Posts Tagged ‘Dayton Tennessee’
What Tennessee is teaching … October 10th, 2008
Dayton, Tennessee
Miss Eleanor would have been 3 when the ‘Monkey Trial’ trial took place here. She spent here life as a math teacher. One math problem that she or the several generations of teachers in Tennessee (including the present one) haven’t posed to their students is: If a boat were to accommodate a pair of animals of every species, how big would it need to be?
It’d have to be a little bigger than Dayton (10,000 people), and, in fact, all of the Bible Belt, I suspect. But why recalculate when Noah’s done all of that already?
Miss Eleanor will vote Republican. This is not a given with everyone who shares her beliefs–and everyone in Tennessee, give or take a few confused liberals, does. Religion is the superset here, two of its subsets happen to be republican and democrat.
Miss Eleanor’s decision has a lot to do with John McCain’s vice-preidential choice. “Long before she became a running mate. When everybody wanted her to have that abortion (Palin’s fifth Down syndrome, a condition that affects both physical and intellectual growth)… and she said that the Lord had given her this baby and she certainly wasn’t going to get rid of it… Oh I hope she wins this election.”
And with that she left the Dayton Coffee shop. It was her birthday, she had come in for lunch. As she does often, sitting at a table from where you can read the Ten Commandments on the wall.
People wear badges here saying: ‘I’m voting for Sarah Palin… Oh yeah, and that old guy too’. The Alaska governor is anti-abortion; her views on gay marriage are that the only union sanctioned by God is one between man and woman; and she is a believer in the biblical version of the origin of man and the world (created in a week). What more proof does Dayton need that she will make a fine vice-president? Even the dominant baptists grudgingly set aside their belief that the woman’s place is in the home for Sarah’s sake.
According to state law, and this applies to all public schools, creationism can’t just not be taught, teachers could get sued for even mentioning it. Darwin is an integral part of the curriculum and has to be taught as a theory (as opposed to a fact), because even though the evidence is overwhelming, it is still a theory, unlike, say, the laws of motion. People like Sarah Palin would prefer if creationism was taught alongside Darwin’s theory as an alternative theory, but tough luck to them.
In practice, though, schools and teachers in places with the same beliefs as Dayton have gotten around the problem quite easily: they simply make an error of omission, by not teaching evolution. Result: kids who have never heard of Darwin, leave alone the Galapagos islands.
There is one cost that these towns incur for doing this that they refuse to take into account. The Advanced Placement exam that high-schoolers take to go to college has a curriculum where evolution is a central theme. If you fail the test because you haven’t heard of natural selection or cannot answer questions on the evidence in support of evolution, your chances of going to college are greatly reduced.
Moreover, if you do well on these tests, you get credits to take with you to college. Which means you can graduate in less than four years. For parents who have to pay huge fees, every semester gained is several thousand dollars saved. One would have thought that Dayton, which so cleverly brought money back into town with the Scopes trial, wouldn’t mind sitting through a few evolution lessons if it saved a few thousand bucks. But no, that’s asking too much.
Judge McKenzie, who presides over the court in Dayton nowadays comes from a family that was involved in the trial that made Dayton famous–on the prosecution side. He says his favourite word is ‘jail’ and his least favourite word is ‘atheist’. Neither he nor his kids have read anything about evolution. Nor have the two young convicted felons I speak to next. ‘Do you think all the world’s animals would fit on one boat?’ I ask. ‘Sure’ says one, ‘if you took just two of each.’
Tags: Dayton, Dayton Tennessee, John McCain, Noah's Ark, Sarah Palin, Scopes Trial, US Elections 2008
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The Monkey Trial was about money … and Dayton won October 9th, 2008
Dayton, Tennessee
If you travel over hills that roll on smooth, broad highways that bend and weave through forests of Maple trees that seem to turn from green to red even as you pass them, mesmerised, it is easy to miss anything made by man: houses, gas stations, McDonalds’ signs and so on. But near the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, you cannot miss the churches: there are too many of them. Besides, as people here will point out, these are works of God.
Why would such an area initiate a debate on whether man descended from apes or was made in God’s image? But in 1925, with Scopes v State, Dayton did exactly that.
This is the Bible Belt, a group of states, strapped tight across the middle of America, which has historically done a terrific job of concealing, or at least pushing north, an annoying liberal belly which seems to be getting a little out of hand this election year. What with the release of films like ‘Religulous’ last Friday. The very title (a fusion of religion and ridiculous) is abhorrent.
Comedian Bill Maher’s film is the kind of inquisition that the Bible Belt hates, because his questions are all about evolution. It isn’t playing in Dayton, though there is a lone theatre in Knoxville, 100 miles away screening it. May the lord forgive it.
These are communities whose foundations lie in the literal interpretation of the Bible. They are easy to mock–they believe in a talking snake, for God’s sake. But their persuasions are not always religious. The best example of this, ironically, is the Scopes (or ‘Monkey’) Trial of 1925. This trial kicked off the debate on whether God made man, and took his rib to make woman or whether there was any truth in what this chap called Darwin was saying. But Dayton didn’t host the trial to champion either cause. It had the most secular motive there can be: money.
The story goes back to 1885 when coal was discovered in the area. A boom followed, but after 30 years and three accidents in quick succession, the mines were closed. The town went into decline and was fumbling around for life support, when townspeople read an advertisement in the Chattanooga Times.
The Butler Act, which forbade the teaching of evolution in schools had recently been passed. The American Civil Liberties Union wanted to challenge it, and to do so, it needed a teacher who was willing to break the law and be tried. All expenses would be paid by the ACLU, said the ad.
An engineer from the sick Cumberland Coal and Iron company saw the potential of hosting such a trial right away: the attention the town would get would surely revive it. And soon, the whole town was conspiring to make this thing happen. The ‘hustling’ drugstore owner; the superintendent of schools; the barber; even, according to some accounts, the judge who would hear the case, were in on it.
They called in John T. Scopes, 24, a studious looking teacher with horn-rimmed glasses and asked him whether he would be willing to be prosecuted. Scopes had just one problem: he had never taught evolution. They worked around this by getting him to talk with a few boys outside of school. Scopes was then formally charged.
In New York, ACLU members, unaware of most of this, thought they had it made. Clarence Darrow, one of the top defense lawyers of the time volunteered to defend Scopes. His opposing number would be the prominent democrat and lawyer William Jennings Bryant.
By the time the trial began in May 1925, the plan was working so well that divine intervention was the only explanation. Dayton, where only a few thousand ragged people lived at the time, suddenly had 200 journalists descending upon it, using 65 telegraph lines to file their stories. A future Supreme Court chief justice attended proceedings as did prominent individuals from the church and public life. Joe Mendi, the famous trained chimpanzee, came as well. It was a carnival.
Outside of Dayton, the interest was huge. For the first time in its history, America would hear the court proceedings live on the radio (the O.J. Simpson trial is a descendent of the Scopes trial). People like George Bernard Shaw and Albert Einstein responded to trial proceedings. Dayton was booming again.
As for the trial itself, the judge, probably keeping public sentiment in mind, stuck only to whether Scopes had broken the law or not, rather than begin the debate in town. Darrow got around this to an extent by asking Bryan to take the stand as an expert. The prosecution lawyer was made to look somewhat foolish and pedantic (he insisted that a “big fish” rather than a mere whale, swallowed Jonah, the prophet who spent three days floating in digestive juices to escape a storm.) Bryan also conceded an important, but quickly forgotten, point: that the Bible cannot always be interpreted literally.
Nevertheless, the judge found Scopes guilty and fined him $100. This was okay with the ACLU, because the real debate would take place in the Tennessee Supreme Court during the appeal. But the Supreme Court was too clever to allow that. It dismissed the case on a technicality: that the judge set the fine, not the jury as required by law.
The swarms that had descended, trooped out, but the positive economic impact of the trial on Dayton was lasting. Bryan died shortly after the trial, but Bryan University came up in 1930 and now forms the core of the town. And what of the impact on religion and belief? Well, God willed that it remain exactly the same in election year 2008 as it was in 1925. If there was a winner in Scopes v State, it was Dayton.
Tags: Bill Maher, Dayton Tennessee, Religulous, Scopes Trail, Scopes v State, US Elections 2008
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