The Public Understanding Of Science in the 1920s:
Relativity and Evolution
Carisa Sousa
______________________________________________________
An honors thesis submitted to the History Department of Rutgers
University
Written under the supervision of James Reed and
Jackson Lears
_____________________________________________________
School of Arts and Sciences
New Brunswick, NJ
April 2012
1
The Media, the Men of Science, and the Men of Religion
2
Table of Contents
Pages
Introduction
4-10
Part 1. The Problem of Popularization
11-34
Part 2. Cultural Considerations
35-58
Conclusion
59-63
Bibliography
64-66
3
Introduction
The “Principles” of relativity, as they were understood among physicists between 19051919, reached consensus and theory status by the May 29, 1919 solar eclipse. Following
Einstein’s special theory of relativity paper, published in 1905, physicists at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) began investigating the phenomenon. After their work in 1908
confirmed the theories, they presented their findings to a joint meeting of the American
Association for the Advancement of science (AAAS) and the American Physical Society. The
physics community confirmed the theory’s validity: Daniel Comstock [one of the physicists of
MIT] proclaimed, “the principle [of relativity] is already in harmony with so many phenomena
that the burden of proof lies with those who object to it.” Still debate pressed on. Many
scientists firmly denounced the theory’s unintelligibility as it pertained to the senses and
common experience regarding space and time. They scientists objected to modern physics’ new
“economy of thought:” lamenting the modern turn away from empiricism to theoretical
mathematics. “It is better to keep science in homely contact with our sensations at the expense
of unity than to build a universe on a simplified scheme of abstract equations,” professor of
physics Lewis Trenchard More summarized. Three successful tests of the theory later silenced
protest within the scientific community.1
The New York Times reported on the Royal Academy of London's confirmations of the
theory on November 9th (the meeting was on November 7th) 1919, signaling the entrance of the
1
Tobey, The American Ideology of National Science, 100-104. The three tests were observation of the “red shift” of
light, the derivation of the advance of the perihelion of Mercury and starlight deflection. The latter test was affirmed
with the May solar eclipse.
4
theories into the public sphere.2 There was no immediate hostility. Journalists reported
favorably on the theory, though they questioned (as skeptical scientists did) its
incomprehensibility and apparent rejection of common sense. Serious debate and challenges
began in early 1921. Physicist Charles Lane Poor began by questioning the scientific validity of
the theory which the Times published in full on February 20th 1921.3 Then on April 10 1921, the
NYT published an article on Professor Arvid Deuterdahl's accusations of plagiarism, attacking
Einstein himself.4 Attention was paid, judging by the letters to the editors of the NYT, because
soon after, the NYT adopted a skepticism toward the theory, suggesting its possible immorality,
its scientific inaccuracy, and problematic assumptions. The newspaper continued publishing the
objections of scientists to the theory, or to Einstein. Despite the attempts of a few scientists to
defend the theories, media frenzy over relativity continued unabated into the mid-1920s.5
Scientific consensus followed by public rejection existed within the field of biology as
well. Even though the controversy surrounding Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution
through natural selection raged for thirty years (1860-1890), Christian biologists worked to
compromise evolution with faith. They usually prefaced discussion with an honorable mention
of theism, often proclaiming their own religiosity. The biologist Asa Gray explained that
evolution in fact proved God; it showed how all species are "part of one system, realizations in
2
Special Cable to THE NEW YORK TIMES, November 9, 1919, “ECLIPSE SHOWED GRAVITY VARIATION:
Diversion of Light Rays Accepted as Affecting Newton's Principles. HAILED AS EPOCHMAKING British
Scientist Calls the Discovery One of the Greatest of Human Achievements,” p 6
3
NYT, February 20, 1921, “EINSTEIN LACKS PROOF: Motions of Planets Do Not Confirm Claims of Advocates
of New Theory Confirmation Not Complete. Sun Not a Sphere. EINSTEIN LACKS PROOF,” p XX2.
4
NYT, April 10, 1921, “CHALLENGES PROF. EINSTEIN: St. Paul Professor Asserts Relativity Theory Was
Advanced in 1866,” p 21.
5
NYT, April 13, 1921, “EINSTEIN WRONG, BRUSH INDICATES: New Experiments in Gravity Startle the
American Philosophical Society. VARIATION OF FORCE FOUND Inventor Declares Theory Behind Results
Upsets Views of the Earth's Density. New Method Used in Experiments. Discoveries in Atomic Forces. EINSTEIN
WRONG, BRUSH INDICATES,” p 1; December 31, 1922, “Einstein's Theory Re-Examined,” p 44.
5
nature, as we may affirm of the conception of One Mind."6 But early 20th century developments
in genetics not only proved the theory but provided an even more disturbing mechanism: random
mutations. The geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan found that in his experiments with fruit flies
during the 1910s, "evolution could take place by the incorporation into the race of mutations that
are beneficial to the life and reproduction of the organism." The biological scientific community
quickly accepted random mutation as a mechanism for evolution. Henry Fairfield Osborn,
president of the American Museum of Natural History, concluded in 1922 "No living
naturalist...differs as to the immutable truth of evolution."7
As soon as Darwin's work was published, an enormous wave of public debate and
rejection resulted as a direct consequence of the theory's exclusion of "primary causes," ie, God.
Debate of evolution resurfaced through various decades, and returned again during the 1920s.
The discovery of the Piltdown Man, published by the NYT on December 19, 1912, as well as the
introduction of random, directionless mechanisms of evolution, provoked debate. It however,
proceeded quiet and overshadowed by European turmoil. Only after the War, the League of
Nations fight, and the Russian Civil War, did the anti - evolution campaign begin, led by
William Jennings Bryan. Bryan's campaign began in 1922 and culminated with the Scopes Trial
in 1925. His critique of evolution blended progressive politics, World War I atrocities made
possible by modern science, and traditional morality. The NYT published articles, by
fundamentalist dissenters and atheist supporters, pitting this battle as one between God and
Darwin.8
6
Larson, Summer for the Gods, 22, 23.
Larson, 25, 26.
8
NYT, December 19, 1912 “PALAEOLITHIC SKULL IS A MISSING LINK: Human Remains Found in England
Similar in Some Details to Bones of Chimpanzee. FAR OLDER THAN CAVEMEN Bones Probably Those of a
7
6
Tempting as it is to frame the rejection of science during the 1920s to religious sources,
upon deeper examination, the reasons were more complicated. While religion may appear to
dominate the controversy surrounding Darwinian evolution by natural selection, its role was
superficial. Only in the 1920s did both the fundamentalist movement and the denial of evolution
become popular. At that same moment, fundamentalist leaders and the lay public turned to
physics and also denied its revelations. How did this hostility to science become so widespread
if only a small proportion of Americans identified with evangelical Christianity? There must
have been something about the 1920s that caused a more general denial of science, while religion
was used to explain away their rejection, to hide bigger problems.
Within the history of American science, the struggle between layman and scientist
connects the physicists’ apparent rejection of lay rationality and biologists’ apparent rejection of
lay religion. The denial of science bubbled to the surface during a decade of intense cultural
tension and anxiety. It was a confusing new era following the First World War; an age of
flappers, female suffrage, Prohibition, labor strikes, socialist experiments, Palmer raids, heavy
immigration, modern science. It was also the first decade where urban Americans outnumbered
rural Americans, sustaining the belief of an encroaching morality and culture. Rejection of
science was one of many outward expressions of a subconscious longing for certainty in the face
of an invading modernity.
How had the lay public even come to know of the debate? During the 1920s they became
buyers in a more aggressive consumer society. Along with radio programs, films, and cars, the
news was also a product to be consumed. To receive their financial support, a newspaper had to
Direct Ancestor of Modern Man, While Cavemen Died Out,” p 6. It was not known then that it was in fact a hoax,
and was treated as more proof of the theory.
7
appeal to them. So newspapers seized the opportunity given by cultural anxieties, even fueled
the impression of encroaching modernity because increased readership meant increased profits.
They also seized the opportunity given by loud religious fundamentalists – herein lies the
explanation of how a small percentage of religious minorities’ scientific beliefs influenced the
larger population’s scientific beliefs. The New York Times’ coverage of evolution and the
Scopes Trial cast the debate as a religious one, leading the lay culture to understand modern
science as clashing with religion. Feeling culturally fragile, many sided with anti-science,
reinforcing the disunions between scientist and layman, and of science and society.
The national science movement, as documented by Ronald C. Tobey in The American
Ideology for National Science, led by Robert Millikan, Edwin Slosson, and George Ellory Hale,
attempted to reach a public consensus through popularizing the importance of science for
national policy. This was an endeavor to bridge the cultural divide. After World War I, the
group attempted to establish an ideology of national science (a national consensus for public
science funding), but failed due to an extensive and growing cultural disunion between the
science and lay society. In the Progressive Era (1890s-1920s), society valued and supported
science and technology, and science and technology worked hand in hand with the government,
culminating with World War I. The two cultures shared a common national cause but this
superficial unity would shatter with the ending of World War I. The failure of the movement
highlights an already present cultural problem (as does the Scopes Trial in 1925) that predicts its
inevitable failure. We can infer the importance of culture regarding questions of science.
Ultimately, their failure resulted in a decline of science popularization by scientists themselves
and left a void for the media to fill who were unscientifically trained and driven by different
8
motives. They took up, and made worse, newspaper practices of sensationalism and
superficiality..
In chapter 1, I explore the role of the media, in particular, of the New York Times. Why
did they report on science the way they did? After the decline in popularization by scientists, a
new method of science dissemination appears – newspapers – and a new group of people began
doing the popularizing – journalists. Mass media used sensationalism, a method designed to
attract the uneducated public and increase readership (profit), transformed into schizophrenic
endorsements of both sides in the science debates. Without attempting to educate the lay public,
journalists also frequently printed a series of isolated facts that compounded the problem of
scientific specialization. Further the media portrayed the scientific community as in
disagreement over the validity of the theories, indulging outlier or fringe scientists by giving
them an equal voice to balance credible scientists. The historian John C. Burnham argued in
How Superstition Won and Science Lost, the tragic consequence of this new popularization was
a media increase in science show rather than science reality, which produced a popular increase
in confusion, misinformation and ultimately scientific illiteracy. The media sustained and
supported the rejection of science.
Chapter two addresses the larger cultural context. Beginning in the 1890s and lasting
until the end of World War I, the Progressive Era, science and society enjoyed a happy marriage.
The lay public embraced science and technology. But after World War I, tensions between
modernity and traditionalism flared in popular American culture. Pre-World War I society no
longer seemed relevant, but many Americans longed for “a return to normalcy.” The new
physics and biology combined with increasing specialization to widen the knowledge gap
between expert and layman. Relativity and evolution failed familiar tests of truth. The new
9
sciences rejected the common senses and experiences of men, the rational philosophy of linearity
and absolutism, and compartmentalized god. Some historians, such as Edward J. Larson, argue
that modern science revived the timeless debate between science and religion, to which scientific
skepticism arose out of a clash between fundamentalism and modernism. I instead view the
clash between religion and science as a larger struggle, which predominantly took place in this
culturally intense decade.
10
Part 1: The Problem of Popularization
The mid nineteenth century marked the turn to a professionalized culture of science,
beginning in 1833 with the introduction of the word “scientist” by William Whewell to the
British Association for the Advancement of Science.9 In the 1860s, new discoveries like
electromagnetism, evolutionary theory, and the periodic table of elements delineated natural
philosophy into physics, chemistry and biology. Consequently, specialists created separate
scientific societies – the American Chemical Society in 1876, the American Psychological
Association in 1892, and the American Astronomical Society and the American Physical Society
in 1899. Though early industrialization produced a middle class with income to spare on funding
scientists in the early nineteenth century, it was not enough to buy the new complicated
equipment required to verify the complex experiments of the new scientists. The famous
Michelson-Morley experiment, which disproved the existence of the aether, was “carried out
with the aid of the Bache Fund,” an early investment bank with the means to finance lasers and
interferometers. As the pace of professionalization and specialization accelerated, more
complicated science was produced, educationally unavailable to the middle class.10
The resulting knowledge gap gradually became a cultural gap between the scientists and
the “cultivated” citizen, the middle and upper class citizens who had previously subsidized
research. The rate of knowledge gained through heavy specialization and professionalization
surpassed that of the knowledge gained through American secondary education. Not only had
the numbers of those in the cultivated class pursuing the physical sciences in university decrease,
9
Ede and Cormack, A History of Science in Society, 245.
Michelson and Morley, “On the Relative Motion of the Earth and Luminiferous Ether,” American Journal of
Science, 333.
10
11
thereby decreasing the whole of the middle class’ knowledge of the sciences, but the quality of
education in American research universities was elementary, forcing many aspiring scientists
abroad. Josiah Willard Gibbs, theoretical physicist, decided instead to take his doctorate in
engineering because of the university’s simplistic physics curriculum. Another physics Ph.D
candidate shared Gibbs’ experience; at Princeton he “browsed the library, played in the
laboratory, and deteriorated mentally.”11 A knowledge gap presented the scientists in the late
19th century with a problem in patronage - how could the middle and upper classes sympathize
and continue to support the sciences, if they lacked the knowledge required to understand it?
The problem with the knowledge gap was that it broadened into a cultural gap.12
The diffusion (translation) and demonstration of science was used in the Enlightenment
Era through the early 19th century to unite the natural philosopher and the cultivated citizen on an
educational basis, but due to the increasing complexity of science by the latter half of the 19th
century, popularization was introduced to unite the two publics on a cultural basis. The goal was
to relate the values of the scientist to that of the middle and upper class citizen, and the meaning
of science to society. In 1883, the editor of Popular Science Monthly, Edward L. Youmans,
summarized that popularization meant “science adapted to everyone’s wants, to everyone’s
needs.”13 The media of popularization were generally direct communications: public lectures
and magazines. Numerous scientists (generally imported or visiting British physicists) embarked
on national speaking tours during the 1840s-1880s; in 1872, British physicist John Tyndall and
British biologist Thomas Henry Huxley entertained crowded audiences for their lectures on the
11
Kevles, The Physicists, 31, 39.
Tobey, The American Ideology of National Science, 10.
13
Youmans, quoted in Burnham, How Superstition Won and Science Lost, 34.
12
12
contemporary scientific developments of conservation of energy and evolution.14 Charles
William Eliot, president of Harvard, who transformed the institution into an American research
machine, summarized in 1867: “These are the days of popular lectures and familiar treatises on
scientific subjects.”15 Other “familiar treatises” appeared in print: many scientific magazines
were introduced (1845 Scientific American, 1872 Popular Science Monthly, 1899 The
Technology Review.) Scientists embraced three elements central to contemporary
popularization: simplification, translation and updating. Simplification meant the omission of
complex mathematics (high level calculus was only available in prestigious research
universities); translation, the paraphrased summary of a scientist’s work into the vernacular; and
updating, keeping the public current with developments and important events due to the
cumulative nature of science (one theory builds upon a predecessor.) The popularity of
popularization, the duty scientists had felt towards it, and the warm reception it received from the
public reflected a healthy relationship between the scientist and the layman.16
However, by the turn of the century (into the 20th), patterns of popularization drastically
changed. During the Progressive Era popular interest and scientist popularization declined
steadily, becoming almost nonexistent by 1915. The esteem with which popularization was
regarded by scientists transformed into disdain as revealed in several examples regarding the
need for rejuvenated efforts. James McKeen Cattell, the editor of Popular Science Monthly (and
later advocate of national science), wrote a letter in 1900 to prominent astronomer Simon
Newcomb on the importance of popularization. Admitting that he may have been overestimating
the need for direct popularization, he pleaded “I think that you will … agree with me that this is
14
Kevles, 14-16.
Eliot, quoted in Burnham, 33.
16
Burnham, 38.
15
13
not unimportant.” Newcomb did not respond enthusiastically, and continued his research in
professional isolation. In response, Cattell complained three years later that the Smithsonian
Institute was doing “absolutely nothing … for the promotion and diffusion of knowledge.”17
George Ellery Hale’s proposals to reform the National Academy of Sciences in 1913-1915
further reveal the general scientific community’s contempt for popularization. In a November
1913 meeting, Edwin Grant Conklin (president at the time of the National Academy of Sciences)
introduced Hale’s paper on recommendations for the future of the NAS that called for a stronger
relationship with the government, including re-establishing the relationship between the lay
public and the scientist. Though more votes were cast in favor of increased public lectures, most
did not even reply (26 in favor, 10 opposed, 39 no opinion), and most thoroughly rejected NAS
sponsored museums, exhibitions, and sustained efforts to improve scientist-journalist relations.
In 1913 Cattell summarized the situation to his friend William H. Welch, “Neither am I hopeful
about the likelihood of popularizing science or extending its influence among the public.”18
Simultaneously, the period of 1890s-1910s was characterized by a decreased popular
interest in pure science, due to the compounded effects of increased specialization, conceptual
and mathematical complexity, economic recession, and the Progressive emphasis on technology
rather than pure science. Readership dropped, forcing scientific magazines to specialize to an
audience, scientifically trained, that remained interested in developments, and financially
available for cultivated learning (ex, 1915 Popular Science Monthly changed its name to
Scientific Monthly.)19 The lay public during the Progressive Era interested itself more in
engineering and efficiency, as the popularity of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of
17
Cattell, quoted in Tobey, 11.
Welch, quoted in Tobey, 11. Tobey, 23, 24, 26, 27.
19
Burnham, 172, Tobey, 11, 12.
18
14
Scientific Management suggested. Taylor predicted the salvation of corruption, incompetence
and inefficiency through successful application of the method of science. Only with the
application of science, engineering and inventions, could humanity’s condition, declining as a
result of rapid urbanization, improve. The benefits of engineering were preached as a part of the
Progressive Era movement and heralded as the only kind of science that mattered. The public
emphatically agreed through the support of Progressive Era experts.20
The lay public and the experts blamed each other for the disappearance of scientific
popularization. The Nation put it this way, “…One may say not that the average cultivated man
has given up science, but that science deserted him,” while Youmans complained that “the world
at large must be made to feel that science is … the best expression of human intelligence and not
the abracadabra of school, that it is a guiding light and not a dazzling fog.”21 John C. Burnham’s
How Superstition Won and Science Lost: Popularizing Science and Health in the United States,
lays a two part blame of popularization decline onto the pure scientist and the changing audience.
Beginning in the 1880s, a demographic shift quietly emerged, unnoticed in population statistics.
Immigration and urbanization (including the rural flight of 1890s) produced a poor urban class,
who were generally uneducated, which inadvertently decreased the proportion of cultivated
Americans.22 These population changes produced a lay change in attitudes: a shift in focus from
pure science to applied science (engineering). The increased poverty caused by urbanization
without adequate infrastructure created a public more interested in social reform. While social
reformists (John Dewey and Frederick Winslow Taylor) employed scientific methods, they
20
The Age of Reform, 127-128. Efficient management reduced the dangerous conditions in a factory which had
previously slowed work down, and the introduction of air conditioning controlled the amount of heat stress on it
workers as well as controlling the amount of bacteria and mold that infected workers.
21
The Nation, quoted in Kevles, 98. Youmans, quoted in Tobey, 35.
22
Burnham, 36.
15
usually ignored science. The emphasis changed from self-improvement and national cultivation
to social reform and inventions that made life better for an increasingly urban America. 23
Coincidently, as science continued to specialize, popularization (and education) no longer
provided financial means as a profession. The money, during the 1890s-1910s, was in industry
and engineering, turning many young scientists away from pure research into the applied
sciences. This divergence resulted in a dual withdrawal of applied scientists, who did not need to
popularize to the masses, but only to private business, and pure scientists, who mocked the lay
public’s vulgar preference for gadgets and inventions, and their regard for scientists as magicians
(Edison was the “wizard” of Menlo Park.) Pure scientists did not turn to popularize to the
masses – they sought financial support from university and private philanthropy, to the detriment
of the middle class who were relatively more educated but did not attend research universities,
where their clients and patrons resembled their cultivated ideal. Regardless of the pure
scientist’s disdain or the applied scientist’s profit motives, financial means no longer existed in
the public sphere.24
Burnham’s argument, convincing as it is with respect to the 1880s-1890s decline in
scientist popularization, is bolstered by Ronald C. Tobey’s analysis of a similar decline in the
early 1920s. The national science movement promoted public support for federal funding of a
centralized national research program for pure science. Experiencing the benefits of
centralization of science during the war, scientists embarked on a renewed effort to bridge the
cultural divide between layman and scientist.25 Due to a similar increase in mass politics, the
increased number of voters (women join the voting population 1920) were relatively uneducated
23
Kevles, 97.
Kevles, 61.
25
Tobey, 62, xiii.
24
16
when compared to the rapidly specializing modern sciences of biology and physics. In an effort
to solicit their support, scientists created a new scientific magazine (as well as revitalizing old
magazines such as Scientific Monthly edited by James McKeen Cattell) that would reach the
entire lay public of all educational and income levels –Science Service.26 Judging from the
responses to the Scripps-Ritter proposal to the NAS, establishing the magazine, William
Emerson Ritter, a biologist at the University of California concluded that “great majority” of
scientists “[were] greatly impressed” with Scripps efforts and the idea of Science Service, but the
majority also shared the mathematician E. B. Wilson’s “rather poor opinion of scientific men for
running a popular journal.” Perhaps a snide remark on the apparent dignity of isolation (which
could prove the existence of the pure scientist’s contempt for popularization carried over through
the 1920s), Wilson’s statement predicted the inevitable doom of popularization by scientists.
Once again, intense industrialization and business culture of the 1920s forced pure scientists to
appeal to bigger funders of science, and forego pure research for the greater rewards in
engineering. Consequently, pure scientists withdrew from popularization, doubting, as Milikan
eventually did, the lay public’s ability to govern themselves.27
The professional scientist’s withdrawal from popularization created a vacuum to be filled
by a new entity: newspapers. Throughout the 1790s-1840s, the press was dominated by
competing party (or political) ideologies.28 In forging the new nation, parties (there were many
at the time) found newspapers as their organ for presenting their ideologies to attract greater
support (now that most white males were voting) in electoral campaigns, resulting in “paper
26
Tobey, 66-69. Conceptualized in 1920 and published in 1922, Science Service was established by E. W. Scripps
mainly because of his anxiety regarding the state of democracy. A non-scientist, and social democrat, Scripps
founded the magazine to summarize the work of scientists to the average layman. Hesitant over the survival of
democracy after the war, the growing informational gap between them created further instability over democracy,
inherently, he believed, dependent upon an educated public.
27
Ritter, quoted in Tobey, 69. Wilson, quoted in Tobey, 64. Tobey, 199-200, 195, 198.
28
Nerone, “Newspapers and the Public Sphere,” 289.
17
wars” between editors of politically opposed newspapers, both receiving patronage from national
parties.29 Publisher of the Weekly Register, Hezekiah Niles summarized the state of the media by
1840: editors acted “together as if with the soul of one man, subservient to gangs of managers,
dividing the spoils of victory, of which these editors also liberally partake.” Developments in
science were hardly discussed in the party press, even during weekend supplements, not such bad
news, considering the activity of scientist-popularizers during this same period.30
Absent though it was during the era of scientist popularization (1840s-1880s), changes
occurring within the media world during this time, produced a new media capable of replacing
the older forms of popularizing science. By the 1880s, newspapers had become a commercial
press, dominated by market pressures and demand. This dramatic shift was spurred by
technological advances and population trends. Steam-powered cylindrical presses immeasurably
increased production, while improved transportation (both intra-city and inter-cities) hastened
the distance between subscriber and news station, as well as created congested areas for
distribution focus.31 The general increase of population and urbanization in the post Civil War
era freed the newspaper from party patronage. Though industrialization increased production
efficiency and advanced distribution, a newspaper became too costly (too costly for political
parties as well) to survive on subscription and street sales alone. Advertising paid for most
newspaper costs, which in turn needed a greater amount of eyes in order to sell their products.
Newspapers, promising more eyes, competed among other newspapers to win readers, usually
promising fair, non-partisan news, for fear of alienating potential circulation. The 1880s
29
Tucher, “Newspapers and Periodicals,” 389, 408.
Nerone, 234.
31
Nerone, 237. The Lightning Press executed eight thousand impressions per hour.
30
18
appearance of new patrons, and subsequent new goals, resulted in new practices designed to
increase readership and more funding.32
In the 1880s, new media practices were developed that were derived from the need to
attract more readers to satisfy the demands of advertisers. Three elements came to define
newspapers nearing the turn of the century: sensationalism, non-partisanship, and intellectual
simplicity. The idea of the newspaper was to first, make the reader view the paper that would
catch his or her eye via an emotional reaction; to think “Gee whiz,” as journalist Will Irwin
concluded.33 An emotional reaction could be achieved in a number of ways that were adopted in
the early 1880s: illustrations, and front page headlines. Scattered “illustrated news” appeared in
the 1850s – Illustrated News (1853), Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (1855), Harpers
Weekly (1857), New York Illustrated News (1895) – but it was not until 1873 that photo
reproduction become technically and financially available to newspapers. Still, illustrations only
became regularly implemented in the 1920s.34
Before the 1870s, headlines did not exist. A newspaper was typically four gray pages of
tiny words crowded into narrow columns generally without news content organization - it was an
indicator of prestige (the New York Times initially followed this style). However, due to the rise
of advertising, newspapers employed short headlines highlighting attention to products and
services, for example, “HATS” or “WOODSTOCK ACADEMY.” In the 1880s, newspaper
editors witnessing the benefits of this style in advertising, employed it to outline a story and grab
street sales, first using a short phrase to describe the news, later with a stack of emotionally
charged lines. All these efforts toward the gradual improvement of a newspapers’ aesthetics were
32
Nerone, 238-239
Irwin, quoted in Burnham, 172.
34
Nerone, 241.
33
19
an attempt to convey, quickly to busy masses in crowded areas, a moral point, or a sensation.
(See Figure 1 for a comparison of cover pages of the New York Times.) The latter two practices
were developed as a result of a general audience, instead of a limited one based on political
ideology and educational background that could bind a newspaper to a smaller circulation (and
smaller funding). Due to commercial competitiveness, these methods were adopted by virtually
all newspapers, which further increased competitiveness, and by extension, accentuated
newspaper practices.35
Newspapers practices established in the 1880s, and heightened during the era of the
yellow press (1890s-1920s), also defined coverage of science. Examining the two most widely
read newspapers in 1890s-1920s, the New York Times’ and the Washington Post’s, for their
coverage of relativity and evolution, one finds the front pages dominated by sensationalist
headlines. During the relativity debate, the New York Times featured headlines both in support
and opposition of the theory. Two front page headlines in 1921, only days apart read “PROF.
EINSTEIN HERE, EXPLAINS RELATIVITY:"Poet in Science" Says it is a Theory of Space
and Time” seeming to support Einstein and his theories, while another in April boldly
proclaimed, “EINSTEIN WRONG, BRUSH INDICATES.” 36 The Washington Post, similarly
sensationalized the debate: “Close Guard Kept On Plates That May Disprove Einstein,”
“Einstein Theory Disproved, Says
35
36
Nerone, 242.
NYT, April 3, 1921, p 1; April 23, 1921, p 1.
20
Figure 1: Two cover pages from the New York Times. On the left is the first cover page of the
newspaper, printed in 1851, the right, is one printed in 1925. Notice the lack of aesthetics in the
earlier newspaper, compared with the improving appearance via use of illustration and attention
grabbing headlines in the later version.37
37
Cover Pages of the NYT. On the left: September 18, 1851. On the right: July 1, 1925.
21
See; Newton Upheld”38. Veracity did not matter, accepting or rejecting the theory was of
secondary concern; the ability to catch the reader’s attention was the editors’ only priority.
The same practices occurred in the evolution debates preceding the Scopes trial.
Following the coverage of discoveries or events that confirmed Darwinian evolution, the New
York Times published articles of other events that questioned its veracity. On December 27th,
1922, the New York Times printed a front page article titled, “SCIENTISTS UPHOLD
EVOLUTION THEORY: Leaders in That Field Unanimously For It, Council of Association
Says. FLEE TEACHING DEMANDED Convention Is Opened at Cambridge With More Than
2,000 in Attendance,” summarizing a convention at the Association for the Advancement of
Science (AAAS) the day before whereby more than 2,000 scientist attendees proclaimed their
support for evolution.39 In October and December, the NYT published articles on fossils that
confirmed the theory of evolution.40 Then, as we get closer to the Scopes trial in July 1925, the
NYT published an article on March 9th, 1924 about a fossil found that disputes the theory.41
Though the title ran under the sensationalist headline, “FOSSIL FIND UPSETS SCIENTIFIC
THEORY: Nevada Mining Engineer Brings East a Petrified Horse's Foot of Modern Shape,” the
fossil find did not upset the theory of evolution. The journalist claimed “[the discovery] violated
all the rules,” governing evolution theory, but concluded that the fossil was merely controversial,
and that more study was needed. In fact, the fossil was found among coal deposits [which can’t
38
Washington Post, November 15, 1922, p 1; October 13, 1924, p 1.
NYT, December 27, 1922, “SCIENTISTS UPHOLD EVOLUTION THEORY :Leaders in That Field
Unanimously For It, Council ofAssociation Says.FLEE TEACHING DEMANDEDConvention Is Opened at
Cambridge With More Than2,000 in Attendance. Limit on Teaching Deplored. SCIENTISTS UPHOLD
EVOLUTION THEORY Value of Later Discoverice. 1,000 Papers to be Read. Will Observe Centenaries,” p 1.
40
NYT, October 7, 1923, “SCIENTISTS FIND NEW CLEWS IN SEARCH FOR MISSING LINK :RECORDS OF
PAST IN ASIA Fossil Jaws May Belong to Species Between Ape and Man,” p XXI; Written by PAUL
MARSHALL REA. Director, Cleveland Museum of Natural History, printed by NYT, December 16, 1923,
“EVOLUTION CLUE SOUGHT IN OCEANIC BIRD STUDY,” p F10.
41
NYT, March 9, 1924, “FOSSIL FIND UPSETS SCIENTIFIC THEORY :Nevada Mining Engineer Brings East a
Petrified Horse's Foot of Modern Shape. ANTI-EVOLUTION ARGUMENT According to Archaeologists the
Present Equine Quadruped Originally Had Five Toes,” p E4.
39
22
support fossils], nor was it taken to paleontologists or geologists to confirm that it was indeed a
remarkable discovery.
These headlines indicated the value placed upon sensationalist, attention grabbing
headlines, used to convey emotion through exaggeration of stories, that often turned out to be
false or unproven, as well as the use of strong language, and the emphasis on the personalities of
characters, (Einstein, Newton, Darrow, Bryan, Darwin)[searching ‘Einstein,’ ‘Darrow,’ ‘Bryan,’
‘Darwin’ produced more material than ‘relativity’ or ‘evolution’] to attract readership. The
objective truth of the stories or personal beliefs of readers did not affect circulation – the goal of
editors was to evoke a reaction, whether positive or negative, in order to draw in a reader. But
these headlines also indicate the choices for sensationalist articles that resulted in schizophrenic
endorsements of both sides of the debate. The NYT would print a story accepting the theory
with an exaggerated title, then follow through during the next months with one endorsing the
position of the deniers.
Once drawn in by sensationalist and contradictory headlines, the promise of nonpartisanship within the newspaper was achieved via debate balance over scientific theories. The
biggest and longest running debate, occupying later pages and running through the opinions
sections, was the argument between naval astronomer and professor, Capt. T. J. J. See and
various rebuttals from different scientists. Beginning in 1921 with the New York Times article on
April 13, Professor See accused Einstein of errors and of plagiarizing his theories from earlier
work by Henry Cavendish and J. von Soldner.42 More articles appeared in the New York Times
featuring See accusing Einstein of plagiarizing, and denying the accuracy of the theories of
42
NYT, April 13, 1923, “Article 1-No Title,” p 5.
23
relativity.43 Then on May 9th, the NYT published an article of a defender of Einstein, W. M.
Malisoff, refuting See’s argument, and sparking a year-long debate over the validity of
relativity.44 The Washington Post similarly published articles regarding See’s attacks, one of
which was a front page article that detailed See’s own observations on starlight deflection which
he believed refuted Einstein’s theory.45 British physicist Arthur S. Eddington declared See’s
evidence “all bosh and nothing to it,” which was the general opinion of the scientific
community.46 These articles created a debate within the scientific community, where none
existed. In an attempt to appear non-partisan and non-biased, newspapers covering science in the
1920s included reporting on deniers, to present a debate balance, without properly examining
those deniers or the evidence they presented.
Newspapers also portrayed the presence of a scientific debate among biologists with
regards to evolution theory. In the early 1920s, small battles between biologists and geologists
occurred within the columns of the New York Times regarding certain aspects of evolution
mechanisms. Refutations began with concerns regarding evolution’s social implications; i.e.
Social Darwinism.47 Then, following the Second International Congress of Eugenics, another
article appeared on September 24th, 1921, objecting to the mechanism of random variation. Dr.
Lucien Cuentot argued that insects result from design because of the lack of origins explanations
43
NYT, April 15, 1923, “ATTACKS EINSTEIN AGAIN :Professor See Says He Himself Discovered Magnetism
Theory,” p20; Written by T.J.J. See, printed by NYT, May 1, 1923, “CAPT. SEE SCORES EINSTEIN :Naval
Astronomer Denies Relativity Theory Is Proved,” p 20.
44
NYT, Written by WILLIAM MARIAS MALISOFF, printed byNYT May 9, 1923, “DEFENDS EINSTEIN
THEORY:W.M. Malisoff Declares Capt. See's Attack on it Is Ill-Founded,” p 18, May 13, 1923, “Letter to the
Editor 2 -- No Title;” May 13, 1923, “Letter to the Editor 3 -- RELATING TO RELATIVITY :What Einstein's
Theory Is Interpreted by Various Writers of a Varying Understanding of the Subject;” October 14, 1924 T.J.J. See
begins again followed by rebuttals from scientists Frank Dyson and Arthur S. Eddington on October 16, and 18,
1924.
45
Washington Post, October 13, 1924, “Einstein Theory Disproved, Says See; Newton Upheld :Discovery of Simple
Geometrical Error in Formula for Calculating Bending of Light Shows Relativity Useless, Navy Astronomer
Declares. CAPT. SEE REFUTES EINSTEIN THEORY ON BENDING OF LIGHT,” p 1.
46
Tobey, 110.
47
NYT, January 23, 1921, “Reversing Darwin's Theory of Evolution,” p 54.
24
regarding the stinger of the bee or ovipositor of the grasshopper. “One may boldly declare that
none of the theories of evolution enables us to understand the genesis of these organs of definite
intentions.” 48 No direct rebuttal followed, only a series of articles describing recent findings that
support evolutionary theory, none of which addressed evolution’s social implications or
origins.49 The New York Times did not couple these previous refutations with explanation of
how they did not contradict evolution theory, nor did the New York Times settle confusion
regarding the relationship to Eugenics, or how most scientists, including the ones mentioned,
supported the principle of evolution, and may have disagreed with smaller details.
While there was no equivalent of an evolutionary scientist T. J. J. See, there existed
equivalent media frenzy, spurred by fundamentalist theologian Dr. John Roach Straton. Dr.
Straton began on February 9th, 1922, announcing his national anti-evolution campaign.50 Straton
continued later in the month, attacking H.G. Wells’ “The Outline of History” “as being full of
antique and exploded theories about the origin of the world and of man.”51 A few rebuttals from
evolution defender Dr. Frank Schlesinger, astronomer at the Yale Observatory, followed.52 Two
48
NYT, September 24, 1921, “BIOLOGIST DENIES CHANCE EVOLUTION :Dr. Lucien Cuentot Says Insects'
Mechanical Devices Evidently Result From Design. CUTTLEFISH AN EXAMPLE Eugenic Congress Listens to
the Theories of an EminentFrench Scientist. Organs of Insects Cited. Theory of Modern Biologists Reptile-Bird of
Antiquity. Study of One-Cell Life..," p 7.
49
NYT, April 16, 1922, “"JOHN DANIELS'S TOE WITNESS FOR DARWIN :Shape of It Held to Prove Man
Could Have Descended From a Gorilla. SOME OBJECTIONS REFUTED Foot Lost Curvature When Man Quit
Clinging to Trees and Became Flat So He Could Walk. Change in the Feet. Toes Not Such a Big Obstacle..," p 38;
August 30, 1923, “BIRD STUDY AIDS DARIIN THEORY :Leader of Whitney South Sea Expedition Returns With
6.OOO Rare Specimens. .TELLS OF NARROW ESCAPES Rollo Beck to Resume Searchu Collection to Be Shown
at Natural History Museum..," p 25.
50
NYT, February 9, 1922, “"STRATON TO FIGHT DARWIN IN SCHOOLS :Baptist Fundamentalists Expected to
Protest DogmaticTeaching of Evolution.STARTLED BY HIS OWN SONSpreading Belief in Monkey Ancestry
Liable to Make BoysBrutes, Says Pastor..," p 9.
51
NYT, February 13, 1922, “"DR.STRATON ASSAILS HISTORY BY WELLS :Is Full of Antique and Exploded
Theories, He Says, Also Attacking Evolution. BANS IT AS SCHOOL DOGMA Scientists Deny Sun Is Mass of
Flaming Matter, He Declares --Holds to Bible. "Based on Exploded Hypothesis." Sees Argument for Socialism..," p
3.
52
NYT, February 14, 1922, “DOES NOT EXPECT SUN SPOT AURORA :Newest Solar Outbreak Is Small, Says
Dr. Schlesinger of Yale.REFUTES STRATON'S STANDAttack on Wells Puts Pastor InPosition of Contradicting
Own Argument. Cycle Not Favorable. Contraction Theory Dropped;” February 20, 1922, “DOES NOT EXPECT
25
years later, Straton returned to his fight against evolution, attacking the American Museum of
Natural History for its exhibition on man’s evolution and accusing its president, Henry Fairfield
Osborn, as “a traitor to God.” [Coincidently, on the same day as the article cited earlier which
cast doubt on evolution with an upsetting fossil found – March 9th seems to be a day of denial.]53
Osborn ignored the challenge, but four articles (letters to the editors of the Times) questioned
different aspects of Straton’s argument, all supporting evolution and all within the same month
(March.)54 Though Straton was not a biologist, it is interesting to note that authority was given
to him by the New York Times, perhaps because of the gradual disappearance of scientific
opposition, but most likely his voice was given to create the impression of evolution as a
religious issue, something sure to spark the attentions of the lay public. As we get closer to the
Scopes trial in 1925, the impression intensified.
Media coverage of the Scopes Trial further elaborates and provides the ultimate
exemplification of newspaper practices of the 1920s. Even before the century passed a quarter of
it, newspaper attributed the sensationalist title "Trial of the Century" to the Scopes trial.55
Newspapers hailed the trial as epoch making even before the trial came to be, establishing an
early anticipation for the event, and illuminating national spotlight on the sleepy town of Dayton,
Tennessee - by early May, Dayton was transformed from a simple uneventful town into a
SUN SPOT AURORA :Newest Solar Outbreak Is Small, Says Dr. Schlesinger of Yale.REFUTES STRATON'S
STANDAttack on Wells Puts Pastor InPosition of Contradicting Own Argument. Cycle Not Favorable. Contraction
Theory Dropped..”
53
NYT, March 9, 1924, "DR. STRATON ASSAILS MUSEUM OF HISTORY :Says "False and Bestial Theories of
Evolution" Are Harmful to Children. WANTS BIBLE ON DISPLAY Attacks "Hall of the Age of Man" -- Prof.
Osborn Sends Answer to Charges. GIVES VIEWS ON EVOLUTION Museum Head Defends Exhibits as Perfect
and Necessary to Children's Education..;" March 10, 1924, “"CALLS THE MUSEUM A TRAITOR TO GOD
:Natural History Exhibit a Libel on the Human Race, Says Dr. Straton. SCOFFS AT APE-MEN SHOWN Prof.
Henry Fairfield Osborn Declares That Museum Officials Are Not Perturbed by Charges.."
54
NYT, March 11, "TREASON AND LIBEL;" March 23, "A Fundamentalist Exhibit for the Museum of Natural
History -- Evidence of Educational Failure;" March 23, "Letter to the Editor 4 -- No Title;" March 30,
"EVOLUTION ESTABLISHED.”
55
Larson, 6.
26
bustling one crammed full with media representatives and journalists. Anticipating a grand trial,
the courtroom was repainted, and 500 extra seats created for spectators. Wires and microphones
were built in the courtroom, an airstrip out of a Dayton field, extra trains, souvenir and hotdog
stands. Two thousand dailies covered the trial, and the New York Times alone, printed 300
articles regarding the trial (between May and August of 1924), more than those the paper
covered on evolution from 1916 to 1925.56 The New York Times printed articles featuring news
of witnesses as they accepted their positions, and documented closely the choices for defenders
and prosecutors, and their words regarding the trial, blending the sensationalism, nonpartisanship and intellectual simplicity that had been used in the relativity and evolution debates
preceding the Scopes trial. The NYT warned on May 24th, “PREPARE FOR THRONG AT
EVOLUTION TRIAL.”57 The next month, the NYT announced the major players in the trial –
Bryan and Darrow.58 Next, the newspaper listed the witnesses, gathering more buzz in the
scientific community.59 They include their arguments, for each side, though no real discussion
ever took place regarding scientific method, observations, conclusions, or context. What was
generally noted, was the religiosity of expert witnesses, their achievements made for science, and
the reputation they held in the scientific community. All the while, continuing to describe the
trial on cover pages as hostile (“Hostility Grows in Dayton Crowds”), warring (“Bryan and
Darrow Wage War of Words in Trial Interlude,” “Dayton Fortified Against Last Shock of
Darrow Attack”), and dramatic (“Dramatic Scenes in Trial. Angered He Shouts That He Is
56
Currell, American Culture in the 1920s, 17.
NYT, May 24, 1925, p 1.
58
NYT, Jun 10, 1925, “COLBY AND DARROW WILL DEFEND SCOPES :Hope to Make the Trial Decrease
Hostility of Many Religious Persons to Evolution. EXPECT FINE, THEN APPEAL Education Through
Newspapers to Be Aim Until the Case Is Decided. COLBY AND DARROW WILL DEFEND SCOPES," p 1.
59
NYT, June, 29, 1925, “"TO DEFEND SCOPES IN SCIENCE'S NAME :Darrow Outlines the Big Question
Involved in Tennessee Teacher's Case. STATE CONTROL AN ISSUE Not Settled by Oregon Decision, He Says -Talk of Fosdick as a Witness.," p 1; June 30, 1925, “"COUNSEL FOR SCOPES COMES FOR WITNESSES :More
Names Are Added to the List During Conference in Chicago.," p 1; July 14, 1925, “List of Scientists and Ministers
to Aid Scopes If Evidence Is Admitted on Evolution and the Bible," p 1.
57
27
Fighting for God Against America’s Greatest Atheist.”)60. Rarely mentioning scientific facts,
frequently focusing on the figures involved (Bryan and Darrow), the media made the "Trial of
the Century" as superficial and showy as possible, but more importantly, framed the debate as
between the popular men of religion against the popular men of science (atheists), thus
generating publicity and popular interest in the trial.
A horrible mix of concerns over morality and religion, and the creation of a faux debate
made matters of sensationalism and superficiality worse. This resulted in an immensely popular
trial, a trial that had to be moved to a wooden stage outside the courthouse due to the sheer size
of the audience. According to the quantity of articles published by the NYT, it would seem that
the newspaper made sense of the debate as a struggle between Darwin and Bible, though it was
clear among scientific circles, even among religious ones, that this debate wasn't so; even if
Bryan versus Darrow existed, Darwin versus Bible or science versus religion did not in reality, in
scientific nor religious reality.
Voices other than Bryan or Darrow were few and far between, buried deep in the
newspapers, which the gatekeepers, editors, knew would not likely spark interest. Scopes’
opinion was muffled by Darrow’s or Bryan’s. Many articles appeared in the New York Times
reconciling science and religion61, some included prominent modernist theologians, such as
Harry Fosdick (“Talk of Fosdick as Witness.”) In a letter to the editor on March 24th, 1925,
Jerome Alexander wrote, “Governor Peay has failed to see that the theory of evolution deals only
60
NYT, July 12, 1925; July 20, 1925; July 20, 1925; July 21, 1925.
NYT, April 5, 1925, “SCIENCE AND RELIGION,” p E4; June 15, “HIBBEN RECONCILES EVOLUTION
WITH GOD :Princeton Head Says Christianity Needs No Ban on Scientific Teaching. TO OPEN ENDOWMENT
DRIVE $20,000,000 Campaign for University Announced -- Two Deans Depart From Office.," p 17; April 20,
"LIBERAL PREACHES IN OLD JOHN STREET :The Rev. A.H. Cann Praises Christian Evolution to Methodism's
Mother Church. OLD THEORIES ARE DROPPED That Is Because They Have Become Outworn After Serving
Their Day, He Says.," p 20; July 13, "CALLS DAYTON TRIAL A SILLY PERFORMANCE :Evolution Does Not
Contradict Fact of Creation, Says the Rev. W.B. Kinkead.," p 15.
61
28
with the method … It does not deny God – on the contrary: it makes him and his works all the
more marvelous.”62 The opinions of pro-science laymen or religious figures who spoke the
boring words of reconciliation and friendship were relegated to later sections in the newspaper.
They were not given coverage equal to those who spoke of theological war. The NYT knew
attention would be paid if the trial, and science itself, was cast as a battle between the pious and
the impious.
The shift from scientists’ to journalists’ popularization of science led to two
consequences for the public understanding of science. First, the lay public responded with a
tallying approach toward scientific debate. Compared to the earlier popularizing scientists’
lengthy conversation of historical context, methodology, observations and implications,
journalists short interpretation of the scientists’ general conclusion and emphasis on fact
divorced from meaning, cut out scientific detail which produced a confused, misunderstanding of
the science. Very rarely would detailed explanations of science appear in the New York Times or
the Washington Post, such as Van Buren Thorne’s “From Solar Systems to Deep Sea Soundings”
(summarizing Slosson’s book Keeping Up With Science) that included method detail and
implications, and set science within its historical development.63 Even then it was a summary of
a scientist popularizer in a specialized magazine. Yet what appeared more often than articles
reporting science inadequately, were articles that presented a scientific debate. Along with the
controversy generated by Professor See in relativity were numerous others: with regard to the
debate on relativity – Sir Oliver Lodge versus Professor Charles Lane Poor64, Albert Michelson
62
NYT, March 24, 1925, “"Tennessee and Evolution," p X12.
NYT, By VAN BUREN THORNE. "From Solar Systems to Deep-Sea Soundings :KEEPING UP WITH
SCIENCE: Notes on Recent Progress in the Various Sciences for Unscientific Readers. Edited by Edwin E.
Slossons, H.S., Ph. D., Director of Science Service, Washington. Author of "Easy Lessons in Einstein." "Cheatice
Chimestry." "Blots and Personalities," p BR12.
64
NYT, January 16, February 9, 1920, February 8, February, 20 1921.
63
29
versus Professor Dayton C. Miller65, and the popular Einstein versus Newton.66 The same was
so for the public debates over evolution, structured however as religious, especially as we near
the date of the Scopes trial.
The problem with this approach, without coupled discussion of science, was that it forced
the lay public to rely on conflicting scientific authority, which by the 1920s was viewed as failed
progressive era value, and represented as elitist. Without the proper education, the public
responded with keeping a scoreboard; i.e. keeping a count of the total number of authorities in
favor of a scientific theory versus those in opposition. This was a highly subjective system; the
lay public’s votes would depend upon their own personal beliefs, or lack thereof, or even how
long they kept up with running debates. Perhaps the lay public majority would hold whichever
side produced the largest number of supporters, as truth, but in reality the lay public voted for
each side according to their personal beliefs, each side presented by the media as holding specific
cultural attributes. A scoreboard in a decade of cultural anxiety reflected the tensions of the
time.
The second effect of the new pattern of popularization, whether by intention or not, was
an underlying reinforcement of anti-intellectualism. By presenting a debate, journalists appeared
to embody the objectivism of science. In practice, however, this meant a shifting of educational
responsibilities – a journalist would often quote scientists of differing beliefs regarding the truth
of a scientific theory.67 Then he would conclude with a snide remark on the theory’s
incomprehensibility. Sometimes this would be the introduction of an article, and sometimes be
65
NYT, April 29, July 22, 1925.
NYT, January 8, 1928.
67
Burnham, 237, 238.
66
30
the entire article – “Can’t Understand Einstein.”68 Journalists frequently emphasized scientists’
admissions of complexity and difficulty, reveling in the admissions of other prominent figures of
its unintelligibility – “Einstein Idea Puzzles [President Warren] Harding”69 From the outset, the
New York Times printed an editorial suggesting the “most disturbing feature of the situation” was
that “only men of wonderful learning have the ability,” to understand relativity, a clear, negative
mark against elites.70 In relativity, more so than in evolution, journalists attempted to mock the
theory’s incomprehensibility by fostering a deepening anti-intellectualism and contempt for the
elite few who did understand science. Ironically, the journalists offered no better education than
the scientists they mocked.
In the public debates over evolution, newspapers frequently quoted (sometimes
misquoted) defending scientists charges of ignorance against their opponents to suggest their
elitism. Most scientists did not believe in a clash between science and religion, and in fact, were
generally Christian. Yet the New York Times maintained the impression of their elitism by
focusing on those few scientists who agreed with Darrow and resented fundamentalist religion.
Before the Scopes trial, the newspaper published articles on scientists calling those who did not
believe in evolution ignorant, unintelligent or primitive.71 Yet one such scientist, Dr. R. C.
Osburn, was not calling the lay public ignorant; his quote was taken out of context. He was
referring to “modern theorists” in Ohio’s Academy of Scientists, though one’s impression was of
a direct attack against the public. Worse still was the editor of the Methodist Review, Dr. George
68
NYT, November 29, 1919.
NYT, April 26, 1921.
70
NYT, November 11, 1919, “Topics of the Times,” 12.
71
NYT, April 15, 1922, “CRITICS OF EVOLUTION ARE CALLED IGNORANT :Professor Osburn Says
Scientists Agree on the Fact, Disagree on the Method,” p 8.
69
31
Elliot, who claimed that “the doctrine of evolution is accepted by nearly all intelligent people.”72
During the Scopes Trial even worse opinions were voiced through the New YorkTimes: one
called Bryan a “religious bigot,”73 and another called him a “Neanderthal type.”74 These
examples should not summarize the notions of all those on the evolution side, but the publication
of these few voices, usually out of context, certainly lent credibility to the popular perception of
elitist experts casting judgment on the “uncultivated class.”
Burnham accurately concludes the general consequence for the public’s understanding of
science is scientific illiteracy, ironically in an era of high science subject content. He
summarizes the fundamental problem in the scientist to journalist transfer in popularization was
the journalist’s goal of the public’s acceptance of the world of media. Journalists and their
gatekeepers, editors, employed the tactics of sensationalism, non-partisanship and intellectual
condensation, in an effort to increase readership, circulation, and by extension, funding from
advertisers. The lay public in turn, showed little enthusiasm for science, and more for its fruits,
and its drama. Editors made “a surprising discovery: the public likes science or pseudo science!”
Editors and journalists were not concerned with the public’s acceptance of the world of science,
pushed into specialized magazines which were the newspapers’ competitors. Only when
pressured by more informed constituents would newspapers feature improved reporting on
science. Together, sensationalism, non-partisanship, and snippet science limited the lay public’s
72
Special to The New York Times.. July 16, 1923, “CALLS BRYAN SUPERFICIAL :Methodist Editor Calls His
Anti-Evolution Ideas a Danger..,” p 13.
73
NYT, May 25, 1925, “BRYAN IS ARRAIGNED AS RELIGIOUS BIGOT :The Rev. J.S. Williamson, in 16
Accusations, Replies to Dissenter Charge Made in Tilt. DEFENDS MODERNIST CREED Declares Bryan Is
Enemy of the Bible, a Peddler of Half-Truths and a Fomenter of Discord,” p 10.
74
NYT, December 22, 1924, “BURBANK SEES IN BRYAN 'NEANDERTHAL TYPE' :In Which 'Feeling,
Gesticulation and Words' Count More Than Inquiry and Reflection..,” p 18.
32
understanding of science. This forced readers of any intellectual background to make their own
conclusions considering the validity of science.75
Missing in Burnham’s excellent analysis, however, is the cultural context of popular
attitude during the 1920s, which would bolster his argument. Why did the lay public conclude to
reject science? What were the dangers with score boarding and anti-intellectualism? Burnham
explains the rejection of science on the public’s relative lag in education, but really, the 1920s
public was no more ignorant than the public in any other decade. While increase in the numbers
of newspapers in the 1840s through the 1880s, and the explosion of scientific popularization
during the same time frame may suggest a more literate public, the reality was more
complicated. Consumers of popularization in this decade were limited to wealthier audiences
than the average layman. In fact, popularization efforts in this era by scientists were due to the
controversy generated by the first War against Evolution after Darwin’s publications, The Origin
of Species (1859), and The Descent of Man (1870). Because funding for the sciences still came
from the cultivated class, scientists desperately attempted to display science as more than a threat
to traditional beliefs. The dynamic changed after the 1880s – now newspaper popularization
needed to include the lay public to reap the financial benefits of an increased circulation. Now a
greater audience emerged, to which the editors attempted to appeal using the baser methods of
drama and emotion. The journalists’ resistance to the popularization performed by scientists in
earlier decades widened the informational gap, as well as a cultural gap preexisting among the
uneducated lay public and the experts.
The media role in the public debate was to transform the layman’s scientific skepticism
into entrenched denial. Culturally, the public had regarded science with skepticism since 1921.
75
Burnham, 172, 200, 238, 241.
33
The reasons the effects of anti-intellectualism and score boarding, and the patterns of
sensationalism, feigned debate, and snippet science were intensified in the 1920s were due to the
cultural tensions of the decade following World War I. Occasionally the media would fuel
cultural tensions, and most important, as is the case in the Scopes trial, offered the tangible mask
(religion) with which to discuss science. By framing the debate the lay public solidified their
positions, and used material presented in newspapers as justification for their beliefs, but never
discussed the more pertinent issues and never truly educated the lay public.
34
Part 2 Cultural Considerations
Concentrating their popularization efforts to relate the values of scientists to the values of
the public, national scientists used the scientific method as the means to unite the scientist and
the layman. Due to the successful application of progressivism during the war, and the
perception of a progressive public, national scientists appealed to a perceived shared cultural
unity of progressive values. The scientific method, they explained, was the embodiment of
progressivism: at the heart of the scientific quest was the betterment of society, and indeed all
humanity. It could guarantee, in fact save democracy, to a people anxious about its continued
survival after the war, by entrusting upon the voting public a rational and objective method for
self-education, and moral improvement.76 Science, they promised, could “make the world safe
for democracy.”77
Not only did national scientists use the scientific method as a guarantor of progressive
politics, they also embodied the cherished faith in a committee of experts, valued during the
Progressive Era. The National Service Research Foundation (later to be called the National
Research Council) was a committee proposed by national scientists, George Ellery Hale and
Edwin Conklin to conscript the larger scientific community in the war effort through an
inventory of the nation’s scientific resources. The NRC embodied the scientific management of
scientists, combining the progressive values of efficiency, collectivity and cooperation led by an
expert panel, which included elite scientists and engineers such as Hale, Robert A. Milikan and
Herbert Hoover. It was remarkably fruitful, successful both for victory and the American state
76
Tobey, 89, 154.
Woodrow Wilson’s address to a special joint-session of Congress on April 2, 1917. Quoted in Paterson et all,
American Foreign Relations: A History Since 1895, 84.
77
35
of scientific research. But the NRC was not a product of wartime needs, nor the committee craze
of the Progressive Era – science was an oligarchy, an elite jury who decided facts and theories.
Milikan summarized: “[If] nine out of ten of the most competent, experienced, and dependable
physicists agree on the answer to the physical question about which I desire knowledge,” then it
was an established fact.78
National scientists also heralded progressive internationalism. Before the war ended, an
NAS meeting on April 21, 1918, one of the topics discussed, ran under the heading
“Establishment of an International Research Organization,” which noted how much could be
gained by international cooperation based on how much was gained through national
cooperation.79 International cooperation was a goal of the national scientists, and an important
necessity to control the potentially disastrous consequences of more dangerous modern science –
early predictions were made of the need for a worldwide government to control science after the
developing discoveries in atomic energy were made known to scientists. During the League of
Nations fight, many scientists endorsed the organization as a rational arbitrator for national
conflicts. Milikan said that the League of Nations was like the scientific methods, “the objective
mode of approach to international difficulties.” Science was the ultimate assurance of
progressive values, the consensus culture that reached its height in the 1910s, but became
questionable leading into the new decade.80
The League of Nations fight in 1918-1919 demonstrated the beginning of the end of
progressivism. Congressional Republicans, led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA), blocked
United States peace-making efforts with a series of reservations, which questioned the American
78
Milikan, “Science and the Standard of Living,” 17-173, Quoted in Tobey, 196.
Tobey, 47.
80
Milikan, “Science and Modern Life,” 155. Quoted in Tobey, 193.
79
36
role in international politics and its potentially detrimental effect to national interests.81 Lodge’s
reservations reflected the American public’s. When war became eminent after the sinking of US
ships from unrestricted German warfare, and the Zimmerman Note, Wilson needed a new tool to
mold an initially hesitant public opinion to receive both national consensus and financial support
for the war.82 Established in 1917 through Executive Order 2594 and headed by Progressive
journalist George Creel, the Committee on Public Information set forth a propaganda machine
that demonized the enemy. The American film and radio industries took a patriotic and
aggressively anti-German tone, releasing films such as The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin that
featured an evil and greedy German Kaiser Wilhelm II jailed by an American captain. 83 The CPI
treated World War I as an ideological battle, pitting, as evangelist Billy Sunday summarized,
“Germany against America, Hell against Heaven.”84 By limiting and describing the enemy in
such terms, propagandists discouraged from entering into collective security or international
agreements or a League of Nations with the very evil nations it had warred against. The public
no longer desired a Progressive internationalism if it meant being on the same side as evil
nations, which by 1921, also included the Soviet Union.
Before 1916, the lay public was generally politically progressive. Woodrow Wilson,
victorious in the 1912 and 1916 elections on a progressive agenda, promised a progressive
administration and commitment to progressive ideals: it would be defined by committees and
experts. However, Progressive Democratic politicians lost overwhelmingly in the November
1918 elections, leaving Congress with a conservative majority in both houses. The new society
rejected the wisdom of progressive era experts, like Creel of the CPI, who formed a consensus on
81
Paterson et all, 96-98.
Paterson, 83.
83
Whalan, American Culture in the 1910s, 158, 156.
84
Sunday, quoted in Paterson, 84.
82
37
faulty evidence or exaggerated propaganda, and created institutions designed to curtail civil
liberties – or like Wilson himself, who steadfastly campaigned for international cooperation.
Ultimately, the public decided these men understood no better than the average citizen. By the
end of 1921 international or progressive sentiment was obsolete and thoroughly rejected by a
new society that was isolationist and individualistic.85
The public similarly rejected national scientists, and their movement to receive public
support for a federal policy centralizing research, based on their political progressivism; in
particular the public recoiled from their belief in a scientific oligarchy and commitment to
internationalism. Statements such as Milikan’s and those of other national scientists on these
aspects of progressivism drove away a people skeptical of elites and anxious over international
events. By 1926 it was clear that the movement had failed. The National Research Council
never received additional funding from the federal government – national scientists’ appealed to
corporations through personal relationships for large donations. National science attempts were
thus ill-fated in a society where progressivism was disintegrating. Promoting anti-intellectualism
by making scientists sound elitist, the media fostered resentment of experts and elites.86
Tobey illuminates this relationship between the failures in progressive popularization and
the failure of the national science movement. He argues that the scientific rejection of
progressivism completed the demise of the national science movement. Meanwhile, the national
scientists withdrew from popularization altogether; the boom in business during the latter half of
the decade offered them financial support, thereby eliminating the need for scientists to convince
the public. While Tobey offers a convincing and comprehensive explanation for scientific
disillusionment with the national science movement, he fails to account for popular
85
86
Blanke, The 1910s, 9.
Tobey, 217.
38
disillusionment. After all, both experts and laymen had become conservative converts in the
1920s. The lay public had rejected the scientists’ appeals, which produced not only a loss of
interest and lack of support for a federal science policy, but a lack of sympathy for the movement
as well.87
Tobey places partial blame on the Einstein controversy. In fact, he credits it with initially
undermining the national science movement, frustrating the progressive message popularized by
the national scientists. The theories of relativity revolutionized the field of physics, giving
prominence to a “new physics” that seemed to overthrow Newtonianism and all the progressive
values associated with a regular, predictable universe. Newton’s laws provided the consistency
of nature and time required for humanity’s intellectual and moral progress, and scientific
research thereafter emphasized rationality, and cooperation among elite gentlemen. The new
physics shattered these traditional values and revealed instead a degenerative, decaying, chaotic
hostile and amoral universe, guided by neither common good nor common cause. The new
physics also denied the lay public the comfort of rationality, the comfort of common sense and
common experience. The lay public would have to place their faith in foreign scientists or the
American scientists who defended the foreigners’ work. Fearing that relativity threatened
traditional progressive values, national scientists increased their efforts to portray science itself,
regardless of physics, as inherently progressive in nature.88
The difficulties in Tobey’s argument lie in his analysis of the relationship between the
relativity public debate and the progressive popularization of science. The claim that relativity
challenged progressive popularization is debatable. Skepticism was limited from the onset of the
relativity debate, November 9th 1919, until the first attack on Einstein’s theory in early February
87
88
Tobey, xiii.
Tobey, 133, 136, 177.
39
1921.89 National scientists also succeeded in reconciling relativity with the progressive vision of
science during this time by ensuring the safety of Newtonianism.90 Nor was there hostility in the
coverage of relativity by the New York Times or the Washington Post, which published positive
articles regarding the veracity of the theories as well as the words of supporting scientists.91 The
importance of the debates over the theories themselves makes questionable Tobey’s claim of
relativity as undermining the national science movement. One must ask: how prominent did
theoretical physics figure into the minds of the lay public? Considering the limited media
coverage and the space it occupied in buried sections of the newspapers, perhaps the debates
over the new physics were not so shattering to progressive popularization. Because progressive
popularization remained consistent from the start of the preparedness campaign in 1916 until the
demise of the national science movement in 1926, while debate over relativity only began in
1921, we can conclude that something else that occurred between 1919 to 1921 caused the
ultimate failure of the national science movement. What changed was the cultural context within
which the scientists popularized; the problem was not that relativity undermined progressive
popularization, but the progressive message itself.
89
NYT, November 9, 1919 “ECLIPSE SHOWED GRAVITY VARIATION :Diversion of Light Rays Accepted as
Affecting Newton's Principles. HAILED AS EPOCHMAKING British Scientist Calls the Discovery One of the
Greatest of Human Achievements”, NYT February 8th 1921 POOR SAYS EINSTEIN FAILS IN EVIDENCE
:Columbia Professor Declares Discordance of Planets Does Not Prove Theory Advanced.”
90
NYT November 16, 1919, “DON'T WORRY OVER NEW LIGHT THEORY :Physicists Agree That It Can Be
Disregarded for Practical Purposes. NEWTON'S LAW IS SAFE At Most It Suffers Only Slight Correction, Says
Prof. Bumstead of Yale University,” December 2, 1919, “NOTHING WRONG IN SPACE The "Fourth Dimension"
is Only in the Mathematical Equations That Deal with Certain Phenomena,” January 11, 1920 “EINSTEIN'S
DISCOVERIES. A Revolution in Physics, but Not in Philosophy.”
91
NYT, November 25, 1919, “A NEW PHYSICS, BASED ON EINSTEIN :Sir Oliver, Lodge Says It Will Prevail,”
February 10, 1920 “EVIDENCE FOR EINSTEIN :Sir Frank Dyson Bees it in Airmen's Unconscious Upsets,”
March 28, 1920 “EINSTEIN'S THIRD VICTORY :Red-Displacement of Spectral Lines Regarded as Completing
Proof of Relativity Theory” Washington Post, December 7, 1919, “EINSTEIN'S THEORY UPHELD Results of
British Expeditions to Brazil Show Light Is Affected by Gravitation and Has Weight as Well as Mass -- Deflected in
Its Passage Near the Sine,” January 18, 1920, “Theory of Relativity Does Not Overthrow Newtonian Creation, Says
Dr. Einstein.”
40
Tobey explains that the causes of failure lay in scientists’ popularization efforts; he
blames the Einstein controversy as initially undermining those efforts, then, he argues the
general disintegration of progressive culture finalized disunion between scientists and the lay
public. Adopting a cultural lens, we shift our emphasis in Tobey’s analysis to the growing
disenchantment with progressivism, begun in the November 1918 elections, the growing public
support for conservatives’ isolationism and their abandonment of progressive ideals. Though
Tobey argued that the national science movement failed by 1930, through this cultural lens, we
refine his timeline choices. The movement failed in 1926, perhaps earlier, in 1921 with the
creation of Science Service, aimed at a specialized audience, politically cynical with uneducated
laymen, desiring that the world be run according to experts, a progressive value rejected, at this
time, by the average layman. We can extend this argument even further - popularization was
rather the health indicator for the national science movement. The indicator declined to poor
health entering the 1920s, and remained in critical condition throughout the decade.
More can be gained through Tobey's argument – it introduces a powerful new force,
unrelated to scientific fact that can affect a peoples understanding of science. That the surfacing
of the theories of relativity and evolution coincided with the national science movement's failure,
and with a changing culture, is no odd coincidence. There would then be a new relationship
between the scientific debates and the national science movement. The public scientific debates
in the 1920s demonstrate the failure of the national scientists’ efforts at popularizing a common
culture due to their reliance on political progressivism in a culture that was changing: politically,
it was no longer progressive or optimist, but conservative and cynical. Developments in public
science revealed the significance of cultural explanations. The national science attempt failed
because of a shifting cultural narrative – a cultural gap was created in the 1840s, but the values
41
of the layman and the scientist could and did unify in certain occasions. It was however not the
case in the 1920s when cultural tensions intensified the divide between scientist and lay public.
Assuming the centrality of culture in the public understanding and debate of science, we can
point to cultural answers for the cause of public rejection of relativity and evolution. Shifting
our emphasis on changing cultural context, the rejection of national science, and the skepticism
toward relativity and evolution, reveals a not so hidden anxiety and cultural tension that would
define the 1920s lay culture.
The change in political climate signaled a broader change in popular beliefs. Voter
turnout statistics demonstrate a general withdrawal and disillusionment with politics, a waning of
the progressive faith in democracy, and of optimism about people’s power to vote responsibly.
Turnout, for general elections was high during the Progressive Era, but declined following World
War I. Fewer than 50% of the public voted in the general election of 1920.92 (FIG 2) These
numbers underscored F. Scott Fitzgerald’s view: “The events of 1919 left us cynical rather than
revolutionary … it was characteristic of the Jazz Age that it had no interest in politics at all.”93
The progressive era showed how unwise the progressive faith in experts was; experts had
manipulated public opinion and engaged in consensus building that proved detrimental to
national interest. The foundations of democracy were unstable, domestically and internationally.
One of the defining components of the philosophy of modernity was its pessimism,
frequently describing post-World War I society as irrational, random and degenerative. The
philosopher John Dewey summarized “the growing sense of unsolved social problems,
accentuated by the war, has shaken that faith” in liberalism, which defined earlier as a
“philosophy of hope, of
92
93
US Census Bureau
Fitzgerald, quoted in Currell, 4.
42
Figure 2: Voter turnout history of the United States. Note the low turnout in the 1920s in
relation to the higher turnout during the Progressive Era.94
94
US Census Bureau
43
progress.”95 The modern literary movement explored the theme of degeneration, a shattering of
the belief of human progress and improvement, revealed by World War 1. Freud’s theories
which had become “epidemic in America” in the 1920s, owed their popularity to their
revelations regarding the deceiving appearances of human rationality. He unraveled an entire
subconscious driven by “death instinct:” man’s instinct to destroy both his civilization and
himself. The 1920s Prohibition culture of illegal drinking and the popularity of violent sport
offered further proof, besides the war, of humanity’s irrationality. The popularity of jazz further
reinforced perceptions of the chaos of modern life; the improvisation of jazz offered no
direction.96 Jazz poet Vachel Lindsay quipped, “Jazz is hectic.” Post-World War I society
seemed excessively irrational, and random.
But the public did not want to descend into pessimism, nor did it reject all aspects of
modernity. Finally exhausted with idealistic commitments to greater causes, Americans who
could afford it chose a life of leisure and consumption. Tax cuts for the wealthy increased
through the 1920s, which signaled how money worship became fashionable.97 Though the
public accepted these aspects of modernity, they rejected others. Not up for popular decision
was the acceptance of the morality and philosophy of modernity – uncertainty, irrationality and
randomness. Bruce Barton's career and best-selling book The Man Nobody Knows (1925) best
represents the transitional nature of lay culture. Barton's Jesus was the perfect cure for the
cultural instability of the 1920s; He was a modern businessman, but had retained a veneer of
Biblical morality. The majority of Americans supported Prohibition on matters of moral and
spiritual grounds. They rejected the immorality of the flapper, of gangsters, and of sexual
95
Dewey, quoted in Currell, 35.
Currell, 12, 37, 72.
97
Congress in 1921 passed the Revenue Act which cuts taxes fprm 70% down to 50%, Drowne, 1920s, 6; Then in
1923 from 50% to 40%, Currell, xxii; Then in 1926 from 40% to 20%, Currell, xvi.
96
44
liberation. They supported material progress in the vain hope that they would not only stimulate
economic growth, but that some day they too would live among the wealthy. They also
supported individualism, strongly resenting the progressive faith in experts. Most important, the
lay culture hoped to find optimism and normality through refreshed [re, purified, but soon to be
understood as 'fundamental'] spirituality and clung to traditional religion as a source of stability,
while rejecting modern morality in a culturally boisterous society.
The fluctuating state of morality reflected the volatile and sensitive state of religion in
post-World War I society. Exhausted with selfless sacrifices to ideals Americans defiantly
turned to self-indulgence, consumerism, materialism, and the comforting leisure mass
technology offered. The modern effects of mass technology and consumerism led partly to a
decline in church attendance.98 New immigration patterns also introduced greater religious
minorities, especially greater numbers of Catholics, who tended to interpret the Bible more
liberally. Though the US was founded on neither Christianity, nor Protestantism, the dominant
culture of the founders was an Anglo-Protestant one. But by 1900, Catholics comprised of 1/6th
the nation.99 Coincidently, the popularity of Sigmund Freud’s theories on group psychology, and
the popularity of atheism,100 led to a general public perception of a threatened and possibly
marginalized Christianity.101
To reconcile these developments with religion, modernism itself entered Christianity.
Though a few religious leaders were preaching against mass consumerism and its detrimental
effects for spirituality, Christian modernists ironically embraced some elements of modern
culture. Aimee Semple McPherson became the first radio evangelist. Though she was not a
98
Roaring Twenties, 91.
Roaring Twenties, 91, 210.
100
Currell, 15.
101
Roaring 20s, 91.
99
45
modernist, her popularity illustrates the ironic merging of modernity and tradition. Shailer
Mathews, theological modernist, summarized “The Faith of Modernism” in 1924: “[Theological]
Modernists endeavor to reach beliefs and their applications in the same way that chemists or
historians reach and apply their conclusions… [their] theological affirmations are the
formulations of results of investigation both of human needs and the Christian religion.”102 In
light of modern scientific and technological discoveries and theories, modernists emphasized
spiritual or liberal translations of the Bible, reminding, as Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick did,
of the ethical and moral teachings of Christ, while removing “intellectually dishonest” beliefs in
certain miracles such as the virgin birth. Modernists sought to reconcile post-World War I trends
in both science and popular culture with Christianity.103
The growing presence of modernism in affairs religious and the increasing secularization
of modern American society provoked a powerful reactionary movement – fundamentalism. The
term itself was adopted in 1920.104 Professing the five Fundaments – Biblical literalism, the
reality of miracles, and the virgin birth, sacrifice and resurrection of Christ – from “The
Fundamentals: A Testimony To The Truth,” fundamentalist Christians opposed theological
Modernists, sparking a religious controversy beginning in May 1922 with Fosdick’s sermon
defending of Modernism, titled “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” Though Fosdick spoke of
reconciliation with modernity and religion, fundamentalist leaders Charles Macartney and
Gresham Machen accused Modernists of secularizing Christianity105, while others like E. J. Pace
102
Matthews, quoted in Currell, 14-15.
Drowne, 20.
104
Currell, 16.
105
Macartney, quoted in Roaring 20s, 92, 94, 95.
103
46
Figure 3: E. J. Pace, cartoonist, depicting the modernization of Christian in the 1920s. The
Modernists, he mocked, were deconstructing Christianity until it resembled atheism.106
106
E. J. Pace, “Descent of the Modernists.” Christian Cartoons, 1922.
47
depicted theological modernizers as descending toward atheism.107 (FIG 3) In Macartney’s
rebuttal sermon, “Shall Unbelief Win?” Modernists were creating “a Christianity without
worship,”108 by de-emphasizing supernatural occurrences and miracles in the Bible – ie, making
inerrancy of the Bible unnecessary and irrelevant.109 Fundamentalists pressured Presbyterian
Churches to affirm the five Fundamentals, but the Auburn Affirmation in 1923 declared the
affirmations unnecessary to the practice of Protestant Christianity. Disgruntled by their loss (and
several other losses), fundamentalists continued their movement against modernity, fueled and
supported by general discontent of the lay public with modern morality.110
Edward J. Larson in Summer For The Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing
Debate Over Science and Religion analyzes the evolution debate in the 1920s, discussing the
religious, cultural and political contexts. Framing this debate as a conflict between science and
religion, Larson concludes that the 1920s anti-evolutionism phenomena arose out of the religious
Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy. Larson explains the centrality of religion in three
convincing arguments. First, Larson cites the importance of religious/fundamentalist leaders in
converting lay Americans into the anti-evolution camp. Two particularly important rallyers were
Billy Sunday, and William Jennings Bryan. The second facet of Larson’s argument is his
explanation of the moral and religious reasons for leading figures’ opposition to evolution. The
majority of leaders in the anti-evolution campaign were fundamentalist Christians who rejected
evolution on religious grounds. To men like Bryan, who accepted the five Fundamentals, the
theory of evolution needed to get its “hands off one thing and one thing alone, the divine creation
of man, the human being with a soul.” Third, Larson argues, the rhetoric used in questioning and
107
Wiki pic, E J Pace
Roaring 20s, 95.
109
Drowne, 20.
110
Roaring 20s, 95.
108
48
answering during the Scopes trial revealed the scientific irrelevance of the theory of evolution.
By the end of the two hour exchange between Darrow and Bryan, it was clear that neither cared
for the science of evolution: Bryan viewed himself as the Voice of the people, Protector of the
word of a traditional God who created man in his image against a demoralizing theory that
“accept[ed] a brute ancestry,” while Darrow saw himself as Enlightened, protecting the people
from “fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes.”111
Summer For The Gods provides an eloquently, thoroughly convincing analysis of the
Scopes trial. However, though the subtitle “America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and
Religion” alludes to a general discussion of science, Larson limits science to biology. The
general rejection of modern physics as well as modern biology during the 1920s is neither
inconsequential nor coincidental, but exposes a greater struggle in society. Not only are the
causes for denial of relativity unrelated to religion, but physics during the 1920s left room for a
Creator. The Big Bang theory was only a hypothesis at the time: its development began in the
late 1920s, and happened quietly among physicists without public awareness of it. There was no
Darrow equivalent in the relativity debates, no one who exploited science to attack and
undermine religion. Many popularizers went through great pains to reconcile relativity with
religion. Arthur S. Eddington, a science popularize and defender of both Einstein and Darwin, in
the New York Times frequently stressed that relativity was limited to man’s measurements of
nature, not really even a revolution against Newton, and does not address “the nature of things.”
The developments in quantum mechanics, though they did not enter the public discourse either in
the 1920s, convinced the majority of physicists of the existence of “the spiritual world alongside
the physical.” Two hundred physicists signed Robert A. Milikan’s statement regarding the
111
Larson, 267, 268, 54, 97, 46. Bryan, quoted in Larson, 8. Bryan, quoted in Larson, 47. Darrow, quoted in Larson,
190.
49
marriage of religion and science in “Men of Science Also Men of Faith,” an article in Science.112
Yet the public still remained skeptical over the veracity of the relativity debates. Both modern
biology and modern physics must therefore represent something more - a modern culture with
modern values and morality. Both were immoral and irrational according to the layman’s
understanding, because they offered a materialist conception of the universe.
Larson also relies heavily on the thoughts and actions of leaders of the anti-evolution
campaign without giving deeper analysis on the pertinent causes of rejection by the lay public.
Larson’s reliance on Bryan and Darrow limits his analysis to a selective, arguably more educated
and privileged few. The entire trial itself was a planned challenge by the ACLU, formed in 1920
to defend individual rights. One of these rights was the freedom of and from religion. The
young organization succeeded in persuading John Scopes, a biology teacher from Dayton,
Tennessee, to break a state educational law, the Butler Act, which prohibited teachers “to teach
any theory that denies the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible and to teach instead that
man has descended from a lower order of animals.” But Scopes was hardly paid any attention –
the trial was dominated by infamous figures whose religious or social causes lay in their hearts,
as Larson explained, and were important enough to them to persuade them to offer their services
for free. Thus the evolution or anti-evolution cause may have been exploited for a higher fight.
Darrow was fervently anti-Christian; he frequently called Christianity “a punitive slave religion,”
and mockingly charged anti-evolution fundamentalists as proudly “flying banners and beating
drums … marching backward,” even though he himself frequently conflated evolution, and
genetics, and misunderstood core concepts in contemporary evolutionary theory. Bryan’s true
motivations may also have been suspect. His main reason for disbelief, though he accepted
112
Eddington, quoted in Kevles, 178. Kevles, 177, 179. (Science June 1923, reprinted in Literary Digest July).
50
general fundamentalist morality and religion, was its social implications, evolution interpreted as
Social Darwinism. During the Progressive Era (1890s to 1910s), Bryan fought for the plight of
workers and spoke against the greed of big business.113 He equated evolution with ruthless
capitalism and with corporate justifications over unfair business practices. Big Business was let
loose in the 1920s, and conservative Republicans dominated US politics. Bryan turned antievolution into a Democratic political campaign; the popular slogan during the 1924 elections was
“Bryan and the Bible.” During questioning, Bryan would mockingly refer to conservatism or
Republicans. Claiming that evolution demotes humanity to baser animals, he joked that humans
occupied the same level as elephants.114 Considering the motivation behind those involved Darrow certainly driven by his anti-religious instincts, Bryan perhaps driven by political
concerns - it was most likely that the majority of Americans did not sympathize with these men
and their causes.
Moreover, the amount we can infer regarding the causes for scientific skepticism is
limited. The Scopes trial was a public event, and as such, was subject to the volatility of the
attendees; their presence was not a direct comment on their beliefs regarding the incompatibility
of religion and science. Michael Schudson criticizes the overextension on inferences when the
event in question is in the public sphere, simply because it involves a public. Though Schudson
analyzes this trend regarding historians’ inference of a rational public from the popularity of the
Lincoln-Douglas debates, the same can be applied to Larson's inference of a religiously inclined
audience from the popularity of the Scopes trial. The Lincoln-Douglas debates and the Scopes
trial were extraordinary events [and media sensations] involving extraordinary people. They did
not represent the general discourse or even opinion regarding slavery or science. To say that the
113
114
Darrow, quoted in Currell, 17. Currell, 16-18.
Larson, 48, 177.
51
Scopes trial is a comment on the religious causes for the lay public's denial would be like
suggesting that Bill Clinton's impeachment trial was a comment on the lay public's opinion
regarding extramarital sexual congress during the 1990s. This is not to say that the Scopes trial
or religious considerations are irrelevant, only that we must supplement, and refine our
understanding of a public event with care. We must take into account deeper or hidden themes
and set events within their appropriate context – a context that could have affected the lay
public’s inclination to side with powerful fundamentalist leaders who offered a “return to
normalcy” through the retention of Biblical literalism.115
For many in the lay public, a decaying society was falling victim to an encroaching
modernity. The seductive effects of modern mass culture – radio, film, cars - reinforced a
culture of leisure and consumption but undercut traditional morality.116 Movie industry
competition during the 1920s forced many companies to greater lengths in attracting larger
audiences, often employing morally ambiguous romantic and sexual themes. Films such as
Daughters of Pleasure (1924) and Kiss Me Again (1925) explore not only the controversial
sexual topics of extramarital affairs, but the seductions of modern art, music and morality instead
of traditional wives and hobbies. Both these films starred sex symbol Clara Bow (See FIG 4),
who represented the new liberated woman, often smoking, drinking and sexually aggressive.
Almost as morally taboo was male counterpart Rudolph Valentino, the “Latin Lover” whose
erotic tango in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) won him that title, and unsettled
anxious Americans. Other modern dances were attributed to the moral degeneration of the
115
116
Schudson, “Was there ever a public sphere? If so, when? Reflections on the American case,” 150-152.
Drowne, 20.
52
Figure 4: The perceived new sexuality displayed by popular actress Clara Bow. Hollywood in
the 1920s sustained the impression of a changing morality.117
117
Currell, 114.
53
younger generation. The New York Journal American (a newspaper owned by William
Randolph Hearst) proclaimed in 1922, “Moral disaster is coming to hundreds of young American
girls through the … sex-exciting music of jazz orchestras.” Jazz music, the majority of broadcast
programs on the air, and increased leisure and vacation time, convinced the lay public that a
moral transformation was being propagated by the new business culture and a new modern,
urban elite.118 Religious modernity was another aspect of encroaching modernity, which by
1921 included modern science.119
Modern science, in the lay view, embodied the most disturbing elements of modernity: it
was chaotic, random, pessimistic, and amoral. Three aspects of modernity defined modern
science. First, the new physics and new biology eliminated traditional comfort in absolution and
certainty, offering instead randomness, volatility, uncertainty and relativity. Second, the new
sciences revolutionized traditional concepts of rationality by making obsolete the common
senses and common experiences of the lay public. Last, modern science no longer held
humanity’s best interest and removed, or even abolished belief in, a traditional Christianity,
ultimately serving as the weapons for degeneration.
The new science ushered in a revolutionary philosophy of truth that was neither linear nor
absolute. Newton’s law displayed a comfortable logic and demonstrated the familiar concept of
linear progress desired in the Progressive Era. President of the American Physical Society and
professor of physics at Princeton, William Francis Magie described the comforting Newtonian
laws as absolute and linear: the laws “[were] the same for all men now, have been the same in
118
Currell, 103, 109, 113, 115, 129, 172.
Roaring 20s, i; The 1920s were the first decade in which urban Americans outnumbered rural Americans,
solidifying the impression of urban invading culture. Urban America was defined as sinful, where God’s laws were
not followed.
119
54
the past and will be in the future,”120 portraying all nature as rational. The theories of relativity
and evolution shattered traditional notions of absolutism - relativity eliminated absolute frame of
reference, absolute ideas of time and space, while evolution suggested species variations,
eliminating static species creation. In a 1920 paper, Einstein further explained his theory of
relativity as even eliminating “the idea of a straight line.”121 In a letter to the editor on May 30
1923, Stewart Arthur MacNab summarized, “for the idea of evolution is nothing more than the
affirmation … of the indisputable fact that life is a process of growth and decay.”122
Generalizing to modern science, he summarized the uncertainty and directionless change in the
new “economy of thought” of modern science. The new philosophy of science scrapped
absolution and certainty as a requirement for its veracity.123 Theoretical physicist Joseph Seidlin
explained, by a “successful theory [was] meant one which… enlarges our conception of the
universe,” which no longer was restricted to certainty or linearity.124
The new discoveries in physics and evolution, if limited to traditional notions of truth,
seemed also to defy rationality. The layman, with his limited education and knowledge of
advanced science, could only understand the theories according to his experience. In relativity,
Lt. Col. Graham Denby Fitch concluded, “the fourth dimension has no ‘real’ existence in the
sense in which the external world that we know by means of our senses has real existence.”125
No man could experience the fourth dimension nor understand the concept of time dilation and
relative mass and motion using only common senses. In fact, Einstein explained the truth
derived from everyday experience, “[was] founded on rather incomplete experience…We shall
120
Magie, quoted in Tobey, 101.
Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory.
122
Letter to the Editors of the New York Times: “Evolution and Modern Science,” May 30, 1923.
123
Tobey, 112-114.
124
Tobey, 113.
125
Fitch, “An Elucidation of the Fourth Dimension.” Quoted in Tobey, 121. Fitch wrote a prizewinning essay in a
Scientific American popularization contest.
121
55
see that this ‘truth’ is limited.”126 In evolution, the gradual “production of new forms”, and the
“extinction of old forms” and natural selection occurred in times longer than human lifespan,
unseen and invisible to men.127 The mechanism of random mutation and variation as discovered
by Thomas Hunt Morgan through inheritance likewise contradicted man’s senses and
experiences. To the laymen, the theories seemed irrational – it did not describe their reality as
Newtonian philosophy did and revolutionized its empirical ideals. Modern science, Bertrand
Russell announced, “[depended] to a considerable extent upon getting rid of notions which are
useful in ordinary life.”128
Though science by its inherent idea was limited to the study of the natural world, modern
science had completely eliminated God from the equation, thereby painting a naturalistic picture
of the world that made belief in God obsolete. Darwin had described natural history without
judging the supernatural:
Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species
has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the
laws impressed on the matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the
past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes.”129
He emphasized the “secondary causes” as opposed to the primary ones. “Nature [cared] nothing
for appearance, except in so far as they may be useful to any being.”130 Evolution, including
man’s evolution, was wholly naturalistic, a concept few men in the 1920s, including scientists,
found easy to stomach. Relativity similarly removed primary causes, though, it was relegated to
126
Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory, 1920.
Darwin, Origin of Species, 274.
128
Russell, quoted in Tobey, 126.
129
Darwin, 383.
130
Darwin, 76.
127
56
descriptions of the heavens131, and was not so much a direct assault on man’s divinity – let us
remember Bryan’s plea for modern science to keep its hands off this one thing, and the generally
spirituality of physicists during the 1920s. Modern science’s injurious statements describing a
naturalistic, amoral universe was the final aspect of modernity that the public could not accept.
However, even more culturally injurious was the new science’s exhibition of an
immorality that was rejected by laymen longing to return to traditional moral codes after World
War I broke them. Though popularized and thought of as beneficial for society, World War 1
chemical warfare demonstrated the destructive ability of science. Germany, who had entered the
imperial competition late, lacked the resources of the Allies and thus turned to its chemists,
directing Fritz Haber to equalize military prowess with a chemical warfare program. 132
Americans read in horror about the successful use of chlorine gas on April 22, 1925 by the
German army133 which killed 5,000 French soldiers.134 (Second Battle of Ypres). While the
physical sciences produced ever more dangerous weapons, modern evolution commonly
compared to eugenics in the minds of some anti-evolutionists. Moral implications of evolution
were certainly the major causes for the famous anti-evolution leader, Bryan.135 To traditional
social and economic Progressives like Bryan, “survival of the fittest” led to and justified to the
greed and excesses of capitalism, imperialism, and militarism,136 itself the main causes of World
War I. Eugenics, according to this interpretation, was the logical consequence of evolution by
natural selection and his link was used as such to prohibit its being taught in public schools.137
131
According to Einstein in Relativity: The Special and General Theory, the heavens retained its perfection, and the
theories still enabled that “the universe would necessarily be spherical.”
132
Ede and Cormack, 298-299.
133
NYT, April, 26 1915.
134
Ede and Cormack, 299
135
Larson, 25.
136
Larson, 27.
137
Larson, 27-28. Eugenics and scientific racism was in fact preached by many scientists during the 1920s.
57
Anxious over the contemporary state of morality in post-World War I society, the majority of
Americans displayed a similar anxiety over the new science.
Considering cultural tensions prevalent in the 1920s, and extrapolating the phenomena of
scientific rejection to other field of science, we arrive at a more complete understanding of
scientific public debate. The perception of an encroaching modern morality through film, radio,
secularization, and urbanization, and proliferated by a new culturally modern, conservative elite
(not to mention the emotional disillusionment and detachment following war) created an anxious
and sensitive public. Modern morality and modern religion threatened to overthrow long-held,
safe traditional beliefs. The developments in modern science represented a new morality,
demoting the heavens to chaotic coincidence and man to base mammal, but also a new modern
philosophy of truth. Traditional measures of scientific fact – common experience and common
sense – even undermined “proven” mathematics. Longing for a “return to normalcy,” and a
traditional America, leaders convincingly argued against modern science. Culturally and
educationally susceptible and vulnerable, the lay public was captivated by the rhetoric of the
anti-evolution campaign, but had already responded with hesitation and skepticism by 1921. The
media entered the debate to highlight and intensify cultural anxieties regarding modern science,
making the cultural gap between science and society so extensive that it could only take the
prospect of nuclear war in the 1940s to unite the two cultures once again.
58
Conclusion
The national science movement, 1919-1929, reflected the emerging relationship between
science and lay society. The World War I organization of science under the centralization and
coordination of the NRC proved scientifically fruitful, so fruitful that participating scientists
initiated a large scale movement to maintain national funding under a national organization
during peacetime. Needing to bridge the cultural divide between the lay public and the scientific
community, scientists embarked on a new popularization effort that appealed to cultural unity to
receive public support for a comprehensive national policy concerning the future of science. The
cultural unity that the scientists appealed to was a perceived embrace of traditional, progressive
era values: popularizers went through great pains to show the progressive nature of science
through the scientific method. The failure to establish a national science introduces the concept
of culture as strong enough to influence popular attitudes toward scientific developments. The
disintegration of progressivism was credited with destroying national science efforts. The subtle
cultural changes, beginning in 1919, went unnoticed among the scientists, as they continued to
appeal to politically traditional, progressive values, though these were quickly becoming
irrelevant, even assailed, by the public. This 1920s re-emergence of popularization, in
magazines, and sporadic newspaper articles was short-lived. It was a sustained effort by
powerful journalists and editors who sympathized with the national scientists’ ideals, and who
employed scientists still fresh from wartime experience, proponents of a closer relationship
between the public and the scientist. However, this relationship was only fitfully sustained; an
established culture of science and an entrenched commitment to professional isolation predated
the 1920s, and remained within the scientific community, never fully discarded. Scientific
59
popularizers descended into the realm of specialized magazines and business popularization.
Finally, the national science movement’s failure eliminated even this kind of scientific
popularization, further isolating scientists, and opening the door for newspaper popularization.
World War I served as a symbolic end to progressive culture. Its conclusion signaled the
beginning of an emerging culture struggling to resolve the tension between tradition and
modernity. Gone were the old ways and traditional rules governing American society: the end of
World War I shoved Americans into modernity. However modern cultural authority and
conservative elites embraced the new values, the lay public was not yet modern. Popular culture
was much more difficult, much more complex to define, and in the 1920s was in a state of flux.
The increasing urbanization and secularization, as well as the portrayal of an encroaching
modernity, through popular philosophies, sciences, literature and music, created the perception
of an invading culture. While The Great Gatsby (1925) was not met with commercial success it
describes accurately the mood of the 1920s. It illustrates the dangers of modern life as an
accident waiting to happen, and longs to believe, as Gatsby and the general public did, thatthey
could repeat the past.
As the lay public sought to define itself within a changing cultural context, it rejected and
embraced certain aspects of progressivism – they rejected the political culture of progressivism
(experts, optimism, cooperation, committees), but embraced its emphasis on morality, scientific
absolutism, certainty and linearity. The national science movement’s failure revealed the
presence of a cultural dichotomy between the scientist and the layman: national scientists
appealed to progressivism, but the public no longer sympathized with those values. However,
the lay public also understood science as representing modernity. Not only had science
revolutionized traditional certainty and philosophical absolution of truth, it also revolutionized
60
traditional ideas of morality. This perceived sense of modernity in science was propelled by,
later reinforced by the media, and religious movements; in the 1920s, it provoked the
fundamentalist resurgence. Prominent religious figures on both sides descended onto the debate,
either supporting modern science or traditional religion. The frame of the debate, as much as it
sounded like the theme of science against religion, was in actuality, tradition versus modernity.
In this overarching thesis, the average layman, who wasn’t enjoying the wealth of the decade and
wasn’t embracing fundamentalist spirituality, was hesitant, culturally anxious or skeptical of
anything resembling modernity. He turned to the fundamentalists because they seemed to offer
the only protection against modernity.
The media did not create the public scientific debates, nor did it create the cultural gap,
which had existed since 1840s. Yet the media, especially the newspapers, the most popular
source of information for the general public in the 1920s, solidified the lines delineating those in
support of modernity and those who opposed it. Considering this historical development of the
newspaper, a pattern of news coverage was created to increase circulation, along with newspaper
chains and affordability for all. These general patterns of coverage, which by the 1880s began to
discuss science in their Sunday newsletters, consisted of sensationalism to draw the reader in,
non-partisanship to appear un biased, and intellectual condensation to reach all educational levels
of their readers. However, with regard to newspaper science, the pattern of coverage resulted in
a subjective scoreboard, open to sensationalism, exploitation, the creation of science or religious
celebrities, and bred anti-intellectualism. Editors chose stories that they knew would capture the
public’s attention. What would capture the public’s attention in the 1920s were stories
presenting scientists behaving as elitists, and science as one of the aspects of modernity,
revolutionizing both traditional morality and philosophy.
61
The failure of the national science movement was not so devastating for scientific
research; popularization was not crucial to scientists for receiving funding. Federal funding was
only one of the means for finances, and not even the most rewording. Pure science in the 1920s
flourished as never before. The industrial corporations and philanthropic foundations possessed
funds sufficient enough to fund research. During 1873-1890, only 22 Americcan physicists
chose to study in American universities138, but in the 1920s, that number leaped into the
thousands.139 Some young Americans who were offered fellowships and scholarships from the
National Research Council, (funded by US Steel and AT&T) or the Rockefeller Institute, would
become the prominent scientists of the 1940s, including J. Robert Oppenheimer and Theodosius
Dobzhansky. In actuality, the rise of conservatism and business culture laid the foundations for a
new scientific era based in the United States.
While the state of science did not suffer from failed efforts at popularization, the public
did. Methods of popularization were always important for a public to understand science given
the growing knowledge gap between professionals and the public. Many scientists before 1890
used popularization as a tool to unite science and society on a cultural basis. It worked. But the
shift to popularization by journalists in the 1920s eliminated the careful analysis of the method,
observations, conclusions and implications of a scientific discovery which was used in
popularization by scientists. Patterns inherent in the media did not necessarily diminish a
people’s faith, optimism or understanding of science, but when coupled with a decade of cultural
tensions, the media heightened underlying anxieties about encroaching modernity. Already
138
Kevles, 39.
Kevles, 200. There was twice as many American physicists in university between 1920-1932 than there was
between 1865-1992.
139
62
scientifically illiterate, and culturally uneasy, the public was vulnerable to media reporting that
encouraged the rejection of science.
63
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