Art in the Service of Falsehood

Inherit the Wind

Can a superb work of art be evil? Can it tell lies about the human condition and still be splendid in its execution, its intelligence, the coherence of its parts, and the power of its presentation?

This question is not easy for me to answer. I have encountered works whose greatness in one respect or another has struck me, yet afterwards I feel the uncanny sense of having been deceived, or of being seduced along a path that leads to contradiction and chaos. In this category—and I hesitate to name them, because I freely admit that I may be missing something—I would place Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, with its hatred of tradition and family life and the pieties we owe to our forebears; so also George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, for its reducing religion, both Christianity and Judaism, to the political and racial; and so also this film I am discussing here, Inherit the Wind (1960), directed by Stanley Kramer.

It is not that I dislike Kramer’s work. His Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) is a powerful defense of the natural law written on the hearts of men, the Law to which all human law must defer.

He produced High Noon (1952), the story of a courageous sheriff who risks his life for the sake of law and the welfare of a town whose people are not worth his commitment. In both cases, and in other of his films, he admires people who stand athwart the cries of the crowds; you will not find any kindness toward ordinary people, not even in his zany comedy It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963).

But that is the problem with Inherit the Wind. Ostensibly, it is a film about the notorious Scopes “Monkey Trial,” where two former friends—the statesman, three-time loser in presidential elections, and outspoken Christian William Jennings Bryan and the agnostic lawyer Clarence Darrow—came to Dayton, Tennessee, the former to prosecute John Scopes, the latter to defend him. The trial made headlines around the world. That was no surprise, since H. L. Mencken of The Baltimore Sun was behind the uproar. He it was who brought Darrow to Tennessee in the first place.

Gross Fictionalization

In the film, these persons are both present and not present. The account is fictionalized, and sometimes in grossly abusive ways, while still being offered up as a faithful account of the events in question. The names themselves are but thinly veiled: Clarence Darrow is one Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy); William Jennings Bryan is one Matthew Harrison Brady (Fredric March); H. L. Mencken is E. K. Hornbeck (Gene Kelly); and John Scopes is Bertram Cates (Dick York).

Kramer and his screen writers Nedrick Young and Harold Jacob Smith said that the film was not about any battle between science and religion, but rather about McCarthyism and the freedom to think and to speak one’s mind. I will deal with that issue shortly. The problem is that you cannot watch Inherit the Wind without sensing the conclusion you are meant to come to, which is that the Scriptures—for that is what stands in the crosshairs, not some all-including “religion”—are absurd, if they are interpreted literally, and thus that everyone who does so interpret them is an idiot. The real William Jennings Bryan did not believe that the six days of Creation were periods of twenty-four hours, as his parodic counterpart Matthew Harrison Brady believes. The real Bryan offered to pay any fine that the court imposed upon Scopes. He was not a gibbering moron, as he is sometimes portrayed by March. The real people of Dayton, Tennessee, did not rise up in fury against the reporters but welcomed them. They did not threaten to torch the court.

In the fictionalized trial, Brady-Bryan puts the fiancée of Cates-Scopes on the stand and savages her, getting her to admit that Cates-Scopes left the church over the question of whether a drowned baby that had not been baptized would be excluded from heaven. There was no such fiancée, and the question seems to have been chosen precisely to embarrass Christians while avoiding the range of answers that Christians themselves have given to it. In the fictionalized trial, after the guilty verdict is given, Drummond-Darrow demands an appeal, after which a blubbering Brady-Bryan collapses to the floor with a heart attack after having been denied the chance to enter a summative speech. But Darrow was the one who demanded a guilty verdict so that he could appeal it, and so that he could block Bryan from entering his speech. Bryan died in his sleep several days later.

These are not “inaccuracies.” They are not exercises in poetic license, invented to get at the heart of the events without distraction. They are lies. Fredric March—an actor I admire—plays Brady-Bryan as a fool. Spencer Tracy—another actor I admire, but not in his roles as a political grandstander—plays Drummond-Darrow as a folksy old friend of brave thinkers everywhere. The screenplay allows him to surprise Hornbeck-Mencken in the end, by setting the Bible and On the Origin of Species together, as if the man were somehow still a Christian, deep inside. The film thus keeps Hornbeck-Mencken at arm’s length—no surprise, since the real Mencken loathed political liberalism and democracy.

Gross Dishonesty

As for the film’s being really about the McCarthy era and the Hollywood blacklist, I doubt very much that a single moviegoer out of a hundred would have made that connection. Language is not a private thing. If you say to a man, “You are a liar and a thief,” you do not get to defend yourself by saying later on that you really meant that his neighbor Joe was an adulterer.

There is one thing that the McCarthy hearings, along with those of the House Un-American Activities Committee, have in common with the people of Tennessee who passed the law against teaching human evolution. They were aimed at preserving something the people believed was good, which they perceived to be under threat. I am not here defending their means, nor do I here make any claim about the biological origin of species. That is beyond the scope of this article. But I will note that the most terrifying political experiment against human freedom and the mind of man was going on full-bore in the world of Kramer, Young, and Smith: namely, the miseries of living behind the Iron Curtain, such offenses as make the worst of the Hollywood blacklisters look like a schoolyard bully who filches the cupcake from your lunch bag. I will also note that the focus on McCarthy to the exclusion of real traitors is a neat way of averting the issue. For there were Soviet moles high in the ranks of the American government, as McCarthy contended, particularly in the State department: Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, for example.

I will also note that to imply of the Tennessee law that it was simply lame-brained stuff coming from knuckle-dragging rednecks is to beg the question and to avert the issues, which have to do with being sure that something you teach schoolchildren really is the truth, and, if it is still open for debate, whether such matters and their social and intellectual implications are fitly addressed in a public school. I know from my old copies of The Century Magazine, in my experience the broadest-based and most rewarding of all American periodicals,that theological discourse was carried on at a very high level. It is true that the judge at the Scopes trial did not permit Darrow to call in scientists as witnesses for the defense. Nor is it clear to me that the judge should have done so, since the law itself neither compelled nor permitted evil action; a county courthouse is not the place to adjudicate the prudence of a law enacted by the duly elected legislature when the worst that can be said about the law is that it is too timid, that it prevents something good from being done, whose goodness is questionable even so.

Demagoguery & Liberal Self-Flattery

Inherit the Wind is worth watching for the brilliant performances of Tracy and Kelly, for reminding yourself of the dangers of demagoguery, and for seeing on full display the flattering unction that American liberals lay to their souls.

The free speech movements on American campuses in the 1960s had little to do with freedom of inquiry in the classroom, but rather with protests and forms of behavior corrosive to civility and the common good. Most of those champions of free speech, when they came to power, were quick to impose an all-ambitious program of political orthodoxy that we are far from getting out from under. Try to say, at any public school or college in America, that you believe that a man cannot conceivably marry another man, that it is a biological and anthropological absurdity, and that accepting the absurdity has brought harm to family life, to social analysis, to political discourse and action, and to the common good, and then see how many admirers of Inherit the Wind will come to your defense. Try to say at a high school any of a thousand things that liberals themselves once took for granted as common sense. H.  L. Mencken might have defended you, if for no other reason than that he suspected that all mass movements were founded in stupidity. Bryan would have defended you. Darrow? Kramer, Young, and Smith? I’d like to believe they would have, but I doubt it.