Common Sense with Paul Jacob

On July 22, 1937, the U.S. Senate voted down Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s court packing scheme.

On July 21, 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee, high school biology teacher John T. Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution in a public school classroom, and fined $100. The ambiguous legacy of the trial would continue — for decades, even to the present — to reveal the tensions inherent within a school system run by government and funded by taxpayers.

Interesting fact rarely noted: Scopes was teaching a heavily “eugenics” view, which would hardly be considered scientific by most modern standards.

Pictured above, publicity for Inherit the Wind, a 1960 movie about the trial, but with the names changed, fictionalized. The movie starred Spencer Tracy in the Clarence Darrow (lawyer for the defense) role; Frederic March in the prosecutorial part, “Matthew Harrison Brady,” the pseudonymous name for politician William Jennings Bryan; Dick York as the defendant, Mr. Scopes; and Gene Kelly as the Baltimore journalist, a stand-in for H. L. Mencken, whose infamous coverage of the story shocked the nation almost as much as the trial itself. It was Mencken who dubbed the affair “The Scopes ‘Monkey’ Trial.”

At the end of the movie (spoiler alert!) the famous prosecutor dies in the courtroom. In the historical case, Bryan died five days after the verdict. The movie was based on the 1955 play of the same name, written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, directed by Stanley Kramer. The script was adapted by Nedrick Young (originally as Nathan E. Douglas) and Harold Jacob Smith.

Today is the 51st anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission’s perambulation upon the Moon, on July 21, 1969. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked upon the surface of Mare Tranquillitatis for about two hours and 15 minutes. They spent over 21 hours on the surface, total, most of it inside the Lunar Module, at the site they called Tranquillity Base, before launching to rejoin astronaut Michael Collins in lunar orbit, and returning to Earth on July 24.

Born on July 20, 1754, Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de Tracy, French philosopher and economist. Perhaps best remembered for coining the term “ideology,” he didn’t mean by that term what scornful Napoleon and communist Karl Marx later turned it into — for Destutt de Tracy ideology meant “the science of ideas,” a unified approach to all knowledge, from epistemology to social theory.

Though his family had been enobled twice, he renounced the title and entered the 1789 Estates General conference as a member of the Third Estate. During the Reign of Terror, he was imprisoned, and would have been executed had not Robespierre got to the scaffold ahead of him.

Two of his books became popular in early 19th century America, his commentaries on Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, and his Traité de la volonté, which Thomas Jefferson, the editor of the American edition, retitled A Treatise on Political Economy. Tracy’s economics was of a deductivist stripe, familiar to readers of later economists such as Nassau Senior and Ludwig von Mises.

Destutt de Tracy’s political philosophy was republican, and his preferred economic policy was laissez-faire.

NASA’s Apollo 11 landed two humans on the Moon — Commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin — on July 20, 1969, at 20:17 UTC. Today is the 50th anniversary of this exploratory achievement.