The Antievolution Crusade
Not since the days immediately following the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species has popular interest in the Principle of Organic Evolution run so high as it does to-day. The reason for this is not far to seek. The opponents of the principle have advertised it in a highly effective manner through their sensational modes of attack. The newspapers and other popular prints have been loaded with anti-evolutionary propaganda, so bitter in invective and withal so entertaining that it has usually been accorded front-page space . . . The result has been that vast numbers of people . . . had the issue repeatedly forced upon their attention.
Even more effective in exciting popular interest than newspaper propaganda has been the attempt . . . to use the legislative machinery of several of our less progressive states as a weapon of attack . . . All this has been played up in the metropolitan press with especial emphasis upon the more amusing episodes. The result is that the mention of evolution nowadays appears to be good for laugh in almost any company. Ridicule, when skillfully used, is one of the most effective of controversial weapons; but to remain effective it must be aimed aright. In this case the weapon seems to have back-fired with considerable violence . . .
Horatio Hackett Newman, Contributions of Science to Religion (1924)
Historical context of anti-evolutionism
1)Aftermath of WWI
2)The Roaring Twenties
3)Growing popularity of Darwinism among Southern educated classes
4)Rural versus urban values
5)Fundamentalism versus Modernism
Myths about opposition to evolution
1)Anti-evolutionism has been characteristic only of the American South
2)Anti-evolutionists typically condemned all evolution
3)Fundamentalists generally disliked & feared science
4)William Jennings Bryan betrayed Fundamentalism at the Scopes trial
5)Bryan & the Fundamentalists lost at the Scopes trial and afterwards
a)Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties (1931)
b)Inherit the Wind (1955, play, 1960, film)
Excerpts from The Creationists:
The Evolution of Scientific Creationism (1992)
by Ronald L. Numbers
The early twentieth century witnessed the unprecedented growth of public high schools, most of which used biology texts that presented evolution favorably. More than anything else, argues historian Edward J. Larson, it was this phenomenon “that carried evolution to an increasing number of America’s youth for the first time, including the children of countless fundamentalist parents.” In some instances the purveyors of evolution may have provoked retaliation by their intolerance and insensitivity. Shailer Mathews (1863-1941), one of the leading modernist theologians of the day, believed that “the teachers of science themselves were partially to blame because of sometimes a ‘smart Alec attitude’ toward religion.” Academic freedom, he argued, did not grant teachers “license to insult other people’s convictions.” The biologist Charles B. Davenport (1866-1944) agreed. “A little humanizing of the biologist,” he thought, “would go a long way toward calming the fears of those who believe that society is being undermined by the biologist who uses his knowledge to attack a social arrangement which, on the whole, plays a useful role.” Another contemporary observer blamed the creation-evolution controversy in part on the “intellectual flapperism” of irresponsible and poorly formed teachers who delighted in shocking naïve students with unsupportable statements about evolution. It was understandable, wrote an Englishman, that American parents would resent sending their sons and daughters to public institutions that exposed them to “a multiple assault upon traditional faiths.” . . .
Early in 1922 William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925), Presbyterian layman and thrice-defeated Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States, heard of an effort in Kentucky to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools. “The movement will sweep the country,” he predicted hopefully, “and we will drive Darwinism from our schools.” He prophecy proved overly optimistic, but before the end of the decade more than twenty state legislatures debated antievolution laws, and three—Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas—banned the teaching of evolution in public schools . . . Many persons shared responsibility for these events, but none more than Bryan. His entry into the fray had a catalytic effect and gave antievolutionists what they needed most: “spokesman with a national reputation, immense prestige, and a loyal following.”
The development of Bryans’s own attitudes toward evolution closely paralleled that of the fundamentalist movement’s attitudes. Since early in the century he had occasionally alluded to the silliness of believing in monkey ancestors and to the ethical dangers of thinking that might makes right, but until the outbreak of World War I he saw little reason to quarrel with those who disagreed with him. The war, however, exposed the darkest side of human nature and shattered his illusions about the future of Christian society. Obviously something had gone awry, and Bryan soon traced the source of the trouble to the paralyzing influence of Darwinism on the human conscience. As he explained to one young correspondent, “The same science that manufactured poisonous gases to suffocate soldiers is preaching that man has a brute ancestry and eliminating the miraculous and the supernatural from the Bible.” By substituting the law of the jungle for the teaching of Christ, it threatened the principles he valued most: democracy and Christianity. Two books in particular confirmed his suspicion. The first, [Vernon L.] Kellogg’sHeadquarters Nights (1917), recounted firsthand conversations with German officers that revealed the role Darwin’s biology had supposedly played in persuading the Germans to declare war. The second, Benjamin Kidd’sScience of Power (1918), purported to demonstrate the historical and philosophical links between Darwinism and German militarism. Both fundamentalists and scientists took these revelations seriously. But whereas Bryan responded by attempting to quash the offending doctrine, a number of American biologists sought to restore the tarnished reputation of science by stressing the importance of cooperation rather than conflict in the evolutionary process . . .
[Bryan] also became aware, to his great distress, of unsettling effects of the theory of evolution was having on America’s own young people. From frequent visits to college campuses and from talks with parents, pastors, and Sunday-school teachers, he heard about the epidemic of unbelief that was sweeping the country . . . Again Bryan found confirming evidence in a recently published book, Belief in God and Immortality (1916) by the Bryn Mawr psychologist James H. Leuba (1868-1946), who demonstrated statistically that college attendance endangered traditional religious beliefs. After the much-publicized 1924 trial of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb for the kidnapping and murder of Robert Franks, Bryan and other antievolutionists commonly added this heinous crime to their list of charges against the teaching of Darwinism . . .
Armed with information about the cause of the world’s and the nation’s moral decay, in 1921 Bryan launched a nationwide crusade against the offending doctrine. In one of his most popular and influential lectures, “The Menace of Darwinism,” he summed up his case against evolution, arguing that it was both un-Christian and unscientific. Darwinism, he declared, was nothing but “guesses strung together,” and poor guesses at that. Borrowing an illustration from Alexander Patterson’sOther Side of Evolution (1903), Bryan explained how the evolutionist accounted for the origin of the eye:
The evolutionist guesses that there was a time when eyes were unknown—that is a necessary part of the hypothesis . . . .A piece of pigment, or, as some say, a freckle appeared upon the skin of an animal that had no eyes. This piece of pigment or freckle converged the rays of the sun upon that spot and when the little animal felt heat on that spot it turned the spot to the sun to get more heat. The increased heat irritated the skin—so the evolutionists guess, and a nerve came there and out of the nerve came the eye!
“Can you beat it?” he asked incredulously—and that it happened not once but twice? As for himself, he would take one verse in Genesis over all that Darwin wrote.
Bryan was far from alone in balking at the evolutionary origin of the eye. Christian apologists had long regarded the intricate design of the eye as “a cure for atheism,” and Darwinism himself had readily conceded his vulnerability on this point. “To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances . . . could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree,” he wrote in the Origin of Species. But logical consistency impelled him to extend “the principle of natural selection to such startling lengths.” When his American friend Asa Gray wrote a letter candidly describing the section dealing with the making of the eye as “the weakest point in the book,” Darwin confided in reply that “the eye to this day gives me a cold shudder.” . . .
Throughout his political career Bryan had placed his faith in the common people, and he resented the attempt of a few thousand elitist scientists “to establish an oligarchy over the forty million American Christians,” to dictate what should be taught in the schools. To a democrat like Bryan it seemed preposterous that this “scientific soviet” would not only demand to teach its insidious philosophy but impudently insist that society pay its salaries. Confident that nine-tenths of the Christian citizens agreed with him, he decided to appeal directly to them . . . “Commit your case to the people,” he advised creationists. “Forget, if need be, the highbrows both in the political and college world, and carry this cause to the people. They are the final and efficiently corrective power.”
Who were the people who joined Bryan’s crusade? As recent studies have shown, they came from all walks of life and from every region of the country. They lived in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles as well as in small towns and in the country. Few possessed advanced degrees, but many were not without education. Nevertheless, Bryan undeniably found his staunchest supporters and won his greatest victories in the conservative and still largely rural South. [39-44]