July 31, 2006
More on Fred Smoler Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 04:00 PM EST Taking up a number of points raised by Fred Smoler in his recent posts:
1. “Is it damning to note that ‘the whole trial [was] basically a publicity stunt?” No, of course not. That’s why I never said it was damning. Nor did I suggest that Darrow was wrong, or say anything about Winston Churchill or Dred Scott, or express an opinion on Scopes’s heroism, or make any attempt to defend Tennessee’s legislature.
2. “Does the fact that Bryan didn’t consider himself humiliated mean that he was not humiliated in the eyes of history?” Yes, it does. Eleanor Roosevelt said it best: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Lawrence and Lee, those champion liars, depicted their Bryan character stammering and crying on the witness stand, so greatly surprised by the Darrow character’s elementary questions that the audience turns on him. Many other historians, scholarly and popular, describe or allude to something similar. But it never happened. The real Bryan never cried, never sputtered, and fielded all Darrow’s questions, which he had been studying and writing about for years, with ease. The audience cheered him loudly and repeatedly and never expressed the slightest disapproval. That doesn’t mean Bryan was right, but it does mean that he was not humiliated by any stretch of the imagination. This is a fact, not an opinion, and since history is concerned with facts, “in the eyes of history,” as in the eyes of everything else, Bryan was not humiliated.
3. “Does the play unduly distort history when it compresses the sprawling chaos of real cross-examination into an ahistorically-dramatic form?” No, the simple act of compressing the cross-examination is not what makes the play a ludicrous piece of propaganda. What makes it a ludicrous piece of propaganda is that it falsifies virtually every fact from the real Scopes trial because the true facts of the case did not suit Lawrence and Lee’s political views.
4. In his post about technology, Mr. Smoler says in the second paragraph that technologies take a long time to develop. That’s exactly what I said was happening in the 1970s and 1980s. So do we disagree? If so, he doesn’t say how.
5. Cable and VCRs were important, to be sure, but I don’t think they had anywhere near the impact that television itself did. A few successful TV series still dominate the entertainment landscape, just as they did in the 1970s. In fact, VCRs and DVDs have contributed to this by making it easier to tape episodes you missed and watch boxed sets of previous seasons.
6. Precision-guided missiles are also important, but the item I wrote was concerned with consumer technologies. My point was that a description of an average person’s daily life in the mid-1970s could fairly easily pass for the early to mid-1990s. The two eras were not exactly identical, to be sure, but they were fairly close, whereas when you go from the early 1990s to today, the differences in the average person’s daily life are enormous. VCRs and cable have given consumers much greater choice about what to watch and when to watch it, but with or without them, you still spend four or five hours a day sitting on the sofa watching bubbleheaded actresses try to resuscitate stale jokes. But mobile phones, the Internet, e-mail, and high-level computer games were things that, for the great mass of people, did not exist 15 years ago and are now ubiquitous. That’s all I was saying.
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