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Intelligently Designed
How Creationists Built the Campaign against Evolution
By EDWARD CAUDILL UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2013 Edward Caudill
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-03801-3
CHAPTER 1
The Genesis of Young-Earth Creationism
[Scopes] is here because ignorance and bigotry are rampant.
—Clarence Darrow, July 1925
Evolution is at war with religion.
—William Jennings Bryan, July 1925
Antievolutionism did not spontaneously generate itself in 1925, the year of the Scopes trial, though one might think so in reading press accounts of subsequent innumerable cases involving teaching evolution in public schools. All of them seem to be "Scopes 2." There is justification for the now clichéd label attached to cases involving religious objections to teaching evolution in public schools. This is a result of the Scopes trial—the first one—having become more than cultural shorthand for the evolution-religion issue. The case also became a template for subsequent clashes over the irreconcilable issue. That template includes
• Public schools as the battleground of choice.
• Winning media attention.
• Iconic figures, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, whose arguments about the nature of science and appeals to cultural values and myths have endured.
• A political fight, as opposed to a philosophical, theological or scientific one. The issue usually erupts with elected local boards or state legislatures. Now, there are national organizations devoted to campaigning for young-Earth creationism, such as Answers in Genesis (AiG) in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the Center for Science and Culture, a branch of the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington.
The political dimension of creationism versus evolution is important because scientists and the public so often have attempted to explain or understand these clashes as science-religion debates. Obviously, they are, in some respects. But the debate and the success of creationists remain incomprehensible to many because they ignore the political nature of antievolutionism. Like elections, campaigns against teaching evolution in public schools return with great regularity, the results of the last "election" cycle notwithstanding—i.e., that creationists eventually lost the legal case. But like any political cause or party they did not just go away. The popularity of young-Earth creationism is incredible, particularly considering that it has almost no credibility in the scientific community. "Success" is measured on the basis of national polls over the last several decades that have consistently showed anywhere from about one-third to one-half of Americans accepting a creationist-literalist reading of Genesis. However, this is not so much a failure of science as it is a triumph of politics. Though creationism is suspect science, it is a model of political activism, which took form at the Scopes trial.
Religious Objections
Those who have denounced Darwin have not always been theologically inspired. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some of the toughest critics of Darwin and On the Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1871) were scientists. Many scientists still saw science as a means of shedding light on God's workings in nature. Darwin set science on a new course by ignoring this traditional view of science's purpose and by discarding the presumed distinction between humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom. In the twenty-first century, this remains an issue for many people.
A few decades after publication of Origin, a dedicated, conservative Christianity coalesced around a defense of tradition, the threat of modernism, and a spirit of political reform. America's Social Gospel movement arose at a time of unregulated capitalism, abuses of labor, manipulations of markets, and the accumulation of huge fortunes by a few people. The Social Gospel was a Protestant attempt to sacralize Godless cities and factories. The attempt to "save" the city was a restatement, perhaps even an affirmation in uniquely American terms, of the Old Testament Eden Myth. New ideas, new people, and new ways were slithering into the new-world garden. This new manifestation of the serpent, some believed, should be cast out of the garden in order to reclaim that sacred tradition. The emerging menace was complex and included modernists, who advocated new, critical approaches to art, literature, and history.
Modernism was an intellectual movement, imported from European universities, and thus was of little interest to most Americans. But any reevaluation of sacred texts—the Bible, in this case—incensed many people. Evolution, another aspect of modernist thought, was fairly familiar to all, its implications easy to understand. Evolution's proponents said it applied to everyone, whether one rejected or accepted it. Two aspects of evolution repelled conservative Christians for several reasons. First, evolution was an implicit assault on a literal reading of Genesis. Second, it substituted a materialistic explanation of humanity's existence for a divine one. The objections were easy to understand, easy to communicate to others, and applied to the moment. Such immediacy and relevance to a large number of people meant evolution could be an issue with great political resonance.
The rapid growth of antievolutionism in the early twentieth century was more than a religious backlash to modern science. Since the early republic, evangelicals had seen themselves as having a mandate from God to transform society into a moral order. This idea ultimately collided with the social discord of late-nineteenth-century America, including labor strikes and the free-thought movement. Social order itself became an important part of a moral society. Universities were changing, less bound to religion and moving to empirical inquiry, particularly in the sciences. Eventually, this view of the morality of order, which was part of a religious mission, was confronted with the implicit disorder or seemingly random variation that was part of Darwinism.
Organized antievolutionism arose from a larger stream of conservative theology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A series of twelve pamphlets, The Fundamentals, published from 1910–1915 and distributed nationally, were defining documents for the movement. More than three million copies of each volume were distributed to pastors, professors, and theology students across the country. The Fundamentals launched the namesake religious movement with essays that addressed a variety of Christian doctrines, assailed modernist or "higher criticism" of the Bible, and promoted evangelism. The series contributed to fundamentalism's growing antievolutionism by devoting about 20 percent of its space to the subject, which ranged from more conciliatory, "liberal" views to uncompromising rejection of evolution. The lead essay of the seventh volume argued that evolution had been made materialistic by later Darwinists, and that Darwin himself did not exclude God's design as an explanation. The next generation, in other words, just went too far with the original idea. Essays in volume eight, however, rejected evolution, stated there was no universal law of development, and said transmutation of species was not possible. The Fundamentals espoused biblical inerrancy, which was not necessarily literalism. Evolution did not accommodate a literal reading of the Bible, and it was at odds with the fundamentalist vision of a planned and purposeful universe. At first, The Fundamentals did not provoke a lot of attention because they were not seen as particularly radical, though Christian fundamentalists later recognized them as the movement's beginning.
Over the next decade, antievolutionists organized themselves, found leaders, and worked their way into the cultural mainstream with savvy media campaigns, appealing to religious tradition and national values. In a 1918 meeting in Philadelphia of what was later called the World Christian Fundamentalist Association (WCFA), fundamentalists saw in World War I the threat of modern industrialism realized, the culmination of amoral "survival of the fittest." In this maelstrom of ideas and events, fundamentalists became more militant, and any earlier tolerance for evolution began to disappear. Established in Philadelphia in 1919 and organized by William Bell Riley, an author of The Fundamentals, the WCFA was the movement's first formal organization. In spite of the name, the organization's efforts were national.
The WCFA was not the only ingredient of a national political movement. The Fundamentals were, in effect, a policy platform published for mass consumption, and William Jennings Bryan was the party leadership. The pamphlets reached the grassroots level of the campaign by going out not just to church leaders but also to members. The publisher began offering the pamphlets for only 15 cents each, $1 for eight copies, and $10 for one hundred, encouraging their distribution in communities as well as churches. In the beginning of the third volume, the editors wrote that they found encouraging the receipt of more than 10,000 letters, from around the world, in support of the series. At the same time, public education was growing, and many schools used textbooks that were favorable toward evolution. This meant evolution confronted an unprecedented number of people, usually as a matter of children being taught the idea in schools. It was a dual shock for many parents, whose children may have been the first generation to benefit from a higher level of public education. This accompanied a growing fundamentalist presence in politics, with thirty-seven states introducing antievolution legislation, which became law in Tennessee (1925), Mississippi (1926), Arkansas (1928), and Texas (1929). In 1922, the U.S. Senate went so far as to debate, but eventually reject, legislation to outlaw proevolution radio broadcasts.
Religious conservatives found in evolution a subject that would drive a mass political movement, transforming the issue from a theological argument to a moral war in which the very soul of democracy was at stake. Public debates pitted notables from each side in dramatic, well-attended publicity events. The fundamentalists were good campaigners. For example, Bryan and other fundamentalist leaders knew the difference between Darwinism and social Darwinism, but did not differentiate. Such intellectual precision would have distracted from their message and been of little interest to an audience that generally was uninterested in such professorial fine points. So antievolutionists cast guilt upon the whole theory, and by extension upon materialism and modernism, for the decline of civilization. They also seized upon debates among scientists about the nature of evolution, whether it really was Darwin's natural selection or another mechanism, and cited the lack of perfect agreement among scientists as proof of the uncertainty about the whole idea of evolution. Any scientists expressing reservation about any aspect of evolutionary theory was further evidence. This belied some ignorance about the very nature of science, especially the role of doubt and the necessity of a method that would provide a way to disprove a theory—i.e., if an idea cannot be subjected to empirical testing, it is not science. The indictment for scientific disagreement also revealed some hypocrisy in that fundamentalists ignored the fact that disagreement existed among theologians.
When Bryan emerged as the national leader of antievolutionism, he gave the movement its celebrity and its voice. He was widely known, and liked, and he knew how to lead a national movement—just as he knew how to conduct a national campaign. He had found an issue to put himself back in national politics, and antievolutionists had found a spokesman. His antievolution campaign took definitive shape in 1921, with a nationwide lecture tour that included "The Menace of Darwinism," in which he argued that evolution was un-Christian and unscientific. His evidence included the complexity of the eye, which he said was proof of God's design. The popularity of the pamphlets, the growth of schools, and Bryan's injection of himself into the controversy made the issue appealing to the press because more people than ever were engaged in the topic, which Bryan simplified for easy consumption.
Reformers and Newsmakers
Bryan and Clarence Darrow are the historical personifications of the thesis and anti-thesis of the modern culture war, which explodes dramatically when it comes to teaching evolution in public schools. As the lead actors in the Scopes trial, Bryan and Darrow defined the subsequent place of antievolutionism for fundamentalists. The Scopes trial was not just a reaction against Darwin and evolution, but against science in general. Leading the charge against teaching evolution in public schools was an opportunity for Bryan to combine his political experience, populist impulses, and pulpit principles. Though they became adversaries, both Bryan and Darrow were among the reform-minded Democrats of the late nineteenth century who looked for real change and acted on their own versions of profoundly moral principles to further the cause of humanity.
Like Bryan, Darrow identified with the common man, the underdog. Like Darrow, Bryan often associated with fringe political causes, such as socialism. Darrow first met Bryan at the 1896 Democratic National Convention. In The Story of My Life, Darrow praised Bryan's political ability and oration, especially the "Cross of Gold" speech, a response to Republican nominee William McKinley's gold-standard platform. Bryan electrified the convention with his delivery, eloquence, and words, including his famous closing: "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!" Bryan went on to be nominated for president, with Darrow on down the ticket as a candidate for Congress. Darrow later wrote that he was relieved to lose. Bryan again won the nomination in 1900, and Darrow campaigned for him, motivated by Bryan's advocacy for Philippine independence. Bryan lost again. In 1908, their parting of ways started when Darrow refused Bryan's request for help in a third run for presidency. Darrow explained it as simply a matter of Bryan ignoring "dangerous problems." Bryan's alliance with a growing prohibition movement also irked Darrow.
Bryan and Darrow both were experienced benders of public opinion well before the Scopes trial. Each was an accomplished politician and publicist. Darrow sought and nurtured publicity for himself and his causes from the earliest days of his legal career. He reveled in the headlines about his clients, which over the years included labor radicals, murderers, and socialists. His friendship with journalists was more than mere convenience or the sort of symbiosis so common in the news business between reporter and source. He had the journalistic impulse of the muckrake era to right wrongs, challenge authority, and defend the aggrieved. His relationship with two journalists in particular, H. L. Mencken of the Baltimore Sun and muckraker extraordinaire Lincoln Steffens, were philosophic kinships. Darrow and Mencken were fellow pessimists about the future of learning and enlightenment, and they held a mutual contempt for religion. At times, Darrow's writing even assumed a Menckenesque tone, as in "The Pessimistic versus the Optimistic View of Life": "What is a pessimist, anyway? It is a man or a woman who looks at life as life is. If you could, you might take your choice, perhaps, as to being a pessimist or a pipe dreamer. But you can't have it, because you look at the world according to the way you are made."
Darrow and Steffens were fellow crusaders for labor and the common man, at least once in the same court case. They were longtime friends by the time of the trials of John and James McNamara for the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building in 1910. John McNamara was secretary-treasurer of the Structural Iron Workers Union, and James McNamara was a union sympathizer and activist. The bomb destroyed the building, killed twenty people, and wounded many others. Both Darrow and Steffens had doubts about the brothers' innocence, but they saw a larger truth at issue. When Steffens visited the brothers in jail—a privilege Darrow had granted him—Steffens told them he came not so much for the trial itself but to expose abuses of labor. The sentiment paralleled Darrow's. Steffens had a hand in engineering a plea bargain for the brothers, helping them avoid the death penalty. Darrow negotiated plea bargains, which were unusual in labor cases.
A few years later, in July 1912, Steffens was the star witness for the defense in Darrow's bribery trial in which he was accused of bribing a juror in the McNamaras' trial. Asked if he were an anarchist, Steffens retorted was that he was "worse than an anarchist." He was a Christian: "It is more radical." In further testimony, Steffens's ideas about crime mirrored Darrow's: "I am trying to make a distinction between the crime that is merely done by an individual and the crime that is committed by an individual for a group which grows out of social conditions, and I think that those two lines of crime must be handled differently." As for the McNamaras' trial, Steffens said Darrow pleaded the two brothers guilty because there was no other defense—not to avoid charges himself.
Darrow's relationship with journalists reflected not just a shared philosophy but an appreciation for exposé as a tool for reform. His success as a newsmaker was among a plethora of traits that are common to successful public figures, but uncommon among scientists. He enjoyed the attention, shared values with his journalist friends, and was a talented communicator with a mass audience.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Intelligently Designed by EDWARD CAUDILL. Copyright © 2013 Edward Caudill. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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