This Day in Populist History (Death of William Jennings Bryan, ‘The Great Commoner’)

July 26, 1925—Less than a week after the conclusion of the trial that damaged his reputation as an advocate of liberal causes, William Jennings Bryan—whose silver tongue led him to stints in Congress and heading the State Department, not to mention a three-time Democratic nominee for President—died in his sleep at age 65 in Dayton, Tenn.

Bryan had come to this small community as the lead prosecutor in the case against John T. Scopes for teaching evolution in the public schools—a notorious trial I discussed in this post from 15 years ago. Already battling diabetes, he had suffered in the recent oppressive heat in an age lacking air conditioning, particularly during his grueling and highly unusual cross-examination by defense attorney Clarence Darrow.

The final resting place for this politician, among war veterans in Arlington National Cemetery, might surprise many. But Bryan was entitled, as a colonel of volunteers in the Third Nebraska Regiment in the Spanish-American War—though his widow kept in mind his profound aversion to war (evidenced in his opposition to imperialism) by eschewing a full military funeral.

In his lifetime, because of his tireless dedication to the ordinary citizen, Bryan earned the nickname “The Great Commoner,” and even politicians who disagreed strongly with him, such as the Republican incumbent in the White House, Calvin Coolidge, paid tribute to him at his death.

But since then, the meaning and value of his career have been called into question primarily because of three men: iconoclastic journalist H.L. Mencken, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Hofstadter, and Donald Trump.

Throughout the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” Mencken had poured scorn on Dayton as a symbol of backward, anti-scientific ignorance and Bryan as its unworthy champion. Bryan’s death provoked the Baltimore Sun columnist and American Mercury editor into writing an obituary that has become legendary for its vitriol. This sample will give a sense of its tone:

“If the fellow was sincere, then so was P. T. Barnum. The word is disgraced and degraded by such uses. He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses.”

With a blizzard of canceled subscriptions and pulled advertisements over the incendiary post mortem, Mencken was forced to revise it after the first edition hit the streets of Baltimore, according to Glenn Branch’s July 2014 account on the Website of the National Center for Science Education. Nevertheless, the journalist left those passages intact when the article was reprinted in The American Mercury, a publication influential in the kind of urban intellectual circles already unsympathetic to Bryan’s embrace of creationism and Prohibition.

Mencken’s brief was given scholarly heft by way of Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter in The Age of Reform, an examination of the Populist and Progressive movements, and especially his chapter on Bryan as “The Democrat as Revivalist” in the even more widely read The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It.

More coolly ironic than Mencken, Hofstadter ended up just as dismissive towards Bryan, and for many of the same reasons: “He closed his career in much the same role as he had begun it in 1896: a provincial politician following a provincial populace in provincial prejudices.”

The growing intellectual disaffection expressed by Mencken and Hofstadter took more widely seen creative form in the Jerome Lawrence-Robert E. Lee play Inherit the Wind.

Written at the height of the McCarthy Era, it highlighted the Scopes trial as a distant mirror of the threats to freedom of inquiry posed by anti-Communist hysteria. Its heavy use of the transcript of the Bryan-Darrow courtroom clash, however, blinded many viewers to its deviations from fact concerning other aspects of the trial and its participants.

Lastly, I would argue, Donald Trump’s domination of the political arena has led to countless facile interpretations of the meaning of “populism.” Characteristics of the term, springing from the writings of Mencken and Hofstadter, include anti-elitism, anti-intellectualism, suspicion of large institutional forces, nativism, anti-Semitism, and conspiratorialism.

The link between Trump and Bryan was surely cinched when Steve Bannon told a CPAC audience in 2017 that the former reality TV star was “probably the greatest public speaker in those large arenas since William Jennings Bryan.”

But Trump’s dark whisperer has even less reason to link the New York plutocrat to the heartland populist than he does to associate him with Andrew Jackson. More balanced—and, I would argue, more accurate—assessments of Bryan can be found in this 2017 Politico article by Michael Kazin and especially in Garry Wills’ scintillating 1990 study, Under God: Religion and American Politics.

Following Bryan’s electrifying “Cross of Gold” address at the 1896 Democratic National Convention, he had become over the next 30 years “the most important figure in the reform politics of America,” Wills observes, with his three Presidential campaigns “the most leftist mounted by a major party’s candidate in our entire history.”

The list of causes that Bryan championed early on are especially telling: “women’s suffrage, the federal income tax, railroad regulation, currency reform, state initiative and referendum, a Department of Labor, campaign fund disclosure, and opposition to capital punishment.”

In trying to curb the excesses of the Gilded Age—and in disdaining the lure of easy money, even when it might have bolstered his bank account and Presidential prospects—Bryan contrasts as dramatically with Trump as any other politician in Hofstadter’s “American Political Tradition.” We do a disservice to him and to the desperate people looking for a similar champion in likening him to Trump.

Appreciations: Ray Bradbury’s Tale of T-Rex, Environmentalism and Fascism

“It towered thirty feet above half of the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker’s claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior. Each thigh was a ton of meat, ivory and steel mesh. And from the great breathing cage of the upper body those two delicate arms dangled out front, arms with hands which might pick up and examine men like toys, while the snake neck coiled. And the head itself, a ton of sculptured stone, lifted easily upon the sky. Its mouth gaped, exposing a fence of teeth like large, sharp knives. Its huge eyes rolled, empty of all expression save hunger. It closed its mouth in a death grin. It ran, its pelvic bones crushing aside trees and bushes, its taloned feet clawing damp earth, leaving prints six inches deep wherever it settled its weight. It ran with a gliding ballet step, far too poised and balanced for its ten tons. It moved into a sunlit arena warily, its beautifully reptilian hands feeling the air.”—Science-fiction writer and screenwriter Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), “A Sound of Thunder,” in The Stories of Ray Bradbury (Everyman’s Library, 2010)

I picked this passage from Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi story “A Sound of Thunder” to illustrate his enormously vivid powers of physical description--something I don't think I adequately explored in my prior post in honor of his centennial earlier this year. But the story as a whole—about man’s foolish certainty that he can best Nature—also makes for a powerful admonition for our time.

Several months ago, a friend, a retired Florida schoolteacher, told me about this story. It is a great example of why one of my high school English teachers, Sister Margaret Bradley, preferred the phrase “Alternative Futures” to another by which this genre is better known: “Science Fiction.” “Alternative Futures” is concerned less with gadgets than with concerns likely to persist well beyond the present moment.

Bradbury set this tale in 2055, anticipating what life would be like a century roughly from when he was writing, in 1952—when the Cold War was already a decade old, when memories of Fascism were fresh, and when the Broadway hit Inherit the Wind had reminded Americans of the battle over evolution that had occurred in Dayton, Tenn., during the Scopes “Monkey Trial.” In cinema, time travel had begun to be treated by directors, most famously in George Pal’s adaptation of H.G. Well’s The Time Machine. All these elements—fascism, evolution and time travel—figure in Bradbury’s story.

The company at the heart of this story, “Time Travel Safari,” involves a plaything for the rich: returning to prehistoric times to hunt live dinosaurs. (Remarkably, the tale also foreshadowed by a year the development of Disneyland.)

This Great Misadventure is fraught with danger, but the hunter who signs up for it, Eckels, chafes at bureaucrats who potentially impede his problematic pursuit. So what if a billion mice cease to exist because of one of his actions? A member of the company, Travis, tries to explain what is at stake:

“Well, what about the foxes that’ll need those mice to survive? For want of ten mice, a fox dies. For want of ten foxes, a lion starves. For want of a lion, all manner of insects, vultures, infinite billions of life forms are thrown into chaos and destruction. Eventually it all boils down to this: fifty-nine million years later, a caveman, one of a dozen on the entire world, goes hunting wild boar, or saber-toothed tiger for food. But you, friend, have stepped on all the tigers in that region. By stepping on one single mouse. So the caveman starves. And the caveman, please note, is not just any expendable man, no! He is an entire future nation. From his loins would have sprung ten sons. From their loins one hundred sons, and thus onward to a civilization. Destroy this one man, and you destroy a race, a people, an entire history of life.”

The company that runs Time Travel Safari is terrified that an infraction of the rules may lead to a bureaucratic crackdown of their operation—a fictional illustration of how business has feared the long arm of government for ages. But these seemingly draconian regulations may be viewed another way: that the state has been forced to take such stringent measures now because citizens refused to take voluntary mass action when it could have made a difference.

While Bradbury’s treatment of dinosaurs could be satirical in “Tyrannosaurous Red” (which explores the creatures’ use in cinema), in “A Sound of Thunder” it is prophetic, a warning that man’s weaponization of technology to tame nature, his seizure of godlike power even to tinker with the past, would be severely punished—and for generations.

As I started to read the following even more pointed explanation to Eckels, I couldn’t help but think of how it relates to climate change—but by the end, I heard an eerie premonition of COVID-19:

“A dead mouse here makes an insect imbalance there, a population disproportion later, a bad harvest further on, a depression, mass starvation, and, finally, a change in social temperament in far-flung countries. Something much more subtle, like that. Perhaps only a soft breath, a whisper, a hair, pollen on the air, such a slight, slight change that unless you looked close you wouldn’t see it. Who knows? Who really can say he knows? We don’t know. We’re guessing. But until we do know for certain whether our messing around in Time can make a big roar or a little rustle in history, we’re being careful. This Machine, this Path, your clothing and bodies, were sterilized, as you know, before the journey. We wear these oxygen helmets so we can’t introduce our bacteria into an ancient atmosphere.”

This is not the only warning Eckels receives: he is given the chance to back out, and told bluntly that:

*The Thunder Lizard they are hunting is “the damnedest monster in history”;

*In the prior year, six safari leaders and a dozen hunters had been killed; and

*The company refuses to guarantee that he’ll come back alive;

*If Eckels does survive, he’ll incur a $10,000 fine and possible government action if he disobeys instructions.

But Eckels, not just oblivious to risk but maybe driven by it, blows off this advice as a challenge to his machismo (“Trying to scare me!”). His heedlessness is so enormous that he even uses a proprietary adjective about the hunt (“Shooting my dinosaur”).

The quotation that starts this post conveys dramatically what Eckels has let himself in for. Cascading images follows his discovery of the great beast, but Bradbury avoids a common mistake of other writers—mixed metaphors—because they all revolve around T-Rex’s barely concealed potential for extreme violence: its “arms with hands which might pick up and examine men like toys,” its “pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior,” its “fence of teeth like large, sharp knives” and its “death grin” mouth,

The story’s denouement—Eckels stepping on a single butterfly as he veers off the path and flees from the threatening dinosaur, with cataclysmic environmental consequences—anticipated by a decade “The Butterfly Effect,” decade MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz’s theory that the flap of a butterfly’s wings might ultimately cause a tornado. (See Peter Dizikes’s 2011 article for MIT Technology Review on this landmark contribution to chaos theory.)

But the ramifications of Eckels’ folly extend further. At the start of the tale, a Time Travel Safari employee agrees with him that it’s a good thing that a particular Presidential candidate had just lost:

“We’re lucky. If Deutscher had gotten in, we’d have the worst kind of dictatorship. There’s an anti-everything man for you, a militarist, antichrist, anti-human, anti-intellectual. People called us up, you know, joking but not joking. Said if Deutscher became President they wanted to go live in 1492.”

Yet, upon returning to present time, Eckels discovers that the prospect he had dreaded—a Deutscher victory—has not only come to pass, but even been embraced by citizens. (The clerk behind the desk says, “We got an iron man now, a man with guts!")

The electoral reversal, Bradbury implies, is made possible by breakdowns in education and communication, signaled by a change in the sign greeting visitors to Time Travel Safari, with each word changed—misspelled—from what Eckels encountered before his trip.

It is not hard to imagine how Bradbury, were he alive today, might have viewed a President intent on degrading all rivals and critics as “weak.”

So prolific and varied was Bradbury’s career that a reader is bound to find something of value and interest in at least one of his works—and, in this centennial year of his birth, there can hardly be a more opportune time to introduce him to readers.

My schoolteacher friend admitted that, as much as she admired this particular story, it was not so easy to teach her former high school students, many of whom had only the dimmest concept of what concepts like evolution and the interdependence of species are all about.

Nevertheless, I hope that more teachers will try to teach this story—preferably in print form, but if not, then through playing for their classes a DVD of the 1985-1992 cable TV series Ray Bradbury Theater, in which the novelist adapted this short story for an episode starring Hill Street Blues actor Kiel Martin as the oblivious Eckels.

Flashback, July 1925: Darrow Cross-Examines Bryan at Scopes Trial

In a confrontation as heated as the Tennessee weather that week, William Jennings Bryan, the most radical major-party Presidential candidate until Jesse Jackson, endured hours of cross-examination on the literal interpretation of the Bible by Clarence Darrow, the longtime “attorney for the damned.”

When it was over, Darrow had not managed to avert a sentence of guilty for client John Scopes for teaching evolution, but he had left Bryan’s reputation as a populist in tatters and spawned some of the most simplistic assumptions in America’s long history of culture wars.

Appropriately, a trial that began as a stunt climaxed as one. The defense team at the Scopes “Monkey” Trial had no more intention of getting anything useful out of Bryan’s testimony than the prosecution had of putting the defendant’s livelihood and human rights at risk.

For a trial that was not just massively but maniacally covered (it was the first time a legal proceeding was filmed or broadcast live over the radio), innumerable myths have spring up about the eight-day case in Dayton, Tenn. Most of these derive from Inherit the Wind, by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, especially in the 1960 film adaptation starring Fredric March and Spencer Tracy in the principal roles.

Lawrence and Lee could probably claim some form of dramatic license just by naming the two adversaries “Matthew Harrison Brady” and “Henry Drummond.” But so much of the centerpiece of the movie—Bryan’s cross-examination—was taken from the Scopes trial transcript that viewers could be forgiven for thinking just about everything in the film was true. 

Hollywood’s distortion of history, ranging from elementary facts to larger issues regarding the major figures’ motivations, fits in perfectly with what historian Garry Wills wrote about the trial in Under God: Religion and American Politics (1990): “Almost everything about the Scopes trial has been misinterpreted, and it is the ‘educated’ part of America that has accepted the distortions.”

In the popular imagination, for instance, the notion has taken hold that Bryan believed literally in every single word of the Bible. But a careful examination of the following small portion of the trial transcript—part of Darrow’s cross-examination of Bryan--reveals that the great orator and three-time Democratic nominee for President was not what would nowadays be termed a fundamentalist:

CLARENCE DARROW: Do you claim that everything in the Bible should be literally interpreted?

WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN: I believe everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there. Some of the Bible is given illustratively; for instance, "Ye are the salt of the earth." I would not insist that man was actually salt, or that he had flesh of salt, but it is used in the sense of salt as saving God's people.

DARROW: But when you read that Jonah swallowed the whale -- or that the whale swallowed Jonah, excuse me, please -- how do you literally interpret that?

BRYAN: When I read that a big fish swallowed Jonah -- it does not say whale.

DARROW: Doesn't it? Are you sure?

BRYAN: That is my recollection of it, a big fish. And I believe it, and I believe in a God who can make a whale and can make a man, and can make both do what He pleases.

DARROW: Mr. Bryan, doesn't the New Testament say whale [Matthew 12:40]?

BRYAN: I am not sure. My impression is that it says fish, but it does not make so much difference. I merely called your attention to where it says fish, it does not say whale.

DARROW: But in the New Testament it says whale, doesn't it?

BRYAN: That may be true. I cannot remember in my own mind what I read about it.

DARROW: Now, you say the big fish swallowed Jonah, and he remained how long -- three days -- and then he spewed him up on the land. You believe that the big fish was made to swallow Jonah?

BRYAN: I am not prepared to say that; the Bible merely says it was done.

That hardly ended the distortions associated with the Stanley Kramer film. Among the other misimpressions:

* That Bryan’s testimony took place inside the courtroom. Temperatures were so high and the courtroom was so packed that the cross-examination was moved outside.

* That Scopes was targeted right in his classroom while teaching Darwin. Though Scopes had previously taught from the textbook George William Hunter's A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems (1914), he had not done so on the day specified in the indictment. In fact, Darrow did not want to place his client on the witness stand lest the fact emerge at cross-examination—and the case be thrown out before it could be appealed.

* That Scopes was locked up at the start of the trial. This was an invention of the film, but there was no chance of it happening. For starters, the town fathers were not out to stamp out evolution (though they surely wouldn’t have minded it) so much as to increase tourism. (It was in the midst of a recession that had resulted in the town's population declining by half.) They believed—correctly, as it turned out—that the media would be out in full force if they could mount a challenge to Tennessee’s recently passed legislation banning the teaching of evolution in schools. Moreover, the whole thing was a put-up job: not only did the schools superintendent and owner of a local coal mine ask Scopes if he were willing to, in effect, act as a “test case” against the new Tennessee law, but a couple of members of the prosecution team were also friends of the schoolteacher.

* That Bryan bullied Scopes’ girlfriend. Never happened. In fact, not only did the “Great Commoner” offer to pay Scopes’ fine for teaching the class, but the defendant wrote in his memoir (published decades later) on his continuing admiration for Bryan.

* That Bryan’s testimony represented the turning point of the trial. Judge John Raulston, it was certainly true, was not in any way, shape or form impartial, but he was surely correct that Bryan’s testimony was highly irregular. His ruling should have carried the day, except that Bryan, eager to air his views, said he had no objection to the defense motion. (That horrible mistake was compounded by the fact that Bryan had not argued a case in nearly three decades.) In any event, Raulston ruled, the day after the testimony, that the jurors were to disregard every bit of it.

* That Bryan suffered a fatal heart attack toward the conclusion of the trial. The heat—not to mention Darrow’s cross-examination—was rough on Bryan, who suffered from diabetes. But he did not die immediately after his day on the stand, but five days after the end of the trial, in his sleep.

* That, despite their clash, Darrow retained deep respect for Bryan. The closing scene of the film shows Drummond reproving cynical reporter E.K. Hornbeck for his cruel summary of Brady’s life. In fact, Darrow was just as scathing. When he was told by reporters that Bryan had died—perhaps from a broken heart over the trial, it was suggested—Darrow muttered bluntly that it had to do more with "a busted belly," then offered something more palatable for public consumption.

*That H.L. Mencken, though displaying contempt for Bryan, kept an ironic distance from Darrow. The Hornbeck character was based, of course, on columnist-editor-lexicographer H.L. Mencken. Unlike his character in the film, Mencken acted as a virtual consultant to the Scopes defense team. In the modern media environment, that connection would itself be the subject of controversy because of the writer’s extreme lack of objectivity.

* That the case represented the Waterloo for teaching evolution in the schools. Not really. Scopes lost the case before Judge Raulston, but a higher Tennessee court overturned the verdict on a technicality (the jury, not Raulston, was supposed to figure out the size of the fine)—exactly what Darrow was hoping to avoid. He wanted the law to be overturned on its merits, rather than the denouement in this case.

*That Bryan objected to evolution largely because he couldn’t accept the notion of man’s descent from apes. This might be the greatest distortion of all in the movie. The crux of Bryan's opposition came down to what he believed to be a natural consequence of Darwinian evolutionary theory—the notion of “social Darwinism.” Several robber barons had argued that, since evolution favored the strong, they had no obligation to help the poor to survive. Bryan disagreed vehemently, and counterposed the Christian “gospel of love” against it.

Quote of the Day (Craig Ferguson, on an Unexpected Aspect of Evolution)

“Scientists say they have found the missing link—a little monkey. It lived on mostly twigs and berries, which makes it the direct answer of today’s supermodel.”—Craig Ferguson, on The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson, quoted in Reader’s Digest, September 2009

Hmmm…think the monkey’s number is Gisele? Something to think about…

That thought is probably enough to make certain of my readers turn creationist in a heartbeat.

Oh, wait—now comes news about Ardi, the oldest fossil skeleton of a human ancestor—a 110-pound female with a small brain. The “small brain” part still leaves open the possibility of supermodel descendants, but I’m afraid that the small height puts her out of that class. So choosy, that industry is!

Quote of the Day (Hans Kung, on Charles Darwin)

“In (Charles) Darwin the two great scientific trends of the nineteenth century—natural science and the human sciences, which at first had developed on completely separate lines—came together. Nature and history were seen to be evolving in a single mighty natural-historical process which by the smallest steps over vast ages had produced all the wealth of the world and the abundance of its living beings.”—Hans Kung, Does God Exist? An Answer for Today (1981)

On this date 150 years ago, Charles Darwin submitted the first three chapters of The Origin of Species to his publisher. That anniversary, along with the bicentennial of his birth celebrated two months ago, is a reminder of a peculiar cultural phenomenon of our time: no sooner do the apostles of rationalism tear off the haloes surrounding the old gods and saints than they promote their own heroes to secular canonization.

For nearly 70 years, Lenin’s Tomb became the Soviet Union’s counterpart to medieval shrines such as Thomas Becket’s at Canterbury. Since his assassination, John Lennon—who, in “Imagine,” sang of a world in which there was “nothing to kill or die for,/And no religion too”—has achieved a pop apotheosis as a visionary of the Age of Aquarius, a prophet of peace and light whose own darkness (sarcastic, cutting humor and substance abuse) ends up being glossed over.

There ought to be a way to talk about such figures without special pleading, in much the same way that we can now speak of the contradictions that led Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, to retain slaves throughout his lifetime.

At least Kung (and, before him, Teilhard de Chardin) sought to reconcile scientific inquiry by positing a God with a beautiful creation in mind. More secular advocates of Darwin, however, have not only ignored that approach, but have bleached out some of the darker stains on their hero’s legacy.

Case (very much!) in point: Adam Gopnik. Two and a half years ago, the New Yorker staff writer published an essay on the scientist. More recently, noticing the interesting coincidence that Darwin was born on the same date as Abraham Lincoln, he wrote another think piece on the President, then combined them into Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life.

Like blogger Ross Douthat, I agree that for Gopnik, “where something more than cleverness is called for he's often at a loss, or else inappropriately facile.” Douthat was subjecting Gopnik’s “The Troubling Genius of G.K. Chesterton” to searching analysis.

“Troubling Genius” is a less appropriate title for the hyperprolific and largely happy Chesterton than for Darwin, a hypochondriac who spent years on his magnum opus—and only then rushed it into print when it became apparent that someone from out of the blue, Alfred Russel Wallace, was ready to proclaim the same theory of evolution after spending much less time testing and pondering it.

Moreover, though Gopnik made heavy weather out of Chesterton’s anti-Semitism, he thoroughly airbrushed Darwin’s far more significant contribution to what may be two of the great horror stories of the first half of the 20th century: class exploitation and scientific racism.

I should state right here that I think the evidence of evolution is overwhelming. Moreover, despite the anti-science label slapped on groups indiscriminately lumped together as the “religious right,” many elements of the latter—including the Roman Catholic hierarchy—have no problem with the theory of evolution.

That is a far cry, however, from claiming, as so many of Darwin’s advocates seem intent on doing, that his thought is without fault. Early on, Herbert Spencer applied his phrase “survival of the fittest” to Darwin’s theory of natural selection. In Banquet at Delmonico’s: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America, Barry Werth is at great pains to reclaim the scientist from the American robber barons who quickly adopted “Social Darwinism” as their standard.

I’m afraid that this won’t fly, anymore than Gopnik’s notion that, despite sharing some of his age’s “gentry tastes and snobberies,” Darwin represented, like Lincoln, a new, more realistic form of liberalism. The most devastating assault on Gopnik’s fatuous arguments came two years ago from Peter Quinn, in his dissection of the “Gentle Darwinians.”

These apologists for the scientist have the equivalent of a ticking bomb in their hands: the utter readiness with which so many elements of the Victorian ruling class rushed to accept Darwinism, even pushing it into a realm pioneered by Darwin’s cousin Sir Francis Galton: eugenics.

Naturally, following the Second World War, the idea that there could be superior and inferior classes of human beings acquired a distinctly unappetizing aroma. The Gentle Darwinians, however, attempted to sanitize their hero of any association with this discredited theory.

Unfortunately, try as they might, a large obstacle stands in their way: Darwin’s own words. By the time he wrote the second edition of The Descent of Man (1874), Darwin had not only taken to calling Spencer “our greatest philosopher” but had labeled Galton’s studies on intelligence and character “remarkable.”

Anybody who believes that Quinn is not giving Gopnik a fair shake ought to read the work of The New Yorker writer himself. You’ll see that Gopnik leaves himself so open for an intellectual takedown that he’s unintentionally engaging in self-parody.

Take the excerpt from his new book that appeared in The Smithsonian back in February. Let’s start with the way he mounts his major thematic hobbyhorse, that Darwin is some kind of prose master: “Darwin's work remains probably the only book that changed science that an amateur can still sit down now and read right through. It's so well written that we don't think of it as well written.”

Well, I had a somewhat different reaction when I was assigned to read The Origin of Species in my Contemporary Civilization class at Columbia University. It wasn’t only that I read another work—Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems—that, for ease of reading (and love of intellectual combat), easily surpassed Darwin. No, it was the fact that, strictly on the merits of The Origins of Species, Darwin’s writing was not memorable or even particularly good.

When I read Gopnik’s observation, I blinked and asked myself, “Did I miss something?” But then, I came across a writer—far greater than myself, Darwin, or (can you imagine?) Gopnik—who felt the same way I did.

Irish playwright-novelist Samuel Beckett, I found out from a review of his recently published early diaries, purchased a copy of The Origin of Species, but came away with a pronounced case of buyer’s remorse, calling it “badly-written catlap.”

Elsewhere, Gopnik writes that for Darwin, “the habit of pontification was completely alien to him, unless it was reassuringly tied with a bow of inductive observation.” Put aside, faithful reader, how much you might want to wretch at that cute little “bow of inductive reasoning” and ask yourself if it’s really true.

After WWII, the cause of racial hygiene and its extreme uses—compulsory sterilization, immigration quotas—at home and in Nazi Germany inspired more than a little scientific skepticism. You won’t find any of that in Darwin, who quoted approvingly from studies remarking airily on the inferiority of the Irish and African-Americans to Anglo-Saxon stock.

Most damning of all, Gopnik would like to have it both ways: He claims repeatedly that Darwin freed the world from the shibboleths of churchmen in favor of “humanism, in flight,” yet he ignores the evidence that the eminent Victorian left the world in even greater thrall to the far more pernicious doctrine of racism.

If we’re going to think of Darwin in any kind of adult way, we’d do well to consider how we regard the work of another scientist: Thomas Jefferson. As the embodiment of the American Enlightenment, the latter produced, in Notes on the State of Virginia, an argument for the inferiority of African-Americans based on “observations” concerning their childishness, irrationality, even their “disagreeable odour.”

Two centuries later, though they give Jefferson full credit for his contribution to the cause of freedom worldwide, you won’t find many reputable historians excusing the astonishingly bad scientific thesis quoted above. Too bad that the same openness to spirited inquiry hasn’t yet been embraced by Gopnik and the other diehard advocates of Darwin.