CONTROVERSIES
OF THE 1920S
Sacco and
Vanzetti
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
Child Labor
If there is
any matter upon which civilized countries have agreed...it is the evil of
premature and excessive child labor.....It is not for this Court...to say that
[Prohibition]...is permissible against strong drink, but not as against the
product of ruined lives.
--Justice
Holmes's dissent in Hammer v. Dagenhart
Evolution
and Religion
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
Questions
to think about:
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?