65 Years Later, Inherit The Wind Still Has Lessons To Teach Us (And Not The Ones You're Thinking of)

 

From my adolescence well into my college years I spent a fair amount of my time reading collections of some of the greatest plays of the greatest American playwrights. And during that same period I had a great deal of difficulty connecting with it on an emotional level the same way I could the great novels and short stories that I read during that same period.

I should tell my readers that, by and large, most of the plays I was reading at the time were unassigned and done in my free time. However, I still reach the fundamental conclusion that the only way to truly appreciate these plays is to see them performed, if not in live theater then in a filmed version. Because I live on New York I’ve had an edge on the former than the majority of Americans don’t and it has helped me comprehend why so many of these are masterpieces. I read Death of A Salesman at least a dozen times in my teenage years but it wasn’t until I saw the 1999 production with Brian Dennehy as Willy Loman that I finally understood why it was a classic. I’d never been able to process Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night after multiple readings but when I saw a production with Dennehy, Vanessa Redgrave, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robert Sean Leonard playing the troubled Tyrone family that I understood why O’Neill was one of the great playwrights of our time. And I probably read and reread Inherit The Wind at least four or five times throughout by childhood and I knew more of the historical context than the average high school student. But I didn’t fully appreciate what it meant until I saw George C. Scott and Charles Durning face off on Broadway in the 1990s.

That’s not to say there isn’t value in reading the printed version of these plays. I wasn’t formerly diagnosed with what was  known in the 1990s as Asperger’s Syndrome until I was seventeen years old but in many ways I consider a benefit to me rather than a stigma. One of the ways it has infinitely aided me is a reader and in some ways it has been beneficial when I read scripts or plays. I spent a lot of time focusing on stage directions and other minutiae that there’s a decent chance the average reader – perhaps even the average performer – might miss. And because I scoured over every page multiple times I was able to pick up details that the playwright put into words but the viewer never got a chance to actually see.

Such was the case with the introduction that Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (no relation) wrote for their play. Despite the fact that it is, for all intents and purposes, the dramatic equivalent of a roman a clef for the Scopes Monkey Trial they went out of their way to try and argue that the issues were prevalent and always would be. “These events may have happened yesterday. They could happen tomorrow,” are the last lines of that introduction. This is a more lyrical way of saying history repeats itself something that we have seen over and over again.

I recently had occasion to see Stanley Kramer’s film adaptation of Inherit The Wind, a film that Roger Ebert listed in his third volume of Great Movies. I wrote about Kramer in great detail about the masterpiece he made the following year Judgement at Nuremberg and have written that Kramer was one of the few filmmakers, along with Sidney Lumet and Norman Jewison, who was capable of making entertaining films that delivered messages to their audiences. This year is the 65^th anniversary of Inherit The Wind, a fact I am sure will be overshadowed that it is the 100^th anniversary of the Scopes Trial that inspired it and which, sadly, we now no longer seem to have any consensus on who won.

I’ve seen Inherit The Wind quite a few times and like all of Kramer’s films over the years it has  messages that everyone should hear but that few people have taken away from it. I have little doubt those who know of the film (without having bothered to see it, of course) believe that the religious right and the fundamentalist mindsight refused to get the clear lessons it taught. That is true, but its also true that Kramer was using the play to also teach lessons that are relevant to today’s progressive mindset that were relevant then – but that might have been overlooked. And the best way to do so is through the three most famous historical characters that Kramer shows us in the film.

Note: For the purposes of brevity I will refer to the dramatis personae not by their names in the movie but as to their real life equivalent.

William Jennings Bryan is played by Frederic March in Kramer’s version. There have been multiple remakes of the play over the years but March goes out of his way to make his version look the most like Bryan in 1925. Bryan’s reputation has taken a huge hit over the last century so its worth going into detail on who he was before he came to Tennessee to prosecute Scopes.

Bryan was a Congressman from Nebraska who at the 1896 Democratic Convention electrified the crowds with his legendary ‘Cross of Gold’ Speech. Bryan was only 36 years old, just one year above the age limit to be eligible to run for President but when he delivered his oration he mobilized the crowds into nominated him for President, still the youngest man to ever be nominated by a major party.

Bryan was considered a radical by the masses and many questioned his sanity. While his main argument was for regulation of money, he also advocated for the rights or workers, regulation of railroads, increased suffrage and a kind of pacificism. He was also the first major Presidential candidate to travel the entire country for votes, something unheard of and considered demeaning in the 19^th century. The corporate interests, the GOP and even some Democrats, thought he was a dangerous and it would be a threat to the national interest if he became President. In short, Bryan was 19^th century equivalent of a progressive.

He lost the Presidency to McKinley, then lost again by a wider margin in 1900. He would run once more against Taft in 1908 and suffer an even bigger defeat. He argued against imperialism, fought for the right of the farmer and the laborer and was responsible for the Democratic Party’s slow but steady embrace of labor and workers. By 1912 he was still enough of a force in the Democratic Party that his backing would help Woodrow Wilson become President. Wilson made him Secretary of State.

That was a huge blunder because Bryan was a pacifist and a quasi-isolationist. With war brewing in Europe his positions quickly became out of touch with the political scene and he resigned in 1915. From that point on his position in the Democratic party became more diminished though he still showed up at each convention. By 1924, he was completely out of touch with modern politics but he still had a following among the Southerners and the evangelicals. By the time Bryan makes it to Tennessee, then as in reality, he is still popular with the crowds of the faithful but very little else.

Spencer Tracy portrays Clarence Darrow. Darrow was considered an iconoclast in America who’d once had political ambitions himself. Like Bryan, he opposed imperialist causes and actively supported organized labor in multiple cases in his early years. Despite doing his best Darrow was frequently attacked by many of his own movement for never doing enough for it. He spent his career opposing the death penalty, which he believed was in conflict with humanitarian means. This gave the impression, early on, that he was a sensationalist and more importantly that because of the criminals he represented he was himself as much  a criminal. When it’s announces he’s coming to Tennessee to represent Scopes there is a reaction in horror, particularly about his most recent case: “those boys in Chicago.” They are referring to Leopold and Loeb, who Darrow has just acquitted for killing Bobby Franks, a fourteen year old boy. The two of them had confessed and plead guilty so Darrow was trying to keep them from hanging. He gave a twelve hour speech which sentenced them to life in prison. But because the two young boys came from wealthy families, Americans considered him greedy and an opportunist. It’s for that reason he’s considered a monster.

Finally there’s H.L. Mencken, played by Gene Kelly. Mencken has since been proved to be fundamentally both deeply conservative and racist, but those are not evident in the play or the film. What is evident is Mencken’s utter disgust for humanity in general and the people in this town specifically. He’s been assigned to this story but it’s not clear whether he has much interest about evolution or thinks its legitimate. When he sees a circus monkey he shouts: “Grandpa!” and then starts to ask it for a statement.

To call Mencken in a cynic is too generous; in Kelly’s portrayal he has a disgust for humanity in general. The fate of Scopes honestly seems less important to him then proving what he already believes about the ‘plain people’ and their lack of common sense. Ironically while the people of this town no doubt consider him part of ‘the liberal media’, he’s as conservative as they are but he holds them in greater contempt. When one offers him a nice place to stay he responds: “I had a nice place to stay. And I left it to come here.”

In the original play everyone’s dialogue is listed in traditional print, save for Horndecker (Mencken) which takes the appearance of blank verse. One gets a sense of it in Kelly’s delivery, as if he is proud to stand apart from these people. The only person in the entire play he treats with respect is Darrow but even that’s marginal. When Darrow arrives someone shouts out: “It’s the devil.” Mencken shakes his hand, saying: “Hello, devil. Welcome to hell.”  In these five words Mencken makes it very clear how little he thinks of where he is and the people who live here – something, it should be noted, Darrow doesn’t share in his delivery.

Commonly forgotten about the Scopes trial is that, technically, Scopes lost. The jury found him guilty after little deliberation. It’s pretty clear almost from the start that this is a rigged game, given the contempt the judge treats Darrow in his cross-examination and how he is clearly leaning towards every word Bryan says. When Bryan makes it clear that none of the scientific experts Darrow has brought to testify can take the stand, the judge doesn’t even bother to give Darrow a hearing before ruling.  When Darrow calls Bryan to the stand he tries to get him to talk about the Origin of Species but the judge rules that he shouldn’t have to testify on it.

Essentially the only victory Darrow managed to make in his cross-examination is to make Bryan, the self-proclaimed mouthpiece of Christianity, look like a babbling idiot on the stand and even that he only achieves in the final minutes. Because not long after the verdict Bryan dies (in the play it happens within minutes; in real life, it happened within days) there might be a perception that the victory is he killed off the loudest opponent to evolution and therefore ‘won’ the fight. But that’s not how these things work in real life and its worth noting Darrow himself expresses admiration for his fallen foe that Mencken won’t. This is the kind of humanity that, frankly, the progressives themselves clearly lack then and now.

In many ways I think the most relevant passage to the events America a century after the Scopes Trial comes when Darrow is (as the stage directions tell us) “looking for a chink in the armor.” Darrow asks if he considers anything holy and he says: “The individual human mind…An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral.” Few progressives would argue with this even today. But what does Darrow say next:

“Progress has never been a bargain. You have to pay for it. Sometimes I think there’s a man who sits behind a counter and says: “All right, you can have a telephone, but you lose privacy and the charm of distance. Madam, you may vote but at a price: you lose the right to retreat behind the powder puff of the petticoat. Mister, you may conquer the air, but the birds will lose their wonder and the clouds will smell of gasoline.”

That is what progressives, then and now, have never taken into account. One could easily extend Darrow’s monologue to every single move forward in the twentieth century and well past it. There is a cost to every move forward and few today would want to live in the world of even the late twentieth century but they have no desire to pay for it and have little use for those who cling to the old ways.

Bryan immediately afterwards responds by saying: “We must not abandon faith! Faith is the most important thing!” This is the response of a reactionary and in this case Bryan is one. But it is also the voice of belief in something that, by and large, today’s progressives do not have. I suspect at least one of the problems in today’s society is not that the battle is being fought between the descendants of Bryan and those of Darrow, but by those of Bryan and Mencken. What’s the difference? Darrow at least believes in something – the human mind, the ability to think, and can have respect even for the opposition. Mencken believes in nothing and has nothing but contempt for those who do.

Throughout the movie he goes out of his way to mock even Darrow’s efforts at trying to win. “Henry, why don’t you wake up?” Darwin was wrong! Man’s still an ape….When he first achieved the upright position he took a look at the stars…thought they were something to eat.”

When Darrow reacts by saying: “I wish I had your worm’s eye view of history. I t would make things a lot easier.” Mencken then turns on him:

“You’d still be spending time trying to make sense of what’s laughingly referred to as the human race….you think man still has noble destiny. Well I tell you he’s already started on his backward march to the salt and stupecy of where he came.” He calls Cates: “A monkey who tried to fly.”

This is just as true when he sees Bryan suffer his heart attack. He says: “Something happened to an also-ran.” Not even his death bothers him. “He died of a busted belly.”

This finally snaps Darrow’s patience

Darrow: You never pushed a noun against a verb except to blow up something.

Mencken: You know that’s a typical lawyer’s trick – accusing the accuser.

Darrow: What am I accused of?”

Mencken: Contempt of conscience, sentimentality in the first degree.

The final lines of the film are changed from what they are in the play. It’s an exchange between Darrow and Mencken.

Darrow: “My god, don’t you understand the meaning of what happened here today?”

Mencken: “What happened here has no meaning…

Darrow: YOU have no meaning! You’re like a ghost pointing an empty sleeve and smirking at everything people feel or want or struggle for! I pity you…What touches you, what warms you? Every man has a dream. What do you dream about? What…what do you need? You don’t need anything, do you? People, love, an  idea, just to cling to? You poor slob. You’re all alone. When you go to your grave, there won’t be anybody to pull the grass up over your head. Nobody to mourn you. Nobody to give a damn. You’re all alone!

All of this rolls off Mencken and he just turns even Darrow’s vitriol against his believe against him:

“You’re wrong…You’ll be there. You’re the type. Who else would defend my right to be lonely?

Darrow’s attack on Mencken sums up the modern progressive perfectly. They look at the entire world with disregard at best and contempt for those who try to change things at worst. I should mention much of Mencken’s dialogue bares the greatest revision from the original play, no doubt done in large part with the influence of Kelly but it is still a very clear belief in how Mencken saw the world. He had little use for humanity, thought democracy and progress were a sham, and looked at so many of the great Presidents of his era from TR to Truman as world-beaters because they tried to improve things for a populace Mencken felt didn’t deserve to have things change.

I’m reminded of a line from the comedy Taxi that parallels Mencken’s mindset: “What do you think of the human race? I’m looking for an outsider’s opinion.” In a nutshell, it’s clear that so much of the modern left has not embraced the ideas of Darrow, who at one point in his career was sympathetic with causes of Bryan (in the film Bryan says Darrow twice campaigned with him for President) but that of Mencken who thinks  to fight for a cause is a sucker’s game.

This is true based on what was happening in politics at time. Not long before Inherit the Wind was nominated for four Oscars (including Best Actor for Tracy and Best Adapted Screenplay) JFK gave his famous inaugural address where he said: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Before the decade was over an entire generation was protesting in the streets because the idea of doing something for your country – namely fighting in Vietnam – was something that was beneath their ideals. Their actions were one of the main reasons the New Deal consensus – formed not long after Bryan died in 1925 – fractured for good and led to the conservative revolution that was powered by the spiritual descendants of Bryan in the Bible Belt where this conflict was the greatest.

During the play Bryan remarks on how he and Darrow were once friends and should be fighting the same fight. “Why is it, my old friend, that you’ve moved so far away from me?” Darrow responds: “All motion is relative…Maybe it’s you who’ve moved away by standing still.” That concept sums up the idea of progressivism today but the problem is that motion for progressive’s takes on the idea of the Red Queen’s Race: you have to move twice as fast to stay in the same place – and the progressives never stay there long enough for you to catch up. And because they always moving forward towards a future they refuse to define;  they combine Darrow’s idea of motion with Mencken’s pomposity that even the great changes don’t mean anything. The Mencken’s of this era will no doubt say there is no real difference between America in 1925 and the present time that man continues to march backwards despite living in a world where they have reaped the benefits of progress and have never had to pay the cost.

But the Darrow’s of the world know better. When Scopes is fined just $100 for breaking the law, the playwright’s say that one of the great precedents of all time ‘has exploded with the force of a wet balloon’. Bryan realizes the significance of this in his last moments and so does Darrow, even if Mencken doesn’t or refuses to admit it. And it’s worth noting that even though Mencken’s gives the final lines of the film, the writers let Darrow have the last word. He picks up Origin of Species, starts to walk away, then pauses, picks up the Bible and claps them together before leaving the courtroom.

In his review of the film Ebert is trying to figure out what Kramer meant by that last scene: “Has Darrow found a way to conflate the two, or does he just think he’ll need them for the appeal?”  There’s a third interpretation. Darrow knows that this is just one battle and that the war still needs to be won. And going forward he’s going to need all the tools he can get to win the fight. He is in motion yet again and he will not stand still for the adversaries that remain nor listen to the scorn of those who don’t believe him on either side. He believes that you have to pay for progress but he’s more than willing to keep footing the bill, even if that means being considered the Devil.