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“Scopes Wasn't the First”: Nebraska's 1924 Anti-Evolution Trial

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“Scopes Wasn't the First”: Nebraska's 1924 Anti-Evolution Trial “Scopes Wasn’t the First”: Nebraska’s 1924 Anti-Evolution Trial (Article begins on page 2 below.) This article is copyrighted by History Nebraska (formerly the Nebraska State Historical Society). You may download it for your personal use. For permission to re-use materials, or for photo ordering information, see: https://history.nebraska.gov/publications/re-use-nshs-materials Learn more about Nebraska History (and search articles) here: https://history.nebraska.gov/publications/nebraska-history-magazine History Nebraska members receive four issues of Nebraska History annually: https://history.nebraska.gov/get-involved/membership Full Citation: Adam Shapiro, “‘Scopes Wasn’t the First’: Nebraska’s 1924 Anti-Evolution Trial,” Nebraska History 94 (2013): 110-119 Article Summary: “Darwin and Genesis fought out a battle in District Judge Broady’s court in Lincoln,” reported the Fremont Tribune on October 22, 1924, “and . Genesis lost and Darwin won.” Nebraska had its own anti- evolution trial nearly seven months before the famous Scopes trial opened in Tennessee. But how did the Nebraska case remain obscure while the Tennessee case became a national sensation? Cataloging Information: Names: John Scopes, Charles Darwin, William Jennings Bryan, Charles W. Bryan, David S Domer, William A Klink, Charles William Taylor, Frank R Beers, Herbert Spencer, Charles Hodge Place Names: Dayton, Tennessee; Rising City, Butler County, Nebraska Keywords: evolution, Midland College, slander, Genesis, eugenics, (physical) disability, Four Minute Men, Siman Act, United Lutheran Church in America (ULCA) Photographs / Images: “Another Pied Piper” (illustration) from Seven Questions in Dispute, by William Jennings Bryan; Charles W Bryan and William Jennings Bryan; Fremont College (later Midland College); inset article about the Nebraska anti-evolution trial settlement (Fremont Tribune, October 22, 1924; Rising City school building; First English Evangelical Lutheran Church, Rising City; Bryan at the Scopes trial, July 1925 SCOPES WASN’T THE FIRST Nebraska’s 1924 Anti-Evolution Trial BY ADAM SHAPIRO 110 • NEBRASKA history he waning days of the 1924 presidential cam- Nebraska Governor paign found William Jennings Bryan back in Charles W. Bryan and his his former home state of Nebraska. On Friday brother, William Jennings T Bryan. Library of Congress. evening, October 17, 1924, The Commoner, as news- papers called him, spoke to an audience of hundreds at the high school auditorium in Fre- mont. It was one of many campaign stops he made across the state. In fact, he had already made two appearances in smaller towns earlier in the day.1 It was a frenzied tour by train. By the next morning he would be fifty miles south, in his former home- town of Lincoln. That Saturday night, he would address thousands in a “packed house at the Lincoln auditorium.”2 Bryan told Nebraskans of his worry that votes might be split between the Democratic ticket and the third-party candidacy of “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, handing an easy electoral victory to the Republican nominee, Calvin Coolidge. It was the fear of losing the votes of Western farmers that had prompted the Democratic Party to nominate William’s brother, Nebraska governor Charles W. Bryan, to be their vice-presidential candidate. William himself had been dispatched on a speak- ing tour to Colorado, Nebraska, and Kansas, which was what had brought him to Lincoln seventeen days before the election. evolution when he spoke that Saturday in Lincoln The long arc of Bryan’s public life and his career because less than half a mile away America’s first in national politics had begun in Lincoln over thirty antievolution trial had just concluded a few hours years earlier when he was elected to represent earlier. In district court presided over by Jefferson the area in the U.S. Congress. It would end in little Hoover Broady (the son of Bryan’s first campaign more than nine months’ time with his death on July manager), a schoolteacher accused of being 26, 1925—just after the end of the Scopes “mentally and morally unfit” to teach because he antievolution trial in Dayton, Tennessee. By 1924, believed in “Darwinism” had just won a civil law- the three-time Democratic nominee for U.S. suit against his slanderers. President was also America’s best-known antievo- The civil lawsuit of David S. Domer against lutionist. His 1922 book In His Image had attracted William A. Klink and eight residents of Rising City, the ridicule and rebuttal of some of the nation’s Nebraska (in Butler County, about forty miles most prominent biologists and also sold widely northwest of Lincoln) is an enigma. It has been and gained a following among Fundamentalists. completely unknown to historians and received In 1923, he successfully guided a resolution reaf- almost no public attention or press coverage when firming the “truth of the Bible” through the General it happened. There’s a stark contrast between the Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. public spectacle that took place just nine months He had already successfully inspired Florida later with the Scopes trial in Tennessee and this (where he had moved in 1913) to pass a resolution earlier case that had much the same potential. condemning the teaching of evolution in schools.3 This suggests that there were important differ- Bryan had even gained the ear of textbook publish- LEFT: Illustration from ences in the way that the evolution controversy was William Jennings Bryan’s ers who were just beginning to adapt their books to understood in Nebraska in 1924 and Tennessee in book, Seven Questions mollify the antievolution movement.4 1925 and that the trope of an “evolution trial” as in Dispute (New York: But Bryan didn’t talk about evolution in his a convenient way to understand these cases (and Fleming H. Revell, 1924), speeches that October. The teaching of evolution the many that have come later) is not unchang- p. 124. Though Bryan was was an issue in some states, but it was not a federal not involved in Nebraska’s ing. Indeed, the anonymity of Domer v. Klink et al. Domer v. Klink case, matter and it did not figure in the national election. shatters one of the pervasive myths about the later Domer’s opponents saw And yet it’s ironic that no one asked him about Tennessee trial. In 1925, participants in the Scopes evolution as Bryan did. FALL 2013 • 111 trial and the journalists reporting on it tended to months later. And yet the specter of Bryan and the describe the trial not in terms of the local politics Scopes trial hovers over an investigation into this or peculiarities of Tennessee, but as the natural earlier court case. Knowing how an antievolution expression of an unavoidable conflict between Dar- trial could unfold, it’s impossible for us today to win and the Bible. They gave the impression that look at Domer v. Klink et al. and not ask: why did it the epic debate between science and religion had not become a famous public spectacle? to turn into a great public debate. Even though the Scopes trial’s creators went out of their way to pro- An Unqualified Slander mote the event, and celebrity figures like Clarence The Making of an Evolution Trial Darrow and William Jennings Bryan co-opted the It’s an anachronism to look at David Domer’s court case in order to engage in a public debate, lawsuit as if it were some sort of alternate-reality there was still a consensus, forged by that trial’s Scopes trial that somehow didn’t become a na- creators, that the media attention and the spectacle tional phenomenon. Despite the ubiquity of court were inevitable.5 cases in the United States that have taken place What happened in Lincoln was quite different. since Scopes, in 1924, there was no prior evidence In 1922, Domer was the superintendent of the Ris- that a courtroom could be a suitable venue to ing City school. He applied for a new job teaching contest the alleged conflict between science and English at Midland College, a small school in Fre- religion. Despite the fact that the journalists cover- mont affiliated with the United Lutheran Church ing the Tennessee case (and many of the trial’s in America. William Klink was the pastor of the participants) cultivated a sense that something ULCA-affiliated church in Rising City at the time, like Scopes’s indictment was inevitable since the and along with eight other members of the con- day Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in gregation, wrote a letter to the dean and president 1859, the Scopes trial likely wouldn’t have occurred of Midland, alleging that Domer would bring the without the influence of particular developments in school into disrepute, in part because he was a education policy in Tennessee. Darwinist. Domer lost the job. The following year, This sense that an evolution trial was not inher- Domer sued for damages because of the loss of ently something worthy of spectacular publicity is salary and his continued difficulties finding a job in reinforced by the fact that the only newspaper that the state due to the damage to his reputation. The mentioned Domer’s trial before it took place failed jury awarded him $5,675. to mention evolution at all. The October 16, 1924, This is not a story about William Jennings Bryan. edition of the Fremont Tribune reported that Domer Indeed there’s no evidence that he was ever made was suing the defendants “charging that they were In 1919 the Fremont aware of the Domer case. And of course, no one in responsible for an alleged slanderous letter which College campus became caused him to lose a lucrative position as an in- Midland College.
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