Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion
Page 29
Antievolutionism managed to survive and flourish even as commentators pronounced it dead and gone because its proponents focused their efforts inward, within the fundamentalist church, rather than outward, toward the general public. Beyond the church, people did not hear about Rimmer and Price during the thirties in the way they had heard about Bryan and Riley during the twenties. The leading evangelical historian, George M. Marsden, attributed this development to the Scopes trial. “It would be difficult to overestimate the impact of ‘the Monkey Trial’ at Dayton, Tennessee, in transforming fundamentalism,” Marsden wrote. “The rural setting ... stamped the entire movement with an indelible image. Very quickly, the conspicuous reality of the movement seemed to conform to the image thus imprinted and the strength of the movement in the centers of national life waned precipitously.” 15 Fundamentalism, which began amid revivals in northern and West Coast cities, appeared increasingly associated with the rural South. The national media ceased covering its normal activities. Conservatives lost influence within mainline Protestant denominations. The string of legislative defeats for antievolution bills in northern states made further political activity outside the South seem futile. After the Scopes trial, elite American society stopped taking fundamentalists and their ideas seriously.
Indeed, fundamentalism became a byword in American culture as a result of the Scopes trial, and fundamentalists responded by withdrawing. They did not abandon their faith, however, but set about constructing a separate subculture with independent religious, educational, and social institutions. The historian Joel A. Carpenter traced these activities in the development of fundamentalist colleges and schools, conferences and camps, radio ministries, and missionary societies during the 1930s. The founding of Bryan College in Dayton fit the pattern perfectly. As membership in mainline Protestant associations shrank during the Great Depression, it surged ahead in most fundamentalist denominations—a phenomenon that Carpenter attributed to the role these churches played in providing “ordinary people with a compelling critique of modern society.”16
Antievolutionism continued to feature prominently in this critique and remained a virtual tenet of Protestant fundamentalism in the United States. Rimmer, Price, and other antievolutionists spoke widely at fundamentalist churches and conferences. Their followers taught science at fundamentalist colleges and schools, which typically required all teachers and students to affirm their belief in biblical inerrancy. Bryan College twice invited Rimmer to become its president and welcomed Price to speak on campus.
Just as fundamentalists built their own religious institutions parallel to the traditional Protestant structures that shunned them, they sought to build separate institutional structures for propagating creationist scientific theories. “During the heady days of the 1920’s, when their activities made frontpage headlines, creationists dreamed of converting the world; a decade later, forgotten and rejected by the establishment, they turned their energies inward and began creating an institutional base of their own,” Numbers observed.17 Price co-founded the creationist Religion and Science Association in 1935, for example, but soon left to form the stricter Deluge Geology Society. For a time, antievolutionism also found a home within the American Scientific Affiliation, a professional association of evangelical science educators created in 1941. These organizations and their journals provided an independent institutional base for creationism outside mainstream science. By the 1940s, a fundamentalist subculture had formed in the United States, with a creationist scientific establishment of its own.
Although the Scopes trial helped push fundamentalists out of mainstream American culture, they seemed almost eager to go. A separatist streak marked elements of conservative American Protestantism ever since the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock in 1620. Some distinct creationist sects, such as the Amish and Jehovah Witnesses, always isolated themselves from secular society. Others, such as the Mormons and some ultra-Orthodox Jews and Christians, tended to live in their own communities. The African-American church never had much contact with America’s lily-white scientific establishment. Many strands that united under the fundamentalist banner during the early part of the century, including dispensational premillenialism and the holiness movement, had strong tendencies to renounce modern society. Their Bible told them that they were “not of this world” and that “God made foolish the wisdom of this world.”18 Bryan, Riley, and Straton prodded fundamentalists to carry their light to the world, but when the world rejected that light and martyred their champion at Dayton, the next generation of fundamentalist leaders—including John R. Rice, Carl Mclntire, and Bob Jones, Sr.—called them back to separation. In the words of a popular hymn of the thirties, fundamentalists gladly sang,Just a few more weary days and then, I’ll fly away;
To a land where joys will never end, I’ll fly away.
... When I die, Hallelujah, by and by, I’ll fly away.“19
In the meantime, they felt little need to submit to the dominant culture and quietly built an ever larger and more intricate subculture of their own.
America’s social elite ignored these developments for decades and institutionalized its view of the Scopes trial. Following Frederick Lewis Allen, the trial became an increasingly significant symbolic victory for liberal progress over the forces of reaction. Yet Allen dealt only with the 1920s. Political historians covering a broad sweep of modern American history faced a dilemma: Bryan stood at the center of two supposedly watershed events in American history—the populist revolt of the 1890s and the Scopes trial of the 1920s—but he had shifted sides. The same historians who deified the young Bryan of the nineties demonized the elderly Bryan of the twenties.
Richard Hofstadter, a leading American historian of the mid-twentieth century, set the tone. “Bryan decayed rapidly during his closing years. The post-war era found him identified with some of the worst tendencies in American life—prohibition, the crusade against evolution, real-estate speculation, and the Klan,” Hofstadter wrote in his 1948 classic, The American Political Tradition. “As his political power slipped away, Bryan welcomed the opportunity to divert himself with a new crusade,” he explained. “The Scopes trial, which published to the world Bryan’s childish conception of religion, also reduced to the absurd his inchoate notions of democracy.” In short, Hofstadter described Bryan as “a man who at sixty-five had long outlived his time.” Later historians would reconstruct a more balanced picture of Bryan, showing that he never truly changed during his political career, but the Hofstadter view reigned for a generation and influenced American history textbooks even longer.20
The Scopes trial became a popular topic for historians during the fifties. In 1954, for example, Norman F. Furniss made it the pivotal event in his book on the fundamentalist controversy.21 Two years later, William E. Leuchtenburg’s influential book, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914-1932, cast antievolutionism as a peril to progress and the Scopes trial as the purgative. Ray Ginger contributed the first authoritative book-length study of the trial in 1958. Furniss and Leuchtenburg relied heavily on Allen’s depiction of events at Dayton and interpretation of the outcome. For Leuchtenburg, “the campaign to preserve America as it was, to resist the forces of change, came to a head in the movement of Protestant Fundamentalism climaxed by the Scopes trial.” In the end, he concluded, “The antievolutionists won the Scopes trial; yet, in a more important sense, they were defeated, overwhelmed by the tide of cosmopolitanism.”22 Ginger titled a concluding chapter, “To the Losers Belong the Spoils,” and drew the lesson from Bryan’s “fatal error of tactics: if a person holds irrational ideas and insists that others should accept them because of their authoritative source, he should never agree to be questioned about them.”23 In his 1955 book, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R., Hofstadter reasserted, “The pathetic postwar career of Bryan himself, once the bellwether for so many of the genuine reforms, was a perfect epitome of the collapse of rural idealism and the shabbiness of the evangelical mind.”24
Hofsta
dter’s collegiate American history textbook (which appeared in various editions with several co-authors beginning in 1957) presents the standard historical interpretation of the Scopes trial. In Hofstadter’s work, fundamentalism appears alongside the Red Scare, the Ku Klux Klan, immigration restrictions, and Prohibition in a section on the “intolerance” that darkened the 1920s. The subsection “Fundamentalism” consists solely of a summary description of the Scopes trial. Ever since, nearly every American history survey text has lumped fundamentalism with reactionary forces during the 1920s and featured similar depictions of the Scopes trial. Many continue to perpetuate Allen’s account that, as one popular textbook asserts, Scopes intentionally “lectured to his class on evolution and was arrested.” Most reduce the trial to an emotional encounter between Darrow and Bryan that resulted in a decisive moral defeat for fundamentalism. Leuchtenburg’s textbook called it “nineteenth-century America’s last stand.” Another text adopted the title “Only Yesterday” for its chapter on the twenties, concluding its account of the trial with the observation, “Darrow and company had won a signal victory by making fundamentalism henceforth the butt of ridicule.” As in many of the texts, the ACLU and all of Darrow’s co-counsel entirely lost their place in history.25
Once Riley, Straton, and other antievolution leaders associated with prosecuting the Scopes case passed from the scene, fundamentalists did little to contest the popular interpretation stamped on the trial by secular commentators and historians. Bent on separating their movement from the general culture, the next generation of fundamentalist leaders largely ignored the trial and its impact on society—a development that later, more worldly fundamentalists would come to deplore.26 Fundamentalist students increasingly attended separate academies and colleges that, typically, did not utilize textbooks that either criticized or contradicted their faith. Most likely, only a few fundamentalists actually read what secular authors wrote about the Scopes trial, and most of them probably did not care.
Even creationist science lecturers and writers abandoned the prosecutors of John Scopes. During the late 1920s, Harry Rimmer and Arthur I. Brown defended Bryan’s efforts at Dayton, but they did so less in later years.27 The position of George McCready Price changed even more dramatically. A week before the trial, he advised Bryan to concentrate on the “utterly divisive and ‘sectarian’ character” of teaching evolution: “This you are capable of doing, I do not know of any one more capable.” Yet Price turned against Bryan after the Commoner testified that the days of creation in Genesis represented ages of geological history. At first, Price simply commented that Bryan “really didn’t know a thing about the scientific aspects of the case.” By the 1940s, however, Price even surpassed secular commentators in describing the trial as a crushing defeat for fundamentalism, “which may be regarded as a turning point in the intellectual and religious history of mankind.” He blamed the entire disaster on “poor Bryan, with his day-age theory of Genesis.”28 Later fundamentalist proponents of a more recent creation agreed. Price’s successor at the helm of the “scientific” creationist movement, Henry M. Morris, commented, “Probably the most serious mistake made by Bryan on the stand was to insist repeatedly that he had implicit confidence in the infallibility of Scripture, but then to hedge on the geological question, relying on the day/age theory.”29 Of course, Bryan simply testified to what he and many prominent fundamentalists of his day believed. Nevertheless, late-twentieth-century fundamentalist leader Jerry Falwell maintained that Bryan “lost the respect of Fundamentalists when he subscribed to the idea of periods of time for creation rather than twenty-four hour days.”30
During the period of fundamentalists’ self-imposed isolation from the broader culture, it took threats to repeal the Tennessee antievolution statute to arouse even Bryan College stalwarts to defend the memory of Bryan’s role at the trial. The first such threat came in 1935, when a 22-year-old Tennessee state representative—described in the press as a “pipe-smoking Vanderbilt law student”—offered legislation to repeal the statute. Bryan College teachers and students beseeched legislators with letters and petitions condemning the repealer. Sue Hicks, then a state representative, warned his colleagues that “repeal of the law might endanger” the college. Another lawmaker declared on the state house floor, “I believe that God looked down from high Heaven on Dayton when William Jennings Bryan was there sacrificing his blood not only in the interests of man, but in the interests of his God.” A third representative maintained, “A law that was good enough for William Jennings Bryan is good enough for me.” The proposal lost by a vote of 67 to 20.31 Seventeen years later, a second effort to repeal the statute raised a similar outcry from Bryan College. Its longtime president, Judson A. Rudd, sent copies of Bryan’s closing arguments to every member of the state legislature with a note stating that “the arguments advanced by Mr. Bryan [are] as sound today as when presented twenty-five years ago.”32 Once again, the repeal effort failed.
Even though Rudd’s letter defended Bryan, it suggests a further reason why midcentury fundamentalists abandoned the Commoner. “We are asking you to use your vote and influence to retain this historic and important law,” Rudd wrote in this 1951 letter. “It is even more important today that we withstand the efforts of atheistic communism to deny the dignity of man and to undermine the Christian foundations of our country.” To the extent that fundamentalists entered the political fray during the middle part of the century, their main concerns were with communism, which came to a peak in the early 1950s when the fundamentalist leader Carl McIntire actively supported Senator Joe McCarthy’s crusade against Communist influences in America’s political, education, cultural, and religious institutions.33 From the outset, most leading fundamentalists (except Bryan) tended to lean toward the conservative end of the political spectrum, but now the movement swung hard right. Its new leaders had little inclination to defend a liberal Democratic politician such as Bryan, especially when they could blame their perceived setback at Dayton on his willingness to compromise on an ultraliteral interpretation of Genesis. Even in the early 1920s, when leading fundamentalists enlisted Bryan to aid in their fight against teaching evolution, the historian Ferenc M. Szasz observed, “it is doubtful if many of them ever voted for him. The officials of Moody Bible Institute on his death admitted that they never had.” Only much later, when some evangelicals began reclaiming their heritage of social activism, did a few seek to restore Bryan’s reputation.34
During the fifties, McCarthy-era assaults on individual liberty heightened liberal interest in fundamentalism and the Scopes trial. In particular, the sociologist of religion James Davison Hunter noted, these assaults “and the participation of conservative Protestants in them alerted the academy and the broader liberal culture to certain propensities within the conservative Protestant subculture.”35 The Scopes trial came to symbolize a moment when civil libertarians successfully stood up to majoritarian tyranny. This is apparent in Ray Ginger’s 1958 book about the trial, which concludes by comparing Darrow’s interrogation of Bryan with “the Senate hearings regarding Joseph R. McCarthy, where the line of questioning was weak and compromised, but the mere fact that McCarthy could be forced to answer questions at all caused millions of people to see him in a new way.”36 Similarly, Leuchtenburg’s interest in the perils of prosperity during the 1920s grew out of his concern about the perils of prosperity during the 1950s—with antievolutionism standing in for anticommunism. Furthermore, Furniss began and ended his book on fundamentalism in the twenties with references to political repression of domestic dissent during the fifties.
Again, Richard Hofstadter helped set the tone. His most extensive analysis of the Scopes trial appeared in the landmark study, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. “Although this book deals mainly with certain aspects of the remoter American past, it was conceived in response to the political and intellectual conditions of the 1950’s,” he stated at the outset. “Primarily it was McCarthyism which aroused the fear that the
critical mind was at a ruinous discount in this country.” Several chapters of this book discuss episodes of religious anti-intellectualism, one of which focuses on fundamentalism during the 1920s. “It was in the crusade against the teaching of evolution that the fundamentalist movement reached its climax and in the Scopes trial that it made its most determined stand,” Hofstadter wrote in this chapter. Yet he described the trial as a momentous defeat for fundamentalists. “The Scopes trial, like the Army-McCarthy hearings thirty years later, brought feeling to a head and provided a dramatic purgation and resolution. After the trial was over, it was easier to see that the antievolution crusade was being contained,” Hofstadter concluded.37
One significant distinction between the interpretation given the Scopes trial by historians of the 1950s and that given it by Allen and other commentators during the 1930s involves its seriousness. Both eras saw the trial as a defeat for fundamentalism, but Allen presents it primarily as a media spectacular. His account of the trial appears sandwiched between lighthearted descriptions of the mah-jongg craze and Red Grange’s gridiron exploits in a chapter titled, “The Ballyhoo Years.” In the shadow of McCarthyism, historians of the fifties inevitably placed it alongside the Red Scare, even though fundamentalists did not initiate or disproportionately participate in that earlier assault against alleged domestic Communists. Ballyhoo gave way to bogeymen.