Rachel Maddux visits Dayton, Tennessee, to check out the town’s annual Scopes Festival, which celebrates the famous trial over the teaching of evolution in public schools that took place there. She finds that the episode just wasn’t about religion:
[T]he real story of the trial, like Dayton itself, began with the mines: they were dwindling, the town was suffering, and a group of local boosters—including drug store owner and school board president F. E. Robinson and school superintendent Walter White—were looking for a pick-me-up. Meanwhile, the fledgling ACLU was offering pro-bono legal representation for any teacher accused of breaking Tennessee’s recently passed Butler Act. Soon as the boosters got a whiff, they pounced. The trial was bound to be a big to-do somewhere, so why not Dayton? A willing defendant was found in John T. Scopes, a teacher and football coach at Rhea County Central High School. “I wasn’t sure if I had taught evolution,” Scopes wrote in his 1967 memoir. “Robinson and the others apparently weren’t concerned with this technicality. I had expressed willingness to stand trial. That was enough.”
The prospect of tourism still drives the town’s relationship to the trial – spurred by the fact that William Jennings Bryan, who argued for the prosecution that the state was justified in keeping evolution out of schools, died there just five days after the verdict:
If Bryan hadn’t died here and made way for [Bryan College], the town might have unraveled completely—the mines closed in 1930, just before the Great Depression rolled in. Dayton eventually came back as a manufacturing town, which it remains today, lately cultivating a sprawl of strip malls and chain stores. Bryan College hosts 1,300 students every year, or retains them—many are local and many more settle in Dayton after graduation to raise their own kids here. There are lakes and hills and woods all around, old coke ovens turned into nature preserves. Niche tourism is on the rise, so there’s even a chance the old boosters’ scheme might finally pay off. Coal isn’t the best source of metaphors for sustainable industry, but some things do need time to sit under great pressure before they can be of use. The Scopes Trial Museum, housed in the courthouse basement, brings in a few thousand visitors each year; in 2013, a few hundred attended the festival. Not quite Disney World, but it’s more appealing than blinkered silence.
The Dish 