Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [98]
Perhaps the bloodiest battleground between fundamentalists and modernists was the relatively new science of evolution. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had been published in 1859. Just over twenty years later, when Darwin was still alive, the presidents of nine leading Eastern colleges were asked by the New York Observer whether their faculties taught evolution; the response was a shocked and unanimous no. Even though the theory of survival of the fittest would be used to promote racism and eugenics during the early twentieth century, at this stage the mere idea that man was descended from apes was unthinkable.
By the 1920s, though, progressive intellectuals had accepted Darwinism (and the concept that science would one day explain everything) so entirely that it had become an article of modernist faith. When a bill prohibiting the teaching of man’s evolution from animals was brought before the Delaware legislature, it was facetiously referred to the Committee on Fish, Game and Oysters.
But pious Southerners still believed that the entire truth about the creation of the universe was contained in Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”
The notion that man was descended from apes was seen as blasphemy. As a French visitor to the United States in the mid-twenties observed, one of the frightening implications of Darwinism, for Southerners who believed implicitly in white supremacy, was its message to black people. “If the monkey can become a man, may the Negro not hope to become white?” The Ku Klux Klan added Darwinists to their list of anti-American conspiracists which included Catholics, blacks, Jews and Bolsheviks. After being ousted from the Klan’s high command in 1924, Edward Clarke became an anti-evolution campaigner.
Throughout the early 1920s the fundamentalist crusade to ban the teaching of evolution in schools gained pace. When the Texas legislature rejected a bill permitting censorship of school books, the state governor, “Ma” Ferguson, declared, “I am a Christian mother, and I am not going to let that kind of rot go into Texas textbooks.” She blacklisted or bowdlerized the offending books to remove any mention of Darwinism.
In early 1925 the state of Tennessee became a particular focus for the anti-evolutionists, headed by William Jennings Bryan. Known as the “Great Commoner,” the charismatic Bryan was a Southern folk hero, a sincere, energetic Jacksonian democrat with an abiding mistrust of education. “The only morality comes from the Bible, all our institutions and our social life are founded on an implicit belief in it, and without that belief there is no ground on which moral teaching may be founded.”
Bryan had three times run as Democratic candidate for president (and twice more as an independent) and served in President Wilson’s Cabinet before resigning when Wilson led the United States into the First World War. Having moved to Florida hoping to improve his wife’s health, Bryan was also a major beneficiary of the Florida property boom, receiving handsome payment for promoting the “Coral Gables Land Association.” His political causes—pacifism, Prohibition and female suffrage, as well as anti-evolutionism—sprang out of his twin convictions: a deep religious faith and a passionate commitment to populism and social justice. He blamed Darwinism for the Great War and the decline of faith in 1920s America, and hoped to prevent schools and “infidel universities” from teaching scientific theories of evolution. “What shall it