Winterton C. Curtis

July 20 is coming up, marking both the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 (here's how I marked the 40th) and the 94th anniversary of the pivotal date of the infamous Scopes Trial in Dayton, TN (here's how we marked the 93d).

Don mentioned Scopes would-be witness Winterton Curtis yesterday at the Museum. That's all the pretext I need to run this snippet from a post introducing last summer's MALA course. Curtis is not in my genealogy but was a big early influence.

At our first meeting I'll probably mention for the first but not the last time my personal connection to evolution in America, the gentleman I call my first landlord, Dr. Winterton C. Curtis of the University of Missouri. He was in Dayton in the summer of '25 (though not allowed to testify, like all the other scientific witnesses on hand), I was in his home in the late '50's, he was in my home pulling dollar bills "from my ear" in the mid-'60s... My late father Dr. James C. Oliver (MU, DVM '60), in other respects the opposite of a mystic, was convinced that Dr. C. somehow implanted in me my lifelong fascination with evolution. I don't know about that, but I do know that Dr. C.'s neglected classic Science and Human Affairs From the Viewpoint of Biology (1922) is a real gem. I particularly like his thoughts on "the humanistic philosophy of life"...

Dr. Curtis wrote, in 1921,

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. Science and Human Affairs From the Viewpoint of Biology

Of the Scopes Trial itself, he wrote of the 1925 Dayton Tennessee spectacle:

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 Defense Expert's Impressions of the Scopes Trial from D-Days at Dayton: Fundamentalism vs Evolution at Dayton, Tennessee by Winterton C. Curtis (1956)

And Curtis wrote:

Young New Englander Comes To Little Dixie Area in 1901 "In May of 1901, after I had completed all the requirements except my oral examination, for my doctor's degree at the Johns Hopkins, I received a letter from Professor George Lefevre, of the University of Missouri. We had taught together at the Marine Biological Laboratory before he went to Missouri in the fall of '99, and now he was writing me about an instructor being added to his staff. He invited me to visit Columbia at the University's expense, so that I might be looked over and look the place over for myself. With my Van Dyke beard and pince-nez, I thought I would make a good impression and hoped that I should like the University of Missouri as much as I liked Lefevre..." (continues, A Damned-Yankee Professor in Little Dixie: abstract from the autobiographical notes of Winterton C. Curtis:Winterton C. Curtis (1957)... Damned Yankee in Columbia... Westmount... Westmount pic 2017 (504, formerly 210)

Here's a slideshow of last year's Dayton MALA fieldtrip...