Editorial cartoon during the Scopes trial ridiculing Bryan’s attacks on science. (Copyright © 1925 New York World. Used with permission of The E. W. Scripps Company)
In his role as leader of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and owner-editor of its journal, Science, the efforts of Cattell on Scopes’s behalf were less visible than those of Osborn but no less important. He met Scopes in New York to reaffirm the AAAS’s commitment to the defense. “The American Civil Liberties Union can count on the association providing scientific expert advisors in defense of Professor Scopes,” the AAAS promised in accord with a formal resolution drafted by Osborn, Davenport, and the Princeton biologist Edwin G. Conklin. The resolution declared that “the evidences in favor of the evolution of man are sufficient to convince every scientist of note in the world” and hailed Darwin’s theory as “one of the most potent of the great influences for good that have thus far entered into human experience.” 10 The resolution served as a launching pad for Cattell’s efforts. As a scientist and AAAS officer, he worked closely with Maynard Shipley’s Science League of America in orchestrating scientific support for the Scopes defense; as a science editor and publisher, he promoted the cause through editorials in Science and work with Watson Davis’s Science Service, an agency that distributed popular articles about science to magazines and newspapers.
Davenport’s involvement in the Scopes case began with a Science Service article entitled “Evidences for Evolution” that appeared in scores of newspapers across the country as the first in a series of pretrial columns in which prominent scientists capitalized on popular interest aroused by the case to educate the public about evolution. Davenport represented a logical choice for writing the initial article because, as America’s lead eugenicist, he had a vital stake in defending the teaching of evolution. The textbook used by Scopes, Hunter’s Civic Biology, featured Davenport’s research into the evolutionary improvement of humans “by applying to them the laws of selection,” and stressed the importance of proper “mate selection” in this process.11 Eugenic mate selection required education, however, and Bryan had targeted eugenic thinking as one of the evil consequences of teaching evolution. Davenport struck back first in his Science Service article and later by giving his public blessing to Scopes in New York. “Fundamentalists accept what they have been told about the accuracy of description of the origin of the universe given in Scripture,” Davenport noted in the Science Service article. “The biologist has his own idea of what is the word of God. He believes it to be the testimony of nature.” He offered the laboratory breeding of new “forms of banana fly” as his evidence for evolution. 12 Later articles in the series featured other elementary evidences for evolution, such as the human tailbone and cultural development. With the Scopes trial only weeks away, such shopworn scientific evidence became newsworthy.
Throughout the country, scientists and educators reported widespread curiosity about the theory of evolution. Books on the topic sold briskly even in Tennessee, where Vanderbilt University chancellor James H. Kirkland predicted that the trial would stimulate “far more inquiry” into Darwinism. At the time, most Americans simply understood the theory of human evolution to mean that people came from apes. Bryan played on this common understanding in his public addresses, often repeating the popular applause line, “How can teachers tell students that they came from monkeys and not expect them to act like monkeys?” Osborn took this opportunity to explain otherwise. “The entire monkey-ape theory of human descent, which Bryan and his followers are attacking, is pure fiction, set up as a scarecrow,” he commented in the New York Times. “Man has a long and independent line of family ascent of his own.” Following Osborn’s lead, Scopes made similar comments to the press. Referring to the massive outpouring of information about evolution, the world-famous horticulturist Luther Burbank described the trial as “a great joke, but one which will educate the public and thus reduce the number of bigots.”13
Liberal ministers joined in the public outcry over the indictment and trial of John Scopes. These events unfolded at the height of the fundamentalist—modernist controversy, when intradenominational battles between liberal and conservative Christians made front-page headlines in newspapers across the country. The antievolution movement split those factions along the crucial fault line of an evolutionary versus a literal interpretation of the Bible. Neither side could afford to back down on the issue. Bryan stood as the recognized leader of fundamentalist forces within the northern Presbyterian church. His entry into the Scopes case brought a predictable response. “Practically every preacher in New York touched on the subject last Sunday,” one newspaper reported the following week. “Many defended the law, but many others ridiculed it and scored William Jennings Bryan for his dramatic entrance into the case.”14
Charles Francis Potter, a prominent Unitarian minister, led the assault on Bryan in Gotham that Sunday and hounded the Commoner all the way to Dayton. “Mr. Bryan beclouds the issue, saying that the choice is between fundamentalism and atheism,” Potter declared. “If the voice which demands absolute acceptance of every word of the Bible is the only one to be heard, the less educated will begin to believe that voice.” Potter and other modernists sought to provide other voices at this seemingly critical juncture. Indeed, warning that “we are just beginning to hear the Fundamentalist advance—the Tennessee trial is the opening barrage,” he called on modernists to “take ten of the hundred reasons for doubting the Bible’s literal truth and drop them from airplanes if necessary in cities of the South.” As public interest in the Scopes trial mounted, Potter grew increasingly optimistic about its educational value.15 “If the Anti-Evolutionists in Tennessee were aware of the existence of any other religions than their own, they might realize that it is the very genius of religion itself to evolve from primary forms to higher forms,” he commented in a later sermon. “The author of the anti-evolution bill is obviously nearer in mental development to the nomads of early biblical times than he is to the intelligence of the young man who is under trial.”16
Seizing the opportunity to educate and enlighten, Potter carried his message to the people of Dayton, originally with the expectation of serving as an expert witness on religion for the defense but ultimately as a freelance writer and speaker after he refused to endorse the defense’s public position that the theory of evolution was compatible with scripture. Mencken captured the scene in a report from Dayton: “There is a Unitarian clergyman here from New York trying desperately to horn into the trial,” Mencken observed. “He will fail. If Darrow ventured to put him on the stand the whole audience, led by the jury, would leap out of the courthouse windows, and take to the hills.”17 For Potter, the Bible reflected an earlier religious consciousness from which only Christ’s moral teaching should be retained—and those should be integrated into an evolutionary world view. Rappleyea secured an invitation for Potter to preach this gospel in Dayton’s northern Methodist church one Sunday during the trial, but opposition within that relatively liberal congregation to the so-called New York infidel forced a cancellation. He settled for delivering a Sunday evening sermon on the courthouse lawn. Despite Mencken’s prediction, Potter also managed to give the opening prayer at trial one day—without any leapers—and took that occasion to petition for “the progress of mankind toward thy truth” from “Thou to Whom all pray and for Whom are many names.” All other courtroom prayers were directed exclusively to the Christian God.18
Potter’s place as a defense expert passed to the preeminent voice of modernism among American Christians, Shailer Mathews of the University of Chicago divinity school. Mathews could easily reconcile evolutionary science with the Bible through a modernist interpretation of scripture. “The writers of the Bible used the language, conceptions and science of the times in which they lived. We trust and follow their religious insight with no need of accepting their views on nature,” he explained in a widely reported address delivered in Chicago shortly before he was to leave
for Dayton. “We have to live in the universe science gives us. A theology that is contrary to reality must be abandoned or improved.” This left Mathews between Potter and the fundamentalists: science informed scripture rather than the other way around, as the fundamentalists believed; but the Bible remained divine, which Potter denied. “He who understands the Bible in accordance with actual facts has no difficulty in realizing the truth of its testimony that God is in the processes which have produced and sustain mankind,” Mathews maintained. For him, evolution was divine creation, and human religious understanding developed over time. At trial, Mathews offered to explain how the Genesis account of creation symbolized an evolutionary process, “and how that process culminated in man possessed of both animal and divine elements.”19
Modernist ministers and theologians pressed the assault against fundamentalists in countless churches throughout the country. “William Jennings Bryan thinks that God ceased speaking to man after the first chapter of Genesis was written,” one New York Methodist pastor proclaimed. “To make belief in Genesis and belief in Christ stand or fall together is absurd. The two beliefs are on different levels,” a Michigan Baptist minister insisted. “Evolution is not on trial; Tennessee is,” a California Congregationalist preacher added. “And the judgment has already been given by the high court of public opinion. The people of Tennessee are the laughing stock of the world.”20 Suddenly, for a few weeks, ministers could grab headlines anywhere in the country simply by asserting that the theory of human evolution did not conflict with the Bible.
Tennessee’s beleaguered modernists took up the cause with especial fervor. Several Tennessee clerics offered to serve as experts for the defense, two of whom were picked to testify. Still others preached sermons attacking Bryan and the prosecution. A large crowd turned out in Knoxville for a mid-June debate between two local fundamentalist and modernist ministers. “Today, theology is called upon to adjust itself to scientific facts,” the modernist minister maintained. “Christian theology adjusted itself to the Copernican theory, and to the facts of geology and for a majority of Christian scholars the adjustment to the facts of evolution has already been made.”21 In Tennessee, such scholarship centered in Vanderbilt University, a liberal Methodist school. When the threat of antievolution legislation first arose, the university hosted a major address by the famed New York modernist Harry Emerson Fosdick. After the law passed, its chancellor vowed to continue the teaching of evolution within his private institution. Now, with the Scopes trial looming, school officials turned the June commencement exercises into a defense of evolutionary science. “Christ did not come into the world to dictate to scientists what they should think,” declared the baccalaureate speaker, according to whom the theory of evolution harmonized perfectly with scripture. Indeed, he claimed that the Bible depicted an evolutionary development of religious consciousness, and urged the church to “canonize” Darwin and other scientists “under a special head: Servants of the truth of God.” The commencement speaker echoed these themes.22
Middle ground did exist between modernism and fundamentalism but gained little attention in the public debate surrounding the Scopes trial. Each viewpoint was internally consistent, but many Americans opted for a pragmatic compromise that left room for both traditional religion and modern science by maintaining that orthodox belief in the Bible does not preclude an allegorical interpretation of the creation account. “A man can be a Christian without taking every word of the Bible literally,” one defense expert on theology offered to testify at the Scopes trial. “When St. Paul said: ‘I am crucified with Christ,’ and when David said, ‘The little hills skipped like rams,’ neither expected that what he wrote would be taken literally.” Similar textual interpretation allowed this witness to reconcile evolutionary science with the Genesis account by accepting evolution as God’s means of creation. “I am thoroughly convinced that God created the heavens and the earth,” he observed, “but I find nothing in the Scripture that tells me His method.”23
Another Christian theology expert argued for the defense that science and religion could never conflict because they belonged to separate spheres of knowledge. “To science and not to the Bible must man look for the answers to the questions as to the process of man’s creation,” he offered to testify. “To the Bible and not science must men look for the answer to the causes of man’s intelligence, his moral and spiritual being.”24 By presenting these two witnesses along with Mathews, the defense effectively demonstrated various ways that American Christians harmonized sincere religious faith with the findings of modern science.
Editorial cartoon suggesting that many Christians did not agree with Bryan’s attackson the theory of evolution. (Copyright © 1925 New York World. Used with permission of The E. W. Scripps Company)
The popular press seemed intent on pitting fundamentalists such as Bryan and Riley against modernists such as Mathews and Fosdick, or against agnostics such as Darrow, all of whom scorned the middle. Bryan, for example, publicly dismissed theistic evolution as “an anaesthetic that deadens the Christian’s pain while his religion is being removed,” while Mathews rejected attempts to retain Mosaic concepts of morality without Mosaic concepts of creation.25 During the twenties, these two extremes gained adherents at the expense of the middle—and each claimed to represent the future of Christianity. Their clash spawned the antievolution movement and well deserved the attention it received during the Scopes trial. Christians caught in the middle sat on the sidelines.“The thing that we got from the trial of Scopes,” a Memphis Commercial Appeal editorial observed, was that most “sincere believers in religion” simply wanted to avoid the origins dispute altogether. “Some have their religion, but they are afraid if they go out and mix in the fray they will lose it. Some are afraid they will be put to confusion. Some are in the position of believing, but fear they can not prove their belief,” the editorialist noted, so they leave the field to extremists such as Darrow and Bryan.26
The middle did not remain entirely silent. President Hibbon of Princeton loudly complained about the trial, “I resent the attempt to force on me and you the choice between evolution and religion.” Some religious scientists used the opportunity to promote nonmaterialistic theories of evolution. Many were modernists, like Osborn, but others were orthodox, such as the Vanderbilt University science professor who wrote into the Nashville Banner, “As a scientist, I believe that the theory of Lamarck concerning the inheritance of acquired characteristics is probably in the process of being verified.”27 That would resolve the controversy, the writer maintained. Such subtle arguments, however, attracted few headlines in newspapers bent on dramatizing the conflict between science and religion.
Even James Vance, the leading proponent of moderation within Tennessee’s religious circles, added little to the public debate over the Scopes trial. Vance served as pastor of the nation’s largest southern Presbyterian church and once held the denomination’s top post. In 1925, readers of a leading religious journal voted him one of America’s top twenty-five pulpit ministers, along with fundamentalist Billy Sunday and modernist Harry Emerson Fosdick. When the antievolution movement first began in 1923, Vance and forty other prominent Americans, including Conklin, Osborn, 1923 Nobel laureate Robert Millikan, and Herbert Hoover, tried to calm the waters with a joint statement that assigned science and religion to separate spheres of human understanding. This widely publicized document described the two activities as “distinct” rather than “antagonistic domains of thought,” the former dealing with “the facts, laws and processes of nature” while the latter addressed “the consciences, ideals and the aspirations of mankind.” It offered no reasoned reconciliation of the apparent conflicts between them, however.28 In 1925, Vance joined thirteen moderate or liberal Nashville ministers in petitioning the Tennessee Senate to defeat the “unwise” antievolution bill. After reading the petition on the Senate floor, however, even an opponent of the legislation had to concede “that there was no reason assigned in
the written request” for defeating the bill.29
Vance had plenty of company straddling the fence over the Scopes case. Most national politicians followed the lead of President Calvin Coolidge in dismissing the case as a Tennessee matter. Tennessee politicians tended to mimic their governor, who defended the law and denounced the trial, but who clearly wished to avoid the entire issue and vowed to stay away from Dayton. Very few state legislators attended the trial, despite offers of reserved seating. Even the law’s author, J. W. Butler, only showed up after a newspaper syndicate offered to pay him for commentary on the proceedings. Labor unions hesitated to choose sides between two longtime friends—Bryan and Darrow. Only a handful of small unions did so, such as the prodefense Georgia Federation of Labor. Even the nation’s two leading teachers’ organizations split. Pushed by its vice president, ACLU executive committee member Henry Linville, the smaller American Federation of Teachers adopted a resolution in support of Scopes. The larger National Education Association rejected a similar resolution as “inadvisable.”30 Relatively little comment about the trial survives from African Americans. A few black evangelists, such as Virginia’s John Jasper, endorsed Bryan’s position, while the NAACP, which worked regularly with the ACLU, participated in some of the ACLU’s New York meetings on the trial. In any event, the outcome would not affect African Americans, because Tennessee public schools enforced strict racial segregation and offered little to black students beyond elementary instruction.
Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion Page 15
