Ah! Dreams…“We are the stuff that dreams are made on,” said Shakespeare and it is true.
This is a very special dream week. It is a week of wonder in terms of the creative as well as the courageous. Fair Reader, read on!
All I Have to Do Is Dream, the Everly Brothers, 50 years ago this week, released that fabulous song.
Ten years later, Otis Redding’s (Sittin’ on the) Dock of the Bay was on top of Billboard.
In 1964, The Beatles had just released A Hard Day’s Night which was followed, just one year later, by that ode to teenage angst, The Rolling Stones’ (I can’t get no) Satisfaction.
Check out this weird musical medley of hits from the 1970s:
On the one hand is The Commodores’ Three Times a Lady sharing radio space with Debby Boone’s You Light Up My Life, while on a totally different third hand are Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson asking, Mammas, Don’t Let Your Children Grow Up to Be Cowboys.
That, in a clef note, was America in the late 1970s.
Some other high notes of the week:
Happy Birthday!
Wyoming (1890);
And happy birthday to the original raging bull, Jake la Motta (1921); to that heart-warming comedian Bill Cosby (1937); to tennis great Arthur Ashe (1943) … and to Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland (1274). That last one may be pushing it but ‘twas a great movie now, wasn’t it?
But! More important than Classic Coke’s return in 1985, or the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team winning the World Cup in 1999…
More important than Etch-a-Sketch making its happy debut in 1960…
Even of greater note than Geraldine Ferraro’s historic 1984 vice presidential nomination is the fact that…
On July 11, 1925, the Scopes Trial had just begun its second day of putting the freedom to teach evolution on trial.
Clarence Darrow would represent John Scopes, the Tennessee teacher who was accused of breaking a state law, the Butler Act, by teaching evolution in his science class.
The state was represented by that great orator and presidential aspirant, William Jennings Bryan.
Scopes was found guilty on July 21 (short trial) and fined $100.
It was, however, the Butler Act that was really on trial. Was it a fair law? (See the link below for the full text of the law.) It was repealed September 1, 1967.
On day 2 of the trial, Darrow argued that this law was, indeed, unconstitutional saying:
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools… At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant [sic], and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. … After awhile, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed.
The trial became the inspiration for the play, Inherit the Wind. The title, by the way, comes from a Bible verse:
He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind: and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart. (Proverbs 11:29)
Be well!
Concord Star
Related links courtesy of UMKC Law School:
Full text of the Butler Act (Tenn. HB 185, 1925) and its repeal: www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/tennstat.htm
Background on the trial:
www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/scopes.htm
Transcript of the trial:
www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/scopes2.htm
