Evolution for John Doe: Pictures, the Public,
and the Scopes Trial Debate

Constance Areson Clark

For suggestions on how to use this article in the United States history survey course, see our new "Teaching the JAH" Web site supplement at http://www. indiana.edu/~jah/teaching.
According to Joseph Wood Krutch, the most dramatic event at the Scopes trial of 1925 occurred when William Jennings Bryan announced, incredibly, that he was not a mammal. Looking back from the 1960s, Krutch, who had covered the trial for the Nation, remembered the moment with amusement. H. L. Mencken, Krutch noted, had made a point of falling noisily from a table, as if to punctuate the absurdity of Bryan's statement.1 The trial transcript shows that Bryan did not precisely deny his place within the zoological class Mammalia. He did, however, emphatically object to a diagram that located humans among the mammals or, as he put it, in "a little ring . . . with lions and tigers and everything that is bad!" (See figure 1.) The diagrammatic balloon that so offended Bryan came from a discussion of evolution in George William Hunter's Civic Biology, the textbook assigned to John Thomas Scopes's biology class. Bryan responded viscerally to the image.2	1
Figure 1. William Jennings Bryan objected to this diagram in Civic Biology, the 1914 textbook assigned to John Scopes's students. Both at the trial and in his Memoirs, Bryan complained that the diagram implied that humans were lost among the mammals in a small insignificant circle, rather than assigned a circle of their own. Reprinted from George William Hunter, A Civic Biology Presented in Problems (New York, 1914), p. 194.
Bryan had a point. Although he never really understood evolution, he had an eye for ambiguity in evolutionary metaphors. Like many diagrams published by scientists and science popularizers of the time, Hunter's balloons could be interpreted as undermining common written and spoken defenses of evolutionary theory, defenses made vulnerable by the claims scientists made, the disarray of evolutionary theory in the 1920s, and a disjunction between public and scientific understandings of scientific illustration. Visual images played an important part in the public discourse associated with the Scopes trial, but they did not necessarily convey the messages their authors intended.	. . .