tract national attention during the 1920s, the first great decade of American ballyhoo. News media sought the sensational while those fundamentalists with a flair for publicity played to their strength. Billy Sunday, a former baseball player, agreed with Machen that liberalism differed qualitatively from Christianity, but put the case more bluntly: ''Going to church doesn't make a man a Christian any more than going to a garage makes him an automobile." Almost in the same league was New York City's foremost fundamentalist, John Roach Straton of the Calvary Baptist Church. He succinctly stated the social case against Darwinism: "Monkey men means monkey morals." Discussing his home town in the apocalyptic atmosphere of 1918, Straton wondered, ''Will New York be destroyed if it does not repent?" We need not belabor this sermon's answer.
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The fundamentalist controversy of the 1920s occurred on two levels. On one level, the struggle escalated among Protestants to define orthodoxy and control denominational policy. The bitterness of the fight, which especially racked the Presbyterian church, can be seen in the controversial career of a prominent Baptist New Yorker, Harry Emerson Fosdick. In 1918 Fosdick, perhaps the most esteemed American preacher, became pastor of the First Presbyterian Church on Fifth Avenue. A liberal who defined God as the "creative reality," Fosdick tried to rally his fellows against fundamentalism. They in turn questioned his orthodoxy, and in 1923 the Presbyterian General Assembly launched an investigation. Although the New York Presbytery defended Fosdick, he moved to a Baptist pulpit and then in 1931 became founding minister of the nondenominational Riverside Church. During this tumult, Straton compared Fosdick to Jesse James. No rhetorical slouch himself, Fosdick called Jasper Massee, his fellow Baptist and Boston's premier fundamentalist, an "egregious ass."
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Despite many such bitter remarks, the fundamentalist controversy of the 1920s would be little remembered if it had not spread beyond devout and divided Protestants to the wider culture. Although fundamentalists also battled strong drink, sexy movies, and birth control, it was the trial of John Thomas Scopes for teaching evolution that servedand continues to serveas the preeminent symbol of their impact on American life. They had never liked Dar-
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