The class forces at play in the ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’ and the consequences for workers.

‘Evolution, Capitalism and the Workers’ from The Daily Worker. Vol. 2 No. 153. July 10, 1925.

In no other advanced capitalist nation could such a trial take place as that opening at Dayton, Tennessee.

That John Scopes, a teacher in a public school, can be brought to trial for teaching evolution as a law of nature, under a law enacted by the Tennessee legislature, is evidence of the retarded development of a whole section of the United States.

The south is not yet industrialized. It is dominated intellectually by feudal conceptions which are not found in the great industrial centers where the masses are either irreligious or lukewarm towards orthodox religion.

It is noticeable that the great metropolitan dailies are on the side of evolution. The Scopes case has given them a splendid chance to demonstrate a devotion to scientific truth–truth divorced from the class conflict.

It was rising capitalism that brought about the Reformation–the restrictions placed upon independent inquiry by feudal religion made commercial progress difficult and the merchant class broke the power of the Roman church.

Insofar as orthodox religion has been of use to capitalism it has been encouraged, but the ethics of christianity have never been allowed to interfere with business–the bourgeoisie have two codes as Lafargue explained long ago: One for business and one for their private lives.

Between the two a constant struggle takes place with the result that the best christian businessmen are the biggest hypocrites.

But to get back to Dayton.

There is much to interest the working class in what is taking place in that little mountain town where feudal reaction is in the saddle. The defenders of Scopes and his prosecutors are of the middle class. It is therefore evident that within that class is a deep division.

Darrow is typical of the middle class liberal professional intellectual–individualistic, a believer in personal liberty, educated and cultured.

Bryan represents the agrarian element in the middle class he is a leader of the well-to-do farmers of the middle west and of the south whose economic interests are opposed to those of big capitalism–the element that at different times has crusaded as Greenbackers, Populists and Free Silverites, rallying always around some chimerical scheme of currency reform in which was expressed their antagonism to the increasing control of industry and finance by the big capitalists.

The city and the town–these are the two forces in opposition to one another in Dayton and it is noticeable that Bryan is calling the attention of the ruralites to the ridicule heaped upon them in the metropolitan press as part of his campaign in defense of the dogma of a creator, a special creation and the first chapter of Genesis.

In Great Britain this struggle was fought out during the 80’s and 90’s. The complete victory of British capitalism over feudalism symbolized by the huge expansion of industry and the rise of industrial capitalism with the proletarianization of the overwhelming majority of the British masses, was accompanied by the spread of rationalism, the printing and distributing of millions of pamphlets on the Darwinian theory; pamphlets by Lyell, Huxley, McCabe, Allen; the works of Leckie and Haeckel, Lubbock and Romanes.

But it was not until the dominant capitalist class had found in the Darwinian theory of the “survival of the fittest” a justification for their oppression of the working class that opposition to the theory of evolution became negligible in England. The jungle law of “tooth and claw”, seemed to them to be eminently fitted for their period. Nature itself had placed the seal of approval upon British capitalism and all its works, they claimed, and this distorted Darwinism became the petted darling of the lords of coal and steel.

It may be well to say here that capitalism seldom if ever interferes with the search for abstract truth. Scientific researches in physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, astronomy, geology and other sciences are encouraged. It is the sociological sciences where the class character of society is shown by every truthful investigator that are frowned upon by the ruling class. Academic freedom is curtailed only when the results of scientific research tend to expose the hypocrisy and cruelty of the ruling class and weaken it or strengthen the working class.

Modern science is the handmaiden of capitalist production and this valuable servant it is not going to destroy.

If we want to prove to ourselves that it is abstract freedom and not social freedom that the metropolitan press defends in the Scopes case we have only to compare the amount and the kind of publicity given by it to another recent case–the Gitlow case.

Here was a class case. The question involved was the constitutional right to advocate the overthrow of American, capitalist government and the replacement of it by a workers’ and farmers’ government.

With a few strokes of the pen the United States supreme court wiped out the constitutional guarantee of free speech. It legalized prosecution under criminal syndicalism laws in 35 states and placed the whole working class in jeopardy.

From the capitalist press which either denounces or ridicules the prosecution of Scopes came a chorus of approval for the action in the Gitlow case.

There is one more thing in connection with the Scopes case and the anti-evolution law under which he is tried that is of grave importance to the working class. We can be certain that in spite of the devotion to abstract truth manifested by the capitalist press, that if the Tennessee law is upheld and other states adopt similar measures they will be used freely by the capitalist class to suppress all educational work having any social significance.

Just as the criminal syndicalism laws were adopted as war measures for the curbing of enemy aliens and then used against the working class, so will anti-evolution laws become another means of jailing the most intelligent and militant workers.

Invoked for this purpose they will be objects of praise instead of denunciation in the capitalist press.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924. National and City (New York and environs) editions exist.

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