dd
--- "Max B. Sawicky" <sawicky at bellatlantic.net> wrote:
> how was WJB a crank? (Gary Wills has a fun argument
> that in
> the Scopes trial, WJB was right and that other guy
> -- I'm blanking
> on his name -- was wrong.)
The "other guy" was Clarence Darrow, the great people's lawyer of the era. The Scopes trial was about the teaching of evolution in the Tenn. public schools, not gold (you know this, but maybe others don't). I haven't read Wills' piece, but probably he talked about how the story was more complicated than the version told in the Inherit the Wind movie. The trial was a deliberate test case; the prosecution was in on the test case; Scopes was clearly in violation, and was convicted. Darrow nailed Bryant on the stand by making him out to be a fundamentalist ignoramus. That wasn't the issue in the trial, and only the collusion of the court as well allowed this manifestly irrelevant testimony.
ALl that said, Bryant, the 1898 (I think) Democratic presidential nominee, was an advocate of "free silver"; his famous nominating speech was the "cross of gold" speech, and his point was that the gold standard was bad for workers, farmers, and small business, which was true; the call for free silver was essentially a call for cheap credit and an inflationary policy. It wasn't so cranky at the time when the gold standard was a reality and a real problem.
I don't know what Bryant's crankiness was supposed to consist in. He was a fundamentalist, but that was and is a common view, wacky, but too common to make one qualify as a crank, unless we have 40 million cranks in the country.
Obviously there are non goldbug cranks -- Korbyzinski-ites, Objectivists, members of small Marxist-Leninist cults, etc. The point was just that goldbugs are cranks for the reasons others have explained.
jks
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