“Ye Shall Know Them By Their Fruits”: Evolution, Eschatology, and the Anticommunist Politics of...

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“Ye Shall Know Them By Their Fruits”: Evolution,Eschatology, and the Anticommunist Politics ofGeorge McCready Price

Carl R. Weinberg

Church History / Volume 83 / Issue 03 / September 2014, pp 684 - 722DOI: 10.1017/S0009640714000602, Published online: 31 July 2014

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0009640714000602

How to cite this article:Carl R. Weinberg (2014). “Ye Shall Know Them By Their Fruits”: Evolution,Eschatology, and the Anticommunist Politics of George McCready Price. ChurchHistory, 83, pp 684-722 doi:10.1017/S0009640714000602

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“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-dayAdventist amateur geologist who pioneered the idea of a young earth in the earlytwentieth century. Price laid the foundation for modern “creation science,” which tookoff decades later, with the publication of Henry Morris and John Whitcomb Jr.’s TheGenesis Flood in 1961. Despite his extensive writings on the details of geology,however, Price admitted that his main objections to evolution were not scientificbut “moral” and “philosophical”—the “fruits” of the “corrupt tree” of evolution.Historians have almost entirely neglected this aspect of Price’s opus; yet, Priceauthored a series of works from 1902 to 1925 that, in increasingly alarming tones,blamed evolution for socialism and communism. This article analyzes these works byexamining Price’s Adventist background, his early experiences working and living inthe United States, and the broader political context in which he wrote. It also assessesthe impact of Price’s political writings on subsequent generations of creationists andconservative evangelicals. Price should be seen as part of the long process by whicha New Christian Right was forged from materials including creationism andanticommunism. He was not only a geologist but also a creationist politician.

“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, butinwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Domen gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good treebringeth 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 nowproceeding hand in hand with the doctrine of organic evolution to breakdown all those ideas of morality, all those concepts of the sacredness ofmarriage and of private property, upon which Occidental civilization hasbeen built during the past thousand years.”—George McCready Price, ThePredicament of Evolution (1925)

The author would like to thank Ronald Numbers, Jeffrey Moran, Constance Clark, and theanonymous reviewers for Church History for their extremely helpful comments on earlier draftsof this article.

Carl R. Weinberg is Adjunct Associate Professor of History at Indiana University.

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Church History 83:3 (September 2014), 684–722.© American Society of Church History, 2014doi:10.1017/S0009640714000602

ACanadian-born Seventh-day Adventist writer, teacher, and self-trainedgeologist, George McCready Price (1870–1963) is best known forhis pioneering books in the field of what has come to be called

“creation science.” In 1923, Price published The New Geology, a college-level textbook that denounced evolution as a scientific fraud. The bookargued that a universal Noachian flood, and not eons of evolution, explainedthe geological features of the earth, which he estimated to be six thousandyears old. Scientists widely ridiculed Price, but by 1926, he had gainedenough notoriety that the editor of Science magazine could describe him asthe “principal scientific authority of the fundamentalists.”1 As Price’sgeological work formed the intellectual basis for John Whitcomb, Jr. andHenry Morris’s highly influential Genesis Flood (1961), Price is rightlyviewed 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 correspondedwith eminent researchers,2 his main objection to evolution had nothing todo with the veracity of scientific claims. As Ronald Numbers has noted,Price acknowledged that his opposition to evolution stemmed not from theobservable scientific facts of geology, but rather from what he viewed asthe “philosophical and moral” consequences of evolution—the “evil fruits”of the “corrupt tree” of evolution, in the words of Jesus’s Sermon on theMount. Moreover, Numbers observes of Price—but does not elaborate onthe point—that “in two of his books, Poisoning Democracy (1921) andSocialism in the Test Tube (1921), he explicitly linked evolution and‘Marxian socialism.’”3 Building on Numbers’s valuable clue to Price’sthinking and politics, this article examines a series of works and thehistorical context in which Price developed the “fruit” analogy to lambastboth evolution and socialism. The works include Outlines of ModernChristianity and Modern Science (1902), God’s Two Books (1911), Backto the Bible (1916), The Phantom of Organic Evolution (1924), andThe Predicament of Evolution (1925), as well as the two books thatNumbers cites.

1“Letter to the editor of Science from the principal scientific authority of the fundamentalists,”Science 63 (March 5, 1926): 259.

2Among the letters in Price’s papers is a reply from none other than Albert Einstein, who wrotePrice this brief note: “I have not seen the article you mentioned in your letter of January 29th. Butaccording to your remark about its conclusions it must be nonsense or at least misleading” (AlbertEinstein to George McCready Price, February 6, 1954, George McCready Price Papers, Collection2, Box 2, Folder 2, Adventist Heritage Center [AHC], James White Library, Andrews University,Berrien Springs, Michigan).

3Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 103.

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Perhaps because Price’s Adventism kept him away from the mainstream ofChristian fundamentalism and because he worked hard to cultivate an academicidentity, his anti-socialist writings have received almost no attention fromscholars. Indeed, while historians have explored the social and politicalcontext of antievolutionism in a variety of ways, the relationship betweenMarx and Darwin, and even the reception of evolutionary ideas amongAmerican Socialists, they largely have neglected the subject of creationistanti-socialism and anti-communism.4 The broader subject, and Price’s placewithin it, deserves analysis for several reasons. First it helps to emphasize animportant dynamic of the modern creationist movement: evolutionaryscience not only raised questions about the central theological, other-worldlyquestion of salvation—whether Christian believers have access to eternal lifeafter death—but it also generated deep concern about a range of its alleged

4See, for instance, Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, andReform 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: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1989); Robert M. Young, Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in VictorianCulture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). On Marx and Darwin, see Paul Heyer,Nature, Human Nature, and Society (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982); John BellamyFoster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000); andGiuliano Pancaldi, “The Technology of Nature: Marx’s Thoughts on Darwin,” The NaturalSciences 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 theEvidence,” 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, BeforeScopes: Evangelicalism, Education and Evolution in Tennessee, 1870–1925 (Athens: Universityof Georgia Press, 2004); Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial andAmerica’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1997); Constance Areson Clark, God—or Gorilla (Baltimore, Md.: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 2008); Jeffrey P. Moran, American Genesis: The Evolution Controversies fromScopes 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’sCulture 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-CenturyEvangelicalism: 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 208–210; R. ScottAppleby, “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 theMaking 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, AmericanSocialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993).

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this-worldly social and political repercussions, including communism.Historians have long recognized this general dynamic. George Marsden’sclassic 1980 study of fundamentalism made it clear that opponents ofmodernism often linked it to socialism or Bolshevism. In their studies ofpremillenialists, who tended to oppose evolution, both Timothy Weber andPaul Boyer underlined the role that anticommunist fears played. Focusingmore specifically on antievolutionism, Jeffrey Moran noted that creationistsblamed 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 politicalscientist Michael Lienesch’s study of antievolutionism, In the Beginning(2007), which made effective use of social constructionist theory to analyzethe dynamics of creationism primarily during the 1920s. In a discussion of“frame bridging,” where social movement activists craft their appeals tobroaden their base of support to include new audiences, Lienesch claimedthat “when all else failed, antievolutionists asserted that Darwinism wasleading to political radicalism.” He then provides several examples,including a 1923 speech of J. Frank Norris who warned that evolution isallied with Bolshevism.6 What is problematic here is the qualifier, “when allelse failed,” which implies that making such appeals was a kind of last-ditcheffort, a rhetorical last resort, with little basis in current reality or history. Myanalysis 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 twostandard creationist approaches—evolution is bad science, and it contradictsthe Bible—the argument about this-worldly consequences has a unique abilityto 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 complexand detailed critiques of evidence for evolution, the fruit argument is mucheasier to follow—it has a populist cast. Furthermore, from Price onward,creationists have identified explicitly the forces behind evolution and its fruitsas Satanic. Attributing various forms of alleged moral decay to a Satanicevolutionary science may seem ludicrous to secular-minded academics. But asKarl Giberson and Donald Yerxa note, dismissing such ideas “would mean

5Jeffrey Moran, American Genesis: The Evolution Controversies from Scopes to CreationScience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 94; George Marsden, Fundamentalism andAmerican Culture, 126, 153–156; Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief inModern 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.

6Lienesch, In the Beginning, 90–91.


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 YorkCity helps explain the compelling nature of this framework.

Third, and finally, due to Price’s role as a pioneering scientific creationist andthe impact of his flood geology on the young Henry Morris, there is at least apossibility that Price’s anticommunist politics also shaped Morris’s outlook.From at least 1962 through the 1990s, Morris himself consistently linkedevolution and communism as part of a broader framework focusing onevolution’s “evil fruits.” Morris purveyed his creationist anticommunistmessage not only in books and speeches, but also through the Institute ofCreation Research (ICR) museum first established in 1976. While Morris, adevout fundamentalist Baptist, was wary of publicly associating himself withPrice due to the latter’s Adventist theology, he openly acknowledged Price’s“profound” influence on this creationist thinking, and the two men kept up alively correspondence in the fifteen years preceding Price’s death in 1963. Atthe very least, it is clear that Price was part of a broader conversation aboutthe connections between evolution and communism that drew in a variety ofevangelical conservatives. Given historians’ growing recognition of thefoundational role of militant anticommunism in the rise of the New ChristianRight, 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 aspectsof Seventh-day Adventist theology. The church originated as an offshoot of themillenarian movement led by farmer and lay preacher William Miller. Millerhad fixed the date for Christ’s Second Coming as October 22, 1844, basedon passages in the Book of Daniel that foretold a “cleansing of thesanctuary.”9 In the wake of the “Great Disappointment” that followed the

7Karl W. Giberson and Donald A. Yerxa, Species of Origins: America’s Search for a CreationStory (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 106.

8See, for example, Markuu Ruotsila, “Carl McIntire and the Fundamentalist Origins of theChristian Right,” Church History 81 (June 2012): 378–407; Jonathan Herzog, The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America’s Religious Battle Against Communism in the Early Cold War(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins ofthe 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 UniversityPress, 2010); Donald Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’sCrusade (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Kim Phillips-Fein, InvisibleHands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York:W. W. Norton, 2009).

9On Millerism, see Ronald L. Numbers and Jonathan M. Butler, eds., The Disappointed:Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 1987).

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Messiah’s failure to appear, a group coalesced around the idea that Miller hadnot erred about the date, only about the nature of what had taken place. Christwas indeed cleansing the sanctuary—as Daniel had prophesied—but the eventwas taking place in the heavenly realm instead of on earth. By 1863, one“remnant” of the Millerite movement formally constituted itself as theSeventh-day Adventist Church, established its own weekly newspaper, andset up headquarters in Battle Creek, Michigan. Ellen White (1827–1915),who grew up in a Millerite family in Portland, Maine, began to have wakingvisions as a teenager, married church co-founder James White, and came tobe the central seer and prophet of Seventh-day Adventism. Her writings aresecond 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—inwhich the Antichrist would gather great strength and cause horrible strifeand suffering. Those who followed Christ would ultimately triumph, butbefore that, rather than moving toward a thousand years of heaven on earth,as the postmillennialists believed, humanity was inevitably headed fordisaster. For historicists—which included Adventists, as well as mostProtestants before the mid-nineteenth century—the biblical propheciesforetold history from ancient times through their own time. In regard toRevelation 13, for instance, the Adventists agreed with Protestant traditionthat the first “beast,” with seven heads and ten horns, represented theCatholic Church.11

To the traditional Protestant identification of the Antichrist with the CatholicChurch, the Adventists added a unique twist. It was contained in theirinterpretation of the second beast of Revelation 13, which had “two hornslike a lamb,” and “spake as a dragon.” This hypocritical creature appeared tobe lamb-like, or Christ-like, but later was revealed to be Satan. Unlikeprevious interpretive traditions, which had associated this beast with variousEuropean powers, the Adventists stood alone in identifying it as none otherthan the United States of America. The horns were, respectively, the republicand Protestantism, standing for civil and religious liberty. Despite theirpremillenialism and inclination toward political quietism, many foundingAdventists were abolitionists and felt that the U.S. was betraying its

10On 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 JonathanM. Butler, “Prophecy, Gender, and Culture: Ellen Gould Harmon [White]* and the Roots ofSeventh-day Adventism,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 1 (Winter1991): 3–29.

11On millenarianism, see Paul Boyer,When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in ModernAmerican Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).


founding republican ideals. The early Adventists also felt betrayed byProtestantism. As they focused intently on the expected Advent as October22, 1844 approached, many had suffered scorn and even disfellowship fromtheir primarily Methodist, Baptist, and Christian Connexion congregations.Finally, their minority Sabbatarian beliefs made them highly sensitive to thegrowing movement for Sunday laws in the nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies. While it was fellow Protestants, and not Catholics, leading thesecampaigns, the historic identification of the Antichrist with the Pope, and theassociation of the Catholic Church with political tyranny, led Adventists tobelieve that the threat of a revived Papal “despotism” was always around thecorner.12

The distinctive Adventist focus on the Saturday Sabbath day not only set thechurch apart in terms of liturgical practice, but also provided the framework forits distinctive position on evolution, as established in the early writings of EllenWhite. By the late nineteenth century, large numbers of Protestant evangelicalleaders had made an accommodation with the latest scientific discoveries thatpointed to an ancient earth. They hewed either to the day/age theory, in whicheach Biblical day of creation represented an indefinite period, or the gap theory,which postulated an unaccountably long delay between Genesis 1, the creationof the earth, and Genesis 2, the creation of Adam and Eve. But few Adventiststook this position, since in Spiritual Gifts (1864), published five years afterDarwin’s On the Origin of Species, White rejected both approaches. Statingthat she been transported during a vision back to the time of creation, Whitereported that the week of Genesis was “just like every other week.” Contraryto the arguments of “infidel geologists,” she wrote, Genesis days meant“literal days.” To deny this fact was to launch a direct attack on the FourthCommandment, in which God reminded us of his work during that firstliteral week. Thus, White’s claim that the earth “is now only about sixthousand years old” became part of bedrock Adventist doctrine.13

Adventist responses to evolution also were informed by White’s explanationfor biological diversity in the aftermath of the Noachian flood, which hinged onthe 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 ofamalgamation, were destroyed by the flood. Since the flood there has been

12Douglas Morgan, Adventism and the American Republic: The Public Involvement of a MajorApocalyptic Movement (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2001), 15–17.

13Ellen G. White, Spiritual Gifts: Important Acts of Faith, in Connection with the History of HolyMen of Old (Battle Creek, MI: Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Assn., 1864), vol. 3, 90–92;Ronald Numbers, “‘Sciences of Satanic Origin’: Adventist Attitudes Toward EvolutionaryBiology,” in Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1998), 92–110.

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amalgamation of man and beast, as may be seen in the almost endlessvarieties of species of animals, and in certain races of men.14

For over a century now, Adventists have fiercely and publicly argued over theproper interpretation of this key passage, which seems to imply that humansand animals mated and produced offspring; and that some racial groups wereless than fully human. Such implications not only violated existing scientificknowledge, but also cast doubt on the egalitarian values that the Adventistfounders had embraced in their well-known opposition to slavery. SomeAdventists long contended that White meant, in effect, “of man and ofbeast,” but the latest research strongly suggests that a plain reading of herwords is correct; that those “certain races” included Africans, NativeAmericans, and others who were commonly classed as inferior; and that thisis the way that Adventists at the time understood her words.15 As for thecause of amalgamation and thus the proliferation of new “confused” non-Godly species after the flood, White never explicitly identified it, butAdventist commentators commonly assumed, based on her subsequentwritings, that she had Satan in mind for this role.16

It was in 1870, only seven years after the formal founding of the church, andsome four hundred miles east of Ellen White’s hometown, that George EdwardPrice was born on a farm in Havelock, New Brunswick, Canada. Father GeorgeMarshall Price farmed seven hundred acres of land and ran a gristmill andsawmill. Mother Susan McCready came from a more educated family. Herbrother 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 atime in my early youth and young manhood when I did not aspire to be awriter”—it is hardly surprising that he adopted his mother’s name as hisown.18 Soon after his father’s death, Susan McCready joined the Seventh-day Adventist church and George took up a new occupation—sellingAdventist 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

14White, Spiritual Gifts, 75, emphasis added.15Ronald Osborn, “True Blood: Race, Science, and Early Adventist Amalgamation Theory

Revisited,” Spectrum Magazine 38, (Fall 2010): 16–29; Gordon Shigley, “Amalgamation of Manand Beast: What Did Ellen White Mean?,” Spectrum Magazine 12 (June 1982): 10–19; RonaldL. Numbers and Rennie B. Schoepflin, “Science and Medicine,” in Ellen Harmon White:American Prophet, 215–216.

16For 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.

17Clifton L. Taylor, “Pioneer Days,” Eastern Canadian Messenger, April 16, 1918, 4.18George McCready Price, “If I Were Twenty Again,” These Times, September 1, 1960, 23.


http://www.whiteestate.org/issues/amalg.html

Christ.19 Part history, part prophecy, White’s book traced the struggle betweenSatan and Christ by following the fortunes of “God’s children,” who includedearly Christian martyrs, European Protestant reformers, an “upright, honest-hearted farmer” named William Miller, and the early leaders of the Seventh-day Adventist church. On the side of Satan stood the false Catholic Church,which presided over a long period of “spiritual darkness.” Moreover, readerswere reminded about the various “snares” that Satan had planted amongwell-meaning but easily fooled Christians:

He is intruding his presence in every department of the household, in everystreet of our cities, in the churches, in the national councils, in the courts ofjustice, perplexing, deceiving, seducing, everywhere ruining the souls andbodies 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 thedistinctive Adventist apocalyptic explanation of how the “great controversy”would be resolved in favor of Christ. While Price would soon have his ownexperiences 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 thisstormy but ultimately hopeful vision with his bookselling partner AmeliaAnna Nason, a fellow native of New Brunswick, twelve years his senior. Intime, they developed a mutual affection, and in 1887, they were married; hewas 17 and she was 29.21 In the fall of 1891, both George and Ameliaattended Battle Creek College, an Adventist institution in Battle Creek,Michigan.22 Finances forced them to bounce between bookselling and theirstudies. Neither finished college but both would enter the teachingprofession. 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.

20Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan: The Conflict of the Ages inthe Christian Dispensation (Mountain View, California: Pacific Press Publishing Association,1911), 508, 678; W. R. Beach to George McCready Price, February 13, 1958, George McCreadyPrice Papers, Collection 2, Box 2, Folder 2, AHC.

21According to her obituary, Amelia and George both attended Battle Creek College. Obituaryfor Amelia Anna Nason Price, Review and Herald 131 (December 1954): 21. Numbers’saccount has only George attending, citing “Battle Creek College Records, 1876–94,” (AHC),369, 383; Numbers, The Creationists, 463n7.

22George McCready Price, “Some Early Experiences With Evolutionary Geology,” Bulletin ofDeluge 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.

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would remain married for 67 years.23 In some ways, the pair would seem tohave met the late-nineteenth-century Adventist ideal of marriage as an equalpartnership—a “perfect blending of two imperfect parts into one perfectwhole.”24 But for the first decade of the new century, they spent much oftheir time apart as George struggled to make ends meet in a succession ofjobs as a bookseller, school administrator, teacher, preacher, writer, andhandyman.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 northeasternNew Brunswick—that George McCready Price first discovered evolutionaryscience.25 In some respects, the “dreary, remote” fishing and farmingvillage—as Ronald Numbers describes it—would seem an unlikely settingfor Price to encounter cutting-edge ideas. For town residents, the primarylocal institution was the St. Jean Baptiste et St. Joseph Catholic Church,established in 1823. In 1895, just two years before Price arrived, the localparish 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 anincreasingly secular education. In 1871, the provincial Assembly passed theCommon Schools Act, which aimed to replace the system of parish-runCatholic schools with secular institutions run by the provincial government.Catholics put up fierce resistance, refusing to pay school taxes, and conflictwas ongoing and sometimes violent. In this context, it is not surprising tolearn 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 influentialProtestant minority. In 1895, local Protestants—who included Anglicans andPresbyterians—erected their first evangelical church. Presumably, the schoolat which Price taught from 1897 to 1902 was non-denominational, if notstrictly secular. Currents of economic change also tied Tracadie to widernetworks. In the late nineteenth century, the rich timberlands of northeasternNew Brunswick were increasingly bought up by outside investors. In theearly 1900s, the Tracadie Lumber Company, a U.S. firm, hired hundreds ofmen in the region to cut timber and work in its industrial sawmills.26

23Obituary for Amelia Anna Nason Price, Review and Herald 131 (December 1954): 21.24Quoted in Laura L. Vance, Seventh-day Adventism in Crisis: Gender and Sectarian Change in

an Emerging Religion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 110.25On 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 alsohttp://www.tracadie-sheila.ca/index.php.

26Kerry 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 inthe northern woods, see Jeff A. Webb, “The Arthur Webb Story, 1855–1964,” Labour/Le Travail48 (Fall 2001): 182–183.


http://www.tracadie-sheila.ca/index.php

II. OUTLINES OF MODERN CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN SCIENCE

For George McCready Price, the most consequential fact about Tracadie wasneither its churches, nor its sawmills, but the lazaret or leprosarium foundedthere in 1849 by the provincial government and operated by the CatholicHospitalieres de Saint-Joseph (who also had started the short-lived parishschool). When Price arrived in town in 1897, the Harvard-trained Dr. AlfredCorbett Smith had served as leprosarium director for decades—and was theonly practicing doctor in a fifty-mile radius. He was an enthusiasticevolutionist and agnostic. Thanks to his friendship with Smith, Price beganreading standard works in biological evolution, geology and paleontology,and began his lifelong subscription to the journal Nature. These new worksand new arguments tested his faith. His personal studies in the years leadingup to Tracadie had consisted mainly of daily Bible readings. As he recalled,his “intellectual interests had been entirely elsewhere.” But despite Smith’sbest efforts to win a convert to evolution, Price emerged from the experienceconvinced 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, theSeventh-day Adventist church published Price’s Outlines of ModernChristianity and Modern Science (1902), the first of many books seeking toexpose evolution for the fraud he believed it to be.27

This book set the mold for Price in two fundamental ways. First, Pricefocused his fire on evolutionary geologists’ alleged circular reasoning whendetermining the age of rock layers. Geologists assign dates to strata in thegeological column based on the types of creatures and plants fossilizedtherein. The simpler types of fossils are found in the lower layers. The morecomplex creatures are found higher up. The contents of these layers areroughly consistent around the world. Therefore, evolutionists conclude, thelower strata must be older. But, Price wrote, “it is nothing but a pureassumption, utterly incapable of any rational proof.”28 In contrast to thistheory, Price argued that the specific gravity of different living creaturesduring the flood determined their place in the geological column. (Later, inIllogical Geology [1906], after he had discovered that in some mountainousregions, 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 atruly uniform geological column. He scoffed at the commonly accepted

27Numbers, The Creationists, 91–92; Clark, Crusader for Creation, 14–16; Price, “Some EarlyExperiences With Evolutionary Geology,” 151; George McCready Price, Outlines of ModernScience and Modern Christianity (Oakland, Calif.: Pacific, 1902).

28George McCready Price, Outlines, 137.

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geological concept of thrust faults, tremendous pressures which, geologistsbelieved, 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 addresssocialism explicitly, Outlines provides the basic analytic framework hewould later employ. In a chapter on “Evolution of the World Problems,”Price demonstrated how Adventist eschatology was intertwined with hisdeveloping moral/political critique of evolution. He prefaced the argumentby invoking Christ’s teaching on false prophets in Matthew 7:15, usinglanguage he would repeatedly invoke in later works: “It is rightly consideredthat the supreme test of any doctrine, religious, social, or scientific, is itsbearing upon life and human action. ‘Ye shall know them by their fruits.’What are the fruits of the evolution theory?” According to Price, evolutionwas “utterly subversive of civil and religious liberty for the individual.”Indeed, “the only gospel it knows for the evils of our world is a religio-political despotism.”30

How was it that evolution led to despotism? According the Price, acceptanceof evolutionary ideas—the survival of the fittest—had caused “the increase ofcrime and lawlessness of every kind, the increased lack of self-government onthe part of the individual . . .”31 In associating evolution with “lawlessness,”Price may well have been influenced by discussions in the Adventist Reviewand Herald that made this connection. Less than a month after theassassination of President McKinley the previous year, the editors opinedthat, “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 andmorals by law.” Of what did this “despotism” consist? For Price, it tookseveral 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-civilizedpeoples beyond the seas,” Price wrote, “we shall end up finding a similarstate of things requiring attention at home.” In this comment, Price echoedthe concerns of other Seventh-day Adventists. Their peculiar concern withliberty had led the church to denounce the annexation of the Philippines.33

Indeed, Percy Magan, who had taught Price Roman history at BattleCreek College, published a church-endorsed book on the subject in 1899with a telling title: Imperialism Versus The Bible, The Constitution, And the

29George McCready Price, Illogical Geology: The Weakest Point in the Evolution Theory (LosAngeles, Calif.: The Modern Heretic, 1906), 30; Numbers, The Creationists, 112–113;

30Price, Outlines, 234, 252.31Ibid., 262.32“Evolution and Anarchy,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, October 1, 1901.33Price, Outlines, 261–62, emphasis in original. Morgan, Adventism and the Republic, 69.


Declaration of Independence or The Peril of the Republic of the UnitedStates.34

Price’s implicit criticism of imperialist racism—the “white man’s burden”—also drew on Adventist traditions reaching back decades. Due to the abolitionistsympathies of William Miller and prominent Millerite abolitionists such asJoshua Himes, antislavery feeling and even belief in racial equality found arelatively accommodating home in the early Adventist movement.35 WhileAdventists were conflicted about performing military service, Ellen Whiteand other Adventists publicly supported the Union side in the Civil War,viewing the slaveholders’ rebellion as satanically inspired. DuringReconstruction, Adventist publications gave voice to Radical Republicanviews in favor of racial equality, though violence directed at interracialAdventist 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 fullracial equality. While he rarely addressed the topic head-on, fragmentaryevidence gives a sense of his views. Price attributed human racial variety tothree factors: God’s dispersal of humanity in punishment for the Tower ofBabel, the changing environment, and the process of racial amalgamation,taught to him by Ellen White. In a poem penned in 1910, Price focused onthe first two in explaining the origins of what he understood to be the clearlyinferior Negro race. According to Price, “the poor little fellow” who fledBabel 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, ThePhantom of Organic Evolution, Price argued that the distinct human races“greatly resemble true species” and that “natural instincts,” aided by God’sprovidential action at Babel, should have kept them separate. Contrary tonature 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 1905letter, written just two years after Outlines, Price acknowledged that hejoined with other Adventists in identifying “the great primal hybridizer” ofhuman races, plants, and animals, as Satan.39

34Percy T. Magan, Imperialism Versus The Bible, The Constitution, And the Declaration ofIndependence or The Peril of the Republic of the United States (Battle Creek, Mich.: NationalCo-operative Library Association and Publishing Company, 1899), 81, emphasis in original.

35Ronald D. Graybill, “The Abolitionist-Millerite Connection,” in Ronald L. Numbers andJonathan M. Butler, eds., The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the NineteenthCentury (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993), 139–152.

36Samuel G. London, Jr., Seventh-day Adventists and the Civil Rights Movement (Jackson:University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 44–65.

37Quoted in Ronald Numbers, The Creationists, 102.38George McCready Price, The Phantom of Organic Evolution (New York: Fleming H. Revell,

1924), 106.39Quoted in Numbers, The Creationists, 101.

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Imperialism was one sign of the growing danger of despotism; another,closer to home, was the amassing of collective power, both by largecorporations and by workers. “What with the labor unions, and what withthe trusts,” wrote Price, “we are certainly beholding the fast passing ofindividualism.” In capital letters, Price warned of “THIS HEAVEN-DARKENING DESPOTISM OVER THE GRAVE OF LIBERTY.”40

Premillennialists of all stripes often expressed a kind of even-handedness onthe subject of class conflict, viewing its very existence as a sign of theapproaching end times. It is also worth noting, however, that the Adventistswere not neutral on the subject of labor unions. In the wake of the 1902anthracite coal strike, Ellen White had made the anti-union position of thechurch clear. “Unionism,” she wrote, “is controlled by the cruel power ofSatan. Those who refuse to join the unions formed are made to feel thispower.” The next year, the Review and Herald called labor unions “a dragonvoice which is heard speaking in the nation to-day,” a clear reference to thesecond 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 thesigns of the times?”42 Not only did White present unions as a threat toindividual liberty, but she viewed them as inextricably tied to the city withall 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 didrefer to the evil designs of the Catholic Church, but not to any specifics.What also seemed to be concerning him was the involvement by modernistChristians in ecumenical social reform efforts—“an organized raid on allunrighteousness, thus hastening the glad reign of peace and joy”—which heportrayed as “more horrible” than the threat of plain political despotism.44

Rather than focus on saving individual souls, these alleged Christians werepursuing collective political goals, which could only be another sign of theend times. Indeed, Price described his two forms of despotism as “twinfiends, born in iniquity and cradled in apostasy from God.”45

40Price, Outlines, 263.41Carlos A. Schwantes, “Labor Unions and Seventh-day Adventists: the formative years, 1877–

1903,” Adventist Heritage 4 (Winter 1977): 18–19.42Robert C. Kistler, Adventists and Labor Unions in the United States (Washington, D.C.:

Review and Herald, 1984), 41.43Ellen 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 LaborUnions,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, January 26, 1905, 9.

44Price, Outlines, 267–68.45Ibid., 262.


III. PRICE IN NEW YORK

By 1904, Price had several years of teaching and a published book under hisbelt. But the three years following Tracadie were anything but encouraging.At the age of thirty-four, with three children to support, Price despaired ofhis inability to make a decent living as a bookseller. As he confided tochurch elder William Guthrie in late August, “I have tried to do the best Icould, and yet it has seemed like accomplishing nothing.” Still hoping tofind a teaching position in the fall, Price noted, in a subsequent and evendarker letter, that “the good schools are now all taken up, but I suppose Imay be able to get some backwoods affair at perhaps $280 or $300.” Shortof 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 andmagazines.” But if he failed in that department as well, he would take hisown life and “the world would be rid of another useless, good-for-nothingman.” “Were it not for my family, my dear children,” Price added, “I shouldcertainly end the tragedy here and now.”46

Within weeks of penning this letter, the last that he would write fromeastern Canada, Price sailed for New York City. The trip was both aneconomic and spiritual gamble. Not only was Price betting that he couldobtain work writing for cosmopolitan, secular publications— something hehad 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 tofollow his quixotic dream of literary success. On both counts, the trip wasa profound failure. In light of Ellen White’s warning about the dangers ofcity life, it is striking that when Price arrived from New Brunswick inNew York City, he chose for his residence two neighborhoods that had (orwould come to have) singularly immoral associations: Greenwich Villageand Hell’s Kitchen. In September 1904, Price moved into a room in a four-story brick apartment building at 95 Christopher Street, at the corner ofBleecker, in the heart of the west Village.47 While the neighborhood’sBohemian days still lay ahead, it already had a long-established reputationas a literary enclave, which may well have attracted Price’s attention.Herman Melville, Henry James, Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, and otherliterary leading lights had lived and worked just blocks from Price’s

46George McCready Price to Elder Wm. Guthrie, August 26, 1904; George McCready Price toW. H. Thurston, August 28, 1904, both in RG 11, Box 20, President’s Incoming Letters, 1905-D to1905-P, Archives of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, Silver Spring, Maryland.

47New York State Census, First Election District, Block A, Fifth Assembly District, Borough ofManhattan, 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 andbakery. Price most likely boarded or “lodged” with the family of Charles Whitney, a young banksecretary, and his German-born mother.

698 CHURCH HISTORY

temporary quarters. Perhaps unknown to him, but consequential for his laterwritings, the neighborhood had also begun to attract a group of well-heeled,reform-minded activists who would become leaders of the budding Americansocialist movement. Just two years before Price arrived, an influx ofnewer immigrants, primarily from Italy, had led Progressive reformers toestablish Greenwich House—a settlement house—just three blocks southon Bleecker.48

Price arrived in New York hoping to earn money as a writer. But as heinformed Elder William Guthrie in late December 1904, “experience hasmade 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 ownfamily back in New Brunswick was “destitute and almost starving” drovePrice once again to thoughts of suicide and damnation. “Heaven only knowswhat privations I have gone through and what torment of soul I havesuffered,” he told Guthrie.49 Spiritual woes deepened financial ones. Alreadyfeeling alienated from church leadership when he left Canada, Price’srelationship with the church reached a low point in New York. He attendedSeventh-day Adventist services in the city for “a month or two” afterarriving, but sensed that no one cared “a pin whether I starve to death ornot” and so “quietly dropped out altogether.” “They don’t miss me,” hecommented bitterly in his December letter to Guthrie, “and I suppose the‘cause’ will get along just as well.” For Price, this perceived behaviorreflected a crisis in the church more generally: “Oh, the heartlessness andhollow hypocrisy that masquerades in the Adventist body under thesemblance of the zeal for the Lord!”50 While Price clearly blamed the earthlyleaders of the church for his problems, Guthrie saw the devil at work. In asubsequent letter to Price, the church elder told Price that he had “allowedthe enemy to take advantage of you to dishearten and distract you in everyway possible,” just as Ellen White had warned.51

The new year did bring temporary respite. Price reported that he had onceagain obtained work. He was working long hours—sometimes twelve tofourteen a day—but was glad to have the opportunity to “earn an honestliving.” It may have been the new job that spurred Price to move uptown toan apartment on west 57th Street, on the northern edge of Hell’s Kitchen,

48Gerald W. McFarland, Inside Greenwich Village: A New York City Neighborhood, 1898–1918(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 58.

49George 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 ofthe General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, Silver Spring, Maryland.

50Ibid.51William 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-dayAdventists, Silver Spring, Maryland.


next door to the Central Presbyterian Church.52 Despite Price’s new job, hisfamily was still in desperate straits. And soon again was Price. In March1905, son Ernest was forced to drop out of South Lancaster Academy forlack 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 adirection away from what he considered an “honest” living. Around thistime, General Conference President Daniells wrote Price to cheer him up andalso offer him a job working at manual labor in the construction of thechurch’s new headquarters in rural Tacoma Park, Maryland, an offer thatPrice would soon take. Price thanked Daniels for the offer but also confidedthat due to his “present associations and occupation, which are not right,” hefelt that his “eternal welfare is at stake in making a change and cuttingaway” from his life in New York. “Pray for me,” Price implored.54

One of the many temptations that New York City had to offer GeorgeMcCready Price was the young but growing socialist movement. As aregular reader of the Adventist Review and Herald, Price would haveencountered fairly regular discussions of the new party. Consistent with theapproach that Price later took in his own writings, Adventist editorsexpressed sympathy with socialist aims, but rejected collective politicalaction in favor of individual salvation through the acceptance of Jesus assavior and belief in Adventist eschatology. In a 1905 article commenting onthe gains of the Socialists in the 1904 elections, for example, church leaderLeon A. Smith, son of Seventh-day Adventist pioneer Uriah Smith,commented that “from a political standpoint, much may be said in favor ofsocialism as compared with other political systems”; and yet, the onlysolution to humanity’s problems was “the coming kingdom of Christ.”55

Socialists had even established a small but significant toehold in Price’snative New Brunswick by this time. Maritime membership in the SocialistParty of Canada (founded in 1905) never reached more than three hundred.But there were branches of Canadian socialists in the larger towns of New

52New 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 livedat 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.

53Amelia Price to A. G. Daniells, March 5, 1905, RG 11, Box 13, Presidential OutgoingLetterboxes, Book 35, Archives of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, SilverSpring, Maryland.

54George McCready Price to A. G. Daniells, from 422 W. 57th Street, New York, N.Y., March19, 1905, RG 11, Box 20, President’s Incoming Letters, 1905-D to 1905-P, Archives of the GeneralConference of Seventh-day Adventists, Silver Spring, Maryland.

55Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, July 13, 1905.

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http://trinitynyc.tripod.com/trinity.html

http://trinitynyc.tripod.com/trinity.html

http://g.co/maps/zmyq3

Brunswick—Saint John, Fredericktown, and Moncton, among others—as wellas some of the smaller ones such as Albert and Whitehead.56

Early 1905 was a heady time for New York City’s more radical-mindedsocialists due to events happening thousands of miles distant. On January22, which soon became known as “Bloody Sunday,” the troops of CzarNicholas II fired rifles into a crowd of some 100,000 workers and peasantswho had traveled to the Winter Palace to present a petition to their ruler.“Civil War Threatened, Workman Have Lost Faith in the Czar, and NowMean to Fight,” read one headline in the New York Times the next day. Asstrikes quickly spread through St. Petersburg and beyond, Russian-Jewishsocialists on the lower east side of New York, just across town from Price’sformer 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 ofRussian freedom, have found a haven, and there was not one of these whodid not feel a personal share in the events.”57 Socialist intellectuals frommore privileged backgrounds were also inspired by the scale and depth ofthe Russian revolt. Soon after “Bloody Sunday,” New York socialist WilliamEnglish Walling headed off to Russia to cover events for the socialist press.58

Explaining the significance of the events a week later, the Times editorsobserved that “industrial Russia has outgrown political Russia.” Relying onHerbert Spencer’s evolutionary framework, they agreed with him that theemergence of large-scale factory production in Russia had sounded the doomof “militancy,” by which Spencer meant a political system in whichobedience, hierarchy, and compulsion are the norm. For its part, the Reviewand Herald had little to say about Russia except to reprint a January articlenoting striking parallels between the French Revolution and developingRussian revolt. Rather than reach any definitive conclusions, the editorsended by inserting a series of question marks, wondering whether the“terror” they observed in both France and Russia would end, as it did inFrance, with “democratic government.” The following year, however, afterprinting news of mass execution, imprisonment and exile of the Czar’sopponents, Adventist editors placed the events in a prophetic perspective.“There are abundant evidences,” they wrote, “in all parts of the world that

56David 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 HailsNews with Joy,” New York Times, January 23, 1905, 2.

58McFarland, 122–123. Walling was not formally a member of the Socialist Party of Americauntil 1910, but he helped write the party’s 1904 platform and wrote widely for socialistpublications during the decade. Mark Pittenger, American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought,1870–1920, 147.


we have come to the perilous times which indicate that the end of all things is athand.”59

American socialists in New York and elsewhere might well have agreed withthe Spencerian evolutionary scheme outlined by the Times editors. As historianMark Pittenger has shown, early American socialists enthusiastically promoteda mix of Darwinian and Spencerian ideas. They built on a solid foundation ofadmiration by Marx and Engels for Darwin’s discoveries. John Spargo, aprominent American socialist who knew Marx, recalled the founder saying,“Nothing ever gives me greater pleasure than to have my name linked untoDarwin’s. His wonderful work makes my own absolutely impregnable.Darwin may not know it, but he belongs to the Social Revolution.” AndAmerican socialists included a range of popularizers of evolutionary science,who tended, contrary to Marx and Engels, but consonant with Spencer, toapply Darwin’s ideas to the whole social “organism.” Perhaps the bestknown was Arthur M. Lewis, whose Evolution Social and Organic (1908)contained a series of lectures that Lewis gave to overflow working-classaudiences around the country.60 To the extent that Price, and others, wouldtie evolution to socialism, their argument certainly contained a grain of truth.

In the spring of 1905, well before the Russian Revolution reached its climaxin 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 churchPresident Daniells. He left New York City, and moved to Tacoma Park,Maryland, where he took up work as a teamster, helping with the building ofthe new national headquarters of the Seventh-day Adventist church. Afterseveral months of manual labor, Price was assigned to serve as principal ofan Adventist school in Oakland, California, and, at the end of the summer,he arrived there, carrying a trunk full of papers from his unpublishedmanuscript.61 During that summer, when Price was not hauling constructionmaterials, he was researching and writing what would be his next book,Illogical Geology, published in 1906. But Price’s stint in Oakland lasted onlya year. In the summer of 1906, he was back to doing construction andhandyman work for the church in Loma Linda, California, a buddingAdventist settlement sixty miles east of Los Angeles. Once again withoutprofessional work, Price was “heartbroken.” But starting in 1907, he beganteaching 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.

60Mark Pittenger, American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870–1920, 17, 140–145.61Ernest 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.

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of the remainder of his life living and teaching at Adventist institutions fromEngland to Nebraska to the West Coast.62

IV. GOD’S TWO BOOKS

Price’s students at Loma Linda were young Adventist nursing students whomEllen White dubbed “medical evangelists.” One of Price’s students from theseyears was Eda Reid, the daughter of Swedish immigrants who had grown up inNebraska and joined the Adventist church. She took Price’s classes in physicsand chemistry. As she recalled, “he opened every class with prayer. He alwayshad a twinkle in his eyes.” As for his teaching methods, “I can’t remember hisjust telling us things,” she noted. “We found them out by experimentation. Evenwhen we wondered what some strange mixture might do, he let us go ahead,knowing, of course, there would be no explosion, which we feared therewould be.”63

For Price, and likely for many of his students, there was no contradictionbetween opening class with prayer and then jumping into scientificinvestigation. After all, at this Adventist institution, students were alsorequired to take a course in Spirit of Prophecy (the life and writings of EllenWhite), taught by John B. Burden, the founder of the Loma LindaSanitarium, and the president of the College Board of Trustees.64 The ideathat nature and revelation were mutually reinforcing sources of truth drew ona centuries-old Christian apologetic tradition reaching back to early patristicwritings. In North America, it was expressed as early as 1721 with CottonMather’s Christian Philosopher, which referred to the “Book of Nature”along with the Bible as proof of God’s glory. While Price was herefollowing 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 theuntrammeled exercise of reason, unchecked by faith in God.65

These two sources of truth—and the dangers of straying from them—are theprimary focus of the book Price published in 1911: God’s Two Books: Or PlainFacts about Evolution, Geology and the Bible. Published by the AdventistReview and Herald Publishing Association, this work is the first one in

62Numbers, The Creationists, 94–95, 98.63Eda 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.

641908 Yearbook of the Seventh-day Adventist Denomination (Washington, D.C.: Review andHerald, 1908), 139.

65Ronald 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.


which Price explicitly addressed socialism and the labor movement. Thesocialist movement had grown substantially since Price published Outlines in1902, and the labor movement, including in his adopted California, had beenmaking headlines. The intellectual framework for his critique of evolutionwas the by-now familiar “fruits” argument, but this time draped in a morerigorous scientific-sounding guise. Perhaps due to his newfound academicauthority in a college classroom—Loma Linda would also award him anhonorary bachelor of arts degree for his previous coursework and teaching—Price paid more serious attention in this work to the question of scientificmethod.66

In doing so, he drew upon a longstanding tradition of joining Protestanttheology with Baconian empiricism.67 As a number of scholars haveobserved, a wide range of American Protestant thinkers embraced Baconianinductive reasoning. Originally a weapon wielded against medievalscholasticism, Baconian ideas were enlisted, through the agency of ScottishCommonsense Realism, as a defense of the existing order against what wereviewed as dangerously speculative hypotheses arising from the FrenchRevolution. Pure facts, unadulterated by any (false) assumptions came first;only then could conclusions follow. Without acknowledging the deeply apriori and deductive character of their own theistic worldviews, Protestantleaders fixed on the words of scripture as the essential objective facts to becollected, classified, and organized. As American evangelical leader ReubenTorrey put it in his contribution to the Fundamentals on the subject of theresurrection of Jesus Christ, “we shall not assume anything whatever.” Or asPrice 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 personwith access to the Bible and a dose of what Price called “enlightenedcommon sense” could use these facts to reach conclusions about bothspiritual and earthly matters. And it had sunk deep roots in the Anglo-American world. A popularized version of Baconianism had become sofirmly entrenched in England by the mid-nineteenth century that even

66Harold Clark, Crusader For Creation, 32; Numbers, The Creationists, 107.67On 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.

68George 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 ReligiousThought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977); Reuben Torrey, “The Certaintyand Importance of the Bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the Dead,” in TheFundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth (Chicago: Testimony, 1915) 5:83.

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Charles Darwin, who was putting forth the audacious hypothesis of naturalselection without ever having empirically observed the process, clothed hiseffort in proper Baconian garb on the frontispiece of the first edition of Onthe Origin of Species. The selection he chose from Bacon’s 1603 work, TheAdvancement of Learning, trumpeted the value of studying both “the book ofGod’s word” and “the book of God’s works.”69 For exactly oppositepurposes, Price included on his title page of God’s Two Books a similarquotation from Bacon’s De Augmentis Scientiarum, a Latinized version ofThe 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’spages, the speculative, unfactual theory of evolution comes up wanting. Whileacknowledging that a certain amount of common descent must have takenplace, Price scored evolutionists for their unwarranted “assumptions” whichget them into trouble.71 But what is telling about Price’s “inductive” book isthat its opening chapter is entitled, “Moral and Social Aspects of theEvolution Theory.” His argument that we can know the scientific theory ofevolution by its “fruits” is by now familiar. And yet it is also strikinglydeductive. At one point in the chapter, for instance, Price touched on thesubject of human evolution when he analyzes the perennial subject oftheodicy—that is, “the evil and misery of our present world” in face of thenotion that God is good. Price argued there are three possibilities. First,perhaps God made us evil. Second, perhaps he made us “by developmentfrom ruder and still lower conditions, and we be now on the road to a yethigher plane of development” (the evolutionary answer, albeit a theistic one).Third, God made human beings good, but Adam and Eve violated “morallaw” 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 ofhow humans have developed through their history or prehistory. Rather,option two implied that if “pride and lust are perfectly natural to the humanheart,” then these evil traits “must in some way express the character of ourDesigner.” 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

69Charles 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: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1988), 34–36.

70George McCready Price, God’s Two Books: Or Plain Facts About Evolution, Geology, and theBible (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald, 1911; 2nd edition, 1918). This is a translation of theLatin text quoted by Price.

71Ibid., 59.


there must be something wrong with a notion of man’s origin that leads to sucha frightful conclusion.” Therefore, by using deductive syllogistic logic, theanswer must be option three: human immoral conduct is the result ofdegeneration caused by human original sin.

Price capped off his deductive chain of reasoning with the followingrestatement of the “fruits” argument:

And surely the moral issue, as set forth above, is a surer way of gauging thetruth or falsity of the Evolution theory than the long, complicated methodsconnected with “variation” and “selection,” “heredity” and “environment,”and the other biological problems, even supposing the theory apparentlycapable of the most exact proof. In short, we need offer no apology forthus measuring this scientific hypothesis by other and far more certainstandards 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 thestatus of the facts drawn from the natural world that support or refute thatidea. 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 firsttime made an explicit connection between the “moral” fruits of evolutionand socialism. The basic framework—that evolutionary theory threatens “thevery foundations of civil and religious liberty”—harkened back to hisdiscussion in Outlines nine years earlier. But Price seemed more alarmed atthe potential consequences of the “ceaseless struggle for existence andsurvival at the expense of others.” He pointed to the danger of “the grim,Red terror loading its pistol and sharpening its dirk while awaiting theopportune time to strike.” Indeed, Price argued that evolutionary “ethics” arethe primary cause of

firing the blood and quickening the pace of the present strenuous age, untilthe only apparent outcome will be the wreck and anarchy of Revolution, allthe more hopeless and horrible this time because it will be universal over theglobe, coterminous with the bounds of civilization.

72Ibid., 27–31, emphasis added.73In 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; andthe beauty of a sunset can be appreciated without any profound knowledge of optics or ofmeteorology. In the same way our intuitive knowledge of justice, and truth, and benevolencemay serve as safer guides in attempting to read the mysterious messages of nature, than will ourconclusions based on such studies as those presented by Malthus, On Population, or those madeso popular in the Origin of Species” (George McCready Price, The Phantom of OrganicEvolution [New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1924], 180).

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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 remakethe world are doomed to end in despotism. As he wrote, “every public-ownership man, every Socialist, every imperialist, every trust magnate, iscontributing something to the swelling cry of those enthusiastic but deludedvoices” who will eventually call for a “Caesar or a local chieftan” to imposeorder. The point “to be especially noted,” Price concluded, “is thatpractically every Socialist, every imperialist or world federationist, bases hiswhole argument ultimately on the evolutionary progress of the race or theworld.”74 In line with all premillenialists, Price believed such progress wasdeeply 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, whichwere covered amply in the Adventist press. Since Price was living and workingnear Los Angeles, it is also likely that his thinking about the fruits ofevolutionary science and their connections to labor and socialism wasaffected by a literal explosion that took place there shortly before God’s TwoBooks was completed. On October 1, 1910, a dynamite bomb ripped throughthe Los Angeles Times building, setting it on fire, killing twenty-one people,and injuring one hundred. The explosion took place during a strike byunionized ironworkers against the city’s iron manufacturers. Times publisherHarrison Gray Otis was bitterly anti-union and headed the city’s employerassociation, which aimed to break the strike and run unions out of LosAngeles. Otis promptly accused unionists—whom he called “anarchistscum”—of setting the bombs. In April 1911, authorities arrested and chargedironworker union leaders J. B. and J. J. McNamara for the crime, to whichthey pled not guilty. The American Federation of Labor rallied to theirdefense, as did the Socialist Party. Job Harriman, Socialist front-runner in theLos Angeles mayoral race, joined the McNamaras’ defense team, which washeaded by Clarence Darrow. But soon after the trial opened in October, thebrothers, under intense pressure, changed their pleas and admitted tocarrying out the bombing.75

George McCready Price and other readers of the Adventist press nationwidereceived a steady stream of commentary on the McNamara case. Upon thearrest of the two brothers, an article in Signs of the Times noted that theSocialists “propose to make ‘California a battleground.’” Observing that

74Price, God’s Two Books, 32–35.75Philip 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.


opinion about the McNamaras’ guilt was deeply divided, the Signs editorsplaced the conflict in prophetic perspective. “Strifes of this kind are growingboth in frequency and in bitterness,” they wrote.76 In the spring of 1911,Signs reported that William “Big Bill” Haywood had proposed a generalstrike to protest the “capitalistic conspiracy” against the McNamaras, a movethe 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 world-wide spirit of revolution”—that focused on the McNamara case. The articlefeatured a substantial excerpt of a piece by Socialist Eugene Debs, who alsocalled for a general strike and urged workers to “roll up a united Socialistvote in California that will shake the Pacific Coast like an earthquake.”Without taking a stand for or against the McNamaras, Signs focused on theintensity of the conflict, citing this as proof of Bible prophecy in the book ofTimothy: “But know this, that in the last days grievous times shall come. Formen shall be lovers of self, lovers of money.”78

The optimism of Debs and fellow Socialists in early 1912 was bolstered bythe growing Socialist vote. In November 1912, it would be further confirmedwhen Debs himself received some 900,000 votes in his presidential bid.Once again, the Adventist press followed these events and provided readerswith ample coverage of Socialist proposals.79 For instance, a Review andHerald article published in March 1912 commented on the “rapid increase ofthe Socialist vote.” It quoted a recent Outlook article, which noted withalarm, the election of Socialist mayors in a number of industrial cities andtowns, as well as the election of Socialist state legislators in New York andRhode Island. It also drew from a speech given by the president of CornellUniversity, Jacob Gould Schurman, a former philosophy professor and anative of Prince Edward Island, Canada, who stated that “the spirit ofdiscontent is far more widely diffused than ever before, and the causes are atonce more fundamental and more permanent.” His assessment, wrote theAdventist editors, “is worthy of serious consideration.” Naturally, thesignificance for the Review and Herald, as always, was that such conflict

76Signs of the Times, July 4, 1911.77Signs of the Times, May 23, 1911.78“A Condition and Not a Theory,” Signs of the Times, September 26, 1911, 602–603.79See, 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 andHerald, 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 VersusChristianity,” Advent Review and Herald, January 30, 1908, 10–11; “Christianity VersusSocialism,” Advent Review and Herald, March 17, 1903, 5; “Jesus and Socialism,” AdventReview 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.

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was yet another sign of the approaching end times. The attempts of theSocialists to remake the world, they concluded, “are only preliminary to atime of violence and lawlessness which will as surely come as effect followscause.”80

V. BACK TO THE BIBLE

As the Review and Herald was seeking to educate Adventist readers about howsocialists fit into the “signs of the times,” Price published Back to the Bible(1916), in which he once again addressed himself to socialism and itsconnections to evolutionary thought. In a chapter entitled “The Federation ofthe World,” Price warned of the danger that humanity was trying to organizeon 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 therace.” Rather than accept that the ultimate cause of misery is “man’s evilnature,” 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 areequally and entirely mere matters of convention, matters of expediency; thatmorality is only petrified custom; and that the race is absolutely free from allexternal constraint.”81

While Price claimed that either capitalists or workers could push such ascheme, his discussion focused mainly on the latter, which he called “theimmediate issue.” “The radicals among the Socialists, the labor-unionists, theI. W. W.,—in a word, the whole of the proletariat,—are raising issues whichthey consider are the real first steps toward the goal of their ambitions,”warned Price. But following the lead of the Review and Herald, Price addeda disclaimer, saying that he was merely studying the subject in the “impartialspirit of science.” In fact, he went even further, saying he wanted to clarifyhis position, which was: “all honor to those who are trying to secure byevery righteous means a greater degree of ‘social justice’ for the oppressedand downtrodden.”82

The degree to which Price gives the socialists some credit is striking. It maybe that his own struggle for survival on the margins of academic respectabilityand 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, 8.81George McCready Price, Back to the Bible or the New Protestantism (Washington, D.C.:

Review and Herald, 1916), 170–172.82Ibid., 175–178.


career trajectory also fluctuated in this period after 1912. His position at theCollege of Medical Evangelists in Loma Linda ended in that year. Over thefollowing six years, he taught at two Adventist secondary institutions—Fernando Academy in Los Angeles County, from 1912 to 1914, and thenLodi Academy from 1914 until 1920, when he once again obtained acollege-level position.83

Not only does Price concede socialists their good intentions, but healso 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, telephoneand telegraph, which have converted the world into “one vast communitywith common interests, common aspirations, and a unified self-consciousness.” Moreover, Price wrote, corporations which no longer areconfined within national borders are also contributing to this growing senseof “internationalism.” Thus, whether one seeks to build a global capitalistempire or an international labor movement, “consolidated humanity” isessential.84 Not only does this analysis parallel Marx’s logic, but even someof the language Price uses in the book echoes the Marxist classics. Witness,for instance, his unrealistic conflation of the radical section of the labormovement, cited earlier, with “the whole of the proletariat.”

The somewhat schizophrenic respect that Price expressed for socialists inBack to the Bible dovetails with his continuing critique of imperialism.Although American and European socialists took a variety of stands onimperialism 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 1899article, “Consecrated Fallacies,” to expose the arguments used to justify theU.S. annexation of the Philippines. Fiske challenged anti-imperialists’ use ofthe Declaration of Independence to argue against imposing U.S. rule onFilipinos “without consent of the governed.” Using the example of AfricanAmericans in the United States, Fiske wrote that “all men are not createdequal in any possible sense of the word. The creation of men has been agradual process of evolution and they have been coming into being indifferent parts of the earth through long generations with differences andinequalities which development has varied and widened, and not obliterated.”85

As before, Price attributed such thinking to evolutionary ideas, employed bya wide variety of pro-imperialists. Evangelist Josiah Strong, for instance,

83Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists, 465n22.84Ibid., 168–169.85Ibid., 158; Amos K. Fiske, “Some Consecrated Fallacies,” The North American Review 169

(December 1899): 822, 827.

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quoted Darwin and Spencer in arguing that the “Anglo-Saxon” was “divinelycommissioned to be . . . his brother’s keeper.”86 Arguing against Fiske’sposition in 1902, Price had simply concluded that “the stronghold, thejustification of it all is the doctrine of universal evolution.” This second timearound, however, his attribution had a much sharper political character.Reminding readers that Fiske’s nakedly racist language did not harken fromthe pre–Civil War era but rather from recent years, Price commented that“the capitalist oligarchy of our day is again boldly teaching the samedoctrine, and it is everywhere appealing to the accepted theory of Evolutionas the justification for these doctrines.”87 Price’s outlook in 1916 reflectedthe changing landscape of American politics, in which the conflict betweencapital 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 socialistquest for proletarian international brotherhood would end in disaster. In fact,in Back to the Bible, Price concluded that in comparison with the “despotismthat is already looming up on the horizon of our time,” “the Roman Empirein 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 thislatest drive for “federation of the world” by the socialists may “justly beregarded by heaven . . . as the climax of apostasy, calling for the finalclosing of the long reign of sin.”88 In a perverse way, the socialists and otherpromoters of world federation might well be speeding the second coming ofChrist.

VI. PRICE MEETS THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION

When Price returned to the topic of socialism five years later—in PoisoningDemocracy and Socialism in the Test-Tube, both published in 1921—therewas no mistaking his negative appraisal. In the aftermath of World War I and

86Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 170–200; Josiah Strong, OurCountry: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (New York, N.Y.: American HomeMissionary Society, 1885), 161.

87George McCready Price, Back to the Bible, 158, emphasis added. Price’s change of languagemay have partly reflected the increasing prominence of Amos Fiske in business circles. In 1899, theHarvard-educated Fiske served on the editorial staff of the New York Times. Starting in 1902, Fiskebecame associate editor of the New York–based Journal of Commerce and was an authority on thebanking 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 onBanking and Currency, United States Senate, Sixty-Fifth Congress, 2nd Session, on S. 3928, toamend Federal Reserve Act, 137.

88Ibid., 176–179.


the Bolshevik Revolution, his attitude had clearly hardened. Price could stillbreezily dismiss socialism as a set of “temporary expedients for those whowould seek to prolong the present dying agonies of a doomed world.” Thesecond advent of Christ was still the only solution for Price. But socialismnow represented more than meetings, agitators, and subversive books—itmeant a revolutionary government in power. It also appeared ever moreclosely intertwined with evolution.

Adorned with photos of Lenin and Trotsky, Socialism in the Test-Tubewarned of the dangers of the Bolshevik government. Co-written withSeventh-day Adventist missionary Robert B. Thurber, the book was clearlyaimed at a popular audience. The book’s argument is presented in the formof a fictional conversation between Gordon, a young American soldier onleave from fighting in France, and some of his friends and neighbors. Whenhe asks Stevens, a local respectable labor leader about revolutionary Russia,he learns the following: “the chaos of Russia is a lurid beacon” of the “ruinthat awaits the state” when the people have been “degraded by centuries ofapostate religion, and finally poisoned by the teachings of MarxianSocialism.” Explaining the connection to evolution, Stevens added that “theethics of the jungle and the cave, inspired by Darwinism, and the doctrine ofthe class war and dictatorship of the proletariat, taught by Socialism, may betrusted to evolve the vulgar tyranny of Bolshevism, but never the orderlydemocracy of America.”89

Poisoning Democracy sounded similar themes. Published by Fleming H.Revell, whose imprint included a wide swath of American fundamentalistauthors, including William Bell Riley of the Minneapolis First BaptistChurch and the World Christian Fundamentals Association, this book alsomade it clear how closely allied evolution and socialism were. The“Evolution doctrine,” wrote Price, “develops logically and inevitably intoSocialism and Bolshevism as its natural expression in the department ofsocial and civil life.” Again using the analogy of judging “a tree by itsfruits,” Price pointed to the baleful example of Russia where, he said, “thesedoctrines have been carried to their logical results.”90 Price also drew onearlier anti-socialist polemics to emphasize the terrible moral consequencesof evolution. He quoted Theodore Roosevelt, from a 1909 article, where theformer president charged that “doctrinaire Socialism would replace thefamily and home life by a glorified state free-lunch counter and Statefoundling asylum, deliberately enthroning self-indulgence as the ideal, with,

89George McCready Price and Robert B. Thurber, Socialism in the Test-Tube (Nashville, Tenn.:Southern, 1921), 113.

90George McCready Price, Poisoning Democracy: A Study of the Religious and Moral Aspects ofSocialism (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1921), 14, 19–20.

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on its darker side, the absolute abandonment of all morality between man andwoman.”91 Adventist readers of the Review and Herald were familiar withthese claims about the Bolsheviks. As one 1919 article quoted a witnesstestifying before a U.S. Senate investigating committee, “they are aiming atfree love and hope to do away with marriage; to make marriage a contractfor a term of years, so to speak.”92

The Adventist concern with the moral “fruit” of Bolshevism convergedduring the 1920s with a broader critique of proposals for “companionatemarriage” in the U.S. as Bolshevik-inspired.93 The alleged nexus betweenevolution, Bolshevism, and immorality made for a potent political mix andhelps explain the intensity of the fight over teaching evolution in the schoolsduring that decade. Such concerns were echoed in a letter Price received in1921 from John Freeman, pastor of the Baptist church in Springfield,Kentucky, who wrote about the baneful “influence of modern scientificinstruction upon the moral and religious life of our people,” which Freemandescribed as “heart-crushing.” “Everywhere,” he wrote, “there is the lettingdown of sexual barriers; the breaking down of the marriage altar and thedisintegration of the home.”94

In Poisoning Democracy, in comparison with his rather vague discussion inhis 1902 Outlines, Price clearly explained how socialism could also be viewedas a form of religious despotism. Here, he drew an intriguing parallel betweenhis own eschatology and Marxism:

The picturesque stories of Darwin’s struggle for existence and the ape originof man constitute the Genesis and Exodus of the socialist Bible; theeconomic interpretation of history makes up the rest of its Old Testament;while the cheerful doctrine of the class struggle is its Apocalypse, with itsprophecy of a coming Armageddon, followed by a socialist new heavenand new earth.

Socialism, in other words, “is a religion.” Indeed, it was the “devil’s poison fordemocracy,—a poison for the working classes who accept it as their religion.”95

Casting socialism as religion made it doubly dangerous in Adventist terms—itencompassed both horns of the lamb-dragon. And yet, once again, this verydanger also offered hope. The Review and Herald captured the paradox nicelyin an April 3, 1919 headline: “Bolshevism as a Sign of Christ’s Coming.”96

91Ibid., 58.92Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, April 3, 1919.93Rebecca Davis, “‘Not Marriage at All, but Simple Harlotry’: The Companionate Marriage

Controversy,” Journal of American History 94 (March 2008): 1146–1148.94John D. Freeman to George McCready Price, July 23, 1921, “Correspondence, 1906–1925,”

George McCready Price Papers, Collection 2, Box 1, Folder 2, AHC.95Price, Poisoning Democracy, 47, emphasis in original.96Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, April 3, 1919.


While Poisoning Democracy is virtually unknown today, it did succeed ingarnering some high-profile reviews. An anonymous reviewer for The LiteraryDigest, a publication of the Saturday Evening Post, wrote that Price’s latestwork was “truly a remarkable little book entitled to more consideration than itis likely to get.” Price received plaudits for an argument that was “inexorablylogical” and “ingenious” and a writing style that showed “admirable lucidity.”At the same time, the reviewer did find Price’s eschatology “curious,” comingas it did, from a college geology professor.97 Price must have been pleasedwith the review, especially its comment on his literary prowess.

His reaction was not shared by Bryn Mawr College geologist MalcolmBissell, who read Price’s book and then sent off a blistering attack on it tothe Digest. Far from being worthy of “‘more serious consideration,’” Bissellwrote, Poisoning Democracy is “not worth noticing at all.” Citing Price’scavalier dismissal of thrust faults, Bissell thought the book showed “anastonishing ignorance of geological as well as biological sciences.” WhenPrice wrote to the geologist in defense of his work, Bissell was blunt,writing that “I am convinced that there is something wrong with your mentalprocesses.” Moreover, Bissell questioned the “evil fruits” argument that Pricehad made central to Poisoning Democracy. “If it were true,” Bissell wrote,“all believers in evolution, all scientists who not share your views, would bedespicable creatures, devoid of all finer qualities and without religion ormorality. This is absurd.”98

Price’s Adventist theology and questionable science continued to havelimited appeal, but in the politically heated post-World War I years, his twinindictment of Bolshevism and evolutionism seems to have struck a chordamong the nation’s conservatives. In early 1922, Poisoning Democracyreceived favorable coverage in The Constitutional Review, published by theNational Association for Constitutional Government (NACG). Founded in1917 by career diplomat and Republican Party leader David Jayne Hill, theNACG railed against both progressive reform and postwar labor radicalism,featuring articles in the January 1922 issue of The Constitutional Review thatwarned of the dangers of Bolshevism among both students and workers.Price, wrote a reviewer, provided a “scathing indictment” of “socialism’sshuddering aversion from religious beliefs and observances, its degradingattitude toward the relation of the sexes and family life, and its fluctuatingand opportunist standards of right and wrong.”99

97Review of Poisoning Democracy, The Literary Review, January 21, 1922, 372.98Malcolm Bissell, Letter to the Editor, The Literary Review, March 25, 1922, 538; Malcolm

Bissell to George McCready Price, April 6, 1922, Correspondence, 1906–1925, GeorgeMcCready Price Papers, Collection 2, Box 1, Folder 2, AHC.

99Review of Poisoning Democracy, The Constitutional Review 6 (January 1922): 64. On theNACG, see Michael Kammen, A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in

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Poisoning Democracy also drew praise from a range of conservativeevangelicals who shared Price’s apprehension about the moral and politicalfruits of evolutionary thought. They included Virginia educator andconservative Presbyterian Joseph D. Eggleston who had sent Price a string ofsupportive missives during the World War I years, while serving as presidentof Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech). In 1921, as newlyappointed president of his alma mater, the Presbyterian-affiliated Hampton-Sydney College, Eggleston wrote to congratulate Price on PoisoningDemocracy, which he termed a “smashing indictment.” In those early daysof Prohibition, facing unexpectedly unruly students at his beloved school,Eggleston was pleased to share the news with Price that fellow Presbyteriancrusader 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 otherantievolution activists mobilized sentiment in favor of removing theteaching of evolution from the public schools, Price and Adventist churchleaders increasingly found common ground with fundamentalists, despitetheir 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 ofAdventist-affiliated Union College, where Price had most recently beenteaching, giving him good news. “The manager of our Pacific Press branchin Portland told me,” he reported to Price, “[that] he sold sixty-six booksmostly on writings of yours in one evening on the occasion of a lecture byDr. Riley on evolution.”102

It is likely that at least one of those books was Price’s latest effort to engagethe topic of evolution, The Predicament of Evolution (1925), which alsotouched pointedly on the topic of socialism. Brief and heavily illustrated, thebook contained a chapter on socialism with a highly suggestive title, “RedDynamite.” Here Price was playing on a quotation from one fascinatingcharacter 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 MarkkuRuotsila, 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.

100On 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.

101Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, August 20, 1925.102W. E. Howell to George McCready Price, Sept. 7, 1925, “Correspondence, 1906–1925,”

George McCready Price Papers, Collection 2, Box 1, Folder 2, AHC.


http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Eggleston_Joseph_Dupuy_Jr_1867-1953

http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Eggleston_Joseph_Dupuy_Jr_1867-1953

White graduated from Union Theological Seminary in 1902, pastored severalchurches in New York City (during the time Price visited there), and thenunder the impact of the 1909–1910 shirtwaist strike and subsequent TriangleShirtwaist Fire of 1911, became a militant socialist preacher, founding hisown denomination called the Church of the Social Revolution. Based on hishigher critical training, White authored a book about Jesus as a socialrevolutionary, Call of the Carpenter, which made a profound impact onEugene Debs and many others. Like other socialists of his time, Whitehailed evolution’s ability to undermine the idea of “God the fatheralmighty”— which he thought had been used as a weapon of classexploitation. This explained, he wrote why Darwinism had been hailed bythe “proletariat” and the “democracy.” In Price’s account, he quoted Whitespeaking about how liberal seminary teachers were aiding the cause ofsocialist revolution. White approvingly described their teachings—whichincluded 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 andillustrations may have made it a more powerful vehicle for Price’s messagethan either Poisoning or Test-Tube. To bring home the point about literal andfigurative dynamite, Price included a photo of the aftermath of theSeptember 16, 1920 bombing on Wall Street, just outside of the bankinghouse of J. P. Morgan.104 Under the heading “Evolution and Socialism One,”Price spelled out the nature of their twin threat to Christianity, “Anglo-Saxonfreedom,” and “Western civilization”:

Marxian Socialism and the radical criticism of the Bible, though arising firstin point of time, are now proceeding hand in hand with the doctrine oforganic evolution to break down all those ideas of morality, all thoseconcepts of the sacredness of marriage and of private property, uponwhich Occidental civilization has been built during the past thousandyears.105

Focusing his attention on the danger of teaching evolution in the schools, Priceurged his readers not to become complacent. In his view, the stakes could nothave been higher.

103David Burns, The Life and Death of the Radical Historical Jesus (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2013), 82–125; Bouck White, The Call of the Carpenter (1911; New York:Doubleday, Page, 1914), 296.

104On the Wall Street explosion, see Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story ofAmerica in its First Age of Terror (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

105George 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.

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http://www.creationism.org/books/price/PredicmtEvol/index.htm

http://www.creationism.org/books/price/PredicmtEvol/index.htm

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 creationistorganizations, including the Religion and Science Association (1935–1937)and the heavily Adventist Deluge Geology Society (1938–1947). Over thecourse of these years, however, Price and his allies increasingly failed to win amajority of the creationist members of these groups to a young-earth position.Price’s former student Harold Clark, who succeeded him at Pacific UnionCollege, gradually came to reject the Pricean denial of a uniform geologicalcolumn, earning bitter enmity from Price, which he expressed in a pamphletpublished and distributed in 1947, entitled, “Theories of Satanic Origin.”106 Atthe same time, more liberally minded evangelicals in the American ScientificAffiliation (ASA), founded in 1941, gravitated toward a theistic evolutionaryperspective. In 1954, the ASA’s Bernard Ramm published The Christian Viewof Science and Scripture, which took a progressive creationist position that putthe age of the earth at millions of years.107

It was precisely this liberalizing trend among creationists—and Ramm’sbook in particular—that led John Whitcomb, Jr., a Bible teacher andgraduate student at Grace Theological Seminary, to strike back in 1957 witha dissertation entitled, The Genesis Flood, which drew heavily and openlyon Price’s writings. To turn the dissertation into a book, Whitcomb teamedup with Henry Morris. A Texas native who attended Rice Institute, Morriswas an early non-Adventist member of the Deluge Geology Society and firstread Price while still at Rice in 1943.108 Now heading up the civilengineering department at Virginia Tech, Morris provided the credentials andknowledge 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 todistance themselves from Price in the text of the 1961 book version of TheGenesis Flood.109 Still, Price was clearly important to Morris. Writing toPrice’s biographer in 1964, some eighteen months after Price’s death, Morriscarefully wrote that while “the direct influence of his writings were notsignificant in the preparation of our book, the indirect influence was quitesubstantial.”110 Similarly, in his History of Modern Creationism (1984),

106Numbers, The Creationists, 148; P. W. Christian to GeorgeMcCready Price, January 16, 1947,George McCready Price Papers, Collection 2, Box 2, Folder 1, AHC.

107Numbers, The Creationists, 208–211.108Ibid., 140.109Ibid., 194–198.110Henry 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.


Morris made a point of distancing himself from Price—“I obviously disagreewith Adventist eschatology, as well as . . . revelation and soteriology”—butthen effused that Price’s “tremendous breadth of knowledge in science andScripture, his careful logic, and his beautiful writing style made a profoundimpression on me.”111

While it was “scientific creationists” who were most interested in Price’swork in his latter years, there were others who made common ground withPrice based on his anti-communist credentials. In the 1950s, Price kept up acorrespondence with James Bales, a professor of Bible and theology atconservative Church of Christ–affiliated Harding College in Searcy,Arkansas. During this period, Harding president George Benson convinced agroup of fundamentalist businessmen to pour funds into the HardingAmerican Studies Institute, which transformed the nearly bankrupt schoolinto a major center for anticommunist organizing. It attracted a wide range ofconservative figures including the young Ronald Reagan.112 With a doctoratein the history and philosophy of education from University of California atBerkeley, Bales had become active on the evolution issue in the late 1940s,linking up with a British creationist organization called the Evolution ProtestMovement. Bales was increasingly outspoken about communism, publishinga series of books, including Atheism’s Faith and Fruits in 1951, and laterworking with Billy James Hargis’s anti-communist Christian Crusade.113

In 1954, Bales contacted Price about his anticommunist activism, and Pricesuggested he read Poisoning Democracy. Bales thanked him for thesuggestion, writing that he would get himself a copy and stating that Pricewas “exactly right” about the connection between evolution andcommunism. In a 1959 letter, Bales again complimented Price, saying that“men like you knew of the menace of Communism long before the generalpublic or even our governmental officials, as a general rule, awoke to thefacts 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 repeatedlysent material on this subject to Seventh-day Adventist publications, only to findout that he was now out of step with their editorial priorities. One article, forinstance, was returned to Price because the editors believed it was “more

111Henry M. Morris, History of Modern Creationism (1984; 2nd ed., Santee, Calif.: Institute forCreation Research, 1993), 88.

112Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 163–167.

113Numbers, The Creationists, 174; Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture, “JamesDavid Bales (1915–1995),” http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=4724.

114James Bales to George McCready Price, January 8, 1954, August 27, 1959, George McCreadyPrice Papers, Collection 2, Box 2, Folder 2, AHC.

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http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=4724

political than theological.” In 1951, Price was told by the Review and Heraldthat there was a “strict ban” on “anything that discusses Communism.” Sincethere were Adventist believers “behind the Iron Curtain,” and publishinganticommunist material might make things more difficult for them, theeditors politely declined the article. On the other hand, Price had bettersuccess with the same piece—“What is Marxian Socialism?—submitted tothe journal Christian Economics, published by the Christian FreedomFoundation, which received substantial funding from conservative oil baronJ. Howard Pew. Foundation president Howard Kershner—who also had aHarding College connection and may have learned of Price from Bales—wrote to Price informing him that an edited version of the article wasaccepted and that “you are twenty years my senior and I rejoice in the factyou keep fighting.”115

Whether or not Morris was similarly inspired by Price’s anticommunistarguments we will never know for sure. Certainly, there were others makingsimilar arguments as Morris was coming of age in Texas in the 1930s and40s. In February 1923, in a widely reported address to the Texas statelegislature, fundamentalist firebrand preacher J. Frank Norris, who pastoredthe First Baptist Church of Fort Worth and edited the Searchlight, chargedthat “evolution means to deny authority” and described lurid scenes ofcriminal and atheistic Bolsheviks. As a student at Rice starting in 1935,Morris may well have heard that Norris had attacked Rice faculty back in1923 for their evolutionist bent. Indeed, none other than Julian Huxley, thegrandson of Darwin’s “bulldog” T. H. Huxley, had started the biologydepartment at Rice in 1912. And if student newspaper reporting is anyindication of the prevailing views in 1923, Norris was not popular there.116

OrperhapsMorrishad seenorheardof fundamentalistDanGilbert, aWestCoastjournalistwho servedas a contributingeditor forWilliamBellRiley’sPilot.Gilbertpublished a series of books in the 1930s that made the red connection to evolution,includingCrucifying Christ in Our Colleges (1933), The Vanishing Virgin (1935),and Evolution: Root of All Isms (1935). In the latter work, the author opened hisintroduction with “By their fruits ye shall know them,” and proceeded to call onfellow“foesofevolution” tostopwastingtimewritingaboutrocks, fossils,anatomyand rather, to start using the “simpler and surer standard” of evolution’s

115Howard Kershner to George McCready Price, January 15, 1959, George McCready PricePapers, Collection 2, Box 2, Folder 2, AHC. On the Kershner and the Christian FreedomFoundation, see Allan Lichtman, White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the AmericanConservative Movement (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2008), 174.

116“Address on Evolution Before the Texas Legislature,” Searchlight, February 23, 1923; “RiceTopics,” The Thresher, October 12, 1923. On Norris, see Barry Hankins, God’s Rascal: J. FrankNorris & the Beginnings of Southern Fundamentalism (Lexington: University Press ofKentucky, 1996).


“consequences, its results—its fruitage.”Those fruits included “the lethal gasses ofcommunismandfree-love.”117

We do know that shortly after Morris arrived in Minneapolis in 1946 to starthis doctoral training at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, the agingRiley called in the young man, who had just published That You Might Believe,and floated the idea of Morris taking over Northwestern Bible College, whichMorris politely declined. (Riley hired Billy Graham in his place.) Still, Morrismay well have been acquainted with Riley’s writings, which included the likesof Inspiration or Evolution? (1926). In a chapter entitled, “Evolution orSovietizing The State through Its Schools,” Riley drew on the example ofsocialist preacher Bouck White, whom Price had used the previous year inPredicament to illustrate the concept of “Red Dynamite.” For his part, Rileyput the spotlight on Soviet-minded professors in the U.S. who, in the nameof “Evolution” are “carefully laying their socialistic explosives as to dowhat Bouck White said he learned from his Seminary, how to ‘blow theGovernment to bits.’”118

We do know thatMorris shared Price’s basic political viewpoint. On September10, 1962, Morris gave a talk to some five hundred members of the HoustonGeological 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 andGeology, was an attack on the false “presuppositions” of uniformitarian geology.But the way Morris ended the talk was strikingly un-geological. Under theheading of “Importance of the Question,” Morris stated that “there is muchmore at stake here than simply a matter of geologic interpretation.” Evolutionaryscience, he argued, had invaded “nearly every aspect of human life,” and wasthe basis of Dewey’s progressive education, Nietzschean ethics, fascism, andNazism. Significantly, he added, “even more seriously . . . modern Communismtoday 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 treeitself.”119 If the political arguments held any water with his audience, perhapsthat morning’s front-page headlines might have made an impact—anti-CastroCubans in the U.S. appealing to the Kennedy administration to help overthrowthe Castro regime; the possibility of war with Cuba; and the downing ofU.S.-made U2 aircraft sent by Taiwan into Communist Chinese airspace.120 In

117Dan Gilbert, Evolution: The Root of All Isms (San Diego, Calif.: Danielle Publishers, 1935),6–8, emphasis in original.

118William Bell Riley, Inspiration or Evolution? (Cleveland, Oh.: Union Gospel Press, 1926), 99.119Henry Morris to George McCready Price, January 9, 1963, George McCready Price Papers,

Collection 2, Box 2, Folder 2, AHC, emphasis added.120See, 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 atCuba; Castro Will Not Start Attack on U.S.,” El Paso Herald-Post, September 10, 1962, 1.

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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 knowthat the Houston crowd was “surprisingly friendly.”As far as we know, this wasthe last letter Morris wrote to Price, who died about two weeks later, at the ageof 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, evolutionwas based on Satan’s rebellion against God. Just as Price had warned abouta coming despotism and looked for signs of the end times, Morris warnedthat the United Nations foreshadowed a Satan-inspired, human-centeredworld 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 itsMuseum of Creation and Earth History in Santee, California in 1992, thelast exhibit that visitors would see before entering the gift shop, wasa panel displaying a Creation Tree—with good “fruits” representing“Genuine Christianity” and “Correct Practice,” such as “true science,” “truehistory,” and “true government”—and an Evolutionary Tree with “HarmfulPhilosophies” and “Evil Practices.” At the top of the list of the former:Communism. While this display was taken down some time before themuseum 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 ofthe 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. Attheir center and sitting higher in elevation than all the rest is a portrait ofKarl Marx, of whom we learn that “although he was a professing Christianin his youth, he became an atheist and (according to some) a Satanist incollege.”123 Morris had made the same argument connecting Marx and

121Henry Morris, The Twilight of Evolution (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1963), 77, 83, 94.122On 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/. Onthe Santee tree of evil, see Elizabeth Anderson, “If God is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?” inPhilosophers 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 ofBabel: 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 withTom Cantor, November 16 and November 17, 2012, Santee, Calif.

123Museum guests who want more detail can step into the bookstore and purchase a copy of TheModern Creation Trilogy: Society and Creation (1996), vol. 3, by Henry Morris and his son, andcurrent ICR president, John Morris. This volume covers the full range of evolution’s alleged evilfruits from abortion to homosexuality to communism to racism. To buttress the claim of Marx’s


http://www.lifeandlightfoundation.org/

evolution to Satan in his influential book on the “culture war” facingevangelical conservatives, The Long War Against God (1989).124

VIII. CONCLUSION

From1902 to 1925,GeorgeMcCready Price’swritings evinced a strong interest inthe moral and socio-political consequences of evolutionary ideas. Over the courseof that period, the essential eschatological framework of Price’s analysis remainedstable; the concreteness of his analysis, however, changed over time.Vague textualreferences to despotism and labor unions in 1902 had evolved, shall we say, intoindictments of specific organizations and revolutionary leaders by World War I.Evolution and socialism also seemed to become more closely allied in Price’smind, so that by 1925, he could assert that “Evolution and Socialism” were oneand the same thing. Price’s level of alarm also seemed to grow. As the culturewars of the 1920s were beginning to rage, Price seemed far less content towithhold judgment on the merits of socialism in the name of science.

Due to his peculiarly Adventist theology and his stubborn insistence on aliteral six-day creation, Price was often viewed as a supremely marginalfigure, and an isolated, pseudo-academic one at that. As disconnected as hisgeological writings may have been from mainstream academia, however, Pricedid not fail to notice the connections, as he saw them, between his attempts atscience and the broader political and moral world around him. It may wellhave been that the very marginality of his precarious existence sensitized himto the appeal of the Satanic siren song of socialism. Even late in his life, inthe context of the Cold War, Price connected with a new generation ofcreationists and conservative evangelicals who drew inspiration from his long-standing work. The more we learn about the connections between creationismand anticommunism, the more we can see the importance of his enduringexample. In his own distinctive way, George McCready Price was not only anamateur geologist, but a creationist politician as well.

communion with Satan, the authors cite Richard Wurmbrand’s Marx and Satan (1986), whichmakes use of Marx’s rebellious youthful writings to convict him of devil-worship. Compared toTwilight, Trilogy goes further in tying the Satanic origin of evolution to a specific place andperson—the Tower of Babel and King Nimrod, who communed with Satan atop his monumentto 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, seeKarl W. Giberson and Donald A. Yerxa, Species of Origins: America’s Search for a CreationStory (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 105–110. Morris makes a similar argumentin Henry M. Morris, The Long War Against God: The History and Impact of the Creation/Evolution Conflict (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1989), 83.

124Henry M. Morris, The Long War Against God, 82–92, 182–183.

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