An Adversary for Mr. Bryan: West Virginia’s Forgotten Contribution to the Antievolution Crusade

Every spring, spanning from February to April, West Virginia University hosts the Festival of Ideas, a series of lectures in celebration of an important aim of higher education: the freedom to discover and discuss new ideas both within the classroom and outside of it. In the spring of 2009, in commemoration of Charles Darwin’s birth two hundred years earlier, the entire Festival of Ideas was dedicated to the influence of Darwin on modern thought. Intellectuals and scholars from across the country came to the university to discuss Darwin’s work and impact on disciplines across the spectrum of western academia. Those in charge of the event, dubbed DarwinFest, were careful to delineate that it was an open forum for learning and not a continuation of the evolution versus creationism debate that has plagued this country’s educational system for the last century.

DarwinFest was not the first time that the work of Charles Darwin captured the thoughts and conversations of the faculty and student body at West Virginia University. Nearly a hundred years earlier, in the spring of 1922, the issue embroiled the university in a scandal of national repute. The inhabitants of Morgantown, like other people across the country, were struggling to understand the theory of evolution, especially the Darwinian brand, in order to judge the legitimacy of the claims of some Christian authorities that it was to blame for the alarming moral decay of the American youth. In the spring of 1922, William Jennings Bryan, famous for his political career and especially his oratory skills, came to the university to explain “the menace of Darwinism.” Arguing that professors of science across the country were instilling atheism and agnosticism in impressionable college students by teaching Darwinian evolution as fact, he offered a hundred dollar reward to any professor who could harmonize belief in the Bible with the theory of evolution.¹

The WVU science faculty immediately declared that they would respond, choosing Dr. Robert Spangler, professor of botany, as their spokesperson. The ensuing dialogue between Spangler and Bryan carried on for months and was followed eagerly by local and national newspapers. Letters championing and condemning Spangler and the university poured in from across the country. Finally, Bryan agreed to pay Spangler the award. Some West Virginians were upset by the response of Spangler and the university, and although the administration quietly moved to silence Spangler, a backlash ensued within the state. Opponents, led by evangelical organizations and fire-and-brimstone Fundamentalist preachers, outraged at the atheism purportedly being spread at the state university, circulated petitions for Spangler’s resignation. Under pressure from the president of the university, Spangler returned the victory check to Bryan and ceased correspondence with him.²

The events that unfolded at West Virginia University in the spring of 1922 reflected changes that were occurring both in the academic and cultural life of the nation at that time. Enrollment in colleges and universities was increasing dramatically, and the public pushed for a shift away from classical education to more practical degrees. At college, youngsters were drinking and dancing, smoking and snuggling, and their parents were worried. In response to this sense of chaos, some American Christians, who held fast to the old light of revivalism, found a culprit in the theory of evolution. Launching a major campaign that started in colleges and universities but eventually spread to public school systems, the group coalesced into a movement of Fundamentalist fury against the growth of Darwinian thought.³

West Virginia was one of many states enmeshed in this cultural struggle between academic freedom and the pursuit of modernity, on the one hand, and adherence to traditional values and the simple and austere Christian life, on the other. Although a vast amount of scholarship on the antievolution crusade exists, it focuses almost entirely on the movement’s culmination in the Scopes Trial. The campaign against teaching evolution at the college level receives little attention, and only in a handful of endnotes and side comments mention West Virginia University’s participation in the struggle.⁴ However...