The surrealists played with images – and the verb is pertinent; they were seriously suggesting that man could play himself out of trouble, for in play the unconscious was released. By the same token they brought eroticism to the surface, because repression of sexuality cut off man from his true nature. But above all, taking their lead from dreams and the unconscious, their work showed a deliberate rejection of reason. Their art sought to show that progress, if it were possible, was never a straight line, that nothing was predictable, and that the alternative to the banalities of the acquisitive society, now that religion was failing, was a new form of enchantment.
Ironically, the wasteland was a very fertile metaphor. What underlines all the works considered here is a sense of disenchantment with the world and with the joint forces of capitalism and science, which created the wasteland. These targets were well chosen. Capitalism and science were to prove the century’s most enduring modes of thought and behaviour. And by no means everyone would find them disenchanting.
* In fact, Ulysses is more deeply mythical than many readers realise, various parts being based on different areas of the body (the kidneys, the flesh); this was spelled out in James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in collaboration with Stuart Gilbert in 1930. It is not necessary to know this for a rich and rewarding experience in reading the book.36
12
BABBITT’S MIDDLETOWN
In the 1920s the eugenicists and scientific racists were especially persistent in America. One of their main texts was a book by C.C. Brigham called A Study of American Intelligence, which was published in 1923. Brigham, an assistant professor of psychology at Princeton University, was a disciple of Robert Yerkes, and in his book he relied on the material Yerkes had obtained during the war (Yerkes wrote the foreword for Brigham’s book). Despite evidence that the longer immigrants were in the United States, the better they performed on IQ tests, Brigham’s aim was to show that the southern and eastern peoples of Europe, and Negroes, were of inferior intelligence. In making his arguments he relied on the much earlier notions of such figures as Count Georges Vacher de Lapouge, who thought that Europe was divided into three racial types, according to the shape of their skulls. Given this, Brigham’s conclusions were not surprising: ‘The decline in intelligence [in America] is due to two factors, the change in the races migrating to this country, and to the additional factor of the sending of lower and lower representatives of each race…. Running parallel with the movements of these European peoples, we have the most sinister development in the history of this continent, the importation of the negro…. The decline of American intelligence will be more rapid than the decline of the intelligence of European national groups, owing to the presence here of the negro.’1
In such a context, the idea for a return to segregation was never far below the surface. Cornelia Cannon, noting that 89 percent of blacks had tested as ‘morons,’ wrote in the American periodical Atlantic Monthly, ‘Emphasis must necessarily be laid on the development of the primary schools, on the training in activities, habits, occupations which do not demand the more evolved faculties. In the South particularly … the education of the whites and colored in separate schools may have justification other than that created by race prejudice.’2 Henry Fairfield Osborn, a trustee of Columbia University and president of the American Museum of Natural History, believed ‘those tests were worth what the war cost, even in human life, if they served to show clearly to our people the lack of intelligence in our country, and the degrees of intelligence in different races who are coming to us, in a way which no one can say is the result of prejudice…. We have learned once and for all that the negro is not like us.’3
The battles over biology did not stop with the victory the eugenicists achieved in getting the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act passed. The following year biology was back in the public eye in the notorious Scopes trial. As early as 1910 the Presbyterian General Assembly had drawn up a list of the ‘Five Fundamentals’ which they believed to be the basis of Christianity. These were: the miracles of Christ; the Virgin birth; the Resurrection; the Crucifixion, understood as atonement for mankind’s sins; and the Bible as the directly inspired word of God. It was the latter that was the focus of the Scopes trial. The facts of the case were not in dispute.4 John Scopes, of Dayton, Tennessee, had taught a biology class using as a textbook Civic Biology by George William Hunter, which had been adopted as a standard text by the State Textbook Commission in 1919. (It had actually been used in some schools since 1909, so it was in circulation for fifteen years before it was considered dangerous.)5 The part of Hunter’s book which Scopes had used reported evolution as a fact. This, the prosecution argued, was contrary to Tennessee law. Evolution was a theory that contradicted the Bible, and it should not be asserted as bald fact. The trial turned into a circus. The prosecution was led by William Jennings Bryan, three times a presidential nominee, a former secretary of state, and a man who told Seventh Day Adventists before the trial that it would determine whether evolution or Christianity survived. He also said, ‘All the ills from which America suffers can be traced back to the teachings of evolution. It would be better to destroy every book ever written, and save just the first three verses of Genesis.’6 The defence was led by a no less colourful person, Clarence Darrow, a skilled orator and a fabled criminal lawyer. While Bryan was determined to make the trial a contest of Darwin versus the Bible, Darrow’s technique was to tie his adversary in knots, aided by eminent scientists and theologians who had arrived in Dayton determined to see that Bryan did not have his fundamentalist way. At one point, when Bryan insisted on testifying as an expert in biblical science, he proved unwilling or unable to answer questions about the age of the earth or of well-known archaeological sites. He defended himself by saying, ‘I do not think about things I do not think about.’ Darrow replied drily, ‘Do you think about things you do think about?’ In fact, Bryan won the case, but on a technicality. The judge kept the focus of the trial not on whether Darwin was right or wrong but on whether or not Scopes had taught evolution. And since Scopes admitted what he had done, the result was a foregone conclusion. He was given a fine of $100, which was then successfully appealed because the judge rather than the jury had set the fine. But that technicality apart, Bryan lost heavily. He was humiliated and mocked in the press, not just in America but around the world. He died five days after the trial ended.7
religion, however, explained only part of the reaction to the Scopes trial. In his Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter argues that particularly in the American South and Midwest, people used the Christianity/evolution struggle as a cipher for revolting against modernity. The rigid defence of Prohibition, then in force, was another side to this. Hofstadter quotes with some sympathy Hiram W. Evans, the imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who, he says, summed up the major issue of the time ‘as a struggle between “the great mass of Americans of the old pioneer stock” and the “intellectually mongrelised Liberals.”’ ‘We are a movement,’ Evans wrote, ‘of the plain people, very weak in the matter of culture, intellectual support, and trained leadership. We are demanding, and we expect to win, a return of power into the hands of the everyday, not highly cultured, not overly intellectualised, but entirely unspoiled and not de-Americanised, average citizen of the old stock…. This is undoubtedly a weakness. It lays us open to the charge of being “hicks” and “rubes” and “drivers of second-hand Fords.” We admit it.’8 The words of the Klan wizard highlight the atmosphere in America at the time, so different from that in Europe, where in London and Paris modernism was flourishing.