Best book review ever of worst book ever (so far) on the Scopes Trial

[Janice Rael]

Did I say I still had a friend at the NCSE? His name is Glenn Branch, and he is wonderful. I follow him on LinkedIn. He just shared his scathing hot review of the "Worst. Book, EVER!" about the Scopes "Monkey" Trial.

This is the Best. Book review. EVER. I mean this for all book reviews; it has been a damn long time since I have seen an author get taken down so hard in this way, I can't even think of a comparison. I had to look up SO many words here! Glenn Branch's thorough handling of what is clearly an atrocious book was a pleasure to read and is a treasure to behold. Enjoy!

Worst. Book about the Scopes Trial. Ever!​

Sep 10, 2024 | American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Education, Atheism, Biology, Butler Act, Charles Darwin, Clarence Darrow, Edward Larson, Eugenics, Evolution, Glenn Branch, H. L. Mencken, Henry Morris, J. Frank Norris, James Gilbert, Jerry Bergman, John C. Whitcomb, John Scopes, Leonard Darwin, Michael Kazin, National Center for Science Education, Racism, Reverse Racism, Ruth Benedict, Scopes Trial, Second Ku Klux Klan, Stephen Jay Gould, Vincent Torley, White Evangelical Racism, William Jennings Bryan | 0 comments
by Glenn Branch

Glenn Branch is deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that defends the integrity of American science education against ideological interference. He is the author of numerous articles on evolution education and climate education, and obstacles to them, in such publications as Scientific American, American Educator, The American Biology Teacher, and the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, and the co-editor, with Eugenie C. Scott, of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design is Wrong for Our Schools (2006). He received the Evolution Education Award for 2020 from the National Association of Biology Teachers.

He's my online friend and I had the pleasure of engaging with Eugenie Scott over the years, too.

In the summer of 1925, a young teacher, John T. Scopes, was on trial in Dayton, Tennessee, for violating a recently enacted state law, the Butler Act, which forbade educators in the state’s public schools to “teach any theory that denies the truth of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” The Scopes trial was instantly a national sensation, partly thanks to the participation of two national figures — William Jennings Bryan on the prosecution team and Clarence Darrow on the defense team — and the reportage of a third, the brilliant but mordant journalist H. L. Mencken. With its hundredth anniversary just around the corner, the Scopes trial is understandably attracting attention again, with recent treatments including Randy Moore’s The Scopes “Monkey Trial” (2022), Gregg Jarrett’s The Trial of the Century (2023), and Brenda Wineapple’s Keeping the Faith (2024). These are all more or less readable and accurate guides to the context, personalities, conduct, aftermath, and significance of the trial. And then, in contrast, there is Jerry Bergman’s The Other Side of the Scopes Monkey Trial (2023).

What is the thesis of The Other Side of the Scopes Monkey Trial? According to its subtitle, At Its Heart the Trial was about Racism, while within the text, Bergman awkwardly declaims, “The trial was about human evolution, and more about racism and eugenics than religion and evolution” (p. 5, emphasis in original). ...

Mordant, what a word. Glenn Branch goes into detail after gory detail about how poorly researched and written this book is, it's a treat.

There is a glaring obstacle to the thesis, which in fact Bergman briefly acknowledges: that “in the entire Scopes court transcript the topic of eugenics and racism was avoided” (p. 81, link added). ... Is there a thesis in the neighborhood that is neither clearly false nor clearly trivial? Perhaps that the attitudes toward racism and eugenics of the participants in and the observers of the trial significantly and substantially influenced the conduct of and the public understanding of the trial? That suggestion threads the needle, but it would require meticulously collected and judiciously assessed evidence to make the case.

No attempt to make such a case is visible in The Other Side of the Scopes Monkey Trial, and meticulous collection and judicious assessment of evidence are likewise absent. Instead, there is hagiographizing, conspiracy theorizing, and mudslinging. ...

Branch provides exquisite, excruciating details to show how Jerry Bergman was wrong in every part of his own wrong book.

Even independently of the fact that it consists entirely of a string of decontextualized quotations from Mencken’s voluminous oeuvre with Bergman’s perfunctory and sometimes bizarre comments on them, intended to portray Mencken as, inter alia, a vicious racist, eugenicist, and bigot, chapter 10 is deeply problematic. The problem is that Bergman’s discussion is conspicuously similar to Vincent Torley’s 2012 blog post “H. L. Mencken: Is this your hero, New Atheists?” — not only in the selection and order of the quotations but also in the language used to summarize and criticize them.

SLAM! Glenn Branch exposes Jerry Bergman's apparent plagiarism without saying that word, choosing instead to pepper his whole review with quotes and comments that show the lack of scholarship of The Other Side of the Scopes Monkey Trial. Honestly, after reading this review, I think I can assert that we IIDB people have seen so much better work, right here on this forum, not to mention in real life.

Bergman’s scholarly practices are otherwise troubling. He often cites subpar scholarship, including from his fellow creationists, without any evident discernment. He repeatedly interpolates unwarranted text of his own into verbatim quotations ...

haha, this is terrible, who does this?

Branch gives Bergman all the benefit of the doubt that he deserves.

Bergman repeatedly, and correctly, emphasizes that the Butler Act, under which Scopes was prosecuted, only concerned the teaching of human evolution. He accordingly devotes chapter 9 to a discussion of human evolution. The result is inaccurate and incompetent. ...

omg, Kendrick didn't diss Drake this much.

Not all of Bergman’s myriad errors are tendentious.

The fk?? Glenn? Making me look up all this stuff... ohh haha, it's worth it. The "myriad errors" are examples of appallingly inattentive typos and other 7th grade mistakes. Glenn Branch skillfully and gleefully exposes the errors, and does the rest of Bergman's homework for him, providing the links to the source material that were omitted and overlooked by the book's author.

I gotta post this epic ending, too; I hope I am not pasting too much of the material, it's just so good.

Early in The Other Side of the Scopes Monkey Trial, Bergman writes, “The present work is an attempt to fill in this important gap” (p. 7). Characteristically, there is no explicit description of a gap in the preceding text, but he appears to mean that there’s a lack of discussions of the trial sympathetic to the prosecution, which overlooks any number of works, including Marvin Olasky and John Perry’s Monkey Business (2005), which appears in Bergman’s bibliography. A shoddy and biased apologia for creationism, Monkey Business is nevertheless head and shoulders over The Other Side of the Scopes Monkey Trial: not nearly so badly conceived, researched, organized, written, and edited. After offering his description of “the present work,” Bergman continues, “and it is up to readers to determine how successful this tome was” (p. 7) — for all the world as if readers are unaware of their prerogatives. Only readers who are already relatively familiar with the trial are guaranteed to recognize the abject failure of the book, unfortunately; despite the crudity and incompetence of what can only be described as Bergman’s propaganda, there is a risk that the uninformed and the gullible will be misled.

The crudity! The crude, cruddy crudity. As a propagandist, I shake my head at Jerry Bergman over his low-info book. Honestly, we put more effort into our own posts here.

I didn't paste the gory guts of Glenn Branch's incisive, insightful review of what may be the worst Creationist claptrap published in 2020s, if not all time. Go have fun reading the rest of the review.