Trying Biology

The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools

Adam R. Shapiro

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780226273440, 9780226029450
• eBook ISBN: 9780226029597
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In Trying Biology, Adam R. Shapiro convincingly dispels many conventional assumptions about the 1925 Scopes "monkey" trial. Most view it as an event driven primarily by a conflict between science and religion. Countering this, Shapiro shows the importance of timing: the Scopes trial occurred at a crucial moment in the history of biology textbook publishing, education reform in Tennessee, and progressive school reform across the country. He places the trial in this broad context—alongside American Protestant antievolution sentiment—and in doing so sheds new light on the trial and the historical relationship of science and religion in America.

           

For the first time we see how religious objections to evolution became a prevailing concern to the American textbook industry even before the Scopes trial began. Shapiro explores both the development of biology textbooks leading up to the trial and the ways in which the textbook industry created new books and presented them as "responses" to the trial. Today, the controversy continues over textbook warning labels, making Shapiro's study—particularly as it plays out in one of America's most famous trials—an original contribution to a timely discussion.

Notes

CHAPTER ONE

1. P. L. Harned, “Facts about the State Adoption of Schoolbooks,” unpublished draft of memorandum, 5, and Bruce P. Shepard to P. L. Harned, March 21, 1924, folder 5, container 98, Governor Austin Peay Papers, and P. L. Harned, memorandum, n.d., Commissioner of Education Records, 1913–70, Record Group 92, Tennessee State Library and Archives (TSLA), Nashville.

2. Other southern states, along with dates of most recent adoption, are as follows: Mississippi, 1920; West Virginia, 1922; and Alabama, Arkansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, 1923. P. L. Harned to Austin Peay, n.d., folder 5, container 98, Peay Papers.

3. Austin Peay to P. L. Harned, January 3, 1924, folder 5, container 98, Peay Papers.

4. Lon C. Hill to Austin Peay, February 26, 1924, folder 2, container 44, Peay Papers.

5. For example, Austin Peay to Mrs. Neil Wright, March 26, 1924, folder 2, container 59, Peay Papers.

6. P. L. Harned, List and Prices of Text Books Adopted in 1919 and Prices on the Same Books from September 1, 1924 to June 30, 1925 (Nashville: State of Tennessee, 1924), 3.

7. P. L. Harned to Austin Peay, October 16, 1924, folder 1, container 59, Peay Papers.

8. Harned, “Facts about the State Adoption of Schoolbooks,” 4.

9. Harned, List and Prices of Text Books, 3.

10. George W. Hunter, A Civic Biology, Presented in Problems (New York: American Book Co., 1914).

11. Edward J. Larson, “Law and Society in the Courtroom: Introducing the Trials of the Century,” University of Missouri–Kansas City Law Review 68 (2000): 543–48.

12. Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists, expanded ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 319–40, and Darwinism Comes to America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 76–91.

13. Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). As implied by Larson’s subtitle, the principal subject of his history is science and religion. (The choice of subtitle was the publisher’s and not Larson’s. Larson nonetheless situates the origins of the Scopes trial in the conflict, or the perception of conflict, between science and religion [see esp. ibid., 11–30].) Earlier histories of the trial also make use of this theme or focus even more directly on the clash between Darrow and Bryan. See, e.g., Leslie H. Allen, Bryan and Darrow at Dayton: The Record and Documents of the “Bible-Evolution Trial” (New York: Arthur Lee, 1925).

14. In the Middle Tennessee division from September 1919 to the end of 1923, 5,900 copies of Hunter’s Civic Biology were sold at contract price and another 647 at exchange prices. “High School Books Sold and Exchanged from September 1, 1919 to January 1, 1924 by Middle Tennessee Book Depository,” memorandum, Commissioner of Education Records, 1913–70, Record Group 92, TSLA.

15. Official Copy of the Proceedings of the Text Book Commission of Kentucky (Frankfort: State Text Book Commission of Kentucky, 1924), 17.

16. William Jennings Bryan to C. H. Thurber, December 22, 1923, container 38, William Jennings Bryan Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

17. “Monkey Talk Hits Book Publisher; Evolution Winner in Nebraska,” Chattanooga Times, June 5, 1925, 1; “Mr. Scopes Wasn’t the First,” New York Times, June 11, 1925, 18.

18. John T. Scopes and James Presley, Center of the Storm: Memoirs of John T. Scopes (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1967), 59.

19. William Jennings Bryan to W. B. Marrs [Marr], June 11, 1925, copy, enclosed in Ewing C. Baskette to Clarence Darrow, January 6, 1934, box 2, Clarence Darrow Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress. This letter was apparently taken from Marr’s office in 1931 and copied by Ewing C. Baskette, who sent a copy to Clarence Darrow three years later. Enclosing a copy of this and one other letter, Baskette writes: “I copied as written in the original including the signature. . . . Make what use you please but don’t mention Mr. Marr’s name as I got this file from his office while I was there about three years ago. I like this kind of stuff. He hasn’t missed it so ___.” Baskette to Darrow, January 6, 1934. W. B. Marr had organized Bryan’s 1924 lectures in Nashville on the subject “Is the Bible True?” Kenneth K. Bailey, “The Enactment of Tennessee’s Antievolution Law,” Journal of Southern History 16, no. 4 (November 1950): 475.

20. Austin M. Peay to Tennessee House, printed in Journal of Tennessee House, 1925 (Nashville: State of Tennessee, 1925), 744.

21. See, e.g., Allen, Bryan and Darrow at Dayton; Larson, Summer for the Gods; and Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette, Reframing Scopes: Journalists, Scientists, and Lost Photographs from the Trial of the Century (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008).

22. John T. Moutoux, “Accused Evolution Prof Most Popular Man in Town,” Knoxville News, May 11, 1925.

23. Larson, Summer for the Gods, 24.

24. F. E. Robinson and W. E. Morgan, Dayton’s Cultural Growth, Particularly Agri-Cultural! (Chattanooga: Andrews Printery, 1925), 2. Though this is the title indicated on the pamphlet, this is frequently cited as Why Dayton of All Places? See Larson, Summer for the Gods, 400; and “The Scopes Evolution Trial of 1925,” http://www.rheacounty.com/scopes.html (accessed July 9, 2012).

25. Robinson and Morgan, Dayton’s Cultural Growth, 3.

26. Larson, Summer for the Gods, 93–95.

27. Robinson and Morgan, Dayton’s Cultural Growth, 5.

28. H. L. Mencken, “Tennessee in the Frying Pan,” Baltimore Sun, July 20, 1925.

29. W. E. B. DuBois, “Scopes,” Crisis, September 1925, 218 (republished as “Dayton Is America,” in The Scopes Trial: A Brief History with Documents, by Jeffrey P. Moran [Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002], 182).

30. Jeffrey P. Moran, “Reading Race into the Scopes Trial: African American Elites, Science and Fundamentalism,” Journal of American History 90, no. 3 (2003): 891–911.

31. Larson, Summer for the Gods, 88.

32. Scopes v. State, 154 Tenn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• One. Beyond Science and Religion: The Scopes Trial in Historical Context
• Two. The Textbook Trust and State Adoption
• Three. Textbooks and Their Makers: Authors, Editors, Salesmen, and Readers
• Four. Civic Biology and the Origin of the Antievolution Movement
• Five. How Scopes was Framed
• Six. The Evolution of the New Civic Biology
• Seven. Biology Textbooks in an Era of Science and Religion
• Eight. Losing the Word: Measuring the Impact of Scopes
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index