God—or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age

Notes

n o t e s Abbreviations Conklin Correspondence Edwin Grant Conklin Correspondence, Edwin Grant Conklin Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey Conklin Papers Edwin Grant Conklin Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey Knight Papers Charles R. Knight Papers, New York Public Library Osborn Family Papers, NYHS Osborn Family Papers, New-York Historical Society Osborn Papers, AMNH Henry Fairfield Osborn Papers, Library of the American Museum of Natural History, New York Preface 1. Peter Bowler attributes the phrase “life’s splendid drama” to the paleontologist William Diller Matthew. See Peter J. Bowler, “The Moral Significance of ‘Life’s Splendid Drama’ from Natural Theology to Adaptive Scenarios,” in Klaas van Berkel and Arjo Vanderjagt , eds., The Book of Nature in Early Modern and Modern History (Louvain, Belgium: Pieters, 2006). The phrase “dramatists of evolution” comes from Alfred Watterson McCann , God—or Gorilla: How the Monkey Theory of Evolution Exposes Its Own Methods, Refutes Its Own Principles, Denies Its Own Inferences, Disproves Its Own Case (New York: DevinAdair , 1922), 83. 2. John Roach Straton, “Worldliness and the Vainglory of Life,” in Straton, The Old Gospel at the Heart of the Metropolis (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1925), 174. 3. John Roach Straton, “The Modern Need of a Great God,” in Straton, Old Gospel at the Heart of the Metropolis, 25. 4. Straton, “Worldliness and the Vainglory of Life,” 174–175. 5. Harry Emerson Fosdick, “How Shall We Think of God?” Harper’s, July 1926, 229. 6. Ibid., 230. Chapter One • The Caveman and the Strenuous Life 1. Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Knopf, 2006); Lawrence W. Levine, Defender of the Faith: William Jennings Bryan, the Last Decade, 1915–1925 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); Ronald L. Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1997); Michael Lienesch, In the Beginning: Fundamentalism, the Scopes Trial, and the Making of the Antievolution Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 2. Chicago Defender, June 20, 1925, sec. 2, p. 12, reprinted in Je¤rey P. Moran, The Scopes Trial: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002), 173; for a more extended discussion of this theme, see the excellent essay by Je¤rey Moran, “Reading Race into the Scopes Trial: African American Elites, Science, and Fundamentalism,” Journal of American History 90 (Dec. 2003): 891–911. There is a variation on this theme in an Art Young cartoon published in The Masses during World War I in which the apes’ responses are used to express horror over the war: see Mark Pittenger, American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 245. 3. L. Perry Curtis Jr., Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), xxii–xxiv, 122. See also Henry Fairfield Osborn, “The Influence of Habit in the Evolution of Man and the Great Apes,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 4 (1928): 216–230. See also Osborn to Chester K. Field, Feb. 15, 1916, folder 31, box 7, Osborn Papers, AMNH; Roselyne de Ayala and Jean-Pierre Gueno, eds., Illustrated Letters: Artists and Writers Correspond (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 98. For the longer historical context of similar images, see Stephanie Moser, Ancestral Images: The Iconography of Human Origins (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Martin Kemp, The Human Animal in Western Art and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); and for the strong racial and ethnic subtexts of such images , see Gustav Jahoda, Images of Savages: Ancient Roots of Modern Prejudice in Western Culture (London: Routledge, 1999); Ter Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Alan E. Mann, “Imagining Prehistory: Pictorial Reconstructions of the Way We Were,” American Anthropologist 105 (March 2003): 139–143; Douglas A. Lorimer, “Science and the Secularization of Victorian Images of Race,” in Bernard Lightman, ed., Victorian Science in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 212–235; and Mark Pittenger, “Imagining Genocide in the Progressive Era,” American Studies 28 (1987): 73–91. 4. Chicago News, July 22, 1925, clipping in folder 6, box 92, Osborn Papers, AMNH. 5. Janet Browne, “Charles Darwin as a Celebrity,” Science in Context 16 (June 2003): 175–194. 6. Judith C...