Darwin--exit stage left

Kansas Theater Revives Infamous Play Inherit the Wind

Hoping to cash in on the Kansas controversy about teaching evolution, the Missouri Repertory Theater in Kansas recently decided to revive the famous play Inherit the Wind. I hope they make enough money to cover their annual deficit@ but they will make it honestly only if they provide program notes telling the audience that the play is propaganda rather than history, just as so much of the newspaper coverage of the Kansas controversy has been propaganda rather than journalism.

Inherit the Wind is a Western for liberals. It is a simple morality play, in which the villains are the Christians who are persecuting the loving, generous teacher of evolution. The hero is the defense attorney, and the hero's comic sidekick is the cynical journalist who reports the proceedings to the public. The play's final message is that the Bible and Darwin are fully reconcilable-if you let the liberals do the reconciling.

As the authors admitted in their preface. the play is not history. That is an understatement. The real Scopes trial of 1925 was not a persecution, but a symbolic confrontation engineered to put the town of Dayton, Tenn., on the map. The Tennessee legislature had funded a new science education program and, to reassure the public that science would not be used to discredit religion, had included as a symbolic measure a clause forbidding the teaching of evolution.

The governor and the legislative leaders had agreed that the clause would never be enforced, knowing that any prosecution would be an embarrassment. The American Civil Liberties Union wanted a test case, however, and advertised for a teacher willing to be a nominal defendant in a staged prosecution. Local boosters in Dayton took up the offer in the hopes that the mock trial would be good for business. The volunteer defendant, John T Scopes, was a physical education teacher who taught biology briefly as a substitute. He was never in danger of going to jail.

The local prosecutors fell in with the scheme and indicted Scope. The trial became a media circus when William Jennings Bryan volunteered for the prosecution, and Clarence Darrow volunteered to be the defense lawyer. Darrow, fresh from a sensational murder trial in Chicago, was nationally famous as an agnostic lecturer. Bryan, a three-time Democratic Presidential candidate, was a progressive politician whose reasons for opposing Darwinism appealed to many liberals and socialists in his day, as they still would. Bryan had seen Darwinism used in America to justify unrestrained capitalism, and in Germany to justify the brutal militarism that led to the First World War.

Clarence Darrow and the Baltimore journalist H. L. Mencken (the model for the journalist in the play) actually did embrace the amoral nihilism that Bryan attributed to Darwinism. Darrow did not want to reconcile the Bible with Darwinism. He wanted to get rid of religion and replace it with agnostic philosophy.

Harvard Rubes

On the other hand, Bryan truly was a scientific ignoramus, and the wily Darrow really did make a fool of him. If Darrow had wanted, he probably could just as easily have made the leading evolutionary scientists of the day look foolish. For example, some of these scientists confidently cited the fraudulent Piltdown Man, and the tooth of "Nebraska Man" (which turned out to be from a kind of pig), as proof of human evolution. If Bryan was confused about the evidence for evolution, he had a lot of respectable company.

The play has had so much impact that its story is more important than what really happened. Once upon a time, it says, the world was ruled by cruel oppressors called Christians, who tried to prevent people from thinking and enjoying life. Liberation from this oppression came via Darwin, who taught us that our real Creator was a natural process that leaves human reason free to make up new rules whenever we want.

Read that way, Inherit the Wind is a bitter attack upon Christianity, or at least the conservative Christianity that considers the Bible to be in some sense a reliable historical record. The rationalists have all the good lines, and all the virtues. The Christian leaders are a combination of folly, pride and malice, and their followers are so many mindless puppets. One would suppose from the play that Christianity has no program other than to teach hatred. In short, the play is a smear, although it is one that smears an acceptable target and hence is considered suitable for use in the public schools.

Just how ugly the smear is came home to me the first time I saw the movie, in a theater next to Harvard University (at a time when I would have called myself an agnostic). The demonstrative student audience freely jeered at the rubes of Hillsboro (Dayton), whooped with delight at every wisecrack from Drummond (Darrow), and reveled in the humiliation of Brady (Bryan). It occurred to me that the Harvard students were reacting much like the worst of the Hillsboro citizens in the movie. They thought they were showing how smart they were by aping the prejudices of their teachers, and by being cruel to the ghost of William Jennings Bryan-who was probably a much better man than any of them.

Maybe Hillsboro isn't just Dayton, Tenn. Maybe sometimes it's Harvard, or the editorial page of the Washington Post, or even a repertory theater where a play pretends to be making audiences think when it is really only pandering to their prejudices.

Mr Johnson, a graduate of the University ofChicago and Harvard Law School, has taught law for 30 years at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a law clerk for Chief Juice Earl Warren of the U.S. Supre Court and has written Darwin on Trial, Reason in the Balance and Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds. This article is based on material that first appeared in Defeating Darwinism.

Copyright Human Events Publishing, Inc. Nov 19, 1999
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