Competing Visions of American Reform in the Scopes Trial

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Competing Visions of American Reform in the
Scopes Trial

• LBUSD TAH presentation
• Eileen Luhr (eluhr_at_csulb.edu)
• July 20, 2007

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essential questionHow did the issues of the
Scopes Trial exemplify the competing visions that
civil rights and moral reform movements had for
American society in the 1920s?
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Standards addressed

• Content
• 11.3.2. Analyze the great religious revivals and
  the leaders involved in them, includingthe rise
  of Christian fundamentalism in current times.
• 11.3.5. Describe the principles of religious
  liberty found in the Establishment and Free
  Exercise clauses of the First Amendment,
  including the debate on the issue of separation
  of church and state.
• 11.5.2. Analyze the international and domestic
  events, interests, and philosophies that prompted
  attacks on civil liberties, including the Palmer
  Raids, Marcus Garvey's "back-to-Africa" movement,
  the Ku Klux Klan, and immigration quotas and the
  responses of organizations such as the American
  Civil Liberties Union, the National Association
  for the Advancement of Colored People, and the
  Anti-Defamation League to those attacks.
• Chronological and Spatial Thinking
• Students analyze how change happens at different
  rates at different times understand that some
  aspects can change while others remain the same
  and understand that change is complicated and
  affects not only technology and politics but also
  values and beliefs.
• Students use a variety of maps and documents to
  interpret human movement, including major
  patterns of domestic and international migration,
  changing environmental preferences and settlement
  patterns, the frictions that develop between
  population groups, and the diffusion of ideas,
  technological innovations, and goods.
• Historical Interpretation
• Students show the connections, causal and
  otherwise, between particular historical events
  and larger social, economic, and political trends
  and developments.

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How does the textbook frame the competing visions
of the 1920s?

• chapter 13, The Roaring Life of the 1920s
• Rural and Urban Differences
• Urban scene (migrations to city resulted in loss
  of small-town values)
• Prohibition (reform movement of small-town
  Protestants)
• Speakeasies and bootleggers organized crime
  (urban response)
• Science and Religion Clash (pp. 438-439)
• Another bitter controversy highlighted the
  growing rift between traditional and modern ideas
  during the 1920s. This battle raged between
  fundamentalist religious groups and secular
  thinkers over the validity of certain scientific
  discoveries.
• Fundamentalism and evolution defined rejection
  of evolution by fundamentalists emotional
  religious revivals of Aimee Semple McPherson and
  Billy Sunday in urban areas
• The Scopes trial was a fight over evolution and
  the role of science and religion in public
  schools and in American society. Summary of
  trial, including Clarence Darrows questioning of
  W.J. Bryan as an expert witness
• conclusion The clash over evolution, the
  Prohibition experiment, and the emerging urban
  scene all were evidence of the changes and
  conflicts occurring during the 1920s.
• Other sections of Chapter 13
• The Twenties Woman (new lifestyles for urban
  women)
• Education and Popular Culture (growth in school
  enrollments)
• Harlem Renaissance (rural migrants change the
  city)
• excerpted from The Americans (McDougal Littell,
  2006)

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Framework for presentation

• My view of the period between 1914 and 1929 A
  variety of reform movements sought to challenge
  the corporate orders consolidation of power.
• Progressives -- government regulation of
  capitalism and use of scientific ideas to improve
  efficiency
• Labor movementdivisions between
  skilled/unskilled workers, workers of different
  races and ethnicities
• NAACP and ACLU--defense of civil rights during a
  period of increased repression
• Prohibition the Scopes Trialmoral reform
  movements

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How does the essential question relate to the
institutes theme of intolerance in the 1920s?

• inclusion and exclusion rather than
  intolerance
• This presentation will present the worldviews of
  the groups linked to the Scopes Trial.
• Why look at it this way? The Scopes Trial served
  an important role in modernitys understanding of
  itself. Anthropologist Susan Harding notes that
  the trial helped establish an escalating string
  of oppositions between Fundamentalist and
  Modernbetween supernaturalist and reasoning,
  backward and progressive, ignorant and educated,
  rural and cosmopolitan, anti-intellectual and
  intellectual, superstitious and scientific, duped
  and skeptical, bigoted and tolerant, dogmatic and
  thinking, absolutist and questioning,
  authoritarian and democratic (62).

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Overview of the Scopes Trial

• Background the origins of the fundamentalist-mode
  rnist split
• Origin of Species (1859)
• Christian geologists hand of God at work

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• B. Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy
• New evidence of human variation evolution
  finally filters into HS education during period
  of expanded enrollment
• Split among Protestants
• Modernists
• a) higher criticism
• b) evolutionary worldview human authorship of
  scripture and evolutionary development (not
  revelation) of Christianity)historical and
  scientific accuracy didnt matter
• Fundamentalists
• a) dispensational premillenialism
• b) Rise of The Fundamentals inerrancy
• c) Holiness Pentecostal movements

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• C. The Scopes Trial
• 1. Three keys to the Modernist defense
• Defense of individual freedom
• Appeal to scientific authority
• Ridicule of fundamentalists and biblical
  literalism
• 2. Three keys to the antievolution arguments
• evolution lacked scientific proof
• Teaching evolution undermined student religious
  faith and values
• the Bible-believing majority should control
  public school instruction

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• D. The Aftermath
• 1. Modernism
• Scopes trial part of the folklore of
  liberalism
• Fundamentalism was identified with the rural
  south
• Issue of evolution in school curriculum not taken
  up again until the late 1950s/early 1960s
• Inherit the Winda critique of McCarthyism
• 2. Fundamentalism
• Antievolution standfundamentalists still opposed
  to Darwin antievolutionists seek equal
  opportunity in classrooms
• fundamentalism continued to grow and to be
  politically active after the trial in separate
  institutions

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How did the issues of the Scopes Trial exemplify
the competing visions that civil rights and moral
reform movements had for American society in the
1920s?

• Three sets of documents that present each side
• Free Speech/ Academic Freedom vs. Majoritarian
  Rule over School Curriculum
• Science vs. Religion
• Provincialism vs. Cosmopolitan Values/ Rural vs.
  Urban Values

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Document Set 1 Free Speech/ Academic Freedom
vs. Majoritarian Rule over School Curriculum

• Key issues
• link to populist majoritarianism (fear of the
  control of a few elites over the common man)
• Emerging modern concepts of individual rights and
  liberty
• ACLUs interest was in defending academic freedom
  (especially against school patriotism programs
  and loyalty oaths), not in attacking religion