Conclusion

Abstract

Contemporary observers disagreed about the net result of the fundamentalist school campaigns of the 1920s. Maynard Shipley, self-styled president of the Science League of America, concluded glumly in 1930 that he and other antifundamentalist activists had lost their war. “Nothing can be taught,” Shipley warned, “in 70 per cent of the secular schools of this Republic today not sanctioned by the hosts of Fundamentalism.”¹ Other foes of fundamentalism reached the opposite conclusion. Liberal Presbyterian intellectual William Adams Brown surmised with relief in late 1926 that the fundamentalist movement was “on the ebb” and that its energetic activism would not have “the serious consequences once anticipated.”²