Apes, Men, and Morons: Eugenics, Evolution, and the Scopes Centennial - Livestream

The “Monkey Trial” Centennial provides an opportunity to examine the widespread misunderstanding about how ideas of evolution and eugenics were implicated in the famous Scopes controversy.  George William Hunter’s textbook Civic Biology was the focus of the case. It endorsed evolution, a theory “that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible” - content prohibited by a 1925 Tennessee law.

The Hunter text also contained a brief discussion of eugenics. In recent years an elaborate mythology has arisen suggesting that the case, and William Jennings Bryan’s advocacy at trial, represented a challenge to eugenics. That claim is not accurate. The teaching of eugenics in its many forms was supported not only by educators, but also by members of the clergy and politicians all across the United States. That support was evident before the Scopes case and continued for decades afterwards, persisting even in full awareness of the Nazi government program that sterilized almost ½ million Germans.

This talk will explain that while William Jennings Bryan rejected the monkey- to-man account of evolution and the cruelties he associated with Darwinian “natural selection,” he made no blanket condemnation of eugenics. To the contrary, Bryan and his wife readily allied themselves with several famous eugenicists and supported eugenic ideology when it coincided with the social policies they favored.

Paul Lombardo, Legal Historian

Watch here.