Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (39 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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Alternative reasons existed for the decline in antievolution activity at the time. By the thirties, fundamentalists had less reason for concern about teaching evolution than before the Scopes trial. Not only had many states and school districts limited such instruction, but their restrictions influenced the content of high school biology textbooks everywhere. To serve the southern market and in response to heightened sensitivity about the topic, national textbook writers became increasingly less dogmatic in their presentation of Darwinism. This process began even before the trial. Worried about sales of its biology text, for example, one major publisher sought an endorsement from Bryan by offering to present evolution as a “theory” rather than “dogma.” Bryan welcomed the suggestion, but responded, “It would take a great deal in the way of elimination and addition to make it clear that evolution is presented only as a hypothesis.”
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After the Scopes trial, many biology textbooks underwent such revision.
 
The evolution of George W. Hunter’s
Civic Biology
exemplified the process. The Tennessee Textbook Commission dropped the book from its approved list shortly after Scopes’s indictment for using it. A year later, the book’s publisher deleted a six-page section on evolution from copies of the text sold in some southern states, and Hunter began work on revising the entire book. He cut out the section title, The Doctrine of Evolution, and deleted charts illustrating the evolution of species. A revised passage about the “development of man” looked back only to “races of man who were much lower in their civilization than the present inhabitants” rather than to subhuman species, and included the biblically orthodox addition, “Man is the only creature that has moral and religious instincts.” A paragraph on “natural selection” remained, but with every sentence qualified as something that Darwin “suggested,” “believed,” or “said.” Hunter no longer hailed Darwin as “the grand old man of biology,” and the phrase about Darwin, “his wonderful discovery of the doctrine of evolution,” became “his interpretation of the way in which all life changes.” Indeed, the inflammatory word
evolution
disappeared altogether from the post-Scopes version of the text, and equivocation replaced certainty wherever evolutionary concepts remained. Other schoolbook writers followed Hunter’s example.
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By the time Hunter finished, antievolutionists had little grounds for complaint, though they scarcely would admit it.
 
Fundamentalists continued to complain about Darwinism, of course, even if they stopped crusading against teaching evolution. Moreover, fundamentalism did not die. To the contrary, it attracted an ever-increasing number of adherents nourished on a steady diet of antievolution books, articles, and tracts published by conservative Christian presses. Riley continued to churn out antievolution pamphlets long after he gave up crusading for antievolution legislation. He often appeared with Harry Rimmer, an itinerant evangelist and self-proclaimed scientist who wrote dozens of antievolution booklets during the decade following the Scopes trial. On at least two occasions, these two popular antievolution speakers entertained large fundamentalist audiences by debating the relative merits of the “day/age” and “gap” theories for reconciling a literal reading of the Genesis account with geological evidence of a long earth history. Neither ever wavered in his commitment to the Adam and Eve account of human creation, however.
 
At the same time, the Adventist science educator George McCready Price gained an increased following among fundamentalists for his creationist theory of flood geology that dispensed with any need for stretching the age of the earth beyond the under 10,000 years provided by an ultraliteral reading of the Genesis account of creation and Noah’s Flood. “In the years after the Scopes trial,” the historian of creationism Ronald L. Numbers noted, Price “emerged as one of the two most popular scientific authorities in fundamentalist circles, the other being Rimmer. In addition to appearing regularly in Adventist magazines, his prose frequently graced the pages of the most widely read fundamentalist periodicals.” As for Rimmer, the leading conservative Christian publisher, William B. Eerdmans, reprinted his antievolution booklets in a series of books that sold over 100,000 copies during the 1940s and 1950s. Although Rimmer and Price rarely championed antievolution laws, they laid a solid foundation of antievolutionism among American fundamentalists during the post-Scopes era.
14
 
Antievolutionism managed to survive and flourish even as commentators pronounced it dead and gone because its proponents focused their efforts inward, within the fundamentalist church, rather than outward, toward the general public. Beyond the church, people did not hear about Rimmer and Price during the thirties in the way they had heard about Bryan and Riley during the twenties. The leading evangelical historian, George M. Marsden, attributed this development to the Scopes trial. “It would be difficult to overestimate the impact of ‘the Monkey Trial’ at Dayton, Tennessee, in transforming fundamentalism,” Marsden wrote. “The rural setting ... stamped the entire movement with an indelible image. Very quickly, the conspicuous reality of the movement seemed to conform to the image thus imprinted and the strength of the movement in the centers of national life waned precipitously.”
15
Fundamentalism, which began amid revivals in northern and West Coast cities, appeared increasingly associated with the rural South. The national media ceased covering its normal activities. Conservatives lost influence within mainline Protestant denominations. The string of legislative defeats for antievolution bills in northern states made further political activity outside the South seem futile. After the Scopes trial, elite American society stopped taking fundamentalists and their ideas seriously.
 
Indeed,
fundamentalism
became a byword in American culture as a result of the Scopes trial, and fundamentalists responded by withdrawing. They did not abandon their faith, however, but set about constructing a separate subculture with independent religious, educational, and social institutions. The historian Joel A. Carpenter traced these activities in the development of fundamentalist colleges and schools, conferences and camps, radio ministries, and missionary societies during the 1930s. The founding of Bryan College in Dayton fit the pattern perfectly. As membership in mainline Protestant associations shrank during the Great Depression, it surged ahead in most fundamentalist denominations—a phenomenon that Carpenter attributed to the role these churches played in providing “ordinary people with a compelling critique of modern society.”
16
 
Antievolutionism continued to feature prominently in this critique and remained a virtual tenet of Protestant fundamentalism in the United States. Rimmer, Price, and other antievolutionists spoke widely at fundamentalist churches and conferences. Their followers taught science at fundamentalist colleges and schools, which typically required all teachers and students to affirm their belief in biblical inerrancy. Bryan College twice invited Rimmer to become its president and welcomed Price to speak on campus.
 
Just as fundamentalists built their own religious institutions parallel to the traditional Protestant structures that shunned them, they sought to build separate institutional structures for propagating creationist scientific theories. “During the heady days of the 1920’s, when their activities made frontpage headlines, creationists dreamed of converting the world; a decade later, forgotten and rejected by the establishment, they turned their energies inward and began creating an institutional base of their own,” Numbers observed.
17
Price co-founded the creationist Religion and Science Association in 1935, for example, but soon left to form the stricter Deluge Geology Society. For a time, antievolutionism also found a home within the American Scientific Affiliation, a professional association of evangelical science educators created in 1941. These organizations and their journals provided an independent institutional base for creationism outside mainstream science. By the 1940s, a fundamentalist subculture had formed in the United States, with a creationist scientific establishment of its own.
 
Although the Scopes trial helped push fundamentalists out of mainstream American culture, they seemed almost eager to go. A separatist streak marked elements of conservative American Protestantism ever since the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock in 1620. Some distinct creationist sects, such as the Amish and Jehovah Witnesses, always isolated themselves from secular society. Others, such as the Mormons and some ultra-Orthodox Jews and Christians, tended to live in their own communities. The African-American church never had much contact with America’s lily-white scientific establishment. Many strands that united under the fundamentalist banner during the early part of the century, including dispensational premillenialism and the holiness movement, had strong tendencies to renounce modern society. Their Bible told them that they were “not of this world” and that “God made foolish the wisdom of this world.”
18
Bryan, Riley, and Straton prodded fundamentalists to carry their light to the world, but when the world rejected that light and martyred their champion at Dayton, the next generation of fundamentalist leaders—including John R. Rice, Carl Mclntire, and Bob Jones, Sr.—called them back to separation. In the words of a popular hymn of the thirties, fundamentalists gladly sang,
Just a few more weary days and then, I’ll fly away;
To a land where joys will never end, I’ll fly away.
... When I die, Hallelujah, by and by, I’ll fly away.“
19
 
 
 
In the meantime, they felt little need to submit to the dominant culture and quietly built an ever larger and more intricate subculture of their own.
 
America’s social elite ignored these developments for decades and institutionalized its view of the Scopes trial. Following Frederick Lewis Allen, the trial became an increasingly significant symbolic victory for liberal progress over the forces of reaction. Yet Allen dealt only with the 1920s. Political historians covering a broad sweep of modern American history faced a dilemma: Bryan stood at the center of two supposedly watershed events in American history—the populist revolt of the 1890s and the Scopes trial of the 1920s—but he had shifted sides. The same historians who deified the young Bryan of the nineties demonized the elderly Bryan of the twenties.
 
Richard Hofstadter, a leading American historian of the mid-twentieth century, set the tone. “Bryan decayed rapidly during his closing years. The post-war era found him identified with some of the worst tendencies in American life—prohibition, the crusade against evolution, real-estate speculation, and the Klan,” Hofstadter wrote in his 1948 classic,
The American Political Tradition.
“As his political power slipped away, Bryan welcomed the opportunity to divert himself with a new crusade,” he explained. “The Scopes trial, which published to the world Bryan’s childish conception of religion, also reduced to the absurd his inchoate notions of democracy.” In short, Hofstadter described Bryan as “a man who at sixty-five had long outlived his time.” Later historians would reconstruct a more balanced picture of Bryan, showing that he never truly changed during his political career, but the Hofstadter view reigned for a generation and influenced American history textbooks even longer.
20
 
The Scopes trial became a popular topic for historians during the fifties. In 1954, for example, Norman F. Furniss made it the pivotal event in his book on the fundamentalist controversy.
21
Two years later, William E. Leuchtenburg’s influential book,
The Perils of Prosperity, 1914-1932,
cast antievolutionism as a peril to progress and the Scopes trial as the purgative. Ray Ginger contributed the first authoritative book-length study of the trial in 1958. Furniss and Leuchtenburg relied heavily on Allen’s depiction of events at Dayton and interpretation of the outcome. For Leuchtenburg, “the campaign to preserve America as it was, to resist the forces of change, came to a head in the movement of Protestant Fundamentalism climaxed by the Scopes trial.” In the end, he concluded, “The antievolutionists won the Scopes trial; yet, in a more important sense, they were defeated, overwhelmed by the tide of cosmopolitanism.”
22
Ginger titled a concluding chapter, “To the Losers Belong the Spoils,” and drew the lesson from Bryan’s “fatal error of tactics: if a person holds irrational ideas and insists that others should accept them because of their authoritative source, he should never agree to be questioned about them.”
23
In his 1955 book,
The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R.,
Hofstadter reasserted, “The pathetic postwar career of Bryan himself, once the bellwether for so many of the genuine reforms, was a perfect epitome of the collapse of rural idealism and the shabbiness of the evangelical mind.”
24
 
Hofstadter’s collegiate American history textbook (which appeared in various editions with several co-authors beginning in 1957) presents the standard historical interpretation of the Scopes trial. In Hofstadter’s work, fundamentalism appears alongside the Red Scare, the Ku Klux Klan, immigration restrictions, and Prohibition in a section on the “intolerance” that darkened the 1920s. The subsection “Fundamentalism” consists solely of a summary description of the Scopes trial. Ever since, nearly every American history survey text has lumped fundamentalism with reactionary forces during the 1920s and featured similar depictions of the Scopes trial. Many continue to perpetuate Allen’s account that, as one popular textbook asserts, Scopes intentionally “lectured to his class on evolution and was arrested.” Most reduce the trial to an emotional encounter between Darrow and Bryan that resulted in a decisive moral defeat for fundamentalism. Leuchtenburg’s textbook called it “nineteenth-century America’s last stand.” Another text adopted the title “Only Yesterday” for its chapter on the twenties, concluding its account of the trial with the observation, “Darrow and company had won a signal victory by making fundamentalism henceforth the butt of ridicule.” As in many of the texts, the ACLU and all of Darrow’s co-counsel entirely lost their place in history.
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