Darwin Centennial Celebration (1959) - Media Coverage and Documentation

Media Coverage and Documentation

In order to get the most out of the Darwin Centennial Celebration beyond the actual event, the planning committee worked with Encyclopædia Britannica to produce a documentary. The resulting 28.5 minute film was completed by 1960, when John T. Scopes was brought in to speak at its premier.

The celebration was also covered widely in newspapers and radio by a 27-member press corps. Huxley's address on religion and evolutionary humanism generated a particularly large amount of coverage (mostly negative). Chicago CBS affiliate WBBM-TV aired a discussion, hosted by Irving Kupcinet, that featured Sir Charles Darwin, Sir Julian Huxley, Harlow Shapley, Adlai Stevenson, and Sol Tax. The radio program All Things Considered (among others) devoted several episodes to the event's panel discussions. The papers contributed to the event and transcripts of all the panels were published early in 1960 as Evolution after Darwin, which received favorable reviews.

The public response to most aspects of the celebration (with the exception of Huxley's controversial speech) was very positive. However, the event also reinvigorated American creationism: Henry M. Morris, a coauthor of the influential 1961 young earth creationism book The Genesis Flood, would later credit the Darwin Centennial Celebration for making clear the threat posed by evolutionary science.

The organizers tried but failed to enlist significant participation by historians of science, who (according to one organizer) seemed "baffled by the task of getting ten authors to write something new in this field." Many historians of evolution were also participating in a competing historical event at Johns Hopkins University. Ironically, the historical interest generated by the centennial may have contributed to the subsequent development of the so-called Darwin Industry.