  Letters Archive
The South, Religion, and the Scopes Trial
Last November the Robert Penn Warren Center for
Humanities hosted a symposium entitled "Religion and
Public Life: Seventy Years after the Scopes Trial."
Ten visiting speakers presented papers on the various
implications of the 1925 trial, in which John Scopes
was convicted for teaching evolutionary theory in a
Dayton, Tennessee, high school classroom. The
conference sessions were widely attended and prompted
lively debates throughout campus. The Center also
sponsored a high school teachers workshop in
conjunction with the conference. Interdisciplinary
teams of teachers from the Metropolitan Nashville
Public Schools and the conference speakers took part
in the workshop. The symposium attracted much
interest from the national media; articles appeared
in the New York Times and the Atlanta
Constitution, among many others. Seventy-one years after the trial of John Scopes, the
issue is still alive and well. This past February an
act was introduced in the Tennessee State Legislature
that would penalize any teacher or administrator who
teaches evolution as a "fact" rather than simply a
"theory." The proposed act reads, in part, "any
teacher or administrator teaching such a theory as
fact commits insubordination. . . and shall be
dismissed or suspended." The following article was originally presented by
Charles Reagan Wilson at the November conference.
Professor Wilson is Professor of History and Southern
Studies at the University of Mississippi. His most
recent book is entitled Judgrnent and Grace in
Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis
(University of Georgia Press. 1995); he is also the
co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Southern
Culture (University of North Carolina Press,
1989). H. L. Mencken wrote that thc Scopes Trial was tragic,
representation of an outcrop of religious ignorance
against enlightened knowledge. Of course, we should
note that he also reflected after the trial that he
had seldom had as much sheer fun in his life as when
he had covered the trial and editorialized about it. Mencken was the premier critic of the South in the
early twentieth century and few people have enjoyed
that role more than he did. He took a special
satisfaction in ridiculing southern religion. He
claimed to see a tyranny of the "Baptist and
Methodist barbarism below the Mason Dixon Line." He
described the 1920s South as "a cesspool of Baptists,
a miasma of Methodists, snake charmers, phony real
estate operators and syphilitic evangelists." Mencken made thc South itself the issue in reflecting
back on the Scopes Trial. Mencken not only offended
orthodox religious Southerners but also progressive
young Southerners as well. They were appalled by the
Scopes Trial but even more by the national media's
caricatures of their region. They were proud of the
progress the region's people had made in the
aftermath of World War I, which had drawn the region
closer to the nation. Tennesseans were especially proud. The National
Association of Manufacturers began the decade of the
1920s by electing a Southerner to be their president.
John E. Edgerton, a textile manufacturer from
Lebanon, Tennessee, became a major spokesman for
American business in that decade. His presence
symbolized that the South had reached a new stage in
its economic and social modernization. A northern
reporter saw the changes in Dixie summed up by the
appearance of a new social type for the South: the
business joiner. He observed that "the rattling
knives and forks and pepful jollities of Rotarians,
Kiwanians, Lions, and Exchange clubs are filling the
erstwhile wisteria scented air with such a din these
days that every visitor must recognize immediately a
land of business progress." Such talk was in some ways simply intensified talk of
a New South, bolstering a mentality that had taken
hold of southern news paper editors and businessmen
in the 1880s and reappearing in a different guise
every generation since. But the 1920s surely
represented a quickening of that spirit. The economic
development associated with increased industrial
activity brought the growth of cities as a tangible
sign of modernization. During the 1920s, the South's
urban population grew more rapidly than any other
regions, from 24 percent to 32 percent. Five of the
seven fastest growing metropolitan areas in the
country were in the South. Kingsport, Tennessee, in east Tennessee, not far from
the Dayton of Scopes Trial fame, was an unusual
example of an entire town built by industrial
promotion, combined with community planning.
Kingsport was a sleepy mountain village in the
Holston Valley until 1909, when the Clinchfield
Railway went through to tap the Kentucky coal fields.
Kingsport gained brick and cement plants the
following year. The Kingsport Improvement
Corporation, a group of investors, hired a
professional engineer to plan the city. Eight years
later the city had a power plant, a hosiery mill,
pulp and paper factories, and a wartime cellulose
plant. Dayton was small but prosperous, the county seat of
Rhea County. The town had 2,000 citizens, paved
roads, city-owned water and electric plants, and a
thriving Protestant church life. Civic leaders
boasted of their Progressive Club. No Ku Klux Klan
had appeared at a time when it was active elsewhere
in the South. About half of Rhea County's people
farmed, mostly on small lots of less than 100 acres.
Half of the county's people worked in non farm
employment, in sawmills, textile mills, construction,
or mining. It was not an isolated community but part
of a growing economy. Amid the bustle of places like Dayton in the 1920s,
one journalist offered a new definition of the
Southerner. "The average Southerner," he wrote, "is a
born booster, and the mood is contagious." A traveler
was impressed with that mood. "Down in Dixie they
tell you . . . that the South is a new frontier.
Everywhere are new roads, new automobiles, new hot
dog stands, tea shops, movie palaces, radio stores,
real estate subdivisions, and tourist camp grounds." One needs to pull back and recall that the South, of
course, was not transformed in the 1920s. Despite
industrial growth in the decade, more commercial
activity, and urban expansion, most Southerners
continued to live in the countryside and to work in
an agricultural economy that did not boom in the
1920s. Traditional southern ways concerning race
relations, male patriarchal dominance, and countless
other customs held sway for many decades after the
1920s. After a boom in World War I, the cotton
economy went into dramatic re cession in the early
1920s and never recovered in the decade. Nonetheless, in understanding the reactions of those
religious people who would spearhead a campaign to
limit the teaching of evolution in the public
schools, we surely must recognize that they lived in
a time of perceived change. Change might offer many
Southerners new economic opportunities, but it also
threatened society as they had known it. The social
changes associated with economic development seemed
to threaten the hegemony that religion had long held
in southern life. The anti-evolution campaign was a national movement,
but held a special meaning in the South.
Anti-evolution laws were introduced in eight Northern
and Western states but did not pass any legislative
house. Every southern state except Virginia, however,
seriously considered laws to restrict the teaching of
evolution, and Florida, Tennessee, Mississippi,
Arkansas, and Oklahoma passed such laws. As historian
Kenneth K. Bailey has observed, "Especially in the
rural South, unusual anxieties were generated by
World War I and its aftermath, then later by a
variety of secularistic intellectual trends, by a
burgeoning technological revolution, by urbanization,
and by drastic departures in common outlooks and
behavior." The energizing force of anti-evolution in the South
was religion. By the 1920s, the distinctiveness of
Southern religious life was clear, defined by its own
predominant patterns and their contrast with those in
other parts of the United States. Above all, the
region stood out for its Protestant dominance. One
hundred years earlier, North and South looked similar
in regards to religion, both dominated by evangelical
groups, especially the Baptists and Methodists who
had quickly risen to influence in the early
nineteenth century. The Civil War was tinged with the
crusading righteousness of evangelical Protestantism,
albeit in northern and southern varieties. But in the late nineteenth century, as immigration
remade American society, religion was transformed as
well. The Roman Catholic church became the largest
American church group and Judaism became a major
American faith. But few immigrants came south because
the region offered little economic opportunity for
them. The South remained overwhelmingly protestant.
To be sure, significant differences existed between
the Presbyterian church in the United States and the
Assemblies of God, the southern Baptists and the
Methodists, and black and white Methodists. But
beneath these differences was a broad,
interdenominational tradition of shared Protestantism
within an American culture that had become much more
religiously diverse. Southern religion in the 1920s was distinctive
because of its predominant evangelical nature.
Evangelicalism holds that the important aspect of
faith is experiential. The central theme of southern
religious history is the search for conversion, for
redemption from innate human depravity. With a
Calvinist-inspired dim view of human nature, it is a
religion of sin and salvation. Evangelicalism offers
assurance to the faithful through direct access to
God. Sinners can be born again, touched by the Holy
Spirit and cleansed, washed white as snow, as the old
hymn says, by the "Precious Blood of the Lamb." That
experience then be comes the foundation for a new,
transformed life. Evangelical groups existed, of course, in other parts
of the United States and in other societies as well.
The distinctiveness of southern religion by the 1920s
was that this tradition had held hegemony over
southern life for so long, its reign identified with
the good society itself. As historian John Lee Eighmy
wrote, the southern churches were in cultural
captivity to the southern way of life, as religious
folk seemed almost unconsciously to blur the
distinction between their church ways and their
cultural ways associated with being southern.
The defense of regional orthodoxy had long been a key
part of the southern way of life, which religious
people had buttressed. White Southerners in the Old
South had launched a vigorous pro-slavery argument
that saw the regions peculiar institution as a
missionary agency ordained from God to bring
Christianity to the slaves. Abolitionists caught in
the South were lucky if tar and feathers were the
only marks left on them before they left the region.
White Southerners rallied around the Confederate
States of America when their leaders seceded from
the Union, and after the war, they tried to define an
ideology that all "good" Southerners should affirm.
The Lost Cause movement honored the Confederacy in
spiritual terms: Robert E. Lee was a saint, Stonewall
Jack son a martyr. The United Daughters of the
Confederacy be came the first Southerners to organize
and campaign before school textbook committees to
ensure that only orthodoxy was represented in school
books, in this case the orthodoxy of regional
tradition. For example, the president of the Florida
Daughters of the Confederacy told a textbook
committee that as a girl "hot blood came to my
cheeks" when reading American histories written by
Northerners. She and her sisters ensured it would not
happen again. The concern for regional orthodoxy even affected a
topic as seemingly alien as mathematics. Daniel Hill,
a math professor in North Carolina, before becoming a
Confederate general, had included this problem in his
post war book, Elements of Algebra: "A Yankee
mixes a certain number of wooden nutmegs, worth 4
cents a piece, and sells the whole assortment for
$44, and gains $43.75 by the fraud. How many wooden
nutmegs were there?" The number of nutmegs was only
one point of knowledge conveyed through the problem.
Although this example is amusing, the spirit of
southern orthodoxy often was not. W. J. Cash coined
the term "the savage ideal" to label the traditional
southern intolerance toward differences that seemed
threatening. "Tolerance," he wrote, "was .pretty well
extinguished in the mid-nineteenth century and
conformity made a nearly universal law." For religious people in the South as throughout the
rest of the United States, World War I heightened
fears of modernism, and modernism became increasingly
a target of regional orthodoxy. As early as the late
nineteenth century, modern thought evoked deep
anxieties in a region dominated by traditional ways
in general, especially in religious matters.
Modernism appeared before and during the war mostly
as an external threat in the South. In a triumph of
orthodoxy, advocates of biblical higher criticism and
scientific evolution ism had been effectively removed
from positions of influence in southern seminaries
during the late 1800s. Looking at the American religious picture persuaded
Southerners that they remained the last stronghold of
Protestant orthodoxy, which they identified as the
heart of traditional Americanism. Southern Protestant
ministers in the World War I era complained of
northern cities, of the predominance of the foreign
born, and, at the center of their religiously based
fears, the rise of the Roman Catholic church. The two
pre dominant southern denominations, the Baptists and
Methodists, began as sectarian groups and dissenters.
They were attuned to issues of religious liberty and
still feared persecution without this protection.
World War I highlighted what Baptists, for example,
saw as a contrast between Baptist democracy and Ro
man Catholic autocracy. Baptist churches are
radically congregational, vesting autonomy in local
churches, with little centralized hierarchy. The
Catholic hierarchy, with its seemingly autocratic
Pope, disturbed them. Southern Protestants feared the
Catholic church and sometimes spoke as if Woodrow
Wilson's crusade for democracy should target the Pope
as well as the Kaiser. World War I drew the South out of its isolation and
into greater contact with Northerners. By comparing
themselves to the North, Southerners now saw their
region as the nation's best hope for preserving and
extending evangelical faith. The South was to be the
sanctuary for orthodox Protestant values, values em
bedded in a hegemonic culture. This faith was
significant because true believers felt it had always
been the basis of "pure American ism." "Americanism"
was a construct that evoked the idea of a special
American nationality, the concept that, in this
context, brought together regional and national ideas
of religious national ism. For Southerners it meant
an American version of Anglo-Saxonism. Anglo-Saxonism
involved race. "The South above any other section
represents Anglo-Saxon, native-born America," claimed
Episcopal Bishop Theodore Du Bose Brattan. "No race
ever had more passion for liberty than the
Anglo-Saxon," wrote Baptist minister Victor I.
Masters. In the United States, Masters concluded,
"the love for freedom of this race found its fullest
expression, and in the South their blood has remained
freest from mixture with other strains." The Reverend
R. Lin Cave had observed in 1896 that "Southern blood
is purely American," by which he meant that the South
and Southerners had had less contact with recent
immigrants than was true in other American regions.
Finally, though, the religious aspect of Anglo-Saxon
American ism was what most firmly linked southern
destiny to American destiny under God. Masters summed
up the connection, noting that in the South, "the
Anglo Saxon's devotion to evangelical religion has
been less interfered with than in other sections."
His Episcopal colleague, Bishop Brat ton, agreed:
"Should this great body of Anglo-Americans ever cease
to be Christian, or become less Christian than it is,
the effect upon our entire nation would be disastrous
beyond the power of thought to conceive."
By the 1920s, then, Southerners perceived that
rationalistic intellectual forces were threatening
their evangelical stronghold. State universities
seemed infected by this plague and even seminaries
seemed not to have evaded the threat. Now their
children's text books spoke of apes and humans in the
same paragraphs. The complex issues involved became
simplified into a dramatic social movement against
Darwinism. William Jennings Bryan became the crusader
Southerners needed, articulating the deeper issues
than just textbooks. "The whole modernistic
propaganda rests on evolution," Bryan wrote. "They
first reject the miracle and then every thing in the
Bible that is miraculous or supernatural. As this
includes the virgin birth, the deity of Christ and
the resurrection, nothing of importance is left...."
Bryan visited Atlanta in 1923 to deliver a fiery plea
to the Georgia House of Representatives to restrict
"the teaching of Darwin ism as a fact."
Representative Hal Kimberly soon proclaimed his
response: "Read the Bible. It teaches you how to act.
Read the hymnbook. It contains the finest poetry ever
written. Read the almanac. It shows you how to figure
out what the weather will be. There isn't another
book that is necessary for anyone to read."
The events in Dayton in the summer of 1925 brought
out the fears of the faithful and dramatized the gap
between southern orthodoxy and the advanced ideas of
the nation's intellectual and cultural centers.
Except for the litigation at Dayton, the anti
evolution laws passed in the South during the 1920s
were dead letters, but the lack of enforcement did
not necessarily signify a retreat by the forces of
orthodoxy.
Privately controlled religious schools in the South
continued to forbid the teaching of evolutionary
theory, and in rural public schools, community
opinion and local boards of education saw to it that
the Genesis narrative was not impugned. This
persistence of religious orthodoxy over scientific
naturalism went beyond the South, too. Historian
Howard Beale concluded in 1941 that more than one out
of three teachers across the nation were "afraid to
express acceptance of the theory of evolution." State
textbook committees remained cautious in
consideration of biology texts for schools, and
fundamentalists remained vigilant in expressing their
concerns. The evangelical attitude to ward evolutionary theory
in the schools in the 1920s was part of a broader
redefinition of southern religious attitudes toward
law and society. Through the nineteenth century,
rural and small town evangelicals had used church
discipline to ensure that a pure church would exist
as a bastion of morality in society, a utopian
institution separate from the corruption of the
world. The pure institution kept itself pure and left
the rest of the world to its ways. The early twentieth century saw the church turning to
moral legislation. Evangelicals were now increasingly
a part of the modern world, through improved
communication and transportation, and through
schoolbooks that taught Darwinian science.
Evangelicals seemed unable to avoid the corruptions
of this larger world. They used moral legislation to
try to discipline society, most dramatically in
outlawing alcoholic beverages through Prohibition.
Anti-evolution laws rep resented the same orthodox
impulse toward using legislation to keep not only
individuals but society pure, as the faithful
understood purity. But this new technique represented
a truly dramatic social difference: wanting to deny
drink to anyone in society, for example, was a
radical step beyond simply discouraging anyone in
one's church from drinking. In the latter case, the
faithful were part of a small community, trying to
preserve their limited world from danger. In the
former, the faithful were part of a larger world, and
they were trying to change the meaning of that world.
In more recent times, American religious people have
again mounted crusades against symbols of a changing
society. We are now all part of a larger world, a
world whose context is not just southern nor even
just American. It is too easy to say that
conservative evangelicals of the 1920s were simply
backward and ignorant. History would suggest that
they were correct that modernism, whether in religion
or in general culture, did promote a radical
insecurity, as old standards toppled and modern
people learned to live with an increasingly relative
world view. The fears of the southern religious
faithful facing a changing society in the 1920s have
been replicated in an even more modern world, what we
would call a postmodern world, but one with
continuing anxieties about even the possibility of
maintaining moral certitude.
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