image CHAPTER TWO image

GOVERNMENT BY THE PEOPLE

FOSSIL DISCOVERIES provided persuasive new evidence for human evolution and as such provoked a response from antievolutionists. Henry Fairfield Osborn threw down the gauntlet in his reply to Bryan’s 1922 plea in the New York Times for restrictions on teaching evolution. Bryan had argued that “neither Darwin nor his supporters have been able to find a fact in the universe to support their hypothesis,”1 prompting Osborn to cite “the Piltdown man” and other recent hominid fossil finds. “All this evidence is today within reach of every schoolboy,” Osborn wrote. “It will, we are convinced, satisfactorily answer in the negative [Bryan’s] question, ‘Is it not more rational to believe in the creation of man by separate act of God than to believe in evolution without a particle of evidence?’”2 Of course, the fact that all this evidence was within the reach of every public-school student constituted the nub of Bryan’s concern, and Osborn further baited antievolutionists by stressing how it undermined belief in the special creation of humans.

During the years leading up to the Scopes trial, antievolutionists responded to such evidence in various ways. The fundamentalist leader

and Scopes trial consultant John Roach Straton, for example, denounced Piltdown man as a fraud.3 The adventist science educator George McCready Price, who devised a creationist theory of geologic history that Bryan cited at trial, challenged the antiquity and evolutionary order given to the fossilized humanoids. Placing their age at only a few thousand years rather than the hundreds of thousands of years reckoned by Osborn, Price wrote in 1924, “Such specimens as those from Heidelberg, Neanderthal, and Piltdown may be regarded as degenerate offshoots which had separated from the main stock both ethnically and geographically.”4 Bryan simply ridiculed paleontologists. “The evolutionists have attempted to prove by circumstantial evidence (resemblances) that man is descended from the brute,” he declared in a 1923 address to the West Virginia state legislature. “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.” Responding in kind, Bryan then shouted derisively at people like Osborn: “Men who would not cross the street to save a soul have traveled across the world in search of skeletons.”5

The tone of these comments reflected the newfound militancy that characterized the conservative Christians from various Protestant denominations who called themselves fundamentalists during the 1920s and drew together to support the prosecution of John Scopes. Certainly some conservative Christians rejected Darwinism all along, but when doing so even Bryan earlier had added, “I do not mean to find fault with you if you want to accept the theory.”6 Some articles in The Fundamentals dating from 1905 to 1915 criticized the theory of evolution, but others in that series accepted it. Indeed, the Baptist leader who founded the series and later helped launch the fundamentalist movement, A. C. Dixon, once expressed his willingness to accept the theory “if proved,” while a subsequent series editor, R. A. Torrey, persistently maintained that a Christian could “believe thoroughly in the absolute infallibility of the Bible and still be an evolutionist of a certain type.”7 Such tolerance largely disappeared during and after the First World War, as the fundamentalist movement coalesced out of various conservative Christian traditions.

Militant antievolutionism had not marked any of the four strands of nineteenth-century Christian theology that more or less came together under the fundamentalist banner during the 1920s, yet each

joined in the new crusade against teaching evolution. Dispensational premillennialists such as Baptist leaders Dixon, Torrey, and C. I.

Scofield brought an intellectual tradition of rigid biblical interpretation that divided history into separate divine dispensations and eagerly anticipated Christ’s second coming to replace the current fallen age with a new millennium of peace and justice. Although their otherworldly faith pulled them away from political activism, their biblical literalism committed them to defend the Genesis account of creation. Conservative theologians at the Presbyterian seminary in Princeton added a formal theory of biblical inerrancy, leading their denomination to adopt a five-point declaration of essential doctrines that became central tenets of fundamentalism: the absolute accuracy and divine inspiration of scripture, the virgin birth of Christ, salvation solely through Christ’s sacrifice, the bodily resurrection of Christ and his followers, and the authenticity of biblical miracles. Even though at least one founder of this school, the Princetonian B. B. Warfield, accepted theistic evolution, it clearly inclined followers toward a literal interpretation of Genesis.

The two other strands feeding into fundamentalism contributed to the cause more in terms of numbers than doctrines. The holiness movement, which grew out of Methodism to form a variety of small Protestant denominations, certainly clung to the Bible as true, but stressed personal piety and Christian service over intellectual issues. Penticostalism, which was then entering a period of dramatic growth that would last throughout the century, built on solid premillennialist and holiness foundations, but set them holy rolling by emphasizing the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of individual believers. Both groups brought to the antievolution crusade an army of loyal foot soldiers ready to fight any public-school teachings that threatened to undermine the religious faith of their children. Bryan, a practical politician with great personal faith in the Bible and no formal theological training, did not fit neatly into any one of these camps, but shared with them a sense that something was wrong with mainline Protestantism and American culture.

The culprit, they all agreed, was a form of theological liberalism known as “modernism” that was gaining acceptance within most mainline Protestant denominations. Modernists viewed their creed as a means to save Christianity from irrelevancy in the face of recent developments in literary higher criticism and evolutionary thinking in the social sciences. Higher criticism, especially as applied by German theologians, subjected the Bible to the same sort of literary analysis as any other religious text, interpreting its “truths” in light of its historical and cultural context. The new social sciences, particularly psychology and anthropology, assumed that Judaism and Christianity were natural developments in the social evolution of the Hebrew people. Modernists responded to these intellectual developments by viewing God as immanent in history. Conceding human (rather than divine) authorship for scripture and evolutionary development (rather than revelational truth) for Christianity, modernists nevertheless claimed that the Bible represented valid human perceptions of how God acted. Under this view, the precise historical and scientific accuracy of scripture did not matter.

Judeo–Christian ethical teachings and individual religious sentiments could still be “true” in a realm beyond the “facts” of history and science. “In brief,” the modernist leader Shailer Mathews of the University of Chicago divinity school wrote in 1924, “the use of scientific, historical, and social methods in understanding and applying evangelical Christianity to the needs of living persons, is Modernism.”8

Conservative Christians drew together across denominational lines to fight for the so-called fundamentals of their traditional faith against the perceived heresy of modernism, and in so doing gave birth to the fundamentalist movement and antievolution crusade. Certainly modernism had made significant inroads within divinity schools and among the clergy of mainline Protestant denominations in the North and West, and fundamentalism represented a legitimate theological effort to counter these advances. Biblical higher criticism and an evolutionary world view, as twin pillars of this opposing creed, stood as logical targets of a conservative counterattack. A purely theological effort, however, rarely incites a mass movement, at least in pluralistic America; much more stirred up fundamentalism—and turned its fury against teaching evolution in public schools.

The First World War played a pivotal role. American intervention, as part of a progressive effort to defeat German militarism and make the world “safe for democracy,” was supported by many of the modernists, who revered the nation’s wartime leader, Woodrow Wilson, himself a second-generation modernist academic. A passionate champion of peace, William Jennings Bryan opposed this position and in 1915 resigned his post as Wilson’s secretary of state in protest over the drift toward war. He spent the next two years criss-crossing the country campaigning against American intervention.

Many leading premillennialists shared Bryan’s open hostility toward America’s intervention in the European conflict, seeing the war as both a product of the depravity of the age and the possible fulfillment of a prophesy regarding the coming of the next millennium. With Shailer Mathews leading the charge, some modernists used this opportunity to attack premillennialism as an otherworldly threat to national security in wartime. Some premillennialists responded in kind by stressing the German roots of higher criticism, attributing an evolutionary “survival of the fittest” mentality to German militarism and accusing modernism of undermining traditional American faith in biblical values. “The new theology has led Germany into barbarism,” the premillennialist journal Our Hope declared in a 1918 editorial, “and it will lead any nation into the same demoralization.”9 The trauma of war stirred passions on both sides and helped spur a bitter, decade-long battle among American Christians. “These ideas, and the cultural crisis that bred them, revolutionized fundamentalism,” the historian of religion George M. Marsden observed. “Until World War I various components of the movement were present, yet collectively they were not sufficient to constitute a full-fledged ‘fundamentalist’ movement. The cultural issue suddenly gave the movement a new dimension, as well as a sense of urgency.”10

When a horribly brutal war led to an unjust and uneasy peace, the rise of international communism, worldwide labor unrest, and an apparent breakdown of traditional values, the cultural crisis worsened for conservative Christians in the United States. “One indication that many premillennialists were shifting their emphasis—away from just evangelizing, praying, and waiting for the end time, toward more intense concern with retarding [social] degenerative trends—was the role they played in the formation of the first explicitly fundamentalist organization,” Marsden noted. “In the summer of 1918, under the guidance of William B. Riley, a number of leaders in the Bible school and prophetic conference movement conceived of the idea of the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association.”11

During the preceding two decades, Riley had attracted a 3,000- member congregation to his aging Baptist church in downtown Minneapolis through a distinctive combination of conservative dispensational-premillennialist theology and politicized social activism. “When the Church is regarded as the body of God-fearing, righteous-living men, then, it ought to be in politics, and as a powerful influence,” he proclaimed in a 1906 book that urged Christians to promote social justice for the urban poor and workers.12 During the next decade, Riley focused his social activism on outlawing liquor, which he viewed as a key source of urban problems. By the twenties, he turned against teaching evolution in public schools. Later, he concentrated on attacking communism. Following the First World War and flushed with success upon ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment authorizing Prohibition, he was ideally suited to lead premillennialists into the cultural wars of the twenties.

In 1919, Riley welcomed some 6,000 conservative Christians to the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association (WCFA) inaugural conference with the warning that their Protestant denominations were “rapidly coming under the leadership of the new infidelity, known as ‘modernism.’” One by one, seventeen prominent ministers from across the country—the future high priests of fundamentalism—took the podium to denounce modernism as, in the words of one speaker, “the product of Satan’s lie,” and to call for a return to biblical fundamentals in church and culture. “It is ours to stand by our guns,” Riley proclaimed in closing the conference. “God forbid that we should fail him in the hour when the battle is heavy.”13 Participants then returned to their separate denominations, ready to battle the modernists. Only minor conflicts erupted within Protestant Episcopal and northern Methodist churches, where modernism was firmly entrenched, or in southern Baptist and Presbyterian congregations, where conservatives encountered little opposition. Both sides proved roughly equal in strength within the northern Baptist and Presbyterian denominations, however, resulting in fierce battles for control. Indeed, it was during the ensuing intradenominational strife within the Northern Baptist Convention that conservative leader Curtis Lee Laws coined the word fundamentalist to identify those willing “to do battle royal for the Fundamentals.”14 Use of the term quickly spread to include all conservative Christians militantly opposed to modernism.

Although these early developments laid the foundation for the antievolution crusade and the ensuing Scopes trial, they did not predestine it. Fundamentalism began as a response to theological developments within the Protestant church rather than to political or educational developments within American society. Even the name of the WCFA’s journal, Christian Fundamentals in Schools and Churches, originally referred to support for teaching biblical fundamentals in divinity schools and churches rather than opposition to teaching evolution in public schools—though it neatly fit the organization’s later emphasis. “When the Fundamentals movement was originally formed, it was supposed that our particular foe was the so-called ‘higher criticism,’” Riley later recalled, “but in the onward going affairs, we discovered that basic to the many forms of modern infidelity is the philosophy of evolution.”15 Riley was predisposed to make this connection, as suggested by the title to one of his earlier books, The Finality of the Higher Criticism; or, The Theory of Evolution and False Theology, but it took William Jennings Bryan to turn the fundamentalist movement into a popular crusade against teaching evolution that led directly to Dayton.

Bryan was not a dispensational premillennialist; he was too optimistic. Certainly he shared with premillennialists a joyful hope in eternal life through faith in Christ. But Bryan did not agree with their view that the Bible prophesied the imminent degeneration of the world in preparation for Christ’s second coming. Quite to the contrary, he enjoyed things of this world—particularly politics, oratory, travel, and food—and believed in the power of reform to make life better. Reform took two forms for Bryan: personal reform through individual religious faith and public reform through majoritarian governmental action. He maintained a deep faith in both throughout his life, and each contributed to his final political campaign against teaching evolution. “My father taught me to believe in Democracy as well as Christianity,” Bryan observed late in his life.16 And so the twig was bent, which grew into the tree.

Bryan’s crusade against teaching evolution capped a remarkable thirty-five-year-long career in the public eye. He entered Congress in 1890 as a 30-year-old populist Democratic politician committed to roll back the Republican tariff for the dirt farmers of his native Nebraska. His charismatic speaking ability and youthful enthusiasm quickly earned him the nickname The Boy Orator of the Platte. Bryan’s greatest speech occurred at the 1896 Democratic National Convention, where he defied his party’s conservative incumbent president, Grover Cleveland, and the eastern establishment that dominated both political parties by demanding an alternative silver-based currency to help debtors cope with the crippling deflation caused by exclusive reliance on limited gold-backed money. Using a potent mix of radical majoritarian arguments and traditional religious oratory, he demanded, “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 speech electrified the convention and secured the party’s presidential nomination for Bryan. For many, he became known as the Great Commoner; for some, the Peerless Leader.

A narrow defeat in the ensuing bitter election did not diminish Bryan’s faith in God or the people. He retained leadership of the Democratic party and secured two subsequent presidential nominations as he fought against imperialism and militarism following the Spanish-

American War and for increased public control over corporate business practices. His vocation became speaking and writing, with majoritarian political commentary and evangelical Protestant lectures serving as his stock in trade. During the remainder of his life, the energetic Bryan gave an average of more than two hundred speeches each year, traveled continually throughout the country and around the world, wrote dozens of books, and edited a political newspaper with a nationwide circulation. After helping Woodrow Wilson secure the White House in

1912, Bryan became secretary of state and idealistically (some said naively) set about negotiating a series of international treaties designed to avert war by requiring the arbitration of disputes among nations. This became more of a religious mission than a political task for Bryan, who called on America to “exercise Christian forbearance” in the face of increasing German aggression and vowed, “There will be no war while I am Secretary of State.”17 Of course, he had to resign from office to keep this promise.

Once again left without a formal governmental post but with an expanded sense of mission, Bryan resumed his efforts as an itinerant speaker and writer on political and religious topics. Although his campaign for peace failed, he helped to secure ratification of four constitutional amendments designed to promote a more democratic or righteous society: the direct election of senators, a progressive federal income tax, Prohibition, and female suffrage. During this period, the aging Commoner moved to Miami for his wife’s health and got in on the ground floor of the historic Florida land boom of the early twenties. Although publicly he played down his profits, the spectacular rise in land prices made Bryan into a millionaire almost overnight.

Private wealth did not diminish Bryan’s public zeal as he found two campaign targets: the conservative Republican administrations in

Washington and teaching evolution in public schools. Both targets remained fixed in his sights throughout the final years of his life. Indeed, after seeing himself portrayed in a political cartoon as a hunter shifting his aim from a Republican elephant to a Darwinian monkey, Bryan admonished the cartoonist: “You should represent me as using a double- barreled shotgun fixing one barrel at the elephant as he tries to enter the treasury and another at Darwinism—the monkey—as he tries to enter the school room.”18 Bryan remained a progressive even as he crusaded against teaching evolution. “In William Jennings Bryan, reform and reaction lived happily, if somewhat incongruously, side by side,” biographer Lawrence W. Levine concluded. “The Bryan of the 1920’s was essentially the Bryan of the 1890’s: older in years but no less vigorous, no less optimistic, no less certain.”19

Bryan’s antievolutionism was compatible with his progressive politics because both supported reform, appealed to majoritarianism, and sprang from his Christian convictions. Bryan alluded to these issues in his first public address dealing with Darwinism, which he composed in 1904 at the height of his political career. From this earliest point, he described Darwinism as “dangerous” for both religious and social reasons. “I object to the Darwinian theory,” Bryan said with respect to the religious implications of a naturalistic explanation for human development, “because I fear we shall lose the consciousness of God’s presence in our daily life, if we must accept the theory that through all the ages no spiritual force has touched the life of man and shaped the destiny of nations.” Turning to the social consequences of the theory, Bryan added, “But there is another objection. The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate—the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak.”20

The Great Commoner was no more willing to defer to ivy tower scientists on this issue than to Wall Street bankers on monetary matters. “I have a right to assume,” he declared in this early speech, “a Designer back of the design [in nature]—a Creator back of the creation; and no matter how long you draw out the process of creation; so long as God stands back of it you can not shake my faith in Jehovah.” This last comment allowed for an extended geologic history and even for limited theistic evolution; but Bryan dug in his heels regarding the supernatural creation of humans and described it as “one of the test questions with the Christian.”21 Although Bryan regularly delivered this speech on the Chautauqua circuit during the early years of the century, he said little else against Darwinism until the twenties, when he began blaming it for the First World War and an apparent decline in religious faith among educated Americans.

As a devout believer in peace, Bryan could scarcely understand how supposedly Christian nations could engage in such a brutal war until two scholarly books attributed it to misguided Darwinian thinking. In Headquarters Nights, the renowned Stanford University zoologist Vernon Kellogg, who went to Europe as a peace worker, recounted his conversations with German military leaders. “Natural selection based on violent and fatal competitive struggle is the gospel of the German intellectuals,” he reported, and served as their justification “why, for the good of the world, there should be this war.”22 Whereas Kellogg used this evidence to promote his own non-Darwinian view of evolutionary development through mutual aid, Bryan saw it as a reason to suppress Darwinian teaching. The philosopher Benjamin Kidd’s The Science of Power further explored the link between German militarism and Darwinian thinking by examining Darwin’s influence on the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Bryan regularly referred to both books when speaking and writing against teaching evolution. For example, citing Kidd for his authority, Bryan warned in one of his popular books, “Nietzsche carried Darwinism to its logical conclusion and denied the existence of God, denounced Christianity as the doctrine of the degenerate, and democracy as the refuge of the weakling; he overthrew all standards of morality and eulogized war as necessary to man’s development.”23

A third book had an even greater impact on Bryan and touched an even more sensitive nerve. In 1916, the Bryn Mawr University psychologist James H. Leuba published an extensive survey of religious belief among college students and professors. The result confirmed Bryan’s worst fears. “The deepest impression left by these records,” Leuba concluded, “is that… Christianity, as a system of belief, has utterly broken down.” Among students, Leuba reported, “the proportion of disbelievers in immortality increases considerably from the freshman to the senior year in college.” Among scientists, he found disbelief higher among biologists than physicists, and higher among scientists of greater than lesser distinction, such that “the smallest percentage of believers is found among the greatest biologists; they count only 16.9 per cent of believers in God.”24 Leuba did not identify teaching evolution as the cause for this rising tide of disbelief among educated Americans, but Bryan did. “Can Christians be indifferent to such statistics?” Bryan asked in one speech. “What shall it profit a man if he shall gain all the learning of the schools and lose his faith in God?”25 This became his ultimate justification for the Scopes trial.

Parents, students, and pastors soon came forward with stories of their own, which Bryan incorporated into his speeches. “At the University of Wisconsin (so a Methodist preacher told me) a teacher told his class that the Bible was a collection of myths,” the Commoner related. “A father (a Congressman) tells me that a daughter on her return from Wellesley told him that nobody believed in the Bible stories now. Another father (a Congressman) tells me of a son whose faith was undermined by [Darwinism] in Divinity School.”26 Bryan’s wife later recalled, “His soul arose in righteous indignation when he found from many letters he received from parents all over the country that state schools were being used to undermine the religious faith of their children.”27 Of course, many university professors viewed this as their mission, to the extent that it followed as a byproduct of encouraging critical thought and empirical inquiry in an age of scientific positivism. Stanford University president David Starr Jordan, an eminent evolutionary biologist who later volunteered to aid in the legal defense of John Scopes, spoke for many academics when he dismissed traditional Protestant revivalism as “simply a form of drunkenness no more worthy of respect than the drunkenness that lies in the gutter!”28

In 1921, Bryan began speaking widely about the dangers of Darwinian ideas, formulating through repeated articulation before diverse audiences arguments he later used at the Scopes trial. Characteristically, this thrust was marked by a new speech, “The Menace of Darwinism,” which Bryan repeatedly delivered during the remaining years of his life and incorporated into a popular new book, In His Image. “To destroy the faith of Christians and lay the foundations for the bloodiest war in history would seem enough to condemn Darwinism,” Bryan thundered, drawing heavily on evidence from Leuba, Kellogg, and Kidd.29 A second speech against Darwinism, “The Bible and Its Enemies,” joined Bryan’s repertoire later that year. The Commoner broke out of the starting blocks so fast that the back cover of the 1921 pamphlet containing the “Enemies” speech already referred to “Mr. Bryan and his crusade against evolution.”30

In addition to stressing the dangers of Darwinism, both speeches denounced the theory as unscientific and unconvincing. “Science to be truly science is classified knowledge,” Bryan maintained, adopting an antiquated definition of science. “Tested by this definition, Darwinism is not science at all; it is guesses strung together.”31 He entertained his audiences with exaggerated accounts of seemingly far-fetched evolutionary explanations for human organs—such as the eye, which supposedly began as a light-sensitive freckle. “The increased heat irritated the skin—so the evolutionists guess, and a nerve came there and out of the nerve came the eye! Can you beat it?” Bryan asked rhetorically. “Is it not easier to believe in a God who can make an eye?”32 As the historian Ronald L. Numbers noted, “Bryan was far from alone in balking at the evolutionary origin of the eye. Christian apologists had long regarded the intricate design of the eye as ‘a cure for atheism,’ and Darwin himself had readily conceded his vulnerability on this point.”33 Yet Bryan possessed an uncanny ability to exploit any such weaknesses in his opponent’s arguments, at least with respect to winning over a popular audience—the only one that mattered to him. “The scientist cannot compel acceptance of any argument he advances, except as, judged on its merits, it is convincing,” the Commoner maintained in defiance of scientific authority. “Man is infinitely more than science; science, as well as the Sabbath, was made for man.”34

This sort of thinking predisposed Bryan to his later course of seeking a legislative judgment on teaching evolution and accepting a trial by jury to enforce any resulting restriction. Indeed, Bryan’s mode of operation and optimistic temperament required offering ready political solutions to outstanding social problems—such as a silver-based currency to promote domestic prosperity or arbitration treaties to secure international peace—and his followers, especially those who called him their Peerless Leader, expected an agenda for action. The Menace of Darwinism speech, however, included only a vague call for “real neutrality” on religious issues in public schools: “If the Bible cannot be defended in those schools it should not be attacked.”35 In the fall of 1921, Bryan gave some meaning to this call by publicly wrangling with University of Wisconsin president Edward Burge over allegedly antireligious teaching at that state institution, but Burge, a distinguished scientist, clearly won the argument when it came to issues of academic freedom for university students and professors. Bryan’s speech called on the church to purge itself of modernist and evolutionary influences as well, and Bryan soon sought the top post of the northern Presbyterian church to implement this policy within his own denomination; this involved purely parochial matters, however, for which even Bryan would not seek a governmental remedy. Despite his commanding role, the antievolution crusade lacked a specific political or legal objective for nearly a year.

This situation changed almost overnight. Late in 1921, Kentucky’s Baptist State Board of Missions passed a resolution calling for a state law against teaching evolution in public schools. Bryan heard about the resolution in January 1922 and immediately adopted the idea. “The movement will sweep the country, and we will drive Darwinism from our schools,” he wrote to the resolution’s sponsor. “We have all the Elijahs on our side. Strength to your arms.”36 Bryan had identified his political objective. Within the month, he was on the spot in Lexington, addressing a joint session of the Kentucky legislature on the proposal. Bryan then spent the next month touring the state in support of such legislation, which lost by a single vote in the state House of Representatives.

The campaign for restrictive legislation spread quickly and all but commandeered the antievolution movement. Fundamentalist leader John Roach Straton began advocating antievolution legislation for his home state of New York in February 1922. J. Frank Norris, pastor of the largest church in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, soon took up the cause in Texas. The evangelist T. T. Martin carried the message throughout the South. By fall 1922, William Bell Riley was offering to debate evolutionists on the issue as he traveled around the nation battling modernism in the church. “The whole country is seething on the evolution question,” he reported to Bryan in early 1923.37 Three years later, these same four ministers became the most prominent church figures to actively support the prosecution of John Scopes.

Riley threw the organizational muscle of the WCFA behind the antievolution crusade hoping to politicize the association by giving it a clear legislative objective. Accordingly, the WCFA jumped to the defense of the Kentucky legislation with an editorial in its spring 1922 newsletter and soon began lobbying for similar bills across the country. Ultimately, its interest in enforcing such legislation helped transform the Scopes trial into a major test of fundamentalist influence in American life.

From its first editorial on the subject, an ominous note sounded from the WCFA. The editorialist (most likely Riley) condemned evolution as scripturally and scientifically unsound, conducive to war, and detrimental to morality. Moreover, the editorial baldly asserted that “great scientists” were divided over the theory of evolution and accused its proponents of attempting to settle the controversy “by imposing the theory upon the rising generation” through the public schools.38 The conspiracy grew darker the following year when an article by Riley in the WCFA newsletter accused evolutionists of “surreptitiously” sowing their “anarchistic socialistic propaganda.”39 Later, Riley accused teachers of evolution of being atheists who “cannot afford to consent to the creation theory, for that would compel recognition of God.”40 By the thirties, he warned of an “international Jewish-Bolshevik-Darwinist conspiracy” to promote evolutionism in the classroom, and praised Adolph Hitler’s effort to foil such conspiracies in Germany.41 The Ku Klux Klan—an organization Bryan despised—supported antievolution laws for much the same reason, adding Roman Catholics to the list of co-conspirators.

Rather than following Riley in proclaiming a need to combat conspiracies, Bryan propelled the antievolution crusade on majoritarian grounds. Bryan’s popular arguments shaped the prosecution’s case in Dayton. “Teachers in public schools must teach what the taxpayers desire taught,” the Commoner admonished the West Virginia legislature in 1923. “The hand that writes the pay check rules the school.”42 Such reasoning went to the core of Bryan’s political philosophy. “The essence of democracy is found in the right of the people to have what they want,” he once wrote. “There is more virtue in the people themselves than can be found anywhere else.”43 Bryan consistently espoused this philosophy: from the 1890s, when he commented on one of his election defeats, “The people gave and the people have taken away, blessed be the name of the people,” through his campaign for world peace in 1917, when he proposed holding a national referendum before the country went to war, to his antievolution crusade of the 1920s. Indeed, the strength of Bryan’s convictions in his fight against teaching evolution sprang from his stated belief that “in this controversy, I have a larger majority on my side than in any previous controversy.”44 He estimated that “nine-tenths of the Christians” in America agreed with his views on evolution.45 Even though that estimate exaggerated the level of support for antievolution laws, clearly a large number of Americans supported Bryan on the issue, especially in the South.46 “Have faith in mankind,” the Commoner proclaimed, “mankind deserves to be trusted.”47

Individual rights lost out under this political philosophy. “If it is contended that an instructor has a right to teach anything he likes, I reply that the parents who pay the salary have a right to decide what shall be taught,” Bryan maintained.48 “A scientific soviet is attempting to dictate what is taught in our schools,” he warned. “It is the smallest, the most impudent, and the most tyrannical oligarchy that ever attempted to exercise arbitrary power.”49 He gave a similarly facile response to charges that antievolution laws infringed on the rights of nonfundamentalist parents and students. Protestants, Catholics, and Jews shared a creationist viewpoint, Bryan believed, and he sought to enlist all of them into his crusade. As for nontheists, he asserted, “The Christians who want to teach religion in their schools furnish the money for denominational institutions. If atheists want to teach atheism, why do they not build their own schools and employ their own teachers?”50 Such a position assumed that the separation of church and state precluded teaching the Genesis account in public schools. “We do not ask that teachers paid by taxpayers shall teach the Christian religion to students,” Bryan told West Virginia lawmakers, “but we do insist that they shall not, under the guise of either science or philosophy, teach evolution as a fact.”51 He apparently expected them to skip the topic of organic origins altogether, or to teach evolution as a hypothesis.

Bryan’s comments reflected the deep ambivalence toward individual rights that underlay his majoritarianism. “No concession can be made to the minority in this country without a surrender of the fundamental principle of popular rule,” he once proclaimed with respect to Prohibition.52 When a conservative Supreme Court began striking down Progressive Era labor laws on the ground that they violated the constitutional rights of property owners, Bryan sought to limit judicial review of legislation. Similarly he could argue about teachers of evolution, “It is no infringement on their freedom of conscience or freedom of speech to say that, while as individuals they are at liberty to think as they please and say what they like, they have no right to demand pay for teaching that which parents and the taxpayer do not want taught.”53 To the extent that American political history reflected a tension between majority rule and minority rights, the Commoner stood for majoritarianism. As Edger Lee Masters observed at the time, to Bryan, “the desideratum was not liberty but popular rule.”54

In his crusade to rally the people against teaching evolution, Bryan was nearly omnipresent. He gave hundreds of speeches on the topic to audiences across the country, including major addresses to nine different state legislatures in the South and Midwest. Bryan pushed the attack in dozens of popular books and articles, beginning with major pieces in the New York Times and Chicago Tribune. His syndicated “Weekly Bible Talks,” carried in daily newspapers with a combined circulation of over 15 million readers, regularly belabored evolutionists. He personally lobbied countless politicians, school officials, and other public figures on the issue. “Forget, if need be, the highbrows both in the political and college world, and carry this cause to the people,” he declared.55 And the people responded.

Concern about the social and religious implications of Darwinism had been a secondary issue within the church for two generations, and although the rise of fundamentalism revived those concerns for some, it took Bryan to transform them into a major political issue. Even Bryan’s wife—his closest confidant, who did not share his enthusiasm on this issue—could not understand the response. “Just why the interest grew, just how he was able to put fresh interest into a question which was popular twenty-five years ago, I do not know,” she wrote in 1925. “The vigor and force of the man seemed to compel attention.”56 The view was much the same from Tennessee. “Bryan can provoke a controversy quicker than any other man in public or private life,” an editorial in the Memphis Commercial Appeal observed three months before the Scopes trial. “In a public address about two years ago Mr. Bryan saw fit to take a fling at the Darwinian theory. For several years prior to that day we had heard little about evolution.… But the Bryan criticism started another controversy, and evolution has become all but a national issue.”57 Two years earlier, the always hostile Chicago Tribune complained, “William Jennings Bryan has half the country debating whether the universe was created in six days.”58

Bryan wanted more than a heated debate, however; he wanted political reform, and this took time. Most states had part-time legislatures that only met in general session during the first few months of odd- numbered years. Kentucky was an exception, but when its antievolution bill died in 1922, proponents of such legislation had to wait until 1923 for their next shot at lawmaking. The legislatures of six different southern and border states actively considered antievolution proposals during the spring of 1923, with Bryan personally involved in most instances, but only two minor measures passed. Oklahoma added a rider to its public-school textbook law providing “that no copyright shall be purchased, nor textbook adopted that teaches the ‘Materialistic Conception of History’ (i.e.) the Darwin Theory of Creation versus the Bible Account of Creation.”59 The Florida legislature chimed in with a nonbinding resolution declaring “that it is improper and subversive to the best interest of the people” for public school teachers “to teach as true Darwinism or any other hypothesis that links man in blood relationship to any form of lower life.”60

The Florida resolution was important because Bryan suggested its language and later claimed that it reflected his “views” on the issue, with one significant exception. “Please note,” he explained, “that the objection is not to teaching the evolutionary hypothesis as a hypothesis, but to the teaching of it as true or as a proven fact.”61 Bryan also agreed with the resolution’s focus on human evolution. In his Menace of Darwinism speech, he stressed that “our chief concern is in protecting man from the demoralization involved in accepting a brute ancestry,” and Zconceded that “evolution in plant life and animal life up to the highest form of animal might, if there were proof of it, be admitted without raising a presumption that would compel us to give a brute origin to man.”62 Bryan asked that Florida legislators outlaw such teaching, however, rather than simply to denounce it as improper; but even on this point, the trusting Commoner added, “I do not think that there should be any penalty attached to the bill. We are not dealing with a criminal class.”63 Cautious legislators in Bryan’s adopted state compromised by unanimously passing an advisory resolution rather than a law, thereby avoiding any risk of a lawsuit over their action. Two years later, Tennessee legislators displayed less caution than their Florida counterparts—and less trust in teachers than Bryan—by opting for a criminal law on the subject, including a penalty provision, and applying it to all teaching about human evolution rather than solely to teaching it as true. These changes set the stage for the Scopes trial.

Antievolutionists began targeting Tennessee soon after the 1923 lawmaking season ended without a major victory. Bills to outlaw teaching evolution had died in committees of the Tennessee legislature that year, mostly due to inattention as Bryan and other antievolution leaders campaigned in other states. Now they focused on Tennessee and its neighbor, North Carolina, in anticipation of the 1925 legislative sessions. Bryan gave several antievolution speeches in the two states during this period, including a major address in Nashville on January 24, 1924, attended by most Tennessee state officials. Riley toured the region in 1923, 1924, and 1925, speaking widely in fundamentalist churches and calling on the faithful to drive Darwinism from public schools. The WCFA held major national conferences in both states, further arousing local interest in the topic. Billy Sunday scheduled massive popular crusades in the two states, and encamped in Memphis during the 1925 Tennessee legislative session. T. T. Martin, J. Frank Norris, and John Roach Straton also appeared on several occasions. As a result of these efforts, teaching evolution became a hot political issue in both states during the 1924 elections, with many Democratic candidates vowing to support “Bryan and the Bible.”

Tennessee offered a particularly promising target, and one that proved more vulnerable than North Carolina. Memphis, the state’s largest city, billed itself as “a Baptist stronghold, the citadel of the denomination,” and served as a hub for conservative Protestant publishing.64 The city’s leading daily newspaper, the Commercial Appeal, could be counted on to endorse antievolution legislation. The state as a whole was solidly Protestant, with more than 1 million church members—nearly half of them Baptists—out of a total adult population of 1.2 million.65 Governor Austin Peay, a popular Democratic politician known as The Maker of Modern Tennessee for his progressive reforms, described himself as an “old-fashioned Baptist” and often complained that some of the doctrines taught in public schools undermined religious faith.66 “Be loyal to your religion,” he once advised state college students, “scientists and cranks will seek in vain to better it. The Christian faith of our people is the bedrock of our institutions.”67

Furthermore, Tennessee had a sufficiently diverse population to raise tensions over recent developments in religion and popular culture. Indeed, Bryan opened his 1924 address in the state capital with the challenge, “I make my religious speech here because Nashville is the center of modernism in the South,” presumably referring to the influence of Vanderbilt University and the city’s nationally famous progressive cleric, James I. Vance.68 In addition, racial tensions tore at the seams of Tennessee society and exploded into race riots and Klan violence following the First World War. Antievolutionism promised a return to normalcy.

Local defenders of teaching evolution tried to stem the rising tide. Vance argued for a middle course between fundamentalism and modernism in his books and sermons, all the while pleading for tolerance. Nashville’s afternoon newspaper, the Banner, regularly denounced antievolutionism and sniped at Bryan’s motives. When the Commoner proposed forgiving war debts owned by European nations in exchange for their disarmament, for example, the Banner sneered, “Neglecting never an opportunity to secure publicity, out of which he has realized a large private fortune, the distinguished Florida gentleman late of Nebraska, William Jennings Bryan, has evolved one of his picturesque and absurd altruistic ideas.”69 Proposals to outlaw teaching evolution were the real target of this editorial, just as they prompted the Commercial Appeal to defend Bryan’s “honestly accumulated” wealth and publicize his angry denial, “I am not a millionaire.”70 State and local school officials sought to play down teaching evolution in the hope that the crusade would pass them by, but by 1925 this issue had gained too much momentum in Tennessee to be easily turned aside. A legislative confrontation was inevitable.

“Fundamentalism drew first blood in Tennessee today,” a January 20, 1925 article in the Commercial Appeal reported, “in the introduction of a bill in the Legislature by Senator [John A.] Shelton of Savannah to make it a felony to teach evolution in the public schools of the state.”71 A day later, John W. Butler offered similar legislation in the House of Representatives.72 Both legislators had campaigned on the issue and their actions were predictable. Butler justified his proposal on Bryanesque grounds: “If we are to exist as a nation the principles upon which our Government is founded must not be destroyed, which they surely would be if… we set the Bible aside as being untrue and put evolution in its place.”73 Butler was a little-known Democratic farmer-legislator and Primitive Baptist lay leader. For him, public schools served to promote citizenship based on biblical concepts of morality. Evolutionary beliefs undermined those concepts. Driven by such reasoning, Butler proposed making it a misdemeanor, punishable by a maximum fine of $500, for a public school teacher “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 had descended from a lower order of animal.”74 Most of Butler’s colleagues apparently agreed with this proposal, because six days later the House passed it without any amendments. The vote was seventy-one to five. Although three of the dissenters came from Memphis and one from Nashville, the bill gained the support of both rural and urban representatives, including most delegates from every major city in the state.

The House action reflected overwhelming support for the general concept of limits on teaching evolution rather than any detailed consideration of the pending legislation, which Butler had drafted himself. About the only information on the bill that House members received was a free copy of Bryan’s 1924 Nashville speech, which did not offer any specific legislative proposal other than to proclaim that if Christians “cannot teach the views of the majority in the schools supported by taxation, then a few people cannot teach at public expense their scientific interpretation that attacks every vital principle of Christianity.”75 Bryan’s Florida antievolution resolution expressly incorporated this seemingly balanced restriction on teaching any theory of origins, but Butler’s bill dealt solely with the theory of evolution—and the distinction between the two positions was never discussed by Tennessee legislators.

In fact, for various reasons, no specific features of the proposal received a public airing prior to the House vote. First, the press failed to report the bill’s introduction, focusing instead on the earlier Senate proposal. Second, the House education committee recommended passage of the measure without holding a public hearing. At least one committee member did not even know of the committee’s action prior to the House vote but after mild protest supported the bill anyway. Finally, the House leadership scheduled the bill for final passage during an afternoon set aside for considering inconsequential and uncontroversial legislation. “Measures were ground out of the hopper with regularity,” the Nashville Banner reported regarding that afternoon in the House, “and with probably less debate than expressed at a session this far along in the life of the legislature.” As the afternoon session proceeded, the House postponed action on any bill arousing prolonged discussion. When the disgruntled education committee member asked to hold over the antievolution bill, Butler objected. “I do not see the need for any further talk,” Butler reportedly said, “as everyone understands what evolution means.” Another representative supported Butler by calling for an immediate vote, and the measure passed without further comment. At the time, this vote received even less attention within the chamber than the passage of a leash law for “egg-sucking dogs,” which at least generated laughter after one member asked how to distinguish which dogs suck eggs.76

The speedy House action apparently caught the public off guard. No letters to the editor for or against the Butler bill appeared in any major newspaper of the state prior to the House vote. A deluge of letters followed that action. Further, petitions to the legislature and newspaper editorials on the subject only began appearing after the House passed the bill. Of course, final enactment required action by the Tennessee Senate and governor, so plenty of opportunity remained to influence the outcome. By that time, proponents and opponents had thoroughly rehearsed the arguments that would capture the nation’s attention during the Scopes trial.

Opponents of the legislation went to work on the Senate. “It was noticed by me that the ‘anti-evolution bill’ was passed by the house of representatives yesterday,” one letter to the Nashville Banner observed. “Is it the intention of all those who advocate free expression… to let this pass unprotested?”77 Clearly not, as scores of opponents wrote letters to state newspapers reflecting the outrage, even shame, undoubtedly felt and expressed by countless Tennesseans over the House action. “Let us not blow out the light as long as the student desires to learn,” one writer pleaded.78 “According to the greatest scientific authorities on earth, evolution is no longer regarded as a theory but an established fact,” another declared. “But the legislators persist in hearing the teaching of Billy Bryan, Billy Sunday and all the rest.”79 Comparisons to Galileo’s trial and Bruno’s execution were commonplace. “I fear we will never stamp out the evolution theory, for old Bruno was burned and old Galileo thrown in prison,” a sarcastic writer protested, “and yet the damnable round earth theory is still being taught.”80 The inevitable references to monkeys also appeared. “No one needs better proof of the truthfulness of Darwin’s theory than to visit Capitol Hill and view some its occupants,” a typical letter joked. “Someone said they sprang from monkeys and that one would be forced to believe they had not sprung very far.”81

Several state newspapers jumped into the fray at this point. “There is no reason why the discoveries of geology and astronomy should be challenges to Christian faith,” an editorial in the Nashville Tennessean advised.82 “The quicker this jackass measure is booted into a waste basket, the better for the cause of enlightenment and progress in Tennessee,” the Rockwood Times added.83 The Chattanooga Times reprinted an editorial declaring, “Perhaps if there is any other being entitled to share Mr. Bryan’s satisfaction at this Tennessee legislature it is the monkey. Surely if the human race is accurately represented by that portion of it in the Tennessee house of representatives, the monkey has a right to rejoice that the human race is no kin to the monkey race.”84

Tennessee’s modernist clerics, although vastly outnumbered by their fundamentalist counterparts, held influential pastorates in several cities and joined in condemning the antievolution bill. Indeed, one liberal preacher gave lawmakers such a tongue-lashing that, after a newspaper reprinted his comments, the House took the unusual step of passing a resolution denying them.85 Thirteen Nashville ministers, most of them either Presbyterians or Methodists, expressed their opposition in a petition to the Senate.86 Chattanooga’s leading liberal pastor, M. S. Freeman, began a widely publicized series of sermons on modernism by criticizing the proposed statute: “I believe that such laws emanate from a false conception that our Christian faith needs to be sheltered behind bars.”87 The modernist leader R. T. Vann, who played a lead role in opposing antievolution legislation in North Carolina, delivered an address in Memphis on the need for academic freedom in science education. “Now, granted that we may and must teach science in our colleges,” he argued, “this teaching must be done by scientists.… Neither priest nor prophet nor apostle, nor even our Lord Himself, ever made the slightest contribution to our knowledge of natural science.”88 Already, the three main tactics for attacking the antievolution measure had emerged: the defense of individual freedom, an appeal to scientific authority, and a mocking ridicule of fundamentalists and biblical literalism; later, they became the three prongs of the Scopes defense.

Senators readily responded to these arguments. Just two days after the House passed the Butler bill, the Senate judiciary committee voted down Shelton’s antievolution measure with the comment that the legislature should not “make laws that even remotely affect the question of religious belief.”89 Six days later, the committee also rejected the Butler bill. Caught in the middle between its judiciary committee and the House, the full Senate vacillated. First, it considered a move to kill the Butler bill outright, then it adopted a motion to schedule the legislation for an expedited vote. Finally, it sent both antievolution bills back to the judiciary committee for reconsideration during a month-long legislative recess that began in mid-February.90 This provided time for antievolutionists to counterattack. They made the most of their opportunity.

“As near as we can judge,” one reader wrote to the Nashville Banner in early February 1925, “the house of representatives has passed the bill…, the senate judiciary committee has recommended the bill for rejection…, and the forum has thus far been monopolized by those who oppose the bill. It is time something was said for the other side.”91 This writer, and dozens of other antievolutionists who sent letters to the editors of Tennessee newspapers in support of the Butler bill, displayed an understanding and acceptance of Bryan’s basic argument that the majority should oversee the content of public school instruction, at least with respect to the teaching of “unproven” theories that profoundly influenced social and spiritual values.

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 pre- historic 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 11, at its first meeting following the legislative recess, 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 opponents 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 antibiblical 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.