I was there, Dayton TN, in 2018 for the community theater re-enactment of a version of the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial” that convicted young High School teacher John Scopes of violating the recently-enacted state prohibition against teaching anything perceived to be at odds with fundamentalist Christianity’s creation myth.
The original event was a sensation, pitting populist politician William Jennings Bryan and “Attorney for the Damned” Clarence Darrow, and drawing the likes of H.L. Mencken and other luminaries to the sleepy little town in the east Tennessee hills near Chattanooga. It was broadcast live on radio, and was national and international headline news for two weeks.
The re-creation in ‘18 is a fond memory. The 3-hour drive from Nashville was made pleasant by the company of two delightful students in my MALA (Master of Liberal Arts) course “Evolution in America.” Sadly, one of them — Don Enss — left us in 2021, mid-way through “Democracy in America.” (Don took every course I offered. We listened to the Beatles all the way home that day in ‘18, at his request. We got his degree in his hands just in time.)
On Saturday I’m heading back, students and friends again along for the ride and the show. The digital playbill for this year’s production just landed in my mailbox. Should be a blast.
After the show last time I left a positive review and a suggestion that they try and work my first landord (the Mizzou zoologist Winterton Curtis (1875-1966), whose expert scientific testimony the judge disallowed) into a future production. I’m not counting on it, but I’d love to see a dramatization of the conversation Curtis had with Darrow on the porch of their lodging house after court dismissed one day. He was then fifty, and had recently received a terminal cancer diagnosis. [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.’” Att’y for the Damned
Curtis did not die that year or the next or the next, and thus was resident in his home on Westmount in Columbia Missouri in the late ‘50s whose upstairs my dad, mom, and I occupied while dad completed his veterinary degree at Mizzou. I don’t quite remember those days, but I do vividly recall Dr. Curtis visiting our home in O’Fallon Missouri a couple years later and producing dollar bills he claimed he’d retrieved from my ears.
Curtis published a book in 1921 called Science and Human Affairs From the Viewpoint of Biology, which includes a pithy statement of humanist thought that comes pretty close to expressing my own quasi-Epicurean worldview. “The humanistic philosophy of life…is a spiritual joy in living and a confidence in the future, which makes this life a thing worthwhile.” Notice the echo of Darrow’s creed, his righteous repudiation of fear.
Just about every time I revisit Columbia, where my sister resides, I make a point of swinging by the old house on Westmount. I think it was a great place to start.
“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.” —Winterton C. Curtis, 1957
504 (formerly 210) Westmount, Columbia MO