Centennials: The Transcontinental Railway and the Monday Evening Club

The ceremony for the driving of the golden spike at Promontory Summit, Utah on May 10, 1869; completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad. At center left, Samuel S. Montague, Central Pacific Railroad, shakes hands with Grenville M. Dodge, Union Pacific Railroad (center right). Photo by Andrew J. Russell.

Delivered to the Club in November, 1969 by Roger Linscott, at the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Club

The year 1869 was notable for at least two historic evens — the driving of a golden spike at Promontory Point, Utah, to complete the first transcontinental railway system across the United States, and the establishment, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, of the Monday Evening Club. Contemplating these two great happenings — the one so freighted with significance for the development of the American West, the other so freighted with significance for, if not the nation, at least that small part of it which gathered here tonight — it occurred to me the other day how delightful it would be if one could find some common link to bind them together and thus fashion the basis for a centennial paper to fit the title which Joe Nugent [Club secretary] had fed to his hungry printing press a week earlier. A common bond between Promontory Point and Pittsfield seemed highly unlikely; but in desperation one tries anything, so off I went to the Lenox Library Saturday to find out what its archives might be able to provide.

The quest — to my happy surprise — proved fruitful. It developed that a leading, if somewhat accidental, figure in the dramatic ceremonies that marked the meeting of East and West at Promontory Point on May 10, 1869, was the Reverend Dr. John Todd, pastor of the First Congregational Church of Pittsfield. And Dr. Todd, I discovered from a parenthetical sentence in a letter which he wrote to a friend shortly after his return from that historic occasion, was a charter member of the Monday Evening Club.

But more about Dr. Todd later. First let us look at the background of the events that earned Dr. Todd of the Monday Evening Club his footnote in history. For they were dramatic events, and historically momentous ones. Indeed, May 10, 1869, is a commonly described by historians as the most significant single date in the record of the American West.

In 1860, the vast region between the Mississippi Valley and California — a region comprising almost half the total area of the United States — was, for the most part, a howling wilderness, occupied mainly by some 300,000 untamed Indians and of millions of buffalo. Thirty years later all this was changed. The Indians had been systematically decimated and subjugated; the enormous buffalo herds had been wiped out; the frontier was gone, and a solid band of rapidly growing states stretched across the continent. It was the transcontinental railroad system, more than any other development, which brought this astonishing transformation about.

Ever since the 1830s, men had dreamed of constructing a railroad that would span the continent. Two visionaries in particular — Asa Whitney, the New York merchant, in the 1840s, and Josiah Perham, a rich Bostonian in the 1850s — exhausted their fortunes in efforts to secure federal legislation and financial backing for the scheme. What blocked every attempt during this period was North-South rivalry. The Southerners wanted a route that would start west from New Orleans or Memphis, linking California to slave states. The Northerners wanted a route to start west from St. Louis or Chicago. It was the Civil War that finally gave Washington the opportunity to end the argument, and a convincing excuse for financing so daring an undertaking. The secession of the South eliminated from Congress the legislators who had held out for a Southern route at the same time that it made imperative the establishment of a communication link that would keep California loyal to the Union. In 1862, Congress passed and President Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Bill, incorporating two railroads — the Union Pacific, which was to build west from Council Bluffs, Iowa, and the Central Pacific, which was to build east from California until the two should meet. More to the point, Congress gave the two companies a right of way across the public domain, all the timber, stone and earth needed for the undertaking, twenty sections of land with every mile of road constructed — that came to a total of 24 million acres — and, in addition, a credit ranging from sixteen to 48 thousand dollars per mile, depending upon the nature of the terrain. And the bonds were to be guaranteed by the federal government.

Enticed by these liberal terms, the promoters who undertook the actual building of the Union Pacific were not idealistic visionaries like Whitney and Perham. Rather, they were hard-headed promoters interested in profits and unhandicapped by patriotism. Chief among them were two men, both figures of great force but somewhat easy virtue. One was Oakes Ames, a wealthy Massachusetts congressman and a manufacturer of shovels (it was commonly said that an Ames shovel “was legal tender in every part of the Mississippi Valley.”) The other was Thomas Durant, and up-and-coming New York financier. (And here, incidentally, we run into another Berkshire angle; for Durant was born and brought up in Lee, Massachusetts, where the Durant family still thrives today.) In any event, it was Durant’s ingenious idea to purchase a controlling interest in a Pennsylvania corporation known as Credit Mobilier of America, a title borrowed from a banking institution in France. The stock of his Credit Mobilier was split up between the directors of the Union Pacific, which Durant served as vice-president, and Credit Mobilier was then made the construction agent for the railroad. In other words, the directors of the Union Pacific proceeded to contract with themselves to build the railroad, and at a price calculated to exhaust the Union Pacific’s resources. Altogether, the cash or equivalent amounted to $75 million. With this setup, there was no urge whatsoever for economy in the construction of the Union Pacific. From the day it was born, the double-jointed money-making machine worked perfectly. As the tracks of the Union Pacific pushed onward across the Great Plains, the Credit Mobilier collected the enormous bounty granted to the line from the public purse and domain. Mile upon mile, the railroad was systematically stripped of its cash, which reappeared almost simultaneously as dividends for the happy stockholders of Credit Mobilier. It was, as Congressman Oakes told his colleagues in the House, “a diamond mine.” To stave off investigation — which finally took place some years later after the damage had been done — the officers of Credit Mobilier distributed free stock to key senators and congressmen and even to Schuyler Colfax, then vice president of the United States.

That was the story on the Eastern end of the deal. In California, the men who organized and ran the Central Pacific followed a course that was equally larcenous but a bit more discreet. By acquiring a controlling interest in the Central Pacific before its huge potential was fully comprehended by bigger financiers, four Sacramento merchants of no great means — Collins Huntington, Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford and Mark Hopkins (not to be confused with the William College president of the same name) got in on the ground floor. They proved to be a remarkably shrewd and effective team; so much so that they all came out of it millionaires many times over. One reason was that they set up their own version of Credit Mobilier — an outfit called the Contract & Finance Company — and made a contract with themselves to build the Central Pacific Railroad. A congressional committee subsequently estimated that the construction company was paid $121 million for $58 million worth of work; but this is uncertain because the Central Pacific’s books happily disappeared in a fire of mysterious origin just as the investigation was getting underway. At any rate, Stanford put aside enough so that, among other benefactions, he was able to give $30 million for the establishment of the university that now bears his name. Huntington left an estate of $75 millions. And Hopkins, though he died relatively young before the Central Pacific had come to full flower, was able to leave his widow well enough fixed to supplement her Nob Hill mansion with a $2 million summer home in the center of Great Barrington — so called Searles Mansion on Main Street which is now owned by the Home Insurance Company of New York. [Since the mid-1980s it has housed the John Dewey Academy.]

Because of the opportunity to make such vast fortunes from construction before any track was open to the public, the promoters on both sides of the transcontinental railroad pushed the work at a furious pace, each seeking to lay as many miles of track as possible before the two lines met. A herculean task confronted them. Some 1700 miles of track had to be laid through a wilderness of prairie, mountain and desert inhabited only by hostile Indians. On the Union Pacific side, the actual construction was directed by General Grenville Dodge, one of the greatest engineers of his day, with a labor force made up of Irish workers and veterans from the Union and Confederate armies who were quick to exchange picks for rifles when Indians appeared. There was no real base of supplies. All material had to be brought up the Missouri River, which was open for navigation only a few months in the year, or hauled in wagons across the plains. Even the railroad ties had to be brought from great distances, as the only timber available along most of the right of way was cottonwood, which was unsuitable for this purpose. For Durant, who was given virtually dictatorial powers by the Union Pacific Board of Directors, speed became an obsession. He spent most of his time on the line and said that sometime he did not remove his clothes for a week. At times, in its haste, the railroad borrowed money in the East at rates as high as 18 or 19 per cent. And in pushing the line far beyond the bounds of civilization without waiting for at the slower pace of the settler and the security which his protection afforded, it often became necessary for half the total number of workmen to stand guard and thus reduce the working capacity of the construction force — notwithstanding which, hundreds were killed by Indians.

On the western side, the engineering faced problems by the Central Pacific were even more formidable. There were no roads over the Sierras, so thousands of tons of equipment, including massive locomotives, were hauled in giant sleds over the snowdrifts. Food, powder, supplies of all kinds, followed the same perilous route. Roadways had to be blasted out of cliffs and bridges thrown over gorges; in the space of 60 miles, fifteen tunnels were bored through the mountains. When snow threatened to halt all construction, the ingenious engineers built 37 miles of snow sheds, and under these the work went on.

The cost of material and transportation was appalling. Congress had specified that the track must be laid with American-made rails. This forced the builders to place their orders in northern factories which, during the early years of construction, were swamped with requisitions for war material, and to ship the finished products in vessels which were compelled to run a rigid blockade maintained by Confederate cruisers. Eight to ten months were required for these runs to San Francisco Bay via Cape Horn, and at one time the Central Pacific had 50 ships chartered just for this purpose. Freight charges and marine insurance rates rose to fantastic figures. But Huntington, operating out of New York as the Central Pacific’s procurement agent, kept the supplies moving at top speed to his partners in California, despite every effort by telegraph, steamship, stage and express companies to obstruct the building of the road.

Initially, labor was the biggest problem of all, since few workmen felt disposed to shovel dirt for the Central Pacific when gold could be had for far less tedious digging along the streams of California. In desperation, Charles Crocker, the partner in charge of construction, suggested Chinese labor, only to be told that building a railroad was a he-man’s job, not a task for light-weight rice-eaters. “Well,” said Crocker, “those same rice-eaters built the Great Wall of China. I guess they can dig grades for an American railroad.”

His guess was accurate. An initial crew of 50 Chinese recruited in Sand Francisco performed so well that 2,000 more were enlisted in short order; and when the possibilities of San Francisco’s Chinatown were exhausted, Crocker began importing from across the Pacific until he had an army of 10,000 Orientals at work.

On both the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, at each stage of the progress, a movable town was erected, pleasantly dubbed by the workmen “Hell on Wheels,” where an army of cooks, sutlers, harpies and gamblers assembled to serve, entertain and fleece the brawny sons of toil. Typical of these instant communities was Benton, Nebraska, which sprang into being 700 miles west of Omaha when the Union Pacific reached that point in August of 1868. A new city of tents blossomed almost overnight into a metropolis of vice. A daily newspaper, five dance halls, and 23 saloons began going at top speed. The heart of the city was “The Big Tent,” a canvas-covered emporium that specialized in liquor and games of chance. Brass bands, operating on day and night shifts, lured cash customers to faro, roulette, poker and monte tables that were available at all hours and at any stakes. A garish mahogany and plate-glass bar, 100 feet long and specially imported from St. Louis, occupied the position of honor across the middle of the tent; and since the street in front was merely a bed of alkali dust a foot deep, the half-strangled customers who fought their way through the white clouds into this delectable oasis proved highly profitable customers. The local aristocracy ranged from bordello proprietors and frock-coated professional gamblers to the Union Pacific laborers who shoveled shallow graves for the victims of the strenuous night life. Benton was, to put it mildly, a lively city; yet its uproar ceased as dramatically as it began. When the Union Pacific reached Wasatch, several hundred miles to the west, and set up a new advance base there, the city called Benton died in a night. Special trains conveyed the surviving citizens to the new instant city, and thick layers of alkali dust blotted out the underground homes of the more peaceful dead they left behind.

The last lap of the race between the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, staged in the second half of 1868 and the early months of 1869, became an American saga. Daily newspapers carried the score as a front-page feature, telling eastern readers in daily telegraphed reports how many miles of track the Union Pacific had laid in the previous 24 hours. From one to two miles was the average in 1868, but with the end in sight, new records were set. The Union Pacific’s Irishmen performed what seemed an impossible feat by laying six miles of rails in one early spring day of 1869. The Central Pacific’s Chinese saw this achievement and raised it a mile; whereupon the Union Pacific three days later laid seven and one-half miles. At that point, Crocker of Central Pacific came back with the statement that he could lay ten miles of rails in a single working day, and Durant of Union Pacific wagered $10,000 that he could not. The wager was covered, and the appointed day, April 29, Crocker’s Chinese army, trained to the precision of machines by long experience, tackled the job at the stroke of 7 a.m. By 7 p.m., they were 56 feet over the ten-mile requisite, having moved more than four and one-third million pounds of material in less than eleven hours. They had placed 25,800 ties in position and strung 3,520 rails weighing nearly 600 pounds each — not to mention handling more than 7,000 plates, 14,000 bolts and 55,000 spikes, Durant paid his bet, and the feat still stands as a world’s record. [Actually, the record was broken the following year during the construction of the Kansas Pacific Railroad.]

A few days later, the Chinese and Irish vanguards had their historic meeting at Promontory Point. Workmen from both camps laid ties and rails in the open space between the ends of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific lines. They stopped a rail’s length apart, and in the intervening space three more ties were laid: one of polished California laurel, one of silver from Nevada’s fabulous Comstock lode, and one of iron, silver and gold, from Arizona. Two locomotives were brought head to head. An assemblage of dignitaries, who had hurried to the scene from East and West, took their places amid a huge throng of workmen to witness the driving of the last spike — a spike of pure gold contributed by California.

And now the Rev. Dr. Todd of Pittsfield’s First Congregational Church re-enters our story. He was there at Promontory Point that day, rather by chance than by design. An exceptionally able and popular pastor, Dr. Todd had served the First Church well for many years — he was then 68 — and an appreciative congregation had raised the money to present him with a trip to California. Chance placed the minister and his party on the train which eventually became the first to cross the continent; and when the railroad officials learned that there was a clergyman aboard they persuaded him, with little difficulty, to contribute a note of piety to the rather raucous celebration by offering the invocation.

Detail of a larger photo taken during the invocation by Dr. Todd (with full white beard in center of photo). Standing next to him, with the full white sideburns, is Thaddeus Clapp of Pittsfield, who was traveling with Todd on a trip to California. Clapp was also a member of the Monday Evening Club.

There was more than a little irony in this, because Dr. Todd was noted as one of New England’s more impassioned temperance advocates, and the audience he addressed that day was composed largely or brawling construction workers who were notoriously bibulous even by the sodden standards of the Old West. “Later-day representations of the ceremonies at Promontory Point,” writes Lucius Beebe “have come to invest it in motion pictures, pageants and idealized art with a quasi-religious respectability and stateliness of preposterous proportions. Historians of the Cambric-tea school are pleased to depict the completion of the railroad as a symbolic meeting of the East and West in the cause of progress and good works. But the record, both from the photographic evidence and the accounts of what few coherent witnesses were present attest that Promontory Point was a thunderous drunk whose convulsions included almost everyone present and lasted several days. The classic photograph made on a wet place by Colonel Charles R. Savage of Salt Lake City, official photographer of the railroads, does not so much depict the pilots touch head to head as it does what appears to be two section hands in amiable dispute over an outsize bottle. In idealized recreations of the scene, the flagon of red-eye is now and then amazingly changed to a small American flag. When it came time for vice president Durant of the Union Pacific to smite the ceremonial golden spike, such was his state of exhilaration that the ceremonial sledge hammer failed to connect and the job finally had to be accomplished by a less august mechanic. Other photographs show a grateful multiplicity of bottles in evidence, and newspaper correspondents to a man were enthusiastic over the inexhaustible sideboard resources of Central Pacific president Stanford’s private car.

Drunk or sober, however, it was a great event, and recognized as such by a proud nation. When the golden spike was finally driven, the simple word “Done” flashed out over the telegraph instruments at the scene, starting a nation-wide celebration. President Grant received the message in the White House. Chicago staged a parade four miles long. The Old Liberty Bell rang out in Philadelphia. The “Te Deum” was sung in New York’s Trinity Church. San Francisco could not wait for the actual ceremony, but organized 48 hours prematurely a colorful three-day celebration during which every business house in town locked its doors and the saloons on Kearny Street never closed. The awe at the completion of such a fabulous engineering feat proved infectious even overseas. “When I think,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, “how the railroad has been pushed through this unwatered wilderness and haunt of savage tribes…how at each stage of construction, roaring, impromptu cities full of gold and lust and death, sprang up and then died away again; how in these uncouth places pigtailed Chinese pirates worked side by side with border ruffians and broken men from Europe, talking together in mixed dialect, mostly oaths, gambling, drinking, quarreling, and murdering like wolves…and then when I go on to remember that all this epical turmoil was conducted by gentlemen in frock coats and with a view to nothing more extraordinary than a fortune and a subsequent visit to Paris, it seems to me as if this railway were the one typical achievement of the age in which we live…If it be romance, if it be contrast, if it be heroism that we required, what was Troy town to this?”

Now back once more to the Rev. Dr. Todd, to return our story to its starting place. Whether or not his rather puritanical nature was scandalized by the revelry at Promontory Point, we don’t actually know; but we can infer it from the fact that while he lectured and wrote about his experience in California after his return to Pittsfield in the summer of 1869, he seems to have made no mention whatever of his role in celebrating the marriage of East and West. No reference to it can be found in the volume of his letter which was edited by his son and published some years after his death in 1873.

In that volume, however, I find a letter to a fellow clergyman, dated November 29, 1869, which comments on the new chapel at the First Church and then goes on to say: “We have a literary club here, limited to twenty-five, all graduates but one or two. We meet every Monday night; hence its name — the Monday Night Club. It meets at the members houses in turn, with an oyster and coffee entertainment at half-past nine. It does well — that is, the eating does.”

A rather cryptic remark, that last one; but let it pass. No doubt we can feel a bit flattered that his membership in this club seemed to him worthier of mention than his participation in what others might think an even more memorable event of one hundred years ago.

 

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Darwin's theory: Hard to swallow, then and now

Presented to the Club by Roger Linscott, about 1981

A century and a half ago, in the year 1831, a young divinity student of 22 set sail from England on a voyage to South America. Twenty-eight years later, after prolonged study and soul-searching, he wrote a book based upon his observations there. The world – certainly the world of science – has never been the same since.

The young man, of course, was Charles Darwin, and the book was The Origin of the Species. When he embarked on his historic voyage, he had already abandoned a proposed career in medicine, after fleeing in horror from a surgical theater in which an operation was being performed on an unanesthetized child, and was a rather reluctant candidate for the clergy, a career deemed suitable for the younger son of an English gentleman. An indifferent student, Darwin was an ardent hunter and horseman, a collector of beetles, mollusks and shells, and an amateur botanist and geologist. When the captain of the surveying ship H.M.S. Beagle, himself only three years older than Darwin, offered passage to any young man who would volunteer to go without pay as a naturalist, Darwin eagerly seized the opportunity to escape from Cambridge. Five years later, he returned to an inherited fortune, an estate in the English countryside, and a lifetime of independent study that radically changed mankind’s view of life and of our place in the living world.

To understand the extraordinary genius of Darwin’s theory of evolution, it is useful to look briefly at the intellectual climate in which it was formulated. Aristotle, the world’s first great biologist, believed that all living things could be arranged in a hierarchy – a ladder of nature in which the simplest creatures had a humble position on the bottommost rung, mankind occupied the top, and all other organisms had their proper places in between. Until the end of the century, most biologists believed in such a natural hierarchy; but whereas Aristotle thought that living organisms had always existed, the later biologists believed, in harmony with the teachings of the Old Testament, that all living things were the product of a divine creation. They believed, moreover, that most were created for the service or pleasure of mankind. Indeed, it was pointed out, even the lengths of day and night were planned to coincide with the human need for sleep.

That each type of living thing came into existence in its present form — specially and specifically created – was a compelling idea. How else could one explain the astonishing extent to which every organism was adapted to its environment and to its role in nature? It was not only the authority of the church but also, so it seemed, the evidence before one’s own eyes, that gave such strength to the concept of special creation.

Actually, it was geologists, more than biologists, who paved the way for overturning this concept. During the latter part of the 18th century, there was a revival of interest in fossils, which previously had been collected only as curiosities, regarded as stones that somehow looked like shells. The English surveyor William Smith, born 50 years before Darwin, was among the first to study the distribution of fossils scientifically. Whenever his work took him down into a mine or along canals, he carefully noted the order of the different layers of rock and collected the fossils from each layer. He eventually established that each stratum, no matter where he came across it in England, contained characteristic kinds of fossils.

Smith did not interpret his findings, but the implication that the present surface of the earth had been formed layer by layer over a very long period of time was unavoidable. This was a brand-new idea. Christian theologians, by counting the successive generations since Adam (as recorded in the Bible) had calculated the maximum age of the earth at about 6,000 years, and no one had ever thought in terms of a longer period. Yet the world described by William Smith was clearly a very ancient one. A revolution in geology was beginning; earth science was becoming the study of time and change, rather than a mere cataloging of types of rocks. As a consequence, the history of the earth became inseparable from the history of living organisms, as revealed in the fossil record.

Although the way to evolutionary theory was being prepared by the revolution in geology, the time was not yet ripe for a parallel revolution in biology. The dominating force in European science in the early 19th century was Baron George Cuvier, a French aristocrat who was the founder of vertebrate paleontology, or the scientific study of the fossil record. An expert in anatomy and zoology, he applied his special knowledge of the way in which animals are constructed to the study of fossil animals, and was able to make brilliant deductions about the form of an entire animal from a few fragments of bone. We think of paleontology and evolution as so closely connected that it is surprising to learn that Cuvier was a staunch and powerful opponent of evolutionary theories. He recognized the fact that many species that once existed no longer did – but he explained their extinction by postulating a series of catastrophes. After each catastrophe, the most recent of which he declared to be Noah’s Flood, new species filled the vacancies. Louis Agassiz, the great Harvard scholar and America’s leading 19th century biologist, was a similarly devout opponent of evolution. He contended that the fossil record revealed 50 to 80 total extinctions of life and an equal number of separate creations.

But the person who most directly influenced Darwin was Charles Lyell, a geologist who was twelve years his senior and whose books Darwin took with him on the Beagle. On the basis of his own observations, Lyell opposed the theory of catastrophes as an explanation for the creation of new species. He believed that the slow, steady and cumulative effect of natural forces had produced continuous change in the course of the earth’s history; and since this process is demonstrably slow, its results being barely visible in a single lifetime, it must have been going on for a very long time. Lyell was not an evolutionist. But what Darwin’s theory needed was the concept of vast amount of time – and it was time that Lyell gave him. The discovery that the earth was very ancient was the snowball that started the whole avalanche.

This, then, was the intellectual climate in which Charles Darwin set sail from England in 1831. As the Beagle moved down the Atlantic coast of South America, through the Straits of Magellan and up the Pacific coast, Darwin traveled the interior. He explored the rich fossil beds of South America, with the theories of Lyell fresh in his mind, and collected specimens of the many new kinds of plant and animal life he encountered. He was impressed most strongly by the constantly changing varieties of organisms he saw. The birds and animals on the west coast were very different from those on the east coast, and even as he moved slowly up the west coast, one species would give way to another.

Most interesting of all to Darwin were the animals and plants that inhabited the small, barren group of islands known as the Galapagos, off the coast of Ecuador. The islands had been named by the Spanish after their most striking inhabitants, the giant tortoises, some of which weight 220 pounds or more. Each of the islands has its own type of tortoise, and sailors who took these tortoises on board and kept them as a convenient source of fresh meat on their sea voyages could readily tell which island any particular tortoise had come from. Then there were groups of finchlike birds, thirteen species in all, that differed from one another in the sizes and shapes of their bodies and beaks, and particularly in the type of food they ate. In fact, though clearly finches, they had many features seen in completely different types of birds on the mainland.

From his knowledge of geology, Darwin knew that these islands, clearly of volcanic origin, were much younger than the mainland. Yet the plants and animals of the islands were different from those of the mainland, and in fact, the plants and animals of different islands of the archipelago differed from one another. Were the living things on each island the product of a separate special creation, Darwin wondered – or was it possible that from an original paucity of birds in the archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends? This problem “continued to haunt him.”

Darwin was a voracious reader. Not long after his return to England, he came across a short but much talked-about sociological treatise by the Reverend Thomas Malthus, which first appeared in 1798. In this book, Malthus warned, as economists have warned frequently since, that the human population was increasing so rapidly that it would soon be impossible to feed all the earth’s inhabitants. Darwin saw that Malthus’s conclusion – that food supply and other factors hold populations in check – is true for all species, not just the human species. For example, Darwin calculated that a single breeding pair of elephants – which are among the slowest breeders of all animals – would, if all their progeny lived and reproduced the normal number of offspring over a normal life pan, produce a standing population of 19 million elephants in 750 years. Yet the average number of elephants remained the same over the years. So, although this single breeding pair could have, in time, produced 19 million elephants, it did, in fact, produce only two. But why these particular two? The process by which the two survivors are, so to speak, “chosen,” Darwin called natural selection.

Natural selection, according to Darwin, was a process analogous to the type of selection exercised by breeders of horses, cattle or dogs. In the case of artificial selection, we humans chose individual specimens of plants of animals for breeding on the basis of characteristics that seem to us desirable. In the case of natural selection, the environment takes the place of human choice. As individuals with certain hereditary characteristics survive and reproduce, and individuals with other hereditary characteristics are eliminated, the population will slowly change. If some horses were faster than others, for example, those would be more likely to survive, and their progeny, in turn, might be faster, and so on.

According to Darwin’s theory, these variations among individuals of a species, which occur in every natural population, are wholly a matter of chance. They are not produced by the environment, not by a creative force, not by the unconscious striving of the organism. In themselves, they have no goal or direction, It is the operation of natural selection over a series of generations that gives direction to evolution. A variation that gives an animal a slight advantage makes that animal more likely to leave surviving offspring. Thus, a giraffe, say, with a slightly longer neck has an advantage in feeding, and so is likely to leave more offspring than a giraffe with a shorter neck. If the longer neck is an inherited trait, some of these offspring will also have long necks, and if the long-necked animals in this generation have an advantage, the next generation will include more long-necked animals – and so on, until, finally the population of short-necked giraffes will have become a population of longer-necked ones, thought there will still be variations.

The extraordinary thing about Darwin’s formulation was not so much his espousal of evolution — which was an idea that had at least crossed other scientific minds before his – but rather, the crucial role he gave to chance variation as the great triggering mechanism of the evolutionary process – the thread that links together all the diverse phenomena of the living world. Species arise, he said, when differences between individuals within a group are gradually converted into differences between groups as the groups become separated in space and time.

It was a truly revolutionary concert that, in one fell swoop, brought biology out of the Middle Ages – out of the realm of theology and into the realm of science.

It also profoundly influenced our way of thinking about ourselves. With the possible exception of the storm that raged about Copernicus and Galileo, no revolution of scientific thought has had as much effect on human thought as this one. The major reason is, of course, that evolution is in flat contradiction to the lateral, fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. The new astronomy had made it clear that the earth is not the center of the universe or even our own solar system. With Darwin, the new biology required acceptance of the proposition that, like all other organisms, we too are not created for any special purpose or as part of any universal design but instead rose in the course of the earth’s long history from earlier and more primitive forms.

The heretical dimensions of this proposition may explain why almost three decades elapsed between Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle and his publication of the Origin of the Species.

Two years after his return to England, he read the essay by Malthus, and in 1842 he wrote a preliminary sketch of his theory, which he revised in a 230-page manuscript in 1844. There is little doubt that he realized the magnitude of his accomplishment. On completing the revision, he wrote a formal letter to his wife requesting her, in the event of his death, to publish it – but then, with the manuscript and letter in safe-keeping, he turned to other work, including a four-volume treatise on the natural history of barnacles. For more than twenty years after his return from his voyage, Darwin mentioned his ideas on evolution only in his private notebooks and in letters to a few scientific colleagues.

In 1850, urged on by his friends Charles Lyell and botanist Joseph Hooker, Darwin set to work slowly preparing a manuscript for publication. In 1858, some ten chapters later, he received a bombshell in the form of a letter from another English naturalist, Alfred Russell Wallace, who was working in the Malay Peninsula and had corresponded with Darwin on several previous occasions. Wallace presented a theory of evolution that almost exactly paralleled Darwin’s own. Tossing in bed one night with a fever, Wallace had had a sudden flash of insight. “I saw at once,” he recollected, “that the ever-present variability of all living things would furnish the material from which, by the mere weeding out of those less adapted to the actual conditions, the fittest alone would continue the race.” Within two days, Wallace’s 20-page manuscript was completed and in the mail.

When Darwin received Wallace’s letter, he turned to his friends for advice, and Lyell and Hooker, taking matters into their own hands, presented the theory of Darwin and Wallace at a scientific meeting just one month later. Their presentation received little attention at the time, but for Darwin the floodgates were opened. He finished his long treatise in another few months, and the book was finally published. The first printing of 1,250 copies sold out the same day.

Why Darwin’s long delay? His own writings, voluminous thought they were, shed little light on this question. But perhaps his background does. When Darwin embarked on the Beagle, he was a devout Christian who did not doubt the literal truth of the Bible and did not believe in evolution any more than did the other English scientists he had met and whose books he had read. When he achieved his Malthusian insight a few years later, he was still in his 20s. He held no professional position, but he had acquired the admiration of his colleagues for his work aboard the Beagle. He was not about to compromise a promising career by promulgating a heresy that he might be unable to prove to their satisfaction. Perhaps more important, his wife, to whom he was deeply devoted, was extremely religious. In short, it seems reasonable to suppose that Darwin, as has been the case with others, found the implications of his theory difficult to confront.

Nor it is any wonder that he shrank from those implications for so long. Once the earth and its living inhabitants are seen as products of historical change, the theological philosophy embodied in the great chain of being ceases to make sense; the fullness of the world becomes not an eternal manifestation of God’s bountiful creativity but an illusion. For most of the world’s history, the vast majority of species on earth today did not exist and considerably less than one per cent of those that did exist do so today. If evolution has occurred, and if it has proceeded from the entirely natural causes Darwin envisioned, then the adaptations of organisms to their environment, the intricate construction of the bird’s wing and the orchid’s flower are evidence not of divine design but of the struggle for existence.

Moreover, and this may be the deepest implication of all, Darwin brought to biology, as his predecessors had brought to astronomy and geology, what has been termed the sufficiency of efficient causes. No longer was there any reason to look for final causes and goals. To the questions “What purpose does this species serve? Why did God make tapeworms?” the answer is, “To no purpose.” Tapeworms were not put here to serve a purpose, nor were plants, not plants, nor people. They came into existence not by design but by the action of utterly impersonal natural laws.

This was an exceedingly hard pill for most people to swallow – and it still is. The fact that the earth is not the center of the universe, though once considered heresy, is now accepted by the vast majority of mankind. The fact that man is descended of apes is not. Almost uniquely among the great scientific formulations of history, Darwinian theory remains a subject of bitter controversy more than a century after his death – not among biologists, who accept it with virtual unanimity, but among ordinary people who cannot bring themselves to face the possibility of a world that operates without a grand, divinely guided design.

Indeed, the hullabaloo over Darwinism is currently more intense – at least in the United States – than it has been since the 1920s when Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan battled the issue in Dayton, Tennessee, at the celebrated Scopes trial. Leading the attack today are the so-called Creationists, who are mostly spokesmen for fundamentalist religious groups – but their popular support is wide and deep. In a recent Gallup Poll of cross-section Americans, nearly half of the respondents agreed with the statement: “God created men pretty much in his present form at one time within the past 10,000 years.” Thirty-eight per cent of the respondents agreed with an alternative statement: “Man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, including man’s creation.” A mere nine per cent accepted a third choice – that man had developed from less advanced forms of life without diving intervention. Another public poll, published in Christian Century several years ago, similarly reported that approximately half the adults in America continue to believe that “God created Adam and Eve to start the human race.”

Armed with this kind of public support, the Creationists in recent years have been zeroing in on the public school system, particularly in the South and Southwest – not with the demand that the teaching of evolution be banned (which was the issue in the Scopes trial) but with the seemingly less dogmatic demand that Creationist doctrines should be given equal time with Darwinian theory in all science classrooms. They have been remarkably successful in this endeavor. In Dallas, Atlanta, and Chicago, not to mention countless smaller cities, school committees have yielded to the equal-time pressure. And perhaps more disturbing, national textbook publishers – whose profits depend on producing books that will be marketable in every part of the nation – have been soft-pedaling Darwinism in their biology texts or specifically including Creationism as an alternative and co-equal doctrine.

“Where will we be,” asks Stephen Jay Gould, the eminent Harvard biologist, “if any pressure group can win, by legislative fiat, the ordered inclusion of its favorite doctrine into school curricula?” It’s a good question. One is reminded of Lyndon Johnson’s story about the earnest young pedagogue who, in the depths of depression, applied for an opening as a science teacher in a backwater town in Texas. Confronting the local school board at his interview, he was asked by the grim-visaged chairman: “Do you teach that the earth is flat or that the earth is round?” The young man looked from face to face without seeing a hint of enlightenment. “Well,” he said, “I can teach it either way.”

The notion that one can teach the great unifying theory of modern biology “either way” is no less absurd.

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