Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion
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Thereafter, Darrow gradually shifted his practice to criminal law, defending an odd mix of political radicals and wealthy murderers. Both types of cases kept Darrow’s name in the national headlines. The former type also connected the Chicago attorney with the New York-based
Clarence Darrow at the time of the Scopes trial. (Courtesy of Bryan College Archives)
ACLU: they joined forces to defend Benjamin Gitlow, for example. The latter type generated the most publicity, such as the 1924 Leopold-Loeb case, one of the most sensational trials in American history, in which Darrow used arguments of psychological determinism to save two wealthy and intelligent Chicago teenagers from execution for their cold-blooded murder of an unpopular former schoolmate, a crime that the defendants apparently committed for no other reason than to see if they could get away with it. Although Darrow’s defense outraged many Americans who believed in individual responsibility, it reflected his long-standing and oft-proclaimed repudiation of free will. 26
Darrow was not content with simply questioning popular notions of criminal responsibility, but delighted in challenging traditional concepts of morality and religion. One historian described Darrow as “the last of the ‘village atheists’ on a national scale,” and in this role he performed for America the same part that his father once played in his hometown.27 “He rebelled, just as his father had rebelled, against the narrow preachments of ‘do gooders,’” Darrow biographer Kevin Tierney concluded. “He regarded Christianity as a ‘slave religion, encouraging acquiescence in injustice, a willingness to make do with the mediocre, and complacency in the face of the intolerable.”28 In the courtroom, on the Chautauqua circuit, in public debates and lectures, and through dozens of popular books and articles, Darrow spent a lifetime ridiculing traditional Christian beliefs. He called himself an agnostic, but in fact he was effectively an atheist. In this he imitated his intellectual mentor, the nineteenth-century American social critic Robert G. Ingersoll, who wrote, “The Agnostic does not simply say, ‘I do not know [if God exists].’ He goes another step, and he says, with great emphasis, that you do not know.... He is not satisfied with saying that you do not know—he demonstrates that you do not know, and he drives you from the field of fact.”29
Good intentions underlay Darrow’s efforts to undermine popular religious faith. He sincerely believed that the biblical concept of original sin for all and salvation for some through divine grace was, as he described it, “a very dangerous doctrine”—“silly, impossible and wicked.”30 Darrow once told a group of convicts, “It is not the bad people I fear so much as the good people. When a person is sure that he is good, he is nearly hopeless; he gets cruel—he believes in punishment.”31 During a public debate on religion, he added, “The origin of what we call civilization is not due to religion but to skepticism.... The modern world is the child of doubt and inquiry, as the ancient world was the child of fear and faith.”32
Darrow often invoked the idea of organic evolution to support his arguments, but it was never central to his thinking. He claimed to understand modern biology but mixed up Darwinian, Lamarckian, and mutation-theory concepts in his arguments, utilizing whichever best served his immediate rhetorical purposes. He frequently appealed to science as an objective arbitrator of truth, but would only present scientific evidence that supported his position. In short, he was a lawyer. In public debates on religious topics, for example, when confronted with the popular defenses of theism offered by such leading scientists as Arthur Eddington, James Jeans, and Robert Millikan, Darrow would dismiss their expertise as not involving religion and their evidence as hearsay. In contrast, Darrow readily embraced the antitheistic implications of Darwinism.33
Darrow’s social views shaped his scientific ideas rather that the other way around, and the theory of evolution proved most helpful in his efforts to debunk the biblical notions of creation, design, and purpose in nature. “From where does man get the [selfish] idea of his importance? He gets it from Genesis, of course,” Darrow wrote in his autobiography. “In fact, man never was made. He was evolved from the lowest form of life.” This view, Darrow maintained, provided a better basis for morality than traditional Christian concepts of eternal salvation and damnation by observing, “No one can feel this universal [evolutionary] relationship without being gentler, kindlier, and more humane toward all the infinite forms of beings that live with us, and must die with us.”34 Of course, Darrow could present a different face in court, such as during the Leopold-Loeb case, when he sought mercy for the defendants by attributing their actions to misguided Social Darwinist thinking.
Darrow welcomed the hullabaloo surrounding the antievolution crusade. It rekindled interest in his legalistic attacks on the Bible, which once appeared hopelessly out of date in light of modern developments in mainline Christian thought. In response to 1923 comments about evolution by William Jennings Bryan, for example, Darrow could again make front-page headlines in the Chicago Tribune by simply asking Bryan questions such as, “Did Noah build the ark?” and if so, “how did Noah gather [animals] from all the continents?”35 Leading Chicago ministers complained that both Bryan’s comments and Darrow’s questions missed the point, but the public loved it.36 So did Darrow. When the Scopes trial arose two years later, Darrow volunteered his service for the defense—the only time he ever offered free legal aid—seeing a chance to grab the limelight and debunk Christianity. “My object,” Darrow later wrote, “was to focus the attention of the country on the programme of Mr. Bryan and the other fundamentalists in America.”37
Neither Scopes in particular nor free speech in general mattered much to Darrow, and this troubled many within the ACLU leadership. Baldwin wanted the focus on academic freedom. Acting chair John Haynes Holmes, a liberal Unitarian minister, later complained that Darrow “in the thought processes [regarding religion] was a mid-Victorian arrived too late on the scene.”38 During the twenties, the ACLU executive committee was never openly hostile toward religion per se, and several of its members feared that Darrow’s militant agnosticism would imperil Scopes’s defense. In his autobiography, Hays clearly took the ACLU’s opposition to antievolution laws out of an antireligious context when he wrote, “We have insisted upon the propagandizing rights of various groups—Communists, IWW’s, evolutionists, birth-controllers, union organizers, industrialists, freethinkers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and even of Fascists, Nazis, and Lindbergh.”39 Yet in Darrow he saw a soul-mate who could turn a small Tennessee courtroom into an international grandstand. Together they went to Dayton.
The ACLU’s commitment to civil liberties for workers did more to influence the course of the Scopes trial than simply bringing together Darrow and Hays; it also fired the organization’s opposition to antievolution laws. Henry R. Linville, president of the Teachers Union of New York City, served on the ACLU executive committee throughout the twenties. Linville held a doctorate in zoology from Harvard University and chaired the biology department at New York’s DeWitt Clinton High School when that institution developed the modern secondary school biology curriculum. George W. Hunter, author of the book at issue in the Scopes trial, had been Linville’s colleague at Clinton and his successor as chair of the school’s biology department. Linville’s own high school texts stressed evolutionary concepts and presented humans within the context of their biological environment.40 Linville brought to the ACLU both a biology teacher’s firsthand experience with instruction in evolution and a labor leader’s commitment to protecting free speech and academic freedom for all public school teachers.
Academic freedom had been an ongoing concern of the ACLU from the organization’s inception; naturally, it related to free speech, yet the interest ran even deeper. The pacifists who helped form the National Civil Liberties Bureau abhorred wartime efforts to promote patriotism and militarism in the schools. They defended teachers fired for opposing American involvement in the war and fought against efforts to purge the public school curriculum of German influences. After the war, when th
e ACLU turned its attention to defending unpopular speakers, its efforts widened to include fighting classroom restrictions on unpopular ideas. “The attempts to maintain a uniform orthodox opinion among teachers should be opposed,” the ACLU’s initial position statement declared. “The attempts of education authorities to inject into public schools and colleges instruction propaganda in the interest of any particular theory of society to the exclusion of others should be opposed.”41
This statement primarily reflected the ACLU’s opposition to school patriotism programs. Building on wartime developments in New York, the Lusk Committee proposed legislation in 1920 to dismiss public school teachers who “advocated, either by word of mouth or in writing, a form of government other than the government of the United States.”42 The ACLU helped persuade New York governor Al Smith to veto this bill in 1921, but Smith’s successor signed similar legislation into law a year later. Dozens of other states required public school teachers and college professors to sign loyalty oaths. Powerful patriotic organizations, including the American Legion, lobbied for promoting “Americanism” in the public schools by mandatory patriotic exercises (typically a flag salute) and through classroom use of education materials that praised the military and disparaged all things “foreign” (often including the international labor movement). Publicity generated by the ACLU forestalled these programs in some places, but an ACLU lawsuit challenging compulsory military training for male students attending the state University of California at Los Angeles failed. The rise of a militantly anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan during the early 1920s led to ACLU efforts to protect both Catholic teachers from mass firings in Klan-dominated school districts and the free-speech rights of the Klan in Catholic communities. Repeatedly, the ACLU was drawn into courtrooms over education. Indeed, during the 1920s, it had to go to court to protect its own right to sponsor programs in New York City schools after the local board of education barred all ACLU representatives from “talking in school buildings” under a general regulation requiring classroom speakers to “be loyal to American institutions.”43
Attempts to propagandize public education did not begin in the twenties. In fact, Massachusetts Puritans founded America’s first public schools during the colonial era partly to promote their distinctive religious and political system. The common-school movement spread during the nineteenth century (at least in part) as a means to indoctrinate into American ways the large number of non-English immigrants entering the United States. Most public school curricula traditionally included American civics, Bible reading, and daily prayers. “Schools were not established to teach and encourage the pupil to think,” Clarence Darrow wrote of his own nineteenth-century education. “From the first grade to the end of the college course [students] were taught not to think, and the instructor who dared to utter anything in conflict with ordinary beliefs and customs was promptly dismissed, if not destroyed.”44
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.”45 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.46 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.47 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.48
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.”49 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.”50 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 “ins
titutions of denominational or political propaganda,” with Lafayette placing itself into the latter class.51 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.”52 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.”53 The coming antievolution crusade would refocus attention on this former class.