The attack on teachers, schools, and school boards was ferocious: the movement to ban evolution from public schools seemed, for a few years, to be an unstoppable political juggernaut. School-board elections became furious affairs, pitting neighbors against one another with accusations of treason and atheism. The article draws a parallel to the furor over "critical race theory" and book banning today. Just as conservative legislatures today are passing bills to try to ban the ideas they don't like, so did conservative legislatures a century ago, like the conservative effort to ban the teaching of evolution. They raised a furor about "subversion" in the schools, claiming that teaching evolution subverted religious faith, which was intolerable. Teaching children that man was descended from other animals frightened conservative clerics and gave them an issue with which to alarm the rubes."
At www.theatlantic.com
