Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (1955)

You don't suppose this kind of thing is ever finished, do you?
Tomorrow it'll be something else–and another fella will have to stand up…

At one point in the extraordinary direct examination of prosecutor Matthew Harrison Brady by defense attorney Henry Drummond, Drummond waves a rock under the nose of his hostile witness and points out the fossil of an extinct prehistoric creature that once lived where they now conduct their trial. Drummond proclaims that the very mountains were submerged in an ancient sea over a million years ago. Brady counters that the rock is a relic of Noah's Flood and could only be 6000 years old. What he misses is the fossilized creature, its life turned to stone, swept away by the deluge of time. Brady doesn't catch how much he–a genuinely great and good man who has dominated progressive American political thought for decades–has become a fossil entombed in stone through his complete refusal to examine his beliefs or move ahead intellectually–worse, by his denial of that right to someone else.

Make no mistake. The Brady of this drama is not a fool and is correct to be profoundly threatened. For all that some of us take Darwin's great theory of evolution as the key to understanding the life sciences, this doctrine was then a deeply ominous way to see the world. It completely demolishes the notion of the special creation of mankind and tumbles us from our pinnacle of self-regard. In the time of the 1925 Scopes trial, which inspired Inherit the Wind, evolutionary theory was also associated with "Social Darwinism" (a perversion of Charles Darwin's thought, by the way), which justified unrestrained capitalism, corporate greed and the oppression of labor by the phrase "survival of the fittest." William Jennings Bryan (on whom the Brady character is based) was a tireless Progressive who battled these forces all his life. Furthermore, Darwin's theories were at that time used to justify the new "science" of eugenics, in the name of which hundreds of people (poor, "criminal," retarded, diseased) were being sterilized. For Bryan, Darwinism was "the gospel of hate."

But without change and growth–that is to say, without evolution--there is no survival and the rising tides of modernity surge through the action of this play like Noah's Flood: radio broadcasts, telephones, a national press, electric fans. Lawrence and Lee ultimately use the legal debate between Brady and Drummond about the teaching of Darwin's theories in a Tennessee schoolroom as a grand metaphor for the ongoing cultural conflict about different systems of belief and control in American life. As the world grows more complicated, where do we turn for meaning? And who do we allow to define that meaning for our society?

Time haunts this play, but it's certainly not a dated piece. The playwrights admonish us to think of it as happening "not too long ago." The action, they warn us, "might have been yesterday. It could be tomorrow."

As a matter of fact, it was only a few months ago that a federal judge in Dover, Pennsylvania, closed yet another chapter in the ongoing battle over evolution vs. strict Biblical interpretation of life's origins and development by handing down a decision for the plaintiff in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Board (December 20, 2005). And, while the lawyers examined expert witnesses and parents, and argued the rights of individuals vs. elected authorities, what should open just down the street but a local theatre production of Inherit the Wind?

Since its first production in January 1955, this play always resurfaces when we are in crisis over matters of faith and reason, majority rule and individual liberty, free speech and public responsibility. These issues have been with us always and won't go away anytime soon. The play was electrifying during the McCarthy era, revived when Civil Rights questions racked the country, and now, here we are again, still debating whether children's minds can tolerate an education that explores the complications and consequences of scientific thought or require the easy certainties of the Bible. Here we are, once more struggling with issues about how much information can be argued publicly, who among us can speak his convictions, and who is rendered a traitor to the larger community by holding certain opinions.

While inspired by the 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial" and constantly referencing that mighty clash between giants William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, Inherit the Wind was written in the late '40s as a response to the growing political abuses of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC). Lawrence and Lee sought production in 1950 at the very moment of Senator Joseph McCarthy's rise to prominence, but no one would produce the play. Not until 1955, when McCarthy's power was beginning to decline, was Inherit the Wind publicly presented. Surely, the producers and audience knew there was more going on onstage than a legal debate about Charles Darwin and the Bible.

Lawrence and Lee compress and build on the historical trial, but they also darken that history considerably. While the Scopes trail was argued with deadly earnestness by Darrow and Bryan, the town of Dayton, Tennessee had whipped up the whole thing as a publicity ploy. Scopes himself had agreed to the arrest over a drugstore soda and the townspeople behaved like peddlers at a country fair. Lawrence and Lee, on the other hand, give us a young man, isolated by a crisis of individual conscience, and uniformly fundamentalist townspeople with the menacing overtones of a fickle mob. In Dayton in 1925, yes, there were folks praying in public, but there were also plenty of experts holding seminars and giving public lectures on Darwin's ideas. So many merchants cheerfully displayed monkeys in their shop windows that the mayor lectured them on being too obviously tasteless. In the play's fictional Hillsboro. the citizens are bullied into intellectual subservience by the worst kind of guilt-mongering preacher. The most fundamental difference, of course, is the play's implication of a true national victory even in legalistic defeat. Whereas, in real life, we know that the struggle continued then and continues now. Yesterday, and tomorrow, too.

© 2006 by Eileen Warburton

For further reading:
Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (NY. Basic Books,1997).
Eugenie C. Scott, Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction [esp. Chapter 5] (Westport, CT. Greenwood Press, 2004).
[and, of course: Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859).]


RHODE ISLAND COUNCIL FOR THE HUMANITIES

Discussion Sunday at 2nd Story Theatre is made possible through major funding support from the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, an independent state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this Discussion Sunday do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Rock a bye baby, in the treetop
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock.
When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall
And down will come baby, cradle and all.—
(Author: a Plymouth colonist)

In the beginning, was the Mayflower - a flotsam cradle set adrift to establish a new, "pure" way of life. And as the Story goes, the first poem the ancestral Puritans wrote shortly after their arrival was Rock a Bye Baby. This lullaby is believed to have been inspired by encounters with Native Americans - who suspended their bundled tots in trees while working their fields. How fitting that this is the first piece of American literature - a song of infancy and mortality. The quaint baby coo soothes the paralleling newborn country with a lulling cure for insomnia. We are truly a fortunate bunch to sleep like babes. Oh, but while we sleep, something as insubstantial as a gust of wind threatens to topple us from our perch. This wind threatens to take our children, our legacy. Instead of securing dominion (inheriting the earth), we risk vanishing into thin air — to inherit the wind.

Stories of origin are often, maybe always, pregnant with a shadow Story of extinction. Where we come from, says a lot about where we are going. If we descend from angels, fashioned from godly garb, then death is "survivable". We may even transcend to yet a greater existence. On the other hand, if we emerge from below, fashioned by godless chance, we must accept a conclusive death, an absolute nullification. Ernst Becker, in his Pulitzer-prize winning book The Denial of Death, makes the case that nearly all human action is motivated by a basic need to push the reality of death out of our routine awareness. Solace is found in feckless denial, beliefs of heavenly escapes, or earthly legacies that offer "symbolic immortality". Our worldviews (systems of belief) contain and nourish our identifications with what we take to be "immortal". To be stripped of one's deeply held worldview is tantamount to enduring the traumatic loss of the life preserver by which one bears the terror of death. If threatened, nations of people will ironically, but not surprisingly fight to their literal deaths to protect the symbolic immortality of their worldview. Perhaps it is fair to say that we are more our beliefs than our material bodies.

Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee's Inherit the Wind dramatically depicts a mortal battle of belief. Biblical literalism and Darwinian evolution face-off as a surface Story for a submerged jousting over individual rights vs. majoritarian rule. The ultimate debate is over how we should cultivate the minds of our children, our legacies, our vehicles of immortality. If they are "corrupted" by alien ideology (incommensurate with our worldview) they may cease to serve at the vessels of our symbolic immortality and instead be co-opted to carry the legacy worldview of the intruding rival. One way to increase the successful transmission of our worldview to our heirs is to reduce and rigidly fix the message to its bedrock foundational fundamentals. Though this "purification" or fundamentalism may overly simplify the "truth", the message gains the survival advantage of high fidelity. More complex and nuanced worldviews, in comparison, respond to the contingent needs of their hosts and thereby mutate and are gradually upgraded. In short they evolve. Interestingly, in Lawrence and Lee's drama, fundamentalism simultaneously opposes its own philosophical/ theological evolution, as well as the Darwinian idea of biological evolution.

While fundamentalism has deservedly gained a nasty reputation of intolerance, before we start casting stones we might recall the obvious fundamentalism of our founding "Puritans". In fact, we may turn to Arthur Miller's Crucible (1952) for a dramatic display of Puritan naughtiness in the Salem witch trials. In Inherit the Wind (1951) our puritans are all grown-up and decked out in Tennessean swagger, but the monumental similarities between the plays are unmistakable. Moreover, both plays bend the facts of the events that inspired them. In the case of Inherit the Wind, the truth is distorted in so many respects that one should perhaps simply treat it as a pure work of fiction rather than anything near a journalistic depiction of the Scope's Trial. (I recommend Edward Larson's 1997 Pulitzer-prize winning history of the trial for the interested reader.) Why distort a truly fascinating moment of American history into leftist propaganda? The play is no innocent memory. It is the retaliatory, nightmarish flashback of a trauma victim. It is a vendetta of a Left brutalized at the hands of Joseph McCarthy.

The play's distortion of reality is an interesting measure of the cultural war of the time. Darwinian evolution truly is a profoundly threatening idea. It was Darwin's discovery that Nietzsche credits as the denouement that led him to declare the death of God. Darwin himself, suffered with the philosophical conclusions of his work — holding back the publication of The Origin of Species for two decades. He worried about opening a Pandorian box. Darwin found the idea of evolution by natural selection simultaneously compelling, beautiful and frightening. If we are the product of chance, how easily we could have never have happened, how tenuous and contingent is our continued existence. I am reminded of Oedipus' search for his origins and the blinding consequence of his fateful discovery.

© 2006 by Rendueles Villalba

This essay was prepared as a companion piece to Shrink Rap, which will take place immediately following the performance on Saturday, October 21.

Ed Shea and local psychiatrist Rendueles Villalba, MD lead informal, post-show discussions to examine the play from the psychological perspective. Ed and Rendueles will often host one specialist whose field is germane to the discussion of the play. Shrink Rap is included in the price of admission.