In 1925, Lela V. Scopes, twenty-eight, was turned down for a job teaching mathematics at a high school in Paducah, Kentucky, her home town. She had taught in the Paducah schools before going to Lexington to finish college at the University of Kentucky. But that summer her younger brother, John T. Scopes, was set to be tried for the crime of teaching evolution in a high-school biology class in Dayton, Tennessee, in violation of state law, and Lela Scopes had refused to denounce either her kin or Charles Darwin. It didn’t matter that evolution doesn’t ordinarily come up in an algebra class. And it didn’t matter that Kentucky’s own anti-evolution law had been defeated. “Miss Scopes loses her post because she is in sympathy with her brother’s stand,” the Times reported.
In the nineteen-twenties, legislatures in twenty states, most of them in the South, considered thirty-seven anti-evolution measures. Kentucky’s bill, proposed in 1922, had been the first. It banned teaching, or countenancing the teaching of, “Darwinism, atheism, agnosticism, or the theory of evolution in so far as it pertains to the origin of man.”. . . Tennessee’s law, passed in 1925, made it a crime for teachers in publicly funded schools “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” Scopes challenged the law deliberately, as part of an effort by the A.C.L.U. to bring a test case to court.
A century later, the battle over public education that afflicted the nineteen-twenties has started up again, this time over the teaching of American history. Since 2020, with the murder of George Floyd and the advance of the Black Lives Matter movement, seventeen states have made efforts to expand the teaching of one sort of history, sometimes called anti-racist history, while thirty-six states have made efforts to restrict that very same kind of instruction.
Some ban the Times’ 1619 Project, or ethnic studies, or training in diversity, inclusion, and belonging, or the bugbear known as critical race theory. Most, like a bill recently introduced in West Virginia, prohibit “race or sex stereotyping,” “race or sex scapegoating,” and the teaching of “divisive concepts”
In Virginia, Governor Glenn Youngkin set up an e-mail tip line “for parents to send us any instances where they feel that their fundamental rights are being violated . . . or where there are inherently divisive practices in their schools.” There and elsewhere, parents are harassing school boards and reporting on teachers, at a time when teachers, who earn too little and are asked to do too much, are already exhausted by battles over remote instruction and mask and vaccine mandates and, not least, by witnessing, without being able to repair, the damage the pandemic has inflicted on their students.
Consider the dilemma of teachers in New Mexico. In January, the month before the state’s Public Education Department finalized a new social-studies curriculum that includes a unit on inequality and justice in which students are asked to “explore inequity throughout the history of the United States and its connection to conflict that arises today,” Republican lawmakers proposed a ban on teaching “the idea that social problems are created by racist or patriarchal societal structures and systems.” The law, if passed, would make the state’s own curriculum a crime.
In the nineteen-twenties, the curriculum in question was biology; in the twenty-twenties, it’s history. Both conflicts followed a global pandemic and fights over public education that pitted the rights of parents against the power of the state. It’s not clear who’ll win this time. It’s not even clear who won last time. But the distinction between these two moments is less than it seems: what was once contested as a matter of biology—can people change?—has come to be contested as a matter of history.
Still, this fight isn’t really about history. It’s about political power. Conservatives believe they can win midterm elections, and maybe even the Presidency, by whipping up a frenzy about “parents’ rights,” and many are also in it for another long game, a hundred years’ war: the campaign against public education.
Progressives fought for children’s welfare and children’s health, establishing children’s hospitals and, in 1912, the U.S. Children’s Bureau. Mandatory school attendance was closely tied to two other Progressive reforms that extended the state’s reach into the lives of parents and children: compulsory vaccination and the abolition of child labor.
Anti-evolution laws, usually understood as fundamentalism’s response to modernity, emerged from this conflict between parents and the state. So did the teaching of biology, a new subject that stood at the very center of Progressive-era public education. At the time, parents, not schools, paid for and provided schoolbooks, so they had a close acquaintance with what their kids were being taught. The textbook that John Scopes used in Tennessee was a 1914 edition of George William Hunter’s “A Civic Biology,” published by the American Book Company. More than a guide to life on earth, “Civic Biology” was a civics primer, a guide to living in a democracy.
“Civic Biology” promoted Progressive public-health campaigns, all the more urgent in the wake of the 1918 influenza pandemic, stressing the importance of hygiene, vaccination, and quarantine.
When anti-evolutionists condemned “evolution,” they meant something as vague and confused as what people mean, today, when they condemn “critical race theory.” Anti-evolutionists weren’t simply objecting to Darwin, whose theory of evolution had been taught for more than half a century. They were objecting to the whole Progressive package, including its philosophy of human betterment, its model of democratic citizenship, and its insistence on the interest of the state in free and equal public education as a public good that prevails over the private interests of parents.
Black intellectuals and Black reporters didn’t think the new law had anything to do with evolution; it had to do with an understanding of history. All Tennessee’s lawmakers know about evolution, the Chicago Defender suggested, “is that the entire human race is supposed to have started from a common origin. Therein lies their difficulty.” If they were to accept evolution, then they would have to admit that “there is no fundamental difference between themselves and the race they pretend to despise.”
During the trial, H. L. Mencken ridiculed Bryan (a “mountebank”) and fundamentalists (“poor half wits”): “He has these hillbillies locked up in his pen and he knows it.” But W. E. B. Du Bois found very little to laugh about. “Americans are now endeavoring to persuade hilarious and sarcastic Europe that Dayton, Tennessee, is a huge joke, and very, very exceptional,” he wrote. “The truth is and we know it: Dayton, Tennessee, is America: a great, ignorant, simple-minded land.”
Scopes, in the end, was found guilty (a verdict that was later reversed on a technicality), but Tennessee had been humiliated in the national press. . . . But the battle was far from over. “The Fundamentalists have merely changed their tactics,” one commentator observed in 1930. They had given up on passing laws. “Primarily, they are concentrating today on the emasculation of textbooks, the ‘purging’ of libraries, and above all the continued hounding of teachers.” That went on for a long time. It’s still going on.
By the end of the nineteen-fifties, segregationists had begun using a new catchphrase: “school choice,” maybe because it would have been confusing to call for “parents’ rights” when they were also arguing for “states’ rights.” In Mississippi, opponents of segregation founded Freedom of Choice in the United States, or FOCUS. Advocates for “choice” sought government reimbursement for private-school tuition costs, in the name of allowing the free market to drive educational innovation. The free market, unsurprisingly, widened the very inequalities that public education aims to narrow.
A century ago, parents who objected to evolution were rejecting the entire Progressive package. Today’s parents’-rights groups, like Moms for Liberty, are objecting to a twenty-first-century Progressive package. They’re balking at compulsory vaccination and masking, and some of them do seem to want to destroy public education. They’re also annoyed at the vein of high-handedness, moral crusading, and snobbery that stretches from old-fashioned Progressivism to the modern kind, laced with the same contempt for the rural poor and the devoutly religious.
But across the past century, behind parents’ rights, lies another unbroken strain: some Americans’ fierce resistance to the truth that, just as all human beings share common ancestors biologically, all Americans have common ancestors historically.
In the end, no matter what advocates of parents’ rights say, and however much political power they might gain, public schools don’t have a choice; they’ve got to teach, as American history, the history not only of the enslaved Africans who arrived in Virginia in 1619 and the English families who sailed to Plymouth on the Mayflower in 1620, but also that of the Algonquian peoples, who were already present in both places, alongside the ongoing stories of all other Indigenous peoples, and those who came afterward—the Dutch, German, Spanish, Mexican, Chinese, Italian, Cambodian, Guatemalan, Japanese, Sikh, Hmong, Tunisian, Afghan, everyone. That’s why parents don’t have a right to choose the version of American history they like best, a story of only their own family’s origins. Instead, the state has an obligation to welcome children into that entire history, their entire inheritance.
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