But does life’s history really match either of these two stories? Addition and differentiation are not mutually exclusive truths inherent in nature. They are schemata of organization for human thought, two among a strictly limited number of ways that we have devised to tell stories about nature’s patterns. Battles have been fought in their names many times before, sometimes strictly within biology. Consider, for example, the early nineteenth century struggle in German embryology between one of the greatest of all natural scientists, Karl Ernst von Baer, who viewed development as a process of differentiation from general forms to specific structures, and the Naturphilosophen (nature philosophers) with their romantic conviction that all developmental processes (including embryology) must proceed by linear addition of complexity as spirit struggles to incarnate itself in the highest, human form (see Chapter 2 of my book Ontogeny and Phylogeny, Harvard University Press, 1977).
My conclusion may sound unexciting, even wishy-washy, but I think that evolution just says yes to both metaphors for different parts of its full complexity. Yes, truly novel structures do arise in temporal order—first fins, then legs, then hair, then language—and additive models describe part of the story well. Yes, the coding rules of DNA have not changed, and all of life’s history differentiates from a potential inherent from the first. Is the history of Western song a linear progression of styles or the construction of more and more castles for a kingdom fully specified in original blueprints by notes of the scale and rules of composition?
Finally, and most important, the bankruptcy of Gladstone’s effort lies best exposed in this strictly limited number of deep metaphors available to our understanding. Gladstone was wrong in critical detail, as Huxley so gleefully proved. But what if he had been entirely right? What if the Genesis sequence had been generally accurate in its broad brush? Would such a correspondence mean that God had dictated the Torah word by word? Of course not. How many possible stories can we tell? How many can we devise beyond addition and differentiation? Simultaneous creation? Top down appearance? Some, perhaps, but not many. So what if the Genesis scribe wrote his beautiful myth in one of the few conceivable and sensible ways—and if later scientific discoveries then established some fortuitous correspondences with his tale? Bats didn’t know about extinct pterodactyls, but they still evolved wings that work in similar ways. The strictures of flying don’t permit many other designs—just as the limited pathways from something small and simple to something big and complex don’t allow many alternatives in underlying metaphor. Genesis and geology happen not to correspond very well. But it wouldn’t mean much if they did—for we would only learn something about the limits to our storytelling, not even the whisper of a lesson about the nature and meaning of life or God.
Genesis and geology are sublimely different. William Jennings Bryan used to dismiss geology by arguing that he was only interested in the rock of ages, not the age of rocks. But in our tough world—not cleft for us, and offering no comfortable place to hide—I think we had better pay mighty close attention to both.
28 | William Jennings Bryan’s Last Campaign
I HAVE SEVERAL REASONS for choosing to celebrate our legal victory over “creation science” by trying to understand with sympathy the man who forged this long and painful episode in American history—William Jennings Bryan. In June 1987, the Supreme Court voided the last creationist statute by a decisive 7–2 vote, and then wrote their decision in a manner so clear, so strong, and so general that even the most ardent fundamentalists must admit the defeat of their legislative strategy against evolution. In so doing, the Court ended William Jennings Bryan’s last campaign, the cause that he began just after World War I as his final legacy, and the battle that took both his glory and his life in Dayton, Tennessee, when, humiliated by Clarence Darrow, he died just a few days after the Scopes trial in 1925.
My reasons range across the domain of Bryan’s own character. I could invoke rhetorical and epigrammatic expressions, the kind that Bryan, as America’s greatest orator, laced so abundantly into his speeches—Churchill’s motto for World War II, for example: “In victory: magnanimity.” But I know that my main reason is personal, even folksy, the kind of one-to-one motivation that Bryan, in his persona as the Great Commoner, would have applauded. Two years ago, a colleague sent me an ancient tape of Bryan’s voice. I expected to hear the pious and polished shoutings of an old stump master, all snake oil and orotund sophistry. Instead, I heard the most uncanny and friendly sweetness, high pitched, direct, and apparently sincere. Surely this man could not simply be dismissed, as by H. L. Mencken, reporting the Scopes trial for the Baltimore Sun: as “a tinpot Pope in the Coca-Cola belt.”
I wanted to understand a man who could speak with such warmth, yet talk such yahoo nonsense about evolution. I wanted, above all, to resolve a paradox that has always cried out for some answer rooted in Bryan’s psyche. How could this man, America’s greatest populist reformer, become, late in life, her arch reactionary?
For it was Bryan who, just one year beyond the minimum age of thirty-five, won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1896 with his populist rallying cry for abolition of the gold standard: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Bryan who ran twice more, and lost in noble campaigns for reform, particularly for Philippine independence and against American imperialism. Bryan, the pacifist who resigned as Wilson’s secretary of state because he sought a more rigid neutrality in the First World War. Bryan who stood at the forefront of most progressive victories in his time: women’s suffrage, the direct election of senators, the graduated income tax (no one loves it, but can you think of a fairer way?). How could this man have then joined forces with the cult of biblical literalism in an effort to purge religion of all liberality, and to stifle the same free thought that he had advocated in so many other contexts?
This paradox still intrudes upon us because Bryan forged a living legacy, not merely an issue for the mists and niceties of history. For without Bryan, there never would have been anti-evolution laws, never a Scopes trial, never a resurgence in our day, never a decade of frustration and essays for yours truly, never a Supreme Court decision to end the issue. Every one of Bryan’s progressive triumphs would have occurred without him. He fought mightily and helped powerfully, but women would be voting today and we would be paying income tax if he had never been born. But the legislative attempt to curb evolution was his baby, and he pursued it with all his legendary demoniac fury. No one else in the ill-organized fundamentalist movement had the inclination, and surely no one else had the legal skill or political clout. Ironically, fundamentalist legislation against evolution is the only truly distinctive and enduring brand that Bryan placed upon American history. It was Bryan’s movement that finally bit the dust in Washington in June of 1987.
William Jennings Bryan on the stump. Taken during the presidential campaign of 1896. THE BETTMANN ARCHIVE.
The paradox of shifting allegiance is a recurring theme in literature about Bryan. His biography in the Encyclopaedia Britannica holds that the Scopes trial “proved to be inconsistent with many progressive causes he had championed for so long.” One prominent biographer located his own motivation in trying to discover “what had transformed Bryan from a crusader for social and economic reform to a champion of anachronistic rural evangelism, cheap moral panaceas, and Florida real estate” (L. W. Levine, 1965).
Two major resolutions have been proposed. The first, clearly the majority view, holds that Bryan’s last battle was inconsistent with, even a nullification of, all the populist campaigning that had gone before. Who ever said that a man must maintain an unchanging ideology throughout adulthood; and what tale of human psychology could be more familiar than the transition from crusading firebrand to diehard reactionary. Most biographies treat the Scopes trial as an inconsistent embarrassment, a sad and unsettling end. The title to the last chapter of almost every book about Bryan features
the word “retreat” or “decline.”
The minority view, gaining ground in recent biographies and clearly correct in my judgment, holds that Bryan never transformed or retreated, and that he viewed his last battle against evolution as an extension of the populist thinking that had inspired his life’s work (in addition to Levine, cited previously, see Paolo E. Coletta, 1969, and W. H. Smith, 1975).
Bryan always insisted that his campaign against evolution meshed with his other struggles. I believe that we should take him at his word. He once told a cartoonist how to depict the harmony of his life’s work: “If you would be entirely accurate you should represent me as using a double-barreled shotgun, firing one barrel at the elephant as he tries to enter the treasury and another at Darwinism—the monkey—as he tries to enter the schoolroom.” And he said to the Presbyterian General Assembly in 1923: “There has not been a reform for 25 years that I did not support. And I am now engaged in the biggest reform of my life. I am trying to save the Christian Church from those who are trying to destroy her faith.”
But how can a move to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools be deemed progressive? How did Bryan link his previous efforts to this new strategy? The answers lie in the history of Bryan’s changing attitudes toward evolution.
Bryan had passed through a period of skepticism in college. (According to one story, more than slightly embroidered no doubt, he wrote to Robert G. Ingersoll for ammunition but, upon receiving only a pat reply from his secretary, reverted immediately to orthodoxy.) Still, though Bryan never supported evolution, he did not place opposition high on his agenda; in fact, he evinced a positive generosity and pluralism toward Darwin. In “The Prince of Peace,” a speech that ranked second only to the “Cross of Gold” for popularity and frequency of repetition, Bryan said:
I do not carry the doctrine of evolution as far as some do; I am not yet convinced that man is a lineal descendant of the lower animals. I do not mean to find fault with you if you want to accept the theory…. While I do not accept the Darwinian theory I shall not quarrel with you about it.
(Bryan, who certainly got around, first delivered this speech in 1904, and described it in his collected writings as “a lecture delivered at many Chautauqua and religious gatherings in America, also in Canada, Mexico, Tokyo, Manila, Bombay, Cairo, and Jerusalem.”)
He persisted in this attitude of laissez-faire until World War I, when a series of events and conclusions prompted his transition from toleration to a burning zeal for expurgation. His arguments did not form a logical sequence, and were dead wrong in key particulars; but who can doubt the passion of his feelings?
We must acknowledge, before explicating the reasons for his shift, that Bryan was no intellectual. Please don’t misconstrue this statement. I am not trying to snipe from the depth of Harvard elitism, but to understand. Bryan’s dearest friends said as much. Bryan used his first-rate mind in ways that are intensely puzzling to trained scholars—and we cannot grasp his reasons without mentioning this point. The “Prince of Peace” displays a profound ignorance in places, as when Bryan defended the idea of miracles by stating that we continually break the law of gravity: “Do we not suspend or overcome the law of gravitation every day? Every time we move a foot or lift a weight we temporarily overcome one of the most universal of natural laws and yet the world is not disturbed.” (Since Bryan gave this address hundreds of times, I assume that people tried to explain to him the difference between laws and events, or reminded him that without gravity, our raised foot would go off into space. I must conclude that he didn’t care because the line conveyed a certain rhetorical oomph.) He also explicitly defended the suppression of understanding in the service of moral good:
If you ask me if I understand everything in the Bible, I answer no, but if we will try to live up to what we do understand, we will be kept so busy doing good that we will not have time to worry about the passages which we do not understand.
This attitude continually puzzled his friends and provided fodder for his enemies. One detractor wrote: “By much talking and little thinking his mentality ran dry.” To the same effect, but with kindness, a friend and supporter wrote that Bryan was “almost unable to think in the sense in which you and I use that word. Vague ideas floated through his mind but did not unite to form any system or crystallize into a definite practical position.”
Bryan’s long-standing approach to evolution rested upon a threefold error. First, he made the common mistake of confusing the fact of evolution with the Darwinian explanation of its mechanism. He then misinterpreted natural selection as a martial theory of survival by battle and destruction of enemies. Finally, he made the logical error of arguing that Darwinism implied the moral virtuousness of such deathly struggle. He wrote in the Prince of Peace (1904):
The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate—the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak. If this is the law of our development then, if there is any logic that can bind the human mind, we shall turn backward toward the beast in proportion as we substitute the law of love. I prefer to believe that love rather than hatred is the law of development.
And to the sociologist E. A. Ross, he said in 1906 that “such a conception of man’s origin would weaken the cause of democracy and strengthen class pride and the power of wealth.” He persisted in this uneasiness until World War I, when two events galvanized him into frenzied action. First, he learned that the martial view of Darwinism had been invoked by most German intellectuals and military leaders as a justification for war and future domination. Second, he feared the growth of skepticism at home, particularly as a source of possible moral weakness in the face of German militarism.
Bryan united his previous doubts with these new fears into a campaign against evolution in the classroom. We may question the quality of his argument, but we cannot deny that he rooted his own justifications in his lifelong zeal for progressive causes. In this crucial sense, his last hurrah does not nullify, but rather continues, all the applause that came before. Consider the three principal foci of his campaign, and their links to his populist past:
1. For peace and compassion against militarism and murder. “I learned,” Bryan wrote, “that it was Darwinism that was at the basis of that damnable doctrine that might makes right that had spread over Germany.”
2. For fairness and justice toward farmers and workers and against exploitation for monopoly and profit. Darwinism, Bryan argued, had convinced so many entrepreneurs about the virtue of personal gain that government now had to protect the weak and poor from an explosion of anti-Christian moral decay: “In the United States,” he wrote,
pure-food laws have become necessary to keep manufacturers from poisoning their customers; child labor laws have become necessary to keep employers from dwarfing the bodies, minds and souls of children; anti-trust laws have become necessary to keep overgrown corporations from strangling smaller competitors, and we are still in a death grapple with profiteers and gamblers in farm products.
3. For absolute rule of majority opinion against imposing elites. Christian belief still enjoyed widespread majority support in America, but college education was eroding a consensus that once ensured compassion within democracy. Bryan cited studies showing that only 15 percent of college male freshmen harbored doubts about God, but that 40 percent of graduates had become skeptics. Darwinism, and its immoral principle of domination by a selfish elite, had fueled this skepticism. Bryan railed against this insidious undermining of morality by a minority of intellectuals, and he vowed to fight fire with fire. If they worked through the classroom, he would respond in kind and ban their doctrine from the public schools. The majority of Americans did not accept human evolution, and had a democratic right to proscribe its teaching.
Let me pass on this third point. Bryan’s contention strikes at the heart of academic freedom, and I have often treated this subject in previous essays. Scientific questions can
not be decided by majority vote. I merely record that Bryan embedded his curious argument in his own concept of populism. “The taxpayers,” he wrote,
have a right to say what shall be taught…to direct or dismiss those whom they employ as teachers and school authorities…. The hand that writes the paycheck rules the school, and a teacher has no right to teach that which his employers object to.
But what of Bryan’s first two arguments about the influence of Darwinism on militarism and domestic exploitation? We detect the touch of the Philistine in Bryan’s claims, but I think we must also admit that he had identified something deeply troubling—and that the fault does lie partly with scientists and their acolytes.
Bryan often stated that two books had fueled his transition from laissez-faire to vigorous action: Headquarters Nights, by Vernon L. Kellogg (1917), and The Science of Power, by Benjamin Kidd (1918). I fault Harvard University for many things, but all are overbalanced by its greatest glory—its unparalleled resources. Half an hour after I needed these obscure books if I ever hoped to hold the key to Bryan’s activities, I had extracted them from the depths of Widener Library. I found them every bit as riveting as Bryan had, and I came to understand his fears, even to agree in part (though not, of course, with his analysis or his remedies).
Vernon Kellogg was an entomologist and perhaps the leading teacher of evolution in America (he held a professorship at Stanford and wrote a major textbook, Evolution and Animal Life, with his mentor and Darwin’s leading disciple in America, David Starr Jordan, ichthyologist and president of Stanford University). During the First World War, while America maintained official neutrality, Kellogg became a high official in the international, non-partisan effort for Belgian relief, a cause officially “tolerated” by Germany. In this capacity, he was posted at the headquarters of the German Great General Staff, the only American on the premises. Night after night, he listened to dinner discussions and arguments, sometimes in the presence of the Kaiser himself, among Germany’s highest military officers. Headquarters Nights is Kellogg’s account of these exchanges. He arrived in Europe as a pacifist, but left committed to the destruction of German militarism by force.