No “E” word
Antievolution legal activity slowed remarkably after 1928. Only one antievolution law was passed in the period between 1928 and 1959 anywhere in the United States. Many antievolution statutes remained on the books, but were rarely, if ever, enforced. At the same time, efforts by groups like the ACLU to oppose antievolution legislation also lost steam. The two camps reached an uneasy truce. During this time a curious phenomenon creeped into textbooks: the disappearance of evolution per se. Existing legislation and fear of controversy led many textbook publishers to remove the mention of evolution altogether, and to replace it by fuzzy terms like “development” or “change”. A good example of this is the 1951 edition of Modern Biology by Moon, Mann, and Otto. Versions of this textbook dominated the biology market in the ‘50s. The word “evolution” appears nowhere in this book, although the text does have a chapter near the end (Chapter 58!) euphemistically named “The Changing World of Life” that includes a discussion on “the evidence that living things have changed through the ages” and on natural selection. Human evolution is nowhere in sight. As long as human evolution didn’t appear in these books, fundamentalists did not object and the laws against the teaching of evolution were left unenforced.
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