The Indicted South

Public Criticism, Southern Inferiority, and the Politics of Whiteness

Angie Maxwell

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781469611648
• eBook ISBN: 9781469611655
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

By the 1920s, the sectional reconciliation that had seemed achievable after Reconstruction was foundering, and the South was increasingly perceived and portrayed as impoverished, uneducated, and backward. In this interdisciplinary study, Angie Maxwell examines and connects three key twentieth-century moments in which the South was exposed to intense public criticism, identifying in white southerners' responses a pattern of defensiveness that shaped the region’s political and cultural conservatism.

Maxwell exposes the way the perception of regional inferiority confronted all types of southerners, focusing on the 1925 Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, and the birth of the anti-evolution movement; the publication of I'll Take My Stand and the turn to New Criticism by the Southern Agrarians; and Virginia’s campaign of Massive Resistance and Interposition in response to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Tracing the effects of media scrutiny and the ridicule that characterized national discourse in each of these cases, Maxwell reveals the reactionary responses that linked modern southern whiteness with anti-elitism, states' rights, fundamentalism, and majoritarianism.

PART I
THE LONG SHADOW OF SCOPES

An authentic folk movement, beyond a doubt: such was the Klan. And such also, in only comparatively less complete measure was the anti-evolution movement. For it cannot be dismissed as the aberration of a relatively small highly organized pressure group made of ignorant, silly, and fanatical people, as some writers have attempted to do. Having observed it at close range, I have no doubt at all that it had the active support and sympathy of the overwhelming majority of southern people.
—W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South

For six days in July 1925, the Scopes Evolution Trial, held in Dayton, Tennessee, captured the attention of the nation, and the world for that matter, and defined the white South for a new generation of Americans. The state of Tennessee had outlawed the teaching of evolution in the Butler Act passed earlier that year. John Scopes, a substitute biology teacher, was arrested and charged with violating the ban. His defense was sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union, which offered the infamous attorney Clarence Darrow as counsel for the young teacher. William Jennings Bryan, Populist leader and three-time presidential nominee, advocated the creationist viewpoint, and he would be goaded into defending the literal interpretation of the Bible on the witness stand. The city of Dayton and the community at large went to great lengths to get ready for the trial, renovating the courtroom with additional seating to prepare for the large crowds headed to town via the Southern Railway. Extensive media equipment was installed to facilitate the radio broadcast of the event live via a Chicago station. News updates reached both coasts via Western Union, which assigned twenty-two telegraph operators to the event.¹ Despite the technical victory enjoyed by the prosecution—Scopes was found guilty of violating the Butler Act, a decision which the ACLU appealed—the fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible did not fare well under the bright and scrutinizing lights of the defense and the media.

The reporters who descended on the small town expected to focus their stories on the legal events, but many could not resist covering the crowds gathering in the town square: “Before the opening day of the ‘monkey trial,’ July 13, 1925, the streets of Dayton swarmed with sundry oddments of humanity—and other anthropoids—drawn to the carnival: publicity-hounds, curiosity-seekers, professional evangelists and professional atheists, a blind mountaineer who proclaimed himself the world’s greatest authority on the Bible, ballyhoo agents for the Florida boom, hot dog and soda pop hucksters, and a miscellany of reporters and publicists.”² After witnessing the circuslike atmosphere of Dayton, journalist H. L. Mencken concluded that he had “enough material stored up to last me the rest of my life”³ and described the local people as “yaps, yokels, morons and anthropoids.”⁴ Such depictions of the religious environment of this southern town did little to bolster its image to the nation at large. The trial, which many local business leaders had hoped would bring attention and fame to rural Rhea County, had backfired.

Bryan’s trial testimony regarding the literal interpretation of the Bible further crystallized the stereotype of provinciality that had been attributed to him two decades earlier. And Clarence Darrow came to represent—at least in the eyes of the churchgoers of Dayton—the liberal, modern, immoral North, persecuting the defenseless South yet again. Religious historian Karen Armstrong claims that the Scopes Trial exemplifies what happens when fundamentalism is attacked:

Before the Scopes “monkey” trial—when the secular press ridiculed the fundamentalists and said they had no place in the modern agenda—fundamentalist Christians had been literal in their interpretation of scripture but creation science was the preserve of a few eccentrics. After the Scopes trial, they became the flagship of their movement. Before the Scopes trial, fundamentalists had often been on the left of the political spectrum and had been willing to work alongside socialists and liberal Christians in the new slums of the industrializing North American cities. After the Scopes trial, they swung to the far right, where they remained. They felt humiliated by the media attack. It was very nasty. There was a sense of loss of prestige, and, above all, a sense of fear.⁵

Even though fundamentalist groups were active throughout the country, George Marsden argues that the Scopes Trial and its southern, rural backdrop “stamped the entire movement with an indelible image.” Public ridicule of Bryan the individual became a collective burden shared by his white southern followers and the region as a whole. Thus, Marsden claims, “fundamentalism, which began amid revivals in northern and West Coast cities, appeared increasingly associated with the rural South.”⁶ The radicalized community in Dayton combated this aspect of negative identity construction by developing what Edward Larson described as “a separate subculture with independent religious, educational and social institutions.”⁷

Compounding this sense of defeat and loss for southern white fundamentalists, Bryan died only days after the trial, even before he could deliver his final speech on what he envisioned to be the legacy of the trial. The community immediately began planning for a memorial to the “Great Commoner.” Nestled in the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains, William Jennings Bryan College crowns the most sacred peak in Dayton, Tennessee, and there, mounted atop the memorial space, stands the defining sign, “Christ above All—Bryan College—Founded 1930.” Bryan himself had envisioned this “city on a hill” during his weeks in Dayton, claiming that it would make a perfect site for the founding of a religious college where young students would “read the Bible of their fathers.”⁸ Additionally, Bryan suggested that students attending this fundamentalist institution would wear blue and gray uniforms to symbolize the reconciliation of the North and the South. Bryan’s original dual vision for the college attempted to resolve what he perceived as two of the central conflicts that arose during the trial—the old sectional battle and the new war between faith and science.

What was left in Rhea County, once the train with Bryan’s body headed east, once Darrow headed home to bask in the glory of his infamous cross-examination, once John Scopes left to pursue his graduate studies on scholarship at the University of Chicago, was a reactionary fundamentalism. It was driven underground, isolated, tucked away from the spotlight that had denigrated it without apology. This public eye had taken a fatal toll on Bryan, and for the newly charged fundamentalists, angered and humiliated by the media ridicule of their faith and their town, Bryan was a martyr. Transforming their frustration and grief into founding a memorial university in Bryan’s name, local Dayton citizens quietly recruited contributors nationwide to assist in their cause. At the heart of their campaign to build William Jennings Bryan College figures an intense desire to respond to this acute awareness of inferiority.

Though the actual events of the trial have been thoroughly recorded by historians such as Larson, little analysis has been offered by scholars regarding the long-term implications of this kind of media scrutiny. Moreover, in order to appreciate fully the impact of this negative attention, it is necessary to survey the cultural conditions, including the impressions of the key players, that preceded the trial. Only then can the full weight be measured of national, international, and internal condemnation and of the response of local religious fundamentalists to this barrage of attention, most notably the fundamentalist cultural isolation that characterized much of the Dayton community in the aftermath of the trial.

The Scopes Trial had other far-reaching implications for the white South, and for the country at large. What appears at first glance as a cultural battle between science and religion is revealed as a larger war being fought on multiple fronts. The sectional conflict of the mid-nineteenth century resurfaces repeatedly in both the events of the trial and the media coverage that followed. The clash between the North and the South now incorporated the standoff between those who were designated as the intellectual haves and those who were the have-nots, with southerners, of course, falling into the latter category. Richard Hofstadter, in fact, noted that during the Scopes Trial, “for the first time in history, intellectuals and experts were denounced as enemies by leaders of a large segment of the public.”⁹ For white southerners, this extended list of oppositional forces—intellectualism, science, modernism, federalism—established a host of inextricable determinants for white identity, including anti-intellectualism, religious fundamentalism, traditionalism, and states’ rights.

In 1990, at the age of eighty-two, former Rhea County high school student H. J. Shelton, who was called as a witness for the prosecution and was a lifelong resident of Dayton, corresponded with Jason Blankenship, an Arkansas schoolboy. He wrote: “I don’t think the trial put our community in a favorable light and it opened a ‘can of worms’ so to speak, as the controversy is still very much discussed and debated today.”¹⁰ The long shadow of Scopes, including the regional battle with inferiority, still lingers over Dayton, Tennessee. Dedicated to the Great Commoner, the man-who-would-be-president (and almost was three times), Bryan College, a tangible compensation to a benighted community, continues to this day to offer a fundamentalist and evangelical education that, among other disciplines, promotes a literalist, creationist view of biology and the development of mankind. Moreover, this particular brand of evangelism, labeled here as reactionary fundamentalism, became an integral component of modern conservatism in the South. Politically mobilized in the last three decades, this community, driven underground in the late 1920s, now dominates the southern political landscape, a bright shade of crimson beneath the Mason-Dixon Line and beyond.

CHAPTER 1
THE TRIPTYCH OF THE TWENTIES:
BRYAN, DARROW, AND MENCKEN AND WHAT THEY MEANT TO THE WHITE SOUTH

But if Christ is the expression of humanity’s struggle up from the beast through the jungle, we have in him a combination and culmination of jungle life in body, soul and spirit, detached from heaven on the same plane with others, with little power to lift or to transfigure. The beast jungle theory of evolution robs a man of his dignity, marriage of its sanctity, government of its authority, and the church of her power and Christ of his glory.
—Rev. Amzi Clarence Dixon, “The Root of Modern Evils” (brother of Thomas Dixon, The Klansman)

If Bryan remained as accurate a spokesman for the fears and aspirations of his rural followers as I believe he did, then a sharper understanding of the forces operating upon him and the nature of his response to them should be a step forward in unraveling the enigmas of the rural West and South in the years after 1918.
—Lawrence W. Levine, Defender of the Faith: William Jennings Bryan, the Last Decade, 1915–1925

Journalist H. L. Mencken, attorney Clarence Darrow, and politician and activist William Jennings Bryan had known of each other long before the 1925 Scopes Evolution Trial. At times, their opinions, their causes, even their politics were in sync; however, in the aftermath of World War I, they would find themselves on opposite sides of perhaps the greatest domestic cultural crisis of the twentieth century. In order to understand how the interactions of these three individuals contributed to a collective regional identity for white southerners, it is necessary to understand how each was viewed by white southerners in the years before the confrontation in Dayton. For all three men, their reputations preceded them. The trial in Tennessee, however, transformed three individual identities into regional symbols of competing cultural and political values that remain relevant today. Darrow and Mencken (and the larger body of journalists that he represented) would be demonized as liberal skeptics, embracing modernism and the debauchery and chaos that would surely follow. More important, Bryan would come to represent the cause of religious fundamentalism and states’ rights. And although this native of Illinois was not a southerner by birth or heritage, he would be cheered by the white southerners who flocked to Dayton, Tennessee, to witness what would be his final public revival. His place within the pantheon of white southern heroes and saints did, indeed, culminate at the Scopes Evolution Trial, but the construction of such a relationship was more than three decades in the making.

From campaigning for the hearts and minds of southern farmers as the Democratic candidate for president to protecting the Ku Klux Klan under the guise of religious freedom, Bryan’s political stands were public performances to many white southerners of a man singing their tune. In a time when scientific advances and wide cultural shifts pulsated relentlessly throughout the country, Bryan “embraced the South . . . not because he had changed, but because to his mind it had not.”¹ He was, at times, the only voice with a southern “accent,” so to speak, on a national stage. All hope of acceptance and reconciliation with the rest of the country, all promise of redemption for the beleaguered South, or at least the perception of a beleaguered South, came to rest in this one man. Only by understanding all that Bryan—the man, the politician, the preacher, and the myth—meant to many white southerners, and by understanding his relationship to figures such as Darrow and Mencken and his fellow critics, can one fully comprehend the impact that ridicule of Bryan and his subsequent demise had on those who crowded the Rhea County courtroom and the town square during those fateful days in the summer of 1925.

BRYAN’S SOUTHERN ACCENT

For many southern whites, William Jennings Bryan’s reputation was shaped initially by the divisive presidential election of 1896. Though many white southerners had begun to recover from the physical and economic devastation of the Civil War, anger toward the North, particularly the perception of northern industrial wealth, smoldered among Agrarians and small business owners. The development of modern banking seemed to benefit only the new culture of mass production that boomed in the urban centers of New England and the Midwest. Rural communities in the South and along the western frontier pleaded for relief, specifically supporting the coining of silver in an effort to put more money in circulation throughout the country, which many believed would deflate their debts. The southern economic practice of bartering and trade now proved antiquated, and many white southerners resented the feeling of being left behind with no real way to participate in the new market system. The Populist Party attempted to channel this frustration and to offer an alternative to this new American industrial culture, giving many white southerners their first competitive candidate for national office. At the Democratic Convention in June 1896, support for the Populist cause reached its pinnacle during a debate regarding the future monetary policy of the United States.² William Jennings Bryan, already a well-known orator for the cause, delivered his famous “Cross of Gold” speech, securing the presidential nomination for himself and giving the De...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: THE ANATOMY OF INFERIORITY
• PART I THE LONG SHADOW OF SCOPES
• PART II THE WRITER AS SOUTHERNER
• PART III THE AMASSMENT OF RESISTANCE
• EPILOGUE: THE POLITICS OF INFERIORITY
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX