Death of Bryan

In researching Donald Davidson for my thesis, I came across lots of stuff I would otherwise not have known. A good deal of it was about my hometown and state, some of which can be read in previous blog entries. One thing I haven't noted much here is how much the Dayton Trial of John T. Scopes, known commonly as the Monkey Trial, was a part of Davidson's thinking. Much of his shift to Southern Agrarianism came after the Scopes Trial was concluded. In his second volume on the history of the Tennessee River, he devotes many pages to a discussion of the trial and its effects on the culture of Tennessee and the South.
In this second volume I discovered that William Jennings Bryan, the Great Commoner who served to assist the prosecution in the case, gave his last public address in Winchester, TN (my hometown) before dying unexpectedly on July 25, 1925 on his way back to Chattanooga. According to The Truth and Herald (July 30, 1925) between 6,000 and 7,000 people attended the public address given by Bryan in Winchester.
I doubt anything Bryan said there was substantially different from what he said at any other time, but it was interesting to me that my little hometown had even been visited by someone like William Jennings Bryan, not to mention that he gave his last public address there.

Davidson on economic stability

The secret of Charleston's stability, if it was any secret, was only the old Southern principle that material considerations, however important, are means not ends, and should always be subdued to the ends they are supposed to serve, should never be allowed to dominate, never be mistaken for ends in themselves. If they are mistaken for ends, they dominate everything, and then you get instability. You get he average modern city, you get New York and Detroit, you get industrial civilization, world wars, Marxist communism, the New Deal.

Donald Davidson, "Some Day, In Old Charleston" Still Rebels, Still Yankees, 222.