Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (14 page)

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Authors: Edward J. Larson

BOOK: Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion
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This approach to education led to a de facto establishment of Christianity within American public schools. About the time of the Scopes trial, for example, the Georgia Supreme Court dismissed a Jewish taxpayer’s complaint against Christian religious exercises in public schools with the observation, “The Jew may complain to the court as a taxpayer just exactly when and only when a Christian may complain to the court as a taxpayer, i.e., when the Legislature authorizes such reading of the Bible or such instruction in the Christian religion in the public schools as give one Christian sect a preference over others.”
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The Tennessee legislature codified a similar practice in 1915 when it mandated the daily reading of ten Bible verses in public schools but prohibited any comment on the readings.
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This suggestion that constitutional limits on the establishment of religion simply forbad the government from giving preference to any one church denomination reflected a traditional view of religious freedom that dated at least as far back as the great federalist U.S. Supreme Court justice Joseph Story.
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By the 1920s, however, an increasing number of liberally educated Americans, including leaders of the ACLU, rejected the idea that public education should promote any particular political, economic, or religious viewpoint—even one broadly defined as democratic, capitalistic, or Christian.
 
The drive to free the American academy from outside political and religious influences began with higher education. Americans originally formed their colleges and universities on the English model, which did not incorporate modern concepts of tenure and academic freedom. At Oxford and Cambridge, for example, faculty members ultimately served under the authority of the Church of England and every college conducted daily Anglican chapel services for students. Similarly, in nineteenth-century America, professors at most public and private institutions of higher education served at the pleasure of the institution’s president and trustees, many of whom were ordained ministers, and even Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia held student chapel services. This did not mean that conservative religious and political ideas held sway on all American campuses—Harvard came under the influence of Unitarianism early in the century, while Oberlin later became famous for its radical egalitarianism and Bryn Mawr for its feminism—but a party line tended to prevail within each institution. Late nineteenth-century populists, progressives, and radicals often accused college administrators of suppressing classroom teaching of alternative economic and political theories. A few highly publicized cases of alleged religious censorship also arose. Coincidentally, the most famous such case took place in Tennessee, where in 1878 the fledgling, southern Methodist-controlled Vanderbilt University terminated the part-time lecturing position of the famed geologist Alexander Winchell for suggesting that humans lived on earth before the biblical Adam. Winchell was an evolutionist, and his firing soon became a cause célèbre in the perceived warfare between science and religion.
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The effort to maintain orthodoxy on American campuses encountered increasing resistance around the turn of the century. The historian George M. Marsden linked this development to the rise of pragmatism, flowing from the theories of the French philosopher Auguste Comte. “In Comte’s construction of history,” Marsden observed, “humans were rising from a religious stage in which questions were decided by authority, through a metaphysical stage in which philosophy ruled, to a positive stage in which empirical investigation would be accepted as the only reliable road to truth.”
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Empirical methods quickly came to dominate academic research in both the sciences and the humanities.
 
New principles of free academic inquiry and discussion logically followed from these new methods for acquiring knowledge. The Johns Hopkins University and the University of Chicago were founded during the late nineteenth century on the model of German universities, which incorporated basic concepts of professorial tenure and academic freedom. Several existing institutions, including Harvard, Columbia, and Cornell, quickly adopted a similar model. By the 1896 edition of his A
History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom,
the former Cornell University president Andrew Dickson White could write of the Winchell affair that Vanderbilt had “violated the fundamental principles on which any institution worthy of the name [university] must be based.”
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About this time, the national professional associations for economists, political scientists, and sociologists formed standing committees to investigate individual cases of alleged assaults on academic freedom.
 
These developments took a decisive turn in 1913, when Lafayette College dismissed the philosophy professor John Mecklin for teaching that social evolution, rather than revealed truth, shaped the development of religious ideas. The American Philosophical Association and American Psychological Association appointed a special committee, chaired by the Hopkins philosophy professor Arthur O. Lovejoy, to investigate the dismissal. Lafayette College defended its action on the grounds that as a denominational institution it could enforce orthodoxy within its curriculum. The committee grudgingly accepted this position, but maintained that “American colleges and universities fall into two classes”: either they guaranteed academic freedom or they served as “institutions of denominational or political propaganda,” with Lafayette placing itself into the latter class.
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To give substance to this distinction and thereby promote the rights of faculty members in the former class of institutions, Lovejoy immediately set about forming the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).
 
With Lovejoy as its first secretary, the AAUP assumed the role of a national guild for university professors. Minutes of the association’s organizational meeting reported that members voted “to bring about a merging in a new committee of the committees already created by the economics, political science and sociology associations to deal with the subject of academic freedom.”
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Lovejoy served on this new committee on academic freedom, which presented its General Declaration of Principles at the AAUP’s first annual meeting in 1915. Endorsing the distinction emerging from the Lafayette College affair, this document recognized two types of institutions. “The simplest case is that of a proprietary school or college designed for the propagation of specific doctrines prescribed by those who have furnished its endowment,” the committee wrote. These institutions, which included many trade schools as well as such church colleges as Lafayette, need not offer academic freedom to their faculty. Institutions receiving support from the government or through appeals to the general public, however, fell into a different category. “Trustees of such institutions or colleges have no moral right to bind the reason or conscience of any professor,” the committee asserted, in defiance of traditional practices. To justify this new principle, the committee observed, “In the earlier stages of a nation’s intellectual development, the chief concern of educational institutions is to train the growing generation and to defuse the already accepted knowledge.” In twentieth-century America, however, “The modern university is becoming more and more the home for scientific research. There are three fields of human inquiry in which the race is only beginning: natural science, social science, and philosophy and religion.” In earlier times, the committee added, “the chief menace to academic freedom was ecclesiastical, and the disciplines chiefly affected were philosophy and the natural sciences. In more recent times the danger zone has been shifted to the political and social sciences—though we still have sporadic examples of the former class of cases in some of our smaller institutions.”
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The coming antievolution crusade would refocus attention on this former class.
 
Despite the prediction that most disputes over academic freedom would involve issues of political and economic ideology, the committee’s General Declaration of Principles placed the AAUP on a collision course with the antievolution crusade. Tennessee was again at the center of the storm. Bryan, of course, crusaded against Darwinism in state universities as well as in public schools. After the Kentucky legislature nearly passed an antievolution bill in 1922, the University of Tennessee president Harcourt A. Morgan asked the education professor J. W. Sprowls not to assign Robinson’s
Mind in the Making,
which presented an evolutionary view of social progress. Morgan, who included evolutionary concepts in his own biology classes, reportedly told Sprowls that “Tennessee was threatened with legislation such as has recently been proposed in Kentucky, and that it was necessary to ‘soft-pedal’ the teaching of evolution in the University in order to prevent the enactment of such a law by the Tennessee legislature.”
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Sprowls acquiesced, but soon learned that his annual teaching contract would not be renewed due to deficiencies in his fieldwork, an essential part of his job. Sprowls claimed that he was fired for teaching evolution, however, and soon the campus was in an uproar. Each member of the Tennessee faculty then served under individual one-year contracts and by the time the dust settled, four additional professors were sacked for agitation in defense of Sprowls. At the same time (but for unrelated reasons) the university decided not to renew the contracts of two other instructors, including longtime law professor John R. Neal. AAUP investigators soon descended on Knoxville to investigate the mass firings.
 
The AAUP investigators criticized the university’s handling of the episode. One-year contracts for senior faculty members violated AAUP standards for tenure. The university failed to give timely notice to the four professors fired for defending Sprowls. None of the dismissed teachers received due process. The evidence on charges of religious discrimination was mixed, however. One university official allegedly said, “We are getting rid of a bunch of atheists,” but the assertion was demonstrably false and he denied ever saying it. Sprowls continued to cast himself as a martyr to the antievolution crusade, but university officials consistently gave other reasons for their actions that the investigators accepted. “Professor Sprowls’ views on evolution,” the AAUP report concluded, “were not one of the reasons—certainly not the controlling reason—which led to the decision of the authorities to discontinue his services.” The investigators disapproved of Morgan’s interference in Sprowls’s decision to assign a text on evolution, however, and the continuing public furor in and around Knoxville over the episode helped set the tone for the Scopes trial in nearby Dayton.
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Neal’s dismissal had an additional impact on the Scopes trial, even though the AAUP investigation found that the action bore no relationship to either the Sprowls affair or teaching evolution. Neal probably missed most of the uproar over Sprowls’s dismissal because it occurred in late spring, when Neal typically taught law in Colorado. Indeed, according to his dean, Neal never spent much time on campus—often arriving late (if at all) for class, devoting class time to rambling lectures about current political issues rather than to the course subject matter, and giving all his law students a grade of 95 without reading their exams. The dean also complained about Neal’s “slovenly” dress, which later deteriorated into complete disregard for personal appearance and cleanliness. Yet Neal was a loyal Tennessee alumnus who had served two terms in the state legislature and helped secure generous appropriations for the university.
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After his dismissal, Neal remained in Knoxville trying to establish a rival law school, stirring up a legislative investigation of Morgan, running unsuccessfully for governor, and claiming that he had been sacked for defending the teaching of evolution. When Scopes was indicted in 1925, Neal promptly offered to represent the defendant and ultimately served as local counsel for the defense throughout the case—to the growing frustration of ACLU attorneys in New York.
 
Although its investigation largely cleared the University of Tennessee of charges that it had suppressed teaching evolution, the AAUP remained concerned about the issue. Its president declared at the time, “Fundamentalism is the most sinister force that has yet attacked freedom of teaching,” and the association empaneled a special Committee on Freedom of Teaching in Science to further study this threat.
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The committee issued its report in December 1924, less than three months before the Tennessee legislature banned teaching evolution. “The last few years have witnessed a revival of the spirit of intolerance which has asserted itself, especially in the opposition to the teaching of evolution,” the committee warned. The AAUP would stand against this popular onslaught. “It is, we believe, a principle to be rigidly adhered to that the decision as to what is taught,” the committee affirmed, “would be determined not by a popular vote ... but by the teachers and investigators in their respective fields.”
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During the following summer, several charter members of the AAUP volunteered to go to Dayton to support this position as expert witnesses for the defense at the Scopes trial.
 
The drive for academic freedom gradually spread from higher education to secondary education—and here the ACLU assumed a leading role. During the 1920s, early ACLU efforts on behalf of pacifism and labor unions in public education blossomed into a broad program to defend academic freedom. Predictably, it began with the ACLU executive committee member Henry Linville, who as head of the New York City teachers union worked closely with the AAUP’s first president, Columbia University professor John Dewey. Linville prepared for the ACLU a Tentative Statement of a Plan for Initiating Work on Free-Speech Cases in Schools and Colleges in the early twenties. The Tentative Statement dealt only with teachers dismissed for expressing their political views outside the classroom, and adopted the AAUP’s distinction between publicly supported schools, where the ACLU would intervene, and proprietary schools, where it would not.
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