Soul beliefs, causes, and consequences. We spent a good bit of time at the beginning of the course and throughout the course actually, talking about some of the various causes for soul beliefs. Why we have them? How they've been influenced by various social and cultural and political changes, throughout history? And we've also talked a little bit about the personal consequences of soul beliefs. How they can provide comfort or guidance or whatever, a lot of different aspects of that? Today, and in Thursday's class, we're going to talk about some of the fairly dramatic social consequences of soul beliefs. And to do that, we need to go back in time a ways, I was playing some of Levon Helms, Dirt Farmer album before classes as we started. Because this story goes back to the Scope's trial back in Dayton, Tennessee. Dayton, Tennessee is way down in the southeastern corner of Tennessee. For those of you familiar with the interstate system, if you get on Route 81 and drive south, you'll probably see an exit for Dayton, when you get down there. This is their courthouse, at the time of that trial back in 1925. The trial, was a trial for evolution, John Scopes was a Biology teacher and was charged with teaching evolution in his Biology classroom. And the trial that emerged has been variously dubbed, it's technically Scopes versus Tennessee, but it has been called the Monkey Trial, and it has been called the Trial of the Century. Trial of the Century is probably a pretty good name for it, because it turned out to just play a major role in the history of the last century. And a role that is continuing right up to the present time, and will surely go into the future as well. So gather around the campfire, boys and girls, old Doc Hamilton is going to tell you a story. I just want to walk you through some of the things that happened in this trial of the century. A lot of the material that I'm going to be covering was obtained from a marvelous, marvelous book called Summer for the Gods by Edward Larson. It is a fascinating book, even for people who might not be fascinated by history. This is a good read. So for those of you who are interested in the topic and want to follow through, and understand more about the people and the times and everything, I don't think there's a better source than Summer for the Gods. So let's go back to 1925. We are way past 1925 now, and I wanted to kind of try of give you a little bit of the flavor of what was going on back in 1925, in Tennessee. I have an image here of a 1925 Ford pretty classy car. In those days if you wanted to drive that car you couldn't just get in and turn the key, you would have to go up front and turn a crank to get the engine started. And it didn't have much in the way of shock absorber and things like that. It wasn't a smooth comfortable ride. But you could buy gas for 29 cents a gallon, and that was a pretty good deal compared to today's prices. The handsome young woman that you see here is Precious Rappleyea, the wife of one of the main character's in this story that we're going to be telling here. The unassuming brick building here is the Dayton High School, with a dirt road leading up to it. There weren't many paved roads in Dayton in 1925. And there you see a state of the art Military plane taking off from an aircraft carrier taking off in 1925. So a lot of things are different, most people well, I guess most people at that time, didn't complete high school. It was very common for males especially, if they were going in to auto mechanics or running a business or going into farming or something like that. They frequently dropped out of school in eighth grade and assumed adulthood. My father in that area had an eighth grade education and was a farmer. My mother was a little unusual in having gone on through high school, but that was pretty much the norm then. And you can see, what is happening in Tennessee in 1910, they had 10,000 students in high school. And then in 1925, they had 50,000 students in high school. And that was not because the population of Tennessee had skyrocketed. That was because expectations had changed. So now, all of a sudden, and 15 years is all of a sudden in terms of social and cultural changes. All of a sudden, we had relatively huge numbers of students going to high school who never would have done that before. And when you go to high school you get exposed to some new ideas, some new concepts, some new facts about the world around you, that you would not necessarily have been exposed to before. And there are people who began to feel that might be a dangerous type of thing. Dayton in 1925, was already seen as a sleepy little town in the corner of Tennessee, not like Memphis or Nashville or more urban areas. The people around, they mostly lived on farms. A typical family might be a small family that lives close to the grandparents, on either end there. Would probably go to a small one room country school through the lower grades and then be shipped into Dayton in some way to go to high school. This is not actually a Tennessee family. This is a family from a neighboring state. Taken a few years after the 1925 thing, and you can see me having a bunch of grapes here. It's my picture taken with the family. So, this 1925 Dayton is my memory. Me, I've never been to Dayton, but I know what was going on in Dayton in 1925, because it wasn't that much different in Iowa a couple of decades later. Wonder what happened to this little guy. His face got longer and all sorts of things like that. So there's a legal context that was going on there, during that period of time, and a lot of states were beginning to think about anti-evolution laws. And they were very much upset about the concept of evolution because they were pretty much uniformly fundamentalist Christian beliefs in that area and the ideas of evolution rubbed them the wrong way. And they had a strong belief that there was no scientific proof for evolution. And for most people, the reason why they had that strong belief was because somebody had told them that. And in most cases, the people who told them that had no basis for saying it. Its somebody else had told them that there was no scientific proof for evolution. There was a strong feeling that evolution had a corrosive effect on one's fundamental faith. And this was really a head to head type of thing. It was a zeitgeist, a spirit of the times, in Tennessee, and in many other states at that time. Not entirely Southern States, but most strongly represented in the Southern States. And there were huge religious crusades that would go on. One of the main players back in that time was a man named Billy Sunday. Some of you baseball nerds out there might recognize Billy Sunday, because he was a professional baseball player prior to becoming an Evangelist. But man, could he pack them in. He would bring in thousands and thousands of people to his crusades that would go on for a number of days. And to give you a little other indication of the social contexts back in those days in one of his crusades being held in Memphis a couple years before this trial began. Drew in thousands of people. And there was a men's night for the crusade, there was a ladies night, there was a negro night, and there was a clan night. So you could have people from all different walks of life coming to this crusade, but just not necessarily all coming on the same day. There was also a strong feeling of what was termed majoritarianism. The idea that, I'm a taxpayer, I'm the one who's paying to build the school, paying the teacher, and I should be able to call the shots on what goes on in this public, tax-supported schools. Ideas that are not really strange to a lot of people today. One of the state legislatures in Tennessee was especially concerned about this second idea here, the idea that the theory of evolution had a corrosive effect on religious beliefs. Because he had heard a story from one of his neighbors, who sent his daughter off to college, and when his daughter came back a year later, she had rejected some, if not all of her religious beliefs, and that was obviously because she had learned about evolution when she went to college. And to avoid that from happening again. This Congressman Butler, on his 49th birthday perhaps as a birthday present to himself, introduced legislature. That said, it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the universities, normals and all other public schools of the State, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, 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. That was the Butler Act, went back and forth a little bit, and was passed. It went to Governor Peay's desk. There were a lot of people telling him, don't sign it, don't sign it, don't sign it, but he saw it mostly as a symbolic piece of legislation and went ahead and signed it. One of the interesting things about this fairly simple little piece of legislation here is that it didn't actually mention the word evolution in the law, but it was pretty clear what was meant by it. And the other thing that differentiated it, and this is going to become important as we progress in the story. The other thing that made it stand out from some of the other laws that had been tried and attempted in other states is that this was a misdemeanor. Some of the states that passed laws making the teaching of evolution a felony, and they often kind of got shut down because it looked like the penalty was too severe, but this one had a maximum penalty of $500, a minimum penalty of $100, a little more than a speeding ticket. But not a life changing event if one should get caught teaching evolution in one of the public schools. So now we have this new law and we need to put it in some context of some of the other things that were going on at the time. In 1925, we had just come back a few years earlier from World War I, and when Wilson, President Wilson Declared war, he also declared that we were going to have to have a firm hand of stern repression. That we were going to have to watch our citizens carefully, to make sure that they weren't saying and doing things that might undermine the war effort. And we need it to be protected from dissent. And in 1919, shortly after the war was over, a bunch of radicals were rounded up because they were dissenting from the countries involvement with the war. We also had a constitution and the constitution suggested to a lot of people that anti-evolution laws violated freedom of speech. That teachers ought to be able to teach their discipline unimpeded in the classroom. And Vanderbilt University, in 1878, fired Professor Winchell for teaching that humans preceded the Biblical Adam, that there were humans on earth, more than 5,000 years ago. The University Administration, didn't approve of that, so they fired his ass and got him out of there. If you look at the reasons why they fired him, it was very similar, you could probably almost go through and do a search and replace thing with a word processor for the text of Galileo's trial a few hundred years earlier. That it was just how dare you teach these things about humans when it violates what we know from the scriptures. So because of all of these things and more, the American Civil Liberties Union was formed to serve as a national watchdog agency to try to protect people's freedom of speech. In 1913, a professor, Mecklin, was fired from Lafayette College for teaching in his classroom that some religions were shaped by social events, social evolution, rather than the revealed truth of the scriptures. And the University of Tennessee had fired several professors who happened to be sympathetic to evolution. By then, Tennessee was trying to be a little bit cautious about this. So they didn't say we're firing you because you're teaching evolution, but everybody knew that was the real reason. And they just kind of had veiled,other reasons for removing them from the faculty. And because of this and other instances, the American Association of University Professors was formed. The AAUP is the bargaining agent for the faculty here at Rutgers and at most major universities across the country. And in those institutions where they are not the formal bargaining agent, they are the set of guidelines that are followed by public and private colleges and universities throughout the land. So an important organization there that was formed. And also the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the premier organization for scientists. Their publication, Science, is perhaps the most prestigious scientific journal. It was owned and operated in the early days by James McKeen Cattell, the president and co-owner who was also an important figure in American Psychology. And this group, under the leadership of Cattell, offered scientific support in the trial that we're going to be talking about. So these are some of the things that were going on then. A lot of concerns about religion and possible challenges to religion. A lot of concerns about freedom and possible challenges to freedom.
