Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Six Days or Forever?: Tennessee V. John Thomas Scopes by Ray Ginger ISBN: 0-19-519784-4 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: August, 1974 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3 (4 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: The first critical account of the Scopes "Monkey" Trial
Comment: In the conclusion to "Six Days or Forever?" Ray Ginger identifies two purposes for writing his account of the Scopes trial. First, getting "the facts straight," in order to correct "many mistakes in previous accounts of the episode," believing his book "comes much closer than do those accounts to telling what actually occurred." Second, Ginger "tried to view the Scopes trial in the broadest possible context." The book was published in 1958, when interest in the Monkey Trial was revitalized by the success on Broadway of the play "Inherit the Wind."
Ginger's primary reference sources were the published stenographic transcript and Leslie H. Allen's edited version, along with the scrapbook files on the case of the A.C.L.U. and Kirtley F. Mather. Ginger made use of the available biographies of several participants as well as full-length studies of Fundamentalism and antievolution, histories of Tennessee, official records of the Scopes appeal, and books on various scientific and religious topics. Ginger also acknowledged several participants who shared their memories in interviews or through correspondence. Finally, in the interest of factual accuracy, Scopes himself read portions of the manuscript.
Ginger prefaces the trial with a quotation from Andre Gide on how Christian orthodoxy either absorbs or rejects any other truth, which clearly indicates Ginger's perspective on what happened in Dayton, Tennessee in the summer of 1925. The passage of the Butler Act and the other developments leading to the trial are detailed in "Law as Symbolic Action." William Jennings Bryan is considered in "Hot Rod Halidon" while Clarence Darrow is presented as "As Uncurried Mind." The trial is covered in five chapters each with an insightful title, with the chapter of Darrow's cross-examination of Bryan called "The Stillborn Miracle."
Ginger's most significant rhetorical aspect is his criticism of both Bryan and Darrow. Calling Bryan's undelivered speech "no mere lallation," Ginger wonders what Bryan hoped to accomplish in Dayton with "a supposed summation to a jury, begun long before he had heard the evidence or investigated the law, and disposing of those topics hastily." Ginger labels Darrow "Almost an anarchist," who "was certain of nothing," a position leading to a paradoxical mix of "skepticism and curiosity." Reminding readers that Darrow had repeatedly dismissed colleges as being worse than useless because "they destroyed compassion without imparting wisdom," Ginger actually forges a common ground between the extreme positions of the literalist Bryan and the agnostic Darrow. Although Darrow was more realistic and more democratic than his critics, Ginger faults the attorney for having ignored the majority. However, in the end Ginger must credit Darrow with providing ridicule as a major weapon against the fundamentalists.
At the end of "Six Days or Forever?" Ginger tries to maintain a balance between Bryan and Darrow and ends up advocating reading the Bible with a scientific and human mind. But even if Ginger perceived Darrow to be the lesser of two evils, Bryan still receives a substantial scouring through the book. Ginger strips Bryan's argument down to the syllogism: "Law, civilization itself depends on ethics. Ethics is derived from religion. Therefore government cannot be indifferent to religion." Ginger accepts the major premise, but argues that ethics was rarely regarded as a high law to be applied to government. I think Ginger's major accomplishment in "Six Days or Forever?" is his presentation of a more rational and less emotional foundation for assaulting Bryan and the antievolution position. Indeed, reviewers at the time praised Ginger for his unwillingness to dismiss the buffoonery of Bryan and the Tennessee yokels in the manner of H. L. Mencken, and most commented on the fact that he found Darrow's open-eyed skepticism to be as myopic as Bryan's blind fanaticism.
Ultimately, Ginger argues the Butler Act rested on the belief that truth could be determined by taking a vote, a belief rooted in a century of American democratic tradition. But while Ginger sees both Bryan and Darrow as propagating the Jacksonian bias that "one man's opinion is as good as another's on any topic," he also argues the overwhelming pressure of society is against this idea, pointing out that most persons hold opinions that point to conflicting decisions on most questions. In the end Ginger advocates a reconciliation of science and religion. However, his prediction that eventually evolution would be found to have nothing to do with religion, the fate of previous scientific truths challenged by orthodox dogma, has certainly not come to pass. While L. Sprague de Camp's "The Great Monkey Trial" provides the most detailed story of the Scopes Trial, Ginger is the first writer to really offer up an objective consideration of the trial in terms of its legal, social, and rhetorical ramifications.
Rating: 1
Summary: When scholarship bows to prejudice
Comment: Given that it is allegedly a scholarly review of the Scopes Trial of 1925, and its background, this book falls flat on its face in almost every respect.
In the first place, although it does indeed present us with the basic facts, they are so heavily fortified with what I imagine must be the author's own prejudices that the book is virtually useless as a serious historical record.
What exactly was it about William Jennings Bryan, I wonder, that drew such frequent and vicious attacks from this writer?
In the second place the author's research appears to be seriously inadequate. Compare this book with Prof. Edward Larson's brilliant study of the same material ("Summer for the Gods") - which includes close on 40 pages of notes and references - and "Six Days..." looks more like a sophomore's essay than the work of a professor of history.
And thirdly, because he was not content to simply record the facts, Ginger's work is now deeply scarred by the ignorance that still prevailed in the late 50's.
For example, though Ginger was indeed a professor of history, not geology, biology or any other of the sciences, he works hard to show how valuable the expert testimony of the defense witnesses would have been, had it been allowed. Yet it is those same aspects of the evidence which Ginger so staunchly defends which are now recognised as being totally useless, or worse, from a scientific stand point...
Or again, Ginger reminds us, with not a hint of doubt or qualification, that the "gill slits" seen in human embryos are a sign of our "aquatic ancestry". What we now know is that they aren't "gill slits" at all, but the rudimentary version of what develops into the middle ear, the parathyroid and the Thymus gland.
And the rout goes on. Ginger tells us about the significance of the numerous so-called "vestigial structures" (down from 180 in 1925 to less than half-a-dozen today); of crucial the evidence provided by homology (shown by microbiologist Michael Denton to be quite useless as evidence of evolution); and so on and so on....
Rating: 4
Summary: Solid narrative history
Comment: This book does an excellent job of placing the Scopes trial within the context of long standing currents in American culture. The progressive/conservative and scientific/fundamentalist tensions have long been present. The book places the evolution debate in context with the social currents that drove abolition, women's suffrage, and prohibition. It helps us understand the social and historical context of the modern Christian Coalition, and more radical ideologies like the Christian Identity movement.
This book changed the Scopes trial from something in "history," and thus far removed and abstracted from my everyday life, to something that might have affected my Grandfather, something that might have happened to people I know. Something that, given the recent decision of the Kansas Board of Eduction to drop evolution as a requirement for an accedited science cirriculum, could happen to my own children.
The book is choppy in places, with momentary digressions into detail that do seem to distract from the main point, but I'm not about to suggest I could have done better. I recommend this book.
 |
Title: The United States at War, 1941-1945 (The American History Series) by Gary R. Hess ISBN: 0882959840 Publisher: Harlan Davidson Pub. Date: April, 2000 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
 |
Title: A New Deal for Blacks by Harvard Sitkoff ISBN: 0195028937 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: January, 1981 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
 |
Title: Franklin D Roosevelt And The New Deal by William E. Leuchtenburg ISBN: 0061330256 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 17 August, 1963 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
 |
Title: The Perils of Prosperity 1914-1932 (Chicago History of American Civilization) by William E. Leuchtenburg, Daniel J. Boorstin ISBN: 0226473716 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: September, 1993 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
 |
Title: War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War by John W. Dower ISBN: 0394751728 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 12 February, 1987 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
