JSTOR

ACAVEMAN IN A 2005 CARTOON from the New Yorker stands peering at a sign that displays a series of figures, from an ape on the left to a human on the right (see Figure 1). An arrow points to a figure in the middle, and above the arrow a notice reads: “You are here.” That the person looking at the sign is a caveman is obvious: he has a sloping forehead and wears a one‐shouldered fur garment. That the joke is about evolution is also obvious. The linear sequence of evolutionary progress from left to right is among the most familiar of all cartoon motifs. It means evolution. Most often, it means that the joke will make fun of someone who is not at the appropriate stage of evolution. The cleverness of this cartoon lies in its combination of two of the most familiar evolution stereotypes. The caveman, looking a little glum about it, locates himself in the sequence—and not very close to the superior end of the trajectory. “You are here.” Though its meaning is obvious, this cartoon also suggests a good deal that may be less obvious, and it wears its history in a clever way. Evolution cartoons have, from the beginning, commented on such preoccupations as race, gender, and social and cultural hierarchies. But their forms—narrative presentations and visual conventions—may reinforce assumptions about how evolution is supposed to work even in cartoons that make fun of those assumptions as applied to society. Evolution cartoons have evolved over time, responsive to changing historical contexts, but they carry their history with them. The iconographic motifs denoting evolution—especially primates, “cavemen,” and the linear evolutionary sequence, have become fixed in a cartoon lexicon. The jokes work because viewers recognize the pattern. It is the familiar popular version of evolution.

(47 KB)

Figure 1. This cartoon, in the most familiar of all evolution templates, spoofs several enduring evolution cartoon themes: that human evolution is a teleological progression to “modern” humans and that human ancestors could exist—like peoples considered “primitive”—as “living fossils.” Robert Leighton, New Yorker, 25 Dec. 2006.

Open New Window

The pattern is not, however, quite Darwinian. Darwin explicitly intended the only illustration in On the Origin of Species, the famous branching diagram, as an argument for a nonlinear, nonteleological evolution; yet popular diagrams of evolution, even when drawn as trees, preserved linearity and teleology.1 Cartoons about evolution repeated, reflected, and perpetuated teleological views of evolution, and they also drew on visual traditions resonant with associations and references to human social hierarchies. They have a lot to tell us about responses to evolution and about the contexts shaping those responses. People learn a lot of things about evolution from cartoons, and they know some of these things without thinking much about them—because they learned them from cartoons. Evolution cartoons have done a lot to help popularize a very non‐Darwinian form of evolution and to fix it in a visual shorthand, making it seem like something that just goes without question: common sense.2 Cartoons have not always been included in discussions of the visual cultures of science, but they should be: they respond to, and can shape, public understandings of science in important ways.

Like any language, the vocabulary of cartoons is full of history. Even before 1859, when Charles Darwin published the Origin of Species, evolution cartoons served as useful vehicles for commentary and social satire. They have drawn ever since on a venerable pre‐Darwinian iconography, and persistent evolution themes have morphed in cartoons to suit shifting historical circumstances, then becoming part of an enduring cartoon language.3 Darwin himself began appearing in cartoons following the publication of the Origin of Species, and especially after The Descent of Man, mostly as the aged, bearded Darwin, the Darwin of the Julia Cameron photographs, rather than the young Darwin of the Beagle voyage.4 Darwin's iconic image quickly came to stand as shorthand for evolution in late nineteenth‐century cartoons; and he remains familiar in cartoons as few other scientists have been. Seldom are scientists recognizable in cartoons without name labels. Darwin is. Cartoon scientists may wear lab coats and hold test tubes. They may look crazed. Occasionally, they resemble Einstein, or caricatures of Einstein: the trademark is wild hair. Or, they may be Darwin.

In late nineteenth‐century cartoons Charles Darwin was often confronted by apes; sometimes he was depicted as an ape/Darwin hybrid. Cartoons playing on the idea of the evolutionary tree entered the tradition early, and several cartoons portrayed Darwin/ape hybrids perched in the family tree (see Figure 2). “That Troubles Our Monkey Again,” one of the more often reproduced and analyzed Darwin/ape cartoons, published in Fun in 1872 (see Figure 3), portrays Darwin facing a woman described as a descendant of an ascidian, who is herself shaped—as an astute analysis by Patricia Fara observes—somewhat like an ascidian, suggesting that the cartoonist assumed a relatively sophisticated reader.5 Cartoons and caricatures of Darwin as a hybrid monkey or ape, Janet Browne points out, firmly fixed his association with evolution: evolution became known as “Darwinism.” Studies of cartoons and missing‐link imagery have contributed to recent revisions of historians' understanding of Darwinism and public responses to it. Browne has suggested that the profusion of these cartoons in Victorian periodicals may actually have helped to shape public understandings of evolution. James Paradis has demonstrated that Victorian evolution cartoons satirized class, convention, politics, and even science itself. Chris Fleming and Jane Goodall argue that the pre‐Darwinian public became accustomed to missing‐link imagery in popular theater and that these audiences may well have been more fascinated than horrified. Others, especially Gowan Dawson, have shown that Darwin and ape cartoons reveal deep tensions in Victorian culture and associations, especially with race and sex, that complicated responses to evolution.6

(102 KB)

Figure 2. Darwin in the evolutionary tree. Darwin and evolutionary family trees entered the evolution cartoon lexicon early—and often together. Linley Sambourne, Punch, 11 Dec. 1875, 69:242.

Open New Window

(126 KB)

Figure 3. An astute analysis by Patricia Fara of this much‐reproduced Darwin cartoon demonstrates the degree to which it assumed a reader sophisticated about the details of Darwinism. The cartoon was published in Fun, Nov. 1872, 16. For Fara's interesting deconstruction see “Pictures of Charles Darwin,” Endeavour, 2000, 24:143–144.

Open New Window

Darwin himself is not the only evolution icon available in the cartoonists' toolkit, however. He has, in a sense, competitors. Public controversies about science are useful to historians of science. They also add new inflections to the visual language of popular science iconography. The trajectory of evolution cartoons from the Victorian era to the evolution controversy of the 1920s in the United States, in particular, illustrates the relationship of this iconography to cultural preoccupations. This progression suggests some of the ways in which variations alter the cartoon lexicon, adapting to particular historical moments. It also reveals the tendency of cartoons to develop a set of visual conventions, a kind of language that, while protean and responsive to new contexts, also preserves traces of its history. These cartoon idioms may shape popular perceptions of evolution in distinctly un‐Darwinian directions.

Non‐Darwinian patterns that have come to dominate evolution cartoons were in place even in early Darwin cartoons. One of the most often reproduced Darwin cartoons, first published in Punch in 1881 (see Figure 4), prominently includes the earthworms about which Darwin wrote so charmingly, along with a vision of evolution from Chaos to Darwin, plotted along a spiraling path. This pattern had been elaborated in the series of cartoons by Charles H. Bennett for Punch, and though it is arranged in a spiral, the pathway is nonetheless functionally linear, from ostensibly “lower” life forms to “higher” ones, suggesting the popular connection of evolution with the old idea of the Great Chain of Being and its modern descendant, the progression of life.7 This teleology was present in late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century science—many scientists accepted evolution but rejected natural selection and, often, materialism, adopting deterministic, progressive, orthogenetic, and often theistic forms of evolution. These versions of evolution survived in popular culture through the medium of cartoons even after their rejection by biologists, beginning in the 1930s, with the restoration of natural selection at the center of the evolutionary synthesis.

(185 KB)

Figure 4. A template familiar in the Punch cartoons by C. H. Bennett appears in this often‐reproduced Darwin cartoon. The circular evolutionary progression was also essentially linear, in that it implied a single progression toward a predetermined culmination. Linley Sambourne, Punch's Almanack for 1882, 6 Dec. 1881.

Open New Window

Many of the Darwin and evolution cartoons and caricatures of the late nineteenth century featured not just monkeys or apes but, in particular, gorillas. Gorillas enjoyed a tremendous vogue in Victorian Britain. After publishing a successful 1861 book, Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, featuring hair‐raising encounters with ferocious gorillas, the controversial explorer Paul du Chaillu embarked on a lecture tour that stimulated avid interest in gorillas. Gorilla cartoons appeared regularly in popular journals, especially after the publication of The Descent of Man. Many of these cartoons suggest a good‐humored irreverence, but from the time of their introduction to Victorian popular culture gorillas appeared in ominous as well as satiric forms. Gorillas suggested implicit racial and sexual themes and perhaps, as some historians have argued, uneasiness about ambiguous boundaries.8

From the very beginnings of European awareness of gorillas in the mid‐nineteenth century, these gentle animals often carried sensational, even salacious metaphorical freight—and racial connotations—in European and American popular culture. Gowan Dawson has demonstrated the interweaving of racial and sexual themes in ape imagery and has shown that these associations had a long history even before 1859. Apes in general and gorillas in particular carried associations with rapacious sexuality and with race, through, for example, the freighted term “miscegenation.” Gorillas began abducting women in European art almost as soon as they became familiar to Europeans, in the mid‐nineteenth century. Casts and reproductions of an 1854 sculpture by Emmanuel Fremiét, Gorilla Abducting a Negress, remained familiar into the 1920s, as did rumors of gorillas kidnapping women and, pervasively, associations of gorillas with racial and sexual preoccupations.9

When the American evolution controversy of the 1920s erupted surrounding—but not beginning with—the 1925 trial of John Thomas Scopes for agreeing to violate Tennessee's law against teaching evolution, gorillas were used as shorthand and as symbols by partisans on both sides of the debate. The California evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson appeared on a poster battling “the gorilla of evolution.” An antievolution lawyer, Alfred Watterson McCann, published an entire book dedicated to refuting and excoriating a famous evolution exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and called it, provocatively, God—or Gorilla. The baseball player turned evangelist Billy Sunday declared that “God will eventually triumph over the gorilla.”10 The associations were inescapable. Antievolution polemicists such as Sunday and the Rev. John Roach Straton repeatedly referred to evolution as “the jungle theory.” Cartoons sometimes alluded with moderate subtlety to jungles (see Figure 5), but there was nothing subtle about the term “jungle” in the racially obsessed American Jazz Age.

(74 KB)

Figure 5. This cartoon from the summer of the Scopes trial suggests the “jungle” association with evolution that was common in the 1920s and alluded, sometimes subtly and other times crudely, to race. Judge, 18 July 1925, p. 3.

Open New Window

Gorilla imagery could be recruited for defiantly proevolution purposes as well. A striking photograph on the cover of the first issue of a new journal in 1927 featured a gorilla looking as large as possible and bore the caption “Man's Blood Cousin—the Gorilla.” The journal was Evolution, a Journal of Nature; it was launched two and a half years after the Scopes trial by Ludwig Erwin Katterfeld and was intended to educate a lay public. Katterfeld was not a scientist. He was a political activist, a socialist and defender of civil liberties; and for him, as for so many on the political left in that decade, the evolution debate was not simply a contest over the details of a scientific theory. It was a struggle for freedom of thought against bigotry and superstition and in support of the values of the Enlightenment.11

The journal featured abundant cartoons, of a self‐consciously irreverent cast. In one cartoon a monkey was pictured above a caption saying “here's a portrait of the editor's great, great, great … grandfather.”12 Readers of the journal would have recognized this as a reference to the debate at the Oxford meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1860, where Bishop Samuel Wilberforce was famously reputed to have asked Thomas Henry Huxley whether it was through his grandmother or his grandfather that he had descended from an ape: Huxley was something of a hero to defenders of evolution in the 1920s. Another cartoon (see Figure 6) portrayed a fundamentalist preacher looking uncannily similar to a picture of a monkey. Cartoons depicting antievolutionists with simian features were typical of this period and were similarly evocative. Ethnic and racial “others” had long been so depicted, and these associations probably contributed to the vehemence of many readers' reactions.

(82 KB)

Figure 6. Many cartoons have played with the idea of human resemblance to monkeys or apes. The humans most likely to be portrayed as simians in this way were Irish people in the late nineteenth century, African Americans in the United States, and fundamentalists in the United States in the 1920s. From Evolution, a Journal of Nature, Feb. 1928, 3:16.

Open New Window

The magazine's cartoons elicited lively responses. Among the most interesting features of the journal was a running discussion in the letters column on the advisability of using humor as a rhetorical weapon in the national dialogue about evolution. From its very inception, Evolution drew fire as well as praise for its ridicule of fundamentalists and, especially, for its cartoons. The editors meant to be provocative in adorning the cover of their first issue with a gorilla. They intended to create controversy. In the second issue they congratulated themselves on the responses to the gorilla cover: “As we expected, the front cover of our first issue, showing Man's Blood Cousin—The Gorilla, caused comment all over the continent. A few who would have been glad to ignore evolution if we had published a conventionally polite cover were aroused to fury by its powerful challenge, but nearly all the comment was very favorable.” The cover did inspire fury in some quarters, not all of them fundamentalist. One reader wrote of a lady who had called him to complain that the picture and the journal were “Despicable. Obscene. Unspeakably vile.” Frances Mason, a science popularizer, had devoted her considerable energies to enlisting scientists to author chapters for her book Creation by Evolution. The message of the book was that evolution, properly understood, posed no threat to Christian piety—indeed, evolution affirmed religious faith. Mason approached her editorship with missionary fervor. And yet even so active a campaigner for evolution found herself utterly repulsed by the cartoons and the gorilla imagery in Katterfeld's journal. Writing in a state of agitation to the Princeton biologist Edwin Grant Conklin, Mason predicted that this journal would turn people against evolution, would suggest to them that it was a “nasty” theory. She supposed that the public associated gorillas and apes with lascivious behavior and that most people therefore found them brutal and vile, as she did herself. One of the scientists included in Mason's book, the paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, shared this response; he wrote that the history of imagery depicting apes in such fashion must surely prejudice the public against evolution.13

Some antievolutionists—in particular the most visible of them, William Jennings Bryan, the politician whose efforts had done so much to bring the antievolution movement to the attention of the public—conflated evolution with Social Darwinism, with the notion that “might makes right,” and, in the wake of the Great War, with German militarism. The gorilla of evolution, in this context, could look a good deal like the famous World War I poster in which a gorilla labeled “Militarism” and carrying a club labeled “Kultur” made off with a half‐dressed woman, presumably representing Belgium (see Figure 7 and Frontispiece).14

(110 KB)

Figure 7. This widely distributed World War I poster by H. R. Hopps portrayed Germany as a gorilla‐like brute, wearing a cap labeled “Militarism,” carrying a club marked “Kultur,” and making off with a woman who is obviously intended to represent Belgium—as in “the rape of Belgium.” It drew for its evocative power on a long tradition associating gorillas with race and with sexual rapaciousness. It also contributed to the antievolution fervor of the 1920s, a decade when many antievolutionists associated evolution with German science and natural selection with what they took to be the German doctrine that “might makes right.”

Open New Window

By the 1920s some of the meanings once assigned to gorillas had been extended to a new taxon of missing links: cavemen. The sexual and racial themes implicit in much gorilla imagery made their way almost seamlessly into the iconography of human ancestry that sprang up after discoveries of fossil hominids in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A new genre, Stone Age fiction, proliferated in the late nineteenth century, and movies followed print fiction in the creation of the popular idiom of the “caveman.” The iconographic elements of popular and scientific caveman imagery existed before the discovery of fossil hominids and before Darwin: as Wiktor Stoczkowski has put it, “prehistoric people were invented before they were discovered.” They gained new power in the context of the evolution controversies. From the beginnings of hominid discoveries, scientists and science popularizers such as the Rev. Henry N. Hutchinson attempted, as Bernard Lightman has shown, to offer the public images of early humans as “cavemen” that were intended both to entertain and to educate. From their introduction in popular culture, cavemen carried a good deal of cultural freight. Cavemen from the start incorporated both racial connotations and intimations of empire by way of the ubiquitous development or recapitulation metaphor, which held that evolution, including the evolution of human societies, was “just like” the development of the individual. Some races of people, according to this logic, were more “primitive” than others. Primitive human races and cultures could be seen as “living fossils,” people who had not progressed as far along a linear evolutionary trajectory as had Europeans and Americans. In the language of the development metaphor, they represented—and were called—“the childhood of the race.” This ideology occupied a place at the very heart of Progressive era culture in the United States, and the popularity of cavemen in American cartoons, movies, and science fiction during the period was inextricably linked to this framework.15

The term “caveman” is necessary, for these stereotypes were as much about gender as they were about anything, and this was especially evident in the cartoon world. Cavemen carried clubs, with which they threatened cavewomen. By the 1920s, the term “caveman” stood in popular jargon for louts who kidnap women. Cavewomen, in the increasingly consumerist culture of the decade, served most often in jokes about consumer cave wives demanding that cavemen use their clubs to acquire exotic furs, usually by separating them from large cats (see Figure 8).

(71 KB)

Figure 8. Cave wife consumer. A number of consumer cave wives in cartoons of the 1920s reveal the degree to which “caveman” imagery expressed stereotypes about and preoccupations with gender. Cavemen in cartoons almost always brandished clubs, with which they often threatened cavewomen. Judge, 5 Sept. 1925, p. 6.

Open New Window

There seems always to have been a kind of taxonomy of missing‐link cartoon symbolism. Gorillas served rhetorical purposes having to do with their shock value, particularly associations with race and sex. Cavemen and cavewomen provided stereotypes for jokes about gender and consumerism. Monkeys, however, were ubiquitous in the American Jazz Age and offered a wide variety of possibilities for social commentary. Like apes, monkeys had long been used in racial and ethnic stereotypes, but in the decade of the Scopes trial their symbolic possibilities multiplied. The 1925 Scopes trial was called the “monkey trial” for good reasons. Magazines and newspapers of the decade were awash in cartoon monkeys. Monkeys became symbolic vehicles for those who wanted to attack what they perceived as the intolerance of conservative religion and for those who simply made fun of attitudes they considered backward and not modern. Cartoon monkeys became little icons of modernity, irreverent critics of a wide variety of pretensions and contradictions prevalent in human society. Anticlerical iconoclasts delighted in simian references. So did the self‐consciously urbane. Monkeys could be more problematic for some of the scientists who attempted to enlighten the public about evolution, however.16

Not all scientists rushed to the defense of Scopes and evolution in the press. Those who did were not always representative of scientists in general: the scientists most prominent in the defense of evolution in the press followed a particular rhetorical strategy. They argued that, far from being a threat to Christian faith, evolution actually affirmed a sturdy religious perspective. Religious souls should take comfort, these scientists argued, in the understanding that evolution implied progress. This progressive view of evolution reflected the tradition of orthogenesis, a directional model of evolution later largely discarded as teleological but still prominent among some scientists in the 1920s; it also suited the rhetorical strategies adopted by scientists attempting to soothe popular concerns about the implications of evolution. The descent of man, as several of them put it, was really an ascent. Linear ascent as the pattern of evolution came to be something of a leitmotif in American newspaper accounts of the issue; and it began to appear more often in evolution cartoons in this decade.

Antievolutionists parodied this notion. A cartoon by Ernest James Pace, “Descent of the Modernists,” depicted descent down a staircase of heterodoxy ending in atheism. Edward Davis has perceptively explored the uses made by antievolutionists of this and other antievolution cartoons to illustrate their lectures; the cartoons were also made available for sale as lantern slides.17 When biologists defending evolution in the 1920s argued that it represented a hopeful vision of human ascent, antievolutionists were not mollified. For conservative Christians, this modernist form of theistic evolution was nonsense. Proponents of progress, from their point of view, discarded an essential tenet of Christian faith, the Fall of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.

Some scientists defending evolution also insisted that the familiar ape and monkey imagery was misleading, even damaging. Humans had not evolved directly from monkeys or from apes but shared with them a common ancestor in the distant past, they often intoned. This argument was simply impossible to make convincingly amidst the ambient noise of simian humor. Monkey cartoons were everywhere and were, as one paleontologist complained, dangerously “irreverent.” But monkeys were inescapable: they adapted too well to the litany of cartoon subjects of the decade. Cartoons in the 1920s made fun of “Puritans” and of laws prohibiting all manner of behaviors—“Aunty Everything” became a familiar character in Judge magazine cartoons. Most of all, they made fun of William Jennings Bryan. Though they also parodied generic fundamentalists, probably no one was more often mocked in cartoons than Bryan. Cartoons portrayed him as an Inquisitor, Don Quixote, the Missing Link, a fool attacking a scarecrow or trying to yank the monkey out of the family tree. Monkeys, in particular, turned out to be just the vehicle for making fun of antievolutionists. Monkeys haunted Bryan's cartoon dreams, threw things at him from perches in trees, and taunted him in zoos. Monkeys also mocked professors, celebrities, and publicity seekers. In a fairly typical example (see Figure 9), Bryan appeared on display in court as “the missing link” between an ape and a professor. Antievolutionists' cartoons often featured deluded professors, coded as professorial by their academic regalia.

(73 KB)

Figure 9. William Jennings Bryan appears as the missing link between an ape and a stereotypical professor. The cartoon includes several prominent themes from evolution cartoons of the 1920s: spoofs of intellectuals, jokes about missing links, and jokes about antievolutionists as missing links. Antievolutionist cartoons often featured deluded professors, coded as professorial by their academic regalia. Judge, 18 July 1925, p. 9.

Open New Window

One of the most frequent themes came in the pattern Jeffrey Moran has called “reverse‐monkey” cartoons. In these cartoons, monkeys commented ironically, and sometimes with formidable bite, on the contradictions and evils of human societies. Monkeys observed human antics and congratulated each other on not being related to these odd creatures. In one of the most breathtaking cartoons, which Moran has discussed in detail, from the African‐American paper the Chicago Defender, a pair of monkeys in a tree cling to one another, shuddering, while watching a lynching below.18 The venerable notion of a morally superior human species looked like so much hubris. In the pages of the Chicago Defender, this was a bitterly ironic twist on Darwin's repeated reflections in The Descent of Man that monkeys and apes could seem more human than “savage” people.19

Some cartoons employed the idea of evolution as a progressive sequence to make fun of such hubris and of the illusion—especially after the Great War—of progress. Yet the sequence, from fish or ape to human, which has since become a template for evolution cartoons, though parodying the idea that humans have arrived at the pinnacle of evolution, also suggests an implicit message that with the advent of Homo sapiens evolution has come to an end—and a worthy end at that. This pattern has lasted and remains familiar in evolution cartoons; it includes an implied teleology even when the cartoons themselves laugh at the teleology.

Primate cartoons could be, in this context, significantly un‐Darwinian, sometimes implying the idea that only monkeys and apes evolved—and had evolved: in a cartoon called “The Upstart” (see Figure 10), which appeared on the first page of the “Evolution number” of Judge in the summer of the Scopes trial, a little monkey sets off to evolve, leaving the rest of the animals looking bemused or puzzled—as if, of all the animals, only the primates had evolved.20

(75 KB)

Figure 10. “The Upstart.” This cartoon seems to suggest that only primates had evolved, or at least that only primates enjoyed a grand evolutionary destiny. Judge, 18 July 1925, p. 1.

Open New Window

Defenders of evolution from the left, like Katterfeld, took very different rhetorical positions than did the more conservative scientists who defended evolution. For many on the political left, the evolution debate was not merely about the content of science. Evolution, in these circles, stood for human liberty, for liberation from the tyranny of ancient superstitions. Darwin, for them, represented this great cause. The cover of the third installment of Evolution featured one of the most familiar images: Darwin as an old man, in a cape; the caption proclaimed boldly, “the great emancipator of the human intellect” (see Figure 11). Darwin remained an iconic figure. Yet among the many icons of the debate that appeared in the cartoons of the 1920s, Darwin himself had to some extent been eclipsed by missing links.

(116 KB)

Figure 11. This iconic image of Darwin appeared on the cover of an early issue of Ludwig Erwin Katterfeld's magazine Evolution, a Journal of Nature, Feb. 1928, 3. Katterfeld, like many defenders of evolution on the political left in the 1920s, associated Darwin with the fight for enlightenment, reason, and tolerance, all values they believed to be inextricably related to science and scientific method and under assault by forces of bigotry and intolerance. Darwin, according to Katterfeld's caption accompanying this photograph, was “the great emancipator of the human intellect.”

Open New Window

Why, when there were so many evolution cartoons in the 1920s, were so few of them Darwin cartoons? Darwin's photograph appeared regularly. Could the relative dearth of Darwin cartoons have been a manifestation of the eclipse of Darwinism?21 Darwinism had become problematic for the scientists who sought to defend evolution from the onslaughts of antievolutionists in this decade. Scientific responses to natural selection remained tentative. Scientists agreed, for the most part, that natural selection played a role in evolution. But they debated among themselves its role as the mechanism of evolution. They attempted to keep such disagreements within their own community, but it was impossible to confine them. Antievolutionists followed these debates—and seized on them. Evolutionists, both scientists and nonscientists, admired and often revered Darwin, but they noted that the use of the term “Darwinism” as a synonym for evolution caused confusion among the public. Scientists wanted to avoid conflating Darwin and evolution in the public debate because they remained uncertain about natural selection and they knew that antievolutionists would capitalize on such uncertainty.

Most scientists, however, did not draw cartoons. Darwin appeared in photographs, as an object of reverence. But the business of cartoons in the 1920s was irreverence. Perhaps Darwin disappeared not because he was unsafe, but because he had become too safe. By the 1920s, in spite of doubts about natural selection, Darwin was firmly established as an authority: evolution was Darwinism, even though scientists tried to alert the public to the nuances. Darwin would have represented an argument from authority, and everyone at least pretended to avoid arguments from authority (with more or less success, of course). Monkeys, on the other hand, made useful comments about modern life; and linear sequences could mock hierarchies and pretensions while at the same time depicting evolution as comfortingly progressive—the “ascent of man.”

Recent historiography of Victorian science challenges the notion that Darwin set off a revolution causing profound culture shock, suggesting that our later misconception of the reaction may have been shaped more by the rhetoric of exponents of evolution—who sought to portray Darwinism as revolutionary and shocking—than by any evidence of actual responses on the part of the public. Missing‐link imagery and public responses to it in the decade of the Scopes trial have been less studied, despite the ubiquity of such imagery at the time. In particular, the proliferation of illustrated newspapers and magazines meant that cartoon commentary on the evolution controversy was inescapable. Scientists and science popularizers expressed concern that the public would find such images repellent; some scientists indeed shared that sentiment. Many popular books about evolution featured illustrations of deliberately benign‐looking apes and monkeys, while some avoided the subject of human evolution altogether. Antievolutionist polemicists also assumed that invoking the words “monkey” and “gorilla” and “jungle” would provoke visceral negative responses. Letters to editors, and many letters written by citizens to well‐known scientists, suggest that some people did feel this way. Many did not—but assumed that others did. It was a highly variegated public. There were many expressions, as well, of amusement—and many sympathetic responses to the symbolic monkey and its critique of everything.

These cartoons flourished in a variety of different kinds of magazines and newspapers. Some of them can surely be read in terms of a sort of consumer branding—for example, readers of magazines such as the New Yorker, Judge, or even Evolution didn't have to be especially interested in the details of evolutionary theory to see evolution cartoons as biting satire on various aspects of modern (or insufficiently modern) life and to identify themselves as people who were enlightened enough to reject the intolerance that—the cartoons suggested—antievolutionists represented. For readers of these magazines, irreverent monkeys made fun of bigotry, of pretentiousness, and of people who took themselves too seriously. Cartoons were about race, gender, and modernity, about progress and hierarchy and the role of science; and they mocked competing claims to authority. Whatever else they meant, they were about a good deal more than evolution. But just as they expressed larger cultural concerns, they also added an interpretive visual language to the store of ideas about evolution available in popular culture, ideas that perpetuated historical traditions in a form that made them seem like just so much common sense—obvious. We may laugh at the idea of a woebegone caveman locating himself in the middle of the evolutionary trajectory, but we remember the trajectory—and the implications about our own place in it.