August 1, 2006
Disinherit the Wind Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 06:15 PM EST Oh well, I knew it couldn’t last between me and Ellen. As you know, every post of mine has to include at least one punk-rock reference, so we might as well get this one out of the way at the start. The New York Dolls, glam-punk heroes of my mildly rebellious youth, have just put out a new album, three decades after their last one. Its distinctly non-punky title is One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This, and while there’s nothing on it to match “Personality Crisis” or “Puss ‘n’ Boots,” I think it’s well worth buying—mostly because I’m a fan from way back. Listening to this record is like seeing a beautiful woman 30 years later: She’s still beautiful, sort of, but it helps to know what she looked like before. The reason I bring this up is that one of the better songs on the album is “Dance Like a Monkey,” which makes gentle fun of the evolution-creation debate while counseling everyone to forget their differences and dance. The lyricist and lead singer, David Johansen, throws around terms like “intelligent design” and “anthropomorphize,” and it’s significant that among the references he crams into the song is Inherit the Wind. This suggests how widely that play is still seen today as a basically accurate dramatization of the Scopes trial. In fact, it is nothing of the kind, not even close—and its use every year in thousands of classrooms across America does much more harm to our nation’s youth than any discussion of intelligent-design theory could possibly cause. Fred Smoler writes, “I don’t think the play’s version of history is anything like fanciful enough to call it alternate history.” To be fair, he admits that he has not read it in a long time, so he can be forgiven for that view. I hadn’t read it since high school either, so I bought a copy to see if it was as bad as I remembered it. In fact, it wasn’t that bad; it was 10 times worse. The cardboard-cutout characters might as well wear signs saying GOOD or EVIL or SMART or STUPID. Every supporter of the Scopes character is a saint, and every opponent is a nasty buffoon. For no apparent reason, the Mencken character declaims in a bizarre sort of free verse. Other characters speak in comic-book dialogue: “Drummond [i.e. Darrow] was perverting the evidence to cast the guilt away from the accused and onto you and me and all of society!” And: “When they started this fire here, they never figured it would light up the whole sky!” Above all else, the play is preachy, preachy, preachy. Inherit the Wind should be banned from every classroom in America, if only to ensure that innocent children will not start writing like Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. But the play’s problems go beyond mere incompetence and hackery. As I say above, millions of people across America remember reading or seeing this play, or the movie based on it, and most of them think it has something to do with the actual Scopes trial. In fact, the play and reality have nothing in common. Let’s look at all the ways Inherit the Wind differs from the Scopes trial: —In the play, the Scopes character is in jail at the start and faces a prison term if convicted. He and his girlfriend share a couple of touching scenes in which they imagine the dismal life he will lead behind bars. In reality, Scopes was never jailed. The worst penalty he faced was a fine, which he and everybody in town knew would be paid by someone else. (As I recall, the ACLU and H. L. Mencken’s newspaper both offered to pay the fine, though as things turned out it was never actually collected.) The climax of the play comes when the judge chooses not to send the Scopes character to jail and instead imposes just a token $100 fine. This is meant to be seen as a great victory for Scopes, truth, and justice. In fact, the $100 fine was a defeat for Scopes. —In the play, the Scopes character’s girlfriend is forced, amid great emotional distress, to reveal his personal religious views, which he had shared with her in private conversations. In real life, no such examination took place, nor could it have, since it had no relation to the question of whether Scopes had taught evolution. In any case, Scopes’s guilt was admitted at the start of the trial by the defense, which concentrated on challenging the validity of the law—and in fact, Scopes himself was unsure if he had ever mentioned evolution to his students on the few days he had taught biology. —In the play, the judge excludes testimony on evolution from scientific experts—and then, illogically, reverses himself and allows it from the Bryan character. In real life, several days were tediously spent on endless scientific testimony from a wide variety of experts. —In the play, the Bryan character believes in the literal truth of the Bible. In real life, Bryan had disclaimed any such belief for years in speeches and pamphlets (he was a creationist but not a fundamentalist), and he repeated the distinction at the trial. —In the play, the Bryan character, overcome with his public humiliation and the collapse of his cherished beliefs, makes a final address to the court during which he lapses into incoherence and then drops dead. This is a sick and ghoulish exploitation of the real Bryan’s coincidental death from a heart attack shortly following the trial, a few days after he made a rousing speech before thousands of fervently supportive creationists. —Most important, in the play, the Darrow character’s ruthless examination reduces the Bryan character to stammering and sputtering on the witness stand, to the point where the audience laughs at him and he breaks down in tears. In real life, none of this happened. The audience cheered Bryan loudly and repeatedly, and afterwards virtually every observer, including Mencken, thought Bryan had won the debate. Lawrence and Lee try to shrug all this off by saying in their preface that “Inherit the Wind does not pretend to be journalism. It is theatre. It is not 1925. The stage directions set the time as ‘Not too long ago.’ It might have been yesterday. It could be tomorrow.” Sure, guys. That’s why one man in the play says of the Bryan character, “I voted for him for President. Twice. In nineteen hundred, and again in oh-eight. Wasn’t old enough to vote for him the first time he ran.” And later the Bryan character says about the Darrow character, “He gave me active support in my campaign of 1908.” Yet Lawrence and Lee disingenuously pretend that they aren’t writing about William Jennings Bryan, and they expect us to buy it. What a pair of cowards! In the preface they also write: “The collision of Bryan and Darrow at Dayton was dramatic, but it was not a drama.” That’s true. In real life, the local citizens were not stupid or clownish enough for the authors, nor were they easily led enough to suddenly abandon the convictions of a lifetime when confronted with a few familiar arguments to the contrary. In real life, Bryan did not oblige the authors by taking the stand unprepared, or by humiliating himself; the law in question was not draconian enough; Darrow was not quick-witted enough; and the conduct of the trial was not one-sided enough to suit Lawrence and Lee’s wishes. So they invented a fantasy world. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I could write a play about Bill Clinton’s impeachment in which the President rapes and kills a seven-year-old blind girl and drinks her blood, but it would have nothing to do with the real Clinton impeachment. Similarly, Inherit the Wind has as much connection with the real Scopes trial as does Valley of the Dolls or The Maltese Falcon. This is not to say that the play has no value at all. It is a fine example of mid-1950s liberal paranoia and condescension, explaining as well as anything else why Adlai Stevenson lost twice. In that sense, it has considerable relevance to the current political scene. But it has zero overlap with the actual Scopes trial. Inherit the Wind is to history as creationism is to science, and it is to literature as Spam is to food. Lawrence and Lee did get one thing right. In the first act, the Darrow character says, “You murder a wife, it isn’t nearly as bad as murdering an old wives’ tale.” People don’t like having their cherished beliefs disproved, and when it happens, they are likely to shut their eyes and cover their ears and start singing “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” at the top of their lungs. In this case, when Lawrence and Lee realized that their beloved old wives’ tale about Darrow using truth and reason to humiliate Bryan and win over the yokels was the exact opposite of what really happened, they cooked up a make-believe version and wrote about it as if it were the truth. Was Darrow correct and Bryan wrong on the facts? Of course. But that doesn’t mean that Darrow outdebated Bryan, let alone made him look like a fool to his supporters. And it certainly doesn’t excuse distorting history to suit 1950s notions of right and wrong. That’s why I find it hard to get worked up about “intelligent design” being discussed side by side with evolution in our schools, when many, many more children are exposed every year to Lawrence and Lee’s noxious propaganda.
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