The Ghost of Bryan Haunts Educationby Alvin Bernstein
The year 1925 was a perilous one for education. It marked the crest of an attempt by Fundamentalists and the like-minded to dominate American public education from elementary school to college. They had already been a powerful force in imposing Prohibition on the adult portion of our population in 1918 and were now, in the 1920s, girding themselves to curdle the minds of the young. William Jennings Bryan, 1860-1925, had been the protagonist of the Fundamentalists in their successful campaign for Prohibition. It was natural for him to assume the leadership of the anti-evolution effort. He volunteered to aid the prosecution at the trial of John T. Scopes, the latter having violated the recently passed Tennessee law that banned the teaching of evolution in state-supported schools. The law specifically barred the teaching of: "Any theory that denies the story of the Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals."1 The famous lawyer and agnostic, Clarence Darrow, defended Scopes. The trial was a test case in which the two antagonists, Bryan and Darrow, respectively represented obscurantism and enlightenment. The defendant, Scopes, was silent throughout the trial. The brilliant Darrow outwitted Bryan, reducing him to stating that each of the six busy days during which God created the world might have been much longer than our conception of 24 hours. Though Scopes lost the case and was fined $100.00, Darrow and the thinking establishment of America won a moral victory. The campaign to crush the teaching of evolution subsided. At the same time, enthusiasm for Prohibition also waned. Yet here we are, 70 years later, contending with deliberate ignorance again, compelled to fight creationism, group prayer in school, and a host of other abominations. The ghost of Bryan subsists. A reinvestigation of the thinking of this individual may aid us in understanding the present crisis of competing educational values. During the trial and in numerous public statements, Bryan expressed repulsion at the idea (actually a fact) that we are descended from animals. Why be repelled? Undoubtedly the idea blemishes one's image of power over nature. The first chapter of Genesis flatters our conceit by stating that God made us lords of nature by granting us dominance over the plants and animals He created. How, then, if we plumb the mentality of people like Bryan, can we be related to animals when we are their masters, when we may destroy or consume them at will? Is not our pride of power thereby assaulted? Must we not therefore be removed from kinship with animals and, in truth, from kinship with the entire natural world we are so busy subduing? God, if we follow Bryan, must be honored because He raises one's ego, not because He reduces it to a proper proportion. We err in absolutely concentrating on the conquest of nature, enjoying the results of doing so, and finally retiring into a happy afterlife. Such self-involvement is a narrow, crass utilitarianism. It leads to the ossification of the power to investigate external phenomena in a disinterested, impartial manner. The portals of extended knowledge are closed. When Darrow informed Bryan of the great advances made in scientific and historical inquiry, Bryan was unimpressed.2 The Bible was sufficient for him. According to his outlook, the subjective, survivalist aspect of being alive superseded knowledge for its own sake. Power over nature took precedence over knowledge of nature. He did not understand that the former often depends on the latter; that technical, material progress may languish without the latter. Bryan and his supporters were proud of their ignorance. Their contemporary descendants, who on a daily basis affect American education, are equally proud of their ignorance. They believe that Eve sinned in partaking of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Perhaps the reverse is true. Perhaps they sin in failing to emulate her. The present-day religious right essentially follows Bryan. It is confronted with new challenges such as the "threat" of abortion, but there is no basic change in outlook. There is one distinction, however. Bryan, whose support sprang from the rural and semi-rural South and West, was virulently opposed to the very evolved capitalism of the Northeast at the beginning of the 20th century. The contemporary religious right bears little of this grudge. Why the change? The likely explanation is that the religious right, as with many other groups, has been vaulted into relative economic well-being by the state paternalism reigning since the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The old Bryanites, almost like European proletarians, felt "exploited" by Wall Street, the big bankers, the railroads and other large corporations. Bryan's shallow "Cross of Gold" speech in 1896, which won him the Democratic presidential nomination, summed up the mood. Though he lost the election against McKinley, he gathered so many popular votes that many politicians were intimidated into adopting much of his program. He accelerated what historians call the progressive movement which, by 1914, effected significant restrictions on capitalistic endeavor. Thus aspects of the liberal creed, the secular side of constraints on the individual, were fostered by Bryan. Bureaucratic statism, though in its infancy compared to the present, was a logical consequence. The power lust is expressed in many ways. Thus Bryan made an easy transition from stress on economic controls to control of America's personal habits, religion, and education. Bryan had lost three presidential elections, those of 1896, 1900 and 1908. As Secretary of State, 1913-1915, he was sharply criticized for appeasing Germany. His intellectual capacity was constantly questioned throughout his career. He became bitter and resentful and went back to his religious roots. He became a knight errant of prohibition and biblical truth. His was, therefore, an unfolding of a double-barreled bigotry, of two pestilential power manifestations, liberalism's secular bigotry and the bigotry of religion. Both have strongly influenced public education in this century. Supplementary pressure is exerted by reactionary Catholicism. This total mass makes a mockery of both public and much of private education. Liberalism, for example, exerts a stranglehold over many universities, making a mirage of academic freedom. On the other side of the coin, religious reactionaries seek control of education through the domination of local school boards. Politicians are responsive to these pressures. What should be done? The proper course is to work toward the termination of public education. Let parents pay for the education of their young without dependence on the taxpayer. Let education be a parent- offspring phenomenon rather than something governmentally dictated. As a result, a significant minority of youth will transcend the bigotries of both the liberal left and the religious right. Another benefit would be alleviation of the overwhelming financial burden of public education. Americans often laud free enterprise without considering that public education is its very antithesis. Education is a commodity to be sold like anything else. It therefore belongs in the private sector, subject to market forces and individual preferences. The young should not be dragooned into a state collective, should not be serfs of the group or groups controlling the collective at any given time. Teachers, like those in private industry, should compete for the approval of the general public rather than hide within their tenure and other iniquitous modes of security. Some may fear that the disestablishment of public education would create an educational apartheid, a warring camp of educational ideologies. Don't we have this phenomenon already? It is surely better to insulate the young in a parent-dictated educational environment than to permit them to be the battered prey of educational conflict during their most vulnerable years. Intelligent parents may be doing our faltering civilization a favor when they isolate their children from an inferior, collectivized educational environment. Bryan often said that the taxpaying public should not be compelled to subsidize teaching of which it disapproves. His point was good but it may be turned against him. Why should part of the taxpaying public submit to the tyranny of the majority by supporting aspects of education it finds repulsive? Why should their money support doctrinaire liberalism or religion? The only solution, the only way of exorcising Bryan's ghost, is to liberate education from the state. If we believe in the separation of church and state, we should equally believe in the separation of education from the state. Should this be consummated, a considerable portion of the American populace will not be infected by the ignoble, power- hungry survivalism inherent in Bryan's outlook, nor will it be infected by liberalism's power lust embedded in its worship of oppressive state paternalism. Bryan died only five days after the end of the Scopes trial, July 16, 1925. Some said his death was the consequence of being humiliated by the defense, especially Darrow. Others, including Darrow, were probably more accurate when they attributed his death to one of the "seven deadly sins," gluttony. His death made headlines in Europe and America. A British writer, Sidney Brooks, fathomed Bryan. He stated that: "The faculty of development was simply lacking in him. He amassed in the course of his life innumerable experiences, but no experience . . . Mr. Bryan knew everything and understood nothing. He could not think . . . he had no scale, no critical sense, no more power of discrimination than any other gramophone." 3 To which this writer responds: Amen. Footnotes Suggested Reading William Jennings Bryan and Mary Baird Bryan: The Memoirs of William Jennings Bryan, The John C. Winston Company, Chicago, 1925. Clarence Darrow: The Story Of My Life, Scribner's, New York, 1932. John T. Scopes: Center Of The Storm, Memoirs of John T. Scopes, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1967. Newspapers, July 1925, that covered the Scopes trials and Bryan's death shortly thereafter. Alvin Bernstein is a scholar and former teacher of European history. He is retired and living in Paradise, California.
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