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Alumni Association Home > Past Issues > 2003 > November-December 2003   Print View The Fight For Academic Freedom 11/10/2003 By Tim Brady The famed Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925 dramatically captured the simmering debate between those who believed in the right to teach the science of evolution and those who believed that the teaching of evolution was poisoning the minds of young people to their Christian heritage. The principals in that epic struggle were Clarence Darrow, who defended high school teacher John Scopes against charges that he had broken Tennessee law by teaching evolution in his classroom, and the aging William Jennings Bryan, three-time Democratic nominee for president of the United States and a former Secretary of State during the Wilson administration. Bryan was also the leading figure in the Protestant fundamentalist movement, which emphasized a literal interpretation of the Bible. The outcome of that classic trial is well-known: Darrow lost his case but won the argument, while Bryan won the suit and lost his life (dying in his sleep five days after the trial's conclusion). What is less well-known is what happened to the evolution debate afterward. In fact, it came north and landed in the state of Minnesota, right here on the doorstep of the University of Minnesota, where the ensuing brawl between fundamentalists and the University community would unite students, faculty, administration, and the maturing alumni association behind the cherished right to academic freedom. William B. Riley, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Minneapolis, was the most-famed minister of his day in Minnesota and one of the leading figures in the fundamentalist movement. Riley was a tall, handsome man, charismatic and a fierce debater. He had arrived in Minneapolis just before the turn of the century and grew First Baptist from a congregation of about 600 to 3,000 by the 1930s. He founded Northwestern College and Northwestern Seminary in the Twin Cities and also headed the World's Christian Fundamentals Association (WCFA), a national coalition of churches formed to counter what it saw as a swing toward modernist thinking in American society, including the teaching of evolution in schools. Riley edited the WCFA organizational magazine from his offices at Northwestern College, and it was the WCFA that lined up William Jennings Bryan as the prosecuting attorney in the Scopes trial. In the 1920s, a handful of southern states, including Tennessee, banned the teaching of evolution, but no northern states had similar proscriptions. In the wake of the Scopes trial, fundamentalists resolved to spread the ban above the Mason-Dixon Line and William B. Riley's station in Minnesota made the state a likely target. The anti-evolutionists, or simply the "antis," as they became known around the University, had already fired warning shots on campus in the early 1920s. Inspired by a lecture visit to Minnesota by Bryan in 1922, Riley and other like-minded pastors formed the Minnesota Anti-Evolution League. The next spring, a number of Presbyterian ministers, backed by Riley's group, sent a letter to University President Lotus Coffman demanding that the University investigate and remove from its syllabi any books containing references to the teaching of evolution. They cited two specific examples, including a history by H.G. Wells. Coffman very politely declined the ministers' request in a personal letter, saying that no students had yet complained about these texts and it was doubtful that much of this reading even sunk in with modern students. "Indeed, I can say to you, that it is surprising to one not familiar with students, how they can skip things in a book; sometimes they can miss most that is between the covers," the president wrote. Later in the letter, however, Coffman did get around to what would soon be the crux of the matter with a lengthy discourse on the University's efforts "to achieve a free and liberal intellectual spirit in its method of instruction." Still, the overall sense in Coffman's response was his hope that the fundamentalists would just go away. They didn't. "The Antis Are At It Again," screamed a March 1926 headline from The Minnesota Alumni Weekly, eight months after the 1925 Scopes trial. The occasion was the cancellation of a lecture by Riley on campus. Riley had originally been granted permission to speak, but he'd slightly misled Dean of Administration F.J. Kelly about the nature of his topic. When Kelly discovered that Riley was advertising his talk with the inflammatory title, "Should the Teaching of Evolution Be Longer Tolerated at this State University?" rather than the simple, "The Fundamentalist Side of the Question of Evolution," the dean withdrew the invitation. Riley was not a man to take rejection lightly. For the next several months, he and the anti-evolution league took to the state's highways and byways, damning the University and drumming up support for legislation that would prohibit the teaching of evolution in all of Minnesota's public schools. The University was feeling some heat. In an attempt to smooth ruffled feathers, Kelly and Coffman agreed to let Riley speak on campus when he asked again, the following November. They even allowed not one but four lectures. But these engagements served only to spur Riley's resolve. In the first of those talks, held before a raucous crowd of 3,000 at the University Armory, one waggish student in the balcony lowered a stuffed monkey on a string in front of Riley's face as he began his speech. The laughs that ensued typified the student-body response to the antis. But a few months later, in March 1927, Riley and company drew up legislation that would make it "unlawful for any teacher or instructor in any public school, college, State Teachers' college or University of Minnesota supported in whole or in part by the public education funds of the State of Minnesota to teach that mankind descended or ascended from a lower order of animals." Word was that many outstate legislators were inclined to agree that the theory of evolution should not be taught in Minnesota's schools. Which meant that the University of Minnesota—as well as higher education institutions across the state, and perhaps the nation—were suddenly faced with the prospect of state legislators, and their pastors, dictating school lesson plans. Suddenly the monkey wasn't nearly so cute. Since its inception in 1904, the General Alumni Association of the University of Minnesota had been unafraid of jumping into the political arena. In fact, it had been founded in a political fight between the state and the University over who controlled the school's budgets. The state had instituted a Board of Controls to oversee the day-to-day finances at the University, which meant that every nickel spent by U department heads was scrutinized by an accountant at the State Capitol. This was just plain wrong, cried the newly formed alumni association, taking its grievances directly to St. Paul. A sympathetic ear and redress were found in Governor John Johnson's office, and by 1905 the Board of Controls no longer controlled University funds and the alumni association was puffing its chest. By the late '20s, however, the alumni association was less inclined to leap wholeheartedly into a donnybrook. But it made an exception in the case of Riley's legislation. "Evolution Fight Calls Alumni," trumpeted a March 1927 Alumni Weekly headline. "A serious blow has been struck at educational freedom! Minnesota alumni therefore are called to arms to present forcefully their views to the state legislature. Rarely in the history of Minnesota education has so serious a crisis existed which called for immediate and concerted action on the part of the intelligent—and we mean the laymen as well as the so-called intelligentsia—people of this state." The question was not whether or not one side was right or wrong in the evolution debate. The issue was tolerance: whether or not, as stated in the Alumni Weekly, "certain groups [could] force their beliefs upon the multitude through the aid of the strong arm of the law." Students took up the same cry, as did the faculty and the administration. On March 8, 1927, the day the state Senate Education Committee was set to begin proceedings for a public hearing on the bill, the All-University Student Council declared "a campus emergency." Classes were dismissed at noon and a mass meeting was held at the Armory, during which squads of students circulated petitions against the legislation. The meeting was said to have attracted 5,000 of the 9,600 students then enrolled at the University, and hundreds reportedly were turned away. The next day at the Capitol, the scene was equally wild. Both Coffman and Riley were scheduled to testify on the merits of the bill, Coffman first. The great issue here was academic freedom, and the University's president began his testimony by recalling the territorial assembly that founded the U of M: "These men had a vision of a great commonwealth ministered to and served by the teachers of the University. Never once in those early years did they seek to limit the work or the activities of the University; never once did they seek to prescribe what it should teach and what it should not teach; never once did they seek to fasten upon it any special creed or doctrine." Coffman kept swinging: "I am opposed to the bill for the reason that it is contrary to the genius of American life. . . . The spirit of America will wither and decay when the correctness of scientific theories is decided by legislation or by the counting of heads." And in closing: "Let the doubtful honor of striking a blow at free schools and the principles upon which our government rests pass to such communities and states as do not know to cherish and defend them." By all accounts, Riley was not nearly as eloquent in his testimony before the committee. He also committed the cardinal sin of not having his facts in order. At the end of his speech, Riley claimed that despite what Coffman, the administration, and the faculty, and the alumni of the University might say about the bill, the majority of U of M students favored the legislation. He got that wrong. The next speaker was Howard Haycraft, editor of the Minnesota Daily. Haycraft had with him "a long roll of paper containing 6,500 signatures opposed to the legislation," which had been collected at the student rally the day before. Haycraft presented the roll to the committee and also reported that, at the rally, a vote was taken on a resolution condemning the proposed anti-evolution bill. It was passed unanimously. Rarely before, and rarely since, has the University community acted in such a concerted fashion. The strength of its collective voice impressed the statehouse crowd in St. Paul, and the next morning the Senate voted 55 to 7 to kill the legislation. The Anti-Evolution Bill was dead in Minnesota and would never rise again. Academic freedom, it seemed, was no monkey on a string. Still, William B. Riley was hardly cowed. He continued to be one of the leading voices in the national fundamentalist movement, even as he tended to his congregation in Minneapolis and oversaw Northwestern College and Seminary. A footnote to his story: As he was nearing death in 1947, Riley handpicked his successor at Northwestern, a young and upcoming minister named Billy Graham, whom Riley had first met in 1944. According to his own account, Graham was somewhat reluctant to take the post but had a hard time turning down the forceful William B. Riley. Graham served as president of the Northwestern schools for the next three years before going on to wider fame. Tim Brady is a St. Paul freelance writer.

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