In the 1920s, the idea of evolution wasn’t new. Charles Darwin’s bombshell book about natural selection had been published 60 years earlier. The outlines of Darwin’s theory had become standard fare in school textbooks and curricula, even though the real scientific controversies about the mechanism of natural selection were by no means settled. But the furious campaign to ban evolution had nothing to do with those debates among scientists.
In 1923, T. T. Martin, the “Blue Mountain Evangelist,” preached that “evolution is being drilled into our boys and girls … during the most susceptible, dangerous age of their lives.” Evolution, Martin warned, was not good science but only a plot by “sneering” “high-brows” to inject mandatory atheism into public schools. Martin claimed to have “abundant evidence that the teaching of these text-books is unsettling the faith of thousands of students.”
He never shared that evidence, but he did paint a terrifying picture of the evolutionary conspiracy’s results. Once the “Evolutionists” robbed children of their faith, Martin wrote, they “laugh and jeer, as the rapist laughs and jeers at the bitter tears of the crushed father and mother over the blighted life of their child.”
Martin’s pitch wasn’t only about religion. He framed his fight against evolution as a fight against all manner of modern woes. Supporters of evolution, Martin preached, were not real men; they were “sissy”; they had given up their “Christian manhood.” They were not even real Americans; they were betraying “the spirit of those who came over in the Mayflower,” Martin said, adding, “Where is the spirit of 1776?”
What could anxious parents do if they wanted to keep their children safe from the schemes of atheists and sissies? How could they protect kids from a vision of America that wasn’t focused on sturdy white Puritans and the heroic followers of George Washington? In language that could have come from 2021 and not 1923, Martin told parents to take over their local school boards, to “put on the Board of Trustees only men and women who will not employ any teacher who believes in Evolution.” After that, Martin predicted, seizing control of state legislatures and cramming through anti-evolution laws would be simple.
It was never quite that simple, but the movement to ban evolution from public schools seemed, for a few years, to be an unstoppable political juggernaut. School-board elections became furious affairs, pitting neighbors against one another with accusations of treason and atheism. To give just one example, in Atlanta, William Mahoney, the local leader of the Supreme Kingdom, a Ku Klux Klan offshoot, attacked school-board members and the city’s teachers. He promised to force the reluctant school board to eliminate five teachers on suspicion of teaching ideas that were “paganistic … atheistic … beastialistic … and anarchistic.”