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

by Edward Larson

  Despite the prediction that most disputes over academic freedom would involve issues of political and economic ideology, the committee’s General Declaration of Principles placed the AAUP on a collision course with the antievolution crusade. Tennessee was again at the center of the storm. Bryan, of course, crusaded against Darwinism in state universities as well as in public schools. After the Kentucky legislature nearly passed an antievolution bill in 1922, the University of Tennessee president Harcourt A. Morgan asked the education professor J. W. Sprowls not to assign Robinson’s Mind in the Making, which presented an evolutionary view of social progress. Morgan, who included evolutionary concepts in his own biology classes, reportedly told Sprowls that “Tennessee was threatened with legislation such as has recently been proposed in Kentucky, and that it was necessary to ‘soft-pedal’ the teaching of evolution in the University in order to prevent the enactment of such a law by the Tennessee legislature.”54 Sprowls acquiesced, but soon learned that his annual teaching contract would not be renewed due to deficiencies in his fieldwork, an essential part of his job. Sprowls claimed that he was fired for teaching evolution, however, and soon the campus was in an uproar. Each member of the Tennessee faculty then served under individual one-year contracts and by the time the dust settled, four additional professors were sacked for agitation in defense of Sprowls. At the same time (but for unrelated reasons) the university decided not to renew the contracts of two other instructors, including longtime law professor John R. Neal. AAUP investigators soon descended on Knoxville to investigate the mass firings.

  The AAUP investigators criticized the university’s handling of the episode. One-year contracts for senior faculty members violated AAUP standards for tenure. The university failed to give timely notice to the four professors fired for defending Sprowls. None of the dismissed teachers received due process. The evidence on charges of religious discrimination was mixed, however. One university official allegedly said, “We are getting rid of a bunch of atheists,” but the assertion was demonstrably false and he denied ever saying it. Sprowls continued to cast himself as a martyr to the antievolution crusade, but university officials consistently gave other reasons for their actions that the investigators accepted. “Professor Sprowls’ views on evolution,” the AAUP report concluded, “were not one of the reasons—certainly not the controlling reason—which led to the decision of the authorities to discontinue his services.” The investigators disapproved of Morgan’s interference in Sprowls’s decision to assign a text on evolution, however, and the continuing public furor in and around Knoxville over the episode helped set the tone for the Scopes trial in nearby Dayton.55

  Neal’s dismissal had an additional impact on the Scopes trial, even though the AAUP investigation found that the action bore no relationship to either the Sprowls affair or teaching evolution. Neal probably missed most of the uproar over Sprowls’s dismissal because it occurred in late spring, when Neal typically taught law in Colorado. Indeed, according to his dean, Neal never spent much time on campus—often arriving late (if at all) for class, devoting class time to rambling lectures about current political issues rather than to the course subject matter, and giving all his law students a grade of 95 without reading their exams. The dean also complained about Neal’s “slovenly” dress, which later deteriorated into complete disregard for personal appearance and cleanliness. Yet Neal was a loyal Tennessee alumnus who had served two terms in the state legislature and helped secure generous appropriations for the university.56 After his dismissal, Neal remained in Knoxville trying to establish a rival law school, stirring up a legislative investigation of Morgan, running unsuccessfully for governor, and claiming that he had been sacked for defending the teaching of evolution. When Scopes was indicted in 1925, Neal promptly offered to represent the defendant and ultimately served as local counsel for the defense throughout the case—to the growing frustration of ACLU attorneys in New York.

  Although its investigation largely cleared the University of Tennessee of charges that it had suppressed teaching evolution, the AAUP remained concerned about the issue. Its president declared at the time, “Fundamentalism is the most sinister force that has yet attacked freedom of teaching,” and the association empaneled a special Committee on Freedom of Teaching in Science to further study this threat.57 The committee issued its report in December 1924, less than three months before the Tennessee legislature banned teaching evolution. “The last few years have witnessed a revival of the spirit of intolerance which has asserted itself, especially in the opposition to the teaching of evolution,” the committee warned. The AAUP would stand against this popular onslaught. “It is, we believe, a principle to be rigidly adhered to that the decision as to what is taught,” the committee affirmed, “would be determined not by a popular vote ... but by the teachers and investigators in their respective fields.”58 During the following summer, several charter members of the AAUP volunteered to go to Dayton to support this position as expert witnesses for the defense at the Scopes trial.

  The drive for academic freedom gradually spread from higher education to secondary education—and here the ACLU assumed a leading role. During the 1920s, early ACLU efforts on behalf of pacifism and labor unions in public education blossomed into a broad program to defend academic freedom. Predictably, it began with the ACLU executive committee member Henry Linville, who as head of the New York City teachers union worked closely with the AAUP’s first president, Columbia University professor John Dewey. Linville prepared for the ACLU a Tentative Statement of a Plan for Initiating Work on Free-Speech Cases in Schools and Colleges in the early twenties. The Tentative Statement dealt only with teachers dismissed for expressing their political views outside the classroom, and adopted the AAUP’s distinction between publicly supported schools, where the ACLU would intervene, and proprietary schools, where it would not.59

  ACLU chair Harry F. Ward wanted to reach into the classroom. “The public mind is poisoned at its source when special interests take hold of educational institutions for their own propaganda,” Ward shot back in a memorandum. “Most conspicuous are the Lusk laws, recently repealed in New York State, the attempt to rewrite history from a nationalistic viewpoint, and the attacks of the American Legion and other organizations on both the teaching of pacifism and on pacifist students.” Although antievolution laws were not yet an express concern, Ward clearly identified “free speech in the class-room” as a potential ACLU priority. “The Union’s chief contribution in situations arising in public and private schools,” he added, “[is] with protests and with the organization of public opinion.” Formal inquiries could be left to professional associations, Ward suggested, but the ACLU should help by “giving the facts national publicity”—a strategy the ACLU would adopt in the Scopes trial.60

  In mid-1924, the ACLU issued its first public statement on academic freedom. The statement essentially combined Linville’s Tentative Statement with Ward’s memorandum and identified both men as its co-authors. In it, the ACLU offered to defend the right of public school teachers to free speech both inside and outside the classroom, and explicitly adopted AAUP’s conception of academic freedom. Significantly, the new statement added antievolution laws as a “chief issue” of ACLU concern, lumping them together with “Lusk laws” and “history text-book laws” as “cases of propagandists’ efforts to distort education.” “Whenever any such issue arises in any school or college described in this memorandum, those interested should write or wire the American Civil Liberties Union,” the statement concluded. “Aid will be furnished at once either through local correspondents, consulting attorneys or direct from the New York headquarters. In important cases a representative will be sent to the scene of trouble.”61

  To supervise this effort, the ACLU formed an elite Committee on Academic Freedom, which brought longtime ACLU activists Linville, Thomas, Holmes, and Felix Frankfurter together with such prominent educators as Stanford University president emeritus David Starr Jordan. An offici
al release announced that the new committee “will deal with laws restricting teaching, such as those attempting to prohibit the teaching of evolution,” and committed the ACLU “to go into each situation promptly, to get the facts before the public, to organize effective protests and to bring to bear national publicity on every local invasion of what we regard as the rights of students and instructors.”62 The release rebroadcast the earlier open offer of free assistance, but the big breakthrough required a narrowly focused appeal from ACLU headquarters in New York.

  “I came across a dispatch in a Tennessee newspaper on my crowded desk which was to turn our office topsy-turvy in excitement. It was a three-inch item stating: ‘Tennessee Bars the Teaching of Evolution,’ ” longtime ACLU secretary Lucille Milner later recalled. “I hurriedly clipped the small article and sought Roger [Baldwin]’s advice. ‘Here’s something that ought to have our attention.... What should we do about it?’ He glanced over it and saw its import in a flash. ‘Take it to the [Executive] Board on Monday,’ he said laconically.”63 Baldwin remembered the episode somewhat differently. Milner, whose job included clipping newspapers for reports of civil liberties violations, noticed an article about a proposed Tennessee law. “When we read press reports of what seemed to us a fantastic proposal pending in the Tennessee legislature to make the teaching of evolution a crime, we kept our eye on it,” Baldwin wrote. “When the governor signed the bill we at once proffered a press release for Tennessee papers, offering to defend any teacher prosecuted under it. That was the origin of probably the most widely reported trial on a public issue ever to have taken place in the United States.”64

  Baldwin’s account rings true. Enactment of the Tennessee antievolution law was a major news story—the first triumph of a four-year national crusade. Only the introduction or consideration of the Tennessee legislation would have been relegated to a small article, especially in a paper from that state. Furthermore, the ACLU closely followed the progress of antievolution legislation in various states throughout the country since the beginning of the crusade and placed them in the context of other restrictions on academic freedom. More than a week before issuing its public offer to assist any teacher in challenging the Tennessee law, the ACLU released a broad survey of restrictions on teaching in schools and colleges. Citing new statutes in seven states to “require daily Bible reading in the schools or forbid employment of radical or pacifist teachers” in addition to the Tennessee antievolution law, the survey concluded that “more restrictive laws had been enacted in the last six months than at any time in the history of the country.” In conjunction with releasing this survey, the ACLU announced, “Efforts to get court decisions on all these restrictive laws are being made through Civil Liberties Union attorneys.”65

  The ACLU press release offering to challenge the Tennessee law appeared in its entirety on May 4 in the Chattanooga Times, which had opposed enactment of the antievolution statute. “We are looking for a Tennessee teacher who is willing to accept our services in testing this law in the courts,” the release stated. “Our lawyers think a friendly test case can be arranged without costing a teacher his or her job. Distinguished counsel have volunteered their services. All we need now is a willing client.” Pursuing the story, a Chattanooga Times reporter inquired whether city schools taught evolution. “That depends on what is meant by evolution. If you have reference to the Darwinian theory, which, I suppose, was aimed at in the law passed by the Tennessee legislature, it is not,” the city school superintendent assured the reporter. “It is recognized by all our teachers that this is a debatable theory and, as such, has no place in our curriculum.” Earlier, in making similar assurances regarding his schools, the Knoxville superintendent had noted, “Our teachers have a hard enough time teaching the children how to distinguish between plant and animal life.”66 These urban school officials clearly did not want to test the new law, but midway between these cities enterprising civic boosters in Dayton craved some attention for their struggling community, and accepted the ACLU offer. They got more than they bargained for. Powerful social forces converged on Dayton that summer: populist majoritarianism and traditional evangelical faith versus scientific secularism and modern concepts of individual liberty. America would never be the same again—or perhaps it had changed already from the country that had nurtured Bryan and Darrow in its heartland.

  PART II

  ... DURING ...

  —CHAPTER FOUR—

  CHOOSING SIDES

  “WHY DAYTON, of all places?” a St. Louis Post Dispatch editorial asked in May 1925, “why Dayton?” Local civic boosters adopted this question as the title for a promotional booklet sold during the trial. “Of all places, why not Dayton?” the booklet asked back, “this bowl in the Cumberland holds ‘logically, fundamentally and evolutionarily’ the amphitheater for a world’s comedy or tragedy, whichever viewpoint the spectators may choose.”1 The booklet went on to note that major events happen in obscure places, giving the example of Christ’s crucifixion at Calvary, then got down to the serious business of promoting Dayton as a place to live and work, without explaining why “logically, fundamentally and evolutionarily” the trial arose in the town—or why any self-respecting civic leaders would want their community to host such an event. Yet those reasons existed and they helped to explain the entire episode.

  Situated midway between Knoxville and Chattanooga in the valley carved by the Tennessee River in the rising foothills of East Tennessee, Dayton lacked both a sense of tradition and confidence in the future. Only a few farmhouses existed in the area at the time of the Civil War, which in 1925 remained a vivid memory for many Tennesseans. The town sprang up in the late 1800s with the coming of the railroads and became the commercial and governmental center for Rhea County. It was part of the so-called New South. Northern money financed laying the rail lines, digging nearby coal and iron mines, and building a blast furnace that attracted hundreds of Scottish immigrants and underemployed Southerners to the new town. Optimistic county officials erected a handsome, three-story courthouse on a spacious downtown square. By linking Dayton to northern markets, the rail lines facilitated the development of commercial farming in the surrounding valley, with Rhea County becoming a major center for strawberry production by the twenties; even though the berry crop flourished and mining continued, the blast furnace went cold. The opening of a hosiery mill early in the new century could not offset the loss of jobs at the furnace. New commercial construction slowed, leaving the downtown with three blocks of one- and two-story storefronts and two sides of the courthouse square undeveloped. Concerned civic leaders actively courted new industry as they watched their town’s population dwindle from a peak of about 3,000 during the Gay Nineties to fewer than 1,800 by the time of the Scopes trial.2

  A New Yorker with some training in chemical engineering, George W. Rappleyea, managed the mines for their northern owners in 1925. Only 31 years old, Rappleyea was described in the Chattanooga Times as “a stranger to the south and southern ways.”3 He had drifted away from religion while in college and fully accepted the theory of human evolution. After moving to Dayton, however, he began attending a nearby Methodist church, whose young modernist minister persuaded him that an evolutionist could believe in Christianity. Rappleyea viewed Tennessee’s antievolution law with disdain and wrote an indignant letter about it to the Chattanooga Times asserting the common modernist line that “John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, ... advanced the theory of the evolution of man 100 years before Darwin.” Upon reading in that newspaper on May 4 about the ACLU offer to help any Tennessee schoolteacher challenge the new law in court, Rappleyea saw a chance to strike the statute—and he set about drawing other townspeople into his scheme.4

  Rappleyea hurried down to Frank E. Robinson’s drugstore with newspaper in hand, or at least that is how the most credible version of this legend goes. Robinson chaired the Rhea County school board, and the soda fountain at his downtown drugstore served as the watering hole for the town’s
business and professional elite during those days of national Prohibition. “Mr. Robinson, you and [local attorney] John Godsey are always looking for something that will get Dayton a little publicity. I wonder if you have seen the morning paper?” Robinson later recalled Rappleyea asking.5 Of course Robinson had seen the morning paper but had not noted the ACLU offer. Rappleyea then related his scheme of staging a test case in Dayton and boasted of having connections to the ACLU in New York. Robinson slowly warmed to the idea, as did School Superintendent Walter White, a former Republican state senator who liked the antievolution law but loved publicity for his town even more. Godsey agreed to assist the defense. A few other Daytonians also may have participated at this stage—many later would claim a role—before Rappleyea was confident enough of local support to place his initial call to New York asking whether the ACLU would make good on its offer if Dayton indicted one of its own schoolteachers. Other key participants signed on the next day, when the ACLU accepted the arrangement.