A new book titled Flock of Dodos (a book, not the movie, and apparently the two have nothing to do with each other) is coming out, and Glenn Branch of the NCSE tells me it mentions something vile about William Jennings Bryan, the defender of creationism at the Scopes trial. That’s his campaign poster to the right. Look closely, very closely — it’s a rather small image — down at the bottom left. There’s a cephalopod defending the American flag, and some kind of crazed scullery maid attacking it with an axe. Obviously, Bryan was no friend of biodiversity.

The description in the book of this image is like so:

Subtlety was not one of [William Jennings] Bryan’s strong suits. His campaign poster from that same election [1900] depicted, among other things, a sort of Lady Liberty archetype attacking a giant octopus with an axe.

This is clearly an incorrect interpretation. The octopus is central and beautiful, and if that were actually Lady Liberty, she ought to be half-naked. I think it’s Bryan advocating an uprising of the servile classes to destroy loyal invertebrate-Americans, the treacherous dog. I’m glad he lost the election.