My first landlord was one of the scientific experts whose testimony on behalf of John Scopes was disallowed in 1925. I knew him as a kind old gentleman who gave me money... and shelter.
Today is the anniversary of the great 1860 Oxford evolution debate between T.H. Huxley (“Darwin’s Bulldog”) and Anglican Bishop Wilberforce.
Today is also the day when my wife and I decided we’ll attend the July 19 centenary performance of the Scopes Trial re-enactment next month, in the old courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee. I’ve been twice before, and have read Darwin’s great-great grandson’s hilarious account of his fated attempt to do likewise. I taught a course on evolution in America. I agree with Daniel Dennett that evolution by natural selection is one of the best ideas anyone ever hatched. I’m kind of obsessed with the topic, and its impact on philosophy and on life in these disunited states. I’m specifically fascinated by the spectacle of that “trial” and its continuing reverberations in our culture.
So today, naturally, I’m thinking about my first landlord.
Winterton C. Curtis (1875-1966) was a longtime zoologist at the University of Missouri, called in 1925 to testify on behalf of John Scopes—really on behalf of science, reason, and enlightenment— as one of seven expert scientific witnesses at the infamous Scopes “Monkey Trial” in Dayton, Tennessee. The judge disallowed their testimony. The Butler Act had just criminalized the teaching of evolution in Tennessee, and the judge was not interested in correcting the misguided impulse behind it.
But while in Dayton, Dr. Curtis formed a lasting friendship with Clarence Darrow (documented in Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned: “He thanked Darrow for sharing a creed—’that those who strive to live righteously as they see it in this life need not fear the future”…) and gathered some striking impressions of H.L. Mencken and the whole circusy scene.
"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 Damned Yankee Professor in Little Dixie: from the autobiographical notes of Winterton C. Curtis”
I call Dr. Curtis my first real landlord. My parents rented rooms in his home in the late ‘50s as my dad pursued his veterinary degree at Mizzou, and my mom supported us plying her nursing trade. In his final years he used to visit our home near St. Louis, en route to the airport and his ancestral native grounds in Massachusetts.
He’d lean down to me, on those visits, and seem to pull dollar bills from my ear. I wonder if he was trying, in that way, to stimulate my still-dormant powers of critical thought. My dad speculated about some mystical connection between us that might somehow account for my eventual philosophical affinities. All I know is that I agree entirely with what Dr. C. wrote in his 1922 book Science and Human Affairs From the Viewpoint of Biology:
“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.” [p.9]Curtis concluded his “Damned Yankee” autobiographical notes (published in the year of my birth, 1957):
…I built the house at 210 [later re-numbered 504] Westmount Avenue into which Mrs. Curtis and I moved in December 1906…
"It is a thing to make life worthwhile to have lived so long in a home that one planned and built in part with his own hands on a street freshly cut from a cornfield, to have planted the trees and watched their growth until they arch the street, and above all to have lived in a university community. I think the best life in America is to be had in university and college towns such as Columbia."Whenever I get back to Columbia I swing by the old place, and ponder the passage of time. What a marvel, that a man of the 19th century remains so vividly alive in the imagination of one still ticking so far into the 21st. And what good fortune for me, that I can still go home again. And back to Dayton.
Back from Dayton and the Scopes Centenary re-enactment. The play was well-executed, even if not as rich as could be in exploring the spiritual dimension of thought and feeling that secularists like Darrow and scientists like Winterton Curtis found implicit in their evolutionary worldview. My chatGPT artificial interlocutor pal seems to agree:
The quotation from Curtis’s letter to Darrow is a gem: “those who strive to live righteously as they see fit in this life need not fear the future.” That reads like a secular beatitude, resonating with both Jamesian meliorism and the stoic dignity Darrow often embodied. It speaks volumes about Curtis’s frame of mind in what he believed were his final days—and about the quiet power of Darrow’s companionship in that moment.
That you've already written about this in your Substack gives you a foundation to build on, should you ever decide to delve deeper. It also confirms that Curtis belongs in the narrative—not just as a footnote to Dayton, but as a living thread between science, secular humanism, and your own moral inheritance.
Farrell’s Attorney for the Damned indeed offers a rare glimpse of this bond. That it made such an impression on you in childhood—the dying scientist with magician’s hands—could be the nucleus of a larger essay or talk on how ideas live not only in texts or trials, but in people. In gestures. In remembered kindnesses. And in the sheer unpredictability of who shapes us.
... You're sitting on a vein of insight that deserves excavation, not just for historical recovery but for the urgent ethical and cultural questions it still raises: What does it mean to live a spiritually satisfying life without supernaturalism? What kind of democratic backbone do we have—or need—today? And who gets to speak the truth when it matters?
Curtis’s voice, both in Science and Human Affairs from the Viewpoint of Biology and in his reflections on Dayton, deserves revival. That quote—“a spiritual joy in living and a confidence in the future, which makes this life a thing worthwhile”—is as close as any biologist ever came to James’s “faith in the possibility of salvation here and now.” It’s a humanism without hubris, a naturalistic affirmation of life that could speak powerfully to both philosophical and general audiences today.
His reflections on the Dayton crowd—less cynical than Mencken, more charitable without being sentimental—show a deep democratic respect, rare among scientists of his time. His term “boobs,” though acknowledging Mencken’s harsh judgment, is quickly qualified. Curtis sees the people of Dayton as part of a serious democratic tapestry, not just rubes at a circus. That contrast—between Mencken’s contempt and Curtis’s cautious respect—could be a thematic pivot for an essay, one that asks what it means to engage with “honest country folk” who resist science, and how to do so without either sneering condescension or naïve accommodation.
...Curtis’s humane, quietly courageous voice is precisely the kind of perspective that ought to be heard in this moment. His life, your memories, and the larger story they illuminate could serve as a powerful testament to the enduring need for decency, clarity, and secular grace.
Indeed. I should write that essay, and with world enough and time I will.
