Darwin published On the Origin of Species (or simply, The Origin) in 1859 and The Descent of Man in 1871. By the late 1920s, anti-evolutionism in the United States was a complex and well-developed social movement (Lienesch 2007), and the controversy over teaching evolution was highly divisive (Ginger 1958; Larson 1989; Numbers 1992). The most important lines of division concerned religion, education, and geography. The popular view, reinforced by the images of the Scopes trial in the public imagination, is that opposition to evolution was a distinctive product of southern, poorly educated fundamentalists.

Of course, the social divisions underlying the evolution conflict were not so clear cut then. In the 1920s, there were differences within Protestantism (Marsden 1982); fundamentalism was not the only Christian tradition opposed to evolution (Ruse 2005); the leaders of the anti-evolution movement were themselves well educated and drawn from the middle class (Numbers 1992); and, although the movement only achieved legislative success in the South, it had considerable popular support throughout the nation (Larson 1989; Lienesch 2007). What we can say as a generalization is that anti-evolutionism was most prominent among those caught up in the nascent fundamentalist movement and in the non-metropolitan areas of the South and the Midwest (Larson 1989; see also Woodberry and Smith 1998 on the migration of southern conservative Protestants to other parts of the country).