by Jill Lepore
In effect, the new regime of immigration restriction extended the black-and-white racial ideology of Jim Crow to new European immigrants (by classing them as white, and eligible for citizenship) and to Asians and Mexicans (by classing them as nonwhite, and ineligible). It drew support from a second Ku Klux Klan that had emerged in 1915; by the 1920s, its five million members attacked Jews and Catholics as vehemently as they attacked blacks; the Klan had provided vocal support of immigration restriction. At the Democratic National Convention in New York in 1924, thousands of members of the KKK marched in the streets of the city, and the party was so disarrayed and disorganized—and so divided over matters relating to race—that the convention took a record-breaking 103 ballots to nominate the unmemorable John W. Davis.132
Driven by a combustible mix of nativism and eugenics, political scientist Lothrop Stoddard rewrote American history as a history of white people. “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line,” Du Bois had written in 1903.133 Black intellectuals, especially the writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance, countered the nostalgia of Colonial Revival with a new, critical attention to the nation’s black past. It’s time to “settle down to a realistic facing of facts,” Alain Locke wrote in The New Negro (1925), a collection that included an essay called “The Negro Digs Up His Past.”134 Stoddard answered with a book called The Rising Tide of Color Against the White World-Supremacy, which blamed discontent and malaise in Europe on the darker races. Stumping for the Immigration Act, he argued that this same social problem had threatened to unravel the United States. By the end of the decade, he celebrated the triumph of immigration restriction. “We know that our America is a White America,” Stoddard said, during a debate with W. E. B. Du Bois on a stage in Chicago. “And the overwhelming weight of both historical and scientific evidence shows that only so long as the American people remain white will its institutions, ideals and culture continue to fit the temperament of its inhabitants—and hence continue to endure.”
“Your country?” Du Bois asked Stoddard. “How came it yours?” And then he pressed him: “Would America have been America without her Negro people?”135
Stoddard had no real answer. In the 1930s and into the 1940s, he applauded Hitler. He died disgraced and forgotten. But the debate he had with Du Bois over the nation’s origins never ended.
IV.
WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS to be self-evident. By 1926, a century and a half after the nation’s birth, every word of its founding statement had been questioned. Who are we? What is true? What counts as evidence?
American politics had become riven by disputes over basic matters of fact. At the heart of those disputes lay rival interpretations of the Constitution, which rested on different understandings of its nature, an extension of the debate over the literal truth of the Bible. But Americans also expressed their political differences in debates over science and history, debates that were shaped by the new business of public relations.
Ivy Lee, one of the field’s earliest practitioners, called it propaganda, which he defined as “the effort to propagate ideas.” Lee, born in Georgia in 1877, the son of a Methodist minister, worked as a newspaper reporter before taking on assignments representing the interests of railroad corporations, attempting to get them better press. Among his earliest clients were John D. Rockefeller, who was attempting to recover from the damage to his reputation by Ida Tarbell’s muckraking into Standard Oil, and Bethlehem Steel, suffering from the taint of Taylor-induced strikes. Carl Sandburg called Lee a “paid liar”; Upton Sinclair named him “Poison Ivy.” In a speech to journalism teachers in the 1920s, Lee argued that facts don’t exist or, at least, they can’t be reported: “The effort to state an absolute fact is simply an attempt to achieve what is humanly impossible; all I can do is to give you my interpretation of the facts.”136
Journalists, especially reporters who’d served in the war, tended to disagree. In 1923, when two young army veterans, Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, decided to found a magazine, they wanted to call it Facts. In the end, they decided to call it Time, with the idea that, in the age of efficiency, it would save readers time. Time was meant to offer busy readers—and especially businessmen—a week’s worth of news that could be read in an hour. Each issue was to contain 100 articles, none over 400 words long, full of nothing but the facts, put together, at first, by cutting sentences out of seven days’ worth of newspapers and pasting them onto pages. Using a Taylor system of task management, Luce and Hadden sorted the news into categories, something that hadn’t been done before. Despite its speed, brevity, and simplicity, Time claimed to be free from error, a record of events “accurately chronicled,” which wasn’t the same thing as making a claim for objectivity. “Show me a man who thinks he’s objective, and I’ll show you a man who’s deceiving himself,” Luce once said.137 Objectivity was impossible; subjectivity led to the introduction of errors. The best that could be done would be to check every article for errors of fact. Time established the practice of fact-checking, and an elaborate method of checking, fact by fact, as if knowledge could be reduced to units, like parts on an assembly line.
To do this work, they hired young women just out of college. “Charged with verifying every word, they put a dot over each one to signify that they have,” a visiting reporter observed. The author of an early manual for Time’s “checkers” advised them:
Checking is . . . sometimes regarded as a dull and tedious occupation, but such a conception of this position is extremely erroneous. Any bright girl who readily applies herself to the handling of the checking problem can have a very pleasant time with it and fill the week with happy moments and memorable occasions. The most important point to remember in checking is that the writer is your natural enemy. He is trying to see how much he can get away with. Remember that when people write letters about mistakes, it is you who will be screeched at. So protect yourself.
When readers wrote complaining of errors, Time published the letters, and printed corrections. Its editors kept a black book, in which every error was entered, with its correction.138
This practice reached a fervid intensity at the nearby offices of Time’s chief rival, The New Yorker, a magazine established in opposition to everything Time stood for—except for its obsession with facts. In the fall of 1924, Harold Ross, a former city newspaper reporter, and, like Luce and Hadden, a veteran of the First World War, wrote a prospectus for The New Yorker, a magazine that was not meant to save anyone even a moment of time. But, like Luce and Hadden, Ross disavowed error, fraud, and nonsense, especially of the PR kind. Ross promised, “It will hate bunk.” “A SPECIAL EFFORT SHOULD BE MADE TO AVOID MISTAKES IN THE NEW YORKER,” Ross announced, after they committed a doozy. One writer said Ross “clung to facts” the way “a drowning man clings to a spar.” Later, he sent a memo to one of his editors: “Add Fact Checking to your list of chores.”139
But if journalists were finding new devices to recommit themselves to accuracy in reporting, businesses were using the tools of public relations to make sure the press heard their particular side of every story. No man played a greater role in this transformation than Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud who used Freud’s theory of the unconscious to help businesses sell their products to American consumers. Born in Vienna, Bernays had grown up in New York. When the war started, he worked for George Creel’s office of war propaganda and traveled with Wilson to the Paris peace talks, where, he liked to say, his services had been invaluable. Returning to civilian life, he began a career in public relations, which he described as “applied social science” but which The Nation called “The Higher Hokum.” In 1924, Bernays met with Calvin Coolidge, who’d ascended to the presidency in 1923, after Harding’s sudden death. Bernays decided Coolidge’s image as a sturdy, crusty Vermonter would be improved by glamour, and so arranged to have Hollywood film stars visit the White House.140
“Good propaganda is an invisible government which sways the habits and actions o
f most of the people of the United States,” Bernays explained. “Rightly employed, it is a quick and effective means of producing changes of social usefulness.” Propaganda, used to run political campaigns, would make democracies run more efficiently: “Honest propaganda, efficiently applied, will save millions in the next political campaign,” he predicted.141
In his 1928 book, Propaganda, Bernays explained that he’d also been influenced by Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion, having read Lippmann’s concern for a gullible public as an opportunity for a canny publicist. “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society,” Bernays insisted. For Bernays, propaganda was to the masses what the unconscious was to the mind, a people’s “invisible governors.”142
The tragedy that this spelled for the mass democracy of the United States played before the public on a stage in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, over five long days in the summer of 1925, at the trial of a high school biology teacher named John Scopes, who was charged with the crime of teaching the theory of evolution. William Jennings Bryan, sixty-five, his broad head grown bald, led the prosecution, having captained the campaign to ban the teaching of evolution in the nation’s public schools. Not all fundamentalists rejected evolution, believing, as R. A. Torrey, the editor of The Fundamentals, that a Christian could “believe thoroughly in the absolute infallibility of the Bible and still be an evolutionist of a certain type.”143 But Bryan’s own views, like those of many fundamentalists, had hardened on the matter after the war, whose horrors so many tried but could not fathom, or reconcile with a loving God.
“Evolution is not truth,” Bryan pointed out. “It is merely a hypothesis—it is millions of guesses strung together.” But what he especially decried was its application to human societies. In 1921, in an essay called “The Menace of Darwinism,” he had explained his support for a raft of Progressive reforms whose intention was to check the very idea that only the fittest should survive: “Pure-food laws have become necessary to keep manufacturers from poisoning their customers; child-labor laws have become necessary to keep employers from dwarfing the bodies, minds, and souls of children; anti-trust laws have become necessary to keep overgrown corporations from strangling smaller corporations and we are still in a death grapple with profiteers and gamblers in farm products.” Bryan saw, in a secular modernity, the end of sympathy, compassion, and charity. He decried the heartlessness of science: “Men who would not cross the street to save a soul have traveled across the world in search of skeletons,” he said in a 1923 speech to the West Virginia legislature. “The great need of the world today is to get back to God,” he wrote. With Bryan, fundamentalism, which had begun as a theological dispute about facts and truth, became a populist movement about faith.144
Shall Christianity Remain Christian?, a pamphlet published in 1922, pictured a journey from doubt to atheism as an inevitable descent. In 1925, after Tennessee became the first state to ban the teaching of evolution, the American Civil Liberties Union convinced Scopes to test the law. The ACLU had been founded in 1917 to defend conscientious objectors, work that grew still more urgent during the Red Scare, the anti-Bolshevik hysteria that had gripped the United States in the last years of the war. “The rights of both individuals and minorities are being grossly violated throughout the country,” its founder wrote. It had since extended into peacetime its wartime mission of protecting Americans from assaults on civil liberties. Its interest in the Tennessee law, like Scopes’s own, had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with free speech. (Scopes was himself a churchgoer and an admirer of Bryan, who had been the speaker at his high school graduation in Illinois in 1919.) The ACLU expected and planned for Scopes to be found guilty, after which the law could be appealed to a higher court.
That plan changed when Bryan was persuaded to join the prosecution and named as a counsel to the Tennessee attorney general. Bryan’s involvement led Clarence Darrow to pledge to defend Scopes. Darrow was big and ornery, broad-shouldered and craggy, and liked to pretend he was a cracker-barrel philosopher, with his baggy pants and suspenders and string tie. “Everything about Darrow suggests a cynic,” one reporter said. “Everything but one thing, and that is—an entire lack of real cynicism.” In his long and justly famous career as the nation’s best-known trial lawyer, he played a role in some two thousand trials; in more than a third of those cases, he was paid nothing. But the Scopes trial was the only trial in which he volunteered his services.145
Darrow and Bryan had both grown up on farms, become country lawyers, and fought for underdogs, and for the poor, their whole lives. They’d fought the same fight, Bryan as the “Great Commoner,” Darrow as the “attorney for the damned.” They spoke the same language. In 1903, when Darrow represented the United Mine Workers in Pennsylvania in arbitration, he told the court, “Five hundred dollars a year is a big price for taking your life and your limbs in your hand and going down into the earth to dig up coal to make somebody else rich.”146 Bryan could have said those words.
But Darrow knew that, for all that Bryan’s campaign against the teaching of evolution was a campaign against social Darwinism, and a campaign for the underdog, it was also an assault on science. And Darrow couldn’t take that, nor could most people who’d fought on the same side of the labor question as Bryan. By 1924, Eugene Debs, a longtime Bryan supporter, had taken to referring to Bryan as “this shallow-minded mouther of empty phrases, this pious canting mountebank, this prophet of the stone age.”147 Darrow agreed. He had been raised reading Charles Darwin and Frederick Douglass. His interest was in education. “I knew that education was in danger from the source that has always hampered it—religious fanaticism,” he said. He considered Bryan “the idol of all Morondom.”148
Dayton had two paved streets and a movie theater that fit seventy-five people. The trial became a circus as the town was flooded with more than one hundred journalists, dozens of preachers and psalm singers, and, not least, trained chimpanzees. “The thing is genuinely fabulous,” H. L. Mencken reported to the Baltimore Sun. “I have stored up enough material to last me 20 years.”149
No one disputed that Scopes had violated the law. The defense hoped to litigate the reasonableness of the law itself. It began by bringing in a parade of biologists to demonstrate that evolution is a science. “This is not the place to try to prove that the law ought never to have been passed,” Bryan said. “The place to prove that, or to teach that, was to the legislature.” But Bryan, as much as Darrow, if not more, wanted to put evolution on trial. The judge sided with Bryan and refused to allow the testimony of the biologists to be heard by the jury. The next day, it was so hot inside the courtroom that the judged moved the trial to the lawn in front of the courthouse. The defense then called none other than Bryan himself to the witness stand, as an expert on the Bible.
“You have given considerable study to the Bible, haven’t you, Mr. Bryan?” Darrow asked.
“Yes, sir, I have tried to.”
But Bryan was no theologian. For two long hours, Darrow sliced and diced him like a spring ham. Was the earth really made in six days? Had Jonah really been swallowed by a whale? If Eve was made of Adam’s rib, how did Cain get his wife? Bryan, flustered, stammered. Darrow pressed. Bryan sweated and made very little sense.
“The only purpose Mr. Darrow has is to slur the Bible,” Bryan complained.
“I object to your statement,” said Darrow. “I am examining you on your fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes.”150
The judge ordered Bryan’s testimony expunged from the record, the jury found Scopes guilty, and, five days later, Bryan died in his sleep, taking a nap, while his wife was reading a newspaper on a porch outside his window. The Boy of the Plains, the Great Commoner, a three-time presidential candidate, had been felled, according to the wire service, “the victim of his last great battle.”151
Fundamentalism did not die when Bryan’s h
ead fell on his pillow. Fundamentalism endured, and the challenge it posed to the nation’s founding principles and especially to the nature of truth would be felt well into the twenty-first century. Darrow was not among those who believed that the Scopes trial, followed so swiftly by Bryan’s death, had closed the book on fundamentalism. “I am pained to hear of Bryan’s death,” said a sober Darrow. “I have known Bryan since 1896 and supported him twice for the Presidency.” But the idea that modernity had killed William Jennings Bryan took hold, and, mere weeks after his death, big-city reporters and above all H. L. Mencken were back to lampooning Bryan and his followers as dumb hicks, while privately, Mencken confessed that he was terrified of the people he’d met on that courthouse lawn in Dayton—their bigotry and fury set him shuddering. “I set out laughing,” Mencken wrote to a friend, “and returned shivering.”152
Walter Lippmann didn’t shiver and he didn’t lampoon. Instead, he sat down to think through the consequences of the argument Bryan had made in Dayton for freedom of religion, freedom of inquiry, and the separation of church and state. For Lippmann, the battle between Bryan and Darrow wasn’t about evolution, it was about how people decide what’s true—does truth derive from faith or from reason?—and, more deeply, what happens in a democracy when people can’t agree about how they decide what’s true. Does the majority rule?
