Clarence Darrow
The book left only two impressions on me. The first was this sketch of Clarence Darrow, the celebrated attorney who chose to defend John Scopes.
By the twenties, Darrow unquestionably stood out as the most famous -- some would say infamous -- trial lawyer in America. Born into an educated, working-class family in rural Ohio, Darrow first gained public notice in the 1890s as a Chicago city attorney and popular speaker for liberal causes. He secured the Democratic nomination to Congress in 1896, but spent most of his time campaigning for the party ticket, headed by presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan, and lost by about one hundred votes. Darrow took up the cause of labor about this time, beginning with the defense of the famed Socialist labor leader Eugene V. Debs against criminal charges growing out of the 1894 Pullman strike. “For the next fifteen years Clarence Darrow was the country’s outspoken defender of labor, at a time when labor was more militant and idealistic and employers more hardened and desperate than ever before or since,” the liberal Nation observed during the Scopes litigation. “The cases he was called upon to defend were almost invariably criminal prosecutions in bitterly hostile communities.” The final such case, a dramatic 1911 murder trial involving two union leaders accused of blowing up the Los Angeles Times building, tarnished Darrow’s reputation with labor when the defendants confessed their guilt after Darrow had professed their innocence.
Thereafter, Darrow gradually shifted his practice to criminal law, defending an odd mix of political radicals and wealthy murderers. Both types of cases kept Darrow’s name in the national headlines. The former type also connected the Chicago attorney with the New York-based ACLU: they joined forces to defend Benjamin Gitlow, for example. The latter type generated the most publicity, such as the 1924 Leopold-Loeb case, one of the most sensational trials in American history, in which Darrow used arguments of psychological determinism to save two wealthy and intelligent Chicago teenagers from execution for their cold-blooded murder of an unpopular former schoolmate, a crime that the defendants apparently committed for no other reason than to see if they could get away with it. Although Darrow’s defense outraged many Americans who believed in individual responsibility, it reflected his long-standing and oft-proclaimed repudiation of free will.
Darrow was not content with simply questioning popular notions of criminal responsibility, but delighted in challenging traditional concepts of morality and religion. One historian described Darrow as “the last of the ‘village atheists’ on a national scale,” and in this role he performed for America the same part that his father once played in his hometown. “He rebelled, just as his father had rebelled, against the narrow preachments of ‘do gooders,’” Darrow biographer Kevin Tierney concluded. “He regarded Christianity as a ‘slave religion,’ encouraging acquiescence in injustice, a willingness to make do with the mediocre, and complacency in the face of the intolerable.” In the courtroom, on the Chautauqua circuit, in public debates and lectures, and through dozens of popular books and articles, Darrow spent a lifetime ridiculing traditional Christian beliefs. He called himself an agnostic, but in fact he was effectively an atheist. In this he imitated his intellectual mentor, the nineteenth-century American social critic Robert G. Ingersoll, who wrote, “The Agnostic does not simply say, ‘I do not know [if God exists].’ He goes another step, and he says, with great emphasis, that you do not know. … He is not satisfied with saying that you do not know -- he demonstrates that you do not know, and he drives you from the field of fact.”
Good intentions underlay Darrow’s efforts to undermine popular religious faith. He sincerely believed that the biblical concept of original sin for all and salvation for some through divine grace was, as he described it, “a very dangerous doctrine” -- “silly, impossible and wicked.” Darrow once told a group of convicts, “It is not the bad people I fear so much as the good people. When a person is sure that he is good, he is nearly hopeless; he gets cruel -- he believes in punishment.” During a public debate on religion, he added, “The origin of what we call civilization is not due to religion but to skepticism. … The modern world is the child of doubt and inquiry, as the ancient world was the child of fear and faith.”
A quick Google search turned up the fact that Darrow wrote several books -- from An Eye for an Eye in 1905, a fictional work that tells the story of Jim Jackson who struggles with poverty and harsh circumstances before murdering his wife in a fit of rage, to The Myth of the Soul in 1929, a short treatise on if the belief in immortality is necessary or even desirable. Definitely a collection worth getting.
Academic Freedom
The other item worth noting is this summarized history of the development of public institutions of higher learning in the United States, and more specifically their establishment of the practice of academic freedom.
Attempts to propagandize public education did not begin in the twenties. In fact, Massachusetts Puritans founded America’s first public schools during the colonial era partly to promote their distinctive religious and political system. The common-school movement spread during the nineteenth century (at least in part) as a means to indoctrinate into American ways the large number of non-English immigrants entering the United States. Most public school curricula traditionally included American civics, Bible reading, and daily prayers. “Schools were not established to teach and encourage a pupil to think,” Clarence Darrow wrote of his own nineteenth-century education. “From the first grade to the end of the college course [students] were taught not to think, and the instructor who dared to utter anything in conflict with ordinary beliefs and customs was promptly dismissed, if not destroyed.”
This approach to education led to a de facto establishment of Christianity within American public schools. About the time of the Scopes trial, for example, the Georgia Supreme Court dismissed a Jewish taxpayer’s complaint against Christian religious exercises in public schools with the observation, “The Jew may complain to the court as a taxpayer just exactly when and only when a Christian may complain to the court as a taxpayer, i.e., when the Legislature authorizes such reading to the Bible or such instruction in the Christian religion in the public schools as give one Christian sect a preference over others.” The Tennessee legislature codified a similar practice in 1915 when it mandated the daily reading of ten Bible verses in public schools but prohibited any comment on the readings. This suggestion that constitutional limits on the establishment of religion simply forbad the government from giving preference to any one church denomination reflected a traditional view of religious freedom that dated at least as far back as the great federalist U.S. Supreme Court justice Joseph Story. By the 1920s, however, an increasing number of liberally educated Americans, including leaders of the ACLU, rejected the idea that public education should promote any particular political, economic, or religious viewpoint -- even one broadly defined as democratic, capitalistic, or Christian.
The drive to free the American academy from outside political and religious influences began with higher education. Americans originally formed their colleges and universities on the English model, which did not incorporate modern concepts of tenure and academic freedom. At Oxford and Cambridge, for example, faculty members ultimately served under the authority of the Church of England and every college conducted daily Anglican chapel services for students. Similarly, in nineteenth-century America, professors at most public and private institutions of higher education served at the pleasure of the institution's president and trustees, many of whom were ordained ministers, and even Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia held student chapel services. This did not mean that conservative religious and political ideas held sway on all American campuses -- Harvard came under the influence of Unitarianism early in the century, while Oberlin later became famous for its radical egalitarianism and Bryn Mawr for its feminism -- but a party line tended to prevail within each institution. Late nineteenth-century populists, progressives, and radicals often accused college administrators of suppressing classroom teaching of alternative economic and political theories. A few highly publicized cases of alleged religious censorship also arose. Coincidentally, the most famous such case took place in Tennessee, where in 1878 the fledgling, southern Methodist-controlled Vanderbilt University terminated the part-time lecturing position of the famed geologist Alexander Winchell for suggesting that humans lived on earth before the biblical Adam. Winchell was an evolutionist, and his firing soon became a cause celebre in the perceived warfare between science and religion.
Like so much of American history -- when it comes to this “culture war” of what to teach and not teach in schools, it's the same as it ever was. But read on to see how academic freedom was established, in which institutions, and why.
The effort to maintain orthodoxy on American campuses encountered increasing resistance around the turn of the century. The historian George M. Marsden linked this development to the rise of pragmatism, flowing from the theories of the French philosopher Auguste Comte. “In Comte’s construction of history,” Marsden observed, “humans were rising from a religious stage in which questions were decided by authority, through a metaphysical stage in which philosophy ruled, to a positive stage in which empirical investigation would be accepted as the only reliable road to truth.” Empirical methods quickly came to dominate academic research in both the sciences and the humanities.
New principles of free academic inquiry and discussion logically followed from these new methods for acquiring knowledge. The Johns Hopkins University and the University of Chicago were founded during the late nineteenth century on the model of German universities, which incorporated basic concepts of professional tenure and academic freedom. Several existing institutions, including Harvard, Columbia, and Cornell, quickly adopted a similar model. By the 1896 edition of his A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, the former Cornell University president Andrew Dickson White could write of the Winchell affair that Vanderbilt had “violated the fundamental principles on which any institution worthy of the name [university] must be based.” About this time, the national professional associations for economists, political scientists, and sociologists formed standing committees to investigate individual cases of alleged assaults on academic freedom.
These developments took a decisive turn in 1913, when Lafayette College dismissed the philosophy professor John Mecklin for teaching that social evolution, rather than revealed truth, shaped the development of religious ideas. The American Philosophical Association and American Psychological Association appointed a special committee, chaired by the Hopkins philosophy professor Arthur O. Lovejoy, to investigate the dismissal. Lafayette College defended its action on the grounds that as a denominational institution it could enforce orthodoxy within its curriculum. The committee grudgingly accepted this position, but maintained that “American colleges and universities fall into two classes”: either they guaranteed academic freedom or they served as “institutions of denominational or political propaganda,” with Lafayette placing itself into the latter class. To give substance to this distinction and thereby promote the rights of faculty members in the former class of institutions, Lovejoy immediately set about forming the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).
With Lovejoy as its first secretary, the AAUP assumed the role of a national guild for university professors. Minutes of the association’s organizational meeting reported that members voted “to bring about a merging in a new committee of the committees already created by the economics, political science and sociology associations to deal with the subject of academic freedom.” Lovejoy served on this new committee on academic freedom, which presented its General Declaration of Principles at the AAUP’s first annual meeting in 1915. Endorsing the distinction emerging from the Lafayette College affair, this document recognized two types of institutions. “The simplest case is that of a proprietary school or college designed for the propagation of specific doctrines prescribed by those who have furnished its endowment,” the committee wrote. These institutions, which included many trade schools as well as such church colleges as Lafayette, need not offer academic freedom to their faculty. Institutions receiving support from the government or through appeals to the general public, however, fell into a different category. “Trustees of such institutions or colleges have no moral right to bind the reason or conscience of any professor,” the committee asserted, in defiance of traditional practices. To justify this new principle, the committee observed, “In the earlier stages of a nation’s intellectual development, the chief concern of educational institutions is to train the growing generation and to defuse the already accepted knowledge.” In twentieth-century America, however, “The modern university is becoming more and more the home for scientific research. There are three fields of human inquiry in which the race is only beginning: natural science, social science, and philosophy and religion.” In earlier times, the committee added, “the chief menace to academic freedom was ecclesiastical, and the disciplines chiefly affected were philosophy and the natural sciences. In more recent times the danger zone has been shifted to the political and social sciences -- though we still have sporadic examples of the former class of cases in some of our smaller institutions.”
It seems like a reasonable distinction to me -- absolute free inquiry in public, research-based institutions that seek to serve and determine the common good, and a more limited approach in private, training-based institutions that seek to define and develop a certain doctrine or discipline. Even there, defined zones of free inquiry could certainly help advance and improve the translation and application of the discipline, but questions about the doctrine’s fundamental purpose could reasonably be restricted. It’s an interesting framework within which to analyze many of the current controversies about public education and the institutions that support it.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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