ۺۦۣۨۧٱڷۜۗۦ۩ۜӨ
ٱٱۛҖӨۦۣۘۛۙғۦۖۡٷۗ۠ۧғٷۢۦ۩ۣ۞ҖҖۃۤۨۨۜ
̀ẳỀẽẮẳΝẴẾếẺẽỄڷۦۣۚڷ۪ۧۙۗۦۙۧڷ۠ٷۣۢۨۘۘۆ
ۙۦۙۜڷ۟ۗ۠Өڷۃۧۨۦۙ۠ٷڷ۠ٷۡٮ
ۙۦۙۜڷ۟ۗ۠Өڷۃۣۧۢۨۤۦۗۧۖ۩ۑ
ۙۦۙۜڷ۟ۗ۠Өڷۃۧۨۢۦۤۙۦڷ۠ٷۗۦۣۙۡۡӨ
ۙۦۙۜڷ۟ۗ۠Өڷۃڷۙۧ۩ڷۣۚڷۧۡۦۙے
ۃۣۢۨ۩ۣ۪۠ٮڷۃگۧۨ۩ۦٯڷۦۙۜےڷۺψڷۡۙۜےڷۣ۫ۢۊڷ۠۠ٷۜۑڷۙﯦڮ
ۣۚڷۣۧۗۨ۠ێڷۨۧۢ۩ۣۡۡۗۨۢۆڷۙۜۨڷۘۢٷڷۃۺۣۣۛ۠ۨٷۜۗۧٮ
ۙۗۦێڷۺۘٷۙۦۗӨیڷۙۛۦٰۣۙ
ۛۦۙۖۢۙەڷғېڷ۠ۦٷӨ
ھھۀڷҒڷۀہڿڷۤۤڷۃۀڽڼھڷۦۙۖۡۙۨۤۙۑڷҖڷڿڼڷۙ۩ۧۧٲڷҖڷڿہڷۙۡ۩ۣ۠۔ڷҖڷۺۦۣۨۧٱڷۜۗۦ۩ۜӨ
ۀڽڼھڷۺ۠۩Ђڷڽڿڷۃۣۙۢ۠ۢڷۘۙۜۧ۠ۖ۩ێڷۃھڼڿڼڼڼۀڽۀڼۀڿۂڼڼڼۑҖۀڽڼڽғڼڽڷۃٲۍө
ھڼڿڼڼڼۀڽۀڼۀڿۂڼڼڼۑٵۨۗٷۦۨۧۖٷۛҖۦۣۘۛۙғۦۖۡٷۗ۠ۧғٷۢۦ۩ۣ۞ҖҖۃۤۨۨۜڷۃۙ۠ۗۨۦٷڷۧۜۨڷۣۨڷ۟ۢۋ
ۃۙ۠ۗۨۦٷڷۧۜۨڷۙۨۗڷۣۨڷۣ۫ٱ
ۃۣۢۨ۩ۣ۪۠ٮڷۃگۧۨ۩ۦٯڷۦۙۜےڷۺψڷۡۙۜےڷۣ۫ۢۊڷ۠۠ٷۜۑڷۙﯦڮڷғۀۀڽڼھڿڷۛۦۙۖۢۙەڷғېڷ۠ۦٷӨ
ۜۗۦ۩ۜӨڷۗۙғۦێڷۺۘٷۙۦۗӨیڷۙۛۦٰۣۙڷۣۚڷۣۧۗۨ۠ێڷۨۧۢ۩ۣۡۡۗۨۢۆڷۙۜۨڷۘۢٷڷۃۺۣۣۛ۠ۨٷۜۗۧٮ
ھڼڿڼڼڼۀڽۀڼۀڿۂڼڼڼۑҖۀڽڼڽғڼڽۃۣۘڷھھۀҒۀہڿڷۤۤڷۃڿہڷۃۺۦۣۨۧٱ
ۙۦۙۜڷ۟ۗ۠Өڷۃڷۣۧۢۧۧۡۦۙێڷۨۧۙ۩ۥۙې
ۀڽڼھڷۤۙۑڷڿڼڷۣۢڷۀۀڽғڿҢڽғۀۂڽғڽۀڷۃۧۧۙۦۘۘٷڷێٲڷۃٱٱۛҖӨۦۣۘۛۙғۦۖۡٷۗ۠ۧғٷۢۦ۩ۣ۞ҖҖۃۤۨۨۜڷۣۡۦۚڷۘۙۘٷۣۣ۠ۢ۫ө
Church History 83:3 (September 2014), 684–722.
© American Society of Church History, 2014
doi:10.1017/S0009640714000602
“Ye Shall Know Them By Their Fruits”:
Evolution, Eschatology, and the Anticommunist
Politics of George McCready Price
CARL R. WEINBERG
George McCready Price (1870–1963) is best known as the Canadian-born Seventh-day
Adventist amateur geologist who pioneered the idea of a young earth in the early
twentieth century. Price laid the foundation for modern “creation science,” which took
off decades later, with the publication of Henry Morris and John Whitcomb Jr.’s The
Genesis Flood in 1961. Despite his extensive writings on the details of geology,
however, Price admitted that his main objections to evolution were not scientific
but “moral” and “philosophical”—the “fruits” of the “corrupt tree” of evolution.
Historians have almost entirely neglected this aspect of Price’s opus; yet, Price
authored a series of works from 1902 to 1925 that, in increasingly alarming tones,
blamed evolution for socialism and communism. This article analyzes these works by
examining Price’s Adventist background, his early experiences working and living in
the United States, and the broader political context in which he wrote. It also assesses
the impact of Price’s political writings on subsequent generations of creationists and
conservative evangelicals. Price should be seen as part of the long process by which
a New Christian Right was forged from materials including creationism and
anticommunism. He was not only a geologist but also a creationist politician.
“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but
inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do
men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree
bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.”
—Matthew 7:15–17
“Marxian Socialism and the radical criticism of the Bible . . . are now
proceeding hand in hand with the doctrine of organic evolution to break
down all those ideas of morality, all those concepts of the sacredness of
marriage and of private property, upon which Occidental civilization has
been built during the past thousand years.”—George McCready Price, The
Predicament of Evolution (1925)
The author would like to thank Ronald Numbers, Jeffrey Moran, Constance Clark, and the
anonymous reviewers for Church History for their extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts
of this article.
Carl R. Weinberg is Adjunct Associate Professor of History at Indiana University.
684
“YE SHALL KNOW THEM BY THEIR FRUITS”
685
A
Canadian-born Seventh-day Adventist writer, teacher, and self-trained
geologist, George McCready Price (1870–1963) is best known for
his pioneering books in the field of what has come to be called
“creation science.” In 1923, Price published The New Geology, a collegelevel textbook that denounced evolution as a scientific fraud. The book
argued that a universal Noachian flood, and not eons of evolution, explained
the geological features of the earth, which he estimated to be six thousand
years old. Scientists widely ridiculed Price, but by 1926, he had gained
enough notoriety that the editor of Science magazine could describe him as
the “principal scientific authority of the fundamentalists.”1 As Price’s
geological work formed the intellectual basis for John Whitcomb, Jr. and
Henry Morris’s highly influential Genesis Flood (1961), Price is rightly
viewed as the godfather of the modern creation science movement.
While Price published thousands of pages analyzing the conclusions of
geologists, subscribed to scientific journals, and regularly corresponded
with eminent researchers,2 his main objection to evolution had nothing to
do with the veracity of scientific claims. As Ronald Numbers has noted,
Price acknowledged that his opposition to evolution stemmed not from the
observable scientific facts of geology, but rather from what he viewed as
the “philosophical and moral” consequences of evolution—the “evil fruits”
of the “corrupt tree” of evolution, in the words of Jesus’s Sermon on the
Mount. Moreover, Numbers observes of Price—but does not elaborate on
the point—that “in two of his books, Poisoning Democracy (1921) and
Socialism in the Test Tube (1921), he explicitly linked evolution and
‘Marxian socialism.’”3 Building on Numbers’s valuable clue to Price’s
thinking and politics, this article examines a series of works and the
historical context in which Price developed the “fruit” analogy to lambast
both evolution and socialism. The works include Outlines of Modern
Christianity and Modern Science (1902), God’s Two Books (1911), Back
to the Bible (1916), The Phantom of Organic Evolution (1924), and
The Predicament of Evolution (1925), as well as the two books that
Numbers cites.
1
“Letter to the editor of Science from the principal scientific authority of the fundamentalists,”
Science 63 (March 5, 1926): 259.
2
Among the letters in Price’s papers is a reply from none other than Albert Einstein, who wrote
Price this brief note: “I have not seen the article you mentioned in your letter of January 29th. But
according to your remark about its conclusions it must be nonsense or at least misleading” (Albert
Einstein to George McCready Price, February 6, 1954, George McCready Price Papers, Collection
2, Box 2, Folder 2, Adventist Heritage Center [AHC], James White Library, Andrews University,
Berrien Springs, Michigan).
3
Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 103.
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CHURCH HISTORY
Perhaps because Price’s Adventism kept him away from the mainstream of
Christian fundamentalism and because he worked hard to cultivate an academic
identity, his anti-socialist writings have received almost no attention from
scholars. Indeed, while historians have explored the social and political
context of antievolutionism in a variety of ways, the relationship between
Marx and Darwin, and even the reception of evolutionary ideas among
American Socialists, they largely have neglected the subject of creationist
anti-socialism and anti-communism.4 The broader subject, and Price’s place
within it, deserves analysis for several reasons. First it helps to emphasize an
important dynamic of the modern creationist movement: evolutionary
science not only raised questions about the central theological, other-worldly
question of salvation—whether Christian believers have access to eternal life
after death—but it also generated deep concern about a range of its alleged
4
See, for instance, Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and
Reform in Radical London (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989); J. R. Moore, ed.,
History, Humanity, and Evolution: Essays in Honor of John C. Greene (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989); Robert M. Young, Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian
Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). On Marx and Darwin, see Paul Heyer,
Nature, Human Nature, and Society (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982); John Bellamy
Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000); and
Giuliano Pancaldi, “The Technology of Nature: Marx’s Thoughts on Darwin,” The Natural
Sciences and the Social Sciences, ed. I. B. Cohen (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), 257–274;
Margaret A. Fay, “Did Marx Offer to Dedicate Capital to Darwin?: A Reassessment of the
Evidence,” Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (Jan.–Mar. 1978): 133–146.
On the broader context in the United States, see Ronald Numbers, The Creationists; Ronald
Numbers, Darwin Comes to America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998);
Ronald Numbers and John Stenhouse, eds., Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race,
Religion, and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Charles Israel, Before
Scopes: Evangelicalism, Education and Evolution in Tennessee, 1870–1925 (Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 2004); Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and
America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1997); Constance Areson Clark, God—or Gorilla (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2008); Jeffrey P. Moran, American Genesis: The Evolution Controversies from
Scopes to Creation Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Adam Laats,
Fundamentalism and Education in the Scopes Era: God, Darwin, and the Roots of America’s
Culture Wars (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
For brief discussions of the relationship between anti-evolutionism and anti-socialism, see George
Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century
Evangelicalism: 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 208–210; R. Scott
Appleby, “Exposing Darwin’s ‘Hidden Agenda’: Roman Catholic Responses to Evolution,
1875–1925,” Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender, ed.
Ronald L. Numbers and John Stenhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 173–
207; and Michael Lienesch, In the Beginning: Fundamentalism, The Scopes Trial, and the
Making of the Antievolution Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 91.
On American socialists and evolutionary ideas, see Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in
American Thought, 1860–1915, 4th edition (Boston: Beacon, 1992), 105–18; Robert C.
Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), 131–135; and Mark Pittenger, American
Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993).
“YE SHALL KNOW THEM BY THEIR FRUITS”
687
this-worldly social and political repercussions, including communism.
Historians have long recognized this general dynamic. George Marsden’s
classic 1980 study of fundamentalism made it clear that opponents of
modernism often linked it to socialism or Bolshevism. In their studies of
premillenialists, who tended to oppose evolution, both Timothy Weber and
Paul Boyer underlined the role that anticommunist fears played. Focusing
more specifically on antievolutionism, Jeffrey Moran noted that creationists
blamed evolution for “the depredations of German aggression, communism,
sexual liberation, secularism, [and] crime,” among others.5
One of the few extended analyses of this connection appears in political
scientist Michael Lienesch’s study of antievolutionism, In the Beginning
(2007), which made effective use of social constructionist theory to analyze
the dynamics of creationism primarily during the 1920s. In a discussion of
“frame bridging,” where social movement activists craft their appeals to
broaden their base of support to include new audiences, Lienesch claimed
that “when all else failed, antievolutionists asserted that Darwinism was
leading to political radicalism.” He then provides several examples,
including a 1923 speech of J. Frank Norris who warned that evolution is
allied with Bolshevism.6 What is problematic here is the qualifier, “when all
else failed,” which implies that making such appeals was a kind of last-ditch
effort, a rhetorical last resort, with little basis in current reality or history. My
analysis of Price’s work suggests otherwise.
Second, exploring Price’s “fruitistic” arguments against socialism help to
highlight why such arguments have persisted to this day. Unlike the other two
standard creationist approaches—evolution is bad science, and it contradicts
the Bible—the argument about this-worldly consequences has a unique ability
to speak to the mundane struggles of ordinary Christian believers. Recent
“fruits” attributed to evolution have included teen pregnancy, abortion,
homosexuality, drug abuse, and school shootings. In comparison with complex
and detailed critiques of evidence for evolution, the fruit argument is much
easier to follow—it has a populist cast. Furthermore, from Price onward,
creationists have identified explicitly the forces behind evolution and its fruits
as Satanic. Attributing various forms of alleged moral decay to a Satanic
evolutionary science may seem ludicrous to secular-minded academics. But as
Karl Giberson and Donald Yerxa note, dismissing such ideas “would mean
5
Jeffrey Moran, American Genesis: The Evolution Controversies from Scopes to Creation
Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 94; George Marsden, Fundamentalism and
American Culture, 126, 153–156; Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in
Modern American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 152–180;
Timothy P. Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillenialism,
1875–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 87.
6
Lienesch, In the Beginning, 90–91.
688
CHURCH HISTORY
missing the powerful inspiration that lies at the very heart of creationism.”7
Placing Price’s early writings in the context of his experiences in New York
City helps explain the compelling nature of this framework.
Third, and finally, due to Price’s role as a pioneering scientific creationist and
the impact of his flood geology on the young Henry Morris, there is at least a
possibility that Price’s anticommunist politics also shaped Morris’s outlook.
From at least 1962 through the 1990s, Morris himself consistently linked
evolution and communism as part of a broader framework focusing on
evolution’s “evil fruits.” Morris purveyed his creationist anticommunist
message not only in books and speeches, but also through the Institute of
Creation Research (ICR) museum first established in 1976. While Morris, a
devout fundamentalist Baptist, was wary of publicly associating himself with
Price due to the latter’s Adventist theology, he openly acknowledged Price’s
“profound” influence on this creationist thinking, and the two men kept up a
lively correspondence in the fifteen years preceding Price’s death in 1963. At
the very least, it is clear that Price was part of a broader conversation about
the connections between evolution and communism that drew in a variety of
evangelical conservatives. Given historians’ growing recognition of the
foundational role of militant anticommunism in the rise of the New Christian
Right, Price deserves his place in this broader story.8
I. SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST BACKGROUND
To properly understand Price’s writings, it helps first to grasp some key aspects
of Seventh-day Adventist theology. The church originated as an offshoot of the
millenarian movement led by farmer and lay preacher William Miller. Miller
had fixed the date for Christ’s Second Coming as October 22, 1844, based
on passages in the Book of Daniel that foretold a “cleansing of the
sanctuary.”9 In the wake of the “Great Disappointment” that followed the
7
Karl W. Giberson and Donald A. Yerxa, Species of Origins: America’s Search for a Creation
Story (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 106.
8
See, for example, Markuu Ruotsila, “Carl McIntire and the Fundamentalist Origins of the
Christian Right,” Church History 81 (June 2012): 378–407; Jonathan Herzog, The SpiritualIndustrial Complex: America’s Religious Battle Against Communism in the Early Cold War
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of
the New American Right (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); Daniel K.
Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2010); Donald Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s
Crusade (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible
Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York:
W. W. Norton, 2009).
9
On Millerism, see Ronald L. Numbers and Jonathan M. Butler, eds., The Disappointed:
Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1987).
“YE SHALL KNOW THEM BY THEIR FRUITS”
689
Messiah’s failure to appear, a group coalesced around the idea that Miller had
not erred about the date, only about the nature of what had taken place. Christ
was indeed cleansing the sanctuary—as Daniel had prophesied—but the event
was taking place in the heavenly realm instead of on earth. By 1863, one
“remnant” of the Millerite movement formally constituted itself as the
Seventh-day Adventist Church, established its own weekly newspaper, and
set up headquarters in Battle Creek, Michigan. Ellen White (1827–1915),
who grew up in a Millerite family in Portland, Maine, began to have waking
visions as a teenager, married church co-founder James White, and came to
be the central seer and prophet of Seventh-day Adventism. Her writings are
second only to the Bible as authority.10
Adventist theology developed into a variant of historicist premillenialism.
Christ was coming, but only after a terrible period—the tribulation—in
which the Antichrist would gather great strength and cause horrible strife
and suffering. Those who followed Christ would ultimately triumph, but
before that, rather than moving toward a thousand years of heaven on earth,
as the postmillennialists believed, humanity was inevitably headed for
disaster. For historicists—which included Adventists, as well as most
Protestants before the mid-nineteenth century—the biblical prophecies
foretold history from ancient times through their own time. In regard to
Revelation 13, for instance, the Adventists agreed with Protestant tradition
that the first “beast,” with seven heads and ten horns, represented the
Catholic Church.11
To the traditional Protestant identification of the Antichrist with the Catholic
Church, the Adventists added a unique twist. It was contained in their
interpretation of the second beast of Revelation 13, which had “two horns
like a lamb,” and “spake as a dragon.” This hypocritical creature appeared to
be lamb-like, or Christ-like, but later was revealed to be Satan. Unlike
previous interpretive traditions, which had associated this beast with various
European powers, the Adventists stood alone in identifying it as none other
than the United States of America. The horns were, respectively, the republic
and Protestantism, standing for civil and religious liberty. Despite their
premillenialism and inclination toward political quietism, many founding
Adventists were abolitionists and felt that the U.S. was betraying its
10
On Ellen White, see Ronald Numbers, Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. White
(New York: Harper & Row, 1976); and Terrie Dopp, Aamodt, Gary Land, and Ronald L.
Numbers, eds., Ellen Harmon White: American Prophet (New York: Oxford University Press,
2014). For an insightful analysis of White’s emergence as a prophet in Portland, see Jonathan
M. Butler, “Prophecy, Gender, and Culture: Ellen Gould Harmon [White]* and the Roots of
Seventh-day Adventism,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 1 (Winter
1991): 3–29.
11
On millenarianism, see Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern
American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).
690
CHURCH HISTORY
founding republican ideals. The early Adventists also felt betrayed by
Protestantism. As they focused intently on the expected Advent as October
22, 1844 approached, many had suffered scorn and even disfellowship from
their primarily Methodist, Baptist, and Christian Connexion congregations.
Finally, their minority Sabbatarian beliefs made them highly sensitive to the
growing movement for Sunday laws in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. While it was fellow Protestants, and not Catholics, leading these
campaigns, the historic identification of the Antichrist with the Pope, and the
association of the Catholic Church with political tyranny, led Adventists to
believe that the threat of a revived Papal “despotism” was always around the
corner.12
The distinctive Adventist focus on the Saturday Sabbath day not only set the
church apart in terms of liturgical practice, but also provided the framework for
its distinctive position on evolution, as established in the early writings of Ellen
White. By the late nineteenth century, large numbers of Protestant evangelical
leaders had made an accommodation with the latest scientific discoveries that
pointed to an ancient earth. They hewed either to the day/age theory, in which
each Biblical day of creation represented an indefinite period, or the gap theory,
which postulated an unaccountably long delay between Genesis 1, the creation
of the earth, and Genesis 2, the creation of Adam and Eve. But few Adventists
took this position, since in Spiritual Gifts (1864), published five years after
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, White rejected both approaches. Stating
that she been transported during a vision back to the time of creation, White
reported that the week of Genesis was “just like every other week.” Contrary
to the arguments of “infidel geologists,” she wrote, Genesis days meant
“literal days.” To deny this fact was to launch a direct attack on the Fourth
Commandment, in which God reminded us of his work during that first
literal week. Thus, White’s claim that the earth “is now only about six
thousand years old” became part of bedrock Adventist doctrine.13
Adventist responses to evolution also were informed by White’s explanation
for biological diversity in the aftermath of the Noachian flood, which hinged on
the concept of “amalgamation.” According to Spiritual Gifts,
Every species of animal which God had created were preserved in the ark.
The confused species which God did not create, which were the result of
amalgamation, were destroyed by the flood. Since the flood there has been
12
Douglas Morgan, Adventism and the American Republic: The Public Involvement of a Major
Apocalyptic Movement (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2001), 15–17.
13
Ellen G. White, Spiritual Gifts: Important Acts of Faith, in Connection with the History of Holy
Men of Old (Battle Creek, MI: Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Assn., 1864), vol. 3, 90–92;
Ronald Numbers, “‘Sciences of Satanic Origin’: Adventist Attitudes Toward Evolutionary
Biology,” in Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1998), 92–110.
“YE SHALL KNOW THEM BY THEIR FRUITS”
691
amalgamation of man and beast, as may be seen in the almost endless
varieties of species of animals, and in certain races of men.14
For over a century now, Adventists have fiercely and publicly argued over the
proper interpretation of this key passage, which seems to imply that humans
and animals mated and produced offspring; and that some racial groups were
less than fully human. Such implications not only violated existing scientific
knowledge, but also cast doubt on the egalitarian values that the Adventist
founders had embraced in their well-known opposition to slavery. Some
Adventists long contended that White meant, in effect, “of man and of
beast,” but the latest research strongly suggests that a plain reading of her
words is correct; that those “certain races” included Africans, Native
Americans, and others who were commonly classed as inferior; and that this
is the way that Adventists at the time understood her words.15 As for the
cause of amalgamation and thus the proliferation of new “confused” nonGodly species after the flood, White never explicitly identified it, but
Adventist commentators commonly assumed, based on her subsequent
writings, that she had Satan in mind for this role.16
It was in 1870, only seven years after the formal founding of the church, and
some four hundred miles east of Ellen White’s hometown, that George Edward
Price was born on a farm in Havelock, New Brunswick, Canada. Father George
Marshall Price farmed seven hundred acres of land and ran a gristmill and
sawmill. Mother Susan McCready came from a more educated family. Her
brother J. E. B. McCready was editor of the Daily Telegraph in Saint John.17
Given the young George Price’s literary ambitions—“I cannot remember a
time in my early youth and young manhood when I did not aspire to be a
writer”—it is hardly surprising that he adopted his mother’s name as his
own.18 Soon after his father’s death, Susan McCready joined the Seventhday Adventist church and George took up a new occupation—selling
Adventist books.
His primary stock in trade included Ellen G. White’s The Great Controversy,
which focused on the heavenly and earthly contest between Lucifer and Jesus
14
White, Spiritual Gifts, 75, emphasis added.
Ronald Osborn, “True Blood: Race, Science, and Early Adventist Amalgamation Theory
Revisited,” Spectrum Magazine 38, (Fall 2010): 16–29; Gordon Shigley, “Amalgamation of Man
and Beast: What Did Ellen White Mean?,” Spectrum Magazine 12 (June 1982): 10–19; Ronald
L. Numbers and Rennie B. Schoepflin, “Science and Medicine,” in Ellen Harmon White:
American Prophet, 215–216.
16
For a leading twentieth-century Adventist apologist’s defense of the “of man and of beast”
interpretation, which also sees a role for Satan in amalgamation, see Francis D. Nichol,
“Amalgamation: Ellen G. White Statements Regarding Conditions at the Time of the Flood,”
(1951), http://www.whiteestate.org/issues/amalg.html.
17
Clifton L. Taylor, “Pioneer Days,” Eastern Canadian Messenger, April 16, 1918, 4.
18
George McCready Price, “If I Were Twenty Again,” These Times, September 1, 1960, 23.
15
692
CHURCH HISTORY
Christ.19 Part history, part prophecy, White’s book traced the struggle between
Satan and Christ by following the fortunes of “God’s children,” who included
early Christian martyrs, European Protestant reformers, an “upright, honesthearted farmer” named William Miller, and the early leaders of the Seventhday Adventist church. On the side of Satan stood the false Catholic Church,
which presided over a long period of “spiritual darkness.” Moreover, readers
were reminded about the various “snares” that Satan had planted among
well-meaning but easily fooled Christians:
He is intruding his presence in every department of the household, in every
street of our cities, in the churches, in the national councils, in the courts of
justice, perplexing, deceiving, seducing, everywhere ruining the souls and
bodies of men, women and children, breaking up families, sowing hatred,
emulation, strife, sedition, murder.
To this familiar litany of Satan’s activities, however, White added the
distinctive Adventist apocalyptic explanation of how the “great controversy”
would be resolved in favor of Christ. While Price would soon have his own
experiences of battling demonic forces in the big city, more than any other,
this book convinced Price to spend his life spreading God’s word.20
For the next several years, George shared the experience of spreading this
stormy but ultimately hopeful vision with his bookselling partner Amelia
Anna Nason, a fellow native of New Brunswick, twelve years his senior. In
time, they developed a mutual affection, and in 1887, they were married; he
was 17 and she was 29.21 In the fall of 1891, both George and Amelia
attended Battle Creek College, an Adventist institution in Battle Creek,
Michigan.22 Finances forced them to bounce between bookselling and their
studies. Neither finished college but both would enter the teaching
profession. By the end of the decade, Amelia, by then in her late thirties,
gave birth to their son, Ernest, and daughters Portia and Beatrice. They
19
“If I Were Young Again . . . I’d Have an Aim,” Review and Herald 138 (February 16, 1961):
14; Gary Land, Historical Dictionary of Seventh-day Adventists (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press,
2005), 344.
20
Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan: The Conflict of the Ages in
the Christian Dispensation (Mountain View, California: Pacific Press Publishing Association,
1911), 508, 678; W. R. Beach to George McCready Price, February 13, 1958, George McCready
Price Papers, Collection 2, Box 2, Folder 2, AHC.
21
According to her obituary, Amelia and George both attended Battle Creek College. Obituary
for Amelia Anna Nason Price, Review and Herald 131 (December 1954): 21. Numbers’s
account has only George attending, citing “Battle Creek College Records, 1876–94,” (AHC),
369, 383; Numbers, The Creationists, 463n7.
22
George McCready Price, “Some Early Experiences With Evolutionary Geology,” Bulletin of
Deluge Geology and Related Sciences 1 (November 1941): 79, in Ronald L. Numbers, ed.,
Creationism in Twentieth-Century America, vol. 9, Early Creationist Journals (New York:
Garland, 1995), 79.
“YE SHALL KNOW THEM BY THEIR FRUITS”
693
would remain married for 67 years.23 In some ways, the pair would seem to
have met the late-nineteenth-century Adventist ideal of marriage as an equal
partnership—a “perfect blending of two imperfect parts into one perfect
whole.”24 But for the first decade of the new century, they spent much of
their time apart as George struggled to make ends meet in a succession of
jobs as a bookseller, school administrator, teacher, preacher, writer, and
handyman.
It was during one of the first of these lone ventures—a teaching stint in the
French-speaking town of Tracadie on the Gulf of St. Lawrence in northeastern
New Brunswick—that George McCready Price first discovered evolutionary
science.25 In some respects, the “dreary, remote” fishing and farming
village—as Ronald Numbers describes it—would seem an unlikely setting
for Price to encounter cutting-edge ideas. For town residents, the primary
local institution was the St. Jean Baptiste et St. Joseph Catholic Church,
established in 1823. In 1895, just two years before Price arrived, the local
parish completed construction of a new stone church, “the pride of Tracadians.”
Yet Tracadie was not isolated from the broader Canadian political world,
which challenged the primacy of the Catholic church and promoted an
increasingly secular education. In 1871, the provincial Assembly passed the
Common Schools Act, which aimed to replace the system of parish-run
Catholic schools with secular institutions run by the provincial government.
Catholics put up fierce resistance, refusing to pay school taxes, and conflict
was ongoing and sometimes violent. In this context, it is not surprising to
learn that in Tracadie, the parish school was forced to close down in 1886,
due to the new law and enforcement efforts led by the small but influential
Protestant minority. In 1895, local Protestants—who included Anglicans and
Presbyterians—erected their first evangelical church. Presumably, the school
at which Price taught from 1897 to 1902 was non-denominational, if not
strictly secular. Currents of economic change also tied Tracadie to wider
networks. In the late nineteenth century, the rich timberlands of northeastern
New Brunswick were increasingly bought up by outside investors. In the
early 1900s, the Tracadie Lumber Company, a U.S. firm, hired hundreds of
men in the region to cut timber and work in its industrial sawmills.26
23
Obituary for Amelia Anna Nason Price, Review and Herald 131 (December 1954): 21.
Quoted in Laura L. Vance, Seventh-day Adventism in Crisis: Gender and Sectarian Change in
an Emerging Religion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 110.
25
On the history of Tracadie, see Debra Kerry, Roy Bourgeois, and Maurice Basque, Tracadie:
Deux siècles de particularisme: une Histoire de Tracadie (New Brunswick: Chedik, 1984). See also
http://www.tracadie-sheila.ca/index.php.
26
Kerry et al., Tracadie, 55, 66, 69–74. See also, W. F. Ganong, “History of Tracadie,”
Acadiensis 6 (1906): 185–200. For a firsthand account of the labor it took to bring down trees in
the northern woods, see Jeff A. Webb, “The Arthur Webb Story, 1855–1964,” Labour/Le Travail
48 (Fall 2001): 182–183.
24
694
CHURCH HISTORY
II. OUTLINES OF MODERN CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN SCIENCE
For George McCready Price, the most consequential fact about Tracadie was
neither its churches, nor its sawmills, but the lazaret or leprosarium founded
there in 1849 by the provincial government and operated by the Catholic
Hospitalieres de Saint-Joseph (who also had started the short-lived parish
school). When Price arrived in town in 1897, the Harvard-trained Dr. Alfred
Corbett Smith had served as leprosarium director for decades—and was the
only practicing doctor in a fifty-mile radius. He was an enthusiastic
evolutionist and agnostic. Thanks to his friendship with Smith, Price began
reading standard works in biological evolution, geology and paleontology,
and began his lifelong subscription to the journal Nature. These new works
and new arguments tested his faith. His personal studies in the years leading
up to Tracadie had consisted mainly of daily Bible readings. As he recalled,
his “intellectual interests had been entirely elsewhere.” But despite Smith’s
best efforts to win a convert to evolution, Price emerged from the experience
convinced that the geological argument was evolution’s Achilles heel.
During his stay in Tracadie, from the fall of 1899 to the spring of 1902,
Price spent nearly all his spare time reading and writing. That year, the
Seventh-day Adventist church published Price’s Outlines of Modern
Christianity and Modern Science (1902), the first of many books seeking to
expose evolution for the fraud he believed it to be.27
This book set the mold for Price in two fundamental ways. First, Price
focused his fire on evolutionary geologists’ alleged circular reasoning when
determining the age of rock layers. Geologists assign dates to strata in the
geological column based on the types of creatures and plants fossilized
therein. The simpler types of fossils are found in the lower layers. The more
complex creatures are found higher up. The contents of these layers are
roughly consistent around the world. Therefore, evolutionists conclude, the
lower strata must be older. But, Price wrote, “it is nothing but a pure
assumption, utterly incapable of any rational proof.”28 In contrast to this
theory, Price argued that the specific gravity of different living creatures
during the flood determined their place in the geological column. (Later, in
Illogical Geology [1906], after he had discovered that in some mountainous
regions, the layers were dramatically out of expected order, with a “newer”
stratum on top of an “older” one, Price attacked idea that there was even a
truly uniform geological column. He scoffed at the commonly accepted
27
Numbers, The Creationists, 91–92; Clark, Crusader for Creation, 14–16; Price, “Some Early
Experiences With Evolutionary Geology,” 151; George McCready Price, Outlines of Modern
Science and Modern Christianity (Oakland, Calif.: Pacific, 1902).
28
George McCready Price, Outlines, 137.
“YE SHALL KNOW THEM BY THEIR FRUITS”
695
geological concept of thrust faults, tremendous pressures which, geologists
believed, could accomplish this feat.29)
Second, the book also made clear his concern with the “political”
consequences of evolutionary science. While Price did not yet address
socialism explicitly, Outlines provides the basic analytic framework he
would later employ. In a chapter on “Evolution of the World Problems,”
Price demonstrated how Adventist eschatology was intertwined with his
developing moral/political critique of evolution. He prefaced the argument
by invoking Christ’s teaching on false prophets in Matthew 7:15, using
language he would repeatedly invoke in later works: “It is rightly considered
that the supreme test of any doctrine, religious, social, or scientific, is its
bearing upon life and human action. ‘Ye shall know them by their fruits.’
What are the fruits of the evolution theory?” According to Price, evolution
was “utterly subversive of civil and religious liberty for the individual.”
Indeed, “the only gospel it knows for the evils of our world is a religiopolitical despotism.”30
How was it that evolution led to despotism? According the Price, acceptance
of evolutionary ideas—the survival of the fittest—had caused “the increase of
crime and lawlessness of every kind, the increased lack of self-government on
the part of the individual . . .”31 In associating evolution with “lawlessness,”
Price may well have been influenced by discussions in the Adventist Review
and Herald that made this connection. Less than a month after the
assassination of President McKinley the previous year, the editors opined
that, “every seed of evolution planted is also a seed of anarchy.”32
This problem, in turn, had given rise to two sorts of proposed solutions:
“a ‘benevolent’ but sturdy despotism” and “the regulation of religion and
morals by law.” Of what did this “despotism” consist? For Price, it took
several forms, or rather, signs. One was imperialism. “By our taking up the
‘white man’s burden’ of governing what we are pleased to call half-civilized
peoples beyond the seas,” Price wrote, “we shall end up finding a similar
state of things requiring attention at home.” In this comment, Price echoed
the concerns of other Seventh-day Adventists. Their peculiar concern with
liberty had led the church to denounce the annexation of the Philippines.33
Indeed, Percy Magan, who had taught Price Roman history at Battle
Creek College, published a church-endorsed book on the subject in 1899
with a telling title: Imperialism Versus The Bible, The Constitution, And the
29
George McCready Price, Illogical Geology: The Weakest Point in the Evolution Theory (Los
Angeles, Calif.: The Modern Heretic, 1906), 30; Numbers, The Creationists, 112–113;
30
Price, Outlines, 234, 252.
31
Ibid., 262.
32
“Evolution and Anarchy,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, October 1, 1901.
33
Price, Outlines, 261–62, emphasis in original. Morgan, Adventism and the Republic, 69.
696
CHURCH HISTORY
Declaration of Independence or The Peril of the Republic of the United
States.34
Price’s implicit criticism of imperialist racism—the “white man’s burden”—
also drew on Adventist traditions reaching back decades. Due to the abolitionist
sympathies of William Miller and prominent Millerite abolitionists such as
Joshua Himes, antislavery feeling and even belief in racial equality found a
relatively accommodating home in the early Adventist movement.35 While
Adventists were conflicted about performing military service, Ellen White
and other Adventists publicly supported the Union side in the Civil War,
viewing the slaveholders’ rebellion as satanically inspired. During
Reconstruction, Adventist publications gave voice to Radical Republican
views in favor of racial equality, though violence directed at interracial
Adventist missions in the South led the church to modify its stance.36
At the same time, Price, like most Adventists, was hardly a champion of full
racial equality. While he rarely addressed the topic head-on, fragmentary
evidence gives a sense of his views. Price attributed human racial variety to
three factors: God’s dispersal of humanity in punishment for the Tower of
Babel, the changing environment, and the process of racial amalgamation,
taught to him by Ellen White. In a poem penned in 1910, Price focused on
the first two in explaining the origins of what he understood to be the clearly
inferior Negro race. According to Price, “the poor little fellow” who fled
Babel to Africa “got lost in the forest dank,” acquired dark skin from the
“fierce sun,” and “his mind became a blank.”37 In a later work, The
Phantom of Organic Evolution, Price argued that the distinct human races
“greatly resemble true species” and that “natural instincts,” aided by God’s
providential action at Babel, should have kept them separate. Contrary to
nature and God’s will, however, a mixing of the races or “amalgamation”
had taken place. Who was responsible Price did not indicate.38 But in a 1905
letter, written just two years after Outlines, Price acknowledged that he
joined with other Adventists in identifying “the great primal hybridizer” of
human races, plants, and animals, as Satan.39
34
Percy T. Magan, Imperialism Versus The Bible, The Constitution, And the Declaration of
Independence or The Peril of the Republic of the United States (Battle Creek, Mich.: National
Co-operative Library Association and Publishing Company, 1899), 81, emphasis in original.
35
Ronald D. Graybill, “The Abolitionist-Millerite Connection,” in Ronald L. Numbers and
Jonathan M. Butler, eds., The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth
Century (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993), 139–152.
36
Samuel G. London, Jr., Seventh-day Adventists and the Civil Rights Movement (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 44–65.
37
Quoted in Ronald Numbers, The Creationists, 102.
38
George McCready Price, The Phantom of Organic Evolution (New York: Fleming H. Revell,
1924), 106.
39
Quoted in Numbers, The Creationists, 101.
“YE SHALL KNOW THEM BY THEIR FRUITS”
697
Imperialism was one sign of the growing danger of despotism; another,
closer to home, was the amassing of collective power, both by large
corporations and by workers. “What with the labor unions, and what with
the trusts,” wrote Price, “we are certainly beholding the fast passing of
individualism.” In capital letters, Price warned of “THIS HEAVENDARKENING DESPOTISM OVER THE GRAVE OF LIBERTY.”40
Premillennialists of all stripes often expressed a kind of even-handedness on
the subject of class conflict, viewing its very existence as a sign of the
approaching end times. It is also worth noting, however, that the Adventists
were not neutral on the subject of labor unions. In the wake of the 1902
anthracite coal strike, Ellen White had made the anti-union position of the
church clear. “Unionism,” she wrote, “is controlled by the cruel power of
Satan. Those who refuse to join the unions formed are made to feel this
power.” The next year, the Review and Herald called labor unions “a dragon
voice which is heard speaking in the nation to-day,” a clear reference to the
second beast of Revelation 13.41 In 1904, reinforcing this idea, White wrote
“Can they not see in the rapid growth of trade unions, the fulfilling of the
signs of the times?”42 Not only did White present unions as a threat to
individual liberty, but she viewed them as inextricably tied to the city with
all of the “snares” set there by Satan.43
About the second type of despotism Price identified in Outlines—
“regulation of religion and morals by law”—he was more vague. He did
refer to the evil designs of the Catholic Church, but not to any specifics.
What also seemed to be concerning him was the involvement by modernist
Christians in ecumenical social reform efforts—“an organized raid on all
unrighteousness, thus hastening the glad reign of peace and joy”—which he
portrayed as “more horrible” than the threat of plain political despotism.44
Rather than focus on saving individual souls, these alleged Christians were
pursuing collective political goals, which could only be another sign of the
end times. Indeed, Price described his two forms of despotism as “twin
fiends, born in iniquity and cradled in apostasy from God.”45
40
Price, Outlines, 263.
Carlos A. Schwantes, “Labor Unions and Seventh-day Adventists: the formative years, 1877–
1903,” Adventist Heritage 4 (Winter 1977): 18–19.
42
Robert C. Kistler, Adventists and Labor Unions in the United States (Washington, D.C.:
Review and Herald, 1984), 41.
43
Ellen G. White, “Our Duty to Leave Battle Creek,” General Conference Bulletin, 35th Session,
Oakland, California, April 6, 1903, 87; See also, K. C. Russell, “Seventh-day Adventists and Labor
Unions,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, January 26, 1905, 9.
44
Price, Outlines, 267–68.
45
Ibid., 262.
41
698
CHURCH HISTORY
III. PRICE IN NEW YORK
By 1904, Price had several years of teaching and a published book under his
belt. But the three years following Tracadie were anything but encouraging.
At the age of thirty-four, with three children to support, Price despaired of
his inability to make a decent living as a bookseller. As he confided to
church elder William Guthrie in late August, “I have tried to do the best I
could, and yet it has seemed like accomplishing nothing.” Still hoping to
find a teaching position in the fall, Price noted, in a subsequent and even
darker letter, that “the good schools are now all taken up, but I suppose I
may be able to get some backwoods affair at perhaps $280 or $300.” Short
of that, he planned to go to New York City and make money as a writer,
even if it meant writing “hack stuff for the Metropolitan newspapers and
magazines.” But if he failed in that department as well, he would take his
own life and “the world would be rid of another useless, good-for-nothing
man.” “Were it not for my family, my dear children,” Price added, “I should
certainly end the tragedy here and now.”46
Within weeks of penning this letter, the last that he would write from
eastern Canada, Price sailed for New York City. The trip was both an
economic and spiritual gamble. Not only was Price betting that he could
obtain work writing for cosmopolitan, secular publications— something he
had never done—but he was also directly disobeying prophetess Ellen G.
White’s injunction to avoid the satanic snares of the big city in order to
follow his quixotic dream of literary success. On both counts, the trip was
a profound failure. In light of Ellen White’s warning about the dangers of
city life, it is striking that when Price arrived from New Brunswick in
New York City, he chose for his residence two neighborhoods that had (or
would come to have) singularly immoral associations: Greenwich Village
and Hell’s Kitchen. In September 1904, Price moved into a room in a fourstory brick apartment building at 95 Christopher Street, at the corner of
Bleecker, in the heart of the west Village.47 While the neighborhood’s
Bohemian days still lay ahead, it already had a long-established reputation
as a literary enclave, which may well have attracted Price’s attention.
Herman Melville, Henry James, Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, and other
literary leading lights had lived and worked just blocks from Price’s
46
George McCready Price to Elder Wm. Guthrie, August 26, 1904; George McCready Price to
W. H. Thurston, August 28, 1904, both in RG 11, Box 20, President’s Incoming Letters, 1905-D to
1905-P, Archives of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, Silver Spring, Maryland.
47
New York State Census, First Election District, Block A, Fifth Assembly District, Borough of
Manhattan, County of New York, State of New York, June 1, 1905, 9–10; 1904 Sanborn Atlas, v. 3,
sheet 12a. As of June 1905, eighteen people lived in the building. The first floor was a grocery and
bakery. Price most likely boarded or “lodged” with the family of Charles Whitney, a young bank
secretary, and his German-born mother.
“YE SHALL KNOW THEM BY THEIR FRUITS”
699
temporary quarters. Perhaps unknown to him, but consequential for his later
writings, the neighborhood had also begun to attract a group of well-heeled,
reform-minded activists who would become leaders of the budding American
socialist movement. Just two years before Price arrived, an influx of
newer immigrants, primarily from Italy, had led Progressive reformers to
establish Greenwich House—a settlement house—just three blocks south
on Bleecker.48
Price arrived in New York hoping to earn money as a writer. But as he
informed Elder William Guthrie in late December 1904, “experience has
made me a wiser and sadder man.” After nearly four months in the city,
Price had worked only about one-third of the time. Knowing that his own
family back in New Brunswick was “destitute and almost starving” drove
Price once again to thoughts of suicide and damnation. “Heaven only knows
what privations I have gone through and what torment of soul I have
suffered,” he told Guthrie.49 Spiritual woes deepened financial ones. Already
feeling alienated from church leadership when he left Canada, Price’s
relationship with the church reached a low point in New York. He attended
Seventh-day Adventist services in the city for “a month or two” after
arriving, but sensed that no one cared “a pin whether I starve to death or
not” and so “quietly dropped out altogether.” “They don’t miss me,” he
commented bitterly in his December letter to Guthrie, “and I suppose the
‘cause’ will get along just as well.” For Price, this perceived behavior
reflected a crisis in the church more generally: “Oh, the heartlessness and
hollow hypocrisy that masquerades in the Adventist body under the
semblance of the zeal for the Lord!”50 While Price clearly blamed the earthly
leaders of the church for his problems, Guthrie saw the devil at work. In a
subsequent letter to Price, the church elder told Price that he had “allowed
the enemy to take advantage of you to dishearten and distract you in every
way possible,” just as Ellen White had warned.51
The new year did bring temporary respite. Price reported that he had once
again obtained work. He was working long hours—sometimes twelve to
fourteen a day—but was glad to have the opportunity to “earn an honest
living.” It may have been the new job that spurred Price to move uptown to
an apartment on west 57th Street, on the northern edge of Hell’s Kitchen,
48
Gerald W. McFarland, Inside Greenwich Village: A New York City Neighborhood, 1898–1918
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 58.
49
George McCready Price to Elder William Guthrie, from 95 Christopher Street, New York City,
December 28, 1904, RG 11, Box 20, President’s Incoming Letters, 1905-D to 1905-P, Archives of
the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, Silver Spring, Maryland.
50
Ibid.
51
William Guthrie to George McCready Price, January 31, 1905, RG 11, Box 20, President’s
Incoming Letters, 1905-D to 1905-P, Archives of the General Conference of Seventh-day
Adventists, Silver Spring, Maryland.
700
CHURCH HISTORY
next door to the Central Presbyterian Church.52 Despite Price’s new job, his
family was still in desperate straits. And soon again was Price. In March
1905, son Ernest was forced to drop out of South Lancaster Academy for
lack of tuition funds. Amelia worried about their son’s spiritual welfare,
writing to a church elder that he “is drifting out in the cold world away from
‘our people.’”53
Meanwhile, George McCready Price’s job seems to have changed in a
direction away from what he considered an “honest” living. Around this
time, General Conference President Daniells wrote Price to cheer him up and
also offer him a job working at manual labor in the construction of the
church’s new headquarters in rural Tacoma Park, Maryland, an offer that
Price would soon take. Price thanked Daniels for the offer but also confided
that due to his “present associations and occupation, which are not right,” he
felt that his “eternal welfare is at stake in making a change and cutting
away” from his life in New York. “Pray for me,” Price implored.54
One of the many temptations that New York City had to offer George
McCready Price was the young but growing socialist movement. As a
regular reader of the Adventist Review and Herald, Price would have
encountered fairly regular discussions of the new party. Consistent with the
approach that Price later took in his own writings, Adventist editors
expressed sympathy with socialist aims, but rejected collective political
action in favor of individual salvation through the acceptance of Jesus as
savior and belief in Adventist eschatology. In a 1905 article commenting on
the gains of the Socialists in the 1904 elections, for example, church leader
Leon A. Smith, son of Seventh-day Adventist pioneer Uriah Smith,
commented that “from a political standpoint, much may be said in favor of
socialism as compared with other political systems”; and yet, the only
solution to humanity’s problems was “the coming kingdom of Christ.”55
Socialists had even established a small but significant toehold in Price’s
native New Brunswick by this time. Maritime membership in the Socialist
Party of Canada (founded in 1905) never reached more than three hundred.
But there were branches of Canadian socialists in the larger towns of New
52
New York State Census, Fifteenth Election District, Block A, Seventeenth Assembly District,
Borough of Manhattan, County of New York, State of New York, June 1, 1905, 43–44. Price lived
at 422 W. 57th Street, New York, N.Y. On the Central Presbyterian Church, see http://trinitynyc.
tripod.com/trinity.html. For a view of both original buildings, see http://g.co/maps/zmyq3.
53
Amelia Price to A. G. Daniells, March 5, 1905, RG 11, Box 13, Presidential Outgoing
Letterboxes, Book 35, Archives of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, Silver
Spring, Maryland.
54
George McCready Price to A. G. Daniells, from 422 W. 57th Street, New York, N.Y., March
19, 1905, RG 11, Box 20, President’s Incoming Letters, 1905-D to 1905-P, Archives of the General
Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, Silver Spring, Maryland.
55
Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, July 13, 1905.
“YE SHALL KNOW THEM BY THEIR FRUITS”
701
Brunswick—Saint John, Fredericktown, and Moncton, among others—as well
as some of the smaller ones such as Albert and Whitehead.56
Early 1905 was a heady time for New York City’s more radical-minded
socialists due to events happening thousands of miles distant. On January
22, which soon became known as “Bloody Sunday,” the troops of Czar
Nicholas II fired rifles into a crowd of some 100,000 workers and peasants
who had traveled to the Winter Palace to present a petition to their ruler.
“Civil War Threatened, Workman Have Lost Faith in the Czar, and Now
Mean to Fight,” read one headline in the New York Times the next day. As
strikes quickly spread through St. Petersburg and beyond, Russian-Jewish
socialists on the lower east side of New York, just across town from Price’s
former digs, were electrified. “In that part of the city,” the paper reported,
“thousands of men and women who have cared and suffered for the cause of
Russian freedom, have found a haven, and there was not one of these who
did not feel a personal share in the events.”57 Socialist intellectuals from
more privileged backgrounds were also inspired by the scale and depth of
the Russian revolt. Soon after “Bloody Sunday,” New York socialist William
English Walling headed off to Russia to cover events for the socialist press.58
Explaining the significance of the events a week later, the Times editors
observed that “industrial Russia has outgrown political Russia.” Relying on
Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary framework, they agreed with him that the
emergence of large-scale factory production in Russia had sounded the doom
of “militancy,” by which Spencer meant a political system in which
obedience, hierarchy, and compulsion are the norm. For its part, the Review
and Herald had little to say about Russia except to reprint a January article
noting striking parallels between the French Revolution and developing
Russian revolt. Rather than reach any definitive conclusions, the editors
ended by inserting a series of question marks, wondering whether the
“terror” they observed in both France and Russia would end, as it did in
France, with “democratic government.” The following year, however, after
printing news of mass execution, imprisonment and exile of the Czar’s
opponents, Adventist editors placed the events in a prophetic perspective.
“There are abundant evidences,” they wrote, “in all parts of the world that
56
David Frank and Nolan Reilly, “The Emergence of the Socialist Movement in the Maritimes,
1899–1916,” Labour/Le Travail 4 (1979): 89–96; Ian McKay, “Of Karl Marx and the Bluenose:
Colin Campbell McKay and the Legacy of Maritime Socialism,” Acadiensis 27 (Spring 1998):
3–25.
57
“Civil War Threatened,” New York Times, January 23, 1905, 1; “Revolution Party Here Hails
News with Joy,” New York Times, January 23, 1905, 2.
58
McFarland, 122–123. Walling was not formally a member of the Socialist Party of America
until 1910, but he helped write the party’s 1904 platform and wrote widely for socialist
publications during the decade. Mark Pittenger, American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought,
1870–1920, 147.
702
CHURCH HISTORY
we have come to the perilous times which indicate that the end of all things is at
hand.”59
American socialists in New York and elsewhere might well have agreed with
the Spencerian evolutionary scheme outlined by the Times editors. As historian
Mark Pittenger has shown, early American socialists enthusiastically promoted
a mix of Darwinian and Spencerian ideas. They built on a solid foundation of
admiration by Marx and Engels for Darwin’s discoveries. John Spargo, a
prominent American socialist who knew Marx, recalled the founder saying,
“Nothing ever gives me greater pleasure than to have my name linked unto
Darwin’s. His wonderful work makes my own absolutely impregnable.
Darwin may not know it, but he belongs to the Social Revolution.” And
American socialists included a range of popularizers of evolutionary science,
who tended, contrary to Marx and Engels, but consonant with Spencer, to
apply Darwin’s ideas to the whole social “organism.” Perhaps the best
known was Arthur M. Lewis, whose Evolution Social and Organic (1908)
contained a series of lectures that Lewis gave to overflow working-class
audiences around the country.60 To the extent that Price, and others, would
tie evolution to socialism, their argument certainly contained a grain of truth.
In the spring of 1905, well before the Russian Revolution reached its climax
in the fall with the creation of the St. Petersburg soviet, a general strike,
mutinies, an abortive uprising in Moscow, and the repression that followed,
George McCready Price accepted the offer of employment from church
President Daniells. He left New York City, and moved to Tacoma Park,
Maryland, where he took up work as a teamster, helping with the building of
the new national headquarters of the Seventh-day Adventist church. After
several months of manual labor, Price was assigned to serve as principal of
an Adventist school in Oakland, California, and, at the end of the summer,
he arrived there, carrying a trunk full of papers from his unpublished
manuscript.61 During that summer, when Price was not hauling construction
materials, he was researching and writing what would be his next book,
Illogical Geology, published in 1906. But Price’s stint in Oakland lasted only
a year. In the summer of 1906, he was back to doing construction and
handyman work for the church in Loma Linda, California, a budding
Adventist settlement sixty miles east of Los Angeles. Once again without
professional work, Price was “heartbroken.” But starting in 1907, he began
teaching at the Loma Linda College of Evangelists, and would spend most
59
“French and Russian Revolutions,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald , February 2, 1905, 5;
“Note and Comment,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, August 16, 1906, 7.
60
Mark Pittenger, American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870–1920, 17, 140–145.
61
Ernest Lloyd to Harold W. Clark, December 7, 1964, “Correspondence about George
McCready Price’s Biography,” George McCready Price Papers, Collection 2, Box 2, Folder 4,
AHC.
“YE SHALL KNOW THEM BY THEIR FRUITS”
703
of the remainder of his life living and teaching at Adventist institutions from
England to Nebraska to the West Coast.62
IV. GOD’S TWO BOOKS
Price’s students at Loma Linda were young Adventist nursing students whom
Ellen White dubbed “medical evangelists.” One of Price’s students from these
years was Eda Reid, the daughter of Swedish immigrants who had grown up in
Nebraska and joined the Adventist church. She took Price’s classes in physics
and chemistry. As she recalled, “he opened every class with prayer. He always
had a twinkle in his eyes.” As for his teaching methods, “I can’t remember his
just telling us things,” she noted. “We found them out by experimentation. Even
when we wondered what some strange mixture might do, he let us go ahead,
knowing, of course, there would be no explosion, which we feared there
would be.”63
For Price, and likely for many of his students, there was no contradiction
between opening class with prayer and then jumping into scientific
investigation. After all, at this Adventist institution, students were also
required to take a course in Spirit of Prophecy (the life and writings of Ellen
White), taught by John B. Burden, the founder of the Loma Linda
Sanitarium, and the president of the College Board of Trustees.64 The idea
that nature and revelation were mutually reinforcing sources of truth drew on
a centuries-old Christian apologetic tradition reaching back to early patristic
writings. In North America, it was expressed as early as 1721 with Cotton
Mather’s Christian Philosopher, which referred to the “Book of Nature”
along with the Bible as proof of God’s glory. While Price was here
following Ellen White, who often used this terminology in her own work,
his writing in these years does betray a concern for the dangers posed by the
untrammeled exercise of reason, unchecked by faith in God.65
These two sources of truth—and the dangers of straying from them—are the
primary focus of the book Price published in 1911: God’s Two Books: Or Plain
Facts about Evolution, Geology and the Bible. Published by the Adventist
Review and Herald Publishing Association, this work is the first one in
62
Numbers, The Creationists, 94–95, 98.
Eda A. Reid to Harold W. Clark, January 12, 1965, “Correspondence about George McCready
Price’s Biography,” George McCready Price Papers, Collection 2, Box 2, Folder 4, AHC. Later,
Reid regularly contributed columns to Adventist publications. See, for instance, Eda A. Reid,
“You Don’t Have to Be Good,” Signs of the Times (June 2, 1953), 11.
64
1908 Yearbook of the Seventh-day Adventist Denomination (Washington, D.C.: Review and
Herald, 1908), 139.
65
Ronald Numbers, “Reading the Book of Nature through American Lenses,” in Numbers,
Science and Christianity in Pulpit and Pew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 59–60.
63
704
CHURCH HISTORY
which Price explicitly addressed socialism and the labor movement. The
socialist movement had grown substantially since Price published Outlines in
1902, and the labor movement, including in his adopted California, had been
making headlines. The intellectual framework for his critique of evolution
was the by-now familiar “fruits” argument, but this time draped in a more
rigorous scientific-sounding guise. Perhaps due to his newfound academic
authority in a college classroom—Loma Linda would also award him an
honorary bachelor of arts degree for his previous coursework and teaching—
Price paid more serious attention in this work to the question of scientific
method.66
In doing so, he drew upon a longstanding tradition of joining Protestant
theology with Baconian empiricism.67 As a number of scholars have
observed, a wide range of American Protestant thinkers embraced Baconian
inductive reasoning. Originally a weapon wielded against medieval
scholasticism, Baconian ideas were enlisted, through the agency of Scottish
Commonsense Realism, as a defense of the existing order against what were
viewed as dangerously speculative hypotheses arising from the French
Revolution. Pure facts, unadulterated by any (false) assumptions came first;
only then could conclusions follow. Without acknowledging the deeply a
priori and deductive character of their own theistic worldviews, Protestant
leaders fixed on the words of scripture as the essential objective facts to be
collected, classified, and organized. As American evangelical leader Reuben
Torrey put it in his contribution to the Fundamentals on the subject of the
resurrection of Jesus Christ, “we shall not assume anything whatever.” Or as
Price later explained, science involved the “patient gathering of facts.”
“Shameful speculation” was to be avoided.68
The focus on collecting facts had a democratic flavor: any literate person
with access to the Bible and a dose of what Price called “enlightened
common sense” could use these facts to reach conclusions about both
spiritual and earthly matters. And it had sunk deep roots in the AngloAmerican world. A popularized version of Baconianism had become so
firmly entrenched in England by the mid-nineteenth century that even
66
Harold Clark, Crusader For Creation, 32; Numbers, The Creationists, 107.
On Price and Baconianism, see Numbers, The Creationists, 107–108; Malcolm Bull and Keith
Lockhart, Seeking a Sanctuary: Seventh-day Adventism and the American Dream, 2nd ed.
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 31.
68
George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 55–62, 111–116, 120–121; Jon H.
Roberts, Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution,
1859–1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 41–42; Dwight Bozeman,
Protestants in an Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal and Antebellum American Religious
Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977); Reuben Torrey, “The Certainty
and Importance of the Bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the Dead,” in The
Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth (Chicago: Testimony, 1915) 5:83.
67
“YE SHALL KNOW THEM BY THEIR FRUITS”
705
Charles Darwin, who was putting forth the audacious hypothesis of natural
selection without ever having empirically observed the process, clothed his
effort in proper Baconian garb on the frontispiece of the first edition of On
the Origin of Species. The selection he chose from Bacon’s 1603 work, The
Advancement of Learning, trumpeted the value of studying both “the book of
God’s word” and “the book of God’s works.”69 For exactly opposite
purposes, Price included on his title page of God’s Two Books a similar
quotation from Bacon’s De Augmentis Scientiarum, a Latinized version of
The Advancement of Learning, which refers to the “volume of Scriptures”
and “volume of the Creatures.”70
In Price’s exploration of the facts of geology, which fills most of the book’s
pages, the speculative, unfactual theory of evolution comes up wanting. While
acknowledging that a certain amount of common descent must have taken
place, Price scored evolutionists for their unwarranted “assumptions” which
get them into trouble.71 But what is telling about Price’s “inductive” book is
that its opening chapter is entitled, “Moral and Social Aspects of the
Evolution Theory.” His argument that we can know the scientific theory of
evolution by its “fruits” is by now familiar. And yet it is also strikingly
deductive. At one point in the chapter, for instance, Price touched on the
subject of human evolution when he analyzes the perennial subject of
theodicy—that is, “the evil and misery of our present world” in face of the
notion that God is good. Price argued there are three possibilities. First,
perhaps God made us evil. Second, perhaps he made us “by development
from ruder and still lower conditions, and we be now on the road to a yet
higher plane of development” (the evolutionary answer, albeit a theistic one).
Third, God made human beings good, but Adam and Eve violated “moral
law” and lost His blessing.
Not surprisingly, Price ruled out option one as impugning the nature of God.
He also found fault with option two, but not by considering any evidence of
how humans have developed through their history or prehistory. Rather,
option two implied that if “pride and lust are perfectly natural to the human
heart,” then these evil traits “must in some way express the character of our
Designer.” And if they are ordained by God, then they must not be immoral.
But surely that cannot be. As Price wrote, “there is no need of saying that
69
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1964), ii. On Darwin and Baconianism, see also Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The
‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), 34–36.
70
George McCready Price, God’s Two Books: Or Plain Facts About Evolution, Geology, and the
Bible (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald, 1911; 2nd edition, 1918). This is a translation of the
Latin text quoted by Price.
71
Ibid., 59.
706
CHURCH HISTORY
there must be something wrong with a notion of man’s origin that leads to such
a frightful conclusion.” Therefore, by using deductive syllogistic logic, the
answer must be option three: human immoral conduct is the result of
degeneration caused by human original sin.
Price capped off his deductive chain of reasoning with the following
restatement of the “fruits” argument:
And surely the moral issue, as set forth above, is a surer way of gauging the
truth or falsity of the Evolution theory than the long, complicated methods
connected with “variation” and “selection,” “heredity” and “environment,”
and the other biological problems, even supposing the theory apparently
capable of the most exact proof. In short, we need offer no apology for
thus measuring this scientific hypothesis by other and far more certain
standards of proof.72
On the one hand, Price seems to make a remarkably un-Baconian argument.
The validity of a biological scientific idea, that is, has little to do with the
status of the facts drawn from the natural world that support or refute that
idea. On the other, he suggests that the facts that truly matter are “moral”
ones—the societal consequences of adopting evolutionary logic.73
In developing this line of thinking in God’s Two Books, Price for the first
time made an explicit connection between the “moral” fruits of evolution
and socialism. The basic framework—that evolutionary theory threatens “the
very foundations of civil and religious liberty”—harkened back to his
discussion in Outlines nine years earlier. But Price seemed more alarmed at
the potential consequences of the “ceaseless struggle for existence and
survival at the expense of others.” He pointed to the danger of “the grim,
Red terror loading its pistol and sharpening its dirk while awaiting the
opportune time to strike.” Indeed, Price argued that evolutionary “ethics” are
the primary cause of
firing the blood and quickening the pace of the present strenuous age, until
the only apparent outcome will be the wreck and anarchy of Revolution, all
the more hopeless and horrible this time because it will be universal over the
globe, coterminous with the bounds of civilization.
72
Ibid., 27–31, emphasis added.
In a later restatement of this argument, Price put it this way: “The stench arising from a putrid
carcass will inform us of decomposition without any elaborate knowledge of organic chemistry; and
the beauty of a sunset can be appreciated without any profound knowledge of optics or of
meteorology. In the same way our intuitive knowledge of justice, and truth, and benevolence
may serve as safer guides in attempting to read the mysterious messages of nature, than will our
conclusions based on such studies as those presented by Malthus, On Population, or those made
so popular in the Origin of Species” (George McCready Price, The Phantom of Organic
Evolution [New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1924], 180).
73
“YE SHALL KNOW THEM BY THEIR FRUITS”
707
He variously referred to this event as the “inevitable crash,” or as “the deluge.”
Again, Price reviewed the possible remedies for this evolutionary and
revolutionary chaos, all of which involve the “curtailing of individualism.”
Whether they intend it or not, Price argued, all collective efforts to remake
the world are doomed to end in despotism. As he wrote, “every publicownership man, every Socialist, every imperialist, every trust magnate, is
contributing something to the swelling cry of those enthusiastic but deluded
voices” who will eventually call for a “Caesar or a local chieftan” to impose
order. The point “to be especially noted,” Price concluded, “is that
practically every Socialist, every imperialist or world federationist, bases his
whole argument ultimately on the evolutionary progress of the race or the
world.”74 In line with all premillenialists, Price believed such progress was
deeply illusory.
One suspects, however, that Price’s growing concern with the Socialists had
everything to do with the real political gains they had made since 1902, which
were covered amply in the Adventist press. Since Price was living and working
near Los Angeles, it is also likely that his thinking about the fruits of
evolutionary science and their connections to labor and socialism was
affected by a literal explosion that took place there shortly before God’s Two
Books was completed. On October 1, 1910, a dynamite bomb ripped through
the Los Angeles Times building, setting it on fire, killing twenty-one people,
and injuring one hundred. The explosion took place during a strike by
unionized ironworkers against the city’s iron manufacturers. Times publisher
Harrison Gray Otis was bitterly anti-union and headed the city’s employer
association, which aimed to break the strike and run unions out of Los
Angeles. Otis promptly accused unionists—whom he called “anarchist
scum”—of setting the bombs. In April 1911, authorities arrested and charged
ironworker union leaders J. B. and J. J. McNamara for the crime, to which
they pled not guilty. The American Federation of Labor rallied to their
defense, as did the Socialist Party. Job Harriman, Socialist front-runner in the
Los Angeles mayoral race, joined the McNamaras’ defense team, which was
headed by Clarence Darrow. But soon after the trial opened in October, the
brothers, under intense pressure, changed their pleas and admitted to
carrying out the bombing.75
George McCready Price and other readers of the Adventist press nationwide
received a steady stream of commentary on the McNamara case. Upon the
arrest of the two brothers, an article in Signs of the Times noted that the
Socialists “propose to make ‘California a battleground.’” Observing that
74
Price, God’s Two Books, 32–35.
Philip S. Foner, The AFL in the Progressive Era, 1910–1915, History of the Labor Movement
in the United States, vol. 5 (New York: International, 1980), 7–31.
75
708
CHURCH HISTORY
opinion about the McNamaras’ guilt was deeply divided, the Signs editors
placed the conflict in prophetic perspective. “Strifes of this kind are growing
both in frequency and in bitterness,” they wrote.76 In the spring of 1911,
Signs reported that William “Big Bill” Haywood had proposed a general
strike to protest the “capitalistic conspiracy” against the McNamaras, a move
the editors believed would not aid “either justice or the cause of labor.”77
The editors also ran a lengthy article on the rise of Socialism—“the worldwide spirit of revolution”—that focused on the McNamara case. The article
featured a substantial excerpt of a piece by Socialist Eugene Debs, who also
called for a general strike and urged workers to “roll up a united Socialist
vote in California that will shake the Pacific Coast like an earthquake.”
Without taking a stand for or against the McNamaras, Signs focused on the
intensity of the conflict, citing this as proof of Bible prophecy in the book of
Timothy: “But know this, that in the last days grievous times shall come. For
men shall be lovers of self, lovers of money.”78
The optimism of Debs and fellow Socialists in early 1912 was bolstered by
the growing Socialist vote. In November 1912, it would be further confirmed
when Debs himself received some 900,000 votes in his presidential bid.
Once again, the Adventist press followed these events and provided readers
with ample coverage of Socialist proposals.79 For instance, a Review and
Herald article published in March 1912 commented on the “rapid increase of
the Socialist vote.” It quoted a recent Outlook article, which noted with
alarm, the election of Socialist mayors in a number of industrial cities and
towns, as well as the election of Socialist state legislators in New York and
Rhode Island. It also drew from a speech given by the president of Cornell
University, Jacob Gould Schurman, a former philosophy professor and a
native of Prince Edward Island, Canada, who stated that “the spirit of
discontent is far more widely diffused than ever before, and the causes are at
once more fundamental and more permanent.” His assessment, wrote the
Adventist editors, “is worthy of serious consideration.” Naturally, the
significance for the Review and Herald, as always, was that such conflict
76
Signs of the Times, July 4, 1911.
Signs of the Times, May 23, 1911.
78
“A Condition and Not a Theory,” Signs of the Times, September 26, 1911, 602–603.
79
See, for instance, “Christianity’s Solution of the Problem of Capital and Labor,” Advent Review
and Herald, August 14, 1913, 7–9; “A World-Wide Industrial Conflict,” Advent Review and
Herald, September 28, 1916, 1; “The Socialist Platform,” Advent Review and Herald, June 11,
1908; “The Socialist Deluge,” Advent Review and Herald, July 13, 1905, 5; “Socialism Versus
Christianity,” Advent Review and Herald, January 30, 1908, 10–11; “Christianity Versus
Socialism,” Advent Review and Herald, March 17, 1903, 5; “Jesus and Socialism,” Advent
Review and Herald, May 28, 1908, 6; “Recognizing Danger,” Advent Review and Herald,
November 5, 1908, 6; “Man’s Versus God’s Rule,” Advent Review and Herald, May 1, 1913, 4;
“Christ and Socialism,” Advent Review and Herald, September 23, 1909, 7.
77
“YE SHALL KNOW THEM BY THEIR FRUITS”
709
was yet another sign of the approaching end times. The attempts of the
Socialists to remake the world, they concluded, “are only preliminary to a
time of violence and lawlessness which will as surely come as effect follows
cause.”80
V. BACK TO THE BIBLE
As the Review and Herald was seeking to educate Adventist readers about how
socialists fit into the “signs of the times,” Price published Back to the Bible
(1916), in which he once again addressed himself to socialism and its
connections to evolutionary thought. In a chapter entitled “The Federation of
the World,” Price warned of the danger that humanity was trying to organize
on a global scale to improve the world. Whether such efforts were led by
“the capitalistic classes” or “the proletariat,” they both fell prey to same evil:
the “deification of man” or the “perfectibility, or the improvability, of the
race.” Rather than accept that the ultimate cause of misery is “man’s evil
nature,” such schemes of world federation rested on the false idea that an
“evil environment” was to blame. This idea, in turn, derived from the
“Evolution doctrine,” which argued that “all things relating to human life are
equally and entirely mere matters of convention, matters of expediency; that
morality is only petrified custom; and that the race is absolutely free from all
external constraint.”81
While Price claimed that either capitalists or workers could push such a
scheme, his discussion focused mainly on the latter, which he called “the
immediate issue.” “The radicals among the Socialists, the labor-unionists, the
I. W. W.,—in a word, the whole of the proletariat,—are raising issues which
they consider are the real first steps toward the goal of their ambitions,”
warned Price. But following the lead of the Review and Herald, Price added
a disclaimer, saying that he was merely studying the subject in the “impartial
spirit of science.” In fact, he went even further, saying he wanted to clarify
his position, which was: “all honor to those who are trying to secure by
every righteous means a greater degree of ‘social justice’ for the oppressed
and downtrodden.”82
The degree to which Price gives the socialists some credit is striking. It may
be that his own struggle for survival on the margins of academic respectability
and economic security made him more sympathetic to the socialists’ message.
It is hard not to think of his time spent in New York City in this regard. Price’s
80
“A Disquieting Situation,” Advent Review and Herald, March 7, 1912, 8.
George McCready Price, Back to the Bible or the New Protestantism (Washington, D.C.:
Review and Herald, 1916), 170–172.
82
Ibid., 175–178.
81
710
CHURCH HISTORY
career trajectory also fluctuated in this period after 1912. His position at the
College of Medical Evangelists in Loma Linda ended in that year. Over the
following six years, he taught at two Adventist secondary institutions—
Fernando Academy in Los Angeles County, from 1912 to 1914, and then
Lodi Academy from 1914 until 1920, when he once again obtained a
college-level position.83
Not only does Price concede socialists their good intentions, but he
also provided an analysis that mirrored the Communist Manifesto itself.
For instance, Price attributed the trend toward world federation to several
“material factors,” including the railroad, steamship, automobile, telephone
and telegraph, which have converted the world into “one vast community
with common interests, common aspirations, and a unified selfconsciousness.” Moreover, Price wrote, corporations which no longer are
confined within national borders are also contributing to this growing sense
of “internationalism.” Thus, whether one seeks to build a global capitalist
empire or an international labor movement, “consolidated humanity” is
essential.84 Not only does this analysis parallel Marx’s logic, but even some
of the language Price uses in the book echoes the Marxist classics. Witness,
for instance, his unrealistic conflation of the radical section of the labor
movement, cited earlier, with “the whole of the proletariat.”
The somewhat schizophrenic respect that Price expressed for socialists in
Back to the Bible dovetails with his continuing critique of imperialism.
Although American and European socialists took a variety of stands on
imperialism in this era, most socialists, and particularly the party’s left wing,
stood staunchly against the growing American empire. As in Outlines
(1902), Price quoted pro-imperialist journalist Amos Fiske from his 1899
article, “Consecrated Fallacies,” to expose the arguments used to justify the
U.S. annexation of the Philippines. Fiske challenged anti-imperialists’ use of
the Declaration of Independence to argue against imposing U.S. rule on
Filipinos “without consent of the governed.” Using the example of African
Americans in the United States, Fiske wrote that “all men are not created
equal in any possible sense of the word. The creation of men has been a
gradual process of evolution and they have been coming into being in
different parts of the earth through long generations with differences and
inequalities which development has varied and widened, and not obliterated.”85
As before, Price attributed such thinking to evolutionary ideas, employed by
a wide variety of pro-imperialists. Evangelist Josiah Strong, for instance,
83
Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists, 465n22.
Ibid., 168–169.
85
Ibid., 158; Amos K. Fiske, “Some Consecrated Fallacies,” The North American Review 169
(December 1899): 822, 827.
84
“YE SHALL KNOW THEM BY THEIR FRUITS”
711
quoted Darwin and Spencer in arguing that the “Anglo-Saxon” was “divinely
commissioned to be . . . his brother’s keeper.”86 Arguing against Fiske’s
position in 1902, Price had simply concluded that “the stronghold, the
justification of it all is the doctrine of universal evolution.” This second time
around, however, his attribution had a much sharper political character.
Reminding readers that Fiske’s nakedly racist language did not harken from
the pre–Civil War era but rather from recent years, Price commented that
“the capitalist oligarchy of our day is again boldly teaching the same
doctrine, and it is everywhere appealing to the accepted theory of Evolution
as the justification for these doctrines.”87 Price’s outlook in 1916 reflected
the changing landscape of American politics, in which the conflict between
capital and labor was increasingly sharp.
Whether or not his own bitter experiences might have inclined him to
sympathize with secular rebels, in the end, Price was certain that the socialist
quest for proletarian international brotherhood would end in disaster. In fact,
in Back to the Bible, Price concluded that in comparison with the “despotism
that is already looming up on the horizon of our time,” “the Roman Empire
in its palmiest days was a mere baby, a doll.” And yet, for premillennialists,
there is always a silver lining in bad news. Indeed, Price speculated that this
latest drive for “federation of the world” by the socialists may “justly be
regarded by heaven . . . as the climax of apostasy, calling for the final
closing of the long reign of sin.”88 In a perverse way, the socialists and other
promoters of world federation might well be speeding the second coming of
Christ.
VI. PRICE MEETS
THE
BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION
When Price returned to the topic of socialism five years later—in Poisoning
Democracy and Socialism in the Test-Tube, both published in 1921—there
was no mistaking his negative appraisal. In the aftermath of World War I and
86
Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 170–200; Josiah Strong, Our
Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (New York, N.Y.: American Home
Missionary Society, 1885), 161.
87
George McCready Price, Back to the Bible, 158, emphasis added. Price’s change of language
may have partly reflected the increasing prominence of Amos Fiske in business circles. In 1899, the
Harvard-educated Fiske served on the editorial staff of the New York Times. Starting in 1902, Fiske
became associate editor of the New York–based Journal of Commerce and was an authority on the
banking industry who helped engineer the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. See “Amos K. Fiske,
Journalist, Dead,” New York Times, September 22, 1921; Federal Reserve Foreign Bank:
Stabilizing the Dollar Exchange in Neutral Countries, Hearings before the Committee on
Banking and Currency, United States Senate, Sixty-Fifth Congress, 2nd Session, on S. 3928, to
amend Federal Reserve Act, 137.
88
Ibid., 176–179.
712
CHURCH HISTORY
the Bolshevik Revolution, his attitude had clearly hardened. Price could still
breezily dismiss socialism as a set of “temporary expedients for those who
would seek to prolong the present dying agonies of a doomed world.” The
second advent of Christ was still the only solution for Price. But socialism
now represented more than meetings, agitators, and subversive books—it
meant a revolutionary government in power. It also appeared ever more
closely intertwined with evolution.
Adorned with photos of Lenin and Trotsky, Socialism in the Test-Tube
warned of the dangers of the Bolshevik government. Co-written with
Seventh-day Adventist missionary Robert B. Thurber, the book was clearly
aimed at a popular audience. The book’s argument is presented in the form
of a fictional conversation between Gordon, a young American soldier on
leave from fighting in France, and some of his friends and neighbors. When
he asks Stevens, a local respectable labor leader about revolutionary Russia,
he learns the following: “the chaos of Russia is a lurid beacon” of the “ruin
that awaits the state” when the people have been “degraded by centuries of
apostate religion, and finally poisoned by the teachings of Marxian
Socialism.” Explaining the connection to evolution, Stevens added that “the
ethics of the jungle and the cave, inspired by Darwinism, and the doctrine of
the class war and dictatorship of the proletariat, taught by Socialism, may be
trusted to evolve the vulgar tyranny of Bolshevism, but never the orderly
democracy of America.”89
Poisoning Democracy sounded similar themes. Published by Fleming H.
Revell, whose imprint included a wide swath of American fundamentalist
authors, including William Bell Riley of the Minneapolis First Baptist
Church and the World Christian Fundamentals Association, this book also
made it clear how closely allied evolution and socialism were. The
“Evolution doctrine,” wrote Price, “develops logically and inevitably into
Socialism and Bolshevism as its natural expression in the department of
social and civil life.” Again using the analogy of judging “a tree by its
fruits,” Price pointed to the baleful example of Russia where, he said, “these
doctrines have been carried to their logical results.”90 Price also drew on
earlier anti-socialist polemics to emphasize the terrible moral consequences
of evolution. He quoted Theodore Roosevelt, from a 1909 article, where the
former president charged that “doctrinaire Socialism would replace the
family and home life by a glorified state free-lunch counter and State
foundling asylum, deliberately enthroning self-indulgence as the ideal, with,
89
George McCready Price and Robert B. Thurber, Socialism in the Test-Tube (Nashville, Tenn.:
Southern, 1921), 113.
90
George McCready Price, Poisoning Democracy: A Study of the Religious and Moral Aspects of
Socialism (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1921), 14, 19–20.
“YE SHALL KNOW THEM BY THEIR FRUITS”
713
on its darker side, the absolute abandonment of all morality between man and
woman.”91 Adventist readers of the Review and Herald were familiar with
these claims about the Bolsheviks. As one 1919 article quoted a witness
testifying before a U.S. Senate investigating committee, “they are aiming at
free love and hope to do away with marriage; to make marriage a contract
for a term of years, so to speak.”92
The Adventist concern with the moral “fruit” of Bolshevism converged
during the 1920s with a broader critique of proposals for “companionate
marriage” in the U.S. as Bolshevik-inspired.93 The alleged nexus between
evolution, Bolshevism, and immorality made for a potent political mix and
helps explain the intensity of the fight over teaching evolution in the schools
during that decade. Such concerns were echoed in a letter Price received in
1921 from John Freeman, pastor of the Baptist church in Springfield,
Kentucky, who wrote about the baneful “influence of modern scientific
instruction upon the moral and religious life of our people,” which Freeman
described as “heart-crushing.” “Everywhere,” he wrote, “there is the letting
down of sexual barriers; the breaking down of the marriage altar and the
disintegration of the home.”94
In Poisoning Democracy, in comparison with his rather vague discussion in
his 1902 Outlines, Price clearly explained how socialism could also be viewed
as a form of religious despotism. Here, he drew an intriguing parallel between
his own eschatology and Marxism:
The picturesque stories of Darwin’s struggle for existence and the ape origin
of man constitute the Genesis and Exodus of the socialist Bible; the
economic interpretation of history makes up the rest of its Old Testament;
while the cheerful doctrine of the class struggle is its Apocalypse, with its
prophecy of a coming Armageddon, followed by a socialist new heaven
and new earth.
Socialism, in other words, “is a religion.” Indeed, it was the “devil’s poison for
democracy,—a poison for the working classes who accept it as their religion.”95
Casting socialism as religion made it doubly dangerous in Adventist terms—it
encompassed both horns of the lamb-dragon. And yet, once again, this very
danger also offered hope. The Review and Herald captured the paradox nicely
in an April 3, 1919 headline: “Bolshevism as a Sign of Christ’s Coming.”96
91
Ibid., 58.
Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, April 3, 1919.
93
Rebecca Davis, “‘Not Marriage at All, but Simple Harlotry’: The Companionate Marriage
Controversy,” Journal of American History 94 (March 2008): 1146–1148.
94
John D. Freeman to George McCready Price, July 23, 1921, “Correspondence, 1906–1925,”
George McCready Price Papers, Collection 2, Box 1, Folder 2, AHC.
95
Price, Poisoning Democracy, 47, emphasis in original.
96
Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, April 3, 1919.
92
714
CHURCH HISTORY
While Poisoning Democracy is virtually unknown today, it did succeed in
garnering some high-profile reviews. An anonymous reviewer for The Literary
Digest, a publication of the Saturday Evening Post, wrote that Price’s latest
work was “truly a remarkable little book entitled to more consideration than it
is likely to get.” Price received plaudits for an argument that was “inexorably
logical” and “ingenious” and a writing style that showed “admirable lucidity.”
At the same time, the reviewer did find Price’s eschatology “curious,” coming
as it did, from a college geology professor.97 Price must have been pleased
with the review, especially its comment on his literary prowess.
His reaction was not shared by Bryn Mawr College geologist Malcolm
Bissell, who read Price’s book and then sent off a blistering attack on it to
the Digest. Far from being worthy of “‘more serious consideration,’” Bissell
wrote, Poisoning Democracy is “not worth noticing at all.” Citing Price’s
cavalier dismissal of thrust faults, Bissell thought the book showed “an
astonishing ignorance of geological as well as biological sciences.” When
Price wrote to the geologist in defense of his work, Bissell was blunt,
writing that “I am convinced that there is something wrong with your mental
processes.” Moreover, Bissell questioned the “evil fruits” argument that Price
had made central to Poisoning Democracy. “If it were true,” Bissell wrote,
“all believers in evolution, all scientists who not share your views, would be
despicable creatures, devoid of all finer qualities and without religion or
morality. This is absurd.”98
Price’s Adventist theology and questionable science continued to have
limited appeal, but in the politically heated post-World War I years, his twin
indictment of Bolshevism and evolutionism seems to have struck a chord
among the nation’s conservatives. In early 1922, Poisoning Democracy
received favorable coverage in The Constitutional Review, published by the
National Association for Constitutional Government (NACG). Founded in
1917 by career diplomat and Republican Party leader David Jayne Hill, the
NACG railed against both progressive reform and postwar labor radicalism,
featuring articles in the January 1922 issue of The Constitutional Review that
warned of the dangers of Bolshevism among both students and workers.
Price, wrote a reviewer, provided a “scathing indictment” of “socialism’s
shuddering aversion from religious beliefs and observances, its degrading
attitude toward the relation of the sexes and family life, and its fluctuating
and opportunist standards of right and wrong.”99
97
Review of Poisoning Democracy, The Literary Review, January 21, 1922, 372.
Malcolm Bissell, Letter to the Editor, The Literary Review, March 25, 1922, 538; Malcolm
Bissell to George McCready Price, April 6, 1922, Correspondence, 1906–1925, George
McCready Price Papers, Collection 2, Box 1, Folder 2, AHC.
99
Review of Poisoning Democracy, The Constitutional Review 6 (January 1922): 64. On the
NACG, see Michael Kammen, A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in
98
“YE SHALL KNOW THEM BY THEIR FRUITS”
715
Poisoning Democracy also drew praise from a range of conservative
evangelicals who shared Price’s apprehension about the moral and political
fruits of evolutionary thought. They included Virginia educator and
conservative Presbyterian Joseph D. Eggleston who had sent Price a string of
supportive missives during the World War I years, while serving as president
of Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech). In 1921, as newly
appointed president of his alma mater, the Presbyterian-affiliated HamptonSydney College, Eggleston wrote to congratulate Price on Poisoning
Democracy, which he termed a “smashing indictment.” In those early days
of Prohibition, facing unexpectedly unruly students at his beloved school,
Eggleston was pleased to share the news with Price that fellow Presbyterian
crusader William Jennings Bryan had come through town speaking on the
“menace” to young people of “Evolution and the Higher Criticism.”100
In the aftermath of World War I, as Bryan, William Bell Riley, and other
antievolution activists mobilized sentiment in favor of removing the
teaching of evolution from the public schools, Price and Adventist church
leaders increasingly found common ground with fundamentalists, despite
their theological differences. In a 1925 issue of the Review and Herald,
an advertisement for all of Price’s books appeared, with the heading
“Fundamentalist Literature.”101 That fall, after Riley had spoken in Portland,
Oregon, Price received a letter from W. E. Howell, the president of
Adventist-affiliated Union College, where Price had most recently been
teaching, giving him good news. “The manager of our Pacific Press branch
in Portland told me,” he reported to Price, “[that] he sold sixty-six books
mostly on writings of yours in one evening on the occasion of a lecture by
Dr. Riley on evolution.”102
It is likely that at least one of those books was Price’s latest effort to engage
the topic of evolution, The Predicament of Evolution (1925), which also
touched pointedly on the topic of socialism. Brief and heavily illustrated, the
book contained a chapter on socialism with a highly suggestive title, “Red
Dynamite.” Here Price was playing on a quotation from one fascinating
character named Bouck White. Hailing from an old-line New York family,
American Culture, rev. ed. (1986; New York: Knopf, 2006), 225. On David Jayne Hill, see Markku
Ruotsila, British and American Anticommunism before the Cold War (London: Frank Cass, 2001),
57, 97, 127; and “For Better Understanding,” New York Times, May 9, 1916.
100
On Eggleston, see Ronald L. Heinemann, “Joseph Eggleston,” in Brendan Wolfe, ed.,
Encyclopedia of Virginia, http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Eggleston_Joseph_Dupuy_Jr_
1867-1953; J. D. Eggleston to George McCready Price, November 29, 1921, Correspondence,
1906–1925, George McCready Price Papers, Collection 2, Box 1, Folder 2, AHC.
101
Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, August 20, 1925.
102
W. E. Howell to George McCready Price, Sept. 7, 1925, “Correspondence, 1906–1925,”
George McCready Price Papers, Collection 2, Box 1, Folder 2, AHC.
716
CHURCH HISTORY
White graduated from Union Theological Seminary in 1902, pastored several
churches in New York City (during the time Price visited there), and then
under the impact of the 1909–1910 shirtwaist strike and subsequent Triangle
Shirtwaist Fire of 1911, became a militant socialist preacher, founding his
own denomination called the Church of the Social Revolution. Based on his
higher critical training, White authored a book about Jesus as a social
revolutionary, Call of the Carpenter, which made a profound impact on
Eugene Debs and many others. Like other socialists of his time, White
hailed evolution’s ability to undermine the idea of “God the father
almighty”— which he thought had been used as a weapon of class
exploitation. This explained, he wrote why Darwinism had been hailed by
the “proletariat” and the “democracy.” In Price’s account, he quoted White
speaking about how liberal seminary teachers were aiding the cause of
socialist revolution. White approvingly described their teachings—which
included an openness to theistic evolution—as “social dynamite” that will
“blow up the whole apparatus” of capitalist civilization.103
While Predicament introduced no new arguments, its very brevity and
illustrations may have made it a more powerful vehicle for Price’s message
than either Poisoning or Test-Tube. To bring home the point about literal and
figurative dynamite, Price included a photo of the aftermath of the
September 16, 1920 bombing on Wall Street, just outside of the banking
house of J. P. Morgan.104 Under the heading “Evolution and Socialism One,”
Price spelled out the nature of their twin threat to Christianity, “Anglo-Saxon
freedom,” and “Western civilization”:
Marxian Socialism and the radical criticism of the Bible, though arising first
in point of time, are now proceeding hand in hand with the doctrine of
organic evolution to break down all those ideas of morality, all those
concepts of the sacredness of marriage and of private property, upon
which Occidental civilization has been built during the past thousand
years.105
Focusing his attention on the danger of teaching evolution in the schools, Price
urged his readers not to become complacent. In his view, the stakes could not
have been higher.
103
David Burns, The Life and Death of the Radical Historical Jesus (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2013), 82–125; Bouck White, The Call of the Carpenter (1911; New York:
Doubleday, Page, 1914), 296.
104
On the Wall Street explosion, see Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of
America in its First Age of Terror (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
105
George McCready Price, The Predicament of Evolution (Nashville, Tenn.: Southern, 1925).
The full text of the book is available here: http://www.creationism.org/books/price/PredicmtEvol/
index.htm.
“YE SHALL KNOW THEM BY THEIR FRUITS”
717
VII. PRICE’S POLITICAL LEGACY
In the decades following the Scopes Trial of 1925, Price continued to teach,
publish, and to help lead a series of small, short-lived creationist
organizations, including the Religion and Science Association (1935–1937)
and the heavily Adventist Deluge Geology Society (1938–1947). Over the
course of these years, however, Price and his allies increasingly failed to win a
majority of the creationist members of these groups to a young-earth position.
Price’s former student Harold Clark, who succeeded him at Pacific Union
College, gradually came to reject the Pricean denial of a uniform geological
column, earning bitter enmity from Price, which he expressed in a pamphlet
published and distributed in 1947, entitled, “Theories of Satanic Origin.”106 At
the same time, more liberally minded evangelicals in the American Scientific
Affiliation (ASA), founded in 1941, gravitated toward a theistic evolutionary
perspective. In 1954, the ASA’s Bernard Ramm published The Christian View
of Science and Scripture, which took a progressive creationist position that put
the age of the earth at millions of years.107
It was precisely this liberalizing trend among creationists—and Ramm’s
book in particular—that led John Whitcomb, Jr., a Bible teacher and
graduate student at Grace Theological Seminary, to strike back in 1957 with
a dissertation entitled, The Genesis Flood, which drew heavily and openly
on Price’s writings. To turn the dissertation into a book, Whitcomb teamed
up with Henry Morris. A Texas native who attended Rice Institute, Morris
was an early non-Adventist member of the Deluge Geology Society and first
read Price while still at Rice in 1943.108 Now heading up the civil
engineering department at Virginia Tech, Morris provided the credentials and
knowledge to enable Whitcomb to sell his work as scientific.
Though Morris and Whitcomb were presenting an essentially Pricean
account, as Ronald Numbers has shown, Morris and Whitcomb took pains to
distance themselves from Price in the text of the 1961 book version of The
Genesis Flood.109 Still, Price was clearly important to Morris. Writing to
Price’s biographer in 1964, some eighteen months after Price’s death, Morris
carefully wrote that while “the direct influence of his writings were not
significant in the preparation of our book, the indirect influence was quite
substantial.”110 Similarly, in his History of Modern Creationism (1984),
106
Numbers, The Creationists, 148; P. W. Christian to George McCready Price, January 16, 1947,
George McCready Price Papers, Collection 2, Box 2, Folder 1, AHC.
107
Numbers, The Creationists, 208–211.
108
Ibid., 140.
109
Ibid., 194–198.
110
Henry Morris to Harold Clark, November 19, 1964, Correspondence about George McCready
Price’s Biography, George McCready Price Papers, Collection 2, Box 2, Folder 4, AHC.
718
CHURCH HISTORY
Morris made a point of distancing himself from Price—“I obviously disagree
with Adventist eschatology, as well as . . . revelation and soteriology”—but
then effused that Price’s “tremendous breadth of knowledge in science and
Scripture, his careful logic, and his beautiful writing style made a profound
impression on me.”111
While it was “scientific creationists” who were most interested in Price’s
work in his latter years, there were others who made common ground with
Price based on his anti-communist credentials. In the 1950s, Price kept up a
correspondence with James Bales, a professor of Bible and theology at
conservative Church of Christ–affiliated Harding College in Searcy,
Arkansas. During this period, Harding president George Benson convinced a
group of fundamentalist businessmen to pour funds into the Harding
American Studies Institute, which transformed the nearly bankrupt school
into a major center for anticommunist organizing. It attracted a wide range of
conservative figures including the young Ronald Reagan.112 With a doctorate
in the history and philosophy of education from University of California at
Berkeley, Bales had become active on the evolution issue in the late 1940s,
linking up with a British creationist organization called the Evolution Protest
Movement. Bales was increasingly outspoken about communism, publishing
a series of books, including Atheism’s Faith and Fruits in 1951, and later
working with Billy James Hargis’s anti-communist Christian Crusade.113
In 1954, Bales contacted Price about his anticommunist activism, and Price
suggested he read Poisoning Democracy. Bales thanked him for the
suggestion, writing that he would get himself a copy and stating that Price
was “exactly right” about the connection between evolution and
communism. In a 1959 letter, Bales again complimented Price, saying that
“men like you knew of the menace of Communism long before the general
public or even our governmental officials, as a general rule, awoke to the
facts about communism.”114
In fact, Price had not stopped writing about communism in these later years,
though he published no major works. From 1946 through 1959, he repeatedly
sent material on this subject to Seventh-day Adventist publications, only to find
out that he was now out of step with their editorial priorities. One article, for
instance, was returned to Price because the editors believed it was “more
111
Henry M. Morris, History of Modern Creationism (1984; 2nd ed., Santee, Calif.: Institute for
Creation Research, 1993), 88.
112
Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 163–167.
113
Numbers, The Creationists, 174; Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture, “James
David Bales (1915–1995),” http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.
aspx?entryID=4724.
114
James Bales to George McCready Price, January 8, 1954, August 27, 1959, George McCready
Price Papers, Collection 2, Box 2, Folder 2, AHC.
“YE SHALL KNOW THEM BY THEIR FRUITS”
719
political than theological.” In 1951, Price was told by the Review and Herald
that there was a “strict ban” on “anything that discusses Communism.” Since
there were Adventist believers “behind the Iron Curtain,” and publishing
anticommunist material might make things more difficult for them, the
editors politely declined the article. On the other hand, Price had better
success with the same piece—“What is Marxian Socialism?—submitted to
the journal Christian Economics, published by the Christian Freedom
Foundation, which received substantial funding from conservative oil baron
J. Howard Pew. Foundation president Howard Kershner—who also had a
Harding College connection and may have learned of Price from Bales—
wrote to Price informing him that an edited version of the article was
accepted and that “you are twenty years my senior and I rejoice in the fact
you keep fighting.”115
Whether or not Morris was similarly inspired by Price’s anticommunist
arguments we will never know for sure. Certainly, there were others making
similar arguments as Morris was coming of age in Texas in the 1930s and
40s. In February 1923, in a widely reported address to the Texas state
legislature, fundamentalist firebrand preacher J. Frank Norris, who pastored
the First Baptist Church of Fort Worth and edited the Searchlight, charged
that “evolution means to deny authority” and described lurid scenes of
criminal and atheistic Bolsheviks. As a student at Rice starting in 1935,
Morris may well have heard that Norris had attacked Rice faculty back in
1923 for their evolutionist bent. Indeed, none other than Julian Huxley, the
grandson of Darwin’s “bulldog” T. H. Huxley, had started the biology
department at Rice in 1912. And if student newspaper reporting is any
indication of the prevailing views in 1923, Norris was not popular there.116
Or perhaps Morris had seen or heard of fundamentalist Dan Gilbert, a West Coast
journalist who served as a contributing editor for William Bell Riley’s Pilot. Gilbert
published a series of books in the 1930s that made the red connection to evolution,
including Crucifying Christ in Our Colleges (1933), The Vanishing Virgin (1935),
and Evolution: Root of All Isms (1935). In the latter work, the author opened his
introduction with “By their fruits ye shall know them,” and proceeded to call on
fellow“foesofevolution” tostop wasting timewriting aboutrocks, fossils,anatomy
and rather, to start using the “simpler and surer standard” of evolution’s
115
Howard Kershner to George McCready Price, January 15, 1959, George McCready Price
Papers, Collection 2, Box 2, Folder 2, AHC. On the Kershner and the Christian Freedom
Foundation, see Allan Lichtman, White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American
Conservative Movement (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2008), 174.
116
“Address on Evolution Before the Texas Legislature,” Searchlight, February 23, 1923; “Rice
Topics,” The Thresher, October 12, 1923. On Norris, see Barry Hankins, God’s Rascal: J. Frank
Norris & the Beginnings of Southern Fundamentalism (Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 1996).
720
CHURCH HISTORY
“consequences, its results—its fruitage.” Those fruits included “the lethal gasses of
communismandfree-love.”117
We do know that shortly after Morris arrived in Minneapolis in 1946 to start
his doctoral training at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, the aging
Riley called in the young man, who had just published That You Might Believe,
and floated the idea of Morris taking over Northwestern Bible College, which
Morris politely declined. (Riley hired Billy Graham in his place.) Still, Morris
may well have been acquainted with Riley’s writings, which included the likes
of Inspiration or Evolution? (1926). In a chapter entitled, “Evolution or
Sovietizing The State through Its Schools,” Riley drew on the example of
socialist preacher Bouck White, whom Price had used the previous year in
Predicament to illustrate the concept of “Red Dynamite.” For his part, Riley
put the spotlight on Soviet-minded professors in the U.S. who, in the name
of “Evolution” are “carefully laying their socialistic explosives as to do
what Bouck White said he learned from his Seminary, how to ‘blow the
Government to bits.’”118
We do know that Morris shared Price’s basic political viewpoint. On September
10, 1962, Morris gave a talk to some five hundred members of the Houston
Geological Society as part of a tour sparked by the success of Genesis Flood.
The bulk of his talk, published the following year as Biblical Catastrophism and
Geology, was an attack on the false “presuppositions” of uniformitarian geology.
But the way Morris ended the talk was strikingly un-geological. Under the
heading of “Importance of the Question,” Morris stated that “there is much
more at stake here than simply a matter of geologic interpretation.” Evolutionary
science, he argued, had invaded “nearly every aspect of human life,” and was
the basis of Dewey’s progressive education, Nietzschean ethics, fascism, and
Nazism. Significantly, he added, “even more seriously . . . modern Communism
today is grounded squarely on the theory of evolution.” He then cited Jesus on
“evil fruit” and urged his listeners to seriously investigate “the nature of the tree
itself.”119 If the political arguments held any water with his audience, perhaps
that morning’s front-page headlines might have made an impact—anti-Castro
Cubans in the U.S. appealing to the Kennedy administration to help overthrow
the Castro regime; the possibility of war with Cuba; and the downing of
U.S.-made U2 aircraft sent by Taiwan into Communist Chinese airspace.120 In
117
Dan Gilbert, Evolution: The Root of All Isms (San Diego, Calif.: Danielle Publishers, 1935),
6–8, emphasis in original.
118
William Bell Riley, Inspiration or Evolution? (Cleveland, Oh.: Union Gospel Press, 1926), 99.
119
Henry Morris to George McCready Price, January 9, 1963, George McCready Price Papers,
Collection 2, Box 2, Folder 2, AHC, emphasis added.
120
See, for instance, “Nationalist U-2 Downed by Reds over East China” and “Cubans in U.S.
Ask Anti Castro Help,” New York Times, September 1, 1962, 1; “Reporter Fires Questions at
Cuba; Castro Will Not Start Attack on U.S.,” El Paso Herald-Post, September 10, 1962, 1.
“YE SHALL KNOW THEM BY THEIR FRUITS”
721
January 1963, Morris sent Price a copy of the talk, writing that he thought Price
“might be particularly interested in the enclosed paper,” and letting him know
that the Houston crowd was “surprisingly friendly.” As far as we know, this was
the last letter Morris wrote to Price, who died about two weeks later, at the age
of 92.
Later that year and for the rest of his creationist career, Morris continued to
connect evolution and communism. In The Twilight of Evolution (1963),
reprinted twenty-six times through 1990, Morris developed further his “fruit”
argument and its connection to communism. According to Morris, evolution
was based on Satan’s rebellion against God. Just as Price had warned about
a coming despotism and looked for signs of the end times, Morris warned
that the United Nations foreshadowed a Satan-inspired, human-centered
world government that would culminate in the Antichrist. Meanwhile, the
“evil progeny” of evolution—which included socialism and communism—
was spreading “in terrifying profusion” around the world.121
When the Institute for Creation Research opened a new facility for its
Museum of Creation and Earth History in Santee, California in 1992, the
last exhibit that visitors would see before entering the gift shop, was
a panel displaying a Creation Tree—with good “fruits” representing
“Genuine Christianity” and “Correct Practice,” such as “true science,” “true
history,” and “true government”—and an Evolutionary Tree with “Harmful
Philosophies” and “Evil Practices.” At the top of the list of the former:
Communism. While this display was taken down some time before the
museum was sold to Tom Cantor and the Light and Life Foundation in 2008
(and the ICR moved to Dallas), the nearby Hall of Scholars is still part of
the museum.122 On one wall of the corridor are proponents of evolution,
who include not only Darwin but social Darwinists of the left and right. At
their center and sitting higher in elevation than all the rest is a portrait of
Karl Marx, of whom we learn that “although he was a professing Christian
in his youth, he became an atheist and (according to some) a Satanist in
college.”123 Morris had made the same argument connecting Marx and
121
Henry Morris, The Twilight of Evolution (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1963), 77, 83, 94.
On the origins of ICR, see Numbers, The Creationists, 312–20. The museum is now operated
by Tom Cantor of the Life and Light Foundation. Visit http://www.lifeandlightfoundation.org/. On
the Santee tree of evil, see Elizabeth Anderson, “If God is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?” in
Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life, ed. Louise M. Antony
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 215–230. See also Robert T. Pennock, Tower of
Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1999), 315–316.;
visit to Creation and Earth History Museum, Santee, Calif,, November 17, 2012; Interview with
Tom Cantor, November 16 and November 17, 2012, Santee, Calif.
123
Museum guests who want more detail can step into the bookstore and purchase a copy of The
Modern Creation Trilogy: Society and Creation (1996), vol. 3, by Henry Morris and his son, and
current ICR president, John Morris. This volume covers the full range of evolution’s alleged evil
fruits from abortion to homosexuality to communism to racism. To buttress the claim of Marx’s
122
722
CHURCH HISTORY
evolution to Satan in his influential book on the “culture war” facing
evangelical conservatives, The Long War Against God (1989).124
VIII. CONCLUSION
From 1902 to 1925, George McCready Price’s writings evinced a strong interest in
the moral and socio-political consequences of evolutionary ideas. Over the course
of that period, the essential eschatological framework of Price’s analysis remained
stable; the concreteness of his analysis, however, changed over time. Vague textual
references to despotism and labor unions in 1902 had evolved, shall we say, into
indictments of specific organizations and revolutionary leaders by World War I.
Evolution and socialism also seemed to become more closely allied in Price’s
mind, so that by 1925, he could assert that “Evolution and Socialism” were one
and the same thing. Price’s level of alarm also seemed to grow. As the culture
wars of the 1920s were beginning to rage, Price seemed far less content to
withhold judgment on the merits of socialism in the name of science.
Due to his peculiarly Adventist theology and his stubborn insistence on a
literal six-day creation, Price was often viewed as a supremely marginal
figure, and an isolated, pseudo-academic one at that. As disconnected as his
geological writings may have been from mainstream academia, however, Price
did not fail to notice the connections, as he saw them, between his attempts at
science and the broader political and moral world around him. It may well
have been that the very marginality of his precarious existence sensitized him
to the appeal of the Satanic siren song of socialism. Even late in his life, in
the context of the Cold War, Price connected with a new generation of
creationists and conservative evangelicals who drew inspiration from his longstanding work. The more we learn about the connections between creationism
and anticommunism, the more we can see the importance of his enduring
example. In his own distinctive way, George McCready Price was not only an
amateur geologist, but a creationist politician as well.
communion with Satan, the authors cite Richard Wurmbrand’s Marx and Satan (1986), which
makes use of Marx’s rebellious youthful writings to convict him of devil-worship. Compared to
Twilight, Trilogy goes further in tying the Satanic origin of evolution to a specific place and
person—the Tower of Babel and King Nimrod, who communed with Satan atop his monument
to ungodliness. See Morris and Morris, The Modern Creation Trilogy: Society & Creation, vol.
3 (Master Books: 1996), 54–56, 116. For one of the few scholarly analyses of this work, see
Karl W. Giberson and Donald A. Yerxa, Species of Origins: America’s Search for a Creation
Story (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 105–110. Morris makes a similar argument
in Henry M. Morris, The Long War Against God: The History and Impact of the Creation/
Evolution Conflict (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1989), 83.
124
Henry M. Morris, The Long War Against God, 82–92, 182–183.