Summer for the Scientists? The Scopes Trial and the Pedagogy of Journalism

Method

This study examines how evolution was covered and explained through three months in 1925—from May, the month Scopes was arrested, through July, when the trial took place—in the New York Times, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, and Atlanta Constitution. The selected newspapers should represent how national and regional press explored evolution concepts, both as they related to the Scopes trial and in the broader culture. Papers that would have covered the trial as more of a local story, such as those in Tennessee, were not examined. Sampling began with a keyword search in the ProQuest database for references to “evolution” from May 1 to July 31, which originally yielded more than 1,250 results. An initial effort to cull the results to relevant newspapers and appropriate articles winnowed the sample to about 930 items. Nearly all of these were opened and scanned to assess their relevance and begin sorting. After further deletions, just under eight hundred documents remained, all of which were sorted into eleven content categories, including stories related directly to the Scopes trial, stories that focused on evolution science, stories examining evolution and religion debates outside the Scopes trial, and a variety of advertisements, humor columns, and cultural references that help illustrate evolution’s place in the broader public consciousness in 1925. ⁵⁵

Culling and categorizing were imprecise due to inconsistency in the way items were displayed in the database, ⁵⁶ because many items could have fit into multiple categories, and because some items jettisoned as irrelevant may have contained hidden nuggets. Any category totals will be rounded and used for illustrative purposes, not to develop a statistical argument. All the same, some proportions are telling. For instance, from more than nine hundred evolution mentions, about 35 non-Scopes-related articles were devoted primarily to reporting or commenting on the work and discoveries of evolution scientists, many of these not news stories but columns or book reviews. ⁵⁷ In the same three-month period, about 135 non-Scopes-related articles were devoted to debates, speeches, sermons, and legal arguments related to evolution. As this paper will make clear, the evidence shows that while opinions and arguments about evolution were legion in the summer of 1925, facts and explanations about evolution were not.

“Such an Opportunity for Popularizing . . . Scientific Truths”

Nobody seemed more optimistic about the pedagogical opportunities raised by the Scopes trial than the editorial writers for the New York Times. Near the beginning of the trial, a July 12 editorial predicted the event would give “scientific men a better opportunity than they have ever had to bring their teaching home to millions. They can unfold the evidence for what they believe, and can get a wider and more interesting hearing for it.” ⁵⁸ In the middle of the event, a July 17 editorial asserted that “in far wider circles there will be a clearer realization of what the word ‘evolution’ means.” ⁵⁹ And by the end of the affair, editors declared an educational triumph:

There is going to be a lot of reading done in and around Dayton in the next few years. Those who do it will soon know more about evolution than do multitudes in other parts of the country who accept it on faith . . .” ⁶⁰

Others shared similar optimism that the Scopes trial could advance public knowledge. Oxford University zoology Professor Julian Huxley, grandson of renowned Darwin defender Thomas Henry Huxley, was quoted saying, “[T]he controversy of fundamentalism against evolution . . . will make people think, and will cause, when they hear the evidence science has to offer and accept the facts of existence, a greater and more complete change of thought.” ⁶¹ Defense supporters made clear their hopes of educating the masses. In a front-page New York Times story with a deck head that read “Education through Newspapers to Be Aim until the Case Is Decided,” one reporter wrote,

The hopes that most of those connected with the defense have of using this trial and its attendant publicity to correct some of the misconceptions with regard to evolution and try to end the antagonism of many religious people toward science and scientists were very evident yesterday. ⁶²

At least one New York Times letter writer implored the press to present the full nuance of evolution theory: “Will the newspapers do their share in dissipating popular error, or will they continue to imply that man came from a monkey and religion consists in believing literally the Book of Genesis?” ⁶³

The question was on point. For all the talk about the educational opportunities afforded by the Scopes trial, the opportunities generally taken were far more sensational, or procedural, than pedagogical. Of the more than 630 news, feature, and non-editorial opinion items mentioning evolution in the present sample, only about 70 had evolution science as their primary focus. These items included news reports of scientists’ testimony in the Scopes trial, reviews of evolution-based books, and a smattering of stories about scientific research. Overall, more than three hundred news items pertained directly to the Scopes trial, but just over a tenth of those placed more emphasis on science than on procedure, conflict, personality, or rhetoric.

Much coverage from May through July of 1925 was devoted to debates and characterizations of evolution or religious fundamentalism by people unconnected to the trial or to scientific research: religious, academic, military, and governmental figures who engaged in a broader cultural debate either through direct references to Scopes or through separate battles over textbooks, curriculum, morality, religion, and science that raged across the country. In about hundred items, public officials or cultural figures commented on the Scopes trial from across the continent and even Europe. One American preacher called the trial “a debauchery of hatred and bigotry,” in which “all ideas concerning evolution and its connection with the Bible are so colored with personal conceit and animosity that the color obscures the partial truths in them.” ⁶⁴ Meanwhile, some 135 news stories touched on non-Scopes-related evolution controversies, including a facetious legal battle that an evolutionist federal employee forced on the Washington, D.C., public schools. ⁶⁵ In short, a very small proportion of newspaper ink spilled on the topic of evolution in mid-1925 was devoted to helping people understand it. ⁶⁶

“Man Is Descended from a Lower Order of Animals”

If evolution was not treated pedagogically in most news stories, how was it treated? One possible characterization is “matter-of-factly.” Most often, the term was introduced as the subject of the story but left unexplained. Despite the express desire, within the press and without, that newspapers be a tool for educating the public on evolution, most coverage appeared to assume that the science was already well understood—at least among newspaper readers. Let this complete New York Times item, an Associated Press story that likely was heavily edited for space, serve as an emblematic example of the contradiction between the education-oriented coverage evolution supporters envisioned and the rhetoric-dominated coverage readers actually got:

London, June 15 (AP)—Sir Oliver Lodge, addressing a meeting here last evening, appealed to his hearers not to be “frightened at the word ‘evolution,’ as they are in America.”

He said he did not know what the Americans thought the word meant, but he thought it was the hope of the world. It meant growth, development, and progress. If the world was not to be stagnant it must be evolving.

Now that humans were conscious beings, with a sense of free-will and knowledge, they could help in the process, and evolution might go on faster. ⁶⁷

Although a three-paragraph brief must omit key information, what is retained and emphasized illustrates the essence of the paradox: even in an atmosphere where it was acknowledged that many Americans might not understand what evolution was, this story, and the vast majority of longer stories surrounding the evolution debate, made no attempt to define and describe evolution science before highlighting what some individual thought it meant. It could mean scientific progress, or academic freedom, or anti-Biblical amoralism, or legal turmoil, or cultural struggle, depending on the nature of the story. In day-to-day coverage, the what of evolution was glossed over on the way to the why. ⁶⁸ These social and cultural connotations often outpaced understanding of the basic science, as advocates across the political spectrum used the concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to promote worldviews and policy aims based on belief that humanity could direct its own evolutionary trajectory. The phrase “social and political evolution” was used in 1925 to describe expectations for an increasingly effective international community through the League of Nations. ⁶⁹ A film critic noted that “[n]atural selection has led to a race of photoplays in which early disabilities have dropped off and the better qualities have been increasingly inbred.” ⁷⁰ More brutal interpretations of the theory “helped unleash the militant nationalism and murderous racism” associated with the twentieth century’s world wars, ⁷¹ a connection that provided moral fuel for Bryan’s anti-evolutionary rhetoric.

Most early Scopes stories that offered even a glimpse into what the science of evolution posited did so indirectly, often by citing the Tennessee statute Scopes was accused of violating, which forbade teaching that “man is descended from a lower order of animals.” ⁷² Reporters and editors were loath to provide even the most basic definitional outlines of evolution on their own authority, deferring instead to the preferred, if inconsistent, descriptions of the featured sources. ⁷³ As the Scopes episode progressed, there was an apparent uptick in descriptive phrases, sentences, or paragraphs in the coverage of speeches and sermons, which occupied a good deal of newspaper territory in mid-1925. These descriptions were essentially unmediated by journalists, who typically quoted at length any source that cared to opine—be it a clergyman, a professor, a politician, or a textbook. The result was a cumulative definition of evolution that ran a broad spectrum, un-refereed from story to story, making it difficult for the average reader to determine which claims represented the best scientific understanding of the time. So here a Chicago preacher got uncommonly specific in reconciling evolution with the Bible, saying the book

has upon it the marks of the lower forms of man’s primitive ideals, just as man bears upon him the physical marks of the lower forms which this organism was evolved. Man is no less divine because he still carries with him a pineal gland and a veriform appendix, relics of lower and now abandoned use. ⁷⁴

Another modernist clergyman offered this evidence:

Paleontologists have discovered in river beds, in gravel and in silt the fossil remains of Rhodesian man, the Neanderthal man, the Heidelberg man, the Piltsdown [sic] man, the Java man (perhaps more ape than man), who lived some half a million years ago. ⁷⁵

Earlier, a Maryland reverend offered a slightly different take, claiming that “Darwin’s book, the ‘Origin of Species,’ has given a wrong slant to the whole question of evolution. . . . Evolution is true, whether new species are formed or not.” ⁷⁶ None of these scientific assertions by religious leaders was held up to the scrutiny of scientists, nor to journalists’ own understanding of evolution science.

Likewise, when Tennessee adopted a new textbook to comply with its own law, the story atop the New York Times’ front page simply quoted from the book—“It is futile . . . to look for the primitive stock of the human species in any existing animals” ⁷⁷ —without contradiction or comment from other sources. Scientists rarely contributed to the intellectual free-for-all. Here is an unusually detailed contextualization from a Kentucky zoologist, tying evolution to a range of less controversial sciences:

If the evolution theory were abandoned, embryology would have to go, and with it and [sic] comparative anatomy, anthropology and other biological sciences . . . Even medical schools . . . would have to be abolished, for modern medical science is evolutionary, interpreting in the light of man’s descent from an animal ancestry rudimentary organs . . . and certain anomalies in anatomical structure otherwise inexplicable. ⁷⁸

As for those defending Scopes, a key aim was not to define evolution, but to distance it from popularly held myths—and to emphasize the tentative nature of scientific knowledge in contrast to the surety of fundamentalism. Scopes, in May, was quoted saying that “man and all animals ascended from the lower orders, but I have never seen or read any scientific statement that man is ‘descended from a monkey,’ and I do not believe that.” He was later paraphrased as accepting that humans and apes arose from a common stem. ⁷⁹ And here was lead defender Clarence Darrow in June:

Evolution is a process and it is too well written in anthropology to be denied, although there are parts of Darwin’s theory which have been rejected . . . Of course, the popular belief that man descended from the apes is wrong, as many other popular opinions are. Evolution nowhere teaches that. There are many branches on the tree of evolution and man is only one of them; the apes are another. They parted company long ago. ⁸⁰

At trial, outlining the defense’s case, Dudley Malone also denied humans’ direct descent from monkeys: “No scientist of any pre-eminent standing today holds such a view.” ⁸¹

These defense assertions, like nearly all claims about evolution from all corners of society, were entered into the record by diligent journalists without interpretation or mediation. Reporters and editors might have been reluctant to get too deep into their own interpretations of evolution due to a lack of developed conventions for science-based reporting. The subfield of science reporting for a mass audience was just beginning to be acknowledged in the 1920s. ⁸² Early in the century, an item in the journal Science poked fun at reporters’ scientific naiveté and at scientists’ critiques of oversimplified or sensationalized reports. ⁸³ A review of two comprehensive newswriting textbooks from the teens shows the term “science” absent from both tables of contents and indexes. ⁸⁴ By 1920, a book on feature writing did acknowledge the importance of science coverage, encouraging reporters to seek out “technical and scientific periodicals” for subjects to popularize. ⁸⁵

Science versus Rhetoric—A “Duel to the Death”

There is probably no better illustration of science’s secondary role during the Scopes trial than a comparison of how an apparently major scientific development was played against a major rhetorical push by prosecution supporter William Jennings Bryan. On July 8, under the headline “Reports Seeing Evolution,” the Times ran an AP story that began:

The theory of Fundamentalists that there is no such process as evolution and that animals and plants as seen by the world today have held their present forms since the beginning of time is directly contradicted in a newly published report of biological activities at Johns Hopkins University here. ⁸⁶

The story reported that, through a microscope, zoology professor Herbert Spencer Jennings ⁸⁷ had been “the first ‘actually to see and control the process of evolution among living things.’” ⁸⁸ The article, purportedly offering direct refutation of the claims of anti-evolutionists like Bryan, was displayed in five paragraphs on page 6. The front page of that day’s Times, meanwhile, featured a top-of-page headline declaring, “Bryan in Dayton, Calls Scopes Trial Duel to the Death: If Evolution Wins, He Declares, Christianity Goes . . .” ⁸⁹ The Atlanta Constitution, which had reported an earlier version of the evolution discovery on page 5 the day before, also ran Bryan’s “Duel to the Death” claim across three front-page columns on July 8. ⁹⁰ The Washington Post published both stories inside the paper on July 8, subordinating the evolution discovery to Bryan’s evolution fighting words. ⁹¹ Despite hopes that the Scopes trial would shine a brighter spotlight on evolution science, the rhetoric of the trial overwhelmed a discovery that directly belied that rhetoric.

Science finally did get a few moments in the spotlight at the Scopes trial, first in the form of zoologist Maynard Metcalf’s on-the-stand testimony—out of the jury’s earshot and later ruled inadmissible—and then in some sixty thousand words of affidavits prepared by eight expert witnesses read into the record for appeal. Metcalf explained evolution in some detail, but the New York Times buried that detail on the jump. Despite the Times’ note in the lead that “Clarence Darrow opened his school of evolution . . . when he placed his first scientist on the witness stand,” the pedagogy in the newspaper story was secondary to legal procedure. ⁹² The Washington Post took a similar approach, ⁹³ and the Christian Science Monitor put the whole story on page 5. ⁹⁴ The Constitution gave Metcalf more room on the front page, where his credentials and background were laid out in a mainbar and Darrow’s line of questioning teased readers to the jump. ⁹⁵ A front-page sidebar went deeper into Metcalf’s summary, in which he defined “the fact” of evolution as “the change of an organism from one set of characteristics into a different condition characterized by a different set of characteristics, either structural or functional” and explained that “[t]he whole series of such changes have taken place during hundreds of millions of years.” ⁹⁶ This summary of Metcalf’s testimony provided perhaps the only instance from May through July in which the explanation of evolution science took center stage.

The second—and final—significant opportunity to teach science directly from the Scopes trial came on Monday, July 20, when written statements of eight expert witnesses were admitted. The purpose of these statements was twofold: to explain evolution science and to show that it was not contradictory to mainstream Christian belief. The experts represented the fields of zoology, anthropology, geology, agriculture, and education, and they offered arguments ranging from the fossil record to human anatomy to genetics. However, as in the case of Herbert Spencer Jennings’ evolution discovery, a more “newsworthy” event occurred on the same day: Clarence Darrow put William Jennings Bryan on the stand and cross-examined him on the Book of Genesis. Science again was subordinate. The Times did start a roundup of the scientists’ statements, off the Bryan–Darrow lead, on the front page and devoted very nearly a full jump page to the testimony. ⁹⁷ But the complicated statements were unleavened by journalistic interpretation or synthesis that could have connected themes or eased understanding. The Washington Post and Atlanta Constitution, meanwhile, relegated the scientists to an inside page, where they lost a battle for column inches to Darrow and Bryan. In the Post, the scientists received about one full column, to the right of the five columns devoted to the legal hulks. ⁹⁸ The Constitution ran the same AP roundup, allowing about two paragraphs for each affidavit. ⁹⁹ The Christian Science Monitor, in a story posted the day the testimony was released, offered slightly more room and reader-friendly editing, but the scientists’ words were at the bottom of a roundup story and did not warrant their own headline. ¹⁰⁰

“The Accumulated Abdominal Sag of Half a Million Years”

There were efforts to teach about evolution in newspapers at the time of the Scopes trial, but most of this work did not come from journalists. The press’ role in explaining evolution in mid-1925 often occurred off the main news pages, beyond the daily crush of speeches, sermons, and legal maneuvers. Newspapers offered their limited opportunities for enlightenment in a few ways. One was a handful of major pieces on evolution topics—typically written by scientists themselves. Another area was in book reviews, where long essays presented cogent summaries of evolution science as described by authors. Editorials, opinion, and special topics columns provided some of the most accessible descriptions. Even advertisements played on evolution themes, often with an approachable tone that journalists might have emulated.

One of the biggest treatments of evolution in mid-1925 was part of a full-page Times face-off on June 21, pegged to the Scopes controversy. Appearing under the umbrella head “Both Sides: Fundamentalism and Evolution” and anchored by a large illustration, the page featured a fundamentalist essay by theology professor J. Gresham Machen and an adjoining piece on evolution science by zoologist Vernon Kellogg. ¹⁰¹ Kellogg’s essay tackled pre-Darwinian understanding of evolution, introduced Darwin, discussed evidence accumulating after Darwin, offered explanation in the form of the human brain and embryo development, and concluded with a forceful affirmation that scientists draw conclusions based on observed evidence: “As [the scientist] studies life, plant, animal, and human, he simply and inescapably finds out that evolution really is. And then he says so.” ¹⁰²

A similar display during the Scopes period was a major July 12 essay by Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History and a eugenicist. In this vast piece, which included a large diagram depicting the “family tree of man,” Osborn answered William Jennings Bryan’s claim that evolution science amounted to nothing more than “guesses strung together” with a detailed rundown of humanity’s perceived ancestors and an assertion that all accumulated evidence “fits into its proper place.” ¹⁰³

In addition to these magazine-style pieces, some of the most pedagogical writing on evolution came from reviews of scientific books. Henry Fairfield Osborn also appeared in book sections, where his tome The Earth Speaks to Bryan, dedicated to John Scopes, was reviewed. ¹⁰⁴ A review of The Fitness of the Environment expounded on the author’s thesis that “not only have living organisms adapted themselves to the environment in which they live, but the environment itself is remarkably adapted for the development of life on this planet.” ¹⁰⁵ Humans’ progression from protoplasm to mammalia is explored in a review of The Science of Biology, along with quotes from the book noting how “[i]n limb plans [man] is more like a frog than either horse or cow.” ¹⁰⁶ Another venue for scientific explanation was opinion and feature columns. Some of the most accessible descriptions of evolution came in a syndicated column titled “In the Garden with Burbank,” ¹⁰⁷ including this mid-1925 explanation:

No two plants, no two animals are exactly alike, and all new species have been built up through the selection of favorable variations. Any slight change that gives a plant or an animal an advantage over its competitor or its surroundings, would in time by repetition improve the species and lead to their survival. ¹⁰⁸

Perhaps most interestingly, evolution science was explored in advertisements. Evolution themes appeared often in fashion ads, including a bold, text-heavy advertisement by the Corset Manufacturers Association of the United States, which described this undergarment as a cure for “the accumulated abdominal sag of half a million years without the muscle strengthening influence of tree life and cliff dwelling to help check the slump.” This conclusion culminated a lengthy essay tracing evolution in scientifically imprecise terms that nevertheless offered an accessible introduction to the basics of early twentieth-century biology: “[Man] has cast aside over 180 organs which have become useless to him. He has left his air bladder, gills, and fins with the fishes, and replaced them with lungs and four limbs.” ¹⁰⁹ The ad is not the best lesson on evolution, but news writers and editors could have taken an example from the tone and simplicity of the writing, not to mention the very act of trying to explain clearly what evolution was in addition to reporting what everybody thought about it.

Summer for the Sensationalists

Journalism serves several vital functions in society. The most prominent is spreading news, information that keeps people in touch with what is happening right now. A less demanded and practiced function, but one that has been acknowledged since at least the turn of the last century, is building a broad base of knowledge to help the public understand and contextualize the news. John Dewey, writing around the time of the Scopes trial, argued that these news and knowledge functions must work in tandem to sustain a healthy democracy: “‘News’ signifies something which has just happened, and which is new just because it deviates from the old and regular. But its meaning depends upon relation to what it imports, to what its social consequences are.” ¹¹⁰ This argument continues today, with some scholars calling for redefining journalism as “the new knowledge profession” to address gaps in the educational system and help build a shared reality amid the fragmentation of information in the digital age. ¹¹¹ A start to this shift involves instilling critical thinking and subject-matter expertise in aspiring journalists, embedding the tools and confidence to pick winners and losers among competing truth claims. ¹¹² The lingering, though often unacknowledged, question has been what mix of news and knowledge best serves society. “[J]ournalism has focused primarily on gathering and conveying the news of the day and less—if at all—on connecting this information with other areas of knowledge,” Wolfgang Donsbach writes. “It seems necessary that journalists widen their societal role . . .” ¹¹³

This examination of four major newspapers’ coverage of evolution around the 1925 Scopes trial demonstrates that, while building knowledge was a main goal of journalists and many trial participants, little scientific knowledge was actually shared. Edward Caudill, one of a handful of scholars to have closely examined press coverage of the Scopes trial, argues that journalists’ coverage betrayed a bias in favor of empirical, observable truth over revealed, religious truth. ¹¹⁴ But the current analysis shows that the empiricist preference rarely translated to a clear presentation of the empirical basis for evolution science. The snark of journalists like H. L. Mencken ¹¹⁵ and the general editorial disdain for fundamentalism aside, day-to-day coverage of the Scopes trial and surrounding evolution debates evidenced a strongly situational empiricism, a transcriptionist methodology that unskeptically presented all cases—be the source a fundamentalist preacher, an evolutionary scientist, or an advocate at trial—thereby hiding the empiricist forest in the empirical trees.

Several other press conventions that interfered with quality pedagogy during the Scopes trial remain with us today. One is the news value of conflict—a preference for highlighting warring factions, such as Bryan’s “duel to the death” provocation, under the assumption that conflict is more dramatic and attention grabbing. ¹¹⁶ Perhaps a repeated focus on informational stories such as the direct observation of evolution in practice, rather than rhetorical claims about evolution as a series of “guesses,” would have engendered broader acceptance of evolution over the past nine decades. Another convention that has hindered understanding of science is the quaint assumption that once a fact is reported, it is widely known and accepted. The New York Times offered a good deal of space to scientists to explain evolution, but only on a handful of occasions that were likely overlooked or under-absorbed by many readers.

A final harmful convention is a preference for opinion over facts. As noted above, for every item unrelated to the Scopes trial that focused on the facts of evolution from May through July 1925, nearly four stories emphasized the unchallenged opinion of a cleric, a politician, an academic, or a lawyer. It is hard to develop understanding of a complex topic when people who do not know about the topic get better play in the news than people who do. ¹¹⁷ Journalism researchers and practitioners should explore new frameworks that can help people better understand the natural world and therefore contribute more constructively to public policy.

Journalists missed an unprecedented opportunity in 1925 to teach Americans about a complex but fundamental scientific theory that underlies all of biology. They missed this opportunity as a result of professional detachment, improper assumptions, and lingering news values that subordinate knowledge to titillation. There were, however, golden moments during the Scopes affair that illuminated the nuance, informality, curiosity, and humanity that can depolarize factions and facilitate a cooperative search for knowledge. One scene-setting piece for the New York Times noted that, even as local authorities forbade a modernist to promote evolution on the courthouse lawn for fear of inciting violence, “the farmers took more kindly to Charley Brooks’s practical demonstration of the origin of species in his exhibit of two kittens with the hind legs of a rabbit.” In a rare portrayal of interaction among scientists and laypeople, the story notes, “the scientific persons present declared the ‘cabits’ were probably examples of the Mendelian law of inherited characteristics, intimating that the grandmother of the ‘cabits’ had rabbit blood as well as cat blood.” ¹¹⁸

The “cabit” anecdote, though presented as an amusing aside, offers a glimpse into the kind of reporting that might have turned the Scopes trial into the pedagogical event that editorial writers hoped it would be. The simple give-and-take between people of different ideas and backgrounds—an exchange of experience and developing knowledge, of curiosity and explanation—offers a way into evolution science that is not available through reams of one-sided, unmediated, formalized claims in transcribed speeches, sermons, and textbooks. Moments like these will always be there for journalists; it is the charge of editors, citizens, and scholars to recognize and treasure them.