At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of men. each very different from the other in instincts. social customs. and. to an extent. in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type. originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race. from the islands of the Pacific; the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race. including the natives of China. Japan. and the Eskimos; and finally. the highest type of all. the Caucasians. represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and Asia.”
That was the last paragraph of
the three pages devoted to evolution in a 432 page textbook. called A Civic Biology. Presented in Problems. by George William Hunter. and published by the American Book Company in 1914. It is the book used eleven years later by one John Thomas Scopes in his high school biology class in Dayton. Tennessee. But the sentence about the Caucasian being the highest type of man would. if anything. cause an even greater ruckus today and job function email list throughout the entire nation than the idea of evolution caused in a small town in Tennessee 75 years ago.
It is my thesis that Puritanism is just as alive today
Mr. Mencken’s day. The objects of criticism may have changed. but the urge to police the other man’s thoughts surges on as ever. Members of the Mencken Society had known this all along. of course. but the parallels between then and now struck me anew when rereading the Sage of Baltimore’s dispatches on the Scopes trial how to create a professional instagram for your business so conveniently gathered by Marion Rodgers in The Impossible H.L. Mencken.
I am going to review what Mr. Mencken
Said about Fundamentalists then and give some background on their reaction to Darwinism. Fundamentalism went quiet not long after the trial and did not reemerge until after World War II. indeed until after Roe vs. Wade in 1973 and the ascendance of cultural relativism. I take the title of my talk from a statement by Kenneth lack data Miller. a cell biologist at Brown University: “The attitude that spawned the creation science movement is the same one that made America a leader in world science: a healthy disrespect for authority.” New York: Anchor Books. 1991 Quoted by Debora MacKenzie. “Unnatural Selection.” New Scientist. 2000.4.22. Thanks to Leo Elliott for finding this.