How the Scopes Trial Was Almost Scooped
Glenn Branch is deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that defends the integrity of American science education against ideological interference. He is the author of numerous articles on evolution education and climate education, and obstacles to them, in such publications as Scientific American, American Educator, The American Biology Teacher, and the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics; and the co-editor, with Eugenie C. Scott, of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design is Wrong for Our Schools (2006). He received the Evolution Education Award for 2020 from the National Association of Biology Teachers.
In 1925, a young teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, was convicted of violating a state law that forbade the state’s educators “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” Especially now, as its centennial year is being commemorated in various ways across the nation, the Scopes “monkey” trial is widely known. But the details of a similar controversy in New Mexico three years earlier deserve to be remembered as well.
Famously, the antievolution crusade of the 1920s was launched by William Jennings Bryan, a politician of national stature, who began to encourage the passage of bans on the teaching of evolution at both the state and the local level early in the decade. Probably as a result, in the summer of 1922, the school board in Fort Sumner, New Mexico — perhaps most famous as the site where the outlaw Billy the Kid was shot and killed — adopted a resolution forbidding the teaching of evolution in the town’s schools, and calling for the resignation of any offending teacher.
Fort Sumner’s superintendent of schools, F. E. (for Finis Ewing: he was evidently named after the founder of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church) Dean, was summering in his home state of Missouri when he received a copy of the resolution. He decided that it would not be useful to argue about the resolution at a distance, planning instead on his return to Fort Sumner to argue in person to the board that “I had not been teaching the…doctrine of evolution in the form attributed to me” and moreover to explain that the antievolution resolution was unworkable.
