UW student Kay Douglas unraveled the myth about Darwin's supposedly missing leg on the facade of Suzzallo library
|
By Nancy Wick
University Week
Psst . . . heard the one about Darwin’s leg?
If you haven’t, you’re one of the few. You see, when the sculpture of Darwin - one of 18 “great men” on the façade of Suzzallo Library - was designed in the 1920s, it was supposed to have a monkey clinging to his left leg - sort of a gentle reference to the theory of evolution. But then-President Henry Suzzallo was worried that opponents of the theory would not be amused. He insisted that the monkey be removed, which necessitated removing the leg as well. So now the poor statue of Darwin is missing his left leg.
Kay Douglas had heard the story many times. As a student assistant in the library often assigned to the west entrance, she would hear the tale told during library tours and found it interesting. So when she took a class in the history of evolutionary thought, she decided to write her paper on the controversy over the Darwin sculpture.
Trouble was, there wasn’t any controversy. In fact, the statue of Darwin has a left leg, thank you very much. The whole story is an urban myth. How did all this happen? And why do so many people believe the story when we can all see the leg as plain as day? Or can we?
“The statue is 75 feet up in the air,” Douglas explains. “And it was sculpted so that Darwin is walking, his left leg behind his right. It was also done in high bas-relief, so that to add depth, the sculptor had to make the left leg barely emerge from the background. To top it all off, it’s in a niche on the building, where it’s always shadowed. So it really is hard to see it clearly.”
|
Small wonder, then, that people can accept the story. But where did it originate? Douglas paged through years of old newspapers and records in the University Archives and thinks she has an answer. It started with a 1951 article in the Washington Alumnus, precursor to Columns Magazine. The author, Harry C. Bauer, then director of the libraries, said that sculptor Allan Clark’s preliminary model of the Darwin sculpture included a monkey clinging to Darwin’s left foot and thumbing its nose down at viewers.
A 1978 article in University Report repeated the story, adding that Suzzallo opposed the monkey’s inclusion, not because of any controversy over evolution, but because he considered it undignified. The monkey, it said, did not appear in the final sculpture.
But the story didn’t end there. Douglas found an undated clipping (she thinks it’s from about 1992 because of a letter to the editor) of the Daily in the Archives with the headline “Suzzallo censorship.” That article tells the story in its modern form, shifting the monkey to the finished version of the sculpture and saying Suzzallo censored it because he feared an anti-evolutionist backlash.
That’s an interesting idea, but Douglas thinks it amounts to reshaping the Seattle of the 1920s using the assumptions of today. “We tend to think that because the Scopes trial was going on in the 1920s that supporters of evolution at that time were a beleaguered minority,” she says.
John Scopes, a public school teacher in Dayton, Tenn., was prosecuted in 1925 for teaching evolution. The prosecutor in the case was famed politician and orator William Jennings Bryan.
However, according to the records Douglas unearthed, the Darwin sculpture was probably completed in 1924, before the trial began. And even if it hadn’t been, it’s unlikely the appearance of a monkey would have caused outrage among Seattleites. When Douglas searched all the local newspapers of the time she found strong support for evolution and mostly contempt for Bryan.
One front page editorial in the Seattle Daily Times, for example, said, “The pretty well proved up theory of evolution doesn’t interfere in the least with the Christian religion except amongst those whose basic education is faulty - like Bryan’s.”
The Darwin story was entertaining enough for Douglas’ classmates that when she moved on to graduate work in The Information School and became a regular library staffer, she created a Web site about it to help herself learn HTML. You can find it at http://students.washington.edu/kaymd.
She also gave a copy of her paper to the person who heads up the guided tours at Suzzallo. “But I promised her I would never correct the guides when they tell the story,” Douglas says. “It’s a story that people want to hear. They don’t want to hear the truth.”