Read an Excerpt
Trying Biology
The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools
By ADAM R. SHAPIRO THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2013 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-02959-7
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Beyond Science and Religion: The Scopes Trial in Historical Context
It was late 1923 when Tennessee governor Austin Peay took note of a deadline that would shape the future of his state and help define his political career. On September 1, 1924, textbook contracts would expire. The state had regulated the adoption of textbooks since 1899, standardizing the titles and prices of school texts in five-year cycles. The new adoption itself was nothing unprecedented. But people in Tennessee would experience an astounding increase in textbook prices, possibly even as much as 50 percent.
The cost of new textbooks had actually increased in 1920 and 1921 as a result of post–World War I inflation and commodity shortages. The costs of paper, binder's board, and cloth had more than doubled, and labor costs had increased nearly as much. But Tennessee's citizens were lucky: the state had locked in prices with contracts signed in 1919. Many neighboring states were also in the practice of adopting textbooks in five-year cycles but had entered new contracts in 1922 or 1923. People in those states were already paying more for the same titles. In September, Tennessee's advantage would come to an end.
Tennessee's 1919 adoption came at a fortuitous time for its citizens and schools but expired at an awkward time for Austin Peay and his drive for school reform in the state. Just two months after Tennesseans would feel the impact of the price increase, Peay would stand for reelection. He had already presented himself as an advocate of public education, and he planned to make the expansion and improvement of the state's schools the defining issue of his 1924 campaign. Tennessee ranked among the worst of the states in literacy and in economic production. Much of Peay's two-year first term had been dedicated to modernizing the state's infrastructure, enabling it to industrialize and become more integrated within the national economy. The next phase of his plans for state development was tied to education and to using the schools to train a new generation to work in this new environment.
A drastic increase in textbook prices would have crippled political support for the additional taxes necessary for school reform. Except in a few large cities where textbooks were purchased by school districts, students (or their parents) usually bought textbooks from designated local depositories at contractually fixed prices. While the greater expense probably would not have cost Peay reelection, it could have reduced his support in a legislature that had already forced the governor to scale back some of his ambitions for the state.
But with the dawning of the new year came an inventive solution to this problem. Perry L. Harned, the commissioner of education and a political ally from Peay's hometown of Clarksville, helped devise a strategy to reduce the impact of this price increase. On January 3, 1924, Peay wrote Harned:
We must not consider an advance of 33-1/3% in our school books. I will exhaust every means available before consenting to such a contract.
I request you to communicate immediately with the publishers having contracts now with the state and express to them my view that we are entitled, for the school term 1924–25, to buy our books under existing contracts since the schools will be running before the contracts will expire.
Many schools in the state would be opened in August, the rest by early September. Any textbooks bought before September 1 would be available for the prices set in the 1919 contract. Keeping the same books also meant that books could be bought secondhand or used again by families with multiple children. If people bought textbooks promptly, a new adoption would not be needed for another year. In effect, Tennessee could squeeze a sixth year out of a five-year contract.
Peay and Harned did not announce this plan right away, and, as the adoption's expiration drew nearer, others took note of the looming rise in textbook prices. In February, a legislator from a rural district solicited Peay's "influence in not changing school books this year, as it will be a heavy expense on the people, especially farmers." In March, Peay privately confided to some acquaintances that he was "determined to have no adoption until next year." But there was no public announcement until April 16, 1924, when the state textbook commission, appointed by the governor, "unanimously decided to defer the adoption of text books until 1925." By delaying their announcement for several months, Peay and Harned effectively (though perhaps not intentionally) allowed the perception of a crisis to build before unveiling their solution.
Saving Tennesseans from higher textbook prices, they were hailed as champions of poor farmers and urban school reformers alike. The trouble Peay had identified in December had become a political success story by April. Voters would not feel the effects of a price increase until after the election. The strategy of coaxing an extra year out of the 1919 contract cast Peay as a governor who saved taxpayers money while promoting and defending education. From September 1, 1924, through June 30, 1925, the books adopted in 1919 would be used. If anyone needed to buy new textbooks, they would be available at increased prices, but most people either bought new books early or were able to buy or reuse old copies. Shortly after the plan was implemented, Harned wrote: "Practically all the books needed for the year were bought before September 1st and ... the children here and there needing books since Sept. 1 bought second hand books in the community. Book men report practically no business since September 1st." Nearly 90 percent of students in Tennessee began the school year before September 1. Tennesseans saved hundreds of thousands of dollars during the 1924–25 school year because the new adoption was postponed. In a published list of interim prices for that school year, Harned claimed that, in addition to this year's savings, it would be beneficial for future adoptions to occur around July 1, at the beginning of the scholastic year, instead of September 1, when many students had already begun classes. He presented the postponed adoption as part of his intended reforms of the administration of Tennessee's public schools.
Postponing the 1924 textbook adoption in Tennessee saved school parents a huge expense and bolstered support for state expansion of education. Peay won reelection in 1924 with a mandate to pursue this agenda. For everyone (except perhaps textbook publishers) the postponement was a good thing. It did, however, contribute directly to one unforeseen consequence: the Scopes trial.
In the waning days of the 1924–25 school year, John Scopes, filling in for the regular biology teacher at Rhea County Central High School in Dayton, Tennessee, assigned reading from George W. Hunter's 1914 textbook A Civic Biology to prepare students for their final examination. The consequences of his doing so have become legendary. Scopes volunteered to be tried in a test case meant to challenge the validity of a new antievolution law enacted by Tennessee in March 1925. He was indicted and convicted and became a symbol of the (perceived) ongoing warfare between science and religion. He was hailed by some as a martyr, compared to the likes of Socrates and Galileo. Often linked to the epithet Monkey Trial, the name Scopes also became a label of derision employed by those who saw evolution as an irreligious and immoral doctrine.
The Scopes trial is one of the best-known events in the history of science and religion in the United States. Subsequent trials concerning the teaching of evolution have been referred to as "Scopes II," and even court cases in other countries have been compared to Scopes. The trial's fame stems in part from the participation of two men—the acclaimed attorney Clarence Darrow and the prominent politician William Jennings Bryan. Their debate over the truth of the Bible and its relation to science captivated the country and was reported throughout the world. Because of this spectacle, this misdemeanor trial in a rural county seat in Tennessee has often been referred to as one of "the trials of the [twentieth] century." In the twenty-first century, interest in the trial has shown no sign of waning. Evolution, and its presence in schools, has become even more politically polarized and more deeply connected to claims of conflict between science and religion than it was in the 1920s. The Scopes trial introduced new ways of thinking about science and religion and their roles in public life throughout the United States and even across the globe.
The assumption that the Scopes trial was rooted in the fundamental incompatibility of science and religion—and was therefore inevitable—has ensured its continued invocation in popular culture. This conflict narrative was cultivated by the trial's participants and has been invoked by those who co-opted the trial to justify later conflicts over evolution. This has led to a historical cycle of self-justification. Science-religion conflict explains why there was a Scopes trial, and the Scopes trial proves the reality of science-religion conflict. To accept this is to embrace the explanation put forth by the trial's participants, who of course accounted for the trial in ways that justified and valorized their own involvement. This self-justification deserves to be viewed with skepticism, and the idea that the Scopes trial proves that science and religion are at loggerheads must be called into question.
This book is an attempt to break the cycle of self-justification that permeates historical accounts of science and religion. It asks how we can give an account of an apparent conflict—the Scopes trial—without resorting to a claim that evolution and the Bible are simply incompatible. To explain how this social movement against the teaching of evolution culminated in a spectacle of science-religion conflict, this book explores how a new high school curriculum—called biology—was developed, printed, distributed, and sold by authors, publishers, educators, and government officials; what that curriculum contained; and how it became an instrument of political ideology tied to an expanded role for compulsory schooling in shaping American life. It then investigates how and why the conflict over American education became understood as a battle over science and religion by examining the ways in which participants in the Scopes trial and producers and consumers of science textbooks reinterpreted the debate over evolution.
DEBUNKING THE INEVITABLE SCOPES TRIAL
Given the trial's importance to the history of science and religion in America, it may seem surprising that if it were not for the 1924 postponement of textbook adoptions in Tennessee—or the postwar jump in commodity prices that prompted it—there likely would not have been a Scopes trial. But it is clear that postponing the adoption until 1925 left an eleven-year-old biology textbook in the hands of ninth and tenth graders. When it was first published, A Civic Biology was a groundbreaking textbook, and for many years it was a best seller. Several thousand copies were sold in Tennessee after its adoption in 1919, but by the early 1920s its national sales had started to wane as newer textbooks competed with it. It continued to sell because of the long term of some adoptions, but by 1924 it had been on the market for ten years; its publisher, the American Book Company (ABC), already felt it overdue for a revision. For reasons of its age alone, the Civic Biology would not have been readopted in Tennessee—had an adoption occurred in 1924. In neighboring Kentucky, where an adoption did take place in the summer of 1924, Hunter's other textbook, the much more recent New Essentials of Biology (1923), was selected.
It is speculative to suggest what might have happened had history unfolded differently, but to suggest that the political circumstances that left Hunter's Civic Biology in Tennessee high schools in 1925 were not critical to the Scopes trial is to accept that something like the trial was bound to happen regardless—that it was, in a sense, inevitable. This myth of inevitability has long been part of the story of the Scopes trial. Many people believe that the conflict of science and religion was so intractable, especially over the question of human origins, that from the moment Charles Darwin penned The Origin of Species something like the Scopes trial was all but certain. According to this interpretation of the trial, the specific details of the case were just happenstance. The essential conflict between evolution and Christianity was unavoidable. If the science and religion conflict had not come to a head in the legal case of Tennessee v. John Scopes in 1925, something similar would have occurred in another setting. As a result, there was nothing unusual about Dayton, Tennessee, or John Scopes that brought about the Scopes trial; the town and the man were subject to historical forces much larger than they were.
The truth is that this myth of inevitability was a self-serving invention of the Scopes trial's participants. Antievolution sentiment was growing in America, but that movement was finding other, less confrontational outlets. Some high school textbooks published in the early 1920s—books that Tennessee might have considered in 1924 and that had been adopted in many other states—approached the topic of evolution differently or avoided discussion of it. Most of these books were published after William Jennings Bryan launched his attack on the teaching of evolution in 1922. One publisher even consulted Bryan on how to present the subject in an inoffensive way. If not for Tennessee v. Scopes, antievolutionism might not have had another chance to culminate in a large public spectacle.
Perhaps even more devastating to the myth of inevitability is the fact that the conditions for such a public spectacle had all been met before, without anything like the Scopes trial resulting. There was another antievolution trial that took place a year before Scopes. David S. Domer, a teacher in Nebraska, was fired from a Lutheran college after church members in the town where he had taught complained that he was "unfit morally and mentally" because he was an evolutionist. In 1924, he sued these church members for slander and was awarded over $5,000 in damages. If teaching evolution was the main source of outrage that was needed to create a public battle between religion and science, then why did it not happen in Nebraska? In some ways, the Domer case would have been a more natural venue to debate the morality of teaching evolution. The trial even took place in Lincoln, where William Jennings Bryan had published a newspaper and which he had represented in Congress. Perhaps the Tennessee case should have been known as "Domer II." Instead, that trial was ignored outside Nebraska at the time and remains unknown today. Its obscurity demonstrates that Tennessee v. Scopes was more than a mere expression of an unavoidable science and religion clash. There were unique circumstances in Tennessee that made a public event possible, circumstances that may not have concatenated anywhere else.
The continued use of Hunter's obsolescent Civic Biology was a crucial part of those circumstances. Scopes recounted in his memoir: "I didn't know, technically, whether I had violated the law or not." He was reassured by consulting the Civic Biology. "There's our text, provided by the state. I don't see how a teacher can teach biology without teaching evolution." Just a month before the Scopes trial, William Jennings Bryan wrote to a colleague: "If you have not read the book in question, 'Hunter's Civic Biology', I suggest you get it. It certainly gives us all the ammunition we need." There were few other states where such aging materiel could still be found in 1925.
Yet, in signing the antievolution law, Governor 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." Though Peay and Bryan saw eye to eye on many political issues, they obviously did not interpret the Civic Biology in the same way. It was not merely the presence of Hunter's book that brought about the trial but a clash between groups of readers who advocated different interpretations of what the textbook said and what was meant by teaching "evolution."
There was no sudden realization in 1925 that Darwin's theories, over half a century old, conflicted with essential truths of religion. Yet most histories of the trial begin from the assumption that the trial was fundamentally about the relationship of science and religion. This treatment suggests an event that is freed from the specifics of time and place. As an epic science-religion clash, the trial, or something very similar, could occur almost anywhere, at any time. It is that view that allows latter-day commentators to refer to the next "Scopes trial" whenever any antievolution case makes the news. That the actual Scopes trial was in Dayton is almost accidental to the matters at hand. The trial was more than an expression of some eternal struggle; it was a specific event, and its occasion relied on several different factors. Some of those contributing factors were unique to Tennessee and even to Dayton, and some had little or nothing to do with either science or religion. The postponement of the 1924 textbook adoption may at first seem a triviality in the series of events that led to the Scopes trial, but, once the role of political maneuvering and the regulation of education in Tennessee are better understood, the event proves crucial.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Trying Biology by ADAM R. SHAPIRO. Copyright © 2013 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
