by Philipp Blom
One artist particularly alive to the inherent contradiction of American painting was Georgia O’Keeffe. Born into a farming family in 1887, she had earned a meager living as a schoolteacher and might not have made the transition to living and working as an artist had not a friend of hers, the photographer Anita Pollitzer, secretly sent some of her drawings to Alfred Stieglitz in New York, where he managed a gallery for modern artists, called simply 291. Stieglitz, himself one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century, was impressed by the abstract compositions he had received and included them in a 1916 exhibition without consulting O’Keeffe. When she learned about the show she was taken aback at first, but eventually she consented to the exhibition and even did a solo show at the gallery during the following year. In 1918, O’Keeffe agreed to move to New York to paint full-time. Soon Stieglitz became more than just her dealer and representative, and they formed an intimate relationship that was to last for the rest of their lives. They were married after Stieglitz’s divorce from his wife in 1924.
At the time of her arrival in New York, O’Keeffe had painted mainly floral subjects and abstract compositions, and her work was deeply introspective. Now, however, she discovered the exhilaration and the drama of a modern city, and by the mid-1920s she was filling canvases with the huge, geometric forms of skyscrapers, the bewitching geometry of the Brooklyn Bridge, or the dazzle of reflections of sunlight caught in high-up window panes.
Another painter, Edward Hopper, treated not the intrinsic beauty of city life but its dystopian potential. His paintings were imaginary snapshots of everyday moments: of loneliness among millions, of small human tragedies played out under the harsh light of commercial premises or in the half-shade of private dwellings.
Like O’Keeffe and Hopper, many artists were experimenting and debating whether traditional art could conquer the big city as a subject, or whether such art was even an appropriate means for treating it. This was an urgent issue, because the landscape of strutting towers of concrete and brick, rail transport, streets swarming with cars and pedestrians, billboards, and illuminated advertising changed not only the traditional face of urban life but also arguably the range of human experience, as the critic Edmund Wilson remarked, with a sly reference to the pleasures of the speakeasy: “Do we not, between the office and the night-club, in the excitement of winning and spending, and slightly poisoned by the absorption of bad alcohol, succeed in experiencing sensations which humanity has never yet known? May we not, under this pressure, in constant collision, be proud at least of striking off flashes of a novel repercussion and color?”21
These novel repercussions of color, the everyday drama of light and shade, the abstractions of shape, the sheer exhilaration of scale, and the faces of the millions inhabiting this new world offered themselves to a medium that was itself a child of the rampant progress of technology: photography. Photography was to painting what jazz was to classical music—a contemporary idiom, born out of the social and technological realities of a new era. The apparent directness of the medium allowed a complex play with expectations: a face in the crowd could shine with the immediacy and universality of the human condition, while a shift in perspective or a technical sleight of hand rendered the familiar strange and forced the public to look at their world with new eyes. Unknown realities and possibilities were revealed by artists working between straight reportage and abstraction. Faces became icons; urban spaces blossomed into fascinating geometric vortexes of light and shade. Alfred Stieglitz, Charles Demuth, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and Walker Evans were among those who created the new face of the United States and established a new aesthetic stance toward a world that was new in every sense of the word, even if the dramas and the comedies played out on this grand stage set were as old as humanity itself. It was, as Lewis Mumford wrote, “a stripped, athletic, classical style of architecture . . . all that is good in the Machine Age: its precision, its cleanliness, its hard illumination, its unflinching logic.”22
From illustrations in the daily papers to artworks in galleries, photography was changing how people looked at the world and how their interest could be manipulated. But the medium also made possible other discoveries. Scientists had used photography since its inception. Now the systematic documentation of the night skies was about to reveal new secrets.
·1925·
Monkey Business
If evolution wins, Christianity goes.
—William Jennings Bryan, 1925
JOHNNY SCOPES WAS AN UNLIKELY HERO IN WHAT WAS TO BE DESCRIBED as the trial of the century. A handsome, unassuming Texas farm boy, twenty-four years old, a popular high school teacher and football coach, he sat in the courtroom and did not speak unless spoken to. But it was not about him; the trial was a clash of titans and of principles, a spectacular confrontation of two visions of society staged in the summer of 1925 in the little town of Dayton, in rural Tennessee, before the eager eyes of more than two hundred journalists.
The misdemeanor with which the young teacher stood charged had been effectively fabricated by a handful of local citizens sitting around a soda fountain. Only weeks before, at Robinson’s drugstore, they had been discussing an article in the Chattanooga Times in which it was reported that the New York–based American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), founded only five years before, was looking for a way to challenge the constitutionality of a recently passed Tennessee state law forbidding the teaching of evolution in all public schools. The men assembled at Robinson’s decided they could provide a precedent that would serve the ACLU’s needs and in the process create publicity—and business opportunities—for their own obscure town in Rhea County. One of the leaders of the “drugstore conspirators,” as they came to be known, was a local (male) state prosecutor named Sue K. Hicks; the other, George Rappleyea, a metallurgical engineer, was originally from New York.
They sent for the local science teacher, Johnny Scopes, a friend of Hicks’s, who appeared fresh from a tennis match with one of his pupils. Though without much real interest himself in the principle at stake, he agreed to serve as sacrificial lamb in a test case to be brought against him by Hicks himself. “I was simply teaching to get money to go back to school again,” Scopes said later. “I did see it was a big important issue. . . . I don’t know if I’m a Christian. I do believe in the ethical teachings of Christ, and I believe there is a God. . . . But all of biology and most other sciences are basically the story of the evolution of matter and of life. I was hired to teach science, and I went ahead and taught it. . . . Many of the men teaching science were married and so tied up they couldn’t take chances. So I stepped in.”1
A warrant was issued for Scopes’s arrest, and he admitted to having taught the theory of evolution in a high school biology class where he had been filling in for another teacher who had fallen sick; he was then released on bail. Hicks and Rappleyea were delighted at this opportunity to strike a blow for intellectual freedom and put their little county on the map in the process. One of the strangest trials of the century had begun; in a satirical report, the famous Baltimore critic H. L. Mencken, who denounced his religiously inclined compatriots as “boobus Americanus,” dubbed it “the monkey trial.”
Like the Red Scare and Prohibition, the anti-evolution law had been a consequence of the prescriptive atmosphere prevailing in the United States after the War. The law’s sponsor, George Washington Butler, a local farmer and member of the Tennessee state House of Representatives, believed that modern education was alienating young people from the teachings of the Bible. The law he had introduced was succinct and forthright:
Section 1. Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Tennessee, That it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a
lower order of animals.
Section 2. Be it further enacted, That any teacher found guilty of the violation of this Act, Shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction, shall be fined not less than One Hundred ($100.00) Dollars nor more than Five Hundred ($500.00) Dollars for each offense.
Section 3. Be it further enacted, That this Act take effect from and after its passage, the public welfare requiring it.
Butler had drawn up the bill after listening to a speech given by a man who was to be one of the protagonists of the Scopes trial: William Jennings Bryan, a prominent Nebraska Democratic Party politician and a fervent evangelical Christian. He had spent the years after the war crisscrossing the United States, giving an average of two hundred speeches a year, in which he denounced the godless ways of modern society and in particular the teaching of evolution, which, he believed, was directly responsible not only for the current plague of immoral behavior but also for the war itself. The Germans, he reasoned, had taken Darwinian teachings to their extreme and decided that their wealth and influence entitled them to rule the world: might made right.
An instinctive populist abundantly blessed with the gift of persuasion, Bryan had risen to national prominence in 1896, polemicizing against the gold standard with a fine flourish of the kind of religiously inspired rhetoric that was to make him famous: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” The “Cross of Gold” speech earned Bryan a nomination as candidate for the presidency in the first of three campaigns, all of which he was to lose. His talents as an orator, however, had made him a man of wealth, much of which he had invested in the Florida land boom.
To Bryan, who had been President Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state in 1915, the war had been a test of the moral fiber of the United States, with the battle lines clearly drawn not in Flanders but in Washington. They ran between the modernists, who advocated American intervention in the war, and the conservatives, who wanted to keep the country from intervening in a conflict that they considered a direct result of European godlessness and decadence. The religious dimension of the argument was not tied to Darwinism alone: American religious moderates and intellectuals had long adopted an approach to the Bible that emphasized probing textual criticism, which had revealed the sacred text to be composed of different layers and traditions, created at different times and by different authors. This form of biblical scholarship had been pioneered at German universities.
Best enemies: Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan sweating it out at the Scopes trial.
Christian conservatives were squarely opposed to what they perceived as a weakening of the biblical message. When war broke out in 1914, the evangelical journal Our Hope exclaimed: “The new theology has led Germany into barbarism and will lead any nation into the same demoralization.”2 Some millenarian evangelicals even supported a strictly isolationist stance on the grounds that the European war not only was the natural consequence of secularism but also heralded the Second Coming of Christ.
The Bible and Its Enemies
LIKE OTHER CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIANS, Secretary Bryan had been opposed to American intervention in Europe—so much so that he had staked his career on it. “As long as I am in office there will be no war,” he had declared, a promise he had eventually managed to keep only by resigning as President Wilson moved toward intervention. Bryan had continued his campaign against it in speeches, articles, and books.
As Europe plunged into the political and socioeconomic crisis of the early postwar years, Bryan saw the social unrest, strikes, and economic woes, as well as the Russian Revolution, as vindication of his view that without religion, humanity was tottering on the edge of the abyss. Driven by the force of his unshakable convictions, in speeches with titles such as “The Menace of Darwinism” and “The Bible and Its Enemies,” he had used his vast public speaking experience to campaign against the teaching of evolution in schools, and to attempt to turn Christians and all Americans away from science in general.
The battle between evolution and theology had been raging since publication in London of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. Formidable scientifically minded pugilists had squared off against clergymen and other indignant or anxious believers in a barrage of articles and speeches and debates on both sides of the Atlantic. The former included the anatomist Thomas Huxley—“Darwin’s Bulldog”—who in an Oxford debate of 1860 with the intellectually evasive Bishop “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce declared that while he himself was not ashamed to have a monkey as an ancestor, he would be ashamed to be connected with a man—such as Wilberforce, for instance—who was using his great mental gifts only to obscure the truth. In the absence of final evidence, the debate between the two had been no more than a series of clever point-scoring opportunities, but as the scientific record solidified over the ensuing decades, defenders of the truth of the biblical account of creation had only hardened their position and their resolve.
After the war, Protestant Christian organizations in the United States had begun to form a united front in the battle, drawing part of their weaponry from a series of volumes published by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, which had been founded in 1908 by California oil magnate Lyman Stewart. The institute’s volumes were entitled The Fundamentals: A Testament to the Truth, and in them theologians attacked scientific and other critical perspectives on the Bible, developing instead a literalist understanding of it. The ninety chapters provided an intellectual foundation and a formal name for the newly influential American phenomenon: Christian fundamentalism.
The message was eagerly received. In the early years of the decade, the evangelist preacher Billy Sunday, following on from the success of his campaign for Prohibition, had been drawing crowds of five thousand and more to his near-hysterical sermons, in which he regularly condemned “the old bastard theory of evolution,” wished all “modernists” to hell, and said gruesomely of teachers who taught evolution that their hands were “dripping with innocent blood.” His carnivalesque Billy Sunday Crusades drew up to two hundred thousand people, marching and singing, accompanied by bands and even Ku Klux Klansmen in full white-hooded regalia.
When in 1921 the Kentucky Baptist State Board of Missions passed a resolution calling for a state law banning the teaching of evolution in schools, William Jennings Bryan had immediately seized on the idea, hoping to start a movement that would sweep the entire United States. His own rural state of Tennessee, whose population was pious, poor, and less well educated on average than the populations of other states, seemed a promising point of departure. Failure to act would be disastrous, he argued: “A scientific soviet is attempting to dictate what is taught in our schools.”3 With the Red Scare of 1919–1921 still fresh in American minds, Bryan’s reference to a “scientific soviet” was enough to awaken many religious and political slumberers.
In 1924, the Canadian-born creationist and amateur geologist George McCready Price dismissed finds of hominid remains in the Neanderthal Valley in Germany as “degenerate offshoots which had separated from the main stock both ethnically and geographically.”4 Others, including Bryan, quickly followed his lead. Neither man allowed his own rudimentary understanding of the natural sciences to stop him from ridiculing any scientific principles that appeared to be in conflict with his Christian faith. “If they find a stray tooth in a gravel pit, they hold a conclave and fashion a creature such as they suppose the possessor of the tooth to have been, and then they shout derisively at Moses,” Bryan scoffed. “Men who would not cross the street to save a soul have traveled across the world in search of skeletons.”5
Bryan in particular was not a man to be swayed from his point by the inconvenient dictates of logic: reduced to paper, his speeches often read like angry ranting, but he was an outstanding speaker with a commanding baritone voice, and he used his talents to convince Butler that the teaching of Darwinism—“the monkey entering the school room,” as he put it—was one of t
he chief moral dangers threatening America. Butler, with only a few years of primary education to his name, was easily swayed by the mighty orator, and duly lent his political weight to the campaign against the teaching of evolution. When the Butler Act was finally passed, many Tennessee lawmakers admitted they had voted for it less out of conviction than because they had feared being portrayed as godless themselves. But motives no longer mattered: the law was on the books, a victory for antiscientific forces in general and Christian fundamentalism in particular.
Mr. Darrow Comes to Town
THE YOUNG SCIENCE TEACHER John Scopes was no more than a willing pawn in what the ACLU viewed as a single battle in the great conflict between religion and science—in effect, a battle for America’s soul. As with Prohibition, the lines were being drawn between Christian fundamentalists, on the one hand, and moderate believers and secularists, on the other. It was in essence a battle between rural and urban, and between states’ rights supporters and federal rights supporters; symbolically, if not strictly geographically, it was a battle between South and North.
With big constitutional principles at stake, the trial could not remain a local affair, conducted away from the eyes of the world in a tiny Tennessee town, and the heavyweights duly arrived. The recently founded World Christian Fundamentals Association (WCFA) secured William Jennings Bryan as counsel for the prosecution, in the hope that his powerful oratory would sway the jurors. The two local lawyers originally assigned to defend Scopes quickly stepped aside to allow a more famous colleague to plead for him: Chicago’s star performer Clarence Darrow, a lion of the courtroom, master of every oratorical trick in the book, and at this time perhaps America’s most famous defense counsel, who had volunteered his services.