Today my family went on a fun little trip down the road to the town of Dayton, Tennessee. The ostensible reason for the visit was to attend the annual Scopes Trial play that they put on in the Rhea County Courthouse. But as usual we combined it with a hike into the beautiful Laurel-Snow Pocket Wilderness Area, replete with remarkable rock formations, beautiful waterfalls (which we didn’t quite reach) and refreshing swimming holes.
The play was fun as a whole, though it sadly skipped over some of the more biting exchanges between Darrow and Bryan. That Bryan College, a fundamentalist college created in the Scopes Trial’s wake, partially sponsored the event probably influenced the play’s director to leave the “hero” intact.
What was striking about the play, however, was the decision to focus especially on the events BEFORE the trial. Specifically, actors played the roles of F. E. Robinson of Robinson’s Drug Store and George Rappelyea who concocted the whole trial as a way to drum up business. The faith-science debate, which still continues today, between evolution and the Genesis story was mostly left out of the play.
It was a remarkably Marxian interpretation, but this is a case that lends itself so perfectly to the “materialist” explanation of culture. Dayton boomed around the turn of the 20th century as the nearby mines churned out coke and coal (some of the old mines were along the trail we hiked earlier in the day). But by the mid-1920s much of rural America was already facing an economic depression and the fathers of Dayton were desperate for a something to boost business. With the mines closing down the town leaders sought a cultural gimmick to bring in people and profits. A Marxist trained in the search for “base” and “superstructure” would have no difficulty identifying the various elements at work. This was clearly a case of culture and culture war distracting from economic strife.
As we all know, the town fathers got more than they bargained for. The trial quickly became a circus. And the acerbic writing of Baltimore’s H. L. Mencken effectively cast the people of Dayton and Rhea County as the epicenter of ignorance and bigotry. Mencken called Rhea County the buckle of the Bible Belt.
Today Rhea County is still the (or a) buckle of the Bible Belt. But the politics surrounding fundamentalist Christianity are so different today than in 1925. Then, it was four-time Democratic Presidential nominee, populist, and activist for big government liberalism William Jennings Bryan who became the hero. The rural poor rallied to Bryan who slammed both the cultural elites AND the economic elites. This same coalition would make Franklin Roosevelt a hero across the South just a few years later.
Today that coalition of Bryan-style economic populism and cultural conservatism finds no home at all, excepts in a few random, mostly Catholic districts in the Midwest, or among people like Pat Buchanan. In the Protestant South, however, economic populism is long dead. Signs along US27 said “Save America: Vote Republican,” an obviously self-serving jeremiad from the Rhea County GOP. Primary elections in Tennessee are coming up soon and the county was FILLED with signs for local politicians and a Congressional primary. One candidate proclaimed himself the only REAL defender of Christianity, capitalism and the Constitution. My guess is that that particular candidate (his name escapes me) will not end up the winner. Robin Smith, the ultimate insider and former State GOP Chairwoman will almost certainly get the nod for Zach Wamp’s old Congressional seat. Nobody claimed to speak up for the poor, the unemployed or the underemployed. The Bryan candidate was missing.
Dayton, like the rest of America, is suffering economically. It’s a charming little town located in one of the most beautiful valleys in America. It has started to become somewhat of a retiree community and a bedroom community for commuters to Chattanooga.
But nowhere was there evidence of that old-style Bryan populism that made him a hero. After all, it wasn’t just his defense of the Bible that endeared him to the people of Southeast Tennessee. It was also his decades-long fight for the rural poor, which found itself increasingly left behind in the new urban-based consumer economy of the 1920s. Rhea County would figure as a poster child for the Tennessee Valley Authority’s government-based economic development plans in the 1930s and 1940s. Nearby Watts Bar Dam ended up boosting the area’s economy more than anything else – and it still does. And for a few decades voters in Rhea and surrounding counties rewarded the FDR-style Democrats with their votes.
But that’s all past now. Conservative Christians in Tennessee once embraced big government, Bryan/FDR-style liberalism as the answer to their economic needs. Estes Kefauver, from Madisonville (a couple counties over from Dayton), even got nominated as the Democratic VP candidate under Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s.
Now they view FDR-style liberalism as some sort of satanic conspiracy designed to destroy America itself.
I don’t know how all of this changed in a place like Dayton. Race, the culprit in many other places, is not really at issue in Rhea County (with a tiny black population). And the economy has not changed that drastically from the TVA-based plan generated by FDR in the 1940s.
But it has become one of the most militantly right-wing Republican areas in the state. And it has done so partially by highlighting the Biblical “martyrdom” of Wm. Jennings Bryan (he died shortly after the trial), even as it whitewashes the man’s economic views that proved equally important in endearing him to the area’s voters.
But then again, hero worship is as much about forgetting as it is remembering. Perhaps we should keep Bryan’s entire career in mind when we think over how the nexus of politics, economic and religion has changed. When Mike Huckabee recently said that cultural conservatives are, by definition, economic conservatives too, he was bearing false witness. There is a deep history of co-existent cultural conservatism and economic liberalism – in the rural South in particular. Surely Huckabee has seen it at work in Arkansas over the years too.
In fact, it may just be that George W. Bush’s big government conservatism was exactly what these rural voters craved. Yet, nowhere in Rhea County today was even that more recent legacy in evidence. I suppose it’s easier to forget.