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

by Edward Larson

  Once again left without a formal governmental post but with an expanded sense of mission, Bryan resumed his efforts as an itinerant speaker and writer on political and religious topics. Although his campaign for peace failed, he helped to secure ratification of four constitutional amendments designed to promote a more democratic or righteous society: the direct election of senators, a progressive federal income tax, Prohibition, and female suffrage. During this period, the aging Commoner moved to Miami for his wife’s health and got in on the ground floor of the historic Florida land boom of the early twenties. Although publicly he played down his profits, the spectacular rise in land prices made Bryan into a millionaire almost overnight.

  Private wealth did not diminish Bryan’s public zeal as he found two campaign targets: the conservative Republican administrations in Washington and teaching evolution in public schools. Both targets remained fixed in his sights throughout the final years of his life. Indeed, after seeing himself portrayed in a political cartoon as a hunter shifting his aim from a Republican elephant to a Darwinian monkey, Bryan admonished the cartoonist: “You should represent me as using a doublebarreled shotgun fixing one barrel at the elephant as he tries to enter the treasury and another at Darwinism—the monkey—as he tries to enter the school room.”18 Bryan remained a progressive even as he crusaded against teaching evolution. “In William Jennings Bryan, reform and reaction lived happily, if somewhat incongruously, side by side,” biographer Lawrence W. Levine concluded. “The Bryan of the 1920’s was essentially the Bryan of the 1890’s: older in years but no less vigorous, no less optimistic, no less certain.”19

  Bryan’s antievolutionism was compatible with his progressive politics because both supported reform, appealed to majoritarianism, and sprang from his Christian convictions. Bryan alluded to these issues in his first public address dealing with Darwinism, which he composed in 1904 at the height of his political career. From this earliest point, he described Darwinism as “dangerous” for both religious and social reasons. “I object to the Darwinian theory,” Bryan said with respect to the religious implications of a naturalistic explanation for human development, “because I fear we shall lose the consciousness of God’s presence in our daily life, if we must accept the theory that through all the ages no spiritual force has touched the life of man and shaped the destiny of nations.” Turning to the social consequences of the theory, Bryan added, “But there is another objection. The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate—the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak.”20

  The Great Commoner was no more willing to defer to ivy tower scientists on this issue than to Wall Street bankers on monetary matters. “I have a right to assume,” he declared in this early speech, “a Designer back of the design [in nature]—a Creator back of the creation; and no matter how long you draw out the process of creation; so long as God stands back of it you can not shake my faith in Jehovah.” This last comment allowed for an extended geologic history and even for limited theistic evolution; but Bryan dug in his heels regarding the supernatural creation of humans and described it as “one of the test questions with the Christian.”21 Although Bryan regularly delivered this speech on the Chautauqua circuit during the early years of the century, he said little else against Darwinism until the twenties, when he began blaming it for the First World War and an apparent decline in religious faith among educated Americans.

  As a devout believer in peace, Bryan could scarcely understand how supposedly Christian nations could engage in such a brutal war until two scholarly books attributed it to misguided Darwinian thinking. In Headquarters Nights, the renowned Stanford University zoologist Vernon Kellogg, who went to Europe as a peace worker, recounted his conversations with German military leaders. “Natural selection based on violent and fatal competitive struggle is the gospel of the German intellectuals,” he reported, and served as their justification “why, for the good of the world, there should be this war.”22 Whereas Kellogg used this evidence to promote his own non-Darwinian view of evolutionary development through mutual aid, Bryan saw it as a reason to suppress Darwinian teaching. The philosopher Benjamin Kidd’s The Science of Power further explored the link between German militarism and Darwinian thinking by examining Darwin’s influence on the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Bryan regularly referred to both books when speaking and writing against teaching evolution. For example, citing Kidd for his authority, Bryan warned in one of his popular books, “Nietzsche carried Darwinism to its logical conclusion and denied the existence of God, denounced Christianity as the doctrine of the degenerate, and democracy as the refuge of the weakling; he overthrew all standards of morality and eulogized war as necessary to man’s development.”23

  A third book had an even greater impact on Bryan and touched an even more sensitive nerve. In 1916, the Bryn Mawr University psychologist James H. Leuba published an extensive survey of religious belief among college students and professors. The result confirmed Bryan’s worst fears. “The deepest impression left by these records,” Leuba concluded, “is that ... Christianity, as a system of belief, has utterly broken down.” Among students, Leuba reported, “the proportion of disbelievers in immortality increases considerably from the freshman to the senior year in college.” Among scientists, he found disbelief higher among biologists than physicists, and higher among scientists of greater than lesser distinction, such that “the smallest percentage of believers is found among the greatest biologists; they count only 16.9 per cent of believers in God.”24 Leuba did not identify teaching evolution as the cause for this rising tide of disbelief among educated Americans, but Bryan did. “Can Christians be indifferent to such statistics?” Bryan asked in one speech. “What shall it profit a man if he shall gain all the learning of the schools and lose his faith in God?”25 This became his ultimate justification for the Scopes trial.

  Parents, students, and pastors soon came forward with stories of their own, which Bryan incorporated into his speeches. “At the University of Wisconsin (so a Methodist preacher told me) a teacher told his class that the Bible was a collection of myths,” the Commoner related. “A father (a Congressman) tells me that a daughter on her return from Wellesley told him that nobody believed in the Bible stories now. Another father (a Congressman) tells me of a son whose faith was undermined by [Darwinism] in Divinity School.”26 Bryan’s wife later recalled, “His soul arose in righteous indignation when he found from many letters he received from parents all over the country that state schools were being used to undermine the religious faith of their children.” 27 Of course, many university professors viewed this as their mission, to the extent that it followed as a byproduct of encouraging critical thought and empirical inquiry in an age of scientific positivism. Stanford University president David Starr Jordan, an eminent evolutionary biologist who later volunteered to aid in the legal defense of John Scopes, spoke for many academics when he dismissed traditional Protestant revivalism as “simply a form of drunkenness no more worthy of respect than the drunkenness that lies in the gutter!”28

  In 1921, Bryan began speaking widely about the dangers of Darwinian ideas, formulating through repeated articulation before diverse audiences arguments he later used at the Scopes trial. Characteristically, this thrust was marked by a new speech, “The Menace of Darwinism,” which Bryan repeatedly delivered during the remaining years of his life and incorporated into a popular new book, In His Image. “To destroy the faith of Christians and lay the foundations for the bloodiest war in history would seem enough to condemn Darwinism,” Bryan thundered, drawing heavily on evidence from Leuba, Kellogg, and Kidd.29 A second speech against Darwinism, “The Bible and Its Enemies,” joined Bryan’s repertoire later that year. The Commoner broke out of the starting blocks so fast that the back cover of the 1921 pamphlet containing the “Enemies” speech already referred to “Mr. Bryan and his crusade against evolution.”30

  In additio
n to stressing the dangers of Darwinism, both speeches denounced the theory as unscientific and unconvincing. “Science to be truly science is classified knowledge,” Bryan maintained, adopting an antiquated definition of science. “Tested by this definition, Darwinism is not science at all; it is guesses strung together.”31 He entertained his audiences with exaggerated accounts of seemingly far-fetched evolutionary explanations for human organs—such as the eye, which supposedly began as a light-sensitive freckle. “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?” Bryan asked rhetorically. “Is it not easier to believe in a God who can make an eye?”32 As the historian Ronald L. Numbers noted, “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 Darwin himself had readily conceded his vulnerability on this point.”33 Yet Bryan possessed an uncanny ability to exploit any such weaknesses in his opponent’s arguments, at least with respect to winning over a popular audience—the only one that mattered to him. “The scientist cannot compel acceptance of any argument he advances, except as, judged on its merits, it is convincing,” the Commoner maintained in defiance of scientific authority. “Man is infinitely more than science; science, as well as the Sabbath, was made for man.”34

  This sort of thinking predisposed Bryan to his later course of seeking a legislative judgment on teaching evolution and accepting a trial by jury to enforce any resulting restriction. Indeed, Bryan’s mode of operation and optimistic temperament required offering ready political solutions to outstanding social problems—such as a silver-based currency to promote domestic prosperity or arbitration treaties to secure international peace—and his followers, especially those who called him their Peerless Leader, expected an agenda for action. The Menace of Darwinism speech, however, included only a vague call for “real neutrality” on religious issues in public schools: “If the Bible cannot be defended in those schools it should not be attacked.”35 In the fall of 1921, Bryan gave some meaning to this call by publicly wrangling with University of Wisconsin president Edward Burge over allegedly antireligious teaching at that state institution, but Burge, a distinguished scientist, clearly won the argument when it came to issues of academic freedom for university students and professors. Bryan’s speech called on the church to purge itself of modernist and evolutionary influences as well, and Bryan soon sought the top post of the northern Presbyterian church to implement this policy within his own denomination; this involved purely parochial matters, however, for which even Bryan would not seek a governmental remedy. Despite his commanding role, the antievolution crusade lacked a specific political or legal objective for nearly a year.

  This situation changed almost overnight. Late in 1921, Kentucky’s Baptist State Board of Missions passed a resolution calling for a state law against teaching evolution in public schools. Bryan heard about the resolution in January 1922 and immediately adopted the idea. “The movement will sweep the country, and we will drive Darwinism from our schools,” he wrote to the resolution’s sponsor. “We have all the Elijahs on our side. Strength to your arms.”36 Bryan had identified his political objective. Within the month, he was on the spot in Lexington, addressing a joint session of the Kentucky legislature on the proposal. Bryan then spent the next month touring the state in support of such legislation, which lost by a single vote in the state House of Representatives.

  The campaign for restrictive legislation spread quickly and all but commandeered the antievolution movement. Fundamentalist leader John Roach Straton began advocating antievolution legislation for his home state of New York in February 1922. J. Frank Norris, pastor of the largest church in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, soon took up the cause in Texas. The evangelist T. T. Martin carried the message throughout the South. By fall 1922, William Bell Riley was offering to debate evolutionists on the issue as he traveled around the nation battling modernism in the church. “The whole country is seething on the evolution question,” he reported to Bryan in early 1923.37 Three years later, these same four ministers became the most prominent church figures to actively support the prosecution of John Scopes.

  Riley threw the organizational muscle of the WCFA behind the antievolution crusade hoping to politicize the association by giving it a clear legislative objective. Accordingly, the WCFA jumped to the defense of the Kentucky legislation with an editorial in its spring 1922 newsletter and soon began lobbying for similar bills across the country. Ultimately, its interest in enforcing such legislation helped transform the Scopes trial into a major test of fundamentalist influence in American life.

  From its first editorial on the subject, an ominous note sounded from the WCFA. The editorialist (most likely Riley) condemned evolution as scripturally and scientifically unsound, conducive to war, and detrimental to morality. Moreover, the editorial baldly asserted that “great scientists” were divided over the theory of evolution and accused its proponents of attempting to settle the controversy “by imposing the theory upon the rising generation” through the public schools.38 The conspiracy grew darker the following year when an article by Riley in the WCFA newsletter accused evolutionists of “surreptitiously” sowing their “anarchistic socialistic propaganda.”39 Later, Riley accused teachers of evolution of being atheists who “cannot afford to consent to the creation theory, for that would compel recognition of God.”40 By the thirties, he warned of an “international Jewish-Bolshevik-Darwinist conspiracy” to promote evolutionism in the classroom, and praised Adolph Hitler’s effort to foil such conspiracies in Germany.41 The Ku Klux Klan—an organization Bryan despised—supported antievolution laws for much the same reason, adding Roman Catholics to the list of co-conspirators.

  Rather than following Riley in proclaiming a need to combat conspiracies, Bryan propelled the antievolution crusade on majoritarian grounds. Bryan’s popular arguments shaped the prosecution’s case in Dayton. “Teachers in public schools must teach what the taxpayers desire taught,” the Commoner admonished the West Virginia legislature in 1923. “The hand that writes the pay check rules the school.”42 Such reasoning went to the core of Bryan’s political philosophy. “The essence of democracy is found in the right of the people to have what they want,” he once wrote. “There is more virtue in the people themselves than can be found anywhere else.”43 Bryan consistently espoused this philosophy: from the 1890s, when he commented on one of his election defeats, “The people gave and the people have taken away, blessed be the name of the people,” through his campaign for world peace in 1917, when he proposed holding a national referendum before the country went to war, to his antievolution crusade of the 1920s. Indeed, the strength of Bryan’s convictions in his fight against teaching evolution sprang from his stated belief that “in this controversy, I have a larger majority on my side than in any previous controversy.”44 He estimated that “nine-tenths of the Christians” in America agreed with his views on evolution.45 Even though that estimate exaggerated the level of support for antievolution laws, clearly a large number of Americans supported Bryan on the issue, especially in the South.46 “Have faith in mankind,” the Commoner proclaimed, “mankind deserves to be trusted.”47

  Individual rights lost out under this political philosophy. “If it is contended that an instructor has a right to teach anything he likes, I reply that the parents who pay the salary have a right to decide what shall be taught,” Bryan maintained.48 “A scientific soviet is attempting to dictate what is taught in our schools,” he warned. “It is the smallest, the most impudent, and the most tyrannical oligarchy that ever attempted to exercise arbitrary power.”49 He gave a similarly facile response to charges that antievolution laws infringed on the rights of nonfundamentalist parents and students. Protestants, Catholics, and Jews shared a creationist viewpoint, Bryan believed, and he sought to enlist all of them into his crusade. As for nontheists, he asserted, “The Christians w
ho want to teach religion in their schools furnish the money for denominational institutions. If atheists want to teach atheism, why do they not build their own schools and employ their own teachers?”50 Such a position assumed that the separation of church and state precluded teaching the Genesis account in public schools. “We do not ask that teachers paid by taxpayers shall teach the Christian religion to students,” Bryan told West Virginia lawmakers, “but we do insist that they shall not, under the guise of either science or philosophy, teach evolution as a fact.”51 He apparently expected them to skip the topic of organic origins altogether, or to teach evolution as a hypothesis.

  Bryan’s comments reflected the deep ambivalence toward individual rights that underlay his majoritarianism. “No concession can be made to the minority in this country without a surrender of the fundamental principle of popular rule,” he once proclaimed with respect to Prohibition. 52 When a conservative Supreme Court began striking down Progressive Era labor laws on the ground that they violated the constitutional rights of property owners, Bryan sought to limit judicial review of legislation. Similarly he could argue about teachers of evolution, “It is no infringement on their freedom of conscience or freedom of speech to say that, while as individuals they are at liberty to think as they please and say what they like, they have no right to demand pay for teaching that which parents and the taxpayer do not want taught.”53 To the extent that American political history reflected a tension between majority rule and minority rights, the Commoner stood for majoritarianism. As Edger Lee Masters observed at the time, to Bryan, “the desideratum was not liberty but popular rule.”54