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July 8,19251 The Nation 61 ayton, Tennessee By HOWARD HOLLISTER E reached Dayton at midnight, and were stopped by a deputy sheriff with a flashlight and a shotgun. A man with a bleeding face was with the sheriff. had been assaulted by a drunken man, who had fled in a car.
Gonvinced that we were newcomers, the sheriff allowed US to go to the hotel. This hotel is called the Aqua, named no doubt in honor of the delicious water which bubbles from springs everywhere in this beautiful hill country. The Aqua is an American Plan hotel of the kmd that has prac- tically disappeared from the East-a place where you get the best the land affords for a flat daily rate. Breakfast starts at seven, dinner is at twelve, and supper at six. At about quarter to seven in the morning the clerk comes and knocks on the doors to announce breakfast.
The farmhouses in these East Tennessee hills have a home-like look. Stetson felts are plentiful, and countrymen carry sticks. The soil produces large crops of strawberries and other fruit, besides corn and potatoes. It is said that Dayton shipped more strawberries than any other to,wn in the United States this year. Through the length of Rhea County, in which lie Dayton and Spring City, flows the Tennessee River, navigable from Knoxville, through the Big Bend in Alabama, past Muscle Shoals and up to its mo’uth in the Ohio at Paducah. Goods can be shipped from Knoxville to New Orleans on the river, but due to low water and rapids only light draft steamboats can negotiate the upper stretches. There is much talk in Dayton about the Government building dams to improve commerce on the river. When the proposition was made a month or more ago to commercialize the evolution trial, the Progressive Day- ton Club considered and finally rejected it. There was a faction that wanted an outdoor stadium built, where the trial could be conducted like a county fair or a circus, but the temper of the Dayton people was against it. As an officer of the Progressive Dayton Club expressed it, “We have a fine chance here to put -Dayton before the world in a favorable light, and we don’t want to lose it by doing anything that might cheapen the town.” The city of Day- ton has remained true to its conservative decision. No prices have been raised. The spirit is entirely one of friendly hospitality. “We want everybody who comes to Dayton to learn the truth about Dayton,” says the cashier of the bank. The citizens greet each newcomer with a smile and a handshake, and invite him to sit down in one of the chairs which line the sidewalks outside the stores.
If one settles in front of Robinson’s drug-store, where the now famous conversation that led to the indictment of: Scopes took place, one hears nothing but opinions on evolu- tion. In such a gathering I found myself the morning after Darrow spoke. The secretary of the arrangement com- mittee of the Progressive Dayton Club was voicing the views of “our side”-the only side ,one hears about in Dayton. He seemed to have been deeply impressed by Darrow’s -unassuming attitude and homespun manners.
“He uses small words, ,but he rolls them right up together at you,” he said with feeling. Another member of the group said everybody who heard Darrow knew he was sin- cere. “He made us understand the relation of cause and effect,” said a third. There seemed to be no feeling against Darrow as the defender of Leopold and Loeb. “I can understand how those boys just had to do that because of the way they were raised,” said the club secretary. Dar- row’s fatalistic philosophy has evidently taken strong root in Dayton.
But the talk soon turned to pleasantries. “This trial is going to be about the idea of God,’’ I ventured. “Well, there’s plenty ’round here that knows all about God,” said the club secretary. “There’s a farmer out here about six miles; he saw God.” This provoked a general laugh. “But that ain’t the only one,” went on another member. “We had a preacher here in the Southern Methodist Church that signed a contract with God. He met God in the street one night, and God told him He wanted him to come and serve Him the rest of his life. But he wouldn’t do it, ’cause he said the spirit was willing enough but the flesh was too weak. So he wrestled with God for an hour or so and then signed a contract to serve Him for seven years and no more.
That preacher baptized more people than any other preacher in Dayton, more than all the others put together, I guess.
Once he baptized seventy-five at a crack.” Dayton has a dozen churches. The principal denomina- tions are Southern Methodist, Sonthern Baptist, and Pres- byterian. It is an unusually large proportion of churches, even for East Tennessee. The religious feeling of the coun- tryside is reflected in numerous signs along roadsides near the town. One I saw said “Take care lest thy sins find thee out.” John T. Scopes is happier now than he was during his brief visit to New York. He goes swimming every day in a natural pool about a mile from tam. He spends the late afternoon, or “evening,” as it is called here, in Robin- son’s drug-store. He takes himself seriously at times, and the trial even more seriously. The attitude o’f the Dayton people against profiteering and “jazzing up” the trial has been austerely upheld by him.
The talk stirred up by the evolution question has laid the East Tennessee towns wide open. People are taking sides, but one hears only one side. The Bryanites appar- ently don’t dare to talk. A cartoon of Bryan, showing him in the guise of a monkey, has a great vogue here. The legend is “He denies his lineage.” Thousands are being sold in Knoxville and Chattanooga.
The good people of Dayton, at least those one sees about the streets and in the stores, understand that no decent evolutionist claims man is descended from a monkey. And they voice no objection to agnosticism of the Darrow stamp.
There is a preacher in Knoxville named Percy Knicker- bocker, who is known as the John Roach Straton of Tennes- see. He preaches hell and brimstone in the Southern Meth- odist Church. When the play “Rain” was advertised sev- eral months ago, he demanded that the city council forbid the performance. The council appointed a special commit- tee of three to witness a dress rehearsal. This committee never made a report, so “Rain” was given to a packed house.
Later this preacher demanded and got a standing vote of 62 The Nation. [Vol. 121, No. 3131 I confidence from his congregation. Probably no preacher would dare make aily such issue now.
When the question o$ defying the anti-evolution law was first broached in the State, it was several weeks ,before a single educator could be induced to express an opinion on the subject. Dr. H. A. Morgan, president of the Uni- versity o-f Tennessee, himself a science teacher, refused to commit himself to reporters. He has since received high praise from Sunday school associations and the funda- mentalist sects throughout the State. The head of the zoology department in the University of Tennessee refused to show his zoology textbook to reporters. The superin- tendent of schools of Chattanooga refused to express any opinion wha€ever on the law. Then Scopes stepped into the breach and everything began to change.
Behind the whole fight stands Dr. John Randolph Neal.
He is perhaps Tennessee’s greatest libertarian. He re- signed from his position as dean of the University of Tennessee Law School at the time of the “slaughter of the Ph.D.’s” in 1923. This came abosut through the imprudence of Professor Jesse Sprowls, teacher of genetic psychology at the university. Mr. Sprowls had the bad taste to order fo,r his class a small consignment of James Harvey Robinson’s “Mind in the Making.” The final result of this action was the dismissal of six professors of as many sci- ences, one being a “German sympathizer” as well as an agnostic. Dr. Neal has since established his o,wn school of law,,to whose graduating class Clarence Darrow and Bain- bridge Colby recently addressed words of encouragement.
Dayton invites everybody to come to the trial. True, the courthouse will not seat everybody, nor the houses hold everybody. But the country is lovely-a softness of atmos- phere pervades it, in keeping with the soft-spoken accents of the people. It is hot, but not insufferably hot. There is plenty of room in the hills around the town to pitch tents.
The stores have plenty of merchandise. The roads are almost perfect.
And John Thomas Scopes has made the finest mouse- trap in the world.
By SILAS BENT Deep Water, N. J.Mechanica1 readjustments in the $1,000,000 tetraethyl lead plant of the Du Ponts here, closed down by company, would eliminate parts of the facturing apparatus from which the fumes might it said today. F you have noted dispatches such as this in the news- papers, you may have wondered about Deep Water, New Jersey. You may have sought to give a local habitation to the name. You may have tried to run it down in an atlas, or in the “Postal Guide.” Neither would have enlightened you. The telegraph companies wonld have told you, if YOU had inquired, that they had no offices there.
Deep Water has achieved no official recognition, no standing with geographers. Although it embraces a tom, it is not a town. Although it is a port of call for ocean- going steamships, nautical charts ignore it. Although it figures in newspaper date lines, no news can emanate directly from it. For it is important as quietly as possible.
Across from Wilmington the Delaware River, here three miles broad, has channeled deepest along a bend of its eastern shore. It is still, this current, with hardly a ripple to catch the casual eye. Still waters run deep ; colonial river folk named this bend. But nowadays Deep Water means a reservation of six square miles, dotted with smoke- stacks, sprawling sullenly along the river bank. During the World War, 25,000 men were busy here at the peak, . making smokeless powder; ships slipped empty to the docks, and waddled away with tons of explosives in their bellies.
In peace, three of its four powder mills have been die- mantled, and: the army of recruits has been demobilized. I,n the phraseology of the Du Ponts, Deep Water is now “the dye wo8rks.” It is a congeries of poison plants. There chlorine and phosgene and the lethal-benzol series, which turns blue the bodies of its victims, are manufactured for trade Curposes. There, until a federal investigation began, the Du Ponts made tetraethyl lead. TO lnost of us Du Pont means Wilmington. It was at wjlmington the directors met the other day to declare a 40 per cent stock dividend ; they had met there a short while before to increase the rate on common from $8 to $10, and all the official statements issue thence. It is a profitable going concern, the E. I. du Pont de Nemours, and Wil- mington is its showplace. But only the cerebral ganglions of a complicated industrial and financial organism are to be found there. The dynamite plants and commodity fac- tories are elsewhere. The poison factories are huddled in the propitious obscurity olf Deep Water.
Tetraethyl lead, although the plant for making it is in “the dye wmks,” and although the men employed there are called “dye operators,” has nothing to do with fabrics. It has notthing to do with dyes. Its commercial significance may be stated succinctly in this, that it will make one gal- lon of gasoline do the work of two. It is mixed one gallon to a thousand, and the result is an “improved motor fuel.” Combustion is better, and the “knock” in the automobile is eliminated; but, best of all, in a high-compression engine, with long and narrow cylinders, it will develop tremendous power. Every automotive engineer in the United States, so it is said, is bending all his energies toward devising better high-compression engine than the others.
Tetraethyl lead is now a matter of public interest and official investigation because of a disaster last October in the Bayway plant of the Standard Oil near Elizabeth, N. J. General Motors and Standard Oil had joined hands as the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation to make the stuff, and five of their workers went suddenly and violently insane. They died in strait-jackets. They died stark mad, grinning and gritting their teeth.* Straightway the newspapers coined a phrase, “loony gas.” It a misnomer. In common parlance “gas” means gasoline, and there was nothing to show that anyone had gone loony from the use of ethyl gasoline. It was the fumes from tetraethyl lead which unbalanced and destroyed the workers ; either inhaling the fumes, or absorbing the in TILE Natiolt for 26, 1924. *An article on Standard 01’s Death Factory Mary
