Social Darwinism in general and Eugenics in particular were considered part of the Progressive movement in the most specific sense, in the Pelagian view that society and people are infinitely perfectible through the use of the coercive tools of government to supposedly improve society. In this case, through a “scientific” application of breeding tools used on animals to the human species. Few young people – can begin to imagine the hold the Eugenics ideology held in America throughout the first half of the century.

 

Christ alone cornestone

Weak made strong in the Savior’s love

Through the storm He Is Lord

Lord of all

——

“Rescue the perishing, 

Care for the dying, 

Snatch them in pity from sin and the grave; 

Weep o’er the erring ones, 

Lift up the fallen, 

Tell them of Jesus, the mighty to save.”

Fanny Crosby

“Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm-tossed human vessels. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the ship of its compass and thus endanger its cargo….If civilization is to be saved from the wreckage threatened by intelligence not consecrated by love, it must be saved by the moral code of the meek and lowly Nazarene. His teachings, and His teachings alone, can solve the problems that vex the heart and perplex the world.” William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Trial, 1925. 

https://lawliberty.org/inheriting-the-wind-or-reaping-the-whirlwind/

Of course the movie (Inherit the Wind) had so little relation to the reality you might think the filmmakers were not actually honest people:

“There are two problems here: the movie is a pack of twisted lies. There is a very good site devoted to debunking this movie; it's called "The Monkey Trial." Point by point, and with quotes and full citations, the site goes through the film's many lies, and history's truths.

HL Mencken was a bigot; his real comments about the South, not to mention African Americans and Jews, are atrocious.

William Jennings Bryan was one of America's greatest orators, not the befuddled dunce Frederick March portrays in this film. WJB was a champion of the working man; see the 2006 WJB biography by Michael Kazin. This biography points out that WJB electrified the masses with his speeches, helped make FDR's New Deal possible, and fought against Social Darwinism, the truly evil application of Darwin's theories to elitist, classist, racist, anti-immigrant, eugenic purposes.

The entire plot of the movie is nonsense; the Monkey Trial was a publicity stunt hosted by the town itself.”

https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1559314/

  ——

   A controversy between fundamentalists and modemists had been percolating in the Presbyterian Church since the 1880s, but it came into the open in the 1920s with a growing apprehension among conservatives that liberal theology undermined the authority of the Bible and led to, well, a revolution in manners and morals. William Jennings Bryan, who devoted much of his postpolitical career to religious causes, believed that Darwinism lent support to the "law of hate" in which the"strong" are allowed to prevail over the "weak"and that Darwinian thinking had influenced the militarism of Germany; “the same science that manufactured poisonous gases to suffocate soldiers is preaching that man has a brute ancestry and eliminating the miraculous and the supernatural from the Bible.” For Bryan, Darwinism was to be resisted because it eliminated any basis for affirming the dignity of all human beings.

    Bryan went on to spearhead an eflort to ban the teaching of Darwinian evolution in the public schools and became involved in a test case in Tennessee, in which a young high school teacher named John Scopes challenged a state law, known as the Butler Act, outlawing the teaching of evolution. The resultant trial, held in summer 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, was a blatant publicity stunt by the town fathers and became a frenzied media “pseudo-event” covered by two hundred reporters, including the famously acid-penned Baltimore critic H. L. Mencken, and featuring a rhetorical duel between Bryan and Scopes's attorney, famous trial lawyer Clarence Darrow. Although Scopes lost the case, as it was always clear he would-there being no doubt that the textbook he used in his course taught Darwinian evolution-the cause of fundamentalism was decisively set back by the ridicule and negative publicity that the trial generated.

     Recent historians of the trial, such as Edward Larson, have noted a complicating factor, however, in the textbook Scopes used in his class. George William Hunter's A Civic Biology was indeed an openly and unapologetically racist text in line with Bryan's claims, It argued that “the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America" were the"highest race type of all" and that eugenics should be used to improve “the future generations of men and women on the earth,” which meant the elimination of such forms of “parasitism” as “feeblemindedness” and other features of a "low and degenerate race.” The scopes trial does not yield today the easy lessons that an educated observer might have drawn from it at the time. 

...

Wilfred M. McClay, Land Of Hope

The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (second edition, 1874). Charles Darwin.

  ”With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.”

Charles Darwin

“Science, which originally simply meant the study of the natural world, has been conflated with scientific naturalism, the philosophy that the natural world is all that exists. As early as 1922, G. K. Chesterton warned that scientism had become a “creed” taking over our institutions, a “system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics.” And in 1955, one educator warned that while America’s public schools are ostensibly neutral, they are “propagating a particular dogmatic faith, namely, scientific naturalism.” That “dogmatic faith” aggressively seeks to subsume everything else under naturalistic categories. Even human beings are reduced to “objects” or “things” that can be inspected, experimented on, and ultimately controlled. Philosopher Arthur Koestler denounced this as “the ratomorphic fallacy,” arguing that it treats humans as though they were a species of laboratory rat. Similarly, the great Christian apologist C. S. Lewis warned that the rise of scientific naturalism would lead to “the abolition of man,” for it denies the reality of those things central to our humanity: our sense of right and wrong, of purpose, of beauty, of God. And if we deny the things that make us truly human, then we will create a culture that is, by definition, inhuman. If we treat morality as subjective feeling, then moral ideals will be relegated to the private realm, and the public realm will be stripped of all morality. If we deny the reality of the virtues that make us superior to the beasts, then those virtues wither away, reducing us to the level of beasts. Thus while science has created technological advances that make life easier and healthier, when science is confused with the philosophy of scientific naturalism, it destroys the very things that make life worth living. We gain control over the natural world at the cost of our own souls. Lewis foresaw this predicament clearly. “For the wise men of old,” he wrote, “the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue.” The purpose of life was defined in terms of the growth of the soul, and there was an abiding moral standard to which to conform. But for the contemporary technical mind-set, “the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique.” This mind-set acknowledges no abiding standards, so there is nothing to check the human desire for control and domination. Watch a good TV interviewer interact with today’s scientists, and you quickly realize that ethical subjectivism has stripped many scientists of the ability to evaluate the implications of even their own work. Their ethical understanding has not kept pace with their brilliant discoveries. As a result, science and technology blunder on without clear moral guidance, creating more sophisticated gadgets but also creating confusion as to what purposes, goals, or values they should serve. Yet despite these ominous weaknesses, it is no easy task to dislodge scientific naturalism from its position of intellectual dominance, for it has invested scientists with enormous power. If science is the only source of knowledge, then their own discipline trumps all others, and they alone speak with authority to the culture at large. Therefore, if we are to stand against attacks on Christian faith made in the name of science, our first target should not be specific theories, such as Darwinian evolution, but the underlying philosophy of scientific naturalism.”

from How Now Shall We Live, Charles Colson/Nancy Pearcey 

“There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness; and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we ourselves are incredibly and sometimes almost incredulously real. It is the fundamental fact of being, as against not being; it is unthinkable, yet we cannot unthink it, though we may sometimes be unthinking about it; unthinking and especially unthanking. For he who has realized this reality knows that it does outweigh, literally to infinity, all lesser regrets or arguments for negation, and that under all our rumblings there is a subconscious substance of gratitude.”

Chesterton, An Abyss of Light (from his essay on Chaucer)

.....................

A Mike C. made some perceptive comments to the linked Law & Liberty article about William Jennings Bryan, Clarence Darrow, G.K. Chesterton, and issues related to the Scopes ‘trial’ such as eugenics. It is interesting that while some of the details or policies we argue about change and shift, the underlying conceptual premises or understanding of what a human being is, or isn’t, are basically the same a century later. 

“When one reads the transcript of the Darrow/Bryan cross-examination, it should be noted that Bryan did not come off as poorly as “Inherit the Wind” portrays. Bryan was a very able debater.

It’s also worth noting that Darrow later debated a much more able Christian apologist, the British Catholic and author G.K. Chesterton, and it did not go at all well for Darrow as he attempted to use the same arguments he had against Bryan. As a newspaper reported at the time:

“At the conclusion of the debate everybody was asked to express his opinion as to the victor and slips of paper were passed around for that purpose. The award went directly to Chesterton. Darrow in comparison, seemed heavy, uninspired, slow of mind, while G.K.C. was joyous, sparkling and witty …. quite the Chesterton one had come to expect from his books. The affair was like a race between a lumbering sailing vessel and a modern steamer. Mrs. Frances Taylor Patterson also heard the Chesterton–Darrow debate, but went to the meeting with some misgivings because she was a trifle afraid that Chesterton’s “gifts might seem somewhat literary in comparison with the trained scientific mind and rapier tongue of the famous trial lawyer. Instead, the trained scientific mind, the clear thinking, the lightning quickness in getting a point and hurling back an answer, turned out to belong to Chesterton. I have never heard Mr. Darrow alone, but taken relatively, when that relativity is to Chesterton, he appears positively muddle-headed.

” … As Chesterton summed it up, he felt as if Darrow had been arguing all afternoon with his fundamentalist aunt, and the latter kept sparring with a dummy of his own mental making. When something went wrong with the microphone, Darrow sat back until it could be fixed. Whereupon G.K.C. jumped up and carried on in his natural voice, “Science you see is not infallible!” Whatever brilliance Darrow had in his own right, it was completely eclipsed. For all the luster that he shed, he might have been a remote star at high noon drowned by the bright incandescent light of the sun. Chesterton had the audience with him from the start, and when it was over, everyone just sat there, not wishing to leave.

“Ostensibly the defender of science against Mr. Chesterton, [Darrow] obviously knew much less about science than Mr. Chesterton did; when he essayed to answer his opponent on the views of Eddington and Jeans, it was patent that he did not have the remotest conception of what the new physics was all about.”

There seems to be a desire by the Left, and the atheistic Left in particular to pigeonhole Bryan into the role of a conservative defender of the “Religious Right” due to his involvement in the Scopes trial, but as Mr. Pulliam noted, Bryan was a progressive. Bryan was the Democratic Party’s nominee for President three times, and he is not easily pigeonholed into traditional political or social categories.

Although he was Secretary of State under Wilson, he was an anti-militarist who opposed the United States’ entry into WWI and resigned over the issue, a position for which he was mocked by much of the pro-war population – the Cowardly Lion in “The Wizard of Oz” was a rather cruel satire of Bryan by L. Frank Baum, a Republican activist, and was recognized as such by the readers of time.

As an opponent of militarism, he had earlier warily supported the Spanish-American War out of a desire for Cuban independence, and even led a regiment of the Nebraska National Guard whose mission ended prematurely before combat with the cessation of hostilities. As an opponent of American imperialism, he was outraged that the Treaty of Paris granted the U.S. control over the Philippines, and made “anti-Imperialism” the key platform plank of his 1900 run at the presidency.

Bryan campaigned for a progressive income tax as a means of wealth redistribution, supported women’s suffrage, opposed the increasing power of the corporations, and fought for a ban on corporate financing of elections, Although he also shared some of the traditionally racist views of the Democratic Party – he opposed Theodore Roosevelt’s invitation to Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House, and although he distrusted the Ku Klux Klan, he helped defeat a resolution condemning the KKK at the 1924 Democratic Convention – he also supported many other common modern progressive issues, including infrastructure spending on highways and education, protections for organized labor and labor organizers, an 8-hour work day, a minimum wage, the right of unions to strike, the end of dark money contributions to political campaigns, and an end to gender discrimination.

With his retirement from politics, Bryan, a Presbyterian, grew increasingly involved in evangelical and church activities, and as was to be expected, his social progressivism influenced that, or perhaps in his mind, grew from that. His creationist views were somewhat nuanced – although a biblical literalist on the issue of Creation, Bryan was a “Day-Age” creationist, and held that the 7 “days” of creation could constitute much longer geological periods, and could even extend to billions of years. Although Bryan advocated for laws against teaching evolution as scientific fact, he opposed any criminal penalty for those teaching it and called for it to be taught only as a hypothesis.

Coinciding with his religious objections to the teaching of Darwinism as scientific fact, he clearly saw and enunciated the social risks of applying Social Darwinism as a Progressive cause. In this, he parted company with his Progressive comrades,

Although his concerns were more for poor and disenfranchised whites than black citizens, he also recognized the danger that teaching evolution could increase the power of the Social Darwinist movement in American society, particularly for the increasingly popular Eugenics movement, which advocated for the forced sterilization of the poor, the “congenitally criminal” or “socially unfit” poorer classes – a movement which was widely popular not only in his Democratic Party, but also in wider political and social circles. Racists throughout American society supported Social Darwinism and the Eugenics movement, with the fear that the “inferior racial stock” of non-white citizens and new immigrants from Europe and Asia would deteriorate America’s supposed superior white race, and the enactment of “Jim Crow” laws against racial mixing and miscegenation by Democratic legislatures were clearly written with Eugenic and Social Darwinist justifications in mind.

Social Darwinism in general and Eugenics in particular were considered part of the Progressive movement in the most specific sense, in the Pelagian view that society and people are infinitely perfectible through the use of the coercive tools of government to supposedly improve society. In this case, through a “scientific” application of breeding tools used on animals to the human species. Few young people – can begin to imagine the hold the Eugenics ideology held in America throughout the first half of the century. Involuntary sterilization of “the infirm” was common, awards were given at state fairs for the “most genetically perfect” babies, Eugenics propaganda posters were a common sight in American cities, and confinement and forced abortions were performed on those deemed genetically unfit.

The Catholic Church was one of the few institutions to oppose Eugenics (which were explicitly condemned in the 1930 papal encyclical Casti connubii by Pope Pius XI), and despite his other faults, Bryan should be given credit as well for his opposition to this horror, which was directly supported by Margaret Sanger in this country and Hitler overseas, among other celebrities, such as H.G. Wells and Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton.

Bryan the anti-militarist was also rightly concerned about the influence Social Darwinism was having on the German militarists after WWI. Per LesLein’s question on sources, Bryan cited Vernon Kellogg’s book” Headquarters Nights: A Record of Conversations and Experiences at the Headquarters of the German Army in France and Belgium”(published by the Atlantic Monthly Press in 1917) which set forth the use of Darwinist principles as applied to nations by the German High Command.

Bryan also expressed concern that Social Darwinists opposed the use of vaccinations for the underclass, and that Darwin’s expressed opposition to vaccination because “it has “preserved thousands who, from a weak constitution would, but for vaccination, have succumbed to smallpox!” All of the sympathetic activities of civilized society are condemned because they enable “the weak members to propagate their kind.” Then he drags mankind down to the level of the brute and compares the freedom given to man unfavorably with the restraint that we put on barnyard beasts. . . . Let no one think that this acceptance of barbarism as the basic principle of evolution died with Darwin. Within three years a book has appeared whose author is even more frankly brutal than Darwin. The book . . . “The New Decalogue of Science” . . . has attracted wide attention.”

Bryan quoted Albert Edward Wiggams bestselling 1922 Eugenics “The New Decalogue of Science” for its promotion of Social Darwinism:

“Evolution is a bloody business, but civilization tries to make it a pink tea. Barbarism is the only process by which man has ever organically progressed, and civilization is the only process by which he has ever organically declined. Civilization is the most dangerous enterprise upon which man ever set out. For when you take man out of the bloody brutal but beneficent hand of natural selection you place him at once in the soft, perfumed, daintily gloved but far more dangerous hand of artificial selection. And unless you call science to your aid and make this artificial selection as efficient as the rude methods of nature you bungle the whole task.” (Wiggams, 1922)

It can and has been argued that of Bryan’s several objections to the teaching of Darwinism in schools – theological concerns, the rights of tax-paying parents to choose what their children are taught in schools, and the scientific objections of the time, such as those of Harvard Biology Professor Louis Agassiz – his primary concern was the social impact of an exclusively Darwinist view of human morality and origins. Bryan was right about some things and wrong about others, but in this, he was correct.”

Mike C.

“Forgetfulness is now the curricular form of our higher education. This form guarantees that we, of the transition from second to third worlds, will become the first barbarians. Barbarism is not an expression of simple technologies or of mysterious taboos; at least there were taboos and, moreover, in all first worlds, the immense authority of the past. By contrast, the coming barbarism, much of it here and now, not least to be found among our most cultivated classes, is our ruthless forgetting of the authority of the past. Sacred history, which never repeats itself, is thus profaned in an unprecedented way by transgression so deep that it is unacknowledged. The transgression of forgetfulness makes the cruelty of abortion absolutely sacrilegious; more precisely, antireligious. According to the unspoken doxology of our abolitionist/abortionist movements, identities are to be flushed as far away down the memory hole as our flush-away technologies of repression permit.”

Philip Rieff

Jeremiah 1:5

Now the word of the LORD came to me, saying, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you;”

O LORD, you have searched me and known me! 

You know when I sit down and when I rise up;    

you discern my thoughts from afar. 

You search out my path and my lying down    

and are acquainted with all my ways. 

Even before a word is on my tongue,    

behold, O LORD, you know it altogether. 

You hem me in, behind and before,    

and lay your hand upon me. 

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;    

it is high; I cannot attain it.

For you formed my inward parts;    

you knitted me together in my mother's womb. 

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. 

Wonderful are your works;    

my soul knows it very well. 

My frame was not hidden from you, 

when I was being made in secret,    

intricately woven in the depths of the earth. 

eyes saw my unformed substance; 

in your book were written, every one of them,    

the days that were formed for me,    

when as yet there was none of them.

Psalm 139:1-6,13-16

“Deeply etched in the fiber of our religious tradition is the conviction that men are made in the image of God and that they are souls of infinite metaphysical value, the heirs of a legacy of dignity and worth. ..we feel this as a profound moral fact...”

Martin Luther King Jr. from Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, 1964.

PSALM 8 

O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! 

You have set your glory above the heavens...

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,    

the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, 

what is man that you are mindful of him,    

and the son of man that you care for him? 

Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings

and crowned him with glory and honor. 

You have given him dominion over the works of your hands...