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7


DARWINISM, DEMOCRACY, AND THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Christians do not object to freedom of speech; they believe that Biblical
truth can hold its own in a fair field. They concede the right of ministers
to pass from belief to agnosticism or atheism, but they contend that they
should be honest enough to separate themselves from the ministry and not
attempt to debase the religion they profess. . . . It is time for Christians
to protect religion from its most insidious enemy.

William Jennings Bryan (1922)(1)

With these words, the Great Commoner, three times the Democratic Party's
nominee for President of the United States,(2) former Secretary of State
under Woodrow Wilson,(3) and the most famous ruling elder in the
Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.,(4) launched in the New York Times an attack on
Darwinism and on the liberal clergymen who held Darwin's views on human
evolution.

Bryan's New York Times article was a warning shot to Presbyterian liberals,
although he did not identify his own denomination as a source of the
problem. Over two decades of relative public peace within the Church were
about to be brought to a close. A new era of doctrinal, personal, and
rhetorical confrontation was about to begin. It would last for a decade and
a half, and would end with the exodus of the most doctrinally Calvinistic
members of the denomination and the creation of two new ecclesiastical
organizations by those members: the Orthodox Presbyterian Church(5) in 1936
and the Bible Presbyterian Church in 1938.

As we shall see, however, Bryan's challenge to theological liberals was
peripheral to his challenge to the American Establishment in the broadest
sense. This battle would soon extend far beyond the narrow confines of the
institutional Church.




Editors Bearing Gifts
As a politician, he should have been suspicious of any request by the
editors of the New York Times to give him free space on page 1 of Section
VII of the Sunday edition. He should have asked himself: "What's the catch?"
The offer was bait, and he bit. He had little choice: to have refused would
have played into the editors' hands. "We gave him a chance to respond, but
he did not." Three years later, the hook attached to this bait led to the
destruction of his reputation and the beginning of a half-century rout of
the fundamentalist movement in America.

The editors had an agenda. It was initially defensive, for Bryan had an
offensive agenda. His agenda had only recently been manifested by political
events. Politics, not theology as such, was what caught the Times'
attention. Publishing Bryan's essay also offered the added benefit of being
able to sell Bryan's publisher advertising space for Bryan's recently
published book, In His Image.

Bryan in 1921 had been invited to deliver the annual Sprunt lectures at the
"other" Union: Union Theological Seminary of Richmond, Virginia, a
conservative Southern Presbyterian seminary.(6) The previous year, Machen
had delivered the lectures that became The Origin of Paul's Religion. In
October, Bryan delivered his lectures, which were published as In His
Image.(7) Chapter 4, "The Origin of Man," was subsequently published as a
separate book, The Menace of Darwinism.(8)

The revival of confrontational rhetoric came from outside the Presbyterian
Church. Political modernists initiated it. Theological modernists inside the
Church merely followed the lead of their colleagues on the outside. Modern
readers may be amazed at the level of vituperation. It is important to
understand that basic to the strategy of the liberals has been the
promulgation of a lie, still repeated: "The conservatives were guilty of
excessive rhetoric." Theological conservatives were subsequently blamed by
modernists and their spiritual heirs, who have written the history books,
for what the modernists in fact adopted as a primary tactic: a level of
confrontational rhetoric beyond the limits of acceptable public discourse,
i.e., acceptable to liberals when used by conservatives, which the
conservatives in fact did not use. What prompted this revival of rhetoric
was a political issue that went to the very heart of the American experiment
in the separation of Church and State: control over the content of public
education.




Bluegrass Democracy
Between 1921 and 1929, 37 anti-evolution bills were introduced into state
legislatures.(9) These bills forbade the teaching of evolution in
taxpayer-funded schools. In 1917, this demand had been made before the
Kentucky legislature, and in 1921, a rider to this effect was attached to an
appropriations bill in South Carolina.(10) Kentucky began to debate such a
law in early January, 1922. Bryan addressed a joint session of the
legislature on January 19, devoting the second half of his speech to the
question of teaching Darwinism in the public schools and universities
supported by government funds. Representative George Ellis introduced such a
bill a few days later.(11) Soon, Bryan received invitations to speak before
the legislatures of Tennessee, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, Ohio,
Wisconsin, West Virginia, and Florida.(12)

This threat of the removal of tax subsidies for Darwinian evolution was
regarded by modernists as a sword of Damocles over their collective heads.
At the public university level, this was indeed a major threat. At the
public school level, this threat was not yet a major threat, for American
high schools rarely taught Darwinism. High school textbooks did not discuss
Darwin's thesis to any appreciable degree, nor did they promote creationism.
This was still true in the centenary of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1959.
Hermann J. Muller, Nobel laureate in physiology, complained in The Humanist
in 1959, "One Hundred Years Without Darwin Are Enough."(13) We must bring
the truths of Darwinism to the little child, he said.(14) But the public
school textbook publishers in the United States are too fearful of losing
sales to promote Darwinism. "Are we then to allow the urge for profits to
keep our children and, through them, all our people benighted and a hundred
years out of date in their world view?"(15) What was true in 1959 was even
more true in 1922.

The modernists knew that the vast majority of the nation did not accept
Darwinian evolution in 1922. This is why they greatly feared democracy on
this issue, and feared Bryan above all, for he still could rally large
numbers of the Democratic Party's troops, millions of whom who were in the
pews of conservative churches on Sunday morning.




The Attack Begins
On February 2, the Times ran a story, "Darwinian Theory Stirs Up Kentucky."
Support for the bill was evenly divided in the state, the Times asserted,
with rural areas favoring it and cities against it. The battle had been
going on for months, the story reported; then Bryan came to speak. The
ex-commissioner of education told the press: "Such legislation belongs to
the dark ages." He asked rhetorically: Why not teach the flat earth or a
stationary earth?(16) These two themes--medievalism and the flat earth--were
to be invoked repeatedly in the attacks that followed.

On the same page, the Times reprinted a letter from Columbia University's
president, Nicholas Murray Butler. Butler served as president of Columbia
from 1901 to 1945. He had been the founder of the Industrial Education
Association, which later established Columbia Teachers College, the most
influential teachers institution in the United States. He served as Chairman
of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from 1925 until 1945. He
won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.(17) In short, he was a major figure in
American education. He had written his letter to the president of the
University of Kentucky, who had issued a national plea for assistance.

Butler's rhetoric never dealt seriously with Bryan's argument, namely, that
the voters of a state can legitimately determine what their tax money is
spent for. Butler's rhetoric was entirely specious. "The bill, as you
describe it, seems to me to lack vigor and completeness. It should, I think,
be amended before passage to include in its prohibition the use of any book
in which the word evolution is defined, used or referred to in any way. It
might even be desirable to include a prohibition of books that use any of
the letters by which the word evolution could be spelled, since in this way
some unscrupulous person might, by ingenious effort, evade the salutary
provisions of the law." He then compared the bill with Soviet tyranny: "I
take it for granted that the introducer of the bill is in close communion
with the rulers of Soviet Russia, since he is faithfully reproducing one of
their fundamental policies." This was all rhetoric and no logic.

Democracy Has Limits

The next day, the Times ran an editorial that did not shy away from the
implications for democracy posed by the bill. The Times repudiated
democracy. It invoked the flat-earth analogy. "Kentucky Rivals Illinois"
began with an attack on Illinois' Wilbur G. Voliva, founder of the flat
earth movement. Next, it switched to Kentucky. "Stern reason totters on her
seat when asked to realize that in this day and country people with powers
to decide educational questions should hold and enunciate opinions such as
these." To banish the teaching of evolution is the equivalent of banishing
the teaching of the multiplication table.(18)

Three days later, the Times followed with another editorial, appropriately
titled, "Democracy and Evolution." It began: "It has been recently argued by
a distinguished educational authority that the successes of education in the
United States are due, in part at least, `to its being kept in close and
constant touch with the people themselves.' What is happening in Kentucky
does not give support to this view."(19) The Progressives' rhetoric of
democracy was nowhere to be found in the Times' articles on Bryan and
creationism, for the editors suspected that Bryan had the votes. For the
Progressives, democracy was a tool of social change, not an unbreakable
principle of civil government; a slogan, not a moral imperative. Though
often cloaked in religious terms, democracy was merely a means to an end.
What was this end? Control over other people's money and, if possible, the
minds of their children.

The Divinization of Man by Default

Then the writer got to the theological heart of the matter: the divinization
of man by default. Two theologians had sent telegrams to the president of
the University of Kentucky complaining that Bryan's views dishonor God and
man. "This will pain Mr. Bryan, who seems to hold that it is dishonorable to
man as well as to God that man should have been created mediately out of the
dust of the earth." But Bryan's creationist point was only that it dishonors
God to identify hypothetically impersonal forces of nature--the only forces
Darwin and his heirs believe in prior to the advent of purposeful man--as
the source of creation.

This was only the beginning. In the Sunday supplement for February 5, John
M. Clarke was given an opportunity to comment on the Kentucky case. He was
the Director of the State Museum at Albany. His rhetoric returned to the
important theme of the weakness of democracy in the face of ignorant voters.
I cite the piece at length because readers are unlikely to have a copy of
this article readily at hand, and when it comes to rhetoric, summaries
rarely do justice to the power of words. It began:

Our sovereign sister Kentucky, where fourteen and one half men in every
hundred can neither read nor write, is talking about adding to the mirth of
the nation in these all too joyless days by initiating legislation to put a
end to that "old bad devil" evolution. Luther threw an ink bottle at one of
his kind; the Kentucky legislators are making ready to throw a statute which
will drive this serpent of the poisoned sting once and for all beyond the
confines of the State, and not a school wherein this mischiefmaker is
harbored shall have 1 cent of public moneys.

He identified as the source of this bill "the distinguished Chautauqua
savant, William Jennings Bryan," a sneer at both Chautauqua and Bryan.
Chautauqua was the major lecture circuit for the nation. Founded by a pair
of Methodists in 1874, Chautauqua soon became America's most successful
early experiment in adult education prior to World War I. By 1918, 300,000
people were enrolled in 10,000 local circles, receiving an informal but
structured education.(20) It had been run by the theological modernist,
William Rainey Harper, from 1883 to 1897. (Beginning in 1892, he also
organized the Rockefellers' University of Chicago.)(21) Chautauqua openly
promoted the science of evolution.(22) So, Clarke's sneer against Chautauqua
was social, not ideological.

Invoking Old Testament language, Clarke predicted that the legislators "will
smite the enemy hip and thigh." Why not amend the state's constitution and
make the idea of evolution illegal? Again, he returned to the theme of the
threat of democracy:

When the majority of the voters, of which fourteen and a half out of each
hundred can neither read nor write, have settled this matter, if they are
disposed to do the right thing they will not stop at evolution. There is a
fiction going about through the schools that the earth is round and revolves
around the sun, and if Frankfort [Kentucky] is to be and remain the
palladium of reason and righteousness, this hideous heresay [heresy] must
also be wiped out.

Here it was again: the flat earth. It has been a favorite rhetorical device
used against biblical creationists for a long time. The claim that
pre-Columbus medieval scholars regarded the earth as flat, it turns out, is
entirely mythical--a myth fostered in modern times. Jeffrey Burton Russell,
the distinguished medieval historian, has disposed of this beloved myth of
the flat earth.(23) The modernists who have invoked this myth have not done
their homework.

They have also not done their homework on medieval science in general, which
was extremely sophisticated. This has been proven by the French historian of
science and theoretical physicist, Pierre Duhem (1861-1916), whose ten
volumes on the subject are exhaustive: Le systhme du monde. The first five
volumes were in print in 1917; the second five volumes appeared in 1954-59.
In between, the French academic community and publishing world suppressed
their publication because they undermined one of the most cherished myths of
the Enlightenment, namely, that medieval science was "medieval." The story
of this exercise in humanist academic censorship has been written by his
biographer, physicist and historian Stanley Jaki.(24) Even today, the only
favorable references to Duhem that I have ever seen, other than in Jaki's
writings, are two brief sentences in Robert Nisbet's History of the Idea of
Progress (1980).(25)

The theological issue for Clarke was, ultimately, the divinization of man by
default, and the divinization of nature: capital N. "It may be that the
conception of the continuity and unity of life from its starting point on
earth up to the climax it has reached in man does magnify the place of
humanity in the scheme of Nature. The doctrine of evolution predicates this,
teaches that out of the struggles of the ages man has stepped forth as the
supreme result, not a finished product, far from that, but with always the
glory of a growing hope for something better beyond. It would seem as though
no more inspiring thought could be imparted to youth. . . ." Here was a
vision of autonomous man's progress, and Bryan was calling this into
question. Bryan believed in progress, and democratic progress above all; he
just did not believe in man's autonomy.

The Rural Masses

Then it was back to the rhetoric of contempt for the masses, and the
elevation of the scientific elite. "It would seem reasonable to assume that
the demonstration of the fundamental doctrine of all Nature, inorganic as
well as organic, might well be left to those who have brought to bear upon
it the highest intellectual refinements. But it is a pleasing thought to
fancy the erudite Nebraskan in academic cap and--gown, of course; we almost
said bells, inspiring the Democratic majority of Kentucky to vote that
Evolution isn't so! and to penalize any one who dares say it is! It is by
such means as this that civilization advances and America assures her own
high place among the cultured nations of the world."(26) The allusion to cap
and bells--the clown's costume in the medieval world--was not all that
clever, but it surely revealed Clarke's contempt for Bryan, his democratic
politics, and his Christianity.

On February 9, another Times editorial cited the Louisville Courier-Journal
as having identified Bryan as the initiator behind the bill. Bryan had
raised up "ignorant fanatics" who had "intimidated" legislators. The Times
warned: "Kentucky is not the only State in the Union, by any means, for
whose village theologians the name of Darwin is still one with which to
scare children. . . ." A nice rhetorical flourish: "village theologians."
Here was a theme that carried through subsequent Times editorials to the
media's coverage of the Scopes trial three years later to the screenplay of
Inherit the Wind: rural Americans as ignorant fanatics, and the readers of
urban newspapers as intelligent people. The Times identified the
Courier-Journal as the spokesman for "intelligent Kentuckians."(27)




Challenging the Flow of Funds
In his essay, Bryan thanked the editor for having invited him to contribute.
He need not have bothered. If ever there was a set-up, it was this.

After surveying at some length why he did not believe that Darwin's
hypothesis was scientifically correct (Darwin's theory of sexual selection,
already a scientific embarrassment in Bryan's day, was one reason),(28) he
got to the heart of the matter from his point of view: democratic politics.
"The Bible has in many places been excluded from the schools on the ground
that religion should not be taught by those paid by public taxation. If this
doctrine is sound, what right have the enemies of religion to teach
irreligion in the public schools? If the Bible cannot be taught, why should
Christian taxpayers permit the teaching of guesses that make the Bible a
lie?" This surely was a legitimate question, one which has yet to be
answered in terms of a theory of strict academic neutrality. But Paxton
Hibben, in his 1929 biography of Bryan (Introduction by Charles A. Beard),
dismissed this argument as "a specious sort of logic. . . .
[Government-funded] schools, he reasoned, were the indirect creations of the
mass of citizens. If this were true, those same citizens could control what
was taught in them."(29) If this were true: the subjunctive tense announced
Paxton's rejection of Bryan's premise--spoken on behalf humanist educators,
from Horace Mann in Massachusetts to this week's multi-million dollar battle
over selecting state-approved high school textbooks. When it comes to a
threat to their self-accredited monopoly over public education, humanists
can spot a "specious" argument at 300 yards. They reply, in rigorous logical
fashion, "Citizens are morally and legally obligated to pay us to teach
their children whatever we want to teach them, especially if they should
disagree with what we teach."

Christians fund denominational colleges, Bryan pointed out. They pay to have
their view of religion taught. He then raised a suggestion that, more than
any other, was as welcome to the modernists, both political and theological,
as a looking into a mirror was to Bela Lugosi's Dracula: "If atheists want
to teach atheism, why do they not built [build] their own schools and employ
their own teachers?" This was the heart of the matter, and remains so. He
repeated this argument in his Preface to The Menace of Darwinism (p. 6). The
thought of self-funding has always been abhorrent to liberals. Accepting
rich men's money, yes; access to tithers' money and taxpayers' money, yes;
but liberals avoid self-funding at all costs because it costs so much.(30)

A year later, in a speech to West Virginia lawmakers, Bryan argued that
scientists had no rightful claim on the taxpayers' money. It is not an
infringement on freedom of speech for a state legislature to refuse to fund
ideas that taxpayers oppose. He then uttered the words, more than any other
words, that describe why education has been a political battle zone for two
centuries around the world: "The hand that writes the pay check rules the
school."(31) It was this doctrine, more than any other, which professional
educators had to destroy through court action, since they found it
embarrassing to oppose it publicly, given liberalism's official commitment
to democracy. Clarence Darrow's defense strategy at the Scopes trial in 1925
was to get the jury to declare Scopes guilty, so that the defense lawyers
could appeal the decision to a higher court and get it reversed. This same
strategy undergirded the secularization of American public education after
1960--which at last overturned the state laws that made possible the Scopes
decision.

Other People's Money

The supreme judicial issue was this: control over other people's money.
Bryan's attack was a direct shot at the heart of the modernist worldview and
program, both political modernism and theological. The central assertion of
modernism, from Lester Frank Ward's Dynamic Sociology (1883) to the present,
is this: the moral authority and legal right an educated elite that
understands the processes of Darwinian evolution to commandeer the
instruments of political coercion, as well as public funds gained through
the threat of State coercion, in order to guide scientifically the evolution
of the social order. This was American Progressivism's main agreed-upon
doctrine. It was also the non-negotiable demand of theological liberals, who
applied modernism's doctrine of the commandeering of State assets to Church
assets, irrespective of the theological confessions of laymen whose money
funded the Church. The divisions that arose within modernism were many, but
they all had to do with the political battle over the distribution of the
loot.

If Bryan was successful in this political project, modernism could lose the
war. Modernists understood, just as Unitarian Horace Mann had understood in
the 1830's, that the public school system is America's only established
Church.(32) "Perhaps the most striking power that the churches surrendered
under religious freedom was control over public education," writes Church
historian Sidney Mead.(33) Bryan was threatening to reclaim this power and
reclaim America's future by means of the method that Ward had said is the
best way to control other people's thinking: by excluding certain ideas from
discussion in the public schools.(34) Ward called this the method of
exclusion (his italics). "This, however, is the essence of what is here
meant by education, which may be regarded as a systematic process for the
manufacture of correct opinions."(35) Bryan assumed that in what he called a
fair fight, the Christians would win. By excluding both creationism and
Darwinism from the public schools, he believed that the Christians would win
the debate. This was naive on his part, for the assumption of educational
neutrality with respect to the Bible is inherently anti-theistic, but the
modernists were determined not to permit Bryan's test.

The debate over Darwinism in the public schools was an aspect of the
politics of plunder. The politics of plunder came early in America, and it
came at the very heart of the Puritan society: the State's establishment of
Church and school. Here was where the flow of ideas would be controlled
through control over the flow of funds. The New England Puritans had imposed
this control system by 1647. Ward had merely extended the Puritans' strategy
in the name of Darwinism. New England in 1635 made local church attendance
compulsory, and in 1638 legislated compulsory financial support of these
churches.(36) In 1642, the General Court of New Haven established a local
school; Hartford followed this example and allocated funds for its
school.(37) In 1647, the General Court of Massachusetts passed a law
mandating that every town of 50 or more inhabitants establish a school, and
that tax money be used to pay for these schools if parents refused.(38)
Connecticut imitated this statute in 1650.(39) Residents, in short, were
threatened with civil violence if they refused to support Church and school
with their money and their persons, whether or not they believed in what was
being taught. They had to attend Church, and their children had to attend
school, or the State would impose negative sanctions. While the compulsory
local church attendance laws were not systematically enforced in New England
after 1650,(40) the other elements of coercion remained. With the coming of
disestablishment laws from 1776 through the 1820's, the churches were cut
out of the distribution of the loot, but increases in both the level of
funding and the level of coercion associated with the public schools in the
nineteenth century more than offset this minimal ecclesiastical deliverance
from civil bondage.

America's schools followed the theological path which the churches of New
England travelled. The schools began as Calvinist strongholds; the New
England Primer is representative. The First Great Awakening and the American
Revolution moved them from Puritanism into pietistic nationalism; the Second
Great Awakening reinforced this. In Massachusetts in the 1830's, Horace Mann
moved them into Unitarianism. In Bryan's day, the war was fought between an
implicit common-ground Unitarian theism, disguised as Protestant culture,
and Darwinian modernism. Bryan, in the name of the Bible, was trying to
retain the traditional classroom theism of Unitarianism; his opponents were
trying to move the schools into secularism. The doctrine of evolution was
the touchstone on both sides of the battle.

To seek to replace what is taught in taxpayer-supported schools is to seek
to replace the existing Establishment. An Establishment understands this
threat. It fully understood in 1922. The American Establishment in the
1920's was modernist: theological, political, or both. It was evolutionist
in its view of the origin of man. Bryan had to be stopped. In 1925, he was
stopped. But the trap was set in early 1922.

Professional Educators Protest

The barrage of ink began again. On March 2, this headline announced a story
on the annual convention of the National Education Association, the
teachers' union: "Paint W. J. Bryan as a `Medievalist.'" He had adopted, the
convention was told, "methods of the Dark Ages. . . ." Columbia University
economist E. R. A. Seligman again invoked the flat earth analogy: "Now, if
we are going back to childhood, let's go all the way. Let's teach that the
earth is flat and that the sun moves around it." He then recommended the
creation of an exhibit that features the dinosaur and other extinct animals
as proofs of evolution. (A decade later, Seligman served as Editor-in-Chief
of the influential Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences.)

Dr. Frank Spaulding, dean of Yale's graduate school of education, brought up
the crucial issue of sanctions. To resort to politics in order to keep the
doctrine of evolution from spreading reveals a "wavering faith." (Rhetorical
question: Is this also true of today's Darwinians, who have used the Supreme
Court to remove every trace of creationism from public school curricula?
Real question: Or is it a matter of sanctions, without which no worldview
can become operational?) Then he invoked Briggs' ancient argument: the true
Christians are the liberals. True Christianity is open to the teaching of
evolution in the public schools. Bryan's methods are wrong. "Such methods
lead away from the true spirit of the Bible."(41)

So much for the "creation in the public schools" debate, a familiar one in
our own day. There was to be no debate. The issues have not changed: control
over tax money by the educational establishment, the public's suspicion of
the good judgment of that establishment, the theoretical possibility of
neutral education, the presuppositions of science, and Christian dreams of
reforming tax-supported education. In short, so much for one more familiar
battlefield of the politics of plunder.

It is now time to dig up one of the best-suppressed stories in American
history. This, you will not find in the textbooks. It will not take much
brainpower to figure out why.




Eugenics and the American Establishment (Pre-Hitler)
Henry Fairfield Osborn's response to Bryan was prominently featured on page
2 of the March 5 Sunday supplement. It is important to understand who he was
and what (and who) he represented. He was one of America's earliest trained
evolutionists, having studied under Thomas Huxley ("Darwin's bulldog").(42)
In 1922, he was president of the Museum of Natural History in New York. He
was professor of zoology at Columbia University. More important, he was a
leading eugenicist, dedicated to the proposition that the scientific
breeding of men is both possible and desirable. He had been a co-founder of
the pro-eugenics Galton Society in 1918.(43) Galton, the origintor of
eugenics, was Darwin's cousin. He had been knighted in 1908 and in 1909 had
been awarded the Copley Medal, the highest honor of Britain's prestigious
Royal Society.(44)

Eugenics and Nordic Supremacy

Another co-founder was his lawyer friend, Madison Grant,(45) author of the
then-famous (and now infamous) book, The Passing of the Great Race,
published by Scribner's in 1916,(46) which by 1921 was in its fourth
edition. It was a defense of the Nordic master race theory. Osborn wrote the
prefaces to the first and second printings, which were retained in
subsequent editions. This was reciprocated by Grant, who identified Osborn
as one of the two men whose works he relied upon most heavily. The other was
economist William Z. Ripley, who wrote The Races of Europe (1899).(47)

Osborn's Preface to the 1916 first edition made plain his own views: in
European history, "race has played a far larger part than either language or
nationality in moulding the destinies of men; race implies heredity and
heredity implies all the moral, social, and intellectual characteristics and
traits that are the springs of politics and government."(48) Grant's book is
a "racial history of Europe," which, Osborn insisted, "There is no
gainsaying that this is the correct scientific method of approaching the
problem of the past."(49) He called this methodology "modern eugenics."(50)
The book is about the "conservation of that race which has given us the true
spirit of Americanism. . . ."(51) In the second printing (1917), he made
himself perfectly clear: ". . . the Anglo-Saxon branch of the Nordic race is
again showing itself to be that upon which the nation must chiefly depend
for leadership, for courage, for loyalty, for unity and harmony of action,
for self-sacrifice and devotion to an ideal. Not that members of other races
are not doing their part, many of them are, but in no other human stock
which has come to this country is there displayed the unanimity of heart,
mind and action which is now being displayed by the descendants of the
blue-eyed, fair-haired peoples of the north of Europe."(52) With the passing
of the great race, the whole world faces a crisis: ". . . these strains of
the real human aristocracy once lost are lost forever."(53)

In Chapter 4, "The Competition of Races," Grant warned against the reduced
birth rate of successful, wealthy races. It leads to "race suicide" when the
encouragement of "indiscriminate reproduction" is heeded by the "undesirable
elements."(54) Altruism, philanthropy, and sentimentalism are a threat
because they "intervene with the noblest purpose and forbid nature to
penalize the unfortunate victims of reckless breeding," which leads to "the
multiplication of inferior types."(55) He then made his point clear:
"Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental
belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of
defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of
no value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of
the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community
or race."(56)

There is now scientific hope in this regard: "A rigid system of selection
through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit--in other words,
social failures--would solve the whole question in a century, as well as
enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals and
insane asylums. The individual himself can be nourished, educated and
protected by the community during his lifetime, but the state through
sterilization must see to it that his line stops with him or else future
generations will be cursed with an ever increasing load of victims of
misguided sentimentalism."(57)

This book became a best-seller in the United States when Adolph Hitler was a
corporal in the German Army. Chronology here is important.

Grant, in turn, wrote the Introduction for fellow eugenicist Lothrop
Stoddard's book, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy,
published by Scribner's in 1921, the year that Scribner's published the
fourth edition of Grant's book, one year before the company published
Stoddard's The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Underman.
(Scribner's was systematically cashing in on a rising tide of color: green.)
In his Introduction, Grant informed his readers, "The backbone of western
civilization is racially Nordic. . . . If this great race, with its capacity
for leadership and fighting, should ultimately pass, with it would pass that
which we call civilization. It would be succeeded by an unstable and
bastardized population where worth and merit would have no inherent right to
leadership and among which a new and darker age would blot out our racial
inheritance" (pp. xxix-xxx). Wherever they looked, backward or forward,
eugenicists saw a dark age. Christianity gave us the old one; Asians, Jews,
southern and eastern Europeans, and Negroes threaten to give us a new one.
The Nordic race is just barely hanging on for dear life: ". . . competition
of the Nordic with the alien is fatal, whether the latter be the lowly
immigrant from southern or eastern Europe or whether he be the more
obviously dangerous Oriental against whose standards of living the white man
cannot compete" (pp. xxx-xxxi). German translations of Grant and Stoddard
were read widely years before the Nazis came to power in 1933.(58)

Eugenics was a widely received faith among American Progressives after 1900.
Walter Truett Anderson has described the origins of eugenics in the United
States from the early years of the century. "America's gates swung open for
eugenics. Lavish support came forth from the wealthy families and the great
foundations. [Charles] Davenport established a research center--the Station
for the Experimental Study of Evolution--with a grant from the Carnegie
Institution of Washington, and later added a Eugenics Record Office with
grants from the Harriman and Rockefeller families."(59) Davenport's Station
was set up in 1904.(60) The Eugenics Record Office was established in 1910
with money from Mary Harriman, Averell's sister. Over the next decade, she
put at least $500,000 into the project.(61) John D. Rockefeller, Jr. donated
money to it.(62) He also gave money to start the American Eugenics
Society,(63) which was co-founded by Osborn.(64) It was organized in 1923.
It published A Eugenics Catechism in 1926, which included this insight: "Q.
Does eugenics contradict the Bible? A. The Bible has much to say about
eugenics. It tells us that men do not gather grapes from thorns and figs
from thistles. . . ."(65)

Eugenics and Forced Sterilization

The eugenics idea had political consequences. In 1907, Indiana passed the
first compulsory sterilization law in America.(66) States passed laws
against marriages between people who were "eugenically unfit." By the late
1920's, 28 states had passed compulsory sterilization laws; some 15,000
Americans had been sterilized before 1930. This figure rose by another
15,000 over the next decade.(67) (In 22 states, Federally restricted
versions of these laws still existed in the mid-1980's.)(68) This was also
the era of laws against interracial marriage; 30 states passed such laws
between 1915 and 1930.(69) (These laws no longer exist.)

The U.S. Supreme Court, in Buck v. Bell (1927), upheld Virginia's model
sterilization law, which was carried out on 19-year-old Carrie Buck. By a
vote of 8 to 1, the Court upheld this before the girl was sterilized; her
guardian had opposed the action. The Court included Progressives William
Howard Taft and Louis Brandeis, who voted to uphold. The lone dissenter was
Pierce Butler, a conservative, who wrote no opinion.(70) The Court's
opinion, written by justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, announced: "We have seen
more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for
their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already
sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices. . . . Three
generations of imbeciles are enough."(71) Holmes was the justice most
closely associated with the ideal of evolutionary law, whose book, The
Common Law (1881), had articulated this ideal. Here was political modernism
in action: the State as biological predestinator.(72)

There was no vocal opposition. Writes Kevles: "Buck v. Bell generally
stimulated either favorable, cautious, or--most commonly--no comment. Few if
any newspapers took notice of the impact of the decision on civil liberties
in the United States."(73) Carrie's daughter Vivian, who died young of an
intestinal disorder, went through second grade. Her teachers regarded her as
very bright.(74)

Virginia also sterilized Carrie's sister Doris in 1928. She found out about
this 52 years later. The physicians had told her that the operation was to
remove her appendix. When she found out, she broke down and cried. "My
husband and me wanted children desperately. We were crazy about them. I
never knew what they'd done to me."(75) Obviously, the woman was a hopeless
imbecile; she should have said, "My husband and I," and she used an
indefinite pronoun reference: "they." No children for her! The U.S. Supreme
Court, the state of Virginia, and Progressive Darwinian science agreed: "The
Bucks stop here."

The United States became the model for pre-Nazi German racial hygienists
after World War I.(76) The Nazis merely applied on a massive scale a program
that their liberal predecessors had recommended. A decade before Hitler came
to power, G. K. Chesterton predicted what was coming in Germany. He
explained why in his book, Eugenics and Other Evils (1922). He called
eugenics "terrorism by tenth-rate professors."(77) The influence of the
eugenics movement in Germany accelerated after Hitler came to power in 1933.
Sterilization had been illegal in Germany prior to Hitler; he changed the
law in July, 1933.(78) Two million people were ordered sterilized by the
Nazi's Eugenics Courts as eugenically unfit, 1933 to 1945.(79)

In 1939, the year of the "Duty to be Healthy," the Nazi program of
sterilization went to the next phase: "mercy killings" of mentally and
physically handicapped people who were incarcerated in hospitals and mental
asylums. One estimate is that some 200,000 people were killed in this way
during World War II. Physicians superintended the massacre.(80) Proctor
writes: "For several years [prior to 1939], German health officials had
campaigned to stigmatize the mentally and physically handicapped as people
with `lives unworthy of living.' Films like `Erbrank' (`The Genetically
Diseased') portrayed well-groomed, white-coated psychiatrists patronizing
ill-kempt patients cast as human refuse. . . . Propaganda efforts of this
sort were important, for though the operation was both secret and illegal (a
euthanasia law was drafted but never approved), there was an obvious need to
deflect potential opposition--especially from the churches."(81) The Nazis
understood in 1939 what the humanist media in the United States had
understood in 1922: churches could have become a major threat to their
genetic ideal and program of forced sterilization for genetic purposes. As
it turned out in both countries, however, churches remained mute on the
issue.

In 1921, Osborn had used the Museum to host the Second International
Congress of Eugenics.(82) At that Congress, he had announced: "The right of
the state to safeguard the character and integrity of the race or races on
which its future depends is, to my mind, as incontestable as the right of
the state to safeguard the health and morals of its people. As science has
enlightened government in the prevention and spread of disease, it must also
enlighten government in the prevention of the spread and multiplication of
worthless members of society, the spread of feeble-mindedness, of idiocy,
and of all moral and intellectual as well as physical diseases."(83)
Sanctions must be applied.

Osborn in 1922 was safely inside Rockefeller's charmed circle. He became one
of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.'s advisors on conservation issues after he and
Madison Grant created the Save-the-Redwoods League in 1919, which
Rockefeller supported.(84) When Junior would bring his boys to visit the
Museum of Natural History, Osborn would sometimes personally conduct their
tour.(85) The Osborn family's connection to the Rockefellers went back to
the days of John D., Sr.(86) Junior put Frederick Osborn, Henry's nephew, on
the board of the Rockefeller Institute in 1938. It was through Frederick
that the Rockefellers were drawn away from eugenics and into the population
control movement.(87) (Liberalism's faith in population control has replaced
its earlier faith, equally confident, in the now-politically incorrect
eugenics movement as a means of reducing the number of those who, in Grant's
words, "are themselves of no value to the community." Between 1965 and 1976,
the Rockefeller and Ford foundations poured $250 million into population
control projects.)(88)




"Good Cop, Bad Cop"
The Times' editors adopted a version of the "good cop, bad cop" prisoner
interrogation technique: a seemingly mild-mannered sterilizer began the
public disemboweling of Bryan, and a hard-nosed sterilizer completed the
operation.

Osborn's rebuttal to Bryan was rhetorically dispassionate. This made it
unique among the Times' anti-Bryan articles. Instead of citing evolutionary
dogma for Bryan, Osborn emphasized dead religious thinkers who supposedly
had accepted evolution. One surely had: the nineteenth-century eccentric
(and chaplain to Queen Victoria) Charles Kingsley. He is more famous as the
author of Water Babies than for his theology. Kingsley had written a letter
to F. D. Maurice proclaiming his commitment to evolution. The orthodoxy of
his theology can be judged by another letter that he wrote to Maurice in
1863 to describe his new discovery that "souls secrete their bodies, as
snails do shells. . . ."(89) Kingsley's social theories were racist to the
core. After visiting Ireland during a famine, he wrote: "I am daunted by the
human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. I
don't believe they are our fault. I believe that there are not many more of
them than of old, but that they are happier, better and more comfortably fed
and lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees
is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their
skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours."(90)

Osborn also cited Augustine at some length on how nature should teach us
truth. He was unaware of, or deliberately ignored, the fact that Augustine
wrote in the City of God: "For as it is not yet six thousand years since the
first man, who is called Adam, are not those to be ridiculed rather than
refuted who try to persuade us of anything regarding a space of time so
different from, and contrary to, the ascertained truth?"(91) Then he told
Bryan that evolution is one kind of truth, religion another kind. If Bryan
had entertained any doubts about his critics' opposition to the Bible's
account of creation, Osborn's article would have cured him. But one citation
was calculated to do real harm: Osborn's reference to the influence in his
life of Princeton University's James McCosh, who had indeed been an
evolutionist. Invoking the beloved McCosh was a good tactic in dealing with
a conservative Presbyterian. Bryan, however, regarded theistic evolution as
"an anesthetic which deadens the pain while the patient's religion is being
gradually removed . . . a way-station on the highway that leads from
Christian faith to No-God-Land."(92)

On the whole, Osborn's essay was mild-mannered and polite. That was bait.
Then came a hook. His article ran over to page 14, where it occupied a few
inches in the middle of the page. Filling page 14 was a large headline and a
long article by Princeton University's E. G. Conklin. The headline was
prophetic of liberal rhetoric yet to come: "Bryan and Evolution. Why His
Statements Are Erroneous and Misleading--Theology Amusing If Not Pathetic."

Dr. Conklin was one of the prominent biologists of the day.(93) He was quite
familiar with Grant's Passing of the Great Race, having footnoted it in 1921
as his only source in a chapter on "Modern Races and Man."(94) It did not
seem to bother him that Grant was a lawyer with no formal training in
biology, genetics, anthropology, or any other natural science. Conklin
followed this with references to Stoddard's Rising Tide of Color in his
chapter, "Hybridization of Races."(95) He also cited Osborn's Contemporary
Evolution of Man.(96)

Conklin was a defender of what he called the religion of evolution.(97) As
he said, "the greatest and most practical work of religion is to further the
evolution of a better race."(98) "To a large extent mankind holds the power
of controlling its destiny on this planet."(99) (Problem: when we say that
man must control man's destiny, this means that some men must do the
controlling, while others must be controlled.) He concluded his book with a
section insisting that "the religion of evolution is nothing new, but is the
old religion of Confucius and Plato and Moses and especially Christ which
strives to develop a better and nobler human race and to establish the
kingdom of God on earth."(100) It was an inspirational thought, how Moses
and Jesus always seemed to be on the side of modernism, inside or outside
the Church, despite modernism's denial of the literal truth of the Bible's
account of Moses and Jesus--or perhaps because of this discrepancy.

As part of this kingdom-building effort, Conklin believed that the State
should either segregate or sterilize citizens suffering from inherited
defects, who presumably carry unfavorable genes.(101) Society needs
intelligent guidance, he said. He then adopted the passive voice, which
evaded the famous question posed by Lenin: "Who, whom?" "In time, under
intelligent guidance, the worst qualities of the race might be weeded out
and the best qualities preserved. This is the goal toward which intelligent
effort should be directed. This should be the supreme duty of society and of
all who love their fellow man."(102) He ended this book with a quotation
from the founder of the idea of eugenics, Galton.

In his Times article, Bryan had referred to the hypothesis of evolution as a
guess. Conklin responded that it was a guess in the way that the law of
gravitation is a guess. Then, in a tone more suitable for pre-Heisenberg
science, let alone pre-Kuhn,(103) he announced that this guess "is supported
by all the evidence available, which continually receives additional support
from new discoveries and which is not contradicted by any scientific
evidence. . . . In the face of all these facts, Mr. Bryan and his kind hurl
their medieval theology. It would be amusing if it were not so pathetic."
(The next time that all the evidence supports any proposed scientific
hypothesis will be the first.) "Bryan and his kind" were surely not Conklin
and his kind: theologians of State-enforced sterilization. "Bryan and his
kind" were pathetic.

Osborn and Conklin were representative of scientific opinion in their day.
Osborn in 1928 wrote a Foreword to Creation by Evolution: A Consensus, an
anthology published by Macmillan.(104) Conklin in that volume waxed eloquent
about the superiority of the facts of evolutionary development over
"prescientific" concepts of acts of creation--"vastly more wonderful," in
fact.(105) He attacked fundamentalists. This appeared in his concluding
remarks in a chapter on embryology, which is evidence that theology was
never far from his mind.

These men were dedicated eugenicists. When, after World War II, it became
clear just how seriously the Nazis had taken these ideas, eugenics fell
completely out of favor with the public. This decline had begun in the
mid-1930's, for obvious political reasons.(106) In 1940, the Carnegie
Institution shut down the Eugenics Record Office.(107) The surviving
founders of the supposed academic discipline of eugenics just stopped
talking about it. They were not penalized retroactively in any way for
having advocated the monstrous policy of forced sterilization. There were no
negative sanctions applied. Osborn became the founder of the Conservation
Foundation in 1947, which Rockefeller's son Laurance helped launch.(108) He
died in 1969, no longer quoted as an authority, but with his reputation
intact. Yet in 1922, he and Conklin were used by the Times to launch the
scientific and rhetorical assault against American fundamentalism. To this
day, their representative victim, Bryan, is regarded as a scientific
ignoramus. But Bryan's view of creation never led to the forced
sterilization of anyone.




Bryan vs. Eugenics
Bryan recognized that a ruthless hostility to charity was the dark side of
Darwinism. Had Darwin's theory been irrelevant, he said, it would have been
harmless. "This hypothesis, however, does incalculable harm. It teaches that
Christianity impairs the race physically. That was the first implication at
which I revolted. It led me to review the doctrine and reject it
entirely."(109) He cited the notorious (and morally inescapable) passage in
Darwin's Descent of Man: "With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon
eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of
health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the
process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and
the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost
skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to
believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak
constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak
members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended
to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly
injurious to the race of man."(110) He could have continued to quote from
the passage until the end of the paragraph: "It is surprising how soon a
want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a
domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is
so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."(111) It is significant
that Darwin at this point footnoted Francis Galton's famous 1865 Macmillan's
magazine article and his book, Hereditary Genius.

Darwin in the next paragraph wrote that sympathy, "the noblest part of our
nature," leads men to do these racially debilitating things.(112) Bryan
replied: "Can that doctrine be accepted as scientific when its author admits
that we cannot apply it `without deterioration in the noblest part of our
nature'? On the contrary, civilization is measured by the moral revolt
against the cruel doctrine developed by Darwin."(113)

Darwin was taken very seriously by many Progressives on the matter of
charity. In her book, The Pivot of Civilization (1922), Margaret Sanger
criticized the inherent cruelty of charity. She insisted that organized
efforts to help the poor are the "surest sign that our civilization has
bred, is breeding, and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of
defectives, delinquents, and dependents."(114) Such charity must be stopped,
she insisted. The fertility of the working class must be regulated in order
to reduce the production of "benign imbeciles, who encourage the defective
and diseased elements of humanity in their reckless and irresponsible
swarming and spawning."(115) Swarming (like insects), spawning (like fish):
here was marvelous zoological rhetoric from the lionized founder of Planned
Parenthood. "If we must have welfare, give it to the rich, not the poor,"
she concluded.(116) "More children from the fit, less from the unfit: that
is the chief issue of birth control."(117)

Bryan's challenge to the science of evolution seemed to threaten the
continuation of the Nordic aristocracy in America by obstinately denying the
theoretical basis of eugenics and proclaiming that all men are made in God's
image. The dedicated eugenicists who were called in by the Times in 1922 to
refute him were defenders of both Darwin and Galton; they wanted to push
Darwinism to its logical conclusion. Over the next two decades, they did. So
did Adolph Hitler, beginning eleven years later. When Hitler's experiment in
applied Darwinism failed politically, Bryan's critics very quietly took this
section of Descent of Man, as well as their own public careers in defense of
eugenic sterilization, and dropped them down the Orwellian memory hole,
where the data still rest in peace alongside the long-forgotten moral
critique by Bryan, who had opposed Darwin on principle on this, the only
known practical application of Darwin's thesis. Bryan is still pictured as a
scientific buffoon in the history textbooks, and his detractors are still
pictured as the fearless defenders of autonomous science. And what of the
30,000 Americans who were forcibly sterilized in the name of Darwinian
science? Long dead, long forgotten, and therefore no longer a potential
embarrassment.




Accomplices of Theological Modernism
In the same March 5 issue, a true master of supercilious rhetoric published
his response in the form of a review of Bryan's In His Image. Here, in one
paragraph, is the finest statement of the older modernism's view of the
relationship between religion and science that I have ever read. Any modern
reader who wonders why theological conservatives in the 1920's regarded
theological modernism as a threat to everything they believed in need only
consider the following:

It is not generally recognized that, parallel with the great march of
science during the last sixty years, religion, so far from retrogressing,
has also advanced; and that never before in the history of the world has the
interest in the spiritual side of life been keener, nor the quality of
religious thought finer and nobler. Religion, indeed, has also been
undergoing an evolutionary process and adapting itself to modern ideas,
modern conditions and modern needs. Many dogmas have been discarded and the
essential truths of religion and morality separated from the obsolete husks
which formerly surrounded them. Not the least part of this progressive
movement has been carried on by theologians and professional teachers of
religion. Naturally, from the standpoint of crude and outmoded beliefs the
new faith looks like a collection of heresies. The primitive religionist
still imagines that to accept the truths of science is to become an
"infidel"; and, since there still survive those who hold this restricted
view, an occasional recrudescence of pre-Darwinian superstition is to be
expected.(118)

On March 10, the Kentucky anti-evolution bill failed by one vote in the
House.

On March 14, Bryan replied in a letter to the editor. He referred only to
Osborn and Conklin. "They dodge the real question and refuse to state how
much of the Bible they regard as consistent with Darwin's hypothesis. But as
far as evidence can be drawn from what they do say, it is evident that they
regard the discovery of the bones of a five-toed horse as a greater event
than the birth of Christ."(119)

The next day, the editors responded, and in this response, we see the
arrogance of urban men who know they possess great influence because they
buy ink by the truck load. They had contempt for small-town Protestant
America: "Nominally addressing The Times, Mr. Bryan really, of course, was
advertising himself as a purveyor of exactly such ideas as he knew would be
received with most favor in the towns where his lectures are regarded as
wonderful expressions of wisdom, piety, and virtue."(120) Dayton, Tennessee,
was such a town.

Two days after the defeat of the Kentucky bill and two days before Bryan's
letter to the editor was published came another shot at him in the Times, as
we shall see.(121) But first, we must consider Bryan's political career:
what he believed and what he accomplished.




A David Without a Stone
Bryan faithfully served the rural Populists in the Democratic Party as a
kind of stoneless David for three decades, from 1896 to 1925, although his
political career had begun earlier. He had moved the Democratic Party from
the pro-gold standard, low-tariff, balanced budget, limited government
political party it had been prior to 1897--the party of Grover Cleveland--to
the Populist-Progressive party that it became under Woodrow Wilson.

Bryan was the greatest master of political rhetoric of his generation. In
1907, 300,000 people paid to hear him. He could earn $25,000 in a summer of
lectures(122) in an era in which the average urban worker earned well under
$1,000 a year.(123) His "cross of gold" speech against the supposed evils of
the traditional gold standard, delivered at the 1896 Democratic national
convention, remains the most important political speech in American history.
It launched his national career, enabling him and his brother Charles, the
first master of the political mailing list, to transform the American
political system by creating a Democratic Progressive party, which would be
countered by Teddy Roosevelt after 1901 in his creation of a Republican
Progressive party. Yet Bryan could not win. No matter what battle he
entered, he always lost. Even when his Progressive political reform programs
won out, which many did, others were given credit for these victories.(124)
It was ominous that he had decided to launch an attack on modernists and
evolutionists.

Political Radical, Theological Conservative

It is one of the peculiar ironies of history that Bryan became the spokesman
for conservative American Protestantism, 1921-25--almost as surprising as
the fact that he was a Presbyterian. Politically, he was a radical;
theologically, he was ill-equipped. His parents were members of a Baptist
church. He had wanted to be a Baptist preacher from his youth, but he was
afraid of water. He witnessed his first Baptist immersion at age six and
never got over it. This is why he joined the Presbyterian Church at age
fourteen.(125) What is significant is that he joined the Cumberland
Presbyterian Church.(126) It was revivalistic and four-point Calvinist.

His political radicalism seemed antithetical to his theology. Political
columnist and historian Garry Wills has called his campaigns the most
leftist ever conducted by any major party Presidential candidate in American
history.(127) In the 1920's, Bryan criticized American churches for their
indifference toward profiteering, business monopolies, and industrial
injustice.(128) His view of business he called "applied Christianity" in a
1919 address of that title. In that same year, he declared that "we should
drive all the profiteers out of the Presbyterian Church so that when they go
to the penitentiary, they will not go as Presbyterians."(129) In a 1920
speech on state constitutional reform, Bryan denied that he was a socialist.
He then called for a new Nebraska constitution that would "authorize the
state, the counties and the cities to take over and operate any industry
they please. . . . The right of the community is superior to the right of
any individual."(130) He distrusted the bureaucracy in Washington, so he
advocated that these controls on business be imposed by state and local
governments.(131) In terms of his political beliefs, Bryan was an advocate
of the social gospel. He corresponded in a friendly manner with such social
gospel leaders as Washington Gladden, Shailer Mathews, Charles Stelzle, and
Progressive economist Richard T. Ely.(132) In 1919, he praised the Federal
Council of Churches with these words: "It is, in my judgment, the greatest
religious organization in our nation."(133)

He was a believer in pure democracy and majoritarian wisdom. He believed
that democracy "is a religion, and when you hear a good democratic speech it
is so much like a sermon that you can hardly tell the difference between
them."(134) He insisted that "the love of mankind is the basis of
both,"(135) an Arminian view of the gospel. To defend this religious vision,
Bryan offered as clear a statement of religious humanism as anything ever
issued by the American Humanist Association: "Have faith in mankind. . . .
Mankind deserves to be trusted. . . . If you speak to the multitude and they
do not respond, do not despise them, but rather examine what you have said.
. . . The heart of mankind is sound; the sense of justice is universal.
Trust it, appeal to it, do not violate it."(136) Levine has summarized
Bryan's political beliefs: "During the very years when Bryan stood before
religious gatherings denouncing evolution he also went before political
rallies to plead for progressive labor legislation, liberal tax laws,
government aid to farmers, public ownership of railroads, telegraphs, and
telephones, federal development of water resources, minimum wages for labor,
minimum prices for agriculture, maximum profits for middlemen, and
government guarantee of bank deposits."(137) Yet by 1922 he was fast
becoming the most visible defender of theologically conservative
Protestantism in the United States.

Bryan, more than any other figure in American history, had unleashed the
forces of the politics of plunder. He had appealed to the rural masses and
had cried out against the Eastern Establishment. He had brought the culture
wars of the Populist Party into the mainstream. But three times he had lost,
and in the persons of Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow
Wilson, the Eastern Establishment had its revenge, both on him and on the
Cleveland wing of the Democratic Party. The shift from Whig politics to
Progressivism had undermined "Clevelandism," but it had also undermined
Populism. Only in 1933, after the election of Franklin Roosevelt, would
Progressivism and Populism at last fuse nationally. Whiggism died with
Cleveland, but it was Bryan who had killed it; Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson
had participated only as pall-bearers at the funeral.




The Scopes Trial and Its Aftermath
Bryan called on modernists to resign voluntarily from the ministry, since
they did not believe in the tenets of Christianity. This had been a
familiar, though incredibly naive, theme of the conservatives ever since the
1892 General Assembly,(138) and would remain so. Machen used it repeatedly.
Not one of those who took this line was ready publicly to identify the
modernists for what they were, judicially speaking: covenantally
disinherited sons who were attempting to steal the lawful inheritance of the
true sons of the covenant. Such language would have been regarded as
rhetorically inappropriate by the vast majority of those whose inheritance
was at risk. Instead, conservatives adopted different forms of
confrontational rhetoric--less judicial but nonetheless inflammatory. The
Church would not tolerate such verbal challenges after 1925. That is to say,
the victorious modernists who visibly gained control in 1926(139) would not
tolerate rhetoric aimed against them. Because they held all the largest
spears after 1926, they did not need rhetoric to achieve their goal. Their
goal was power, and no later than 1926, they had definitively attained it in
the General Assembly. Over the next decade, they would progressively apply
what they had definitively achieved.

Confession Without the Confession

Bryan's leadership on the anti-evolution front placed him in a peculiar
position. He was not a six-day creationist. That is to say, he was typical
of all Presbyterian conservatives; he had abandoned the Westminster
Confession on this point (IV:1). His position became public knowledge in
1925 when Darrow cross-examined him during the Scopes trial. Late in the
exchange, Darrow asked him if he believed that the world was created in six
days. Bryan startled his audience: "Not six days of twenty-four hours."(140)
The creation might have lasted millions of years, but he did not want to
commit himself on this point, he told Darrow.(141)

Bryan was not alone in this desire. Even Machen held to some sort of
theistic evolution scheme. He revealed his views in private letters; in
public he refused to comment on this subject.(142) Most Presbyterian
conservative leaders had been studiously avoiding a fight with evolutionists
for at least six decades. They had all abandoned the Confession's explicit
words. This greatly hampered them. Bryan received little public support on
this issue from conservative Presbyterian leaders.(143)

It was fundamentalists outside the Presbyterian Church who supported Bryan
in this battle. Because of this, he gained a reputation after 1921 for being
a fundamentalist, which in fact he was, rather than a Calvinistic
Presbyterian, which he was not. He was Arminian to the core. His view of
God's election was framed in political terms. He said that the best
description of the doctrine of election he had ever heard was offered by a
Georgia Presbyterian preacher. "It's just this way--the voting is going on
all the time; the Lord is voting for you and the devil is voting against
you, and whichever way you vote, that's the way the election goes."(144)
This was the state of Presbyterian theological conservatism in the fourth
phase of the Presbyterian conflict.

In retrospect, the Scopes trial was a strange event. First, it was a widely
covered media event: 200 reporters, 65 telegraph operators, and a Chicago
station's radio broadcasts of the trial--the first American trial ever
broadcast by radio.(145) Second, the jury was excluded from the trial's
technical debates.(146) Third, neither Bryan nor the American Civil
Liberties Union wanted it to be conducted as a criminal trial. Bryan offered
in advance to pay any fine imposed on Scopes.(147) After the trial, Scopes,
who never testified at the trial, told one reporter that he had not been
present in the classroom on the day that evolution was covered in the
textbook, and that he had feared being put on the witness stand, where he
would have had to admit this.(148)

Bryan died in Dayton on Sunday, July 26, five days after the trial ended.
That morning he had led a local Southern Methodist congregation in
prayer.(149) Its minister conducted the final services,(150) which was
appropriate; Bryan had been far closer to John Wesley's Arminianism than to
Presbyterianism's Calvinism. His reputation had been destroyed during the
trial and posthumously by H. L. Mencken, who was the author of The
Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908). Mencken, following Nietzsche, was
a promoter of the pre-Progressive social Darwinism: the survival of the
fittest individual. He had written: "There must be a complete surrender to
the law of natural selection--that invariable natural law which ordains that
the fit shall survive and the unfit shall perish. All growth must occur at
the top. The strong must grow stronger, and that they may do so, they must
waste no strength in the vain task of trying to lift up the weak."(151)
Nietzsche's philosophy was an extension of Darwinism, and Bryan opposed
both, as he wrote in In His Image.(152) This is not how the public remembers
the Scopes trial, however. As usual, the winners wrote the press releases
and the screenplay.

The effect of the trial devastated fundamentalism as a cultural force. Henry
M. Morris, a dispensationalist, six-day creationist, and the founder of the
modern Creation Science movement, writes: "One of the most disappointing
aspects of the Scopes trial was its intimidating effect on Christians.
Multitudes of nominal Christians capitulated to theistic evolution, and even
those who retained their belief in creation retreated from the arena of
conflict, using the fiction that it was somehow unspiritual to be involved
in such controversies and urging each other to concentrate instead on
`soul-winning,' and `personal Christianity,' with a great emphasis also on
the soon return of Christ. The schools and government and society in general
were, to all intents and purposes, simply abandoned to secular humanist
control, and they have been firmly under that control ever since."(153)




Picking Up the Fallen Torch
A year after Bryan died, Northern Baptist fundamentalist leader William Bell
Riley wrote a book, Inspiration or Evolution? Riley had long been one of the
major spokesmen for American fundamentalism, and this mantle of authority
increased after Bryan's death. He was the main spokesman for the World's
Christian Fundamentals Association until it faded in 1930.(154) Riley
delivered the memorial address at the Great Commoner's funeral.(155) His
biographer calls him "the chief executive of the fundamentalist movement. .
. ."(156)

In 1917, he wrote The Menace of Modernism, in which he pointed out the
obvious: theological modernists had allies in the academic community. He
fully understood this aspect of the modernists' strategy of
subversion--perhaps better than any fundamentalist leader of his day. He
also understood the uses of rhetoric. He once wrote that conservative
ministers had about as much chance of being invited to speak at a state
university as to be heard in a Turkish harem.(157)

In the Foreword to Inspiration or Evolution?, Riley echoed Bryan's 1922
warning about evolution in the public schools, which was not surprising,
since he had been preaching the same theme since 1922.(158) "But the public
schools of America and the denominational schools are alike dependent for
personal and financial patronage upon tax payers, millions of whom are the
best citizens of America. This book is addressed particularly to this class,
and is intended as `A call to arms!' If we silently and indolently endorse
the destructive doctrines to which this volume calls attention, we will
deserve the fate that is certain to befall both Church and State. The muniti
ons of war for the Christian citizen are his voice and vote. He who does not
employ both to preserve the democracy of America and the integrity of her
true churches is a traitor to both country and Christ."(159) He fully
understood that Bryan had been correct, that control over education by the
taxpayers was crucial to rolling back the theory of evolution.

But it was not just public education that was under siege; it was Christian
education, especially higher education. The book reprinted a speech he had
delivered in 1921 at the Third Annual Conference on Christian Fundamentals.
He identified William Rainey Harper as having been the chief propnent of
theological modernism in higher education. Harper, he said, had been the
main figure in the creation of an "Academic Octopus."(160) Harper had been
the academic director of the Chautaqua program, and he became the first
president of the Rockefellers' University of Chicago. Riley recognized the
crucial role of the Rockefellers in American higher education. It was with a
million-dollar grant in 1902 that the process began. "With this bait he saw
the fish begin to rise from every denominational pool, and on October 1,
1905, he increased the wabbler by $10,000,000.00. This grant stirred every
pond."(161) In 1907, he added another $43 million. Riley identified the key
agency: Rockefeller Senior's General Education Board, chartered by the U.S.
Congress in 1903.(162) Here is how the deed was done, according to Riley:

The standardization of the colleges of the South is now sought. Let them
consent to it, as we have already consented in the North, and see what will
be the effect in the instance of a single college. A school, for example,
that has a million dollar endowment accepts the standardization scheme and
agrees to receive from the "Foundation Fund" through the "General Board of
Education" $50,000 more. The moment that amount goes from the Rockefeller
Fund, entire control of that institution as to curriculum, faculty, and
board, passes practically into the hands of fifteen men living in and about
New York, chief of whom is John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and in all fundamental
matters the entire institution must consult the judgment of this fifteen,
which, when it is remembered that John D. Rockefeller, Jr., is the real
representative of these million, means the judgment of this one.(163)

This was an exaggeration; no college surrenders that degree of sovereignty.
Faculties are made up of people who guard their autonomy in the classroom.
But there was a surrender: the acknowledgment of the legitimacy of a more
standardized curriculum, as well as professional academic standards for new
faculty members. Also, there was the lure of further money. The Rockefeller
money would be seen as a down payment. There was a price to pay for
additional funding.

Riley saw in 1921 what a pair of pro-Rockefeller biographers admitted openly
in 1988: "It would be difficult to overstate the value of the work the GEB
did in the ensuing half century. Ironically, it seems largely forgotten
today. . . . To understand the GEB, one must see it as an agency of change,
one of such remarkable accomplishments that it is scarcely an exaggeration
to refer to it as revolutionary."(164) One of its major accomplishments was
"reforming college administration and developing professional standards for
graduate education throughout the United States. . . ."(165) Furthermore,
"the work was done very quietly, with great circumspection and skill, for
the good reason that, like any agent of change, the GEB was up against some
form of established opposition in each of its successive missions. . .
."(166) By the time it was voluntarily shut down in 1960, the year Junior
died, it had expended $324 million on its many projects.(167) Some $208
million had gone into higher education.(168) But setting standards for
lower-level schools was also part of the plan. The GEB was the main factor
behind the creation of the public school system in the South, through the
funding of one professorship in education in every major state university in
the South, and through lobbying in every state capitol. From a few hundred
schools in 1900, the South's public school system grew to thousands in the
1920's.(169)

For seven decades, we have needed a detailed study of the origin of higher
education's accreditation octopus, but as yet such a book has not been
published. Riley was on target. His suggestion that the GEB was the source
of the secularization of Christian higher education has not been followed,
either by the tenured recipients who are still profiting from the system of
accreditation or the victims, who still send their best and brightest into
the system for final certification.




Conclusion
Bryan launched the final phase of his long public career with his attack on
Darwinism as a false religion. In His Image (1922) could have been ignored
by the media and the Establishment had Bryan not understood the political
implications of his confession. He understood that the public schools were
the established Church in the United States, and that the teaching of
Darwinism had to be stopped in public school classrooms. He understood this
as surely as Darwinists today understand that creationism must not be taught
in public school classrooms. He believed that because public schools are
funded by taxes, voters have final authority over what is taught there. (He
was incorrect; the U.S. Supreme Court has this authority, short of a
Constitutional amendment to the contrary.) Bryan realized that if voters
continued to defer to the educational experts, including scientific experts,
the schools would remain in the hands of the educated elite that produces
the textbooks. Bryan had devoted his public career to challenging elites. He
ended his career just as he had started, but on a far more fundamental issue
than the gold standard vs. free silver. This issue was at the heart of the
debate between biblically revealed religion and modernism: the question of
origins.

The Establishment recognized the severity of this challenge from the moment
that Bryan's speech before the Kentucky legislature led to a bill to outlaw
the teaching of evolution in taxpayer-supported schools. Gaining and
maintaining control over these schools had been the most important tactic of
Unitarianism and then modernism since the days of Horace Mann.(170) Bryan
was threatening the most sacred cow in liberalism's pantheon of sacred cows.
In January and February of 1922, the New York Times published one
rhetorically savage article after another in order to lay the foundation of
what would become America's most important religious battle in the 1920's.
This battle ended in July of 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee. With it ended also
the conservatives' influence in both the Presbyterian Church and the
Northern Baptist Church.

Bryan in 1922 wanted his followers to gain control over the allocation of
political plunder. He had been campaigning on this platform for three
decades. He understood that modernist Progressives were now in control of
the political process nationally. He was taking the fight to the hustings,
where he had always had his greatest influence. Yet Bryan had delivered the
Democratic Party into the hands of the Progressives. Like the sorcerer's
apprentice, he now strove to reverse what his oratory and his brother's
mailing lists had conjured. By challenging the modernists' right to override
local democracy through the imposition of compulsory Darwinism in the public
schools, he was invoking the last flickering traces of the Protestants'
ideal of Christendom. He was invoking point four of the covenant--economic
sanctions--in the name of point five: succession.

Bryan's opponents recognized this threat and feared it. They had a major
tactical problem. His arguments rested forthrightly on an official principle
of American democracy, namely, that he who pays the tax-collecting piper
should call the political tune: "No taxation without representation!" Bryan
was a staunch defender of Progressivism's principle that the State has both
the moral authority and moral obligation to confiscate wealth from one group
in order to give it to another group. But he had always been more of a
Populist than a Progressive. He believed that the State should confiscate
the wealth of a minority -- the rich -- in the name of the majority, not in
order to fund some elite group, and surely not a humanistic elite of
Bible-scorning educational bureaucrats, with the hard-earned money of
God-fearing Americans. He appealed to majority rule. This was a powerful
appeal.

To refute him, his opponents had to downplay the obvious: they were taxing
the political majority -- Christians -- in order to educate all children in
terms of religious principles at odds with what most parents believed. They
were not merely stealing money; they were stealing hearts and minds as well.
(The Progressives' power religion tactic was re-stated clearly half a
century later by an American general in Vietnam: "When you've got them by
the -----, their hearts and minds will follow.") So, unable to defend their
compulsory education program in terms of the democratic principle of
majority rule, these professed democrats resorted to the negative sanction
of ridicule and misrepresentation: flat earth, medievalism, etc. The
rhetorical standard which they established in the public press would soon be
adopted by their allies inside the Presbyterian Church against Bryan and his
ecclesiastical allies. Inside the Church, as well as outside, the crucial
issue was sanctions.

If this book helps you gain a new understanding of the Bible, please
consider sending a small donation to the Institute for Christian Economics,
P.O. Box 8000, Tyler, TX 75711. You may also want to buy a printed version
of this book, if it is still in print. Contact ICE to find out.
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Footnotes:

1. Bryan, "God and Evolution," New York Times (Feb. 26, 1922), VII, p. 10.

2. 1896, 1900, 1908.

3. He had resigned in 1915 in protest against Wilson's violations of
neutrality in support of the British in World War I. He resigned on June 7,
1915, exactly one month after the sinking of the Lusitania. LeRoy Ashby,
William Jennings Bryan: Champion of Democracy (Boston: Twayne, 1987), pp.
159-60.

4. Wilson was no longer a ruling elder.

5. Originally called the Presbyterian Church of America.

6. The book became a best-seller: over a hundred thousand copies. Bradley J.
Longfield, The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists, and
Moderates (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 57.

7. New York: Revell.

8. New York: Revell, 1922.

9. Lawrence W. Levine, Defender of the Faith: William Jennings Bryan: The
Last Decade, 1915-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 276.

10. Ibid., p. 277.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., p. 278.

13. Reprinted in Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition, edited by Philip
Appleman (New York: Norton, 1970), p. 544-51.

14. Ibid., p. 548.

15. Ibid., p. 550.

16. New York Times (Feb. 2, 1922), p. 12.

17. Grolier's Encyclopedia (1990): "Butler, Nicholas Murray."

18. New York Times (Feb. 3, 1922), p. 14.

19. Ibid. (Feb. 6, 1922), p. 12.

20. Theodore Morrison, Chautauqua: A Center for Education, Religion, and the
Arts in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 65.

21. George Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant
Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press,
1994), p. 241.

22. Samuel Christian Schmucker, The Meaning of Evolution (Chautauqua, New
York: Chautauqua Press, 1913).

23. Jeffrey Burton Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern
Historians (New York: Praeger, 1991).

24. Stanley L. Jaki, "Science and Censorship: Hilhne Duhem and the
Publication of the 'Systhme du monde,'" Intercollegiate Review (Winter
1985-86), pp. 41-49. Cf. Jaki, Uneasy Genius: The Life and Work of Pierre
Duhem (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984).

25. Alexander Koyri refers to him--last name only--as an anti-Newtonian, but
without naming his books. Koyri, From the Closed World to the Infinite
Universe (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, [1957] 1970),
p. 100.

26. Clarke, "Evolution and Kentucky," New York Times (Feb. 5, 1992), VII, p.
12.

27. Ibid. (Feb. 9, 1922), p. 16.

28. The theory which comprised Part II of Descent of Man, which in turn
constituted over half of the book.

29. Paxton Hibben, The Peerless Leader: William Jennings Bryan (New York:
Farrar and Rinehart, 1929), p. 371.

30. It leads to such debacles as Seminex, the Seminary in Exile, the
short-lived port in the storm for liberals after they were fired by
Concordia Seminary in the mid-1970's.

31. Cited in Levine, Defender of the Faith, p. 278.

32. Sidney E. Mead, The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in
America (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 68.

33. Ibid., p. 66.

34. Lester Frank Ward, Dynamic Sociology; or Applied Social Science, 2 vols.
(New York: Appleton, [1883] 1907), II:547-48. See Chapter 10, below, under
the section "Machen's Plea for Pluralism."

35. Ibid., II:548.

36. Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience,
1607-1783 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 152.

37. Ibid., pp. 180-81.

38. Ibid., pp. 181-82.

39. Ibid., p. 182.

40. Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban
Life in America, 1625-1725 (New York: Capricorn, [1938] 1964), p. 106.

41. New York Times (March 28, 1922), p. 12.

42. Julian Huxley, Memories (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 82.

43. Its full title was The Galton Society for the Study of the Origin and
Evolution of Man.

44. Daniel V. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of
Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985, p. 57.

45. Donald K. Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives (Nashville, Tennessee:
Vanderbilt University Press, 1968), p. 53.

46. On the impact of this book, see Allan Chase, The Legacy of Malthus: The
Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism (New York: Knopf, 1977), pp.
166-71.

47. Madison Grant, "Introduction," The Passing of the Great Race, 4th ed.,
revised (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1921), p. xxv.

48. Ibid., p. vii.

49. Ibid., p. viii.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid., p. xix.

52. Ibid., p. xi.

53. Ibid., p. xiii.

54. Ibid., p. 47.

55. Ibid., p. 48.

56. Ibid., p. 49.

57. Ibid., pp. 50-51.

58. Karl Holler, "The Nordic Movement in Germany," Eugenical News
(Sept.-Oct. 1932); cited in Chase, Legacy of Malthus, p. 635. The translated
edition was published in 1925, as was Lothrop Stoddard's Revolt Against
Civilization. Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 99.

59. Walter Truett Anderson, To Govern Evolution: Further Adventures of the
Political Animal (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), p. 153.

60. Kevles, Eugenics, p. 45.

61. Ibid., pp. 54-55.

62. Ibid., p. 55.

63. Ibid., p. 60; cf. John Ensor Harr and Peter J. Johnson, The Rockefeller
Century (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988), p. 454.

64. Harr and Johnson, p. 456.

65. Kevles, Eugenics, p. 61.

66. In England that year was formed the national Eugenics Education Society.
Kevles, Eugenics, p. 59.

67. Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p. 97.

68. Kevles, Eugenics, p. 111.

69. Anderson, To Govern Evolution, p. 155.

70. Kevles, Eugenics, p. 111.

71. Ibid.

72. No more eloquent or flagrant example of this new American Progressive
religion can be found than the book written by Alex Carrel, a 1912 Nobel
Prize winner in "medicine or physiology" and an employee of the Rockefeller
Institute, Man the Unknown, co-published by Harper & Brothers in 1935.

73. Kevles, Eugenics, p. 112.

74. Ibid.

75. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981), p.
336.

76. Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p. 98.

77. Cited in George Grant, Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned
Parenthood, 2nd ed. (Franklin, Tennessee: Adroit, 1992), p. 94.

78. Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p. 101.

79. Chase, Legacy of Malthus, p. 135.

80. Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: "Euthanasia" In Germany, c.
1900-1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). This book is too
recent to have received academic reviews regarding its evidence.

81. Robert N. Proctor, "Review of Burleigh's Death and Deliverance," New
York Times Book Review (Feb. 5, 1995), p. 3.

82. Chase, Legacy of Malthus, p. 277.

83. Cited in ibid., p. 278.

84. Harr and Johnson, Rockefeller Century, pp. 212-13.

85. Ibid., p. 212.

86. Ibid., p. 457.

87. Ibid.

88. Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1981), p. 293.

89. Cited in William Irvine, Apes, Angels, and Victorians: The Story of
Darwin, Huxley, and Evolution (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), p. 142.

90. Cited in Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold
Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the Rise
of Medieval Europe (New York: Talese-Doubleday, 1995), p. 6.

91. Augustine, City of God (New York: Modern Library, 1950), XVIII:40, p.
648.

92. Bryan, "Preface," Menace of Darwinism, p. 5.

93. Kevles, Eugenics, p. 88.

94. Edwin Grant Conklin, The Direction of Evolution (London: Oxford
University Press, 1921), p. 35n.

95. Ibid., pp. 38n, 39n.

96. Ibid., p. 54n.

97. Ibid., ch. 10.

98. Ibid., p. 241.

99. Ibid., p. 245.

100. Ibid., p. 246.

101. Conklin, Heredity and Environment in the Development of Men, 6th ed.
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1930), p. 309. The first
edition was published in 1917.

102. Ibid., p. 348.

103. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1962).

104. Edited by Frances Mason.

105. Ibid., p. 79.

106. Daniel J. Kevles, "Genetic Progress and Religious Authority: Historical
Reflections," in Responsible Science: The Impact of Technology On Society,
edited by Kevin B. Byrne (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), p. 43. Cf. Kevles,
Eugenics, ch. 11.

107. Kevles, Eugenics, p. 199.

108. Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), p. 401.

109. Bryan, In His Image, p. 107.

110. Ibid., pp. 107-108.

111. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (New York: Modern Library, [1871]
n.d.), p. 501.

112. Ibid., p. 502.

113. Bryan, In His Image, p. 109.

114. Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization (New York: Brentano's,
1922), p. 108; cited in Grant, Grand Illusions, p. 27.

115. Sanger, ibid., p. 115; cited in Grant, ibid.

116. Ibid., p. 96; cited in Grant, ibid., p. 28.

117. Sanger, "Birth Control," Birth Control Review (May 1919); cited in
Grant, ibid., p. 27.

118. Austin Hay, "The Crusade Against Darwinism," New York Times Book Review
and Magazine (March 5, 1922), p. 5.

119. New York Times (March 14, 1922), p. 14.

120. Ibid. (March 15, 1922), p. 18.

121. See Chapter 8, below.

122. David Sarasohn, The Party of Reform: Democrats in the Progressive Era
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), p. 36.

123. Contemporary estimates (journalistic guesses), cited in George E.
Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 1900-1912 (New York: Harper & Row,
1958), p. 3.

124. David D. Anderson, William Jennings Bryan (Boston: Twayne, 1981), pp.
190-91.

125. Levine, Defender of the Faith, p. 246.

126. Hibben, Peerless Leader, p. 48.

127. Garry Wills, Under God: Religion and American Politics (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1990), p. 99.

128. Levine, Defender of the Faith, p. 253.

129. Cited in ibid., p. 252.

130. The Commoner (Feb. 1920), pp. 8-9; cited in ibid., p. 195.

131. Ibid., p. 196.

132. Willard H. Smith, "William Jennings Bryan and the Social Gospel,"
Journal of American History, 53 (June 1966), pp. 45, 47. On Ely's connection
to the social gospel, see Benjamin G. Raider, "Richard T. Ely: Lay Spokesman
for the Social Gospel," ibid., pp. 61-74.

133. The Commoner (May 1919), p. 11; cited in ibid., p. 48.

134. The Commoner (Oct. 28, 1904), p. 2; cited in Smith, "Social Gospel," p.
42.

135. Ibid., p. 43.

136. Cited in Levine, Defender of the Faith, p. 218.

137. Ibid., p. 364.

138. The "Portland Deliverance." See Chapter 5, above: section on "The 1892
General Assembly: Portland, Oregon."

139. I believe they had gained definitive control by 1920, when the Church
did nothing to those officials who had indebted it to pay the bills of
Rockefeller's Interchurch World Movement.

140. Ray Ginger, Six Days or Forever: Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes (New
York: Oxford University Press, [1958] 1974), p. 171. Darrow asked him if he
accepted the date of creation (Bishop Ussher's estimate) of 4004 B.C. Bryan
said he had never made such a calculation. Darrow: "What do you think?"
Bryan: "I do not think about the things I don't think about." Darrow: "Do
you think about the things you do think about?" Bryan: "Well, sometimes."
Ibid., p. 169. The prosecuting attorney realized that this testimony had
thrown his case off-track; he told Bryan that he would not allow him to
testify the next day. The next day, July 21, the judge expunged it from the
record. Darrow protested, and asked the judge to call in the jury to deliver
a guilty verdict. Ibid., p. 175. The judge complied. Darrow told the jury to
convict Scopes, so that a higher court could settle the case. The jury did.
Ibid., pp. 176-77.

141. Ibid., p. 173.

142. Longfield, Presbyterian Controversy, pp. 69-70.

143. An exception was Clarence E. Macartney, who was a vociferous opponent
of evolution. Ibid., pp. 70-72.

144. The Commoner (Feb. 17, 1905); cited in Willard H. Smith, The Social and
Religious Thought of William Jennings Bryan (Lawrence, Kansas: Coronado,
1975), p. 174.

145. Henry M. Morris, A History of Modern Creationism (San Diego: Master
Book Press, 1984), p. 63.

146. Ibid.

147. Wills, Under God, p. 100.

148. Ginger, Six Days, p. 180.

149. Ibid., p. 192.

150. Ibid., p. 193.

151. Cited in Wills, Under God, p. 102.

152. Bryan, In His Image, pp. 123-24, 126.

153. Morris, History, p. 67.

154. William Vance Trollinger, Jr., God's Empire: William Bell Riley and
Midwesern Fundamentalism (Madison: University of Wosconsin Press, 1990), p.
33.

155. Ibid., p. 50.

156. Ibid., p. 33.

157. Cited in ibid., p. 35.

158. Ibid., p. 48.

159. W. B. Riley, Inspiration or Evolution (Cleveland, Ohio: Union Gospel
Press, 1926), p. 5.

160. Ibid., p. 164.

161. Ibid., p. 173.

162. Ibid.

163. Ibid., p. 176.

164. Harr and Johnson, Rockefeller Century, p. 70.

165. Ibid.

166. Ibid., p. 71.

167. Ibid., p. 75.

168. Ibid., p. 79. The two main figures in distributing the funds in the
early years were Jerome Greene and Abraham Flexner. Ibid.

169. Ibid., p. 76.

170. R. J. Rushdoony, The Messianic Character of American Education: Studies
in the History of the Philosophy of Education (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig
Press, 1963).

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