Inherit the Wind the Play

Inherit the Wind

The play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee, "Inherit the Wind," was based on the infamous trial held in Tennessee (in 1925) over a teacher's right to teach Darwinism in a public school. A few years later movie director Stanley Kramer produced a film with the same title. It is ironic that today, 87 years later, a similar argument is being made in conservative Southern states like Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, to name a few. The controversy today exists because the religious right insists on placing the Biblical story of "Creation" (or a similar theory) in the same science books that explain evolution, which is frankly absurd, mixing science and religion; but the American society is fractured and polarized vis-a-vis religion, politics, and science.

The Plot of the Play

Meanwhile, the plot of "Inherit the Wind" begins as teacher Bert Cates is arrested for teaching evolution to his sophomore science class. He's in jail and his girlfriend, Rachel Brown, happens to be the daughter of the preacher Reverend Brown (who is vigorously opposed to the idea of evolution), so she is torn between her father and her boyfriend, Cates. The prosecuting attorney is a former presidential candidate (Matthew Harrison Brady, playing the part of William Jennings Bryan), which frightens Cates because of the notoriety surrounding Brady. But a famous defense attorney, Henry Drummond (playing the role of Clarence Darrow), takes Cates' case and though Cates loses in court, and is fined $100, Drummond destroys Brady's credibility by putting him on the stand and exposing the fact that Brady doesn't interpret the Bible literally.

The Legal Issue

In the real case, John Thomas Scopes was never put in jail but he did break the law because in March, 1925, Tennessee Governor Austin Peay signs the Butler bill into law, the first law in the U.S. "…to ban the teaching of evolution" (www.npr.org). Looking at that law now, it was not fiction, it was real. This law (Butler bill) reflects several things about Southern society in 1925. The South was still segregated (African-Americans couldn't vote in many instances; their children were sent to schools that were clearly not on a par with white schools; they had to sit in the back of the bus and couldn't sit at lunch counters; they had separate drinking fountains in Tennessee and elsewhere) and obviously right wing Christian movements had a lot of power otherwise the governor would not have signed a law against teaching evolution.

The play "Inherit the Wind" changes the real-life script. In the real "Scopes Monkey Trial" Clarence Darrow defends John Scopes and William Jennings Bryan serves as the prosecutor. This was a clash of legal titans, if you will, because Bryan had run for president of the U.S. several times. Actually Bryan can be seen now as a brilliant buffoon, arguing that the Bible trumps science.