Abstract
That a profound cultural clash should be contested as a matter of school policy should not come as a surprise. As historian Lawrence Cremin has pointed out, “Many of the great twentieth-century battles over traditionalism and modernity … were ultimately framed as educational issues.”1 Other historians agree. James L. Axtell has called education the “most sensitive instrument” for noting cultural change.2 Although, as Benjamin Justice has argued, this “warfare thesis” has often overemphasized conflict, in the case of fundamentalist educational policy, warfare has certainly been the norm. Just as in more recent “culture wars,” the struggles for schools in the 1920s were really struggles for the soul of America itself.3
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Notes
Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876–1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 12.
James L. Axtell, “The School Upon a Hill: Education and Society,” in Colonial New England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 285.
Benjamin Justice, The War that Wasn’t: Religious Conflict and Compromise in the Common Schools of New York State, 1865–1900 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005), 2–10.
See also James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991)
and Jonathan Zimmerman, Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
Alfred Fairhurst, Atheism in Our Universities (Cincinnati, OH: Standard Publishing Co., 1923), 84.
T. T. Martin, The Evolution Issue (Los Angeles, CA: n.p., 1923?), 38–39.
James M. Gray, “The Sacred Cow of Evolution,” Moody Bible Institute Monthly [Moody Monthly] 29 (January 1929): 225.
William Bell Riley, “Higher Criticism in College Libraries,” School and Church 2 (January–March 1920): 298.
Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 529.
George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Richard Sutch & Susan B. Carter, ed., Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), http://hsus.cambridge.org.ezproxy.library.wisc.edu/HSUSWeb/ (accessed July 21, 2006).
Thomas A. Askew Jr. “The Liberal Arts College Encounters Intellectual Change: A Comparative Study of Education at Knox and Wheaton Colleges, 1837–1925” (PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 1969), 228, 234, 248;
Frances Carothers Blanchard, The Life of Charles Albert Blanchard (New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1932), 182.
See also Timothy L. Smith, “Introduction: Christian Colleges and American Culture,” in Making Higher Education Christian: The History and Mission of Evangelical Colleges in America, ed. Joel A. Carpenter and Kenneth W. Shipps (Grand Rapids: MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1987), 1–2;
and William C. Ringenberg, The Christian College: A History of Protestant Higher Education in America (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co. and Christian University Press, 1984); “Platform of Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois,” 3 March 1926, typescript copy in President’s Office Papers, Accession 2006–18, L. S. Chafer correspondence, box 10, folder 26, Archives, Dallas Theological Seminary.
Kermit L. Staggers, “Reuben A. Torrey: American Fundamentalist, 1856–1928” (PhD dissertation, Claremont Graduate School, 1986), 55.
Willard B. Gatewood Jr., Preachers, Pedagogues and Politicians: The Evolution Controversy in North Carolina, 1920–1927 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), 87.
Marsden, Soul of the American University, 280–81; see also Jon H. Roberts, “Conservative Evangelicals and Science Education in American Colleges and Universities, 1890–1940,” The Journal of the Historical Society 5 (September 2005): 297–329.
Alabama Baptist, September 12, 1906, quoted in James Clyde Harper, “A Study of Alabama Baptist Higher Education and Fundamentalism, 1890–1930” (PhD dissertation, University of Alabama, 1977), 72.
William Bell Riley, “Modernism in Baptist Schools,” Christian Fundamentals in School and Church [CFSC] 3 (October–December 1920): 411.
William Bell Riley, The Menace of Modernism (New York: Christian Alliance, 1917), 76.
See also William V. Trollinger, God’s Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 34.
W. H. Griffith Thomas, “Report of Committee on Resolutions,” God Hath Spoken (Philadelphia: Bible Conference Committee, 1919), 13.
T. T. Martin, Hell and the High School: Christ or Evolution, Which? (Kansas City, MO: Western Baptist Publishing Co., 1923), 48, 155.
James H. Leuba, The Belief in God and Immortality: A Psychological, Anthropological and Statistical Study, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1921);
William Jennings Bryan, The Menace of Darwinism (Louisville, KY: Pentecostal Publishing Co., 1919?), 32; James H. Leuba to Bryan, 16 May 1925, Bryan Papers.
George Wilson McPherson, The Crisis in Church and College (Yonkers, NY: Yonkers Book Co., 1919). See also G. W. McPherson, “What Shall We Do About It?” King’s Business (February 1920): 151–55.
Alfred Fairhurst, Atheism in Our Universities (Cincinnati, OH: Standard Publishing Co., 1923), 105.
Irvin G. Wyllie, “Bryan, Birge, and the Wisconsin Evolution Controversy, 1921–1922,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 35 (1951–52): 294–301.
Virginia L. Brereton, Training God’s Army: The American Bible School, 1880–1940 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 83.
Suzanne Cameron Linder, “William Louis Poteat and the Evolution Controversy,” North Carolina Historical Review 40 (Spring 1963): 135–57.
J. Frank Norris, “Infidelity in Baylor University,” Searchlight (October 21, 1921): 1; J. Frank Norris, “Professor Dow and Baylor University,” Searchlight (November 4, 1921): 1; see also Barry Hankins, God’s Rascal: J. Frank Norris & the Beginnings of Southern Fundamentalism (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 28.
John D. Hannah, “The Social and Intellectual Origins of the Evangelical Theological College” (PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Dallas, 1988), 216.
J. Frank Norris, “Editorial,” Searchlight (June 29, 1923): 1; J. Frank Norris, “Editorial,” Searchlight (November 7, 1924): 1; Barry Hankins, “The Strange Career of J. Frank Norris: Or, Can a Baptist Democrat Be a Fundamentalist Republican?” Church History 61 (September 1992): 373–92.
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© 2010 Adam Laats
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Laats, A. (2010). Campus Skirmishes. In: Fundamentalism and Education in the Scopes Era. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106796_4
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