In 1922, David Domer was fired from his new job as an English professor at Midland College in Fremont, Nebraska, just weeks after he accepted the offer. The reason? A Lutheran pastor from the town where Domer had previously been school superintendent informed Midland that Domer had published articles “espousing Darwinism” in the local paper, demonstrating his moral unfitness to hold a position at the college.1
For several years now, I’ve described my research on Domer’s successful slander lawsuit and the cultures of scientific literacy and lived religion that shaped it as “Inherit the Wind meets The Cheese and the Worms.” Domer’s 1924 court victory could be said to be America’s first “evolution trial.” I’ve imagined this project as the story of that historic “first,” and as a kind of prequel to my first book on textbook publishers and education policy as impacted by the much more famous Scopes “Monkey” Trial in 1925.2 The contrast between Domer and Scopes illustrates the artificiality of the science-versus-religion trope, and it forces us to ask what exactly counts as “antievolution” across a century of different legal and intellectual directions.3
But lately I’ve started to think that maybe this is the wrong end of the story. In part that is because the fight over evolution seems increasingly petty when there are other forms of science denial—especially the rejection of climate change—which have much more tangible and harmful consequences. I have come to believe the more important part of Domer’s story isn’t how he or his detractors understood the theory of evolution, but rather the fact that the outrage over Domer’s published opinions got him fired. In the parlance of 2021: was David Domer canceled?
At a time when “cancel culture” is a bugaboo in American political discourse, it’s tempting to look to the past to find precursors and precedents, to cast a net for cautionary tales, or at least identify incidents of irony. It’s easy to do that here. It was a successor to the man who fired Domer, former Midland president Ben Sasse (an alt-ac history Ph.D. now working in government) who insisted back in 2019 that Nebraskans would “continue to act like grownups” and never submit to “cancel culture” like Californians do. (The irony is compounded by the fact that after Domer was fired by Midland and he found it hard to work anywhere in Nebraska, he finally moved west and spent his remaining years in Santa Barbara.)
In recent months, there have been a number of cases of academics losing jobs for controversial reasons, often linked to activities outside the classroom, especially expressions of their political or philosophical views.4 While each incident has its own unique context, a pattern does emerge: increased institutional monitoring of academics’ extracurricular speech, combined with a greater tendency for campus leadership to visit retribution upon faculty rather than supporting them in acts of academic freedom. To that extent, Domer’s case is comparable. So let’s dig in.
On April 27, 1922, the Rising City Independent, the newspaper serving the eponymous small town of about a thousand souls, published an article on “The Doctrine of Evolution” by “Prof. D.S. Domer of the Rising City High School.” Domer had never written a column like this for the newspaper before. And despite the article’s closing promise that it was the first of a planned series, no more articles in the series ever appeared.5 This suggests two things. First, the paper’s editor probably solicited Domer to write the column—perhaps in light of the previous week’s news, the purported discovery by American Museum of Natural History president Henry Fairfield Osborn of the “Nebraska Man,” a later-debunked hominid thought to have evolved in the Americas.6 Second, we can infer that, since no follow-up articles were ever published, the negative reaction from the community must have been loud and swift.
It was only a couple of months later that Domer was hired by Midland, a college affiliated with the United Lutheran Church in America (ULCA).7 Domer himself was not Lutheran; he grew up Mennonite and had been ordained in the more liberal Disciples of Christ. But this did not disqualify him from teaching at Midland, since he was teaching a secular subject. Other non-Lutherans were on the faculty. Furthermore, course descriptions from college materials around that time suggest the biology instructor taught about evolution.8
Nevertheless, the college leadership decided they could not ignore the objections of Reverend William Klink and his congregants, who cosigned a protest letter to the school. The original letter seems to have escaped archiving, but according to the complaint filed by Domer, the letter alleged that he was “unfit, morally and mentally” to teach at Midland. Klink was himself an alumnus of Midland, and his church raised a fair amount of money to support the school, which also relied on major funding from the Nebraska and Kansas synods of the ULCA.
For a man in his fifties who had moved around the country in search of better job prospects for nearly three decades, the position at Midland must have come as a great relief. His $2,000 annual salary was a major improvement over the pay he had earned in Rising City as its public school superintendent. It was more than he’d ever made before. When it all came crashing down later that summer, Domer was forced to scramble, taking a teaching job at a high school nearly 200 miles away. In Domer’s words it was “a nice place to work,” but “I get just a small salary, $135 a month, hardly enough to live on.” (This was likely not a 12-month position.)9
As his prospects in eastern Nebraska evaporated and his applications for jobs at other colleges proved unsuccessful, Domer turned to the courts for relief. He sued Klink and the cosigners of the letter for slander, alleging that their false allegations of his unfitness to be a teacher had caused direct financial harm.
In court, Domer didn’t attempt to defend evolution. According to a local newspaper account of the trial published nearly a year later, Domer testified that the Rising City Independent article was meant to explain what evolution was, not to advocate for it.10 This defense may suggest that my framing this as an “evolution trial” is a stretch. In a letter to a paleontologist friend, Domer recounted that the defense attempted to “evade the main issue and hide behind the Bible.” No verbatim transcript of the case exists, but it seems that the defendants tried to make the trial into a referendum on science versus religion—and failed in their effort, because Domer’s lawyers stayed focused on the issue of slander, on the cancellation of his job contract, and on the resultant financial harm.11
Domer v. Klink retroactively became an “evolution trial” about a year later. In the weeks leading up to the Scopes trial, a newspaper in Fremont published an article on the previous year’s case, noting that Nebraska had missed out on the opportunity to host such a spectacle as was being seen in Tennessee. The paper also pointed out, despite what Eastern elites might have guessed about the rural Midwest, “the evolution side won.” A story about Domer’s lawsuit was also published out-of-state: in the Chattanooga Times (which was running several articles per day about the Scopes case) and its sister paper in New York. For a brief moment in 1925, Domer v. Klink was an evolution trial, the nation’s first, before memory of it was drowned in a barrel of Tennessee monkeyshines.12
So if the media of 1925 could choose to make an evolution trial out of David Domer’s story, why can’t I evaluate Domer as a victim of “cancel culture?” Is it that the responsibilities of the historian are different from that of the journalist, or that I’ve come to this story years too late?
The real issue, I think, is neither of these. While there are historical echoes and continuities between Domer’s case and those of recent academics mentioned above, this isn’t what “cancel culture” has evolved to mean in this moment. Media studies scholar Meredith Clark has traced how this term moved from “Black vernacular tradition to its misappropriation in the digital age by social elites.” Canceling had its “origins in queer communities of color,” and was a “socially mediated” form of protest against institutions that denied them space in the public sphere. It was an act of resistance performed by withholding attention or cultural capital, often the only currencies of power available to the cancelers.13
The co-opting of this rhetoric by (often white, often conservative) people with outsized public platforms has created a “cancel culture” that inverts the original meaning of the term. It’s a cultural capital version of an NFT, a commodification of outrage that inflates in value in proportion to the offense given. Cancel currency is backed by the impression that those doing the canceling are the very opposite of who they are—that the cancelers are not powerless but instead all-powerful.
Trying to insert Domer into a discourse with this racial and political baggage would obfuscate rather than clarify, and doing so would further the erasure of those who originated canceling as a specific act of cultural resistance. We can do better. But these questions of power and platforms, of character and caricature, remain helpful when considering the case of David Domer and William Klink. Outside of suing for slander, could I imagine Domer somehow leveraging his plight into something that could provide him with a living, perhaps if he had leaned into the evolution narrative? John Scopes turned down an opportunity to go on the lecture circuit after his evolution trial.14 Could the Chautauqua circuit have been Domer’s early-twentieth-century Substack?
Domer was an experienced teacher and a capable public speaker—during the first World War he served as a “Four Minute Man,” giving public addresses in support of the war effort. And given his decision to write for the Rising City Independent, Domer apparently saw it as his role to educate not just his students but the local community. But he lacked the kind of boosterism and need for attention that characterizes those most loudly flaunting their cancellations today. At times, I wish he had been more self-promoting; I’d have more source material to work with!
When David Domer’s job was canceled, his main concern wasn’t that he had lost an audience, but rather that he had lost the ability to provide for his family. This helped him win his trial, since he did not allow the argument to drift into the question of whether his speech was morally correct. As a result, he felt a sense of recognition—that his plight had been understood and heard, and there was room for his voice too. “At any rate,” he wrote to his paleontologist friend, “we won a fine victory, don’t you think?”
- Throughout this article I’ll be drawing on the trial records of David S. Domer v. William A. Klink et al., case file 24643, Nebraska Supreme Court, RG 69 (box 446), Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln, Nebraska.
- Adam Shapiro, “Scopes Wasn’t the First: Nebraska’s 1924 Anti-Evolution Trial,” Nebraska History 94 (2013): 110–19; Adam R. Shapiro, Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
- Adam Shapiro, “What is the history of ‘Antievolution’?,” Science & Religion, May 27, 2016.
- Christian Middleton, “UM Breaks Silence on Prof Felber’s Termination, Says Outcry Tied to Racist Stereotypes,” Mississippi Free Press, Jan. 13, 2021; Simone Carter, “How Collin College Became the Center of a Months-Long Free Speech Debacle,” Dallas Observer, April 14, 2021; Michael Levenson, “Linfield University Fires Professor Who Spoke Out About Misconduct Cases,” New York Times, May 1, 2021.
- The Nebraska State Historical Society has a nearly-complete series of the Rising City Independent on microfilm.
- A book-length account of the Nebraska Man discovery (and subsequent undiscovery) is sorely needed, but a brief synopsis of the story is given in “Essay on a Pig Roast,” in Stephen Jay Gould’s essay collection Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991)
- In 1967, the ULCA merged with three smaller denominations to form the Lutheran Church in America. Then in 1986, the Lutheran Church in America merged with the American Lutheran Church and the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches to form the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), now the largest Lutheran denomination in the United States. Midland College is now Midland University and is affiliated with the ELCA
- Midland College Bulletin 20 (May 1, 1922), 15. Courtesy of the Midland University archives.
- D.S. Domer to Erwin Barbour, Oct. 26, 1924, Erwin H. Barbour Papers, University of Nebraska State Museum, Lincoln, Nebraska. Barbour was director of the state’s natural history museum and had met Domer nearly a decade earlier during the discovery of fossils of a previously uncategorized species of extinct mastodon. The two men remained in touch over the years.
- “Nebraska Had Evolution Case—Quietly Heard,” Fremont Tribune, June 29, 1925, p. 8.
- Domer to Barbour, Oct. 26, 1924, Barbour Papers; “Teacher Who Lost Midland College Contract Wins Suit,” Fremont Tribune, Oct. 22, 1924, p. 2.
- “Nebraska Had Evolution Case—Quietly Heard,” Fremont Tribune, June 29, 1925, p. 8; “Monkey Talk Hits Book Publisher; Evolution Winner in Nebraska,” Chattanooga Times, June 5, 1925. p. 1; “Mr. Scopes Wasn’t the First,” New York Times, June 11, 1925. p. 13.
- Meredith D. Clark, “DRAG THEM: A brief etymology of so-called ‘cancel culture,’” Communication and the Public 5 (Fall 2020): 88–92.
- Scopes mentions this in “Reflections—Forty Years After,” published in Jerry R. Tompkins, ed., D-Days at Dayton: Reflections on the Scopes Trial (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1965).
