Last time I taught it (in summer 2018) we met on campus, unperturbed by any threat or even inkling of pandemic. We took a field trip to the Rhea County Courthouse in Dayton Tennessee for their community theater re-enactment of the Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925. (It was a lovely drive on the backroads from Murfreesboro, through the rolling Tennessee countryside.)
Scopes Trial 2018 from Osopher
This time we'll be "remote" and I don't imagine any of us will dare to trek down to Dayton to sit cheek-by-jowl with a courthouse full of strangers, on those same wooden pews that supported an over-capacity crowd at the "trial of the century" nearly a century ago. I'd sure like to, it was a tremendous experience. Maybe next time.
Our course will again dive into Edward Larson's award-winning account, Summer for the Gods, as well as Matthew Chapman's Trials of the Monkey. Chapman's perspective is particularly interesting, he's a lineal descendant of Charles Darwin who also made his way to Dayton in an attempt to comprehend the particular animus so many Tennesseans (like their champion William Jennings Bryan) felt for his ancestor. The resulting memoir/travelogue is both funny and profound, in its good-faith effort to perceive the humanity of those whose worldviews are so confoundingly out of step with evolutionary science .
When we introduce ourselves in Zoomland I'll doubtless go on again about "my first landlord," the zoologist *Winterton Curtis, who was not allowed to enter testimony on John Scopes' behalf.
In John Farrell's biography Attorney for the Damned, I learned that Scopes superstar defense attorney Clarence Darrow and "my first landlord" *Winterton C. Curtis, who made such an impression on me in my early youth, conversed in Dayton. Curtis divulged that he'd received a terminal cancer diagnosis and thought he had no more than a year to live. I'd never known that, I wonder how the dominoes of my life would have fallen if my parents had never rented rooms in his home and he'd never "pulled $s" from my ears!
Curtis wrote to Darrow later, thanking him for "sharing a creed--'that those who strive to live righteously as they see fit in this life need not fear the future."
The seven scientific experts the judge did not allow to testify at the Scopes Trial in Dayton TN, 1925.
Winterton Curtis: recollections of the Scopes Trial, written in 1956...
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*Winterton C. Curtis
My first landlord was an old zoologist at the University of Missouri named Winterton Curtis (1875-1965). He was one of the scientific experts not allowed to testify at the Scopes Trial in Dayton TN in 1925. My parents (and I) rented rooms from him in his home on Westmount in Columbia Missouri while Dad attended Veterinary school at Mizzou in the early '60s, and later maintained a cordial friendship with him. He used to visit when I was a kid and pull dollar bills from my ears. Dad thought that must be why I was always so fascinated by the concept of evolution.
Dr. Curtis wrote, in 1921,
The humanistic philosophy of life, which flowered in Greece and which has blossomed again, is not the crude materialistic desire to eat, drink, and be merry. It is a spiritual joy in living and a confidence in the future, which makes this life a thing worthwhile. The otherworldliness of the Middle Ages does not satisfy the spiritual demands of modern times. Science and Human Affairs From the Viewpoint of Biology
Of the Scopes Trial itself, he wrote of the 1925 Dayton Tennessee spectacle:
The courtroom audience impressed me as honest country folk in jeans and calico. “Boobs" perhaps, as judged by Mencken, and holding all the prejudices of backwoods Christian orthodoxy, but nevertheless a significant section of the backbone of democracy in the U.S.A. They came to see their idol “the Great Commoner” and champion of the people meet the challenge to their faith. They left bewildered but with their beliefs unchanged despite the manhandling of their idol by the “Infidel” from Chicago.... A Defense Expert's Impressions of the Scopes Trial
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