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.

“A good many of the texts used in every high school teach evolution,” Dean later explained in the local newspaper, the Fort Sumner Leader. “In fact, all modern science, even in elementary texts …, is written from the evolutionary point of view. It is even true[,] as LeConte says, that evolution is more than half of modern thought.” (Not quite: in his Evolution and its Relation to Religious Thought (1889), Joseph LeConte wrote that evolution “is literally one half of all science.”) Dean added, “[T]here is no entering even the vestibule of modern thought except thru [sic] a knowledge of evolution.”

While still in Missouri, Dean wrote to the New Mexico superintendent of schools to ask whether the board could legally insist on the resignation of any teacher who taught evolution. The superintendent referred the question to the state attorney general’s office, which answered that it could not. But the board got wind of Dean’s inquiry, and demanded his immediate resignation “on the ground of my manifest insincerity in agreeing to the resolution and then going over their heads to the Attorney General,” as Dean later explained in the Fort Sumner Leader.

According to Dean, certain members of the board sent him letters “assuring me of the friendly feeling of the Board for me” and blaming the resolution on “public sentiment.” Yet, he was told, “my usefulness was at an end in Fort Sumner and that if I insisted on holding to my contract and returning the school would be torn to pieces.” Unable to return immediately to defend himself, Dean decided to acquiesce, explaining, “I have pioneered long enough. … If the community wants this sort of injustice done to itself, or will even stand for it, it is none of my affairs.”

The front page of the next issue of the Fort Sumner Leader, published August 18, 1922, was almost entirely consumed with reactions to Dean’s resignation. The Alumni Association of the Fort Sumner High School expressed its “love and appreciation” for Dean, and reassured him, and the public, that “we HAVE NOT learned from your teachings that the ‘Mottled ape is our grand-father.’ [Emphasis in original. I don’t recognize the allusion seemingly indicated by the quotation marks.] Neither has it shattered our faith in the bible and made infidels of us.”

Not everybody was supportive. Someone, possibly a minister, with the surname of Smith — the initials are unclear: possibly P. L. S. — wrote in opposition to evolution, invoking various authorities, including “Dr. [Robert] Etheridge, Fossiologist [a word sadly no longer in vogue!] of the British Museum,” “Prof. [Lionel Smith] Beale, of King’s College, London,” and the British biologist William Bateson, who supposedly rejected evolution. Smith added, “Woodrow Wilson does not believe that man came from the beast. So I suppose he is a back number [i.e, out of date].”

Thanks to Smith’s contribution, a vestige of the Fort Sumner controversy would later appear in the Scopes trial. Dean apparently asked his former teacher Winterton C. Curtis, a professor of zoology at the University of Missouri, to investigate Smith’s authorities. Etheridge and Beale were both dead, but Curtis duly wrote not only to his fellow scientist Bateson but also to the former president Wilson, who replied, “Of course, like every other man of intelligence and education, I do believe in organic evolution. It surprises me that at this late date such questions should be raised.”

Three years later, when Curtis was among the expert witnesses for the defense in the Scopes trial, he included the reply from Wilson (who died in 1924) in his affidavit, prefaced by the explanation “Evolution has been generally accepted by the intellectually competent who have taken the trouble to inform themselves with an open mind. The following letter was written in response to a request to state his position, it having been alleged that he was not a believer in organic evolution.” But because the judge decided to exclude expert witness testimony, Wilson’s reply played no role in the Scopes trial.

The only scholar to have taken note of Dean, A. G. Cock (in his “Bateson’s Two Toronto Addresses, 1921: 2. Evolutionary Faith,” published in the Journal of Heredity in 1989), suggests, “Dean deserves to be remembered, along with John T. Scopes, as an early hero of the continuing fight for the right to teach evolution in U.S. schools.” But Cock wasn’t able to follow Dean’s career further: after Curtis told Bateson in November 1922 that Dean hadn’t secured a new position yet, “at least as far as the sources available to me disclose, he disappears from the record.”

I was luckier, having found Dean’s obituary in the Arizona Independent Republic for April 11, 1941. Apparently Dean moved to Arizona in late 1922 or 1923, where he taught in St. David for two years, served as a principal in Benson for seven years, and served as a superintendent of schools in Williams for seven years. After he was discharged from the latter position, he left the education field, engaging in the real estate business and operating a bookstore. He died on April 9, 1941, at the age of 64, owing to complications after a fall in which he broke a left thigh bone.

It isn’t clear why Dean decided to resign from his position in Fort Sumner. He thought that the majority of townsfolk were on his side, and he seems to have been right: the local parent-teacher association adopted resolutions protesting his treatment and urging the board to revoke its resolution and refuse his resignation. His health may have played a role: although he was only 47, he complained that he was “worn out” by the controversy. But if he had fought the board, the resulting trial might have scooped the Scopes trial.

That is, it is perfectly reasonable to imagine that in 2022 we might have devoted great attention to the centenary of the Dean “monkey” trial.

Reposted from “How the Scopes Trial Was Almost Scooped,” by Glenn Branch, with permission of the author and of William Trollinger of the Righting America blog.