July 19, 2006
History vs. Hollywood? Posted by Ellen Feldman at 01:30 PM EST I read with fascination (if somewhat tardily due to a holiday) Frederic Schwarz’s splendid “20 Questions About the Scopes Trial” on American Heritage’s home page. I am ashamed to say that, like many Americans, I grew up believing the Hollywood version of the story. Spencer Tracy was a witty, rational, generous-spirited Clarence Darrow (or rather, Clarence Darrow was a real-life incarnation of the heroic above-Hollywood character we had come to revere, Spencer Tracy). Fredric March was a bumbling, Bible-thumping, immoral (remember his manipulation of Scopes’s innocent girlfriend), gluttonous William Jennings Bryan. In the 1960 film Inherit the Wind, which like all historical fiction says more, or at least as much, about its own era as the one it is portraying, Tracy/Darrow lost the case, but the forces of reason and the power of free thought seemed to triumph nonetheless, especially when the humane Tracy/Darrow reprimanded the opportunistic Gene Kelly/H. L. Mencken for his unbridled cynicism. The movie is brilliant, but I agree with Schwarz’s point that it has done a certain amount of damage by misrepresenting history. (As a historical novelist, I am especially sensitive to this danger.) Bryan came to his fear and rejection of evolution by way of the savagery of World War I (he resigned from Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet after the President’s protest of the sinking of the Lusitania, which he deemed too bellicose) and what he believed to be the unraveling of the social fabric. The late Stephen Jay Gould, and more recently Garrison Keillor, have suggested that one reason for his opposition to Darwinism was its odious association with its less scientific younger sibling, Social Darwinism. To paraphrase Hemingway, wouldn’t it be pretty to think so? The textbook at issue in the trial, which Bryan quoted from and criticized, A Civic Biology, by George William Hunter, made a strong argument for eugenics. As Michael Kazin describes it in his recent book A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan, the textbook cites two families, the Jokeks and Kallikaks, plagued for generations by “immorality and feeble-mindedness.” Members of both families were “true parasites” who, if they were lower animals, “we would probably kill off to prevent them from spreading.” Reading these words more than three-quarters of a century later, we realize that perhaps Bryan was not such a backward-looking proponent of intolerance after all. Kazin, however, disagrees with Gould’s reinterpretation. He points out that, though Bryan railed against the textbook, he neglected to cite these passages or even mention the espousal of Social Darwinism. So while the movie perhaps goes too far in one direction, our tendency toward revisionism may tilt too far in the other. An interesting sidebar to the case is the subsequent careers of some of the attorneys involved. Bryan, as Schwarz points out, died five days later. Arthur Garfield Hayes, a secular Jewish New York lawyer for the six-year-old American Civil Liberties Union, who, with Darrow, represented Scopes, would spend a good part of the following decade fighting to free the Scottsboro Boys. Clarence Darrow, on the other hand, financially strapped by the stock-market crash, would refuse to represent the nine black youths, though their support by the Communist-backed International Labor Defense probably contributed to his unwillingness as much as his need for money. But the same year that he turned down the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, he defended Mrs. Granville Fortescue, a white society matron, who, when a Hawaiian jury found a dark-skinned youth not guilty of assaulting her daughter in the infamous Massie case, took justice into her own well-manicured hands and shot the man to death. Darrow was no more successful getting her off than he was Scopes. I offer no moral here, except perhaps that Hollywood’s myths are a lot more reassuring than history’s questions. And oh, yes: When I was fifteen, coming around a corner of a hotel corridor at high speed, I slipped on the well-polished floor, and fell right into the arms of a surprised Fredric March. He was strong as the Rock of Ages, to which he refers in the movie, and without a whiff of sanctimoniousness.
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