The Scopes Trial and Eugenics

The trial attracted national attention, with two celebrity lawyers–famous labor attorney Clarence Darrow for the defense and former presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution–arguing the case.  Scopes was found guilty and fined $100, but the evolutionists won the PR battle.  The trial became hailed as the turning point in the conflict between science and religion, with science winning.

The case isn’t as clear-cut today.  Now Darwin’s theory of evolution has become the orthodoxy that may not be questioned and criticism of that dogma and evidence that God created the universe are suppressed.

But I’d like to focus on another aspect of that trial, as discussed by Joseph Laconte in his National Review article A Forgotten Lesson of the Scopes “Monkey Trial.”  There were reasons on both sides why feelings were so high in the conflict between scientific evolution and the Bible’s teaching of special creation.

The textbook that Scopes was on trial for teaching did indeed set forth Darwin’s theories of evolution by means of natural selection, the “survival of the fittest.”  But it did so in the course of promoting eugenics.  The book by William Hunt, published in 1914, was entitled Civic Biology.  That is, biology as applied to civic society.  Loconte quotes from what the textbook says about “feeble minded” families:

Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. . . . Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. . . . If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading.

We recently blogged about how the liberal theology of the day was all in for eugenics.  So was much of the intellectual and academic establishment.  Says Loconte,

The eugenic idea seized the imagination of the medical and scientific communities in the early 20th century. Premier scientific organizations, such as the American Museum of Natural History, and institutions such as Harvard and Princeton, promoted sterilization laws and preached the eugenics gospel through lectures, conferences, and research papers.

Progressives led the drive for eugenic policies on all fronts, and the Democratic Party — the party of segregation and the Jim Crow South — became their chief political sponsor. By the end of the 1920s, 33 states passed eugenics laws and carried out thousands of forced sterilizations.

Conversely, theological conservatives–those who believed in the Biblical doctrine of creation and that human beings bear the image of God–opposed eugenics and forced sterilization.  “The pattern of resistance to eugenics was plain,” says Loconte: “It came from those religious communities — Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish — deeply attached to the authority of the Bible.”

William Jennings Bryan was also a progressive and a Democrat, running as his party’s presidential nominee three times (in 1896, 1900, and 1908).  But unlike the upper-crust “Conservative Democrats,” Bryan was a populist, a champion of the common people, including the lower classes that the intellectuals wanted to sterilize.  Contrary to today’s  stereotypes, he was also a Bible-believing Christian.

The debates about creation and evolution were thus often framed as moral issues.  Loconte quotes Bryan:

“Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals,” he said. “It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine.” Bryan objected to the ruthless, militant materialism — “survival of the fittest” — that the advocates of evolution and eugenics seemed to represent. “Let no one think that this acceptance of barbarism as the basic principle of evolution died with Darwin.”

Indeed, it is still with us 100 years later, as the new eugenicists are showing.

Photo:  William Jennings Bryan, 1896 Presidential Election via Picryl, Public Domain.