These public letters raised familiar issues. “Why should Christians and other good citizens be taxed to support the groundless guesses of infidels, which are being taught under the pretense of scientific discovery?” one asked.92 “No one is opposed to research or the word evolution, but ninety-nine per cent of the people of the United States oppose the objectionable teaching that man ... evolved from some sort of lower animal life,” another protested. “If the public is opposed to such teaching it is their inalienable right through the lawmakers to pass a law prohibiting such teaching in schools supported by taxation.”93 Many of these letters were written by women, such as the one asking, “What are mothers to do when unwise education makes boys lose confidence in the home, the Bible, the government and all law?”94 Such letters expressed the sentiments of many Tennesseans and called for action by the Senate. “I glory in our so-called ignorant Legislature,” a self-professed fundamentalist wrote. “Would to God we had more Bryans and fewer Darwin advocates. I do hope that the Senate will concur with the House and pass our evolution act.”95
On the day that the full Senate voted to revive consideration of the Butler bill, Senator John Shelton sought Bryan’s help. “I am writing to know just what form of legislation you would suggest,” Shelton inquired. “Other members have asked me to write you for suggestions before the matter comes up for final passage.” The Senate sponsor of the legislation then invited Bryan to address a joint session of the legislature following the upcoming recess.96 Bryan declined this invitation but offered one suggestion on the bill. “The special thing that I want to suggest is that it is better not to have a penalty,” he advised. “In the first place, our opponents, not being able to oppose the measure on its merits, are always trying to find something that will divert attention, and the penalty furnishes the excuse.... The second reason is that we are dealing with an educated class that is supposed to respect the law.”97 With no penalty, of course, there would be no martyrs to the cause of freedom—and no Scopes trial—simply obstinate schoolteachers flaunting the public will. Bryan could foresee the public relations impact of both courses. On the brink of victory, however, Tennessee crusaders ignored his words of caution.
Two other national fundamentalist leaders did appear on the scene at this time, Billy Sunday and J. Frank Norris—with Sunday having the greater impact. Norris, Riley, and Bryan could preach to the converted and mobilize conservative Protestants into a fighting force; Bryan also could mesmerize a political audience; but no fundamentalist of the twenties could match Sunday’s ability to draw a crowd and win converts. A Billy Sunday crusade would hit a town like the arrival of the Ringling Bros. Circus, with Sunday performing in all three rings at once. The former Chicago Cubs outfielder would preach and pray, sing and shout, and leap across the stage delivering rapid-fire sermons before huge audiences.
During February 1925, Sunday broke his custom of spacing his appearances by returning to Memphis for a second crusade in as many years. An opening night audience of more than five thousand heard him proclaim “a star of glory to the Tennessee legislature, or that part of it involved, for its action against that God forsaken gang of evolutionary cutthroats.” The crowds grew as the eighteen-day crusade continued, with Sunday regularly denouncing, as he repeatedly described it, “the old bastard theory of evolution.” He damned Darwin as an “infidel” on one occasion and shouted, “To Hell with the Modernists,” on another, but reserved a special scorn for teachers of evolution. “Education today is chained to the devil’s throne,” Sunday proclaimed in one typical staccato outburst. “Teaching evolution. Teaching about prehistoric man. No such thing as pre-historic man.... Pre-historic man. Pre-historic man,” at which point, the Commercial Appeal reported, “Mr. Sunday gagged as if about to vomit.” Any deeper issues regarding the social and spiritual implications of naturalistic evolution were lost in a superficial plea for biblical literalism. Indeed, one local journalist described Sunday’s Memphis crusade as “the most condemnatory, bombastic, ironic and elemental flaying of a principle or a belief that [he] ever heard in his limited lifetime and career from drunken fist fights to the halls of congress.”98
“All kinds, varieties, and species came out to hear Sunday,” wrote the Commercial Appeal, which gave daily, front-page coverage to the event. Thousands attended Men’s Night, where males could freely show their emotion out of the sight of women. Even more turned out for Ladies’ Night. The newspaper reported that “15,000 black and tan and brown and radiant faces glowed with God’s glory” on Negro Night. An equal number of “Kluxers”—some wearing their robes and masks—turned out for the unofficial Klan Night. Special trains and buses brought people from all over Tennessee. Many legislators appeared on one or more occasions. Total attendance figures topped 200,000 people, which represented one-tenth of the state’s population. 99 By the time Sunday left and Norris arrived, on the eve of the Senate vote, Tennessee fundamentalists were fully aroused. Compared to Sunday’s bombast, Norris’s suggestion that the evolution teacher “has his hands dripping with innocent blood” sounded downright conciliatory. At least Norris spoke in complete sentences. “Tennessee has before her citizens a bill which aims at the teaching of evolution in the schools,” he observed. “I sincerely hope that Tennessee will be the first state to [do so] by enactment of her legislature.”100
Norris’s hope by this time was the people’s will and the legislature’s intent. On March II, at its first meeting following the legislative recess, 50 the Senate judiciary committee approved the Butler bill without amendment. Ten days later, the full Senate concurred by a vote of twenty-four to six, and sent the bill directly to Governor Peay for his signature. The scant opposition was scattered among senators from rural and urban districts from both political parties, without any apparent pattern other than personal conviction.
The Senate vote followed a spirited, three-hour floor debate in which proponents stressed majority rule and the religious faith of schoolchildren. Speaker of the Senate L. D. Hill, a devout Campbellite Christian who represented Dayton in the upper house, set the tone. At the outset, he barred consideration of an amendment designed to ridicule the legislation by additionally outlawing instruction in the round-earth theory. He then stepped down from the Speaker’s chair to give an impassioned plea for the bill. “I say it is unfair that the children of Tennessee who believe in the Bible literally should be taught things contrary to that belief in the public schools maintained by their parents,” the Speaker declared. “If you take these young tender children from their parents by the compulsory school law and teach them this stuff about man originating from some protoplasm or one-cell matter or lower form of life, they will never believe the Bible story of divine creation.” Senate antievolution bill sponsor John Shelton added that taxpayers “who believe in the divine creation of man should not be compelled to help support schools in which the theory of evolution is taught.” One reluctant supporter justified his vote “on the ground that an overwhelming majority of the people of the state disbelieve in the evolution theory and do not want it taught to their children.” A more enthusiastic proponent estimated that this majority included “95 percent of the people of Tennessee.”101
Outnumbered Senate opponents of the legislation countered with pleas for individual rights. “It isn’t a question of whether you believe in the Book of Genesis, but whether you think the church and state should be kept separate,” one senator asserted. “No law can shackle human thought,” another declared. A Republican lawmaker quoted passages on religious freedom from the state constitution, and blamed the entire controversy on “that greatest of all disturbers of the political and public life from the last twenty-eight or thirty years, I mean William Jennings Bryan.” But a proponent countered, “This bill does not attempt to interfere with religious freedom or dictate the beliefs of any man, for it simply endeavors to carry out the wishes of the great majority of the people.” Such sentiments easily carried the Senate.102
State and national o
pponents of antievolution laws appealed to Governor Peay to veto the legislation. Owing to the governor’s national reputation as a progressive who championed increased support for public education and a longer school year—efforts that later led to the naming of a college in his honor—those writing from out of state probably entertained some hope for success. Urged on by the California science writer Maynard Shipley and his Science League of America, a new organization formed to oppose antievolutionism, letters of protest poured in from across America. For example, taking the line of Draper and White, a New Yorker asked, “The Middle Ages gave us heretics, witches burnt at the stake, filth and ignorance. Do we want to return to the same?” From within Tennessee, some concerned citizens appealed for a veto. The dean of the state’s premiere African-American college, Fisk University, wrote, “As a clergyman and educator, I hope that you will refuse to give your support to the Evolution Bill. It would seem most unfortunate to me should the State of Tennessee legislate against the beliefs of liberal Christianity.” The Episcopal bishop of Tennessee added, “I consider such restrictive legislation not only unfortunate but calamitous.”103
Yet most letters to the governor from Tennesseans supported the measure, and two potentially significant opponents kept silent. The University of Tennessee’s powerful president Harcourt A. Morgan, who privately opposed the antievolution bill, held his tongue so long as Peay’s proposal for expanding the university still awaited action in the state legislature—and admonished his faculty to do likewise. In a confidential note, he assured the governor, “The subject of Evolution so intricately involves religious belief, which the University has no disposition to dictate, that the University declines to engage in the controversy.” Only after the legislature adjourned and the new law became the primary subject of ridicule at the annual student parade did the depth of university opposition to it become apparent.104 Similarly, the Tennessee Academy of Sciences, which counted Morgan and other university scientists among its leading members, said nothing against the measure until after it became law. This left Peay free to follow his personal and political inclinations. “I remember a short conversation I had with you on the capitol steps some weeks ago about the Evolution bill. You said then, ‘That you thought you would sign it,’ ” a Nashville minister wrote to the governor. “May I, as your friend and supporter, ask you to sign the present bill and help us in Tennessee who are making a desperate fight against the inroads of Materialism.”105 Peay kept his word.
The governor explained his decision to sign the bill in a curious message to the legislature. On one hand, Peay firmly asserted for proponents, “It is the belief of our people and they say in this bill that any theory of man’s descent from lower animals, ... because a denial of the Bible, shall not be taught in our public schools.” On the other hand, he assured opponents that this law “will not put our teachers in any jeopardy.” Indeed, even though the most cursory review of Tennessee high school biology textbooks should have shown him otherwise, Peay wrote, “I can find nothing of consequence in the books now being taught in our schools with which this bill will interfere in the slightest manner.” Nevertheless, he went on to hail the measure as “a distinct protest against an irreligious tendency to exalt so-called science, and deny the Bible in some schools and quarters—a tendency fundamentally wrong and fatally mischievous in its effects on our children, our institutions and our country.”106
Peay, whose progressivism grew out of his traditional religious beliefs, simply could not accept a conflict between public education and popular religion. In 1925, only days after he signed the antievolution law, Peay won legislative approval for a massive education reform bill that laid the foundation for Tennessee’s modern, state-supported system of public schools. He approved of limits on teaching evolution as part of those state-funded schools. “I have profound contempt for those who are throwing slurs at Tennessee for having the [antievolution] law,” Peay said during the Scopes controversy. “In my judgement any state had better dispense with its schools than with its Bible. We are keeping both.” Yet he could not totally ignore the tension between a fundamentalist’s fear of modern education and a progressive’s faith in it. In his message to the legislature on the antievolution bill, he fell back on Bryan’s populist refrain: “The people have a right and must have the right to regulate what is taught in their schools.”107 Trapped between fundamentalism and progressivism, Peay may have viewed majoritarianism as an excuse for the law. Caught in the same bind, Bryan saw it as the law’s ultimate justification.
Bryan rejoiced in the decision by Peay to sign the legislation, but both individuals misjudged the consequences of that action. “The Christian parents of the State owe you a debt of gratitude for saving their children from the poisonous influence of an unproven hypothesis,” Bryan wired the governor. “Other states North and South will follow the example of Tennessee.”108 He missed the mark with this prediction because he failed to anticipate a test case involving the act. Indeed, blinded by their sunny progressive faith in the curative power of majoritarian reforms, neither of these experienced politicians saw the Scopes trial coming. According to Peay, the law simply covered anti-biblical doctrines, and he trusted that “nothing of that sort is taught in any accepted book on science.” Bryan, for his part, trusted that public school teachers would “respect the law.” Both could agree with Peay’s comment, “Nobody believes that it is going to be an active statute.”109 It took Riley and the WCFA to appreciate the potential significance of an incipient conspiracy by free-speech advocates, evolution scientists, and publicity-minded townspeople for testing the law in court—and then to call on Bryan to defend his majoritarian reform against charges that it violated elemental concepts of individual liberty.
—CHAPTER THREE—
IN DEFENSE OF INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY
ACTIVISTS WITH THE American Civil Liberties Union did not dismiss the enactment of the Tennessee law against teaching evolution as an insignificant occurrence in some remote intellectual backwater. More critically, they did not view the antievolution crusade in isolation; if they had, they probably would have ignored it along with countless other laws and movements to advance Protestant culture then prevalent throughout the United States. Prior to the Scopes trial, the ACLU did not display any particular interest in challenging government efforts to protect or promote religious beliefs. To the contrary, Quakers played a major role in founding and financing the organization during the First World War as a vehicle to protect religiously motivated pacifists from compulsory military service. Yet ACLU leaders saw the new Tennessee statute in a different light, one that made it stand out as a threat to freedom and individual liberty in the broader American society.
A fashionable new book of the era, The Mind in the Making by James Harvey Robinson of the left-wing New School for Social Research in New York City, captured the reactionary mood of the times as perceived by many of the socially prominent, politically radical New Yorkers who led the ACLU during the early twenties. According to this book, which incorporated an evolutionary view of intellectual and social history, a systematic assault on personal liberty in the United States began during the First World War; various state and local authorities had limited freedom prior to this period, to be sure, but these earlier restrictions represented isolated incidents and could be dealt with accordingly. The war changed everything.1
“It is a terrible thing to lead this great and peaceful people into war,” President Wilson declared in his 1917 war message to Congress. He then added to the terror of some by warning that “a firm hand of stern repression” would curtail domestic disloyalty during wartime.2 At Wilson’s request, Congress imposed a military draft, enacted an Espionage Act that outlawed both obstructing the recruitment of troops and causing military insubordination, and authorized the immigration service to denaturalize and deport foreign-born radicals. The federal Justice Department broadly construed the Espionage Act to cover statements critical of the war effort, while the postal service r
evoked mailing privileges for publications it considered to “embarrass or hamper the government in conducting the war.”3 In 1918, Congress responded to mounting domestic opposition to the war by expanding the Espionage Act to bar “disloyal” or “abusive” statements about the American form of government. Several states outlawed teaching German in public schools. Public and private institutions of higher education throughout the United States, including Columbia University, in the ACLU’s backyard, dismissed tenured faculty members for opposing American intervention in the war.
The National Civil Liberties Bureau was established in 1917 to defend conscientious objectors and antiwar protesters. It initially grew out of the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM), an organization formed by wealthy pacifists to oppose American entry into World War I, but it soon acquired a separate existence under the leadership of Roger Baldwin, a Harvard-educated social worker with an aristocratic pedigree and radical leanings. “We are interested in preserving civil liberties in America,” Baldwin explained at the time, “first, for the sake of democracy itself, and second, for the rights of the people to discuss peace terms and war policies. The rights of both individuals and minorities are being grossly violated throughout the country.”4
Such violations struck close to home for the fledgling organization and helped shape its libertarian philosophy toward free speech. Within weeks of the bureau’s formation, the postal service banned from the mail twelve different antiwar pamphlets the bureau had prepared for mass distribution. Anticipating this problem, Baldwin sought prepublication approval for mailing the pamphlets and secured the aid of Clarence Darrow to negotiate a settlement with the Postmaster General, but to no avail. One of the banned pamphlets, authored by bureau officer and future American Socialist leader Norman M. Thomas, articulated the view of democracy and liberty then taking hold among bureau activists. President Wilson, who hailed from the same liberal establishment that gave birth to the bureau, maintained a majoritarian view of democracy that justified restrictions on free speech and other minority rights once Congress declared war. In the bureau pamphlet, Thomas countered that the majority should never assert control over matters of individual conscience. “Democracy degenerates into mobocracy unless the rights of minorities are respected,” Thomas wrote.5 Triggered both by this encounter with the postal service and by the bureau’s subsequent defense of the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), federal agents began spying on bureau activities. In 1918, Justice Department officials raided the bureau’s headquarters and threatened to indict organization leaders. Later that year, Baldwin began a year in prison for refusing to comply with the Selective Service Act.
Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion Page 8