34 Evolution and the Fossil Record
Twentieth-Century Creationism
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.
—First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution“Creation science” . . . is simply not science.
—Judge William Overton, McLean vs. ArkansasThe first two decades of the twentieth century were a time of global turmoil, with the pro-
gressive politics of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the bloodshed of
World War I, and the great influenza epidemic of 1918. Then came the Roaring Twenties
and a national conservative backlash. It was also a “return to normalcy” as Warren Hard-
ing promised when he won the presidency in 1920. With the conservative backlash came
Prohibition. This did nothing to stop alcohol consumption in the United States, but it did
make profitable careers for gangsters and moonshiners and the owners of illegal speakeas-
ies. Another conservative movement, however, was the backlash against evolution by the
resurgent fundamentalist movement. The movement was led by William Jennings Bryan,
one of the most popular and powerful political figures in the United States, who had run
for president on the Democratic ticket three times and lost. By the 1920s, however, Bryan
was in his sixties, in failing health, and beginning to promote conservative causes that were
becoming popular in the 1920s. Bryan campaigned vigorously for laws to outlaw the teach-
ing of evolution. By the end of the 1920s, more than 20 states had debated such laws, and
five (Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Florida) had banned or curtailed the
teaching of evolution in their public schools. It went so far that the U.S. Senate debated, but
never passed, a resolution that banned radio broadcasts favorable to evolution.
Ironically, Bryan himself was not a biblical literalist. He confided to a friend shortly
before his death that he had no objection to evolution, as long as it didn’t include man (Num-
bers 1992:43). He was also less than literal about the meaning of Genesis 1, subscribing to
the common “day-age” theory that each “day” in Genesis 1 was actually a long period of
geologic time, or “age.” Nevertheless, he became the national spokesman for a witch hunt
that hounded many biologists out of their jobs in Southern universities and destroyed the
careers of many other scientists.
The climax of the creationist movement in the 1920s was the infamous Scopes Monkey
Trial of 1925, long called the “trial of the century” until the O. J. Simpson trial eclipsed it in
notoriety. Not only was it a titanic struggle between two of the giants of the time, Bryan and
the legendary defense attorney Clarence Darrow, but it was also one of the first trials to be
covered live on radio and in newsreels, beginning the modern trend toward celebrity trial
journalism. Among the press covering the trial was none other than the famous satirist and
essayist H. L. Mencken, who wrote many savage columns and editorials for the Baltimore
Sun, ridiculing the biblical literalism and backward habits and racism of the South.
The trial itself was originally planned as a publicity stunt by the town fathers of Dayton,
Tennessee. Anxious to rake in tourist dollars, garner attention, and provide a test case to chal-
lenge the recently passed Tennessee Butler Act, or “monkey laws,” that banned the teaching
of evolution, the civic leaders recruited a local high school teacher, John T. Scopes, to be
their guinea pig. Scopes volunteered to take time off from teaching gym to teach biology
for one day so that he could test the law, although later he admitted that he wasn’t sure he