In a limited sense, this story is true. 1 Yet it is profoundly misleading. Based on the myth that Christian fundamentalists walked away from poli­tics for decades after the Scopes trial, our thumbnail sketch neglects a continuous pattern of Christian conservative political activism from the 1920s through the 1970s. And it misses the true origin story of this activ­ism by misconstruing the historical context of Dayton, Tennessee, itself and its best-known temporary resident, John Thomas Scopes. Dayton was neither sleepy nor isolated. Scopes was far from a passive, politically naïve victim of the trial. Both were tied to wider currents of radical labor and socialist activism, the explosive impact of industrial capitalism, and deep moral questions about the direction of American society at the turn of the twentieth century. 2 Seeing Scopes and Dayton in this light points to the central theme of this book—the deployment of anticommunist argu­ments by creationists from the Scopes trial to the present. At stake at the “Monkey Trial” were not only rival perspectives on natural history and the Bible, but conflicting politicized moral visions about how American society could and should evolve. The real story of Dayton and the Scopes family reveals a century-long explosive historical matrix that meshes with what I have called, following creationist George McCready Price, “Red Dynamite.”