Published September 27, 2020
By Greg Kreinberg
The
1920s brought profound changes to the United States: traditional values,
beliefs, and ideas clashed with the modern world that novelist F. Scott
Fitzgerald called the “Jazz Age.” These
societal shifts divided public opinion and lifestyles in conservative midwestern
cities like Quincy, where religion had been a dominant force. The Gem City had
nearly 60 churches and many allied religious groups, including the “Ben-Hur
Club” named for the era’s best selling Christian book and the 1925 silent
movie.
World War I had disillusioned many
people in their belief that God created humans in a divine image. The notion
that science could explain life as well as religious orthodoxy captivated the
American scene. Scientists had recently discovered antibiotics and developed
vaccines against diphtheria, tuberculosis, and the one that halted the
world-wide Great Influenza Epidemic—which in Adams County had claimed about 500
lives and sickened several thousand more.
A new literary genre called
“science fiction” dazzled public imagination. Quincy papers serialized one of
these first stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Lost World,” and the movie
version played to packed audiences at Quincy’s Orpheum, Empire, and Washington
Square Theaters.
Many
local citizens, weary of war and Victorian morality, overlooked illegal alcohol
use, gambling, and the brazen behavior of “flappers” and “zoot-suiters.” Clergymen like Rev. Celian Ufford of Quincy’s
Unitarian Church delivered sermons and gave dramatic readings of plays, such as
Eugene O’Neil’s “Emperor Jones,” which mirrored the new scientific
understanding of mankind’s animal origins.
On March 13, 1925, Tennessee passed
the Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of human evolution in public
schools and sanctioned only the literal interpretation of creation in the
Biblical book of Genesis. This law silenced the scientific theory proposed in
Charles Darwin’s 1859 book “The Origin of Species By Means of Natural
Selection,” which documented evidence that all life evolved over millions of
years, and humans had descended from a species of primates.
A group of businessmen in Dayton,
Tennessee, eager to boost the town’s struggling economy, conspired to “put
Dayton on the map” by challenging the law in court. They secured high school
science teacher John T. Scopes’ complicity with his admission that he had
taught Darwinian evolution from a state-mandated book. Officials arrested
Scopes, and soon the two most prominent lawyers in the country, Clarence Darrow
for the defense and William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution, took sides in
the case. Bryan had visited Quincy in September 1919 and given a speech to
several thousand people endorsing another conservative cause: the
newly-ratified 18th Amendment establishing Prohibition.
On July 10, 1925 testimony began in
what Journalist H. L Mencken dubbed the “Scopes Monkey Trial,” and it became
the 20th century’s most famous legal battle.
The Quincy Daily Journal published
views of several prominent local citizens about the upcoming trial on May 31,
1925. Dr. William H. Baker, a well-known physician, and Charles Cottrell,
Quincy postmaster, both strongly supported the scientific idea of evolution.
Cottrell said, “I believe the expulsion of Scopes will be classified with Salem
Witchcraft.” Illinois State Bank president William J. Singleton said he did not
spring from monkeys, but that God had made him distinct from animals.
Harold L. Lummis, one of Quincy’s
leading clergymen and a Sunday school teacher at the Methodist Episcopal
Church, stated: “The only trouble with the theory of evolution, as I told the
pastor, is that it is true.” Rev. Harry L. Meyer, pastor of the First
Congregational Church, cautiously broached the subject. “The whole matter of evolution
should be considered as the scientists’ understanding of the way God works in
the world.”
Roman Catholics held the most
conservative views about evolution. Rev. Ferdinand Grunen, president of Quincy
College, said, “There can exist no conflict between scientific and revealed
truth, because all truth is one, coming from one source and no other—God.” The
Franciscan priest concluded, “The whole trial impresses me as a huge joke.”
Local papers and the new medium of
radio provided wide coverage of the trial. An editorial in the June 15, 1925,
Quincy Daily Journal noted obstacles in the case: “[Scopes] peers some of whom
have no objection to a Sunday game of poker, but who would be shocked to see
the Sunday paper laid atop the family Bible are trying to harmonize Darwin and
Genesis. It will be wasted effort.”
After
an eight-day trial, jurors took only nine minutes to find Scopes guilty of
teaching evolution, and the judge fined him $100 (equal to about $1,300 today).
Soon after the decision, Loren H. Wittmer, a Rockport, Illinois, native with
ties to Quincy, filed a federal lawsuit challenging the verdict. An Internal
Revenue Service clerk in Washington D. C., Wittmer had studied at Gem City
Business College 20 years earlier and become an avowed atheist while in Quincy.
In 1922 he ran for Congress in Illinois’ 20th district. He lost both
his congressional bid and this lawsuit.
Although the prosecution prevailed
in the Scopes Trial, the case gave evolution public prominence. Some religious
leaders acknowledged that science and scripture approached the question of
human origin from different perspectives. Clergymen like Rev. Harry L. Meyer of
Quincy’s Congregational Church, who had before been more tentative, endorsed
not only evolution but the ideas of Sigmund Freud—who, like Darwin, aligned
human nature closely with animal instinct and heredity. In a speech to the
Unitarian Church’s Layman’s League, reprinted in the May 17, 1925, Quincy Daily
Journal, Meyer, stated: “Quincy is full of men who quit thinking ten years
ago…Sigmund Freud through his work in psychoanalysis has done work as great
as Charles Darwin.”
Local book reviews lauded Dr. Horatio Hackett
Newman’s “The Gist of Evolution” and the
Free Public Library acquired volumes about the scientific method and the now
widely-accepted theory of evolution. Over the objections of a few outspoken
fundamentalists, Quincy Public Schools continued teaching Darwin’s theory and
presenting factual evidence for man’s evolutionary ascent.
Sources
“Celian
Ufford to Read ‘Emperor Jones.’”
Quincy
Daily Herald
, Feb. 8, 1924, 4.
Darwin,
Charles.
The Origin of Species By Means
of Natural Selection
. London: John Murray Publishing House, 1859.
Larson,
Edward J.
Summer for the Gods: The Scopes
Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over
Science
and Religion.
New
York: Basic Books, 1997.
“Let’s See
the Monster.”
Quincy Daily Journal
,
June 15, 1925, 6.
“Pike
County Man in Evolution War.”
Quincy
Daily Journal
, July 23, 1925, 1.
“Psycho-Analysis
Subject of Interesting Paper Read by Rev. Meyer Before League.”
Quincy Daily
Journal,
May 17, 1925, 14.
“Quincyans
Expressing Views on Scopes Trial, Declare it to be Nonsensical Business.”
Quincy Daily
Journal
,
May 31, 1925, 3.
