TY - JOUR
AU1 - Pavuk, Alexander
AB - Abstract Instead of viewing racial eugenics, modernist religion and prescriptions for social engineering as discourses tangential to the evolution constructs propounded by top scientists in the build-up to the Scopes trial, this article considers how the American Association for the Advancement of Science's committee on evolution intertwined all of these threads by the early nineteen-twenties. Committee members aimed their evolution models at broad public audiences even as they tried to fulfill the American Civil Liberties Union's request to provide a scientifically-sound view of evolution to help combat Protestant fundamentalism in the build-up to the trial. Racialist eugenics was essential to their multi-layered evolution constructs, as were key religious ideas particular to Protestant modernism. ‘Can you come and help us [at the Scopes trial?] … As I learned most of the biology I know from you I feel we must have you’.1 Clarence Darrow to Edwin Grant Conklin (telegram, 9 July 1925). Biological race, eugenics and other ideas preoccupying prominent scientists in the U.S.A. during the nineteen-twenties are often discussed in isolation from the constellation of concerns these scientists brought to the build-up of the Scopes trial of 1925. This is particularly true in historical narratives aimed at broad audiences.2 Unpacking the multiform roles of biological racism – nearly ubiquitous in popular scientific discourse of the late nineteen-tens and early nineteen-twenties – and of eugenics can illuminate underappreciated aspects of public science in those years.3 The period is remembered primarily for evolutionists protecting the sciences from prejudiced religionists and for the role of Protestant fundamentalism, rather than modernism, in the events. Yet evidence suggests that the attitudes of the scientists comprising the official committee on evolution of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (A.A.A.S.) on race and eugenics may have been more important than hitherto acknowledged in influencing their engagement with the trial and related episodes in that era. The committee, consisting of Edwin Grant Conklin (1863–1952), embryologist of Princeton University (committee chair), Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857–1935), director of the Museum of Natural History in New York city, and Charles Davenport (1866–1944), director of the Station for Experimental Evolution, Long Island, New York, itself played a more complicated role in the public understanding of the trial, of evolution, and of religion than has been recognized. This article rescripts the committee on evolution's place in the broader discourse while considering the effects of the members' view that as public scientists they were permitted to cross boundaries into realms of social-moral prescription when opining on matters of racial biology, eugenics and evolution. It seeks to more closely integrate the history of science with the history of public culture and moves outward from a somewhat fundamental question: what interests did the scientists comprising the A.A.A.S. committee on evolution express in race and eugenics in their writings and how did these interests influence their involvement with the trial and with related issues? Scholars and journalists working outside the history of science not uncommonly imply that the most respected scientific experts endorsing racialist theories around the time of the trial were fringe figures marginalized by the more legitimate scientific community. Were that the case, scientific racism could not have amassed the cultural traction it did in the nineteen-twenties, a time when science and its expert practitioners enjoyed extensive influence, especially among progressives.4 It was, after all, of this decade that interwar critic Frederick Lewis Allen wrote, ‘the prestige of science was colossal’.5 Elazar Barkan has said that during the period: ‘Race was perceived to be a biological category, a natural phenomenon unaffected by social forces. Even for self-proclaimed egalitarians, the inferiority of races was no more to be contested than the law of gravity’.6 Historians have also shown that scientific racism in the U.S.A. was connected with the popular eugenics movement, though they have yet to work out how race and eugenics were really understood by scientists in relation to evolution per se; popular science and popular perceptions admixed the concepts. Gregory Dorr contended that eugenics was the ‘lingua franca of science from about 1910 to at least 1929’.7 In tandem with Diane Paul's claim that American eugenics featured a particularly potent racial cast as compared to its sister movements in the anglophone world, it is clear that race and eugenics were both prominent in public science and were, at times, tied together.8 Michael Yudell more recently argued that scholars have hitherto missed the important influence of eugenics on racial studies, that early nineteen-twenties racial studies themselves ‘followed a eugenic paradigm’, and that eugenics was ‘a scientific worldview that helped to define the way in which human difference was viewed, studied and politicized’.9 However, it should be noted that there did also exist a stream of eugenics not focused on racial hierarchies. Conklin's activist science, in particular, tended to conflate race, eugenics and evolution by implying that the latter operated according to a eugenic natural law that worked to sort ‘races’ hierarchically for a purpose having religious implications. He argued that intervention in evolution was necessary to preserve this order. Osborn and Davenport, though very interested in the three concepts of race, eugenics and evolution, wrote about eugenics as an applied form of hereditary law and, thus, stood apart from important aspects of Conklin's broader claims. Answering the question of how they wrote about these shared interests and how they helped shape the trial's meaning calls for consideration of the forums in which public science appeared, especially the print media that popularized scientists' pronouncements to an interested laity.10 Such media will serve as our primary locus of interest. The A.A.A.S. created its committee on evolution in April 1922 specifically to counter the U.S. anti-evolution movement's recent advances and to present a coherent image of evolution, offsetting what its executive committee called the confusion ‘aroused by recent popular publications’.11 As seen in the epigraph and elaborated below, Clarence Darrow and the American Civil Liberties Union (A.C.L.U.) defending John Scopes sought out – and received – the committee's expert guidance before and during the trial. Thus the committee was not without some direct influence, or, for that matter, without indirect influence in this episode. Committee members viewed the farce of state legislatures trying to dictate about science, especially evolution, as a danger to social development. It was clear to them that biological technocrats should assume control of social (not to mention educational) policy since scientists employing a positivist lens claimed to discover that social evolution did not merely parallel, but was also dependent on, biological evolution.12 If this were true, both the mechanisms and rationale of social policy had to be altered to conform to biological principles; only experts could devise a plan to accomplish that. The committee members held in common certain racialist conceptions of progress and maintained some hope for quasi-utopian social goals, though with variations between them. Whereas at times they implied that a racial or eugenic law may have been tied to evolution in some way, they were not particularly clear on how this was so. Further, the committee's activity pre-dated the neo-Darwinian synthesis of the nineteen-thirties; in the nineteen-twenties, self-identified Mendelians and Darwinians were still often working at cross purposes. Notwithstanding these caveats, one putatively scientific idea they shared and purported was that all men were, in fact, not created equal. This they agreed on, irrespective of what they believed could, or could not, be done about it. Race and race gradation was central to their visions of the future and their understanding of the social order. That such a perspective was endorsed by top-flight public scientists meant it would resonate in a culture redolent with both faith in science and the spectre of scientism. For all three scientists, the Scopes trial became both a focal point and an amplifier for their ideas. The trial's build-up was a window of opportunity whereby evolution could be explained and endorsed even as their other views on race and eugenics were advanced as both scientific and as having important social implications. Enlightened scientific progressives had a duty to persuade the public that a scientifically-sound future would involve government guided by biological technocrats overseeing controlled planning. On this view, anti-evolutionists insisting that legislative majorities – not progressive expert scientists – should chart social-educational policy seemed to invite dangerous maladaptation on the social scale. The anti-evolutionists could be interpreted as playing the role of deleterious mutations on a social evolutionary scale in the same way that maladaptation in micro-level biological evolution brought on retrograde selection and even extinction. If unchecked, this backwardness could halt social development and cultural evolution. Put simply, in scientific progressives' perspective, the forces of anti-evolution threatened to send society itself into a tailspin. Some of the committee's efforts to advance their schemas took place in the open; others occurred behind the scenes. Still others became part of the official Scopes record, even if not directly through committee members themselves.13 Whatever eugenics' connection, or lack of connection, to evolution or race per se, all three committee members were its undoubted advocates. Before moving to the main narrative, something should therefore be said of eugenics' broader context in the U.S.A. While eugenics resonated with a wide array of progressive intelligentsia, neither eugenics nor its supporters were in any way monolithic. America's early proponents of Francis Galton's eugenic dream were ‘radical utopian socialist communitarians’ of the eighteen-seventies, such as John Humphrey Noyes, but eugenics by the nineteen-tens and -twenties saw substantial ideological flexibility.14 It also enjoyed wide regional appeal.15 But this diversity was precisely what allowed so many to take shelter under the eugenics flag even as the movement itself escaped criticism from most progressives throughout the country.16 Paul has pointed out that ‘[eugenicists’] only commonality was a general concern with preventing biological deterioration'. Spanning all manner of political and economic perspectives, they were united only ‘in their enthusiasm for technocratic solutions to social problems’. The fact that eugenics was widely understood as objective science strengthened its appeal.17 Strong interest in eugenics by committee scientists, therefore, reflected more than an idiosyncratic scientific bloc carrying a message of limited appeal. The public ubiquity and variety of eugenics, and racial eugenics, could make their words on such matters seem self-evident to many. This was especially true in a context where scientists had embraced naturalism as the mark of scientific professionalization.18 Born into privilege (he was nephew to John D. Rockefeller, Jr.), palaeontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn is often remembered for his long tenure as director of the natural science collection in New York City's Museum of Natural History. His deep imprint on that museum spanned the last decade of the nineteenth century to the early nineteen-thirties. Through exhibit arrangements, books, articles and lectures, Osborn was a very influential interpreter of evolutionary science to the public-at-large. Jonathan Spiro contends that by World War I Osborn was seen as ‘America's foremost [public] evolutionist’.19 Officially, Osborn served as president of the museum's board of trustees and honorary head curator from 1908 through to 1933, having overseen its department of vertebrate palaeontology from 1891 to 1910.20 He used the rostrum of the museum – with its populist slogan ‘For the People; For Education; For Science’ – to publicize his particular racialized evolution model.21 Osborn had earned a doctor of science degree (Sc.D.) in 1891 having studied geology and biology – fields not yet fully distinct from general natural history – at Princeton University.22 Expanding on what he learned from advisor Arnold Guyot, Osborn initially pursued a substantial research programme.23 Elof Carlson contended that Osborn should be acknowledged as a founder of the field of human genetics.24 According to Brian Regal, by the late nineteen-tens and -twenties, ‘Osborn's pronouncements on science, education, and the state of society were taken as authoritative by many … In his day, he was second only to Albert Einstein as the most popular and well-known scientist in America’.25 Whether or not his public influence was quite that substantial, he was undeniably a very visible public expert.26 By 1928, the A.A.A.S. elected Osborn its president. Within the professional scientific community, however, committee chair Edwin Conklin enjoyed the most consistent respect. Hailing from Waldo, Ohio, Conklin had graduated from the Methodist-run Ohio Wesleyan University. His graduate training at Johns Hopkins University encompassed physiology and embryology under the renowned W. K. Brooks.27 After obtaining the Ph.D. in 1891, Conklin served brief stints at several midwestern institutions, including the Methodist all-black Rust College. In 1896, he was appointed to the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. Switching to Princeton in 1908 upon the invitation of its president, Woodrow Wilson, he remained on the biology faculty until his retirement in 1933.28 Long interested in questions of morphology and cell lineage, Conklin retained his scientific clout even when the new generation of cytologists – emphasizing experimental approaches to embryological issues – eschewed his concern with cell lineage.29 Elected president of the American Society of Zoologists in 1899 and the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia in 1901, Conklin enjoyed full membership in the National Academy of Sciences by 1908. His continuing scientific activity after retiring from Princeton in 1935 was evidenced by his presidency of the A.A.A.S. in 1936, his reception of the National Academy's gold medal in 1942, and his presidency of the American Philosophical Society starting the same year (he served two terms as its president, 1942–5 and 1948–52). From the early twentieth century, he was a trustee of the Marine Biological Laboratory and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts where he spent many of his summers pursuing scientific work and engaging with prominent colleagues and assistants.30 Along with the work of T. H. Morgan, Conklin's research helped lay the groundwork for developmental biology's maturation as an independent field. While Conklin published nearly sixty technical articles on embryological research, his public renown came from his scores of articles and certain books aimed at ‘the educated lay public … [most] concern[ing] some aspect of evolution’. The ‘bulk of [these] popular works’ were written and published in the nineteen-twenties and -thirties.31 The final member of the A.A.A.S. committee trio, Charles Davenport, is often remembered more as a strict eugenicist than an accomplished geneticist or evolutionary scientist, but Carlsen has reminded us that he was all three of these at different points in his career: ‘Davenport shifted in activity and reputation from 1910 to 1940 from one of the founders of Mendelism in America to chief advocate of the American eugenics movement’.32 His appointment to the A.A.A.S. committee was predicated on scientific recognition as well as a prodigious public reputation. On the basis of Davenport's significant contributions to the rapid development of classical genetics, Carlsen argued that he ‘should be acknowledged as a founder of that field’.33 He famously directed the research institute in Long Island Sound initially called the Station for Experimental Evolution.34 Davenport's endorsement of individuals and their ideas lent a stamp of legitimacy in the nineteen-tens and -twenties. Faith in his scientific acumen even reached the Federal government during World War I when the U.S. army appointed him to the surgeon general's office. There he worked on anthropometric studies and proposed a method for appointing naval officers based on familial characteristics.35 Notable, too, was his influence on public policy via his assistant, Harry Laughlin. It was through Laughlin that Davenport's ideas on immigrant groups' racial characteristics shaped Congress's eugenicist immigration laws in the early nineteen-twenties.36 After obtaining a Ph.D. in zoology from Harvard in 1892, Davenport's textbook Experimental Morphology (1897, 1899) garnered him a job at the University of Chicago. Following meetings with father of eugenics Francis Galton in 1902, Davenport decided to build his own aforementioned laboratory to study evolutionary processes at Cold Spring Harbor. He did so with funding from philanthropists Mary Harriman and Andrew Carnegie, and later, the Rockefeller Foundation. Completed in 1904, Davenport's facility – the name of which was changed from the Station for the Experimental Study of Evolution to the Department of Genetics after 1918 – quickly grew into a centre of influential and respected scientific work. Davenport added to his infrastructure by establishing the Eugenics Record Office, over which he appointed Laughlin director, and the Eugenic Research Association, also on Long Island. As Barkan has commented: ‘At the center of the American eugenics movement both the office and the A.A.A.S. exerted enormous influence over the content of human biology and science and their dissemination to the American public up to the 1930s’.37 For a time, the scientific establishment was impressed with Davenport himself, too. His work did not endure much public criticism until the late nineteen-twenties, and even then it was often muted.38 Conklin, Osborn and Davenport already enjoyed some of the highest decorations of the professional establishment by the time they were joined together on the A.A.A.S. committee. All three were elected fellows of the holy trinity of American science: the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the A.A.A.S. It should be noted that while anyone could become a regular member of the two-tiered A.A.A.S., its elected fellows derived exclusively from the scientific elite.39 Moreover, the three scientists' publicly-espoused racialism and eugenicism was in no way atypical of any such entities on an organizational level. As Alexandra Minna Stern put it, ‘race betterment was a staple concern of the American Association for the Advancement of Science … meetings’; likewise, the National Research Council (created by the National Academy of Sciences in 1916) officially endorsed the 1921 Second International Congress on Eugenics, a gathering Barkan said ‘represented a comprehensive consensus of biological racism in America and England never matched before or since’.40,The New York Times had depicted Osborn's eugenics views as those of a sound scientist-specialist in a 1921 headline about the eugenics congress: ‘EUGENISTS DREAD TAINTED ALIENS … MELTING POT FALSE THEORY … Prof. Osborn's views’.41 As fellows of the National Academy and the American Philosophical Society, committee members wore the stamp of excellence within professional circles. It was, however, their election to the A.A.A.S. that most strengthened their public position as arbiters of science. The A.A.A.S. was the largest organization in American science explicitly founded for public engagement and popular dissemination.42 This role was augmented by wide press coverage of its activities in newspapers and general magazines. By the turn of the twentieth century such prestige was reinforced by Science magazine. The A.A.A.S. made Science its official journal in 1900 under the editorship of an enthusiastic Galtonian eugenicist, James Keenan Cattell.43 Michael Sokal has classified Science as the ‘the nation's leading general science periodical’ by that year, noting its wide dual readership of professionals and non-professionals.44 Its pages extolled professional objectivity alongside uniformitarian naturalism. In Martin Pernick's view, it was a skein of popularized middle and highbrow media outlets, like Science, that most successfully proselytized the cause of professionalization: ‘the new level of public faith in scientific expertise was in large measure a mass media creation’.45 Barkan included Davenport in his category of ‘universal intellectuals’ or ‘absolute savants’ for the early to mid nineteen-twenties. On his criteria, we might also place Osborn and Conklin in that category.46 Publishing widely in the scientific and popular press, they had the power to shape public science substantially while freely pronouncing ‘in the capacity of master[s] of truth and justice, even on topics where their credentials [were] not pertinent’.47 All three mixed ethical claims – sometimes using religious language – together with technical assertions about evolution in their discourse leading up to the Scopes trial, though their status essentially garnered their rhetoric a presumption of objectivity. The three scientists also contributed to the racialist leanings of physical anthropology. In 1919, Science featured Osborn's museum assistant William Gregory explaining how the Galton Society for the Study of the Origin and Development of Man (which they helped organize and whose meetings they attended regularly) did good work for the racialist camp in anthropology. The discipline was divided into two alternate approaches; in Gregory's words, ‘the first [side] … includ[ed] all lines of investigation on the origin and evolution of human races and their cultures, the second limit[ed] anthropology to the study of physical characteristics’.48 He left no doubt that the Galton Society was founded to support the model focused on racial distinctions.49 The Galton Society was no fringe group, either. More than half its members were elected fellows in the A.A.A.S.; half in the American Philosophical Society; and a third in the National Academy of Sciences.50 Committee members' public scientific unimpeachability and evolution advocacy helped convince the A.C.L.U. to seek the committee's guidance in preparing its Scopes test case. While then-A.A.A.S. president Michael Pupin of Columbia University sought to protect the organization's apolitical image during the trial by maintaining no official presence in Tennessee, he and the A.A.A.S. substantially assisted the Scopes defence behind the scenes. Pupin, along with Cattell, personally met with John Scopes to help him prepare his defence. But the bulk of the A.A.A.S.'s help would come via the committee.51 Committee members regularly communicated with defence attorneys of the A.C.L.U. throughout the trial. Evidence of this exists in several contexts addressed below, but one example is Osborn's letter to Conklin prior to the Scopes trial: ‘After a long conference with Neale, Darrow, Malone, Colby, Scopes and Rappleyea [that is, the A.C.L.U. legal defence team and others figuring importantly in the Dayton case], I have strongly advised making the fact that evolution and religion are not in any way inconsistent the backbone of the defense’.52 Late in May 1922, Charles Davenport wrote to P. P. Claxton of the U.S. office of education to inform him that the A.A.A.S. had created an official committee on evolution consisting of himself, Conklin and Osborn for the purpose of ‘consider[ing] [the] best methods of combating the anti-evolution propaganda’.53 Davenport told him that the committee ‘decided to undertake an investigation to find the extent of this propaganda’ and wanted to know whether the education bureau would appoint Harry Laughlin, assistant director of the Eugenics Record Office, as ‘a special agent of the Bureau to make the inquiry and report to your office’.54 The arguments Davenport proffered in defence of his assistant seemed to tie eugenics to evolution. Writing on behalf of the committee, he presented the A.A.A.S. as accepting the intertwining of the two in policy outreach. Davenport claimed that Laughlin was ‘especially qualified for the position of critiquing anti-evolution propaganda because he served in 1920 as special agent for the Federal census bureau's report on facilities for ‘Defectives, Delinquents, etc.’. He also noted Laughlin's actions as ‘special agent of the Committee on Immigration of the U.S. House of Representatives’, which included devising a report on ‘distributions … of different nationalities in state institutions’.55 Laughlin's Congressional report on the need for immigration restriction, An Analysis of America's Melting Pot, already featured prominently in magazines and newspapers throughout the country.56 Additionally, Davenport pointed to Laughlin's earlier report on proposed sterilization legislation for the city of Chicago.57 In short, Davenport told the education department that Laughlin's work on eugenic sterilization and immigration restriction particularly suited him to co-ordinate government efforts to quash challenges to evolution.58 Around the same time, committee members sprang into action to counter the repercussions of an incident from late 1921. Renowned British biologist William Bateson had told colleagues at the A.A.A.S. annual meeting that nobody could agree on the true meaning of Darwin's model because no one understood the full mechanism driving evolution.59 Predating the neo-Darwinian synthesis, Bateson's comments to fellow professionals actually centred on a technical debate between geneticist Mendelians and quasi-Lamarckian biometricians on the manner of variation and how to study it.60 However, the press picked up the story and misled many North American lay readers by implying that scientists were questioning the fact of evolution itself rather than just an aspect of its mechanism. For example, the Toronto Globe's headline the day after Bateson's address read: ‘Bateson Holds That Former Beliefs Must Be Abandoned. Theory of Darwin Still Remains Unproved … Claims Science Has Outgrown Theory of Origin of Species’.61 It did not help that scientists in the nineteen-twenties tended to use the term Darwinism in professional discourse to mark evolution driven primarily through natural selection whereas the non-specialist often used the term as shorthand for evolution itself.62 No scientist of repute questioned the veracity of evolution; the debate was over process, but committee members worried that Bateson's subtle point about continuous versus discontinuous variation would be lost amid confusing publicity, and that this might open a Pandora's box of public doubt about evolution. Indeed, some Protestant fundamentalists had used the misleading Bateson publicity to suggest scientists could not demonstrate the fact of evolution any more.63 When Bateson's full address appeared in Science, lay readers understandably struggled to make sense of statements such as ‘[though] our faith in evolution stands unshaken, we have no acceptable account of the origin of species … The claims of natural selection as the chief factor … have consequently been discredited … [and thus we are] agnostic as to the actual mode and processes of evolution’.64 Osborn was particularly vexed but he could not simply dismiss Bateson as a crank. After all, he himself in late 1920 had called Bateson ‘the leading biologist of England today’.65 Privately fearing that ‘hostility to Darwinism is becoming an obsession with Bateson’, he went so far as to tell Conklin that he had ‘in my opinion, done far more harm than Bryan’.66 William Jennings Bryan, former three-time Democratic presidential candidate and one-time U.S. secretary of state in Woodrow Wilson's presidential administration, had by the early nineteen-twenties transformed into the chief public voice of the U.S. anti-evolution movement sponsored by conservative Protestants. Bryan led the charge to have state legislatures ban the teaching of human evolution in all schools supported by government monies. His efforts culminated in the 1925 Scopes ‘Monkey’ Trial of Dayton, Tennessee.67 After consulting with committee members, Osborn published an article in Science charging Bateson with carelessness of phrasing. Since ‘our popular addresses … are eagerly read by the public’, Osborn said, Science might still repair the damage done by Bateson's address.68 But his efforts partly backfired when William Ritter of the Scripps Biology Institute told Science readers a few months later that the Osborn-Bateson disagreement was merely the most public example of scientists being unable to agree on evolution's mechanism of operation.69 In March, 1922, The New York Times invited both Conklin and Osborn to respond to its recent anti-evolution editorial authored by Bryan.70 For his part, modernist Conklin dismissed Bryan's fundamentalism in the classic style of J. W. Draper's conflict model of science versus religion: ‘Even progressive theology has come to regard evolution as an ally rather than as an enemy. [M]r. Bryan and his kind hurl their medieval theology’. The quote – a sentence from Edwin Grant Conklin's editorial rebuttal of Bryan's editorial – referred to what Bryan and his ilk were ostensibly doing ‘in the face of all these facts’, that is, in the face of evolutionary science ‘which continually receives additional support from new discoveries and which is not contradicted by any scientific evidence’. He went on, ‘It would be amusing if it were not so pathetic and disheartening to see these modern defenders of the faith beating their gongs and firing their giant crackers against the ramparts of science’.71 Osborn's New York Times article, ‘Evolution and religion’, tied together evolution and religious modernism. Additionally, Osborn dismissed Bryan's popular-Baconian contention that evolution was just a hypothesis, writing that evolution ‘takes its place with the gravitational law of Newton’ as ‘the most firmly established truth in the natural universe’.72 Admitting that evolution's full mechanisms were not wholly agreed upon, Osborn nevertheless minimized Bateson as a narrow research specialist rather than a wide-spectrum biologist-generalist. As the former, Bateson was thereby ‘out of the main current of biological discovery’.73 New York Times editorials, however, were not enough. By May, Conklin wrote to Davenport arguing that the A.A.A.S. should ‘make a strong statement in favor of evolution [because] Bateson's address … is being quoted and misquoted continually’.74 Furthermore, he wanted the committee to work harder on showing that not just scientific experts but all people of sound reason and good will accepted the holistic understanding of evolution they offered. Conklin urged ‘get[ting] the religious journals and theological schools and noted clergymen to enter into the discussion of evolution with a view to stemming the ignorant propaganda that is now taking the country’.75 What he meant by theological schools were schools centred in Protestant modernism. Christine Rosen has shown that many modernist clergy also endorsed applied eugenics in the nineteen-twenties, alternately appealing to the authority of Christianity and professional science and, often, reading Judeo-Christian texts through the lens of eugenics.76 In haste to show the compatibility between religious, evolutionary and eugenics worldviews, Conklin and Osborn decided to move forward in late spring 1922 with Davenport's suggestion to place a recent article by modernist-scientist William North Rice (the first American geologist to earn a Ph.D. in the U.S.A.) in Christian Advocate to counter Bryan's new book In His Image (1922). Before this could happen, Conklin reversed himself, saying it would be better to distribute ‘a small volume of addresses and letters in response to William Jennings Bryan and the “Fundamentalists” … [that would include pieces by] Rev. [Harry Emerson] Fosdick’ and other scientifically-interested religionists and academics.77 As this project gestated, Osborn convinced Conklin to go further and propose a full edited collection to Scribner's Press, to be titled Evolution and Religion. Conklin agreed, calling it ‘a much more feasible plan … since it is probable that it will be widely advertised and will pay for itself’.78 The book never appeared, but a few weeks later Conklin informed his colleagues that the University of Chicago's American Institute of Sacred Literature intended to publish a series of replies to Bryan that would harmonize evolution and religion. The first two essays in the series, Popular Religious Leaflets: Science and Religion, were based on Conklin's and Harry Emerson Fosdick's New York Times editorials, as discussed by Edward Davis.79 Davis noted that of the ten titles eventually published in this series, six were authored by one-time presidents of the A.A.A.S.80 With the help of funding from John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and individual donations from over a hundred scientists (including Davenport), the pamphlets were broadly disseminated free of charge in the years surrounding the Scopes trial. Particular targets were those ‘who played important roles in the national debate about evolution and the schools’, such as high school principals and legislators at all levels of government, along with university chaplains, and ‘thirty thousand Protestant ministers [along with] more than one thousand scientists, carefully chosen to represent the elite of the American scientific establishment’.81 In his pamphlet, Osborn emphasized that natural selection was ‘the only cause of evolution which has thus far been discovered’.82 For some time, however, Osborn had joined other scientists in calling the precise role of natural selection into question.83 Conklin, too, had publicly questioned the sufficiency of natural selection – in the Darwinian sense – to drive evolution. He argued that natural selection weeded out deleterious mutations but was not evolution's primary force.84 In a six-part Scientific Monthly series on evolution published from 1919 to 1920, Conklin never used the term natural selection.85 On the one hand, Conklin's and Osborn's attitudes reflected a trend among palaeontologists and embryologists at the time.86 On the other hand, they probably indicated the particular influence of Protestant modernism on their views of evolution. Both Osborn and Conklin questioned the sufficiency of random natural selection. Both, too, inserted teleology into their evolutionary constructs. In a 1923 letter, Conklin wrote ‘as I have argued it seems to me incredible that the order of nature and the general results of evolution could have been the result of mere chance’.87 Likewise, in his 1922 New York Times article, Osborn had approvingly quoted nineteenth-century German palaeontologist Wilhelm Heinrich Waagen's statement: ‘species do not originate by chance or by accident, as Darwin once supposed, but through a continuous and well-ordered process’. This, Osborn asserted, ‘has since been confirmed by an overwhelming volume of testimony’.88 It is important to note a distinction, however. Osborn's view of evolutionary orthogenesis seemed merely to describe an inherent teleology rather than suggest that this inner teleology had any prescriptive, alterable elements, at one point specifying that he did not believe in vitalism and that what was happening was an ‘adaptive reaction’ not a ‘predetermined tendency’.89 Conklin's sense of teleology was different and will be addressed below. Teleological evolution was first widely endorsed in the nineteenth century by figures like self-identified Darwinist and theistic evolutionist Asa Gray, the renowned botanist. However, teleology as a guided, goal-oriented process fell out of favour in professional science partly proportionate to the ascending hegemony of the uniformity of nature model. Around the same time some modernist Protestant evolutionists began to reconceive how they viewed secondary causes. As Jon H. Roberts has shown, in the later nineteenth century, influential Protestant scientists like geologist Joseph LeConte helped shift like-minded colleagues' understanding of divine action in the world. In the new view, matter did not operate by secondary causes infused with generative power by a supernatural God. Instead, matter was propelled via a spiritual/divine agency existing entirely within the matter itself. When combined with evolution, the implication was that divinity either abided in, or in some senses was, evolution's shaping force.90 Tapped into by modernist Protestant scientists like Osborn and Conklin, this combination permitted speaking of an immanent divinity tied to evolution without abandoning ascendant uniformitarian naturalism, though, again, whether – or how – this divinity could influence, or be influenced, would depend on whether one viewed teleology through a prescriptive or a descriptive lens.91 Conklin alone seemed to endorse the possibility of controlling teleological evolutionary selection. On the other hand, both he and and Osborn simultaneously endorsed the uniformity of nature and forms of immanentism. Both also viewed their science as tied neither to ‘supernaturalism’ nor philosophical materialism. As Roberts pointed out, ‘For thinkers who embraced this kind of immanentism, the terms “natural” and “supernatural” connoted different angles of vision rather than meaningful ontological categories’.92 This explains how Conklin, in particular, could argue in 1921 that Charles Darwin's form of natural selection did not eliminate teleology but rather ‘substitute[d] natural laws for supernatural ones’.93 Natural selection for Conklin seemed to mean an immanent guiding force in both physical and mental evolution, one that had been channelling evolution in a particular direction over the eons.94 Osborn's 1922 New York Times article described evolution as a moral teaching of nature: ‘The moral principle inherent in evolution’ was that ‘nothing can be gained in the world without effort. The ethical teaching inherent in evolution is that the best only has the right to survive’, whereas ‘the spiritual principle in evolution is the evidence of beauty, order, and of design’.95 Nature was also the instructor for social order and development.96 Racialism played an important role in Osborn's descriptive biological-social picture. In blended scientific-theological language Osborn had previously argued in his introduction to Madison Grant's racist tome The Passing of the Great Race (1916) that historical evolution had revealed that ‘divine forces are certainly more widely and uniformly distributed in some races than in others’.97 What Osborn elsewhere termed ‘racial values’ needed to be preserved and refined.98 He said ‘race has played a far larger part than either language or nationality in molding the destinies of men; race implies heredity[,] and heredity implies all the moral, social and intellectual characteristics and traits which are the springs of politics and government’.99 Therefore, scientists should focus on the ‘conservation and multiplication for our country of the best spiritual, moral, intellectual, and physical forces of heredity’.100 Osborn contended that a moral social policy should take strong account of heredity and race. Further, he said, eugenics was an ethical duty: the ‘moral tendency’ of the ‘hereditary interpretation of history’ was ‘in strong accord with the true spirit of the modern eugenics movement’.101 Davenport's contribution to this discourse included a call to prevent ‘adulteration of the national germ plasm’ through immigration restriction, sterilization and eugenic marriages. He justified these as an ethical, even quasi-religious necessity.102 In 1916, Davenport had constructed a creed for eugenics, rhetorically presenting it as a quasi-religion. Its vows included: ‘I believe that I am the trustee of the germ plasm that I carry, that this has been passed on to me through thousands of generations before me; and that I betray that trust if I so act as to jeopardize it’.103 Other creedal statements tied one's reproductive responsibilities to the social-biological whole: ‘I believe in repressing my instincts when to follow them would injure the next generation’, and ‘I believe in the maintenance of a high quality of hereditary traits in the nation’.104 Davenport also contended that biological race stood at the centre of a properly scientific understanding of the past and present. Appointed by Osborn to chair the publication committee for the 1921 International Congress of Eugenics, Davenport wrote in the published proceedings ‘Clearly the race problem has intimate relations with genetics, since biological race distinctions are hereditary traits’.105 All three committee members realized by the early nineteen-twenties that most people would be unlikely to choose eugenics over emotion when marrying or fashioning law. They would instead need substantial prodding to modify their behaviour. In Conklin's view, for example, the hoped-for eugenic millennium would probably never dawn if it depended on individuals having a personal eugenic conversion experience. Humans must be cajoled and directed: ‘the real difficulty is not in the scientific principles [in] back of eugenics, but in persuading human beings to apply those principles to their own reproduction’.106 Reflecting elements of American Comtism, Conklin idiosyncratically saw a possibility to help guide both biological and social evolution – to take part in the teleology itself – in a way that incorporated scientism, statism and quasi-spirituality within a social programme guided by experts. This view was specific to Conklin. It was necessary both because the old teleology could be made more efficient with scientists' intervention and because humans were breeding irrationally. Evolution had revealed the real natural law and the progressive Conklin was ready to help it along.107 As heir to what Donald Pickens once called Progressivism's ‘naturalist–racialist roots’, Conklin insisted that this directed law of nature must refashion both civil law and social relations because current conceptions of both were based in the old, artificial natural law centred in the unscientific concept of individual rights.108 A eugenic-minded social policy must harness the racial power in evolution. Conklin did not doubt that a biological race hierarchy was scientific fact or that it had played a very important historical role in forming a hierarchy of intelligence: ‘There is abundant evidence that there has been growth of intelligence from the earliest to the latest types and that this development has gone farther in some races than in others’.109 The path to future improvement, for Conklin, lay in using those at the top of this present hierarchy of intelligence to mold humanity's collective future.110 On this view, Conklin uniquely seemed to believe it would be possible to cultivate and even accelerate evolutionary progress and that altruism would ultimately lead ‘top specimens’ in the ‘low races’ to realize that their races should eventually lose out in the struggle for existence. It is to Conklin's particular vision we now turn. Conklin's prominent book, The Direction of Human Evolution (1921) articulated a plan for religious-eugenic-social evolution. It represents the A.A.A.S. committee chairman's most complete and widely-disseminated vision of science and society by the time of the Scopes trial. For Conklin (as for Osborn and Davenport) a nation was a biological body politic, its citizen-organisms analogous to a body's cells. As with bodily function, the cells cannot be privileged individually over the body: ‘the most essential feature of biological progress consists in the subordination of minor units to the larger units of organization’.111 But Conklin integrated this idea with political philosophy, saying ‘the further evolution of society must lie in the direction of greater cooperation … any system of organization which exalts individual freedom to the detriment of social union and harmony must go under in the struggle for existence’.112 ‘Governmental units’, he insisted, must ‘bring … together into some form of league or federation all the peoples of the earth’.113 The end result of this path could be a social utopia of good birth: ‘by adding to his own powers the forces of nature, man has entered upon a new path of progress’ and ‘no one can foresee the end of this process of annexing to our own powers the illimitable forces of the universe’.114 Conklin's steps for jump-starting humanity's evolutionary ascent required identifying the smartest people in each (already graded) race through psychometric intelligence testing.115 Knowing who was most deserving, biologically speaking, would allow the state to redirect its educational resources to them. This, in turn, would facilitate a leadership cadre for future generations with relatively equal capacities.116 As part of this process, scientists must necessarily oversee the elevation of every ‘race’, according to the highest point it could reach, even as the talented elite within each one would rationally discipline itself to follow altruistic instinct/moral duty and ‘eliminate from reproduction’ their respective racial groups' ‘most inferior and defective individuals’.117 After millennia of strenuously pursuing this path, humanity might achieve rational organization, though Conklin was not confident people would reproduce rationally: ‘the religion of evolution’, Conklin reminded readers, ‘is a religion of progress through struggle and effort’.118 But the goal was worth the effort: a paradise on Earth, naturalistically conceived. An important element of Conklin's vision was a biological racial hierarchy in two forms. On the one hand, there was a hierarchy within races; on the other hand, there was a hierarchy of races. The overseers of the aforementioned weeding-out process had to operate within each race. But the broader supervisors of the longue durée process had to be those at the top of the highest races. Conklin argued that all efforts – including immigration restriction, racial segregation and endogamy – were necessary to preserve the highest race specimens to oversee the process over time. Conklin believed he knew which were the highest and lowest races. In Direction of Human Evolution, he argued that comparing the qualities of the ‘white, yellow, and black races’ revealed the following: ‘probably the negroid races more closely resemble the original [less evolved] stock than the white or yellow races’.119 Therefore, he said, ‘every consideration should lead those who believe in the superiority of the white race to strive to preserve its purity and to establish and maintain the segregation of the races’.120 Conklin maintained that ‘the longer segregation can be maintained the larger … will become the ratio of whites to other races and the greater will be their contribution to the composite race’ inevitable in the future.121 As to ‘whites’, Conklin worried that as ‘the old New England families are dying out … their places are being taken by recent immigrants’.122 Forging a eugenic utopia, for Conklin, required wholesale socio-political adjustments directed by scientifically-trained members of the racial elite. As a progressive, Conklin saw the state as a moral agent necessary for shaping the future. This would mean that for the Scopes trial, a regional legislature must not be allowed to block the national teaching of evolution. Moreover, acceptance of evolution was crucial for the rationally-directed state's greater moral purposes. The eugenic millennium could only be brought on by scientifically redesigning democracy itself.123 Read through the lens of uniformitarian naturalism, democracy was grounded in evolutionary biology. Thus, it must change with future stages of evolution. In Conklin's view, better to start now and speed up the whole process. He spelt this out in Direction of Human Evolution by mandating ‘the evolution of democracy’ and reminding readers that ‘[r]ace preservation and evolution is the supreme good and all considerations of the individual are subordinate to this end’.124 This required an expert class of managers to make ‘necessary limitations of the idea of universal liberty and equality’.125 Conklin mused that in this evolutionary future, ‘perhaps the least intelligent group can ultimately be denied suffrage: as are the imbeciles, insane, and criminals at present’.126 The conclusion of Direction of Human Evolution reads much like a sermon preached to a racial elect. It exhorts the reader to respond to the eugenic invitation pouring out from eons of evolution: ‘To us is given to co-operate in this greatest work of all time and to have a part in the triumphs of future ages … by improving the ideals of society and by breeding a better race of men’.127 On the one hand, obscurantists could not be allowed to use old-style unscientific legislatures to block the teaching of the science underpinning this holistic vision. On the other hand, one could take heart that the direction of human evolution would not be resisted successfully for long by the ignorant members of any race's ‘bottom-dwellers’, although it might be necessary for the latter to make fools of themselves in full national view before the public woke up to the urgency of the cause. About a month before the Scopes trial began, A.C.L.U. attorney Forrest Bailey had written to committee members saying that ‘the important thing is that the interests of science should be adequately protected by the presence of men who are competent for that purpose’.128 Hoping for a phalanx of competence, the A.A.A.S., its organ Science, its committee and the A.C.L.U. worked together, though not all were willing to go to Dayton, Tennessee to parry openly against retrograde evolutionary selection. Science and the A.C.L.U. fought from the front lines, whereas the A.A.A.S. and the committee did what they could behind the scenes. Science assured readers that committee members worked closely with the Scopes team to prepare for the trial. One article noted that Osborn was ‘tak[ing] a very active part in the scientific side … following conferences between himself and Dr. George W. Rappleyea and Mr. John T. Scopes’.129 Not for lack of A.C.L.U. efforts to get them to the trial did committee members absent themselves. Beyond Darrow, others representing the A.C.L.U. tried repeatedly to get committee chair Conklin, in particular, to Dayton but he would have none of it.130 He advocated from afar in proper professional forums but did not want to be part of a sideshow spectacle. Citing poor health to A.C.L.U. solicitors, he privately told Osborn he ‘would certainly sidestep’ the ‘miserable trial’ since ‘about the only thing which will change the law makers of Tennessee is to have them held up to the ridicule of the world’. Disgusted, he noted that northern newspapers ‘were poking fun at these backward states that are trying to repeal laws of nature with laws of the legislature’.131 As for Osborn's absence, Davis has suggested that he (and Conklin too) ‘refused to testify on behalf of the defense in part perhaps because of Clarence Darrow's opposition to eugenics’.132 It turned out that the judge, interpreting the case's purpose narrowly, refused to allow scientists to testify about evolution to the jury. Select scientific testimony was, however, entered into the official record. Some of it served the committee's vision: for example, Kirtley Mather's statement may be seen to reflect certain elements of racialism and eugenics.133 While no committee member went to Dayton, Science displayed all possible connections between committee members and John Scopes: ‘It is interesting to note that Mr. Scopes studied evolution under Arthur M. Miller, professor of geology in the University of Kentucky, who took his degree of doctor of philosophy under Professor Osborn’.134 Osborn also reminded Science readers that he himself had strongly contributed to the Scopes effort without being there by ‘hurr[ying] through the press of Scribner's for wide distribution in the state of Tennessee a small volume, “The Earth Speaks to Bryan”’.135 The story of the Scopes trial itself is well known. Less known is how the A.A.A.S. committee on evolution's members acted while combating the anti-evolution movement driving the trial, and how their distinct views on biological race and eugenics – reflected in public writings – worked to reverse the maxim ‘all men are created equal’ in favour of a ‘scientific’ view of enlightened inequality. In committee members' writings, eugenics was a scientific and desirable movement. Likewise, racial hierarchies were not social constructs produced by bigotry. Rather, they were reflections of biological processes the importance of which would hopefully be illuminated with the heightened interest in evolution generated by the disputes leading up to, and encompassing, the Scopes trial. Uniquely, the committee's president, E. G. Conklin, argued that getting to the next stage of social evolution required trained scientists from what he saw as the ‘best races’ to take control of the whole evolutionary process, with socio-political structures refashioned in the image of science. Using the fruits of psychometric testing, society's biological wheat should be taught how to gradually weed out society's biological chaff through eugenic measures. Provided that society altruistically prioritized the global collective over the individual – and science was accorded its rightful place as arbiter of social norms – the ‘lower races’ could be humanely planned out of existence. That, for Conklin, would facilitate a human race of biological equals heir to a quasi-religious social utopia of true, scientific democracy. Embarking on this long road, evolution as the most foundational scientific idea had to be not just taught, but taught with a mind to a socio-biological plan for the future. Though Osborn and Davenport did not see evolution as necessarily manipulable in that way, they both endorsed biological racism and eugenics even as they worked to defend evolution while operating on the committee. Taken as a whole, the A.A.A.S. committee on evolution serves as an important example of America's scientific elite seeking and contributing to the creation of normative scientific and moral truth in the nineteen-twenties. Its scientists' proffered visions wore the robes of objectivity in an era when professionalization had claimed the immense moral authority thought to reside in science. The status of Conklin, Osborn and Davenport as quasi-absolute savants combined with the A.A.A.S. stamp of legitimacy seemingly rendered their discourse as scientifically normative. Indeed, an important swath of scientists and allies hoped to see their visions validated legally, socially and culturally amidst the attention garnered by Scopes. Rather than viewing racial eugenics, modernist religion, and prescriptions for social engineering as discourses tangential to the Scopes trial's meaning in American culture, evidence suggests they dovetailed in some important ways within the broader public narratives. Racialism, in particular, was not just part of this, but was central to some important rhetorical arrows aimed by elite professional scientists in the general direction of the Scopes trial. Footnotes 1 Princeton University, Rare Books and Special Collections, Edwin Grant Conklin papers (hereafter Conklin papers), carton 1, ‘Scopes’ folder, Clarence Darrow to Edwin Grant Conklin (telegram, 6:15a.m., 9 July 1925, from Dayton, Tenn.). 2 One important example is the section on ‘Race and evolution’ in J. P. Moran , The Scopes Trial: a Brief History with Documents ( Boston, Mass. , 2002 ), pp. 66 – 9 . Moran dealt with the issue of evolutionary scientists and eugenics very briefly amid a lengthy discussion on how ‘Caucasian [sic] scientists were divided among themselves about the reality of a biological race hierarchy’, and contended that ‘[b]y the 1920s … some biologists and anthropologists were turning toward the position that observable diversity among races grew out of cultural rather than physical or genetic differences’ (pp. 67–8). This assessment rather distorts the realities of the age, as does Moran's claim that Ronald Numbers had argued ‘supporters of evolution seldom referred to racial difference’ (p. 66, n. 186). Numbers actually wrote that anti-evolutionists avoided arguing on a racialist basis Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC ( R. L. Numbers , Darwinism Comes to America ( Cambridge. Mass. , 1998 ), p. 67 ). Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Furthermore, in the early to mid 1920s, very few scientists had turned to the culturalist position Moran characterizes as already ascendant – and certainly not with consistency; quite the opposite, as shown below. See also J. P. Moran , ‘Reading race into the Scopes trial: African American elites, science, and fundamentalism’ , Jour. American Hist. , xc ( 2003 ), 891–911 , at pp. 905 – 7 , for claims of scientific racism's decline under Franz Boas-ian pressure. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat A decade before Moran's work, Elazar Barkan had already demonstrated how the small minority of professional scientists of the 1920s who publicly doubted race hierarchies or eugenics were inconsistent and self-contradictory (see E. Barkan , The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States Between the World Wars ( Cambridge , 1992 )). Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Moran's most recent Scopes book again asserts that ‘Evolutionary science by 1925 had begun to slough off its racialist assumptions’ ( J. P. Moran , American Genesis: the Antievolution Controversies from Scopes to Creation Science ( New York , 2012 ), p. 88 ; Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC see also p. 86). Crossref Search ADS 3 For works instrumental in constructing scientific race in the West from the early modern period onwards, see The Idea of Race , ed. R. Bernasconi and T. L. Lott ( Indianapolis, Ind. , 2000 ). On the mid to late 19th-century racial ideas of Joseph Arthur de Gobineau and Ernst Haeckel, see J. P. Spiro , Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant ( Lebanon, N.H. , 2009 ), pp. 103 – 5 , 124 . For the 20th century, see esp. M. Yudell , Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the 20th Century ( New York , 2014 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 4 ‘Progressive’ is used in the early 20th-century sense articulated by Martin Pernick, as a term for those for whom ‘science constituted an objective method for resolving social and ethical questions’, surpassing older ethics and emotion, and who, as further defined by Spiro, wanted ‘to use the state to enact scientific reforms that would utilize the national germ more efficiently’ ( M. Pernick , The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of ‘Defective’ Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915 ( Oxford , 1996 ), p. 15 ; Spiro, p. 133). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 5 F. L. Allen , Only Yesterday: an Informal History of the 1920s ( New York , 1964 ), p. 164 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC See also D. P. Thurs , Science Talk: Changing Notions of Science in American Popular Culture ( New Brunswick, N.J. , 2007 ), p. 1 (see ch. 2 and 3 for more on the authority of science in 1920s culture). 6 Barkan, pp. 2–3. 7 G. M. Dorr , Segregation's Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia ( Charlottesville, Va. , 2008 ), p. 70 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 8 D. B. Paul , Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present ( Highlands, N.J. , 1995 ), p. 20 . Dorr argued that scientific racism's apex stretched from the turn of the 20th century to just before 1930 (Dorr, p. 70). Alexandra Stern contended that ‘Eugenics achieved its greatest national visibility in the 1920s when it was virtually synonymous with biological racism and modern degenerationism’ ( A. M. Stern , Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America ( Berkeley, Calif. , 2005 ), p. 16 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 9 Yudell , p. 66 . 10 The present author conceives public science as part of broader culture in the vein of A. Daum , ‘Varieties of popular science and the transformations of public knowledge: some historical reflections’ , Isis , c ( 2009 ), 319–32 , esp. p. 323 . Not all evolutionary scientists in America wholeheartedly supported biological racialism or eugenics in the early to mid 1920s, but the exceptions were few and often inconsistent. Most dissenters operated in the nascent field of cultural anthropology, led by Franz Boas, but even their critiques were uneven. Moreover, cultural anthropology was substantially less influential than physical anthropology in the 1920s; the latter field was filled with eugenicists (Barkan, pp. 77–84). In biological science, public opponents of eugenics were rare. Zoologist Herbert Spencer Jennings of Johns Hopkins University testified against eugenic models in the 1924 Johnson Act hearings, yet he was ‘Davenport's most prestigious supporter’, speaking in eugenicist tones about Mendelian recessive genes (Barkan, p. 66) Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS (see, e.g., Jennings's hyperbolic statement on the dangers of defective gene carriers cited in D. B. Paul , The Politics of Heredity: Essays on Eugenics, Biomedicine, and the Nature-Nurture Debate ( Albany, N.Y. , 1998 ), p. 124 . Geneticist T. H. Morgan of Columbia was perhaps the most consistent opponent of eugenics in the period, but he too offered little public opposition until his revision of a textbook in 1925 indicated doubts about racial intelligence hierarchies and their relationship to either genetics or environment Crossref Search ADS ( Paul , Controlling , p. 115 ). Crossref Search ADS See also J. A. Witkowski , ‘Charles Benedict Davenport, 1866–1944’, in Davenport's Dream: 21st Century Reflections on Heredity and Eugenics , ed. J. A. Witkowski and J. R. Inglis ( New York , 2008 ), pp. 35 – 58 , at p. 51 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC William Castle of Harvard University attacked Davenport's warnings against ‘race crossing’, but only in the late 1920s (Barkan, p. 166). Crossref Search ADS Even Julian Huxley, later known for opposing eugenics, squarely supported both racialism and state-mandated eugenic sterilization for much of the decade (Barkan pp. 179–86). Crossref Search ADS 11 Washington, D.C., American Association for the Advancement of Science, Archives and Records Centre (hereafter A.A.A.S. Archives), board and council meeting minutes 1907–25, ‘Meeting of the Spring Meeting [sic] of the Executive Committee April 23, 1922’, box Z-1-1, folder 26, ‘Minutes of the Executive Committee (23 Apr. 1922) and Replies Concerning Secretary of Section Q (Letter from Burton E. Livingston, Permanent Secretary to Dr Fairchild) 26 July 1922’. See also Philadelphia, American Philosophical Society, Charles B. Davenport papers (hereafter Davenport papers), ‘Committee on Evolution Controversy’ folder. 12 While some assume that by the 20th century the term ‘evolution’ was used simply as shorthand for Darwin's view of species adaptation and transformation through natural selection, the discourse reveals greater complexity surrounding evolution's etiology. For a good overview of evolutionary biologists' views of heredity and eugenics from the 1900s to the 1920s, see Witkowski and Inglis, p. 39. For the discourse on recessive Mendelian traits and the role of eugenics, see D. B. Paul and H. G. Spencer, ‘Did eugenics rest on an elementary mistake?’ , in Paul, Politics of Heredity , pp. 117 – 32 , esp. pp. 117–20. 13 Although geologist Kirtley F. Mather did not argue that social progress necessarily depended on eugenics, his Scopes testimony (a written statement entered into the record) included a racialist breakdown of contemporary society (see ‘Seventh day's proceedings’, in J. T. Scopes , The World's Most Famous Court Trial: State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes (repr. New York , 1971 ), pp. 241 – 51 , esp. p. 245. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC For more on Mather's connection to the Scopes trial, including his role as secretary of the Scopes Scholarship Fund, see E. B. Davis , ‘Altruism and the administration of the universe: Kirtley Fletcher Mather on science and values’ , Zygon , xlvi ( 2011 ), 517–35 , esp. p. 531 . Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat 14 On the early movement, see Pernick, p. 32 and Dorr, p. 22. 15 Dorr termed ‘lesser lights’ those in the professional scientific firmament who spread the eugenics creed regionally. Several had intellectual connections to committee members. For the South, these included Paul Barringer and Harvey Jordan of the University of Virginia, with Jordan having been directly trained by Conklin (Dorr, pp. 24, 28). Others included Harry Heck, Gene Ferguson and Ivey Foreman Lewis, all of whom spread the eugenic message in the Southern progressive wing. The flexibility of eugenics in the South is evidenced by Davenport's student Thomas Wyatt Turner, Virginia's first black eugenicist (Dorr, pp. 99–100). In the midwest, physicians Harry Clay Sharp of Indiana and, esp., Harry Heiseldan of Chicago did much to spread the idea of eugenics as preventative medicine and public hygiene in the 1910s (Pernick, chs. 4–6; on Sharp, see Dorr , pp. 11 , 18–20). West coast eugenics propagators included Luther Burbank, physician John R. Haynes and the prominent Paul Popenoe (Stern, pp. 10, 31, 85, 113). 16 Along with the scientific adversaries mentioned above, there were a few institutional opponents, especially the Roman Catholic Church (and its renowned lay writer, G. K. Chesterton). But Catholicism was mostly dismissed by progressives as being unscientific and obscurantist in the 1920s (see S. M. Leon , An Image of God: the Catholic Struggle with Eugenics ( Chicago, Ill. , 2013 )). Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC 17 Paul , Controlling , pp. 19 – 20 . 18 G. W. Hunter peppered eugenics throughout the textbook that symbolically stood at the centre of the trial for evolution (G. W. Hunter, A Civic Biology Presented in Problems (New York, 1914)). Although scholars have pointed out that some sections of the Hunter textbook contain clear endorsements of eugenics, practically its whole presentation of biological science – including evolution – was intertwined in the book with a eugenics-inflected programme of social engineering (Hunter, esp. pp. 11, 196, 261, 263). See also A. R. Shapiro , ‘Civic biology and the origin of the school antievolution movement’ , Jour. Hist. Biology , lxi ( 2008 ), 409 – 33 and Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS A. R. Shapiro , Trying Biology: the Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools ( Chicago, Ill. , 2013 ). Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC R. C. Ohlers traced the influence of key public magazines in popularizing a historical myth that scientists had always believed in the uniformity of nature and, conversely, that such belief was the mark of the professional scientist by the later 19th century (R. C. Ohlers, ‘The end of miracles: scientific naturalism in America, 1830–1934’ (unpublished University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. thesis, 2007)). See also M. Stanley , Huxley's Church and Maxwell's Demon: from Theistic to Natural Science ( Chicago, Ill. , 2015 ), esp. chs. 2, 6, 7. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC 19 Spiro, p. 144. 20 His credibility was enhanced by his service at Columbia University, first as De Costa Chair of biology from 1891 to 1910, then as research professor of zoology from 1910 until his death in 1935 (see F. Milligan , ‘Henry Fairfield Osborn, man of Parnassus’ , Bios , vii ( 1936 ), 5 – 24 ). 21 See E. J. Larson , review of ‘Henry Fairfield Osborn: race and the search for the origins of man’ , American Hist. Rev. , cviii ( 2003 ), 529 – 30 . See also Davenport papers, set I: professional papers, ‘Committee on Evolution Controversy May 2, 1922–May 10, 1925’ folder, Henry Fairfield Osborn to Burton E. Livingston (2 May 1922). 22 B. Regal , Henry Fairfield Osborn: Race, and the Search for the Origins of Man ( Aldershot , 2002 ), pp. 30 – 4 . 23 Regal said of Guyot: ‘He regarded the earth as a living organism and believed that it developed “progressively’ – slowly and according to God's laws” (Regal, p. 37). For more on the College of New Jersey/Princeton University's (and Princeton Theological Seminary's) particular 19th and early 20th century discourse on developmentalism – including Guyot, Osborn and others – see D. N. Livingstone , Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution ( Baltimore, Md. , 2014 ), pp. 155 – 96 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC See also B. J. Gundlach , Process and Providence: the Evolution Question at Princeton, 1845–1929 ( Grand Rapids, Mich. , 2013 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 24 E. A. Carlson , ‘ The eugenic world of Charles Benedict Davenport ’, in Witkowski and Inglis, pp. 59 – 76 , at p. 68 . 25 Regal, p. xii. 26 For more on Osborn's influence, see C. A. Clark , ‘Evolution for John Doe: pictures, the public, and the Scopes trial debate’ , Jour. American Hist. , lxxxvii ( 2001 ), 1275–1303 , esp. pp. 1280 – 3 and Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS C. A. Clarke , God or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age ( Baltimore, Md. , 2008 ), pp. 17 – 20 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC 27 A. Richards , ‘Edwin Grant Conklin’ , Bios , vi ( 1935 ), 187 – 211 . For a detailed discussion of Conklin's upbringing and formative years, see K. J. Cooke , ‘ A gospel of social evolution: religion, biology, and education in the thought of Edwin Grant Conklin ’ (unpublished University of Chicago Ph.D. thesis, 1994), ch. 1. On Conklin's later intellectual difficulties with Methodism, see pp. 72 – 8 , 91 – 110 . 28 J. W. Atkinson , ‘E. G. Conklin on evolution: the popular writings of an embryologist’ , Jour. Hist. Biology , xviii ( 1985 ), 31–50 , at p. 32 . For Brooks's influence on Conklin, see Cooke , ‘ Gospel ’, pp. 41 – 4 , 50 – 61 . 29 Richards, p. 193. As Cooke indicated, morphological study during the era of Conklin's graduate work ‘was directly associated with furthering the knowledge of evolution’ ( Cooke , ‘ Gospel ’, pp. 41 – 2 ). 30 On Woods Hole's early role in Conklin's work, see Cooke , ‘ Gospel ’, pp. 56 – 7 , 107 . See also Atkinson, p. 33. On Conklin as embryologist, see Cooke , ‘ Gospel ’, pp. 79 – 82 . 31 Atkinson, pp. 33, 34. 32 Carlson, p. 66. 33 Carlson, p. 68. 34 See G. E. Allen , ‘The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, 1910–40: an essay on institutional history’ , Osiris , 2nd ser., ii ( 1986 ), 225 – 64 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat 35 Paul, Controlling, p. 65. See also Witkowski, ‘Charles Benedict Davenport’, p. 50. While Witkowski argued that Davenport did not have much influence on the army's I.Q. assessments, Barkan contends that he personally helped create the infamous Alpha and Beta tests (Barkan, pp. 70–1). 36 See M. F. Jacobson , Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race ( Cambridge, Mass. , 1998 ), pp. 82 – 99 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 37 Barkan, p. 70. 38 For an overview of Davenport on his death, see O. Riddle , ‘Biographical memoir of Charles Benedict Davenport, 1866–1944’ , National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoirs , xxv ( 1947 ), 75 – 110 . Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat As late as 1928, Davenport's study with M. Steggerta , Race Crossing in Jamaica ( Washington, D.C. , 1929 ) – which claimed to prove scientifically the evil of miscegenation between ‘pure race[s]’, by comparing loosely-defined ‘browns’, ‘blacks’ and ‘whites’ and asserting that inter-mating resulted in clear structural ‘disharmonies’ – faced little public criticism. Davenport had sought to refute the increasing environmentalist position in genetics. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC While it is true that Harvard's William Castle attacked Davenport's claims in this book, overall, this reputed opponent of eugenics had mostly supported the latter's eugenicist works (see Barkan, pp. 165–6, including n. 61). Despite some criticism, on the whole Race Crossing in Jamaica ‘was treated very much as sound science’ until the 1930s (Barkan, p. 163). For more on the book, see Yudell, pp. 90–2. 39 Davenport's election to the National Academy came on the heels of his influential 1912 textbook, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (Spiro, p. 131). By the later 19th century, the A.A.A.S. constitution required all elected officers to be fellows (see S. G. Kohlstedt , M. M. Sokal and B. Lewenstein, The Establishment of Science in America: 150 Years of the American Association for the Advancement of Science ( New Brunswick, N.J. , 1999 ), pp. 24 – 5 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 40 Stern, pp. 49–50; Barkan, p. 221. Spiro included two of the committee's three members (Osborn and Davenport) in ‘the big four of scientific racism in the United States’ ( Spiro, p. 129 ). For more on the racialism connected with this congress and with the National Academy in the 1920s in general, see Yudell , pp. 66 , 74 – 88 . 41 Quoted in Spiro, p. 214. 42 For the A.A.A.S.'s origins and early decades, see Kohlstedt, Sokal and Lewenstein, pp. 7–49. 43 Cattell ‘ spent two years in England [where he] became enamored of the work and ideas of Francis Galton … Galton's influence on Cattell proved overwhelming ’ ( M. M. Sokal , ‘Stargazing: James Keenan Cattell, American Men of Science and the reward structure in the American scientific community, 1906–44’, in Psychology, Science, and Human Affairs: Essays in Honor of William Bevan , ed. F. Kessell ( Boulder, Colo. , 1995 ), pp. 64 – 86 , at p. 69 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 44 Kohlstedt , Sokal and Lewenstein, pp. 52 – 3 . Barkan argued that eventually the ‘sanction of science [could give] credence to even the most absurd claims’ , claims which were not susceptible to critique by laymen since the latter were not professionally qualified judges ( Barkan, p. 82 ). 45 Pernick , p. 119 . Promoted by newspaper baron Edward Scripps around 1920, print forums like Literary Digest, Time, Life and Newsweek – along with newspapers and the radio bureaus – began to quote Science. By then, the latter included extensive articles and reports on the A.A.A.S.'s annual January gathering. The A.A.A.S. board came to dominate appointments to the board of Science Service, a Scripps syndicated newspaper feature that disseminated much A.A.A.S. information throughout the late 1920s. After 1925, the A.A.A.S. created its own ‘A.A.A.S. press service’ which coaxed big newspapers into offering detailed coverage of its meetings (Kohlstedt, Sokal and Lewenstein, pp. 83–4). 46 Barkan argued that ‘Davenport was the embodiment of the universal intellectual and absolute savant’ (p. 76) (his discussion of the concept appears on pp. 7–8). It is this author's suggestion that Osborn's and Conklin's status placed them in that same category. 47 Barkan, pp. 7–8. 48 W. K. Gregory , ‘The Galton Society for the study of the origin and evolution of man’ , Science , xlix ( 1919 ), 267 – 8 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat On committee members' regular attendance at its meetings, see Davenport papers, set I: professional papers, ‘Galton Society’ folder, Madison Grant to William K. Gregory, 18 Apr. 1918. On the special role of Davenport, see Barkan , pp. 69 – 71 . It was at a Galton Society meeting that Osborn suggested ways of publicizing the Second International Eugenics Congress (Davenport papers, set I: professional papers, folder 5, folder correspondence, ‘Osborn, Henry F.’, Henry Fairfield Osborn to Charles Davenport, 23 Apr. 1920; see also ‘Committee on Evolution Controversy’ folder, Edwin Grant Conklin to Charles Davenport, 6 and 30 May 1922). Osborn had been elected president of the Second Eugenics Congress by a committee that included not only Conklin and Davenport but also T. H. Morgan, Vernon Kellogg and Robert Yerkes (Davenport papers, set I: professional papers, folder 5, folder correspondence, ‘Osborn, Henry F.’, Charles Davenport to Henry Fairfield Osborn, 12 Apr. 1920). Crossref Search ADS Science published Osborn's address at the Congress (see H. F. Osborn , ‘The Second International Congress of Eugenics address of welcome’ , Science , liv ( 1921 ), 311 – 13 ). Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat 49 Gregory, p. 268. Barkan and Selden confirmed that the Galton Society's founders intended it to counter the non-racialist cultural anthropology of Franz Boas (Barkan, p. 68; S. Selden , Inheriting Shame: the Story of Eugenics and Racism in America ( New York , 1999 ), p. 13 ). The Galtonians hoped to join physical anthropology with eugenics, although few of its members were actually anthropologists. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC On the Galton Society's inordinate influence in American science, see Selden p. 15. For other racialist and eugenicist organizations that Osborn, Conklin and Davenport belonged to, see Spiro , Appendix D, p. 395 . 50 Spiro, pp. 307–8. 51 Kohlstedt, Sokal and Lewenstein, p. 85. The A.A.A.S. also solicited a fund to pay for Scopes's legal expenses and underwrite his graduate study at the University of Chicago (Kohlstedt, Sokal and Lewenstein, p. 85). For more on Cattel's eugenicism, see Dorr, p. 84. 52 Conklin papers, carton 1, ‘Scopes’ folder, Henry Fairfield Osborn to Edwin Grant Conklin, 22 June 1925. Mather, a renowned Protestant modernist geologist, later claimed that he, too, had written to Roger Baldwin of the A.C.L.U. to suggest the defence concentrate on showcasing scientists who would explain that evolution and religion could go together ( Davis , ‘ Altruism ’, p. 531 ). It is widely known that Darrow did not take that approach. 53 Davenport papers, set I: professional papers, ‘Committee on Evolution Controversy’ folder, Charles Davenport to P. P. Claxton, 22 May 1922. 54 Davenport papers, set I: professional papers, ‘Committee on Evolution Controversy’ folder, Charles Davenport to P. P. Claxton, 22 May 1922. 55 Davenport papers, set I: professional papers, ‘Committee on Evolution Controversy’ folder, Charles Davenport to P. P. Claxton, 22 May 1922. The latter position related also to Laughlin's Congressional advisory role for the 1924 Johnson-Reed National Origins Act (see Witkowski , ‘ Charles Benedict Davenport ’, p. 51 ). 56 Spiro, p. 216. 57 Davenport papers, set I: professional papers, ‘Committee on Evolution Controversy’ folder, Charles Davenport to P. P. Claxton, 22 May 1922. 58 Harry Laughlin was president of the American Eugenics Society in 1928 when he lectured citing the pivotal importance of the 1921 International Congress of Eugenics in ‘establish[ing] [eugenics'] relationship with the other sciences’. The establishment of the Eugenics Record Office, he said, ‘marked the sound organization of eugenics as a biological science’ ( H. Laughlin , ‘Presidential address of the American eugenics society: the progress of American eugenics’ , Eugenical News , xiii ( 1928 ), 89 ). Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat 59 W. Bateson , ‘Evolutionary faith and modern doubts’ , Science , lv ( 1922 ), 55 – 61 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat 60 See Witkowski , ‘ Charles Benedict Davenport ’, p. 40 . In some cases biometrics involved a resurgence of neo-Lamarckian environmentalism. 61 The Globe, 29 Dec. 1921, quoted in H. F. Osborn , ‘William Bateson on Darwinism’ , Science , lv ( 1922 ), 194 – 7 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat 62 Common usage saw the terms conflated throughout the 1930s. In 1932, experts could still write: ‘in common talk, Evolution, Darwinism, and Natural Selection are hopelessly mixed and muddled’ ( H. G. Wells , J. Huxley and G. P. Wells, Evolution, Fact and Theory ( Garden City, N.Y. , 1932 ), p. 429 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Interestingly, a South Carolina state senator's attempted rider to a 1921 bill prohibiting ‘the cult known as Darwinism’ in public schools tried to limit the bill's coverage to ‘Darwinism’ per se, ‘not to such theories of evolution as are advocated by Lamarck, Bergson, Osborn and others’ (see ‘Anti-evolution legislation in the various states’ , Science , lxi ( 1925 ), x – xii ). 63 See J. Hered review of A. G. Cock , ‘Bateson's two Toronto addresses, 1921:2. evolutionary faith’ , Jour. Heredity , lxxx ( 1989 ), 96 – 9 . 64 Bateson, pp. 58, 61. 65 Davenport papers, set I: professional papers, folder 5, ‘Correspondence with Osborn’, Henry Fairfield Osborn to Charles Davenport, 29 Oct. 1920. Osborn may also have had a personal axe to grind with Bateson, the latter having declined Osborn's presidential invitation to speak at the Second International Congress of Eugenics held at the Natural History Museum in 1921. Although Bateson did not oppose eugenics, he did eschew Osborn's attempts to demonstrate an innate connection between eugenics and genetics. In a 1920 letter to Davenport, Osborn complained of Bateson's recalcitrance: ‘I do not think Bateson's ground is logical’, he wrote, ‘Of course genetics is the foundation of eugenics’ (Davenport papers, set I: professional papers, folder 5, ‘Correspondence with Osborn’, Henry Fairfield Osborn to Charles Davenport, 22 Nov. 1920). 66 Conklin Papers, box 17, folder 31, Henry Fairfield Osborn to Edwin Grant Conklin, 22 Dec. 1922, and Osborn to Conklin, 17 Jan. 1924. 67 For more on Bryan, see M. Kazin , A Godly Hero: the Life of William Jennings Bryan ( New York , 2006 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 68 H. F. Osborn , ‘ William Bateson ’, p. 196 . 69 W. E. Ritter , ‘Osborn versus Bateson on evolution’ , Science , lv ( 1922 ), 398 – 9 . 70 E. B. Davis , ‘Fundamentalist cartoons, modernist pamphlets, and the religious image of science in the Scopes era’, in Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America , ed. C. L. Cohen and P. S. Boyer ( Madison, Wis. , 2008 ), pp. 175 – 98 , at pp. 184 – 5 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC See W. J. Bryan , ‘God and evolution’ , New York Times , 26 Feb. 1922 , p. 84 . 71 E. G. Conklin , ‘ Bryan and evolution ’, New York Times , 5 March 1922 , p. 103 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC The impetus for the Times invitation was Bryan's ‘God and evolution’. On the warfare model, see J. W. Draper , History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science ( 1874 ) and A. D. White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (2 vols., New York , 1896 ). The warfare thesis/conflict thesis did not posit that all religion was false, just that traditional doctrinal religions – especially forms of Western Christianity with developed dogmas – were antithetical to scientific progress. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 72 H. F. Osborn , ‘ Evolution and religion ’, New York Times , 5 March 1922 , p. 91 . Bryan's 19th-century inductivist view of science is evident in W. J. Bryan , In his Image ( New York , 1922 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC See, e.g., p. 131. 73 Osborn , ‘ Evolution ’, p. 91 . 74 Davenport papers, set I: professional papers, ‘Committee on Evolution Controversy’ folder, Davenport Edwin Grant Conklin to Charles Davenport, 6 May 1922. 75 Davenport papers, set I: professional papers, ‘Committee on Evolution Controversy’ folder, Davenport Edwin Grant Conklin to Charles Davenport, 6 May 1922. The A.A.A.S. executive committee adopted and issued such a statement in Dec. 1922 (see A.A.A.S. Archives, board meeting minutes, box Z-1-1, folder 28, ‘Minutes of the Council, A.A.A.S. First Boston Session, Tues 26 Dec. 1922’). 76 Conklin was clear about his religious modernism. For example, he chose Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem ‘The Higher Pantheism’ to illustrate his position in his important book discussed below ( E. G. Conklin , The Direction of Human Evolution ( New York , 1921 ), p. 212 ). In another case, he defended a bishop being tried for heresy in a traditional Protestant denomination saying: ‘Of course, the whole question of what one means by the word “God’ is involved … I got the impression [the bishop] was less an atheist [as the bishop termed himself] than a pantheist and his position in this respect is not very different from my own” (Conklin papers, carton 1, ‘Philosophy and theology’ folder, Conklin to Arthur Wadham (28 Feb. 1924)). On Conklin's changing religious views, see Cooke, ‘Gospel’, esp. chs. 2 and 6. As with Osborn, Conklin's language on religion is sometimes hazy and imprecise. There are moments when he gives the impression of advocating panentheism over pantheism. These varied positions can be hard to disentangle in the discourse of 1920s Protestant modernism. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC For more on postmillennial Protestantism in the 1920s and eugenics, see C. Rosen , Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement ( Oxford , 2004 ), p. 16 . 77 Edwin Grant Conklin to Charles Davenport, 30 May 1922. The original suggestion appeared in Davenport to Osborn, 10 May 1922. Both letters are in Davenport papers, set I: professional papers, ‘Committee on Evolution Controversy’ folder. 78 Davenport papers, set I: professional papers, ‘Committee on Evolution Controversy’ folder, Edwin Grant Conklin to Charles Davenport, 30 May 1922. 79 For a discussion of these pamphlets and their significance, see Davis , ‘ Fundamentalist cartoons ’. 80 Davis , ‘ Fundamentalist cartoons ’, p. 186 . 81 Davis , ‘ Fundamentalist cartoons ’, pp. 186 – 7 . The latter often used the pamphlets in college teaching. The other pamphlet authors were Shailer Mathews, Fosdick, Robert Millikan, Arthur Holly Compton, Mather, Michael Pupin, Edwin Frost and Samuel Christian Schmucker. 82 Osborn , ‘ Evolution ’, p. 91 . 83 See H. F. Osborn , ‘Orthogenesis as observed from palaeontological evidence beginning in the year 1889’ , American Naturalist , lvi ( 1922 ), 134 – 43 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat For the 1930s, see Osborn , ‘Aristogenesis, the creative principle in the origin of species’ , Science , lxxix ( 1934 ), 41 – 5 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Osborn's formative influence with Edward Drinker Cope (a leader of the so-called ‘American School’ of evolutionists), steered him toward the neo-Lamarkism flourishing around the turn of the 20th century (see Regal, pp. 61–5). For a brief discussion of the ‘American school’, Crossref Search ADS see J. H. Roberts , Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859–1900 ( Madison, Win. , 1988 ), pp. 86 – 7 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC 84 Atkinson, p. 41. In Direction of Human Evolution, Conklin simply said, ‘Evolution is one of the responses of the germ plasm to environmental stimuli, and the character of the response is determined largely by the constitution of the germ plasm rather than by the stimulus’ (pp. 12–13). 85 E. G. Conklin , ‘The mechanism of evolution in the light of heredity and development’ , Scientific Monthly , ix – x (6 pts., 1919 –20), 481 – 505 , 52–62, 170–81, 269–91, 388–403, 496–515. See Atkinson's comment on this topic in ‘E. G. Conklin on evolution’, p. 45. 86 Leading figures in American embryology and palaeontology continued to be influenced in the 1920s by biometricians' tendency to privilege outdated assumptions about continuous variation in elementary hereditary particles. This viewpoint would only be thoroughly repudiated by the neo-Darwinian synthesis of the 1930s ( Witkowski , ‘ Charles Benedict Davenport ’, p. 40 ). 87 Conklin papers, carton 1, ‘Philosophy and Theology’ folder, Edwin Grant Conklin to P. O'Dea [New Zealand], 24 Oct. 1923. For more on Conklin and teleology, see Cooke , ‘ Gospel ’, p. 90 . 88 Osborn , ‘ Evolution ’, p. 91 . 89 Osborn , ‘ Orthogenesis ’, p. 40 . 90 Roberts, pp. 137–40. 91 Members of the A.A.A.S. committee were by no means the only professional scientists holding to teleological evolution in the early 1920s. E.g., Mather (whose written expert statement on evolution was partly read out in the jury's absence), espoused similar views when arguing for the compatibility of a quasi-racialist form of evolution with a Christianity centred in vitalism (see E. B. Davis , ‘Robert Andrews Millikan (1868–1953)’, in Eminent Lives in 20th Century Science and Religion , ed. N. Rupke (2nd edn., Frankfurt , 2009 ), pp. 253 – 74 , at pp. 261 – 3 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 92 Roberts, p.140. 93 Conklin, Direction, p. 223. Conklin depicted science as inseparable from the uniformity of nature: ‘so far as we know or can conclude from present evidence, mechanism, law, and order are universal and have been so from all eternity’ (pp. 203–4, author's emphasis). 94 Osborn , ‘ Evolution ’, p. 2 . Conklin declared in the influential Direction of Human Evolution, that the ‘scientific conception of nature’ was ‘a system of eternal universal laws’ (pp. 193–4). This meant, he said, that ‘nature is uniform and her processes continuous’ (p. 7). 95 Osborn , ‘ Evolution ’, p. 14 . See his essentially identical claim about evolution as a moral force in H. F. Osborn , ‘Credo of a naturalist’ , The Forum , lxxiii ( 1925 ), 486 – 94 . 96 Science published Davenport's 1921 argument that eugenics was not just applied but ‘pure science’: ‘[People] do not have heated discussions on the multiplication table’ (C. B. Davenport, ‘Research in eugenics’, Science, liv (1921), 391–7). 97 H. F. Osborn preface to M. Grant , Passing of the Great Race: or the Racial Basis of European History ( New York , 1918 ), p. viii . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC In another venue Osborn argued, ‘This racial soul is the product of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years of past experience and reaction – it is the essence or distillation of the spiritual and moral life of the race’ ( H. F. Osborn , Man Rises to Parnassus: Critical Epochs in the Prehistory of Man ( Princeton, N.J. , 1928 ), p. 220 ). 98 Osborn , Man Rises , pp. 220 – 1 . 99 Osborn in Grant , pp. viii – ix . 100 Osborn preface to Grant, Passing, pp. viii–ix. As Dorr put it, ‘[e]ugenicists reduced the philosophical problem of perfection from a moral to a physical plane … [E]ugenic breeding would increase all those traits that made individuals more moral’ (Dorr, p. 12). 101 Osborn preface to Grant, Passing, pp. viii–ix. Frederick Adams Woods's complimentary review of Grant in Science contended: ‘Mr. Madison Grant's recent success’ in this ‘scientific work’ is ‘justified since [he] has written both boldly and attractively and has produced a work of solid merit … This is a book that will do much to widen the rapidly expanding interest in eugenics’ and will ‘help to disseminate the ever-growing conviction among scientific men of the supreme importance of heredity’ ( F. A. Woods , ‘The passing of the great race’ , Science , xlviii ( 1918 ), 419 – 20 ). 102 Davenport papers, ser. 1, lectures, ‘Eugenics as a Religion’ folder, C. B. Davenport, ‘Eugenics as a religion’ (unpublished ms., 1916) (hereafter Davenport, ‘Eugenics as a religion’), p. 5. 103 Davenport , ‘ Eugenics as a religion ’, p. 4 . 104 Davenport , ‘ Eugenics as a religion ’, p. 5 . For more on Davenport, religion and eugenics, see Rosen, pp. 34–5. 105 C. B. Davenport , ‘ Preface ’, in Eugenics in Race and State, ii: Scientific Papers of the Second International Congress of Eugenics ( Baltimore, Md. , 1923 ), p. ix . 106 Conklin papers, carton 1, ‘Scopes Trial’ folder, Edwin Grant Conklin to John Prior, 23 May 1924. 107 G. J. Harp , Positivist Republic: Auguste Comte and the Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865–1920 ( University Park, Pa. , 1995 ), pp. 187 – 9 , 199 . 108 D. K. Pickens , ‘The sterilization movement: the search for purity in mind and state’ , Phylon , xxviii ( 1967 ), 78–94 , at pp. 82 – 3 . 109 Conklin , Direction , p. 66 . 110 Cooke painted Conklin as distinct from the darker side of the eugenics movement and, instead, as supporting individual dignity (see K. J. Cooke , ‘Duty or dream? Edwin G. Conklin's critique of eugenics and support for American individualism’ , Jour. Hist. Biology , xxxv ( 2002 ), 365 – 84 ). But letters between Conklin and Davenport going back to 1908 show him tying together eugenics with the science of evolution and social progress in a way that de-emphasizes individualism. For early and late exchanges, respectively, see Conklin papers, box 6, folder 8, ‘Charles Davenport’, Davenport to Conklin, 16 Apr. 1908 and 27 Nov. 1909; Conklin to Davenport, 1 July 1929. For examples where Cooke defines eugenics narrowly in arguing for Conklin's individualism, see ‘ Gospel ’, pp. 147 – 8 , 176 , 178 – 80 , 193 , 198 . 111 Cooke , ‘ Gospel ’, p. 114 . 112 Conklin, Direction, p. 122. Mather, influenced by Henri Bergson, wrote analogously of altruism around the same time as Conklin (see Davis, ‘Altruism’, pp. 526–8). 113 Conklin , Direction , p. 70 . 114 Conklin , Direction , pp. 77 – 8 (original italics). 115 Conklin , Direction , p. 104 . 116 Conklin , Direction , pp. 104 – 5 . 117 Conklin , Direction , p. 80 . 118 Conklin , Direction , pp. 239 – 40 , 237 . Conklin said the culmination of this process might require a long period of time if, indeed, it ever happened. The problem was that ‘the development of moral and social ideals of equal justice for all people will prevent the extermination of the inferior races’ ( Conklin , Direction , p. 80 ). Still, following this plan, whatever racial amalgam emerged after millennia of efforts would certainly be no lower than the best of the civilized races at present. That alone was apparently worth pursuing ( Conklin , Direction , p. 81 ). 119 Conklin , Direction , p. 34 . 120 Conklin , Direction , p. 53 . See Yudell on the increasing black-white dichotomy of scientific racialism in the U.S.A. in the 1920s (Yudell, pp. 66, 77–88). Though beyond our timeframe, Yudell also argued that Theodosius Dobzhansky's role in constructing the neo-Darwinian synthesis put race near the heart of evolution (see Yudell, ch. 7). 121 Yudell, ch. 7. 122 E. G. Conklin , Heredity and Environment in the Development of Men ( Princeton, N.J. , 1918 ), p. 450 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 123 From a hereditarian perspective, Osborn, too, argued that current conceptions of democracy were obsolete because based on non-scientific dogmas of equality formulated ‘some hundred and fifty years ago’ (Osborn in Grant, Passing, pp. xvi, xxxiii). For his part, Davenport argued that social species are naturally directed to stratify socially. Equality of opportunity was pointless ( Davenport , ‘ Eugenics as a religion ’, p. 4 ). 124 Conklin , Direction , p. 115 . 125 Conklin , Direction , p. 105 . 126 Conklin , Direction , p. 105 . Conklin saw this as an evolved form of ‘democratic socialism’ ( Cooke , ‘ Gospel ’, p. 245 ). One thing was sure, the Promised Land, once reached, would flow with milk and honey. With utopian aspirations, Conklin said, ‘[F]uture historians may record that super-civilization began with the end of wars and the co-operation of all the peoples of the earth’ ( Conklin, Direction , p. 70 ). 127 Conklin , Direction , p. 247 . 128 Conklin papers, box 17, folder 31, Forrest Bailey to Edwin Grant Conklin, 4 June, 1925. 129 Conklin papers, box 17, folder 31, Forrest Bailey to Edwin Grant Conklin, 4 June, 1925. 130 See exchanges where A.C.L.U. attorney Forrest Bailey tried to get Conklin to come to the trial in Conklin papers, carton 1, ‘Scopes’ folder, Bailey to Conklin, 29 May 1925; Conklin to Bailey, 8 June 1925; Bailey to Conklin, 12 June 1925; Bailey to Conklin, 16 June 1925; Bailey to Conklin, 20 June 1925. Ultimately, Bailey wrote to Conklin (30 June 1925) ruing the fact that the latter, citing ill health, had declined his (and George Rappaleya's separate) plea to testify personally at the trial (Conklin papers, carton 1, ‘Scopes’ folder, Rappleyea to Conklin, 27 June 1925). 131 Conklin papers, carton 1, ‘Scopes’ folder, Edwin Grant Conklin to Henry Fairfield Osborn, 19 June 1925. 132 E. B. Davis , ‘Science and religious fundamentalism in the 1920s’ , American Scientist , xciii ( 2005 ), 253–60 , at p. 258 . Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat 133 For an example of the religion anchored to the Scopes trial defence, anthropologist Fay Cooper Cole of the University of Chicago (whose written statement appears in the trial's official record) reported that renowned modernist/eugenics advocate Shailer Mathews's expert statement reconciling evolution with religion was intended by the defence for entry into the official trial record (see F. C. Cole , ‘A witness at the Scopes trial’ , Scientific American , cc ( 1959 ), 121 – 8 (repr. as part of ‘50, 100, and 150 years ago’ , Scientific American , ccc ( 2009 ) <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/50-years-ago-scope-trial-witness/> [accessed 21 Dec. 2016 ]). 134 Darwin to Scopes , in Osborn, ‘ Evolution ’, p. 43 . 135 Osborn , ‘ Evolution ’, p. 45 . Footnotes * The author would like to thank Christine Leigh Heryman, Jon H. Roberts, Edward B. Davis and Lily Santoro-Williams for their comments and suggestions. He is also grateful to J. D. Hosler for reading the manuscript and to the journal's anonymous peer reviewers for their very useful critiques. © 2017 Institute of Historical Research This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © 2017 Institute of Historical Research
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