AS205: Inbetween Peoples

Thanks to Erin for the shout out to Madison on Tuesday.  If you haven’t read Federalist #10 (or some of the rest of the Federalist Papers), you should.

In looking at the Summer for the Gods reading in comparison to some of the other work we have done for American Civilization I & II, I ran across some ideas we were taught in our section on the ‘New World’. In Jonathan Z. Smith’s, “Close Encounters of Diverse Kinds”, we learned that the argument about evolution, which reached a new level of hysteria in the Scope trial, was nothing new in American history. To sum up (and these are borrowed from a class notes handout) “as Europeans coped with the surprise that was the New World, they reached for a new way of thinking about difference. By the 17^th century, some thinkers were constructing new accounts of human origins – polygenesis and autochthony allowed for independent origins of different peoples and cultures and began to challenge the older monogenetic view that essentially we are all the ‘same’.” These arguments came about as a result of the need for white Europeans to distance themselves from the ‘heathen’ race of Native Americans. In this way, their views on evolution were manipulated to provide a justification for white superiority. Later in the semester, in Professor McKeown’s lecture on ‘Skull Wars’, we learned that Native Americans in the 1990s tried to lay claim to lands by proving that their ancestors had been the first to inhabit them and presented the remains of the ‘Kennewick Man’ as scientific proof.

These efforts represent the ways in which science can be used or manipulated gain authority and legitimacy. In much the same way that early Americans used ‘race’ to differentiate themselves from Native Americans and later Native Americans used fossils to claim legal grounds for property, William Jennings Bryan evoked the moral authority of the Bible and majoritarian politics to prohibit the teachings of evolution. Bryan vehemently believed that evolution, despite the compiling evidence in favor of its validity, was not and would not ever be truth. His fear that school children in particular would be easily persuaded otherwise led him to champion revelation throughout the trial. Having little credible knowledge on the science of evolution, Bryan would never waiver against its elimination in the public school system. In this sense, Bryan was motivated more by social implications rather than the evidence that might or might not prove evolution viable. He feared that “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.” (pg. 39) Bryan was not the only figure during the Scope’s trial whose beliefs were clouded by personal convictions. Clarence Darrow represented the antithesis of Bryan in his views. He claimed to be an agnostic but as Larson points out was probably an atheist and was just as much invested in disclaiming Christianity as he was defending evolution.

From these previous cases and with the agendas of Bryan and Darrow, it is difficult to see the Scope’s trial as a trial about evolution at all. Of course the trial was grounded in religious beliefs, or lack thereof in some cases, but I believe the overriding theme could be that of power and authority. Bryan wanted the authority to control what was being taught in school to prevent the digression of society and those like Darrow wanted to reclaim evolution to be taught to the masses while discrediting Christianity. Of course there were many whose views lie between those of Bryan and Darrow. These views are what make the Scope’s trial so complicated. Ironically, John T. Scope own position on Christianity is not easily discerned. The more popular view of reconciling Christianity and evolution is not given nearly as much emphasis as the more extreme views that characterize the trial. So, perhaps the best way to view the Scope’s trial is as a culmination of the extremely stark views of its key players and the ways in which these views played out in society and the lasting impressions they created.

It would be somewhat simple to say that the legal battle between Clarence Darrow and Williams Jennings Bryan was the playing-out of a decades (arguably centuries) old cultural battle between modernity and fundamentalism. There is no doubt that it was, but its implications for American society run far deeper. The Scopes Trial was in many ways the embodiment of a growing concern over the future of America’s moral center. Bryan feared that “Darwin’s dreadful law of hate was replacing the Bible’s diving law of love as the origin of humanity” in society (Larson 29). If such notions as evolution, which left little room for god (at least from Bryan’s perspective) were taught to the youth of the country, then America ran the risk of turning into a secular society (a fear that still exists in contemporary society). “Secular” was most definitely a pejorative term for a nation that believed they were ordained by God himself/herself to create a “City on a hill.” On the opposite side of this debate stood people like Clarence Darrow, who feared that America’s unfettered faith would blind them from progress, and thus inhibit them from reaching any moral truths. Furthermore, there was a belief on the part of secularists that fundamentalism threatened to get in the way of civil liberties, and thus the founding principles of the United State government. As Larson notes, “Federal courts gave little meaning to the First Amendment” (66).

Perhaps most importantly, a win on the part of modernity would tear away the foundations upon which arguments such as those made by Charlotte Gilman Perkins and the matrons of rescue homes were made. If human development had no divine implications, but was rather a series of successive “selections,” then millennialism could no longer be used as justifications for the superiority of the white race. Not only that, but arguments against “the others” were based on their brutality and similarity to lower orders of animals. Here was a theory that was suggesting that all humans, including white folks, came from a lower order of animals!

From those involved in the battle, it seemed as there was no room for moderation. The nature of a legal battle was transposed over the nature of a philosophical battle, and while the two are seemingly irreconcilable, it created the perception that either science or the bible would triumph over the other, and dictate to the country what its focus should be on. In actuality, most Americans had already reconciled the two, either by applying some form of evolution into their understanding of the Genesis story, or by accepting that the Bible was not meant to be taken entirely literally. Regardless, whoever won the conflict would be the shaper of cultural memory (somewhat reminiscent of the idea that the victor gets to write history, though not entirely the same). At its core, the trial was a discussion about how to teach the future. Would generations down the line look at the Scopes Trial as the day their faith was defended from heathen secularists and agnostics, or the day that science, the only truth, triumphed over the mythology and blinding hypocrisy of religion? The trial was an identity-shaping event in American history. In light of the 2004 Presidential elections, I’m not entirely sure it shaped us the right way, but at the very least, it suggested for the first time that perhaps there was room in America for more than one supreme truth.

Professor Leon prompted the initial posters to look back to Am Civ I and II to locate Edward Larson’s Summer for the Gods’s relevance to the ideas of “place, community, and cultural memory” that those classes covered. As I read through the book, one text in particular echoed strongly: Randy Roberts and James Olson’s A Line in the Sand: The Alamo in Blood in Memory. Now, I include the subtitle of the book not only for the smirks and laughs that I am sure to provoke from my fellow Civ IIers from last spring, but also because the technique that Larson follows is the same as that of Roberts and Olson: extensively detailing both the historical context and the particulars of the “main event” (the “blood”), then detailing the manner in which the recollection of the main event has transmitted through generations to American culture (the “memory”).

In Larson’s work, his sourcing for the “blood” of covering the context of the trial and the trial itself also reflects the memory-producing institutions of the time of the Scopes trial, namely newspaper articles, political cartoons, and speeches. Rather than rely heavily upon statistics, internal documents, or private correspondences, as previous authors we have read tend to do, Larson builds his account–and his argument– around the same material available to the public during the 1920s. Larson humanizes the sense of place and community in a way that, say, Shah’s Contagious Divides does not. Rather than bombard the reader with statistics from Departments of Health or present blueprints of Chinatown, Larson allows the news accounts of the crowds, trial, and aftermath to speak. (Shah, in his defense, dabbles with popular sourcing in Chapter 7 with the inclusion of the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chinese Defender, but takes a more quantifiable approach to recreating the place and the community in San Francisco.)

The use of the newspaper reports also underscore Larson’s observation that the Scopes trial was “more a media event than a spectator show,” for the memory of the event disseminated from national news figures rather than the participants (as was the case at the Alamo) (148). “Farmers in overalls from the hillside farms, silent, gaunt men… they occupied every seat and stood in the aisle and around the walls of the room,” wrote the New York Times. These men, not the 250 or so non-media journalists staying in Dayton, TN during the trial, comprised the community of the trial itself: the community that brought Clarence Darrow’s questioning of William Jennings Bryan to an outdoor platform to engage in something resembling “Punch and Judy puppets performing” (4).

This agrarian, largely fundamentalist community who assembled in support of Bryan and the prosecution embodied, to paraphrase Michael Kazin at last Thursday (10/26)’s panel on William Jennings Bryan, the confluence of “Jesus and Jefferson.” Strange though it is to hear believers in an uninterpretedreading of the Bible mentioned in the same breath as a Founder who redacted the New Testament to exclude any mention of miracles, Bryan and his fellow fundamentalists did combine a decidedly traditional style of living–the yeomen farmers of the 20th century– with a decidedly literal reading of the Bible. Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia– along with Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography– may have referenced God and the Bible, but they could not have predicted the rise of “traditionalists” over a century later.

Finally, the book’s coverage of cultural memory in Part III sheds light on the creation of place–specifically, region– in the late 20th century. Incorporating the accounts of H.L. Mencken, Richard Hofstadter, and Inherit the Wind, Larson outlines the marginalization of Fundamentalists through the lens of the Scopes trial in the (largely Northeastern) elite of academia, media, and enterntainment– which helped lay the groundwork for today’s Red vs. Blue/secular vs. religious/urban vs. rural/Northern vs. Southern/intellectuals vs. yokels (OK, that’s enough) cultural divide. In a sense, the media coverage following and the cultural remembrances of the Scopes trial extended the “line in the sand” between modernity and tradition that Darrow and Bryan first drew in Dayton in 1925, fulfilling the Literary Digest’s prophecy that “the trial at Dayton [was] no more than an opening skirmish, ‘a clash of picket hosts that can not be decisive’” (202).

The Scopes Trial of 1925 polarized the debate between religious “fundamentalism” and science. Conservative Christians, who defined themselves as protectors of the “traditional faith” felt threatened by the implications of the evolutionary principles of natural selection and random variation. Yet, as Clarence Darrow challenged literal interpretations of the bible, the famous defense attorney was not merely dealing with the simple dichotomy between science and religion. Denouncing established religious teachings, Darrow was attacking an institution which shaped the formation of American society and influenced the creation of a distinct American identity.

Religion shaped American society since the arrival of the first settlers in the New World in the seventeenth century. Descriptions of America by early settlers demonstrate how the land was perceived in light of biblical teachings. In fact, the New World was often depicted as an earthly Garden of Eden. Diego Alvarez Chanca, who accompanied Columbus on his voyage to the Americas, described a tree “whose foliage gave off the purest smell of cloves that [he’d] ever encountered” and a flood of water which “seemed to come from the heaven” (Columbus 157-158). Similarly, John Smith, in “The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles,” commented on the plethora of natural resources, such as vegetables, fruits, and animals, found in America (Smith 10-14). Throughout history, many Americans drew authority from the Christian teachings of God. In the late eighteenth century, Jefferson, in Notes on the State of Virginia, supported his conception of an ideal agrarian society by claiming that “those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God” (Jefferson 197). Also, Charlotte Perkins Gilman invoked the biblical story of Adam and Eve to advance her “feminist” agenda. More explicitly, missionary women drew upon their status as pious and pure protectors of the home to extend their influence over the affairs of “uncivilized” women. Identifying themselves with notions of Protestant morality, these reformers backed their effort with the familiar principles of biblical teaching.

Thus, Christianity touched almost every aspect of American life. Determining cultural ideas about economics, gender relations, and “civilization,” religion became a way in which many Americans defined themselves in relation to other groups. Although fundamentalist Christians departed from mainstream Protestantism, they attempted to save the “traditional” aspects of their religion. In doing so, the fundamental Christians sought to protect an institution that was perceived to be at the historic core of their American identity. The influence of the fundamentalist speaker Billy Sunday on “all kinds, varieties, and species” of Americans reflected the widespread religiosity among the diverse American population (55). In fact Bryan questioned Americans as to “what shall it profit a man if he shall gain all the learning of the schools and lose his faith in God” (41). The death of Bryan immediately after the trial transformed the leader of the fundamentalist crusade into a martyr-like national hero. Flags flew at half-mast and thousands of mourning Americans lined up to view his coffin. After the trial, one man observed, “I discovered not a single declaration of victory by the opponents of antievolutionism” (Larson 206). Although the efforts of Darrow advanced the republican notion of individual rights, Christian theology was still deeply imbedded in the lives of the American people.

Today, Christian ideals remain pervasive as modern theologians are still attempting to incorporate evolutionary principles into Christian teachings. The question remains as to how closely Americans today will adhere to our traditional identification with Christianity as we become a more individualistic and scientific community.