July 28, 2006
More on Inherit the Wind Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:40 PM EST I have been mulling over Fred Schwartz’s and Ellen Feldman’s strictures on Inherit the Wind, and I am stuck with the feeling that they are a little too hard on the dramatic and historical vision expressed by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, who wrote the original play. It is true that Bryan was a great man–and my memory is that in the play Darrow insists on that very fact. But Bryan was not being a great man when he sought to employ state power to suppress the teaching of modern biology. Darrow, too had feet of clay–most people do–but he was fighting a very good fight in Tennessee. The play does not note the clay feet, but I do not think the play is obliged to do so. Would a play about the Munich crisis be obligated to note Churchill’s idiocies about Gandhi? Over Munich, Churchill was right, and heroic–as Darrow was in Tennessee.
Is it all that damning to note that “the whole trial [was] basically a publicity stunt”? Finding a test case is an absolutely legitimate tactic, and publicizing a perceived abuse of state power is what citizens in a democracy are supposed to do. Does the fact that Scopes didn’t risk imprisonment make him no kind of hero? I think Scopes was braver than I’d have been, if my teaching job was at stake, not to mention in a world where the Klan was a real force. Is it much of a defense of the local legislature to note that Tennessee did not criminalize all classroom teaching that conflicted with Biblical literalism, only some such speech? Not by my lights. Should the Tennessee legislature be in the clear because the 1925 Supreme Court might have upheld its anti-evolution law? Well, the 1857 Supreme Court upheld the Missouri legislature against Dred Scott, and that hasn’t done much for posterity’s opinion of the ante-bellum Missouri legislature.
Does the fact that Bryan didn’t consider himself humiliated mean that he was not humiliated in the eyes of history? The play, if I remember it correctly, thinks that Bryan damaged his historical legacy. When I was a boy, that was still true, and I suspect it will remain true. The play has a tragic sense of Bryan and a nice, complicated sense of populism: Bryan articulated some of the best and the worst of what many of his countrymen thought. If the people were always right, and the elites always wrong, or if the reverse was true, history and politics would admittedly be a lot simpler. The play has a figure–Hornbeck, the Mencken-surrogate–who shows the potential moral limitation and imaginative poverty of elite sneering at popular passion and piety. The play may too simply make Darrow a Golden Mean, but it does not cheaply mock Bryan.
Does the play unduly distort history when it compresses the sprawling chaos of real cross-examination into an ahistorically-dramatic form? All the litigators I know bemoan juries’ expectations that Perry Mason is liable to show up in front of them, but dramas are supposed to dramatize, and they necessarily do so at a price in verisimilitude. How much that matters is lost when Lawrence and Lee compress and sharpen that confrontation? It’s a matter of taste, I suppose, but I am not offended. It is good theater, and I don’t think the play’s version of history is anything like fanciful enough to call it alternate history.
Ellen Feldman wisely notes that a defense of Bryan resting on the fact that 1920s evolutionary theory had some nasty links with Social Darwinism and the Nazi version of that creed remains implausible. The play indeed has some heroes–Darrow and Scopes–and in 1925 those two men, by my lights, remain more heroic than those who defended the state’s power to punish, however lightly, a man who was teaching plausible science in a public school. Liberal elites can be wrong about all sorts of things, but I am not sure they are wrong in admiring Darrow and Scopes. There is, in any case, a notion that good history does not judge any actors right or wrong, with 20/20 hindsight, or judge at all; it instead seeks to understand the past in its own terms. On that theory, Bryan’s self-understanding is most of what matters. Whether or not that is a good theory of history, I do not think it can be fairly deployed against historical dramatists.
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