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. 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.
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.
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.