The Weekly Sam: The Whole-Language Fraud by Samuel L. Blumenfeld
Back in 1955, Rudolf Flesch wrote Why Johnny Can’t Read, which has become a
classic in educational literature. In that book American parents found out for the first
time why their children were having such a difficult time learning to read. Most of the
parents had been taught to read by way of the centuries-old alphabetic phonics
method, and they assumed that the schools were still using the same methods. Thus it
came as somewhat of a shock when they found out that their children were being
taught to read by a new and very different method.
Flesch explained that in the early 1930s, the professors of education changed the
way reading was taught in American schools. They threw out the alphabetic phonics
method, which is the proper way to teach anyone to read an alphabetic writing system,
and they put in a new whole-word, look-say, or sight method that taught children to
read English as if it were Chinese, an ideographic writing system. Flesch explained
that when you impose an ideographic teaching method on an alphabetic writing
system, you get reading disability.
Actually, Flesch was not the first to make this observation. The first man to do so
was Dr. Samuel T. Orton, a neuropathologist who had studied cases of reading
disability in Iowa in the late 1920s. He came to the conclusion that the cause of the
childlren’s problems was the new sight method of teaching reading, and he wrote an
article on the subject which appeared in the Feburary 1929 issue of the Journal of
Educational Psychology, entitled “The ‘Sight Reading ‘ Method of Teaching Reading as
a Source of Reading Disability.” Dr. Orton wrote:
“I wish to emphasize at the beginning that the strictures which I have to offer here do
not apply to the use of the sight method of teaching reading as a whole but only to its
effects on a restricted group of children for whom, as I think we can show, this
technique is not only not adapted but often proves an actual obstacle to reading
progress, and moreover I believe that this group is one of considerable size and
because here faulty teaching methods may not only prevent the acquisition of
academic education by children of average capacity but may also give rise to far
reaching damage to their emotional life.”
Unfortunately. Dr. Orton’s warning fell on deaf ears, and the professors of education
launched their new textbooks on the education market, the most famous of which were
the Dick and Jane basal readers. It didn’t take long for the reading problems to begin
showing up. Parents began to hear of a new reading disorder called dyslexia, which
many children were coming down with. In April of 1944, Life magazine ran a major
article on the subject, reporting :
“Millions of children in the U.S. suffer from dyslexia which is the medical term for
reading difficulties, It is responsible for about 70% of the school failures in 6- to 12
year-age group, and handicaps about 15% of all grade-school children. Dyslexia may
stem from a variety of physical ailments or combination of them — glandular imbalance,
heart disease, eye or ear trouble — or from a deep-seated psychological disturbance
that ‘blocks’ a child’s ability to learn. It has little or nothing to do with intelligence and
is usually curable. ”
The article went on to describe the case of a little girl with an I. Q . of 118 who was
being examined at the Dyslexia Institute of Northwestern University. After her tests, the
doctors concluded that the little girl needed “thyroid treatments, removal of tonsils and
adenoids, exercises to strengthen her eye muscles.” The article concluded:
“Other patients may need dental work, nose, throat or ear treatment, or thorough
airing out of troublesome home situations that throw a sensitive child off the track of
normality. In the experience of the institute these range from alcoholic fathers to
ambitious mothers who try to force their children too fast in schooL”
Strange as it seems, no one at Life seemed to know that Dr. Orton existed or that in
1929 he had identified the cause of dyslexia: the ideographic way of teaching reading.
In fact, Dr. Orton had popularized the term dyslexia.
In any case, by 1954 it was clear to a lot of intelligent people what was causing the
reading problem. Collier’s magazine of Nov. 26, 1954 explained it all in an article
entitled “Why Don’t They Teach My Child to Read?” by Howard Whitman.
He wrote:
“The man next to me in the airport bus entering Pasco, Washington , said “My six-year-old reads words
at school and can ‘t read the same words when I point them out at home in the newspaper. In school today
the children aren’t taught to read — they’re taught to memorize.”
A man in the seat ahead chimed in, “Everything is pictures. My youngest is in the sixth grade. He’ll still
come across a word like pasture and he remembers a picture in his early reader and calls it meadow ”
Neither passenger knew I was making a national study of modern education; they volunteered their
remarks, sharing something they were concerned — and troubled — about. Like them, thousands of other
American parents with first-grade children who are not catching on to reading as taught by the modernists,
and those with upper-grade children handicapped by lack of a solid reading foundation, are concerned
and troubled.
But most of all they are puzzled. Why is reading taught this way? A thousand times one hears the
question, “Why don ‘t they teach my child to read?” How can schools tolerate a method which turns out
many children of eight, nine and older who stare helplessly at a word (not on their memory list) and cannot
make a stab at reading it? What has happened to the method of teaching reading sound by sound ,
syllable by syllable, so that a child can at least make a reasonable attempt at reading any word?
Two basic teaching methods are in conflict here. One is the phonetic approach (known as phonics), the
old-fashioned way in the view of modern educators. They are likely to call it the “spit and spatter” or “grunt
and groan” method, satirizing the way youngsters try to sound out letters and syllables.
The other method, which the modernists have put into vogue, is the word-memory plan — also known as
“sight reading,” “total word configuration” or “word recognition.” It has the more friendly nickname of “look
and say,” since the youngster is supposed simply to look at a word and say it right out. He memorizes the
“shape” of the word, the configuration, and identifies it with pictures in his workbook Often he is taught to
recognize phrases or whole sentences in his picture book, or on flash (poster) cards, before he can
independently sound out and pronounce such simple words as cat or ball.
The fundamental difference in approach in the two methods reaches deep into philosophy and
scientific theory. Thinkers have wrangled for centuriesover which comes first, the whole or its parts (an
argument perhaps as endless as that over the priority of the “chicken or the egg”). The phonics
advocates say the parts come first; the word-memory people say we start with the whole and the parts fall
into place in due course.
The article explained it all quite clearly. The cause of the reading problems crlildren
were having was the teaching method. And what happened to that method after so
much criticism and parental concern? Did the educators change anything? Did they
admit that they had been wrong? On the contrary. They stuck to their guns and
insisted that their new way of teaching was the better way. And if parents didn’t like it
they could lump it. In fact, in 1956, the professors of reading organized the
International Reading Association, which has become the most powerful professional
lobby for the advocacy of the look-say method. In the main, its presidents have been
the authors of the leading reading textbooks used in the schools.
Does that indicate some sort of conflict of interest between professors of reading
who train their students to teach by their methods, who train the directors of reading
who then recommend the books to the school boards, who receive royalties from the
publishers who sell the books to the school districts? These same professors also
control the professional publications that show a distinct bias and hostility toward
phonics. If that isn’t a conflict of interest, then what is?
There is also the issue of deception. Have the educators been deceiving the
parents all these years? They never asked the parents whether or not they wanted
their children to be taught to read English as if it were Chinese. Have they deliberately
foisted on the American people a defective teaching method which has caused
enormous harm to millions of children, many of whom are now adults? Are they not
responsible for our nation’s precipitous decline in literacy?
In the early ’60s, Dr. Jeanne Chall obtained a grant from the Carnegie Corporation
to do an in-depth study of the two reading instruction methods to find out which method
was the more effective. The study was finally published in 1967 under the title,
Learning to Read: The Great Debate. Dr. Chall’s conclusion was that a phonics
approach, that is, decoding, was the more effective teaching method for beginning
reading.
You would have thought that Dr. Chall had settled the issue and that phonics had
won the great debate. But no such thing happened. True, for a time more phonics
was included in whole-word basal reading programs, but the basic ideographic
approach remained unchanged. The professors of reading remained totally
committed to their methodology. In fact, they invented a new term to describe it,
“psycholinguistics. ”
Indeed, it was Professor Kenneth Goodman who formulated the new definition of
reading which he articulated in the May 1967 Journal of the Reading Specialist as
follows :
“Reading is a selective process. It involves partial use of available language cues
selected from perceptual input on the basis of the reader’s expectation. As this partial
information is processed, tentative decisions are made to be confirmed, rejected or
refined as reading progresses.
“More simply stated, reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game.”
That said it all. Moreover, it indicated that the professor made no distinction
between an alphabetic writing system and an ideographic one. And that was the key
to the deception. Some years later Goodman told a reporter from The New York
Times (July 9, 1975) that it was perfectly all right if a child read “pony” for “horse”
because the child had gotten the meaning.
A professor of reading who does not understand the difference between an
alphabetic writing system and an ideographic one is like a mechanic who doesn’t
understand the difference between a horse-and-buggy and an automobile. The
alphabet did for the ancient world what the computer is doing for the modern world. It
made learning to read easy and speeded up the reading process enormously. It was a
far more accurate and precise form of writing. It permitted a tremendous growth in
vocabulary, thereby expanding the use of language and the ability to think. It
enhanced the exchange of information and knowledge. It helped produce better
speech because now language was visible in the form of symbols representing
speech sounds.
And because it permitted man to do so much more with so much less,
It is probably the single most significant invention of man.
To require children to give up all of the advantages of alphabetic writing in favor of
an ideographic theory of reading makes no sense at all. What have we gained by it?
Nothing. What have we lost by it? The literacy of a nation. It is time for the American
people to decide that enough is enough. The experiment has gone on far too long.
The great debate should have been settled a long time ago.
But now, in the ’90s, we are in a new phase of the debate — open warfare. This is
what we were told by Education Week of March 21, 1990 in an article entitled, “From a
‘Great Debate’ to a Full-Scale War: Dispute Over Teaching Reading Heats Up.” The
article states :
In 1967, one of the most prominent researchers in reading instruction, Jeanne S. Chall, analyzed the
controversy that was then raging in the field in an influential book called The Great Oebate.
Today, nearly a quarter of a century later, the Harvard University scholar says the “debate” not only
persists, but has, in fact, escalated to a full-scale war.
The battle lines are drawn between advocates of phonics, who stress the importance of teaching the
relationships betlween letters and sounds, and those of whole-language methodology, who believe
children should be taught reading by reading whole texts.
And so fierce have their arguments become that two recent attempts to find a common ground — a
federally funded study and a proposal for the 1992 national assessment — have not only failed to quell the
debate but may have exacerbated it.
“It’s always been, in reading, that there was restraint with all our fighting,” Ms. Chail says. “Now it’s as if all
restraints are gone.”
And so, we are now in an educational war, dealing with the very same issues
described by Collier’s magazine in 1954 and Rudolf Flesch in 1955. In all this time,
alphabetic phonics has remained alphabetic phoniCS, but look-say has evolved into
psycholinguistics, which has further eVOlved into whole language. Quite an interesting
metamorphosis. What exactly is whole language?
Whole language is an even more extreme form of look-say. It not only does not
recognize any distinction between an alphabetic writing system and an ideographic
one, it doesn’t even recognize that alphabetic writing is a representation of speech. In
a recently published book, Whole Language: What’s the Difference?, the authors write:
“Oral language, written language, sign language — each of these is a system of
linguistic convention for creating meanings. That means none is ‘the basis’ for the
other; none is a secondary representation of the other.” (page 9)
Those statements not only indicate a lack of understanding of what alphabetic
writing is, but a lack of understanding of its benefits.
Whole language is the latest educational fraud being perpetrated on the American
people. In fact, the whole language fraud is nothing less than the usurpation of
primary education by a group of radical, politicized educators whose goal is not the
improvement of reading but the inculcation of children with collectivist, left-wing ideas.
“Proof of the Illuminati” written by New Hampshire Minister Rev. Seth Payson of Rindge
Over ten years ago,
we
took
a
field
trip
to
the
Rindge
Historical
Society.
The
museum’s
collection
includes
a
military
discharge
signed
by
General
George
Washington,
a
musket
from
a
veteran
of
the
French
and
Indian
War,
and
the
carriage
owned
by
Dr.
William
Dean
of
nearly
Jaffrey,
NH,
whose
murder
in
1918
remains
an
unresolved
mystery.
Before
leaving
this
historic
gem,
we
visited
the
museum’s
bookstore
and
found
reprinted
copies
of
Proof
of
the
Illuminati
by
Rev.
Seth
Payson.
I
asked
the
museum’s
director
why
this
book
would
be
offered
by
the
museum.
She
told
me
that
the
author
was
pastor
of
the
Rindge
Congregational
Church
from
1782
until
his
death
in
1820.
I
bought
a
copy
and
read
this
fascinating
account
of
the
Illuminati.
Camp
Constitution
Press
is
pleased
to
reprint
this
timeless
but
little
known
classic.
From the Foreword:
This work, Proof of the Illuminati, was first published in 1802 under the longer title Proofs of
the Real Existence, and Dangerous Tendency, of Illuminism. It was printed in Charlestown,
Massachusetts by Samuel Etheridge for the author, Seth Payson. Reverend Seth Payson, D. D.
was born in 1758 and died in 1820. He, like his father, Rev. Phillips Payson, and several of his
brothers, became a Congregational preacher. After graduating from Harvard, he was appointed
as the minister of the Congregational church in Rindge, New Hampshire in 1782, and held this
post for the rest of his life. At least one of his sons also followed him into the ministry. Payson
was very active in establishing new churches for communities in northern New England,
including the church in Coventry, Vermont. He was the author of numerous sermons, several of
which were published and had a modest distribution. Additionally, Payson helped educate and
provide for Sophia Sawyer, a woman who would later become famous for establishing the
Fayetteville Female Academy. Rev. Payson served in the New Hampshire State senate from
1802-1805. He was a staunch Federalist supporter. Along with its alarming message regarding
both religion and state, Proof of the Illuminati was also a part of Payson’s campaign platform
A link to a free PDF version of the book:
And, a link to purchase the book from our on-line shop:
https://campconstitution.net/product/59283/
Back in 2012, we took a role in helping to defeat Agenda 21 in the Town of Rindge. Some Leftists in town were not happy with us. One such person was a direct descendent of Rev. Payson. This person was a town official. We pointed out to her that we were simply picking up where her worthy ancestor left off. She had no clue that her ancestor authored a book like this.
CALIFORNIA RESCINDED \\\WOO-H00///
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assemblymember.alanis@assembly.ca.gov, assemblymember.chen@assembly.ca.gov, assemblymember.davies@assembly.ca.gov, assemblymember.dixon@assembly.ca.gov, assemblymember.flora@assembly.ca.gov, assemblymember.jeffgonzalez@assembly.ca.gov, assemblymember.hadwick@assembly.ca.gov, assemblymember.sanchez@assembly.ca.gov, assemblymember.wallis@assembly.ca.gov,
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Camp Constitution Report Interviews Pastor Jackson Lahmeyer of the White House Faith Counsel
PHal Shurtleff, host of the Camp Constitution Report, interviews Pastor Jackson Lahmeyer of the White House Faith Counsel. Jackson Lahmeyer serves as the Lead Pastor of the historic Sheridan Christian Center in Tulsa, OK – now known as Sheridan Church. He is the founder of Pastors For Trump. Jackson and his wife, Kendra, have five children and reside in Owasso, Oklahoma. Lahmeyer attended Oral Roberts University (ORU) and received a B.A. & M.A. in Theological & Historical Studies, graduating Magna Cum Laude. Lahmeyer was then appointed to serve as the Crusade Director traveling the United States for Christ for All Nations, the ministry of Reinhard Bonnke that has helped lead 74,000,000 people to Christ since 1974. While serving as the Crusade Director, Lahmeyer served as the Oklahoma State Coordinator for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association leading more than 300 churches across Oklahoma’s 77 counties to get engaged and fight for conservative values.
In 2021-2022, Lahmeyer was a candidate for the United States Senate in Oklahoma. He was endorsed by Mayor Rudy Giuliani, General Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, Sebastian Gorka, Mike Lindell and other America First leaders. He is the author of Chasing After the Wind.
The Weekly Sam: Making Americans Illiterate: A Key Factor in the Deliberate Dumbing Down of America By Samuel Blumenfeld
( The following is a transcript of a speech given by Sam at a homeschool conference in 2009.)
The planned deliberate dumbing-down of America was started in 1898 by socialist John Dewey
with his attack on the primary school’s emphasis on teaching children to read. This emphasis
sustained the capitalist, individualistic system and it produced high literacy whereby the
average American could read anything and think for himself. Dewey wrote in an essay entitled
The Primary School Fetich:
“The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early school life because of the
great importance attaching to literacy seems to me a perversion … .
No one can clearly set before himself the vivacity and persistency of the child’s motor
instincts at this period, and then call to mind the continued grind of reading and writing,
without feeling that the justification of our present curriculum is psychologically
impossible. It is simply superstition: it is a remnant of an outgrown period of history.”
What Dewey deliberately ignored was the tremendous language learning faculty that every
child is born with, and that teaching a child to read at that early age expands the child’s mastery
of language, which is the key to academic success. A different way of teaching reading had to be developed that would lower the literacy level of the American people. Dewey and his socialist colleagues were determined to change
individualistic America into a collectivist society.
Dewey got his egalitarian, utopian ideas from Edward Bellamy’s novel, Looking Backward, a
fantasy of a socialist America in the year 2000. That book is still being read today in American
universities. Dewey’s plan required that a new educational curriculum should be developed and tested in
private “experiment stations.” He wrote:
“After such schools have worked out carefully and definitely the subject matter of a new
curriculum-finding the right place for language-studies and placing them in their right
perspective-the problems of the more general educational reform will be immensely
simplified and facilitated.”
All of this was being carefully planned by a self-appointed group of socialists who called
themselves “progressives.” They knew that what they were doing was subversive and
treasonous. Indeed, Dewey wrote:
“Change must come gradually. To force it unduly would compromise its final success by
favoring a violent reaction.”
If the changes were so beneficial to America’s children and society, why would they favor a
violent reaction? Obviously, the dumbing-down plan would have to be imposed by stealth,
deceit, and lies. And that is why no progressive educator can be trusted. They have been told
to lie in order to bring about their socialist scheme in our schools.
Did they know that their new teaching methods would create reading disability and dyslexia?
They found out pretty early at the expense of four of the richest boys in America. Believe it or
not John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was a great admirer of John Dewey, and he put his four sons,
Nelson, David, Laurence, and Winthrop, in the Lincoln School, one of the experimental schools
called for by Dewey. Rockefeller donated over $3-million (worth $300-million today) to the
school. The result? All four boys became dyslexic! But of course that didn’t stop the
progressives from implementing their plan. Incidentally, when Nelson was Governor of New York, he wrote in the Reading Teacher of
March 1972:
I appreciate the opportunity to make some observations on the importance of reading
for I am a prime example of one who has had to struggle with the handicap of being a
poor reader while serving in public office.
On many occasions, upon confronting an audience, I have elected to announce that I
have thrown away my speech in favor of giving the audience the benefit of my
spontaneous thouphts. And, usually, I have added: “Besides, I went to a progressive
school and don’t read very well anyhow.” This, of course, is a trial to ~y very able speech
writer as well as a libel upon all the devoted teachers and professors who saw me
through the years of my formal education. It is also usually a rather popular device to
communicate with the audience on a much more intimate basis-but the truth is that it
serves primarily to cover the fact that I really wish I could do a better job of reading a
speech or other public statement. And as you know, Nelson Rockefeller was vice president under Ford. In other words, a
functional illiterate was a heartbeat from becoming President.
David Rockefeller writes in his Memoirs:
“It was Lincoln’s experimental curriculum and method of instruction that distinguished it
from all other New York schools of the time. Father was an ardent and generous
supporter of John Dewey’s educational methods and school reform efforts. . . .
Teacher’s College of Columbia University operated Lincoln, with considerable financial
assistance in the early years from the General Education Board, as an experimental
school designed to put Dewey’s philosophy into practice.
Lincoln stressed freedom for children to learn and to play an active role in their own
education… . But there were some drawbacks. In my case, I had trouble with reading
and spelling, which my teachers, drawing upon “progressive” educational theory, did
not consider significant. They believed I was simply a slow reader and that I would
develop at my own pace. In reality I have dyslexia, which was never diagnosed, and I
never received remedial attention. As a result my reading ability, as well as my
proficiency in spelling, improved only marginally as I grew older. All my siblings, except
Babs and John, had dyslexia to a degree.”
Note that David Rockefeller says he couldn’t learn to read because he was dyslexic, when it was
the progressive look-say reading program that caused his dyslexia.
Returning to Dewey, he advised that a statement by psychologists was needed to give the new
reading instruction program the backing of educational authority. A psychologist by the name
of Edmund Burke Huey, who got his Ph.D. at Clark University under G. Stanley Hall, was chosen
to write the needed book. It was published in 1908 under the title The Psychology and
Pedagogy of Reading. In it, Huey reiterated Dewey’s views on the teaching of reading, and he
provided an idea of how the new whole-word, look-say method of teaching worked. He wrote:
‘It is not necessary that the child should be able to pronounce correctly or pronounce at
all, at first, the new words that appear in his reading, any more than that he should spell
or write all the new words that he hears spoken. If he grasps, approximately, the total
meaning of the sentence in which the new word stands, he has read the sentence….
And even if the child substitutes words of his own for some that are on the page,
provided that these express the meaning, it is an encouraging sign that the reading has
been real, and recognition of details will come as it is needed. The shock that such a
statement will give to many a practical teacher of reading is but an accurate measure of
the hold that a false i,deal has taken hold of us, viz., that to read is to say just what is
upon the page, instead of to think each in his own way, the meaning that the page
suggests.”
There you have the whole-language philosophy of reading well described in 1908, and practiced
today as Huey described it. In other words, the progressives knew in 1908 what kind of readers
their teaching methods would produce. Indeed, Huey’s mentor, G. Stanley Hall had this to say
about literacy in 1911:
“Very many men have lived and died and been great, even the leaders of their age,
without any acquaintance with letters. The knowledge which illiterates acquire is
probably on the whole more personal, direct, environmental and probably a much
larger proportion of it practical. Moreover, they escape much eye-strain and mental
excitement, and, other things being equal, are probably more active and less sedentary .
. . . Perhaps we are prone to put too high a value both upon the ability required to attain
this art and the discipline involved in doing so, as well as the culture value that comes to
the citizen with his average of only six grades of schooling by the acquisition of this art.
Fifteen years later, a neuropathologist at Iowa State University, Dr. Samuel T. Orton, made a
survey of students with reading problems, and came to the conclusion that they were being
caused by the new method of teaching reading. Alarmed, he wrote an article, The “Sight Word”
Method of Teaching Reading as a Cause of Reading Disability, which was published in the
Journal of Educational Psychology in February 1929. The Journal was being edited by the very
professors who were about to impose this new teaching method on all the public schools of
America. Orton wrote:
“I wish to emphasize at the beginning that the strictures which I have to offer here do not
apply to the use of the sight method of teaching reading as a whole but only to its
effects on a restricted group of children for whom, as I think we can show, this
technique is not only not adapted but often proves an actual obstacle to reading
progress, and moreover I believe that this group is one of considerable educational
importance both because of its size and because here faulty teaching methods may not
only prevent the acquisition of academic education by children of average capacity but
may also give rise to far reaching damage to their emotional life.”
What Orton had actually done is convince the educators that their new method of teaching
reading would do exactly what they intended it to do: destroy American literacy. In the next
two decades reading programs like Dick and Jane, Tom and Betty, and others were adopted by
the schools of America.
By 1944, Life magazine could publish an article on dyslexia which, when read today, indicates
the incredible lengths to which the educators had gone to find fault with the children who
could not learn to read by the look-say method. The article reads:
“Millions of children in the U.S. suffer from dyslexia which is the medical term for reading
difficulties. It is responsible for about 70% of the school failures in 6- to 12-year-age
group, and handicaps about 15% of all grade-school children. Dyslexia may stem from a
variety of physical ailments or combination of them-glandular imbalance, heart
disease, eye or ear trouble-or from a deep-seated psychological disturbance that
“blocks” a child’s ability to learn.”
Was this ignorance or deliberate deception on the part of Life magazine? It should be
remembered that Henry R. Luce, a Yale graduate, was a member of Skull and Bones.
Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, some interesting psychological experiments had been
conducted by Dr. Ivan Pavlov, in his Moscow laboratory, on techniques of artificially creating
behavioral disorganization. All of this was well described in a book written by one of Pavlov’s
colleagues, Alexander Luria, The Nature of Human Conflicts, Researches in Disorganization and
Control of Human Behavior, published in 1932. It had been translated from the Russian by W.
Horsley Gantt, an American psychologist who had spent the years 1922 to 1929 working in
Pavlov’s laboratories in the Soviet Union. In his preface to the book, Luria wrote:
“The research described here are the results of the experimental psychological
investigations at the State Institute of Experimental Psychology, Moscow, during the
period 1923-1930. The chief problems ofthe author were an objective and materialistic
description of the mechanisms lying at the basis of the disorganization of human
behavior and an experimental approach to the laws of its regulation …. To accomplish
this it was necessary to create artificially affects and models of experimental neuroses
which made possible an analysis of the laws lying at the basis of the disintegration of
behavior.”
In describing the results of the experiments, Luria wrote:
“Pavlov obtained very definite affective “breaks,” an acute disorganization of behavior,
each time that the conditioned reflexes collided, when the animal was unable to react
to two mutually exclusive tendencies, or was incapable of adequately responding to any
imperative problem.”
One of the reasons why we know so much about Humanistic Psychology today is because of the
defection of one of its major practitioners, Dr. William Coulson, a former colleague of Carl
Rogers and Abraham Maslow. He testified how fraudulent the Encounter Movement was as
science and how destructive it was in practice. The encounter idea was first developed at the National Training Laboratory (NTL) at Bethel, Maine, sponsored by the National Education Association. It was founded in 1948 by Kurt Lewin,
a German social psychologist who invented “sensitivity training” and “group dynamics,” or the
psychology of the collective. Lewin’s work was very much in harmony with John Dewey’s
collectivist educational philosophy.
Lewin’s work in Germany in the 1920s was also in harmony with the experiments taking place in
Moscow on techniques of artificially creating behavioral disorganization. Alexander Luria
wrote:
“K. Lewin, in our opinion, has been one of the most prominent psychologists to elucidate
this question of the artificial production of affect and of experimental disorganization of
behavior. The method of his procedure-the introduction of an emotional setting into
the experience of a human, the interest of the subject in the experiment-helped him to
obtain an artificial disruption of the affect of considerable strength…. Here the
fundamental conception of Lewin is very close to ours.” (pp. 206-7)
Lewin died in 1947 shortly after establishing the National Training Laboratory at Bethel, Maine.
Sensitivity training was considered his most original achievement. Carl Rogers considered
sensitivity training to be “perhaps the most significant social invention of this century.”
B.F. Skinner writes in his autobiography:
“In May 1961, Eve and I were members of a delegation of behavioral scientists who
visited Russia, Czechoslovakia, and Poland under the auspices of the National Academy
of Science and the State Department… . We saw a good deal of Alexander Luria at the
Neurological Institute. … Although Luria was the best known Russian psychologist, he
and his wife, together with his daughter and her husband and an older woman, lived in
three small rooms. He explained that they were near his work and a library. He had a
dacha.”
Skinner discussed the idea of setting up a Walden Two with Luria. Skinner was also well
acquainted with Kurt Lewin. He writes:
“Kurt Lewin was up here a month or two ago [in 1938] … . Have you seen his new book?
He diagrams several lever-pressing situations, and did the same for me for two or three
hours. He is sure we agree, but fundamentally there is the same old ghost of purpose
standing between us.” (p.224)
So it is obvious that Skinner was quite aware of the experiments in artificially creating
behavioral disorganization. The lever-pressing situations relate to Skinner’s animal training
experiments. Indeed, he boasted, “I could make a pigeon a high achiever by reinforcing it on a
proper schedule.” He also wrote in Walden Two:
“We can achieve a sort of control under which the controlled, though they are following
a code much more scrupulously than was ever the case under the old system,
nevertheless feel free. They are doing what they want to do, not what they are forced to
do. That’s the source of the tremendous power of positive reinforcement– there’s no
restraint and no revolt. By careful cultural design, we control not the final behavior, but
the inclination to behave– the motives, desires, the wishes.”
Skinner also wrote:
“Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.”
The any things now control our culture. And that is why America is in the mess it is.
Skinners colleague Engelman applied Skinnerian teaching principles to Direct Instruction,
Mastery Learning, and to the OBE-Outcome Based Education-curriculum. The reason they
work so poorly is because of the complete absence of the spiritual component which must be
part of education. Godless, atheist education leads to purposeless education. The computer is
the perfect Skinner box because it connects directly with the student and can change his values.
That is why the computer will prevail in the school because of its ability to control the student’s
learning,
Luria’s book describes how dyslexia is created by the clash between phonics and look-say. The
phonics reader, with a phonetic reflex, automatically sees the phonetic structure of the written
word while the look-say reader (with a whole-word reflex) automatically looks at each word as
a picture and cannot see the phonetic structure of the word. The clash of reflexes causes
dyslexia. Skinner also became a member of the Pavlovian Society at Johns Hopkins founded by Horsley
Gantt, Luria’s translator.
By 1955, the reading problem had become so acute that Rudolf Flesch felt compelled to write
his eye-opening bestseller, Why Johnny Can’t Read. It gave the reason in no uncertain terms:
The teaching of reading-all over the United States, in all the schools, and in all the
textbooks-is totally wrong and flies in the face of all logic and common sense.
And then he explained how the alphabetic phonics method-the proper way to teach children
to read-had been replaced by a look-say, whole word method that was causing untold harm to
the children. What was the reaction of the professors of education? They circled the wagons and created
the International Reading Association which became the citadel of the whole-word method.
And they did everything in their power, through their professional publications, to denounce
and discredit Flesch. In my book, The New Illiterates, http://blumenfeld.campconstitution.net/Books/New%20Illiterates.pdf I quote the professors ad nauseam. Nevertheless, Flesch’s book awakened many parents, which led to a revival of phonics
programs, but the reaction was not strong enough to derail the dumbing down process in the
schooLS.
In 1961, Watson Washburn, a New York attorney, created the Reading Reform Foundation and
he asked me to become a member of his National Advisory Council. At that time, I was an
editor at Grosset & Dunlap and knew nothing about the reading problem. He advised me to
read Flesch’s book and that’s how I became involved in the reading problem.
I attended all of the Foundation’s conferences, which, of course, were totally ignored by the
reading establishment. However, knowing that millions of children were being denied proper
phonics reading instruction, I decided to write a reading program that any parent could use to
teach their child to read at home. The result was Alpha-Phonics, which I consider to be the
most effective, easiest to use and least expensive reading program ever created.
Meanwhile, the most noteworthy event in the mid-sixties was the completion of Jeanne Chall’s
study of reading instruction methods and its publication in 1967 under the title Learning to
Read: The Great Debate. Three years of intensive research confirmed what phonics proponents
had known all along, that a phonics “code-emphasis” method used in the beginning of reading
instruction produced better readers than methods which began with a “meaning emphasis”
(whole words).
Since Chall’s book was written for the teaching profession rather than the general public it did
not have the impact that Flesch’s book had. She was criticized by the reading establishment
and spent the rest of her professional life in constant conflict with them.
In 1981, Flesch wrote another book, Why Johnny Still Can’t Read, bringing the reading problem
up to date. This time the reading establishment completely ignored him. By then the look-say
method had morphed into the “psycholinguistic” method and finally the Whole Language
method. A new generation parents and teachers were as confused as ever when it came to
reading instruction.
Meanwhile, those parents who were informed enough to know what was going on, left the
public schools and began to homeschool. My Alpha-Phonics program helped thousands of
them teach their kids to read. As for the public schools, reading continued to deteriorate.
By 1981, a Harvard professor, Dr. Anthony Oettinger, was bold enough to tell an audience of
Telecon executives:
“The present ‘traditional’ concept of literacy has to do with the ability to read and write..
.. Do we, for example, really want to teach people to do a lot of sums or write in ‘a fine
round hand’ when they have a five-dollar hand-held calculator or a word processor to
work with? Or, do we really have to have everybody literate-writing and reading in the
traditional sense-when we have the means through our technology to achieve a new
flowering of oral communication?”
“Do we have to have everyone literate?” That’s the attitude of the elite. But then why are we
spending billions on public schools if it is not to make everyone literate?
In 1983, we had the Nation at Risk report, which stated:
“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre
educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of
war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.”
Finally, someone was actually identifying the treason of our educators.
Did this alarming report change anything? According to Parents for Choice in Education:
On the 25th anniversary of this sobering report, the American education system remains
in a state of crisis. We are “A Nation Still at Risk'”
In 2008 the U.S. Department of Education released a report entitled, A Nation
Accountable: Twenty-five Years After A Nation at Risk, stating:
“If we were ‘at risk’ in 1983, we are at even greater risk now. The rising demands of our
global economy, together with demographic shifts, require that we educate more
students to higher levels than ever before. Yet, our education system is not keeping
pace with these growing demands.”
A year earlier, in November 2007, the National Endowment for the Arts issued an alarming
report on the present state of literacy in America, Reading at Risk. According to the Report, the
number of 17-year-olds who never read for pleasure increased from 9 percent in 1984 to 19
percent in 2004. About half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 never read books for
pleasure. Endowment Chairman Dana Gioia stated:
“This is a massive social problem. We are losing the majority of the new generation. They will not achieve anything close to their potential because of poor reading. The survey found that only a third of high-school seniors read at a proficient
level. ”
And proficiency is not a high standard,” said Gioia. “We’re not asking them to be able to
read Proust in the original. We’re talking about reading the daily newspaper.”
What was disappointing about the Report is that it did not state the cause of this decline in
national literacy: the refusal of our educators to use the time-tested, traditional phonies
reading instruction programs that once made Americans the most literate people on earth.
And finally, in 2012 the Council on Foreign Relations has gotten into the act by issuing another
alarming report on American education. The CFR Task Force was chaired by Joe I. Klein, former
head of New York City public schools, and Condoleezza Rice, former U.S. Secretary of State in
the Bush administration, two very prominent members of the elite establishment. Klein had
this to say about the reading problem in an interview conducted by Jon Meacham:
“People ask me, what surprised me most about being chancellor? I used to go to public
schools in this city and walk into a high school and ask a kid to read, and the kid could
not read. I don’t even mean comprehend; I mean read the words on a text. How
the hell can a kid be in a school system for a decade and not read?
I mean, so, you know, this kid — now, it may be that financial literacy will incentivize
them, or entrepreneurism, or some ofthe kind of project-driven work that should
happen. But it’s just not going to win in the 21st century to have kids in high schools
who can’t read.”
When Klein was chancellor, I wrote him a letter with a proposal to help solve the schools’
reading problem by using Alpha-Phonics to turn the worst school in the city to the best school
in the city. Some months later I received a very nice letter from Klein who said he appreciated
my interest. And that was all. My proposal was not even considered. Which told me
something about how constricted members of the establishment are in considering true
solutions to the problems they deal with. The solutions must be within politically correct
parameters. And that is why the reforms offered by the CFR task force will get nowhere.
Their main recommendation was for the schools to adopt Common Core Standards.
Concerning the Common Co·re idea, this is what former Secretary of Education Margaret
Spelling, a member of the Task Force, had to say in the Meacham interview:
“I would target the Common Core effort because I do think that’s the way out of the
wilderness. But I wouldn’t do it with — today let’s go try to do, you know, get to millions of
teachers on how to — how to do it.
‘We got to get, you know, very smart and strategic with places like the College Board and
the big publishers, the big technology companies, to get some research-based tools that
are scalable and systematic. And so this idea that we can expect every single teacher,
master teacher or otherwise, many of whom are not capable of doing this in the first
place, to sort of do the magic in their own classroom is just unreasonable, period,
paragraph. And so, you know, we gotta get smarter about that and THEN deploy it. I
mean, I wouldn’t even talk to the teachers about the Common Core at the moment until
we get our act together about what it is and how it works and, you know, materials around
it and assessments built to it. Otherwise, I fear it’s going to be one of those, “we tried that,
and it did not work.”
Considering the difficulties pointed out by Spelling in implementing the Common Core
throughout the education system, we can foresee that educator resistance will kill it. So there
is no possibility of true education reform as long as the nation tolerates a public system of
education that has literally become a highly organized criminal enterprise.
What are its crimes? Its teaching methods injure children’s brains, which is a form of child
abuse. It contributes to the delinquency of minors by pornographic sex ed and the distribution
of condoms. It destroys a child’s religious beliefs and leads many students into atheism,
nihilism or self-destructive Satanism. It pushes powerful drugs like Ritalin and Adderall on kids
in the schools., which, if done on the streets would put you in jail. And it extorts billions of
dollars of the taxpayer’s money on the false pretext that they are educating the children.
So where do we go from here? If enough Tea Party people are elected to Congress in
November, we may be able to get them to close down the Federal Department of Education.
We should work to get the public schools back under local control. We must shut down the
computerized data collection system on all students in America. In short, we must get the
federal government out of the education business and restore the schools to the people in the
communities who pay for them and send their children to them.
We, at this conference, should form a permanent organization which will ride herd on the
legislators not only in Washington but in all the state legislatures. We may be few in numbers
but our message will appeal to the Tea Party.
The Blumenfeld Archives
The Bucks of America Flag: The First Black Military Unit in U.S. History
In this short video, Hal Shurtleff of Camp Constitution discusses the Bucks of America flag. The original flag, which John Hancock and his son presented to the unit, is on display at the African American Museum in Washington, D.C.
To order this book: Ten Years Ago the Obergefell Opinion Put Kim Davis in Jail
The Following is a news release from Liberty Counsel www/lc.org
Aug 29, 2025
After Davis did not receive the accommodation, a federal judge remanded her to the Carter County Detention Center on September 3, 2015, where she remained for six days. While she was in prison, a deputy clerk removed Davis’ name from the marriage licenses and issued them to three sets of same-sex plaintiffs who filed suit against the Clerk of Rowan County. One set of plaintiffs ended their litigation. But two sets of plaintiffs wanted the name of Kim Davis on their licenses.
Returning to court, they asked Judge David Bunning to hold Davis in contempt, but Gov. Beshear, who refused her original request, responded by saying the licenses were valid without her name. Thus, Davis essentially received the accommodation she sought, and the plaintiffs received the licenses – without her name.
In December 2015, after being sworn in, Gov. Matt Bevin issued a detailed Executive Order granting an accommodation to Davis and all Kentucky clerks to remove their names from the licenses. Then in April 2016, the Kentucky legislature unanimously passed a law removing the names of clerks from marriage licenses. The case should have ended, but two sets of plaintiffs, including David Ermold and David Moore, wanted to mock Davis’ Christian faith.
Ermold and Moore have spent the last 10 years viciously attacking Kim Davis. The two Davids told GQ magazine in December 2015, they had never even discussed getting married before rushing to join the melee outside Davis’ office as she waited for an answer to her religious accommodation request.
They traveled to her office day after day to record themselves harassing her and posting the videos to social media. They bragged to GQ about how their videos made them internet famous. And when their moment of initial fame ended, the men embarked on a targeted campaign to keep themselves in the spotlight by inventing new ways to try to destroy Davis.
They tried to sue to force Davis to put her name on their marriage certificate.
When they failed to win that legal fight, Ermold tried to take Davis’ job by running against her for the Rowan County Clerk position. Davis even helped Ermold complete the paperwork to run against her. Ermold lost in the primary race to another candidate, and their “fame” faded again.
Ironically, even after trying to take Davis’ job, Ermold claimed in court that she had cost him his job. But when Liberty Counsel called his former employer to the stand during trial in 2023, the whole world learned that Ermold’s claim was absolutely untrue.
So, the two Davids changed direction, asking for damages because Davis’ decision to use her lawful religious freedom rights had caused the men “hurt feelings.” Emotional distress, they claimed. No lost wages. No medical treatment. No counseling. Just “hurt” feelings.
Even though the law forbids financial damages over “hurt feelings” with no objective damages when the alleged distress arises because of speech on an issue of public importance, Davis now has a $360,000-dollar judgment hanging over her head.
On July 24, 2025, Liberty Counsel filed a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court requesting the Court to take up her case. The petition presents two issues – that the First Amendment is an absolute defense and Obergefell should be overturned. Four Justices are needed to accept review and five are required for a majority opinion. Chief Justice John Roberts so opposed the Obergefell majority opinion that he read his dissent from the bench – the only time he has done so since joining the High Court. When Justices read their dissent from the bench, it is to emphasize the intensity of that dissent.
“Five lawyers have closed the debate and enacted their own vision of marriage as a matter of constitutional law,” wrote Chief Justice Roberts. “The majority’s decision is an act of will, not legal judgment. The right it announces has no basis in the Constitution or this Court’s precedent.”
Justice Clarence Thomas, who also dissented, noted there would be inevitable conflict between this invented right and religious liberty.
“In our society, marriage is not simply a governmental institution; it is a religious institution as well,” wrote Justice Thomas. “Today’s decision might change the former, but it cannot change the latter. It appears all but inevitable that the two will come into conflict, particularly as individuals and churches are confronted with demands to participate in and endorse civil marriages between same-sex couples.”
As Justice Thomas predicted, conflict arose as Davis stands today as the first victim jailed, sued, and held personally liable post-Obergefell for her sincerely held religious beliefs on marriage. By taking the case, SCOTUS can do two things – affirm religious freedom for all people and also correct the Obergefell mistake by overruling the 2015 opinion. SCOTUS can return the religious and governmental institution of marriage back to the states.
The urgency of this case is even more evident. On August 26, 2025, Ermold and Moore filed a notice in federal district court to begin exploring Davis’ personal assets to see what they can collect to satisfy the judgment. In light of this vindictive development, the High Court should take this case and render justice where justice is due.
The response by Ermold and Moore to Liberty Counsel’s petition is due by October 8, and thus the Justices will be ready to conference the case by the third week of October, at which time they could decide to take up this critically important case.
Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “David Ermold and David Moore’s decade-long vindictive campaign has sought to personally punish Kim Davis for refusing to violate her faith.The plaintiffs created a shame case by intentionally targeting Davis to get a license with her name to mock her Christian faith. If a Christian can be personally sued, jailed, and held liable for their religious freedom and belief that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, then America’s religious freedom is meaningless. Obergefell was wrongly decided and the Supreme Court should overturn it and return the issue of marriage back to the states.”
Liberty Counsel provides broadcast quality TV interviews via Hi-Def Skype and LTN at no cost.
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American Minute with Bill Federer LABOR DAY: Railroad Strikes, Grover Cleveland, Eugene Debs, Socialist Party of America, Outsourcing
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The Weekly Sam: How to Increase Your Vocabulary By Samuel L. Blumenfeld
Evolutionists love to remind us how close our DNA is to that of the chimpanzee or
gorilla. But there is one very sharp distinction between human beings and every other
species, including the various kinds of monkeys. God gave us the faculty of language,
the faculty of speech.
Why did God so endow the human being with this remarkable ability? If you read the
Bible you will find the answer. We read in Genesis 1:27: “And God created man in his
own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”
We were created to be like God, to have certain attributes of God, but not be God. The
next passage makes that clear: “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, be
fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the
fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and of every living thing that moveth upon
the earth.”
And in order to do all of that God gave man a brain properly endowed with extraordinary
intelligence in order to carry out these huge tasks. The Bible further states in Genesis
2:19: “And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every
fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and
whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”
In other words, God made Adam into a lexicographer–an inventor of names, a creator of
vocabulary. Indeed, God gave man the power of language in order to serve four
different functions: The first, to know God and be able to communicate with Him. We
do that every day through prayer. We’ve done that by writing the Bible, the history of
man’s relations with God. Second, we use language to know one’s mate with the ability
to communicate at the deepest intimate level. Third, we use language to be able to know
other human beings and thereby create society. And Fourth, we use language to know
oneself. We are constantly speaking inwardly to ourselves in order to understand who
and what we are, and in order to transform our dreams and ideas into reality.
So why should we want to expand our vocabularies? Because knowledge is power, and
every new word represents new knowledge. And how does one increase one’s
vocabulary? A good place to start is by reading Shakespeare’s plays, all 36 of them
which were published in the First Folio in 1623. It is said that Shakespeare invented
more new words than any other writer in English literature. New words are needed
when it is necessary to convey the meaning of something for which no word exists.
Another good way to expand one’s vocabulary is to read 19th century literature, including
Dickens, Carlyle, James Fenimore Cooper, Thackerary, Washington Irving, and other
great masters of the written word, who had extensive, rich vocabularies. Also read the
most literate writers you can find who are not afraid to show off their use of vocabulary.
However, whenever reading such works, keep a blank notebook at your side in which you
can jot down all of the new words you’ve encountered. Then read their definitions in your
dictionary and write your own sentences using these new words. Remember, the more
words you know, the more knowledge you have, for each new word represents new
knowledge.
As we said, new words are needed to express new ideas or actions for which no words
exist. This is particularly true in our hi-tech culture where advances in computer and
internet technology require us to invent new words. Words like “geek” and “nerd” were
invented by students to describe those with a passion for computers and technological
inventions. Such new words are being invented every day.
The fact that God commanded Adam to name every living creature meant that an
important part of being a human was the need to make good use of greatest gift God gave
us, the faculty of language.
.
In other words, man was exalted in a way that no other species was by his Creator.
Thus, increasing and expanding one’s vocabulary is not only necessary for the
advancement of man’s purpose on earth, but also needed to carry out God’s
commandments. Besides having been given the faculty of speech we were also endowed
with a voice-box that could express thoughts and ideas by sounds. An extraordinary
physical phenomenon.
Language, in fact, is the link to the spiritual dimension in our lives. Man is a spiritual as
well as a physical being. We are made of matter by God who is not matter. Indeed, if
you become a physicist, you will find that the deeper you explore the nature of matter,
you will reach virtually no matter at all.
Remember, language is sounds made by the voice box. It has no substance but what it
signals in our heads. But written language has permitted us to make a permanent record
of what is said. That is why we have science, history, and life stories to tell.
It is the exploration of that microcosmic realm that has made it possible for man to
develop computer science in which a million transistors can be put on a microscopic
silicon chip.
So scientists increase our vocabulary every day by making discoveries that have to be
named. Whenever we invent something new, we have to invent words to describe it.
By the way, God put our language faculty in the left hemisphere of our brains. It is our
most valuable piece of brain matter. Without it we would not be human beings. The
right hemisphere deals with space, dimension, art, and perspective. In American schools
teachers force students to use the right brain to perform the functions of the left brain.
The result is dyslexia.
Learning to read must be taught phonetically through intensive phonics so that it
conforms with the functions of the language faculty and expands its power. In fact our
alphabetic reading and writing system is the most successful reading system ever
invented because it conforms with the left brain’s faculty, thus making it easy for anyone
to learn to read.
And so, increase your vocabulary in order to increase the power of your brain and the
power of your mind. Our brains emit dreams, images, and ideas that are not matter, but
are the basis of human power. The more words you know, the more power you will
have to create, grow, and prosper. Indeed, learning the vocabulary of the stock market
may lead you to become a millionaire.
The Blumenfeld Archives: http://blumenfeld.campconstitution.net/Articles-2.htm
American Minute with Bill Federer Evolution’s Inherent racism defended by Clarence Darrow: The Monkey Trial & William Jennings Bryan
Clarence Darrow was the attorney who defended
EVOLUTION.
Darrow had previously defended Leopold and
Loeb, the teenage homosexual thrill killers who
murdered 14-year-old Robert “Bobby” Franks in
1924 just for the excitement.
Darrow obtained a pardon for antifa-type anarchists
in 1886 who blew up a pipe bomb in Chicago’s
Haymarket, Square, killing 7 policemen and injured
60 others.
A Haymarket Statue was dedicated to the fallen
policemen.
The policemen’s Haymarket Statue was blown up
by the socialist anarchist group Weather
Underground on October 6, 1969, prior to the
“Days of Rage” protests.
The statue was rebuilt, but the Weather
Underground blew it up again on October 6, 1970.
The Weather Underground’s leaders had a lasting
effect, as two of them, Bill Ayers and Bernadine
Dohrn, hosted a meeting in 1995 to launch Barack
Obama’s Illinois State Senate Campaign; and
another, Eric Mann, trained Patrisse Cullors, a
founder of Black Lives Matter.
Clarence Darrow defended the “mentally deranged
drifter” Patrick Eugene Prendergast in 1894 who
confessed to murdering Chicago mayor Carter H.
Harrison, Sr.
Darrow defended socialist organizer Eugene V.
Debs, who was prosecuted for instigating the
Pullman Railroad Strike which caused 30 deaths,
57 wounded, and $80 million in property damages
in 27 states.
Debs founded the Socialist Party of America,
which branched off the Communist Party USA in
1919.
Clarence Darrow represented the Western
Federation of Miners leaders charged with the 1905
murder of former Idaho Gov. Frank
Steunenberg.
In 1911, the American Federation of Labor arranged
for Darrow to defend the McNamara brothers.
The McNamara brothers were charged with
dynamiting the Los Angeles Times building which
killed 21 employees.
Implicated in bribing jurors, Darrow was banned
from practicing law in California.
In 1925, Darrow unsuccessfully
defended John Scopes, a
Tennessee high school
biology teacher who taught the
theory of origins called
“evolution.”
The attorney defending CREATION was the
Democrat Party’s three time candidate for
President, William Jennings Bryan.
Bryan objected to a tooth being presented as proof
of humans evolving from apes.
Later the tooth was found to be that of an extinct
peccary (pig).
William Jennings Bryan won the Scopes case on
JULY 21, 1925.
Though Darrow lost the trial, a
pro-evolution propaganda film
was produced in 1960 titled
Inherit the Wind.
Professor Alan M. Dershowitz wrote on “The
Scopes Trial” in his book America on Trial: Inside
the Legal Battles that Transformed Our Nation
(eBook Edition: May 2004):
“The popular perception of what transpired in the
courtroom comes not from the transcript of the
court proceeding itself, but rather from the
motion picture … Inherit the Wind.
The William Jennings Bryan character, Scopes’s
prosecutor, was a burlesque of know-nothing
religious literalism …
… The actual William Jennings Bryan was no
simple-minded literalist, and he certainly was no
bigot.
He was a great populist who cared deeply about
equality and about the downtrodden.
Indeed, one of his reasons for becoming so deeply
involved in the campaign against evolution was
that Darwin’s theories were being used
misused, it turns out – by racists, militarists, and
nationalists to further some pretty horrible
programs …”
Dershowitz continued:
“The eugenics movement, which advocated
sterilization of ‘unfit’ and ‘inferior’ stock, was at
its zenith, and it took its impetus from Darwin’s
theory of natural selection.
German militarism, which had just led to the
disastrous world war, drew inspiration from
Darwin’s ideas on survival of the fittest.
The anti-immigration movement, which had
succeeded in closing American ports of entry to
‘inferior racial stock,’ was grounded in a mistaken
belief that certain ethnic groups had evolved
more fully than others …
… The Jim Crow laws, which maintained racial
segregation, were rationalized on grounds of the
racial inferiority of blacks.
… Indeed, the very book – Hunter’s Civic Biology
from which John T. Scopes taught Darwin’s
theory of evolution to high school students in
Dayton, Tennessee, contained dangerous
misapplications of that theory …”
Dershowitz added:
“Indeed, its very title, Civic Biology, made it clear
that biology had direct political implications for civic
society.
In discussing the ‘five races’ of man, the text
assured the all-white, legally segregated high
school students taught by Scopes that ‘the
highest type of all, the Caucasians, (are)
represented by the civilized white inhabitants of
Europe and America.’
The book, the avowed goal of which was the
improvement of the future human race, then
proposed certain eugenic remedies.”
Eugenic laws, based on evolution, were passed in
many states.
Virginia’s eugenic law, in 1924, allowed for the
state to sterilize its first victim, Carrie Buck, who
was a patient in the State Colony for Epileptics and
Feeble-minded.
A case was brought which went to the Supreme
Court.
There, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., gave
his infamous Buck v. Bell decision (1927), which
continued to allow the sterilization of people
without their knowledge or consent, stating:
“Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Because of Holmes’ decision, Virginia continued
to sterilize more than 8,000 people until the
practice was stopped in 1974.
Holmes also applied evolution to his decision
making philosophy, calling it “legal realism,” letting
judges alter laws to adapt to changing social and
economic conditions.
Professor Alan
Dershowitz
continued his
critique of the high
school textbook
used by John
Scopes, Hunter’s
Civic Biology:
After a discussion of the inheritability of crime and
immorality, the author proposed an analogy: …
‘Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic
on other plants or animals, these families have
become parasitic on society.
They not only do harm to others by corrupting,
stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually
protected and cared for by the state out of public
money …
They take from society, but they give nothing in
return. They are true parasites …'”
Dershowitz added:
“From the analogy flowed ‘the remedy’:
‘If such people were lower animals, we would
probably kill them off to prevent them from
spreading.
Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the
remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other
places and in various ways preventing
intermarriage and the possibilities of
perpetuating such a low and degenerate race.
Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully
in Europe and are now meeting with success in this
country.’
… These ‘remedies’ included involuntary
sterilizations, and eventually laid the foundation for
involuntary ‘euthanasia’ of the kind practiced in
Nazi Germany …”
Dershowitz continued:
“Nor were these misapplications of Darwinian
theory limited to high school textbooks. Eugenic
views held sway at institutions of higher learning
such as Harvard University, under racist
president Abbot Lawrence Lowell.
Even so distinguished a Supreme Curt justice as
Oliver Wendell Holmes upheld a mandatory
sterilization law on the basis of a pseudo-scientific
assumption about heritability and genetics.
His widely quoted rationale – that ‘three
generations of imbeciles are enough’ – was later
cited by Nazi apologists for mass sterilization …
… It should not be surprising, therefore, that William
Jennings Bryan … would be outraged – both
morally and religiously …
The textbook Scopes wanted to teach was … a
bad science text, filled with misapplied Darwinism
and racist rubbish.”
After the trial, William Jennings
Bryan wrote in his summary of the
Scopes trial of how science tells us
what we can do, religion tells us
what we should do:
“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 vessel.
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
…”
Bryan continued:
“In war, science has proven itself an evil genius; it
has made war more terrible than it ever was before.
Man used to be content to slaughter his fellowmen
on a single plane, the earth’s surface.
Science has taught him to go down into the water
and shoot up from below and to go up into the
clouds and shoot down from above, thus making
the battlefield three times as bloody as it was
before;
but science does not teach brotherly love.
… Science has made war so hellish that civilization
was about to commit suicide;
and now we are told that newly discovered
instruments of destruction will make the cruelties of
the late war seem trivial in comparison with the
cruelties of wars that may come in the future …”
Bryan concluded:
“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.”
Bryan’s 1925 statement was echoed by Winston
Churchill, who stated in 1941:
“But if we fail, then the whole world, including the
United States … will sink into the abyss of a new
Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more
protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”
BELIEVE – A Captivating & Inspiring
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William Jennings Bryan had been a Colonel in the
Spanish-American War, a U.S. Representative from
Nebraska and U.S. Secretary of State under
Democrat President Woodrow Wilson.
Bryan edited the Omaha World Herald and founded
The Commoner Newspaper.
Dying five days after the Scopes Trial, William
Jennings Bryan was so popular that his statue was
placed in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall by the
State of Nebraska and the Post Office issued a
$2.00 stamp in his honor.
Bryan gave over 600 public speeches
during his Presidential campaigns, with
his most famous being “The Prince of
Peace,” printed in the New York
Times, September 7, 1913, in which he
stated:
“I am interested in the science of government but I
am more interested in religion …
I enjoy making a political speech … but I would
rather speak on religion than on politics.
I commenced speaking on the stump when I was
only twenty, but I commenced speaking in the
church six years earlier-and I shall be in the church
even after I am out of politics …”
Bryan reasoned:
“Tolstoy … declares that the religious sentiment
rests not upon a superstitious fear … but upon
man’s consciousness of his finiteness amid an
infinite universe …
Man feels the weight of his sins and looks for One
who is sinless.
Religion has been defined by Tolstoy as the
relation which man fixes between himself and his
God …
Religion is the foundation of morality in the
individual and in the group of individuals …”
Bryan added:
“A religion which teaches personal responsibility
to God gives strength to morality.
There is a powerful restraining influence in the
belief that an all-seeing eye scrutinizes every
thought and word and act of the individual …
One needs the inner strength which comes with the
conscious presence of a personal God …”
Bryan stated further:
“I passed through a period of skepticism when I
was in college …
The college days cover the dangerous period in the
young man’s life; he is just coming into possession
of his powers, and feels stronger than he ever
feels afterward-and he thinks he knows more than
he ever does know.
It was at this period that I became confused by the
different theories of creation.
… But I examined these theories and found that
they all assumed something to begin with …
A Designer back of the design – a Creator back of
the creation;
and no matter how long you draw out the process of
creation, so long as God stands back of it you
cannot shake my faith in Jehovah …
We must begin with something – we must start
somewhere – and the Christian begins with God …”
Bryan continued:
“While you may trace your ancestry back to the
monkey … you shall not connect me with your
family tree …
The ape, according to this theory, is older than man
and yet the ape is still an ape while man is the
author of the marvelous civilization which we see
about us …
This theory … does not explain the origin of life.
When the follower of Darwin has traced the germ
of life back to the lowest form … to follow him one
must exercise more faith than religion calls for
…”
Bryan explained:
“Those who reject the idea of creation are divided
into two schools, some believing that the first germ
of life came from another planet and others
holding that it was the result of spontaneous
generation …
Go back as far as we may, we cannot escape from
the creative act, and it is just as easy for me to
believe that God created man as he is as to
believe that, millions of years ago, He created a
germ of life and endowed it with power to develop
…”
He added:
“But there is another objection.
The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching
his present perfection by the operation of the law of
hate – the merciless law by which the strong
crowd out and kill off the weak …
I prefer to believe that love rather than hatred is
the law of development …”
William Jennings Bryan concluded:
“Science has disclosed some of the machinery of
the universe, but science has not yet revealed to us
the great secret — the secret of life.
It is to be found in every blade of grass, in every
insect, in every bird and in every animal, as well as
in man.
Six thousand years of recorded history and yet
we know no more about the secret of life than they
knew in the beginning …
If the Father deigns to touch with divine power the
cold and pulseless heart of the buried acorn and to
make it burst forth from its prison walls, will he
leave neglected in the earth the soul of man, made
in the image of his Creator? …
The Gospel of the Prince of Peace gives us the
only hope that the world has.”
Democrat President Franklin D. Roosevelt stated
in an address at the Memorial to William Jennings
Bryan, May 3, 1934:
“No selfish motive touched his public life; he held
important office only as a sacred trust of honor from
his country …
To Secretary Bryan political courage was not a
virtue to be sought or attained, for it was an inherent
part of the man.
He chose his path not to win acclaim but rather
because that path appeared clear to him from his
inmost beliefs.
He did not have to dare to do what to him seemed
right; he could not do otherwise …”
Franklin Roosevelt continued:
“It was my privilege to know William Jennings
Bryan when I was a very young man.
Years later both of us came to the Nation’s capital to
serve under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson …
It was Mr. Bryan who said: ‘I respect the aristocracy
of learning, I deplore the plutocracy of wealth but I
thank God for the democracy of the heart.’
Many years ago he also said: ‘You may dispute over
whether I have fought a good fight; you may dispute
over whether I have finished my course; but you
cannot deny that I have kept the faith.’
We who are assembled here today to accept this
memorial in the capital of the Republic can well
agree that he fought a good fight; that he
finished his course; and that he kept the faith.”–
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