Back to Dayton
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 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.
