I heard recently the William Jennings Bryan’s criticism of Darwinism, came from his fear that it would give license to powerful to abuse the weak (Social Darwinism). Is that true?

I’d rate this claim as true. Concern about Social Darwinism, eugenics, and militarism were major factors in William Jennings Bryan’s stance against Darwinian evolution. He also believed that the Bible was without error and should not be challenged. Bryan’s stance was echoed by some of the other Christian critics of evolution during the early twentieth century, and was a consideration in the Scopes trial of 1925.

Bryan was primarily known for his career as a politician and was relatively quiet about his opposition to evolutionary theory before World War I. One of his few mentions of the topic is a 1904 speech where he claimed that he did not personally accept evolution, not because he disagreed with its scientific validity, but because it would require accepting “the merciless law by which the strong crowd out the weak.” He saw evolution as having societal implications that would harm the poor and marginalized. His understanding of Christianity was that it imposed a social duty to care for the weak and needy.

Bryan’s opposition to evolution became more public after World War I, because he began to think that belief in evolution, the Nietzschean philosophy of the “superman,” and militarism were all linked together and had contributed to the climate that made the war possible. By the early 1920s, Bryan was openly disputing with advocates of Darwinian evolution. He took particular exception to the conclusions of Dr. Archdale Reid, a fellow of the Royal Society, who claimed that alcoholism was useful to humanity because alcoholism would kill the unfit.

Bryan’s most famous stand against evolution is of course the Scopes trial, where he agreed to represent the prosecution in a Tennessee case against a high school teacher who had taught evolution in violation of state law. The trial was deliberately engineered by both sides as a public spectacle. Bryan’s main contention was that modern science and evolution were fundamentally amoral, while Christianity promised compassion and “brotherly love.”

The textbook that John T. Scopes had taught evolution from, George William Hunter’s Civic Biology, did briefly mention eugenics. It argued that some people were “true parasites,” and that “if such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them,” though it only urged they should not be allowed to reproduce. It also argued that Caucasians were the “highest type of race.”

Scope’s defense was also heavily connected with the American eugenics movement. Scopes did a series of public appearances with prominent supporters of evolution, including Henry Fairfield Osborne and Charles B. Davenport. Osborne was the director of the Museum of Natural History in New York, and had written the preface to later editions of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, one of the key works of scientific racism. Davenport was the director of Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory and founder of the Eugenics Records Office. He was perhaps the chief voice for eugenics in the United States. One of the experts the defense brought to the trial itself was Charles Francis Potter, a Unitarian minister, who later earned some notoriety as an advocate for what he called “euthanasia,” by which he meant the government should kill the mentally handicapped and “socially useless” (Potter particularly would draw outrage in World War II for suggesting the government should kill injured servicemen).

Bryan saw the challenge that evolution offered to Christianity as inseparable with this social Darwinian agenda. Defending the validity of the creation account in the Book of Genesis was thus seen as a form of political activism, fighting against what he saw as a dehumanizing philosophy. Bryan’s perspective lacked nuance; there were experts who supported evolution who were opposed to Social Darwinism and racial science, as well as supporters of evolution who were Christian, but he was not completely misrepresenting his opponent’s views.

In American popular culture, Bryan and the Christian Fundamentalist opposition to Scopes have often cast as ignorant or malicious. The 1955 play Inherit the Wind (and its subsequent film version) fictionalizes the Scopes trial and removes any mention of eugenics or Social Darwinism, to make its version of Bryan a pious heresy hunter, unwilling to admit the truth of modern knowledge. A considerable amount of recent historical scholarship in the past few decades has pushed back against this simplistic portrayal. Bryan definitely was motivated by his religion to denounce evolution, but there was more at issue here than a debate about scientific claims.