Mr. Lloyd George on his mettle. (1906)

From the December 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

After Mr. Bryan, Lord George. Mr. Bryan declares that if his scheme of Free Trade in Trust articles fails, it must mean the growth of a definite Socialist Political Party. Mr. Lloyd George declared at Birmingham on October 22nd, that the period had arrived when the Liberal Party was to be put to the test. He said that

“the new movement represented a real upheaval due to the impatience of the people of the slow progress made by existing parties in redressing wrongs . . . No wonder the people asked ‘why all this tarrying and dallying?’ They said to the old political parties, ‘If you are in earnest you are bunglers ; If you are not in earnest you are rogues.’ The answer rested with the Liberals during the next three years . . . The people had said to them, ‘We are going to give you your chance, but it is only a chance.’ The whole future of the Liberal Party depended upon the practical answer they gave to the expectations of the people.”

So in three years’ time if the Liberal Party do not remove the conditions that give rise to the complaint of the people (vide Lloyd George), “Here you have been tinkering for generations with reform, and the end of it all is slums, pauperism, and great want in a land of plenty,” the Great Liberal Party will deserve to go. We have no fear but that they will so deserve. The “great want in the land of plenty” is due, as has been proved time and time again in these columns, to the private ownership of the means of living, i.e., capitalism, and nothing short of the abolition of capitalism will abolish that “great want.” The Liberal Party represent the capitalist class and we shall watch with interest capitalism proceeding to abolish itself.

After three years’ more tinkering the condition of the workers will not have improved, and the efforts of the liberals, “bunglers or rogues,” will have failed. And then Mr. Lloyd George says the new movement will grow and displace the bunglers. As in the case of Mr. Bryan’s proposals the alternative has already commenced to develope in anticipation of the failure of the capitalists’ suggested remedies for the evils of the system they are so concerned to conserve.

Dick Kent

Blogger's Note:

"After Mr. Bryan . . . " is a reference to the article, 'Mr Bryan and the Trusts', which appeared in the November 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Mr Bryan and the Trusts. (1906)

From the November 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

When, at. the end of August, Mr. Bryan, the Democratic candidate for the Presidency of the United States, returned from his tour of the world, he made a remarkable speech that should have been commented on in these columns before. He stated that “Landlordism was the curse of Europe, but it was an innocent institution compared with the trust system carried to its logical conclusion. . . . He hoped the trusts would be exterminated root and branch. . . He declared that the time was ripe for the overthrow of plutocracy, which, he asserted, was already sapping the strength of the nation, vulgarising social life, and making a mockery of morals.” But the most remarkable aspect of the matter is what is described by the Tribune as a “remarkably effective method of dealing with the monopolist trust.” The method as explained in the same organ is “that where a trust has achieved an internal monopoly in production the tariff wall should be broken down so as to admit of foreign competition. Free trade in trust articles is an adroit, a politic, and a just proposal. A capitalistic society is tolerable only when free competition protects the public interests. . . . When once the trust system has been formed, State ownership is indeed the only tolerable alternative to competition. Mr. Bryan’s scheme is ingenious and economically sound. Its failure would mean, we imagine, the growth of some third party, with a definitely socialistic aim.”

The third party has already grown in anticipation of the failure of any scheme of the nature of Mr. Bryan’s. I wonder if the writer of the above quoted article has forgotten the Tobacco War, or whether he learned the lesson that had to teach ? The entry into British markets of the products of the American Tobacco Trust had its first effect in bringing British tobacco manufacturers together into the Imperial Tobacco Company. The two trusts did not compete long—they combined; and today the Imperial Tobacco Company and the American Tobacco Trust are a united body. May we not expect the same thing to happen in America. The only foreign competition the trust could feel would be that of an organisation sufficiently strong to bear the disadvantages of the extra cost of transit involved. It would have to be a case of the American trust v. a Foreign trust. Such a battle of the giants would not last long and would most certainly result in the achievement of the next step in economic progress after the National trust, viz. the International trust. The “only tolerable alternative” to which will be State ownership—when the State has been democratised. We seem indeed to be approaching the beginning of the end.

Dick Kent

Pathfinders: Digging Up Old Bones (2007)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Politics and ideologies are in reality best understood not as imponderable excursions into the deeper truths of society but as products mass-produced off a production line and sitting on ideological supermarket shelves with brightly coloured labels, often red, blue, yellow or green or some novel mix thereof. One thing which you cannot fail to have noticed about commodities generally, and which these ‘soft’ commodities share with ‘hard goods’ like washing machines, cleaning products and tinned spaghetti is the inane compulsion to keep rebranding themselves with the legend NEW! in a big starburst banner just next to the price. As with NEW! pasta shapes, so with NEW! Labour. As with NEW! blue-whiteness, so with NEW! blue sky thinking. As with ‘revolutionary’ NEW! hair colour, or our special NEW! improved recipe, the manufacturers are challenging you to do what is probably impossible, and spot a difference that doesn’t exist, due to a change they didn’t make on a formula they didn’t modify. Why the manufacturers do this, in a fast-changing world where novelty has a short shelf-life, is too obvious to need spelling out, but one has a deep-rooted suspicion that many consumers too are so accustomed to these everyday revolutions that they would manage to find a difference between ‘old’ cola and ‘new’ cola even if there wasn’t one. This may be because they desire to see themselves as sophisticated and discerning customers with subtle palates that can detect changes at homeopathic levels, and thus they delude themselves and their peers, and in so doing become accessories to the grand illusion, perfectly trained pavlovian customers of capitalism.

Anyone who remembers, say, the adverts of the 1970s will have a strange feeling of detached deja-vu when seeing modern commercials for ‘revolutionary new products’ such as sunglasses that react to light (aka ‘reactolites’ in the 1970s ), but the feeling is somehow detached because nobody seems to remark on the fact that this is yesterday’s leftovers being served up as fresh. Perhaps to the extent that we stop bothering to protest, we join those consumers who can detect non-existent changes to recipes and in our own way become complicit in the grand illusion, finally for the sake of a quiet life pretending we don’t remember or don’t care. Meanwhile those who don’t remember previous incarnations will of course be under the happy impression that they are getting the newest and the brightest and the best of everything.

So it is part of the heavy labour of any forward-looking revolutionary to be backward-looking as well, in order to recall all the previous times society, debates, ideas and individuals have trod the same paths and been down the same blind alleys, and to remind those who are listening that the most heavily signposted routes are usually the ones that don’t go anywhere. And where politics, or its twisted and malicious great-aunt, religion, impact on the one truly novel field of human endeavour, science, the same dead hands of bigotry beckon us down the same old cul-de-sacs, winding along scenic back roads that skirt the evidence and obscure the real lay of the land.

So it is with the ‘controversy’ over Darwinian evolution. Just when you think, after the recent court judgments in America against it, that creationism is becoming a laughing stock and the American public are finally becoming tired of being caricatured as vegetable-brained hicks who praise the Lord and marry their sisters, the debate convulses once again, a bubble emerges from the fetid swamp, and a NEW! argument explodes over the scenery. Neoconservatives, it seems, are now at war with the religious right in an attempt to reclaim Darwin as the ideological figurehead, not of the scientific liberal progressive agenda, but of red-blooded two-fisted Republican screw-the-other-guy frontier capitalist values (‘A Split Emerges as Conservatives Discuss Darwin’, New York Times, May 5). The argument of the neo-cons is of course that evolution, being ‘red in tooth and claw’, and involving the ‘survival of the fittest’, is perfectly suited to the conservative view of capitalism. Never mind that the first of these phrases was coined by T H Huxley and the second by Herbert Spencer, Darwin is held up as the perfect justification for any amount of callous disregard by the rich of the vast majority of the world’s poor population, and the only people persistently getting in the way of this wonderful ‘proof’ of capitalism’s natural and therefore inevitable provenance are those silly religious evangelists who don’t seem to understand how to intelligently design capitalism’s propaganda machine.

And it is at this point that the reactolite factor sets in. People new to this debate might screw up their eyes, dazzled by the spectacle of conservatives being pro-Darwin and fighting their own religious brethren. But there’s more. What would they make of the logical extension to this scenario, which is the emergence of a liberal progressive element opposed to evolution? Yet the world has seen it all before, where the conservatives championed Darwin and the liberal progressives championed creationism. It was a sell-out gig, it was a set-up, it ruined careers, and it made history. It was the Scopes Monkey trial of 1925, a trial so bizarre that the defendant deliberately got himself accused as a teacher of evolution even though he was actually a football coach, where his friends were on the prosecution counsel, and where the jury was instructed by the defence not to find him innocent. The story of this world-famous publicity stunt, engineered entirely by the defendant and his team of bible-baiters, is hugely entertaining and too long to indulge here (but look it up in Wikipedia).

Why the pro-evolution lobby, and people like Clarence Darrow and H L Mencken, would want to crucify the religious right in public is not difficult for any scientifically-minded progressive to comprehend, especially one with a sense of humour. But, asked Stephen Jay Gould, in his perceptive article on the subject, what on earth possessed a liberal and progressive, three-times Presidential candidate like William Jennings Bryan, a man who had devoted his life to social reform, to lead the prosecution, in what he must have known was an ambush (see Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, 1999)? Bryan, ever since lampooned as the villain of the piece, was according to Gould motivated not so much by any fondness for the theory of creationism or its adherents as by a truly messianic hatred of the iniquitous implications of what had already by then become known as Social Darwinism, a vicious ideology of social callousness which owed more to Spencer than Darwin and whose consequences in social inequality and poverty Bryan had spent his life trying to battle. Gould, himself a lifelong bitter opponent of creationists, nevertheless manages to paint a sympathetic portrait of a decent man consigned to history as a buffoon, who found himself on the wrong side for the right reasons.

To socialists this is all old hat now, and they won’t be tempted into the debate between neo-cons and evangelists in the neo-neo-Darwin saga. They know that Darwin wasn’t a social Darwinist, that capitalism doesn’t show the survival of the fittest but in fact destroys the healthy host and preserves the degenerate and useless parasite, and also that the enemy of your religious enemy is not necessarily your friend. Those addicted to the NEW! however might end up scratching their heads over this one.

Paddy Shannon

Jottings. (1921)

The Jottings Column from the December 1921 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Hon. William Jennings Bryan has been having a fling at the scientists in the Pentecostal Herald (Louisville, Ky.). He falls foul of Darwinism and the doctrine of evolution in general. He flatly refuses to believe that evolution has taken place by the processes described and proved by the scientists, and asks : "Isn't it strange that they can teach this tommy-rot to students and look serious about it? "

The strange thing to-day is how people can believe the tommy-rot that Bryan and his friends teach, in view of the fact that there is enough evidence on every hand not only to discredit it, but to pulverize it.

Unfortunately, the scientists themselves are not straightforward in these matters. When persons of the standing of Bryan get up, there are very few scientists courageous enough to get up in turn and put the quietus on the dope dispensers. Either they remain silent, or, if they do reply, they hasten to say that science in no way clashes with the Bible. This in spite of the incontrovertible facts they have established. Why is this? Are they afraid of these people? Only recently a serial publication was issued claiming in its prospectus that its sole aim and purpose was to provide a clear and concise view of the essentials of present-day science, in the interests of the general public, yet finished up by saying : 

"Matter, as now viewed by science, is something as little materialistic in the old sense as could be well imagined . . .
"True science does not seek to deprive man of his soul, or to drive the Creator from His Universe."

Can you beat it? Either this is cowardice or fear—or both. Why? We may hazard a guess. It may be that if the scientists of to-day were too assiduous in the spreading of accurate knowledge of the facts of life within reach of the working class, they would find their support, financial and otherwise, withdrawn and, like Othello, their occupation gone. We know that under a capitalist system those who pay the piper call the tune.

#    #    #    #

A shocking state of affairs has been disclosed by a Capt. Bagley in the Sunday Times, arising out of the policing of white people by coloured troops in the occupied regions of Germany.

Readers are now contributing their impressions of what they have seen in this area, and are asking what the British people intend to do about it.

We can tell them what they are likely to do about it—Nothing.

  

"There are men who often stand forth in questions, of morality; one heard their voices when German atrocities were to the fore. Why are these men's voices silent now?" Why, because it is now "up another street." When they concerned themselves before it was part of a policy "to win the war." It was all claptrap, of course, but it served its purpose.

#    #    #    #

Blatchford's patriotic sentiments have been hurt by an article of Bernard Shaw's, in the Nation, in which the latter states his reasons for not attending the Washington Conference. Shaw states that the Conference will fail because nobody is really sincere.

  

". . . though the Conference may stage one or two public meetings within earshot of the Press, nothing real will be done or told there. . . . In Washington the delegates who really matter will confer; but they will not confer in public." This is exactly what did happen, so that Blatchford's sloppy adulation of our ruling class receives a bit of a set-back. ''We shall learn nothing about this Conference from the Conference itself. Its business is now avowedly not disarmament, but the old task of arranging a balance of power that will be satisfactory to all parties." (Shaw.) Blatchford won't have this ; but can anyone imagine the capitalists of the world disarming—even partly—and living in complete concord? The idea is absurd. To call it a step in the direction of total disarmament, as Blatchford does, is simply nonsense. Their interests will not permit it. What would they do in cases of wholesale working class repression? Surely they will not relinquish quietly the most effective method—Force !

However, they are not thinking of doing this. A little  item in the Observer (20.11.'21) goes to show that Shaw was nearer the mark than Blatchford— "The War Office is making its plans for the organisation of twenty-three general hospitals, to be located in large towns near Universities and civil hospitals, and capable of dealing with from 25,000 to 35,000 casualties. It appeals for the valuable co-operation of the Universities and civil hospitals."

No; war will not be "outlawed" so long as our masters have something to start a fight over, fools to do the fighting, and prominent men to encourage them. When Blatchford (Sunday Herald, 20.11.'21) says : "There is no Power represented at the Conference that wants war, that does not hate war," we—well, we simply smile.

#    #    #    #

The "Great Silence" dope was pulled off all right. Except for the howling of sirens, the blowing of whistles, the hooting of horns, the banging of guns, and the noise of running engines in standing motor cars, you could have heard a pin drop. Like most swindles, it has caught on, and there is talk of making it a permanent institution—that is, until some selfish employer one day discovers that the slowing down, preparatory to the two minutes, and the gradual starting up again interferes with production, and consequently profits.

Thousands of troops and ex-service men (chiefly unemployed through the Big War) dutifully lined up and paid their tribute to that section of the working class known as the "Glorious Dead."

One man, according to the Manchester City News (12.11.'21), who either forgot the solemnity of the occasion or chose to ignore it, was forcibly stopped in one of the main streets of Manchester by an Army officer and compelled to stand. At the expiration of the two minutes an ex-service man walked up to him and bashed him in the face.

#    #    #    #

Some of the beer now being consumed by the public is alleged to  contain injurious chemicals. It has been noticed lately that the beer spilled on the counters in bars is having a burning action on the wood. — Daily Mail (1.11.'21).

That, taken in conjunction with what G. H. Roberts, M.P., said at the Brewers' Exhibition luncheon recently, explains a good deal.

He told them that when he was Food Controller during the war, the Government caused the beer to be diverted to places where industral unrest was most acute, in order to induce the workers to maintain their output.

Although some members of the Government were staunch teetotallers, they were obliged to face the fact that if they had not had that beer at their disposal, our gallant men in various theatres of the war might have been hampered in their great task.— Observer (30.10.'21).

So we can be told now that it was a mentality induced by bad beer that won the war ! And a Labour man takes the credit for it ! This is a point worth noting.

There is no doubt about it that the mass of the workers to-day are both mentally and physically poisoned. What with religion and labour faking, cinemas and bad beer— is it any wonder? Probably this will account to some extent for their indifference to the slammings they keep getting. The amount of mental damage inflicted by various forms of dope is appalling.

Will readers assist us in providing the necessary antidote by a small donation to our Thousand Pound Fund?

Tom Sala

Letters: Marx and crime (1984)

Letters to the Editors from the January 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx and crime

Dear Sir,

I read with great interest the two parts of the article "Marx’s Conception of Socialism” published in the July and August editions of the Socialist Standard.

Firstly, a point of information: the phrase "the judgement of the criminal upon himself" comes from Chapter VIII of the Holy Family by Marx and Engels. The Foreign Languages Publishing House (Moscow 1956) renders it slightly differently, but the sense is clearly the same.

  . . . under human conditions punishment will really be nothing but the sentence passed by the culprit on himself. There will be no attempt to persuade him that violence from without, exerted on him by others, is violence exerted on himself by himself. On the contrary, he will see in other men his natural saviours from the sentence which he has pronounced on himself, in other words the relation will be reversed, (op cit p.239).

Presumably Marx and Engels meant by this that certain categories of human action, which are now classified as crimes, would be considered reprehensible in a socialist society ("human conditions"). However. while individuals might punish themselves in remorse for such actions, their neighbours, moved by feelings of humanity would try to persuade them not to. Which of these tendencies would win out, the individual's remorse or his neighbour's humanity, one cannot predict. The precise category of actions Marx and Engels had in mind is not clear — they do not mean crimes of violence, for these by definition do not exist, since "coercion is contrary to “(truly)' human nature" (op cit p.238).

Secondly I am worried by the statement that "In a socialist society you will only be able to have free access to the things which society decides it will make available for free access". This sounds dangerously like “‘you will only be available to have free access to the things the majority decide they will make available for free access" and it clearly breaches the principle “'From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs". The article was on much safer ground when it stated that in the early days of socialism, the attitude of relatively opulent workers to "free access" should be: "Don’t take advantage of it". While it may be true that in a socialist society, a majority would be unlikely to abuse its power, nevertheless, the principle of "To each according to his needs" seems to provide a safeguard for minorities, which although only based on “moral" force is better than no safeguard at all.

Clive Hill,

Graduate Common Room,

London School of Economics.

Reply

We thank Clive Hill for the source of the quotation from Marx, in the Holy Family.

Other interesting statements by Marx and Engels will be found in two Pelican books: Karl Marx — Selected Writings (1976) pp. 167/8 and 234/5, and Engels — Selected Writings (1967). pp. 175/6.

Marx and Engels were both examining crime and punishment in capitalist society from the socialist standpoint. Two quotations will indicate the line of their approach: Marx wrote:

 Punishment is nothing but a means of society to defend itself against the infraction of its vital conditions, whatever may be their character. Now, what a state of society is that which knows of no better instrument for its own defence than the hangman, and which proclaims . . . its own brutality as eternal law?

Engels argued that "society creates a demand for crime which is met by a corresponding supply" and added:

 I leave my readers to decide whether it is just to punish criminals under these circumstances.

On his second point, about "free access", Clive Hill's fears are groundless. The passage in the article was an attempt to deal with a misunderstanding about '“free access" voiced by a questioner at a meeting. Reasoning from what goes on under capitalism, with trade unions and other groups making claims and calling on the employers, or the government, or "society", to meet them, the questioner said he interpreted "free access" to mean that whatever any individual though they would like to have society would provide for them. This misses the point that, with the establishment of socialism, all individuals will be members of the community. co-operating together democratically to meet the needs of all on the basis of “free access" and making the necessary production and other arrangements to make it possible.

Editors

Asbestos deaths

Dear Editors

Although the article ‘“Fireproof Death” (Socialist Standard, October 1983, by Gary Jay) is no doubt written with the best of intentions, nonetheless it contains some inaccuracies which this campaign feels should be set right. Perhaps the most important misinformation is the statement. "There are safer substitutes for nearly all uses of asbestos".

It was actually established beyond doubt (see the Anti-Asbestos Campaign Fact-sheet) that satisfactory substitutes for every Asbestos application will be available in Britain by November 1982. I must stress that this is an independent single issue, non-partisan campaign. I say this because you do not necessarily need to be a socialist to realise that when it comes to Asbestos society can no longer afford free enterprise, if you fully understand the nature of Asbestos and its threat — which Gary Jay obviously does not — viz. "Asbestos and similar hazards”. I assure you that Asbestos is entirely in a class of its own as there are no similar hazards. The others that Gary Jay mentions are hazards of chemical poisons or hazards of human mismanagement — minor hazards. Asbestos however is the single most serious threat to life on this planet that I, or anyone else who understands its chemistry, can recognise. In our fact-sheet we ask whether there will be 40,000 deaths per annum in Britain caused by Asbestos in 2022. Even this is a moderate estimate.

Please in the interests of public health and safety do print a summary of these criticisms.

Harry Moss 

The Anti-Asbestos Campaign

Reply

The fact that there is evidence for all asbestos uses being replaced with safer substitutes strengthens the case against a social system which continues to use this murderous material because of its cheapness, and therefore profitability, to the ruling class. This is one of the numerous social problems which are constantly produced by the profit system. The solution is not to campaign against these symptoms individually.

The uses of various unsafe, dangerous and anti-social materials and products have the same social cause — the system of production for profit. By the time that one well-intentioned reform group thinks it has solved a problem, capitalism has produced many more.

Many thousands of people are dying and being injured in ways which could be avoided. They are victims of wars, starvation, insanitary water consumption, industrial accidents and so on, ad nauseam. These are problems produced by a competitive social system. The majority of people, the wealth-producers, produce wealth as wage slaves. Production, production techniques and distribution are geared to profit and not human need.

It was not, as Harry Moss says, simply “human mismanagement" which precipitated the misery outlined in the Socialist Standard article, including Rowan Point, Ford Pintos, thalidomide and poisonous cooking oils. These problems are endemic to our social system. Asbestos is beyond doubt a highly dangerous substance, as information in the AAC fact-sheet illustrates. But asbestos is one of many urgent problems which have the same solution. In a world capable of producing enough food for everybody, more people starved to death each day in 1982 than died from asbestos in the whole year. On the brink of a nuclear war the world now holds the equivalent of over four tons of TNT for every single human being on the planet.

Only in a society of common ownership of the means of producing and distributing wealth can these grotesque problems be made unnecessary. Socialism will mean production for use not profit. The community will control what is produced with all the care, meticulous research and pride which will flow from the awareness that we are producing for our own good, and not as now to provide profits for an owning minority.

Editors

Cross of gold

Dear Editors,

Re: issue of September 1983

On the bottom line, centre column, you attribute the remark “Shall mankind be crucified upon a cross of gold" to Eugene Debs. I believe that you are actually referring to "you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold" made by William Jennings Bryan. Bryan was a US representative and presidential candidate upon the Democratic Party ticket.

As usual, enjoyed this issue. Keep up the good work.

Merwin Orner 

New Jersey, USA

To "M.K., Scotland"
The Editors would like to publish your letter, with our reply to the important points you raise. However, it is not our practice to publish letters without knowing the name and address of the sender — not necessarily for publication. Please get in touch with us.

Editors

Money Bugs (2012)

From the October 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

William Jennings Bryan was what we call today a “money bug.” He believed that a certain change in the monetary system would be enough to bring prosperity to the vast majority and, at least, security to all. But, since money is merely a measure of value, we know full well that a mere change in its form would not add more value to that which it measures, any more than the shortening or lengthening of a yardstick would add length or quality to the cloth it measures.

This is the stumbling block of the majority of money reformers; they believe that a change in the measuring of value, a change in the money system, will bring about an alteration in the wealth it measures and changes in the possession of wealth.

…[N]o mere change in the means of measuring or medium of exchanging values will create new values or cause existing values to circulate more freely.

(John Keracher, Economics for Beginners, 1935 )

Science v Religion (1960)

Theatre Review from the June 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

In July, 1925, at the town of Dayton, Tennessee, a school-teacher was charged under a State law with teaching the Darwinian theory of the origin of man instead of the story in Genesis, as the law demanded.

The case was defended by the great liberal lawyer Clarence Seward Darrow, who was famous for defending many workers in cases that had arisen through their Trade Union struggles; a man who was by many derisively regarded as the friend of criminals, because he considered that society was to blame for their actions, being responsible for not only making men into criminals but also for defining at any time what was criminal and what was not, according to its own interests and prejudices.

Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee have taken the case of the Tennessee schoolteacher John Scopes, and made it the basis of their play Inherit the Wind, which had a regrettably short run at the St, Martins Theatre. The play is not an actual report of the trial and the authors have changes the names of the participants, so that what we have are the essentials of the case and its conflict. This conflict is between the cant and superstition of unsophisticated religion and the enlightenment of “atheistic” science and is played  against the background of the American Middle West with its particular pioneer traditions of suspicion, intolerance and isolation, which looked upon science not only as an encroachment on its religion and a device of the Devil, but as a threat to its way of life. 

The Legislature of the State of Tennessee had laid down that it was unlawful for any public teacher “to teach the theory which denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower form of animals.”* It is also of interest to note that similarly, the State Legislature of Florida had declared it “improper and subversive of the best interests of the state for any public teacher to teach as true Darwinian or any other hypothesis that links man in blood relationship to any other form of life."*

It was against thinking of this kind and every obstacle that could be put in his way, including the refusal to allow the testimony of eminent biologists, and the prosecution’s able lawyer, William Jennings Bryan, that Darrow had to fight in his defence of John Scopes. Bryan was a man who held “firmly with childlike faith to a literal interpretation of the Bible,” who was “hostile to the teachings of biological science which he had never had the inclination to study.”* 

Darrow was moved by his abiding interest in science and his deep commitment to freedom of thought to volunteer to defend Scopes. He was in fact “of an astonishing variety of intellectual and social currents: skepticism in philosophy and religion, determinism in psychology, evolution in science, realism in literature, a farrago of socialism and anarchism in politics.”*

The outcome of the trial was a farcical compromise to save the face of the community, forced by Darrow's brilliant defence and the weight of American public opinion. The teacher John Scopes was simply fined a nominal sum.

So far as Bryan was concerned, says the American Dictionary of National Biography, “the trial only revealed the naivete of his religious faith and his want of familiarity with the trend of biological science." Already an old man, the strain of the trial brought him to his death five days later.

Inherit the Wind conveys with a fair degree of authenticity the setting and atmosphere the trial, though the ending of the play is spoilt by anti-climax. The authors have conceded a point to the prevailing public morality, giving the impression that it is not religion itself that is questionable but merely fundamentalist religion; which is false not only to Darrow and to science, but to the spirit of the play also. Nevertheless, the play is not only good theatre, but a refreshing reminder of the gradual retreat of religion (and other fetishes), which makes our Socialist task that much easier.

Ian Jones

* American Dictionary of National Biography.