unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [65]
Your search for King can also bring up transcripts of King’s actual papers, sermons, and speeches, compiled by the Stanford University historian Clayborne Carson, director of the King Papers Project, and presented on the university’s website. This is the next best thing to holding King’s original letters in your hand or listening to unedited recordings of his speeches. That’s the Internet for you—learn to sidestep the booby traps, and you’ll find enormous stores of high-quality information.
Then what? How certain can you be of any given fact, however authoritative the source may be? How do you tell the important facts from the not so important? How do you draw valid conclusions from the information you have? Those subjects we turn to in our next chapter.
Chapter 8
Was Clarence Darrow a Creationist?
How to Be Sure
SOMETIMES EVEN THE MOST AUTHORITATIVE SOURCE CAN LET US down, making it risky to rely on any single informant. To be certain of our facts—or as certain as we can be in an uncertain world—we often need to question, track back, and cross-check. To avoid error requires a bit of simple mental discipline, but adopting the proper thinking habits doesn’t take a genius IQ or even a lot of work, and can save us from looking foolish.
We offer the example of the creationists who thought they had found an ally in the legendary attorney Clarence Darrow, because of a remark attributed to him by an article in the Yale Law Journal. The Darrow “quote” was repeated countless times, year after year, in books, articles, speeches, sermons, and even newspaper stories. But there’s no evidence Darrow ever said it.
Darrow was the lawyer who in 1925 had defended John Scopes against the charge that he had broken Tennessee law by teaching Darwinism. Supposedly, Darrow said it was “bigotry for public schools to teach only one theory of origins.” Creationists argued that banning the teaching of their religiously based ideas in public schools was “Scopes in reverse,” motivated by anti-Christian bias. Now here was the evolutionists’ own hero saying, in effect, that those who wanted only evolution taught in public schools were “bigots.”
The person who tracked the trumped-up quotation back to its dubious source was a UCLA graduate student named Tom McIver, who published an exhaustively researched, 5,000-word article in Creation/Evolution, a publication of the American Humanist Association. He starts his account with the 1982 book The Creator in the Courtroom: “Scopes II,” whose creationist author, Norman Geisler, attributed the remark only to “Clarence Darrow: Scopes Trial, 1925.” From there, McIver traced the quote back to a 1978 article in the Yale Law Journal by a creationist lawyer, Wendell Bird, whom many other creationists cited as their source. The Yale Law Journal article in turn cited an article from a 1974 symposium at Bryan College, a Bible-based institution in Dayton, Tennessee, the city where the Scopes trial was held. The author of that article was Robert O’Bannon, a biology professor at Lee College (now Lee University) in Cleveland, Tennessee. He in turn cited a 1974 article in a now defunct magazine called Science and Scripture. The author of that article was Jolly F. Griggs, a California creationist.
But what was Griggs’s source? Nowhere in the actual transcript of the Scopes trial does such a remark appear. Griggs admitted to McIver that he had no documentation and said he hadn’t even meant to treat the words as a direct quote. He said he had meant to paraphrase something he remembered being told years earlier