Modern Mind

and rewarding experience in reading the book.36

12
BABBITT’S MIDDLETOWN
     
    In the 1920s the eugenicists and scientific racists were especially persistent in America. One of their main texts was a book by C.C. Brigham called
A Study of American Intelligence,
which was published in 1923. Brigham, an assistant professor of psychology at Princeton University, was a disciple of Robert Yerkes, and in his book he relied on the material Yerkes had obtained during the war (Yerkes wrote the foreword for Brigham’s book). Despite evidence that the longer immigrants were in the United States, the better they performed on IQ tests, Brigham’s aim was to show that the southern and eastern peoples of Europe, and Negroes, were of inferior intelligence. In making his arguments he relied on the much earlier notions of such figures as Count Georges Vacher de Lapouge, who thought that Europe was divided into three racial types, according to the shape of their skulls. Given this, Brigham’s conclusions were not surprising: ‘The decline in intelligence [in America] is due to two factors, the change in the races migrating to this country, and to the additional factor of the sending of lower and lower representatives of each race…. Running parallel with the movements of these European peoples, we have the most sinister development in the history of this continent, the importation of the negro…. The decline of American intelligence will be more rapid than the decline of the intelligence of European national groups, owing to the presence here of the negro.’ 1
    In such a context, the idea for a return to segregation was never far below the surface. Cornelia Cannon, noting that 89 percent of blacks had tested as ‘morons,’ wrote in the American periodical
Atlantic Monthly,
‘Emphasis must necessarily be laid on the development of the primary schools, on the training in activities, habits, occupations which do not demand the more evolved faculties. In the South particularly … the education of the whites and colored in separate schools may have justification other than that created by race prejudice.’ 2 Henry Fairfield Osborn, a trustee of Columbia University and president of the American Museum of Natural History, believed ‘those tests were worth what the war cost, even in human life, if they served to show clearly to our people the lack of intelligence in our country, and the degrees of intelligence in different races who are coming to us, in a way which no one can say is the result of prejudice…. We have learned once and for all that the negro is not like us.’ 3
    The battles over biology did not stop with the victory the eugenicists achieved in getting the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act passed. The following year biology was back in the public eye in the notorious Scopes trial. As early as 1910 the Presbyterian General Assembly had drawn up a list of the ‘Five Fundamentals’ which they believed to be the basis of Christianity. These were: the miracles of Christ; the Virgin birth; the Resurrection; the Crucifixion, understood as atonement for mankind’s sins; and the Bible as the directly inspired word of God. It was the latter that was the focus of the Scopes trial. The facts of the case were not in dispute. 4 John Scopes, of Dayton, Tennessee, had taught a biology class using as a textbook
Civic Biology
by George William Hunter, which had been adopted as a standard text by the State Textbook Commission in 1919. (It had actually been used in some schools since 1909, so it was in circulation for fifteen years before it was considered dangerous.) 5 The part of Hunter’s book which Scopes had used reported evolution as a fact. This, the prosecution argued, was contrary to Tennessee law. Evolution was a theory that contradicted the Bible, and it should not be asserted as bald fact. The trial turned into a circus. The prosecution was led by William Jennings Bryan, three times a presidential nominee, a former secretary of state, and a man who told Seventh Day Adventists before the trial that it would determine whether evolution or Christianity survived. He also said, ‘All the ills from which America suffers can be traced back to the teachings of evolution. It would be better to destroy every book ever written, and save just the first three verses of Genesis.’ 6 The defence was led by a no less colourful person, Clarence Darrow, a skilled orator and a fabled criminal lawyer. While Bryan was determined to make