Inherit the Myth: How William Jennings Bryan's Struggle With Social Darwinism and Legal Formalism Demythologize the Scopes Monkey Trial

AuthorKevin P. Lee
PositionAssistant Professor of Law, Ave Maria School of Law. B.A., M.A
Pages347-382

Page 347

The trial of John T. Scopes is an important milestone in the history of American legal thought. Known in the vernacular as the "Scopes Monkey Trial," the case took place in Dayton, Tennessee in the summer of 1925.1 It concerned a substitute high school biology teacher who was arrested and convicted for teaching evolutionary theory in violation of a Tennessee anti-evolution act.2 At the time, the trial was the most public confrontation between religious fundamentalism and modern science. By 1955, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee had written a play about the trial called Inherit the Wind,3 and film treatments of that play followed.4 These fictionalized accounts helped to create a mythic view of the case in popular culture. Today, the case is usually seen as a fable that cautions against the dangers of religious establishment.5

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This interpretation of the case, however, omits key facts. Most importantly, the motivations of the Christian fundamentalists in seeking to ban the teaching of evolution must be questioned beyond the commonplace myth because, prior to the turn of the twentieth century, fundamentalists voiced no opposition to Darwin's evolutionary theory.6 It was after the First World War and after the legal environment for the poor and labor had been transformed through the rising tide of legal formalism that the fundamentalists began to reject theories of evolution.7 Without such crucial historical facts, the case appears to convey a simple and clear polemical message: fundamentalism ignores reason, and evolutionary theory is scientific, rational, and progressive. When one considers the complaints that the fundamentalists had against evolutionary theory, the popular account of the case seems at best incomplete.

This Article argues that a more thoroughgoing analysis of the history of the case, and especially the role of William Jennings Bryan, who was a leader of the fundamentalists' anti-evolution efforts, is needed to correct the distorted view of the popular understanding. As some historians have noted,8 the case took place in a period when the theory of social evolution that is associated with Herbert Spencer deeply influenced social thought.9 Spencer's philosophy of social evolution would later come to be called Social Darwinism, although its connections to Charles Darwin are largely illusory.10 It was Social Darwinism, not Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection, that influenced intellectual thought in a variety of areas by providing a philosophical basis for the laissez-faire economics that was characteristic of American social thought after the Civil War and well into the 1920s.11

The influence that the philosophy of Herbert Spencer had on the development of legal theory has been given less consideration. By the 1920s, there had been a series of cases in which the courts sought to promote "individualism as a moral and economic ideal."12 For many jurists during this period, law came to be seen as a means for maintainingPage 349 private ownership and contractual rights.13 Courts sought to apply formal legal principles without regard to inequalities that might exist in the distribution of power and wealth in society.14 Moreover, any governmental actions that would disturb existing distributions of property ownership or interfere with freedom of contract were viewed as arbitrarily partisan and working against the moral advancement of society.15 These actions were particularly detrimental to working class persons and to organized labor.16 In case after case, the courts struck down attempts to guarantee labor rights that interfered with or limited freedom of contract.17 The legal thought of this period of ridged legalism has come to be called "Classical Legal Thought" or "Legal Formalism."18

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, fundamentalists such as William Jennings Bryan were largely neutral toward evolutionary theory.19 Some fundamentalists became suspicious of it, however, as they saw the effects that Social Darwinism was reaping for the working class and the poor.20 As the plight of exploited workers grew deeper in the face of the near imperial presence of industrial magnets, fundamentalists such as Bryan became distrustful of evolutionary theory, eventually leading to outright hostility by the end of the First World War.21 After the war, Bryan viewed Spencer's evolutionary theory as part and parcel with German scientism, and its place in American social thought as a pernicious influence.22 He viewed the nascent German biblical scholarship of the late nineteenth century, which sought to modernize Biblical hermeneutics by applying historical-critical methods, as an attempt to secularize scripture by using science to rob it of its spiritual content.23 In all of this, Bryan fed on the rampant anti-German sentiments of the day, giving birth to an anti-evolution movement that did not see a clear separation between Darwin's theory of speciation through natural selection and Social Darwinism's claims of moral progress through free market competition. Seen from this perspective then, the Scopes case illustrates the frustration that labor supporters were feeling during the period following the First World War,Page 350 and how that frustration was fueled by post-war anti-German mania to ignite a reactionary movement against the teaching of evolutionary theory. By placing the Scopes case in the proper context, the role of Social Darwinism, the development of legal formalism, and a richer understanding of the history of fundamentalist social criticism prove to be powerful correctives to the confused and incomplete mythic version of the case perpetuated by the dramatic representations of it. This Article seeks to begin the process of demythologizing the case by presenting a more complete understanding of the historical background.

I American Social Thought: 1860s to 1930s

The anti-evolution act under which John T. Scopes was convicted proscribed teaching a belief "that denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible."24 Scopes was accused of teaching the theory of evolution developed by Charles Darwin.25 The Darwinian theory was not, however, the only theory of evolution that existed at the time, nor was it the most influential.26 There was, in fact, a long history of evolutionary theories dating back at least to the eighteenth century. Many philosophers and natural scientists speculated on the nature of change in societies and individual organisms, offered theories about the mechanism of change, and hypothesized about the moral significance of gradual development. One theory in particular, that of Herbert Spencer, was deeply influential in American social thought in antebellum America27 and remained so at the time of the Scopes trial. Spencer's theory had become an accepted view among social scientists28 and had helped to create the legal thought of the age. Most notably, Spencer's view played a formative role in the infamous Supreme Court decision in Lochner v. New York,29 which articulated the view of freedom of contract that would survive well into the 1930s.30 This case would have a direct influence on the outcome of the Scopes case.

A Evolutionary Theory in American Social Thought

Evolutionary theory appears to have come to the United States with the force of a cannonball at the close of the Civil War.31 During that period of rapid industrialization and colonial expansion, many AmericanPage 351 intellectuals viewed free markets as a moral force and an economic ideal.32 The laissez-faire ideal held that free markets would exercise a selective force in such a way that gradual progress toward a more efficient and moral society would result.33 Eventually, it found support and encouragement by the Victorian evolutionary theorist, Herbert Spencer.34 Even before the Victorian era, however, various theories of gradual, but inexorable human progress, playing out through the workings of natural forces, were forwarded by philosophers and natural scientists.35 The belief in a mechanism of gradual change over time had been "in the air" so to speak, for quite some time.36

In the eighteenth century, philosophers attempted to articulate the basis for an understanding of biological change occurring through the forces of nature.37 Although one finds a tantalizing reference in Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,38 a more developed conceptualizationPage 352 appears in Immanuel Kant's thought. For example, in his essay, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent, Kant writes, "All of a creature's natural capacities are destined to develop completely and in conformity with their end," and that "[i]n man (as the sole rational creature on earth) those natural capacities directed toward the use of his reason are to be completely developed only in the species, not in the individual."39 It is clear in this essay that Kant views history as a gradual progress of creatures toward their ends (Zwecken), and human history as a gradual progress toward a complete and universal rationality (and thereby to Kant's moral ideal, the kingdom of ends).40 For Kant, it is the human species as a whole that advances toward a unity of rational intention (the good will).41 In this early example of Kant's thought, then, a unity of human purposes and intuition will come about through the...

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