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Evolution and Voices of Progressive Catholicism in the Age of the Scopes Trial

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Alexander Pavuk
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Abstract

Belying assumptions about Catholics and science grounded in the old science-religion warfare model in the 1920s, two liberal Catholic intellectuals contributed in some important but overlooked ways to the discourse where prominent scientist-popularizers and other intellectuals constructed the public understanding of evolution and the Scopes Trial in the mid-1920s US. This article explores publicly-disseminated articles and archival correspondence between Catholics and non-Catholics on these topics, concluding that the manner in which the former supported evolution and opposed the Scopes prosecution may have unintentionally fostered scientism and religious modernism, rather than Catholicism, in the public square. Conditioned by their own Progressive-Era experiences and intellectual training, renowned liberal Catholics Fr. John A. Ryan, board member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Michael Williams, editor of Commonweal magazine, framed their arguments directed at non-Catholic intellectual elites almost exclusively in social and biological science to the exclusion of religion. They did so even as public intellectuals and prominent scientists of modernist faith, like Henry Fairfield Osborn of the Museum of Natural History, constructed a public image of evolution that blended religion, philosophy and science when assigning meaning to the Scopes Trial. This study broadens the view of science-religion conversations surrounding evolution in the 1920s by integrating voices usually omitted from the story while further complicating the still-resonant ‘creationist-' evolutionist’ paradigm.

Keywords

EvolutionLiberal [, ] CatholicScienceScopes
Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , Winter 2016 , pp. 101 - 137
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2016

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References

Notes

1. See “Bryan and the Catholics,” New York Times, August 29, 1908. On McCann, see “Declines Bryan's Request,” New York Times, July 3, 1925. For Bryan-McCann correspondence, see Numbers, Ronald L., The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 73, 89Google Scholar.

2. John William Draper's 1874 book, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, was a keystone of this myth and reinforced a Catholic antiscience narrative.

3. Francis P. LeBuffe, S.J., “No Non-Man Ancestry,” New York Times, March 19, 1922, A2. The article's prominent subtitle added, “Catholic Answer to Evolutionists—Jesuit Counters Darwin Doctrine with Scientific Data—Characterizes It as One of Ranking Hoaxes of All Time.“

4. Livingstone, David M., Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), ix, 11Google Scholar.

5. This expression is borrowed from Livingstone (ibid., 18).

6. See Henry Fairfield Osborn, “Evolution and Religion,” New York Times, March 5, 1922, 2, 5, 14, 91. See also Osborn, “Credo of a Naturalist,” Forum 73 (January 1925): 486-94. For Osborn's use of liberal Catholic voices in both Europe and America to rebuke conservative Protestant criticisms of him, see quotations in Murray, Raymond W., Man's Unknown Origins (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Co., 1948), 255 Google Scholar. For an explanation of Protestant modernism and ways its proponents connected it to evolution and evolutionary morality around the turn of the twentieth century, see Kuklick, Bruce, Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven, 1985), 219 Google Scholar. See also Roberts, Jon H., Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859-1900 (Madison: 1988), 136-40Google Scholar.

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8. On the philosophical/theological debates in the late nineteenth century subtly underpinning this disagreement, see Gruber, Jacob W., A Conscience in Conflict: The Life of St. George Jackson Mivart (New York: Columbia University Press for Temple University, 1960), 60–92 Google Scholar.

9. Short, readable essays by historians demonstrating the falsity of the conflict/warfare thesis for Catholicism and for other areas are found in Numbers, Ronald L., ed., Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

10. For the encyclical's text, see http://w2.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_04081879_aeternipatris.html.

11. On varieties of Catholic neoscholasticism, see S.J., Gerald McCool, The Neo-Thomists (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

12. The inaugural issue featured an article by G. K. Chesterton on the scientific and ethical aspects of contraception. See G. K. Chesterton, “Religion and Sex,” Commonweal 1 (November 12,1924): 9. Another article dealt broadly with science and religion, Bertram Windle's “Science Sees the Light.” On the magazine's first anniversary, Williams's editorial stated: “We feel… that we have initiated the general reading public into a sphere generally unknown to it [progressive Catholic thought]. In that sense, our journal has existed for the benefit of our critics and adversaries.” Williams, “Our Second Year,” Commonweal 3 (November 11,1925): 1. On the magazine's tenth anniversary, H. L. Mencken wrote, “I have read THE COMMONWEAL from its first issue, and with constant profit…. I only wish the Protestant and agnostic camps had spokesmen of equal effectiveness.” H. L. Mencken to the editor, Commonweal 21 (November 2, 1934): 35.

13. Martin J. Bredeck, S.J., “The Role of the Catholic Layman in the Church and American Society as Seen in the Editorials of Commonweal Magazine” (Ph.D. diss. Catholic University of America, 1977), 4.

14. For Ryan as self-professed liberal, see his autobiography, Questions of the Day (Boston: Stratford Co., 1931), 255.

15. See, for example, Francis P. LeBuffe, “Evolution and Religion,” America 30 (October 27, 1923): 29.

16. For distinctions between Catholics and others who embraced the Progressive movement, see Woods, Thomas F. Jr., The Church Confronts Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17. For an explanation of these internal Catholic distinctions, see Scott Appleby, R., Church and Age Unitel (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993)Google Scholar and Rehrer, Margaret, “Americanism and Modernism—Continuity or Discontinuity?” U.S. Catholic Historian 1 (Summer 1981): 87–103 Google Scholar. One of the first scholarly works to identify and systematically characterize late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Catholic liberals as a coherent group was historian Robert Cross, The Emergence of Liberal Catholicism in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958).

18. Cross, , The Emergence of Liberal Catholicism, 13–14 Google Scholar.

19. Even Larson's, Edward Summer for the Gods (New York, 1997)Google Scholar, the recent classic, does not address the imbalance where Catholics are involved. Although offering a penetrating critique of the simple creationist-evolutionist paradigm, it virtually ignores the role of the Catholic intellectual response to Scopes. Larson does mention the Catholic Press Association's presence at Dayton, Tennessee, but he cites only a single contemporary Catholic source in his footnotes (127). Michael Williams was personally present for the entire proceedings. His impressions of the trial appeared in his book Catholicism and the Modern Mind (New York: Dial Press, 1928). The best brief historical overview of the creationist movement is Numbers, The Creationists.

20. See, for example, the allusions to the trial in mano Singham, “The New War between Science and Religion,” The Chronicle of Higher Education ﹛The Chronicle Review), May 9, 2010, http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-War-Between-Science/65400/.

21. An unpublished master's thesis by a law student at the University of Virginia discussed some American Catholic rhetoric on the Scopes trial as part of its commentary on a 2005 “intelligent design” trial but mostly fails to distinguish between liberal/progressive and conservative Catholics. Since many of its citations come from America magazine and other more conservative Catholic forums, the author overestimates the importance of neoscholastic frameworks in Catholic public discourse. See Christopher M. Hammer, “Reconciling Faith, Reason, and Freedom: Catholicism and Evolution from Scopes to Dover,” (M.A. thesis, University of Virginia, 2008).

22. The 1917 Official Catholic Directory indicated 17.5 million Catholics in the United States; the U.S. government census published in 1916 listed 16 million Catholics out of a total of just under 42 million total “church members” in America. Statistics quoted in Williams, Michael, American Catholics in the War: The National Catholic War Council, 1917-1921 (New York: Macmillan, 1921), 84–85 Google Scholar. As to the Atlantic, while it was technically nonsectarian, it leaned toward Unitarianism and maintained “an undercurrent of distrust toward Roman Catholicism.” John Tebbel and Ellen, Mary Walker-Zuckerman, , The Magazine in America, 1741-1991 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 201 Google Scholar. Anti-Catholic sentiments in other major magazines were also ubiquitous in the 1920s. By 1928, The Nation editor Walter Lippmann wrote to Fr. John Ryan saying he was “shocked there is so much [anti-Catholicism] that comes to this desk that I feel almost at a loss how wisely to deal with it.” Walter Lippmann to John A. Ryan (October 22, 1928), John A. Ryan Papers, box 22, folder 3, American Catholic Research Center, Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. (henceforth ACRCUA).

23. According to the 1902 Census Abstract of the United States, the number of New Immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a heavily Catholic region, increased from 1880 to 1900 by an average of more than 300 percent, while Catholic Polish numbers rose by 203 percent. See Statistical Abstract of the U.S., 25th number (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1903).

24. A Klan handbill popular in early 1920s Indiana read: “Remember, every criminal, every gambler, every thug, every libertine, every girl miner, every home wrecker, every wife beater… every crooked politician, every pagan Papist priest, every shyster lawyer, every K. of C. [Knight of Columbus]… every Rome-controlled newspaper… is fighting the Klan.” Quoted in Marty, Martin, The Noise of Conflict: 1919-1941, vol. 2 of Modern American Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 95 Google Scholar.

25. In 1893, Pope Leo XIII issued the encyclical Providcntisimus Deus (PD) and then, in 1902, created the official Pontifical Biblical Commission (PBC) as a standing department to deal with further issues of biblical hermeneutics. O'Leary, Don, Roman Catholicism and Modern Science (New York: Continuum, 2006), 68–71 Google Scholar.

26. Francis P. LeBuffe, S.J., “To the Editor,” Commonweal 2 (June 17, 1925): 163.

27. See John L. Morrison, “A History of American Catholic Opinion on the Theory of Evolution, 1859-1950” (Ph.D. diss., University f Missouri, 1951), 281.

28. For Ryan's explanation of this approach—and its application— see Ryan, John A., D.D., “The Method of Teleology in Ethics,” New York Review 2 (January-February 1907): 409-28Google Scholar.

29. Quoted in Ellis, John Tracy, The Formative Years of the Catholic University of America (Washington D.C., Catholic University of America Press, 1946), 118-19Google Scholar.

30. Quoted in ibid., 119. Interestingly, New York's The Sun printed a complimentary piece on December 11, 1884, saying that the proposed Catholic institution should be welcomed by Americans because it would lead to a more educated and informed Catholic clergy. (Ellis, The Formative Years, 117). A written appeal to Catholics for financial support of the soon-to-be-built university by Bishop John Lancaster Spalding in September 1885 listed one of the school's prime goals as reconciling science and religion (ibid., 158).

31. Conklin, Edwin Grant, “Bryan and Evolution” New York Times, March 5, 1922 Google Scholar.

32. Edwin Grant Conklin, “Quotations: The Proposed Suppression of the Teaching of Evolution,” Science 55 (March 10,1922): 266.

33. See, for example, Artigas, Mariano et al., Negotiating Darwin: The Vatican Confronts Evolution, 1877-1902 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 281-83Google Scholar.

34. For a full explication of the Zahm affair, see Artigas et al, Negotiating Darwinism, 125-202. Years after the controversy over his book, Zahm told an interviewer that he believed it was the stigma of the church's perceived overreaction to Galileo that prevented Evolution and Dogma from ever being condemned openly; he thought he was targeted in the first place for his association with the church's liberal Americanist wing (282,178-79). After a careful study of newly available records, Artigas concluded that at no time was there an official Catholic church policy on evolution (279,283).

35. O'Leary, Roman Catholicism, 99. On Yeomans and the lengths he went to create a hegemony of positivism/uniformity of nature in framing scientific data, see R. Clinton Ohlers, “The End of Miracles: Naturalism's Rise in American Science, 1830-1931” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2007).

36. Quoted in O'Leary, Roman Catholicism, 126.

37. Francis J. Wenninger, review of Canon Dorlodot, Darwinism and Catholic Thought, trans. Ernest Messenger, American Midland Naturalist 8/9 (March-May 1923): 213.

38. For Windle on Augustine and evolution, see Morrison, “A History,” 359.

39. At one point, Windle said, “[T]he great lesson which Fr. Wasmann taught… was the virtue of accepting, without question, whatever science had to offer.” Quoted in Morrison, “A History,” 313-14.

40. See, for example, Simon Fitzsimons (letter to the editor), “Wasmann and Evolution,” Commonweal 2 (July 8, 1925): 228-29.

41. See Wasmann, E., “Evolution,” in Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. Herbermann, Charles G. et al., vol. 5 (New York: Encyclopedia Press, 1907), 656 Google Scholar.

42. Richards, Robert J., The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 366-67Google Scholar. Richards argues Wasmann's views on evolution's mechanism approximated an amalgamation of the ideas of Hugo DeVries and Hans Driesch.

43. Ibid., 371.

44. See Gruber, A Conscience in Conflict, 59.

45. For Pope Pius X's Pascendi Domenici Gregis (On the Doctrines of the Modernists), see http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-x/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-x_enc_19070908_pascendi-dominicigregis.html. For the aftereffects and the requirement that priests and theologians take an oath against modernism, see Gleason, Philip, Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 111-14Google Scholar.

46. On Ryan as technocrat, see Preston, Robert M., “The Christian Moralist as Scientific Reformer,” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society 81 (March-December 1970): 27–41 Google Scholar. Ryan's Ph.D. from Catholic University was technically in moral theology. However, his mentors, Frs. William Kerby and Joseph Bouquillon, were both focused on progressive social science. Kerby had created Catholic University's sociology department. Under the tutelage of these figures, Ryan's mind was centered on practical economic and sociological ideas, not theological abstractions, as he himself attested. See Ryan, John A., Social Doctrine in Action: A Personal History (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1941), 63–64, 128Google Scholar. See also Francis L. Broderick, Right Reverend New Dealer: John A. Ryan (London: Macmillan, 1963), 33.

47. Ryan, , Social Doctrine, 59 Google Scholar. Carey, Patrick, ed. argues: “A quasiimmanentist understanding of the relationship of the sacred to the secular lay behind the Americanist call for Catholics to identify themselves with American ideals and institutions.” Carey, Patrick W., ed. American Catholic, Religious Thought: The Shaping of a Theological and Social Tradition (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2004), 51 Google Scholar.

48. Broderick, Right Reverend, 153.

49. O'Brien, David J., American Catholics and Social Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 124-25Google Scholar.

50. In his resignation letter, Ryan claimed he had forgotten that he was an official part of the AES since he was a member of many organizations and had lost track of the fact that his name still appeared on its clergy cooperation masthead. In it, he also stated that upon joining the AES he had been reassured that it would operate “scientifically,” but that it did not, hence his withdrawal (quoted in Catholic Bulletin newspaper [n.d], John A. Ryan Papers, box 51, folder 4, ACRCUA). See also Leon, Sharon M., “'Hopelessly Entangled in Nordic Presuppositions': Catholic Participation in the American Eugenics Society in the 1920s,” journal of the History of Medicine and Applied Sciences 59 (2004): 3–9 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle with Eugenics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), chap. 2.

51. Ryan wrote to Dewey on January 21, 1930, to congratulate him on an article the latter wrote in the current issue of the New Republic; Dewey replied on January 27 (letters in John Ryan Papers, box 10, folder 4, ACRCUA).

52. See, for example, John Ryan to Paul Hutchinson, September 2, 1926, and October 26,1926; and Lewis Gannett to John Ryan, September [?], 1928 (John Ryan Papers, box 17, folder 7, ACRCUA). See also John Ryan to Walter Lippmann, October 17,1928; Lippmann to Ryan, October 22,1928 (box 22, folder 3); H. L. Mencken to John Ryan, June 8,1929, (box 25 folder 40). This exchange with Mencken was a continuation of a previous one that found Mencken commending Ryan for authoring an article he had read in Commonweal. See H. L. Mencken to John Ryan, June 3,1929 (?), (box 25, folder 40), ACRCUA.

53. Broderick, Right Reverend, 115.

54. The Butler Act (Tenn. HB 185, 1925) was the term used colloquially to refer to the Tennessee legislation introduced by John Butler prohibiting state schools from teaching versions of human origins that contradicted the Book of Genesis. It did not say precisely how Genesis was to be interpreted.

55. An article on Darrow in Commonweal printed during summer of the Scopes trial quoted him impugning the Catholic church with the claim that “the Pope issued a bull against a comet once upon a time. But the comet kept on coming just the same. Apparently it had not heard anything of the bull Does not every schoolboy know that Catholicism is the religion of the dark ages?” Garrett, G. R., “A Pope, a Comet, and Mr. Darrow,” Commonweal 2 (June 24, 1925): 181 Google Scholar.

56. Interview with Roger Baldwin, May 8, 1958, quoted in Broderick, Right Reverend, 141. If Ryan had missed the fact that Darrow argued there was such thing as a “soul” to protect, he would be able to read about it in 1928 when Commonweal published M.W. Weston's article, “Is the Soul a Myth?” surveying Darrow's recent piece in Forum magazine that called belief in a soul or immortality “a delusion” since science had not proved the existence of souls. Weston, M.W., “Is the Soul a Myth?” Commonweal 8 (December 26, 1928): 230-33Google Scholar.

57. Samuel Walker, quoted in Larson, , Summer for the Gods, 63 Google Scholar.

58. Larson, , Summer for the Gods, 180 Google Scholar. The Times reinforced that framing in its July 3, 1925, issue by covering Maynard Shipley's Science League of America contest for the best essays on “The Superiority of Evolution over Genesis,” New York Times, July 3, 1925, 6.

59. John A. Ryan, “The Anti-Evolution Trial,” The (New York) World, June 5,1925. John A. Ryan Papers, box 51, folder 6, ACRCUA.

60. Ibid.

61. See, for example, Larson, , Summer for the Gods, 231-32Google Scholar; and Numbers, Ronald L., Darwinism Comes to America (Cambridge: 1998), 59, 87Google Scholar.

62. Employing constitutional and legal lenses, Ryan indicated that he did not agree with the idea that a public teacher could teach absolutely anything he or she wished, but problems in this respect needed to be dealt with “administratively.” Rev. Father John A. Ryan, D.D., Anti-Evolution Laws (New York: American Civil Liberties Union, 1927), 28. John A. Ryan Papers, box 51, folder 7, ACRCUA.

63. Ibid.

64. Ibid.

65. Ibid.

66. See, for example, a 1925 article in The Nation, “side by side with the effort to prohibit the teaching of evolution goes the parallel movement to teach the creation story of the Book of Genesis.” Quoted in “The War against Evolution,” The Nation 120 (May 20, 1925): 566. On Catholic conservatives, see Morrison, John L., “American Catholics and the Crusade against Evolution,” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 64 (1953): 57–71 at 67Google Scholar.

67. On the Boston scenario, see Shapiro, Adam R., Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 62 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In truth, even a brief glance at A Civic Biology would have afforded all the evidence Ryan needed (and in more than just the sections centered on evolution). See George William Hunter, A Civic Biology, Presented in Problems (New York: American Book Company, 1914) 195-96, 261-63, 405. For more on the holistic vision presented in textbooks of that era, see Shapiro, , “Civic Biology and the Origin of the School Antievolution Movement,” Journal of the History of Biology 41 (2008): 409-33CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, esp. 416-23, 427-30 and Shapiro, Trying Biology, 65-80.

68. Ryan, , Anti-Evolution Laws, 27 Google Scholar.

69. Despite his significance, there is no known collection of Michael Williams papers extant. This has truncated his place in the literature on American Catholicism. However, the magazine he founded and, until 1938, edited, has received some scholarly attention. See Clements, Robert Brooke, “The Commonweal: The Williams-Schuster Years, 1924- 1938” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 1972)Google Scholar and Allen, Rodger Van, The Commonweal and American Catholicism: The Magazine, the Movement, the Meaning (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974)Google Scholar.

70. In a summer 1925 article referring to Bryan, Williams said, “As editor of The Commonweal, the leading intellectual organ of lay Catholics in the country, I am closely in touch with Catholic opinion.” Quoted in “Bryan Aim Assailed by Catholic Editor,” New York Times, July 13, 1925, 17.

71. See the bibliography of Williams in the appendix of Clements, “Commonweal.“

72. See Williams, , The Book of the High Romance: A Spiritual Autobiography (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1918)Google Scholar, chap. 2,24-end.

73. Williams, Catholicism and the Modern Mind, chap. 3, 29-35.

74. Tebbel, and Walker-Zuckerman, , The Magazine in America, 120 Google Scholar.

75. Ibid., 122.

76. Marty, Martin E., Under God, Indivisible, 1941-1960, vol. 3 of Modern American Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 7 Google Scholar. Marty's brief discussion of the nature of public rhetoric, which he addressed in light of Celeste M. Condit's arguments on public culture, is also useful for the present article (9-11).

77. Williams also deplored the fact that in 1921 only two million of the total twenty million American Catholics subscribed to the Catholic press (Clements, “Commonweal,” 35).

78. Commonweal was conceived by intellectuals and for intellectuals. Clements said that ever since World War I, “small groups of laymen, many of them professors, or graduates of prominent Catholic and secular universities, began discussing ideas for the establishment of a new publication to serve in the application of Catholic principles to contemporary social problems” (Clements, “Commonweal,” 7).

79. Bredeck, “The Role of the Catholic Layman,” 6.

80. Williams published a piece on the magazine's policies in the NCWC Editorial Sheet of November 1,1924. In it, he said, “[Commonweal's] pages will be open to writers holding different forms of Christian belief, and in some cases, to authors who do not profess any form of Christian faith.” (quoted in Clements, “Commonweal,” 66). See also Van Allen, Commonweal, 17. According to Bredeck, the decision specifically to reach out to non-Catholics did affect the framing of the articles ( Bredeck, , “The Role of the Catholic Layman,” 5–6)Google Scholar.

81. Clements, , “Commonweal,” 60, 69Google Scholar.

82. “A Defender Who Doesn't Attack,” New York Times, November 21, 1924, quoted in Clements, “Commonweal,” 68.

83. Williams was optimistic that the magazine was achieving its mission from the earliest. See Williams, “Our Second Year” 3 (November 11, 1925): 1.

84. The editors frequently lamented that only a relatively small percentage of the nation's Catholic priests held subscriptions. In one year, it was reported that out of 28,000 priests, only 3,200 subscribed (Clements, “Commonweal,” 178).

85. “Memorandum for Contributions to the Guarantee Fund of The Commonweal” (Nov. 15,1929), quoted in Clements, , “Commonweal,” 118 Google Scholar. Martin Bredeck contended that Commonweal offered “published opinion on the part of the better-educated, liberal-minded American Catholic laity” that had somewhat broad influence (Bredeck, “The Role of the Catholic Layman,” 4).

86. John McKormick to John Raskob, January 17,1929, quoted in Clements, “Commonweal,” 118. Commonweal's beginning circulation in 1925 was about three thousand ( Allen, Van, “Commonweal,” 27)Google Scholar.

87. Quoted in Allen, Van, Commonweal, 27 Google Scholar.

88. H. L. Mencken to the editor, Commonweal 21 (November 2, 1934): 35. Other letters came from high-powered figures such as The Atlantic Monthly editor Ellery Sedgwick and Felix Frankfurter. In essence, the people who ran the intellectual forums Williams had set out to reach demonstrated that they had been reached.

89. Schuster quoted in Clements, , “Commonweal,” 204 Google Scholar.

90. Bredeck, “The Role of the Catholic Layman,” 4.

91. John Wynne, S.J. to Francis Talbot, S.J., June 12, 1936. John Wynne Papers, box 63, folder 16, Georgetown University Special Collections, Washington, D.C. Heinz Eulau, writing in the Public Opinion Quarterly, compared the Catholic weekly opinion journal Commonweal with the Jesuit-run America over the years since the former's conception, concluding that Commonweal's influence has been “more influential than certain figures suggest,” and also remarked that it was very “liberal.” Eulau, Heinz, “Proselytizing in the Catholic Press,” the Public Opinion Quarterly 11 (Summer 1947): 191 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

92. See, for example, “The Catholic View of Evolution,” Literary Digest 86 (July 4, 1925): 34. In this article, not only were excerpts from Commonweal extensively quoted, but the New York Times was excerpted, citing the views of John Wynne, S.J., a co-editor of the Catholic Encyclopedia, as saying (during the Scopes trial) that he “upholds the principle of teaching evolution as a scientific theory of human origin and disapproves of attempts to legislate against it” (ibid.) An example of the New York Times quoting Williams during the trial was cited earlier.

93. Michael Williams, “At Dayton, Tennessee,” Commonweal 2 (July 22, 1925): 262.

94. Michael Williams (unsigned), “On Teaching Evolution,” Commonweal 1 (April 22, 1925): 647.

95. Ibid. For more on the Illinois episode to which Williams referred, see Garwood, Christine, Plat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2008)Google Scholar, chap. 6, esp. 210-12.

96. For more on the apocryphal character of the flat-earth myth in Catholic Christendom and its use as a straw man against Catholics starting in the Enlightenment, see Russell, Jeffrey Burton, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (New York: Praeger, 1997)Google Scholar.

97. Williams, “Concerning the Scopes Case,” Commonweal 2 (June 3, 1925): 85.

98. Ibid.

99. Ibid., 86

100. Ibid., 85

101. Elder, Benedict, “A Law That Is Not a Law,” Commonweal 2 (July 15, 1925): 246 Google Scholar.

102. For a version of this claim presented in a conservative Catholic context, see “From Dayton to Chaos,” America 33 (August 1, 1925): 371.

103. Ibid.

104. Ibid.

105. Ibid. Before reversing course when learning of Bryan's role in the defense, H. L. Mencken argued in much the same vein as Elder in “In Tennessee,” The Nation 121 (July 1,1925): 30-31.

106. Morrison, “A History of American Catholic” 349-50. One presumes he meant the secular press in the northern United States. See also Morrison, “American Catholics,” 67.

107. Williams, “At Dayton, Tennessee,” 265. Anti-Catholics had often claimed that Catholic Americans secretly hoped to introduce the papal model of Catholic government; this probably encouraged Williams's vehement desire to separate all Catholics from even the slightest appearance of support for Bryan.

108. See “Bryan Aim Assailed by Catholic Editor,” New York Times, July 13,1925, 17.

109. “The Scopes Dilemma,” Commonweal 2 (July 15,1925): 241-42.

110. Michael Williams (unsigned), “On the Freedom of the Teacher,” Commonweal 2 (June 24, 1925): 169-70. See, for example, Hunter, A Civic Biology, esp. 195-96, 261-63, 405.

111. “Dayton and Great Britain,” Commoniveal 2 (August 5, 1925): 301.

112. Williams's own editorials and articles over the years that specifically focused on evolution supported science but not scientism or naive scientific utopianism. See the following unsigned Williams editorials: “Soundings in Mystery,” Commonweal 7 (November 16,1927): 379-80; [untitled], Commonweal 7 (March 7, 1928): 1139; and “The Conquering Cockroach,” Commonweal 10 (September 11,1929).

113. Untitled, Commonweal 2 (September 9, 1925): 411.

114. Morrison, “A History,” 295. He went on to say specifically of the 1920s, “Catholic writers have been at each other's throats over questions like human evolution, spontaneous generation and St. Augustine's theory of Genesis” (323).

115. Fisher, D. W., “In Defense of Science,” Commonweal 3 (January 20, 1926): 290 Google Scholar.

116. During the 1920s, the scientific community was itself disputing the extent to which natural selection drove evolution. See Bowler, Peter J., “Revisiting the Eclipse of Darwinism,” Journal of the History of Biology 38 (2005): 19–32 Google Scholar. Some non-Darwinian evolutionary theories (i.e., not assigning primacy to natural selection, per se) were popular in the first few decades of the twentieth century. These included theories based in orthogenesis and saltationism (24).

117. O'Toole, Barry, The Case against Evolution (New York: MacMillan, 1925)Google Scholar.

118. Bertram Windle, “The Case against Evolution,” Commonweal 2 (June 10,1925): 124. Windle's articles and reviews dealing with aspects of science and religion appeared frequently in Commonweal. Morrison argued of Windle, “The New York Times considered Windle the spokesman of the [Catholic] Church in North America” (Morrison, “A History,” 338). A few months after the Scopes trial, Windle made another Galileotrial- centered plea designed to distance modern Catholicism from previous Catholicisms: “Our way today is not the way of those days.” Windle, Bertram, “The Roman Catholic View of Evolution,” Current History 23 (December 1925): 336 Google Scholar.

119. Morrison, 336.

120. In an unsigned Williams article from February 1926, “Osborn on Religion,” Henry Fairfield Osborn is given “the fullest sympathy” for expressing the need for “certain aspects of eternity” to be given attention in schools for the purposes of inculcating morals. Williams, while arguing the need for current public education to remain totally secular, uses Osborn's utterances as a springboard to advocate revamping the school system into subcategories of public schools that offer specific “denominational education.” See “Osborn on Religion,” Commonweal 3 (February 2,1926): 343. See also “Sir Oliver and Evolution,” Commonweal 3 (February 10,1926): 370-71; Windle, , review of Ether and Reality by Lodge, Sir Oliver, Commonweal 3 (February 17, 1926): 415-16Google Scholar; Windle, , review of Evolution and Creation by Lodge, Sir Oliver, Commonweal 4 (September 29, 1926): 508-9Google Scholar; and Windle, review of Modern Scientific Ideas by Sir Oliver Lodge, Commonweal 6 (July 6, 1927): 244-5. On Osborn's religious views, see Regal, Brian, Henry Fairfield Osborn: Race and the Search for the Origins of Man (Burlington: Ashgate, 2002), 31-7Google Scholar; on his anti-Catholicism, see ibid., 46.

121. On Osborn's immense public scientific prestige in the 1920s, see ibid., xii.

122. The quote was from Henri Dorlodot. Osborn, Henry Fairfield, “The Earth Speaks to Bryan,” Forum 73 (June 1925): 797 Google Scholar. Later in the article he invoked the Jesuit paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, to do more of the same.