I am not only innocent...but...in
all my life I have never stole, never killed, never spilled blood,
but I have struggled all my life, since I began to reason, to
eliminate crime from the earth....
I am suffering because I am
a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because
I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian...but I am so convinced
to be right that if you could execute me two times, and if I
could be reborn two other times, I would live again to do what
I have done already.
Bartolomeo Vanzetti, 1927
What has religion to do with
facts? Nothing. Is there any such thing as Methodist mathematics,
Presbyterian botany, Catholic astronomy, or Baptist biology?
What has any form of superstition or religion to do with a a
fact or with any science? Nothing but to hinder, delay or embarrass.
Robert G. Ingersoll
Be it Enacted, by the General
Assembly of the State of Tennessee, that it shall be unlawful
for any teacher in any of the universities, normals, and all
other public schools in the State, which are supported in whole
or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach
the theory that 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 order of animals.
Tennessee state law
What is Darwinism? It is Atheism.
Charles Hodge
Evolution is God's way of doing
things.
John Fiske
Evolution, applied to religion,
will influence it only as the hidden temples are restored, by
removing the sands which have drifted in from the arid deserts
of scholastic and medieval theologies. It will change theology,
but only to bring out the simple temple of God in clearer and
more beautiful lines and proportions.
Rev. Henry Ward Beecher
The first objection to Darwinism
is that it is only a guess and was never anything more....The
second objection to Darwin's guess is that it has not one syllable
in the Bible to support it. This ought to make Christians cautious
about accepting it without thorough investigation....Third--Neither
Darwin nor his supporters have been able to find a fact in the
universe to support their hypothesis. With millions of species,
the investigators have not been able to find one single instance
in which one species has changed into another...
Theistic evolution may be defined
as an anesthetic which deadens the patient's pain while atheism
removes his religion.
William Jennings Bryan
Here we find to-day as brazen
and as bold an attempt to destroy learning as was ever made in
the Middle Ages and the open difference is we have not provided
that malefactors shall be burned at the stake. But here is time
for that, your Honor. We have to approach these things gradually....
If to-day you can take a thing
like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public
school...at the next session you may ban books and newspapers....Ignorance
and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always they are
anxious and gloating for more.
Clarence Darrow
1. Why were
many Americans in the early l920s hostile toward immigrants and
foreign political ideas?
2. How would
you explain the opposition to a prohibition on child labor?
3. Why do
you think the issue of evolution become a cause celebré
in the 1920s?
