Inherit The Wind?

By Arthur Schwartz

President Trump’s rantings from the White House, and his appeal to the most base instincts of the American population, have included calls to wipe out large swaths of American history (even going so far as to deny that the Civil War was about slavery). He has also included calls to restore the United States as a “Christian Nation,” whose guiding light should be the Christian Bible and not the Constitution. This caused me to watch Inherit the Wind, a 1960 fictional movie based on real events – a prosecution of John T. Scopes, a young science teacher and coach in Dayton, Tennessee, who volunteered to test the state’s anti-evolution law in 1925. Spencer Tracy plays Henry Drummond – the brilliant defense attorney modeled after Clarence Darrow who represented Scopes. Fredric March plays Matthew Harrison Brady, the zealous prosecutor and orator modeled after William Jennings Bryan (who came close to getting elected president in 1896, 1900 and 1908).

The exchange sounds like a lot of the drama going on in the U.S. these days. Maybe Trump will sign an executive order barring the teaching of evolution, saying it is “fake” like global warming, or “harmful to young minds,” like learning about racism, sex discrimination and sexual orientation.

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Inherit The Wind Excerpts

Bertram T. Cates: [addressing his class as Mayor Jason Carter, Reverend Jeremiah Brown, Jessie Dunlap, and Deputy Sam enter the classroom to arrest him] Good morning visitors. For our science lesson for today, we will continue our discussion of Darwin’s Theory of the descent of man. As I told you yesterday, Darwin’s Theory tells us that man evolved from a lower order of animals: from the first wiggly protozoa here in the sea, to the ape, and finally to man. As some of you fellas out there probably gonna say that’s why some of us act like monkeys.

Deputy Sam: Bertram T. Cates, you’re charged with violation of Public Act 31428 – Volume 37, Statute Number 31428 of a state code – which makes it unlawful for any teacher of the public schools to teach any theory that denies the creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.

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Henry Drummond: For I intend to show this court that what Bertram Cates spoke quietly one spring morning in the Hillsboro High School is not crime. It is incontrovertible as geometry to any enlightened community of minds.

Prosecutor Tom Davenport: In this community, Colonel Drummond, and in this sovereign state, exactly the opposite is the case. The language of the law is clear, your Honor. We do not need experts to question the validity of a law that is already on the books.

Henry Drummond: Well, what do you need? A gallows to hang him from?

Prosecutor Tom Davenport: That remark is an insult to this entire community.

Henry Drummond: And this community is an insult to the world.

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Henry Drummond: I say that you cannot administer a wicked law impartially. You can only destroy, you can only punish. And I warn you, that a wicked law, like cholera, destroys everyone it touches. Its upholders as well as its defiers….Can’t you understand? That if you take a law like evolution and you make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools? And tomorrow you may make it a crime to read about it. And soon you may ban books and newspapers. And then you may turn Catholic against Protestant, and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the mind of man. If you can do one, you can do the other. Because fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding. And soon, your Honor, with banners flying and with drums beating we’ll be marching backward, BACKWARD, through the glorious ages of that Sixteenth Century when bigots burned the man who dared bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind!

Judge: I hope counsel does not mean to imply that this court is bigoted.

Henry Drummond: Well, your honor has the right to hope.

Judge: I have the right to do more than that.

Henry Drummond: You have the power to do more than that.

[the Judge holds Drummond in contempt of court]