Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion

by Edward Larson

  Such grim fascination with the Scopes trial as a foreshadowing of McCarthyism inspired the single most influential retelling of the tale, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s play, Inherit the Wind. In contrast to Allen’s comic portrayal of the trial, Lawrence and Lee presented it as present-day drama. “Inherit the Wind does not pretend to be journalism,” they wrote in their published introduction for the play, “It is not 1925. The stage directions set the time as ‘Not too long ago.’ It might have been yesterday. It could be tomorrow.” In writing this, they did not intend to present antievolutionism as an ongoing danger—to the contrary, they perceived that threat as safely past; rather, their concern was the McCarthy-era blacklisting of writers and actors (the play opened on Broadway in 1955). “In the 1950s, Lee and his partner became very concerned with the spread of McCarthyism,” a student who interviewed him reported. “Lawrence and Lee felt that McCarthyism paralleled some aspects of the Scopes trial. Lee worried, ‘I was very concerned when laws were passed, when legislation limits our freedom to speak; silence is a dangerous thing.’” Tony Randall, who starred in the original Broadway cast, later wrote, “Like The Crucible, Inherit the Wind was a response to and a product of McCarthyism. In each play, the authors looked to American history for a parallel.”38

  For their model, Lawrence and Lee took Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset, a play loosely based on the Sacco—Vanzetti case. Anderson had claimed “a poet’s license to expand, develop, and interpolate, dramatize and comment,” Lawrence and Lee later explained. “We asked for the same liberty ... to allow the actuality to be the springboard for the larger drama so that the stage could thunder a meaning that wasn’t pinned to a given date or a given place.”39

  The play was not history, as Lawrence and Lee stressed in their introduction. “Only a handful of phrases have been taken from the actual transcript of the famous Scopes trial. Some of the characters of the play are related to the colorful figures in that battle of giants; but they have a life and language of their own—and, therefore, names of their own.” For their two starring roles, the writers chose sound-alike names: Bryan became Brady and Darrow was Drummond. The role of the Baltimore Sun’s H. L. Mencken was expanded to become the Baltimore Herald’s E. K. Hornbeck. Scopes became Cates. Tom Stewart diminished into a minor role as Tom Davenport. Malone, Hays, Neal, Rappleyea, and the ACLU disappeared from the story altogether, as did the WCFA and all the hometown prosecutors. Dayton (called Hillsboro) gained a mayor and a fire-breathing fundamentalist pastor who subjugated townspeople until Darrow came to set them free with his cool reason.

  Scopes acquired a fiancée—“She is twenty-two, pretty, but not beautiful,” the stage directions read, and she is the fearsome preacher’s daughter. “They had to invent romance for the balcony set,” Scopes later joked.40 It may not have been accurate history, but it was brilliant theater—and it all but replaced the actual trial in the nation’s memory. The play wove three fundamental changes into the story line (in addition to countless minor ones), all of which served the writers’ objectives of debunking McCarthyism.

  The first change involved Scopes and Dayton. Ralph Waldo Emerson once described a mob as “a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of reason.” In Inherit the Wind, Cates becomes the innocent victim of a mob-enforced antievolution law. The stage directions begin, “It is important to the concept of the play that the town is always visible, looming there, as much on trial as the individual defendant. ”In the movie version, the town fathers haul Cates out of his classroom for teaching evolution. Limited to a few sets, the play begins with the defendant in jail explaining to his fiancée, “You know why I did it. I had the book in my hand, Hunter’s Civic Biology. I opened it up, and read to my sophomore science class Chapter 17, Darwin’s Origin of Species.” For innocently doing his job, Cates “is threatened with fine and imprisonment,” according to the script.41 This change provoked trial correspondent Joseph Wood Krutch. “The little town of Dayton behaved on the whole quite well,” he wrote in rebuttal. “The atmosphere was so far from being sinister that it suggested a circus day.” Yet, he complained, “The authors of Inherit the Wind made it chiefly sinister, a witchhunt of the sort we are now all too familiar with.” Scopes never truly faced jail, Krutch reminded readers, and the defense actually instigated the trial. “Thus it was all in all a strange sort of witch trial,” he concluded, “one in which the accused won a scholarship enabling him to attend graduate school and the only victim was the chief witness for the prosection, poor old Bryan.”42

  Second, the writers transformed Bryan into a mindless, reactionary creature of the mob. Brady was “the biggest man in the country—next to the President, maybe,” the audience heard at the outset, who “came here to find himself a stump to shout from. That’s all.” In the play, he assails evolution solely on narrow biblical grounds (never suggesting the broad social concerns that largely motivated Bryan) and denounces all science as “Godless,” rather than the so-called false science of evolution. 43 “Inherit the Wind dramatically illustrates why so many Americans continue to believe in the mythical war between science and religion,” Ronald Numbers later wrote. “But in doing so, it sacrifices the far more complex historical reality.”44

  On the witness stand, Brady responds even more foolishly than Bryan did at the real trial. In Inherit the Wind, Brady steadfastly maintains on alleged biblical authority that God created the universe in six twenty-four-hour days beginning “on the 23rd of October in the Year 4004 B.C. at—uh, at 9 A.M.!” The crowd gradually slips away from him as he babbles on, reciting the names of books in the Old Testament. “Mother. They’re laughing at me, Mother!” Brady cries to his wife at the close of his testimony. “I can’t stand it when they laugh at me!” At a Broadway performance of the play, the constitutional scholar Gerald Gunther became so outraged that, as he later wrote, “for the first time, I walked out of a play in disgust.” He explained, “I ended up actually sympathizing with Bryan, even though I was and continue to be opposed to his ideas in the case, simply because the playwrights had drawn the character in such comic strip terms.” Even though Bryan in fact opposed including a penalty provision in antievolution laws, the play ends with his character ranting against the small size of the fine imposed by the judge, then fatally collapsing in the courtroom when the now hostile crowd ignores his closing speech. “The mighty Evolution Law explodes with a pale puff of a wet firecracker, ” the stage directions explain, just as McCarthyism itself died from ridicule.45

  Just as Lawrence and Lee debunked Brady-Bryan in the eyes of the audience, they uplifted Drummond-Darrow. In Inherit the Wind, the Baltimore Herald engages the notorious Chicago attorney to defend Cates. Drummond makes his entrance in a “long, ominous shadow, ”the stage directions instruct, “hunched over, head jutting forward. ”A young girl screams, “It’s the Devil!” but he softens as the play proceeds. “All I want is to prevent the clock-stoppers from dumping a load of medieval nonsense in the United States Constitution,” he explains at one point; “You’ve got to stop ’em somewhere.”46

  Drummond remains a self-proclaimed agnostic, but loses his crusading materialism. At the play’s end, it is Hornbeck who delivers Darrow’s famous line that Bryan “died of a busted belly” and ridicules the Commoner’s fool religion. Drummond reacts with anger. “You smartaleck! You have no more right to spit on his religion than you have a right to spit on my religion! Or lack of it!” he replies. The writers have Drummond issue the liberal’s McCarthy-era plea for tolerance that everyone has the “right to be wrong!” The cynical reporter then calls the defense lawyer “more religious” than Brady, and storms off the stage. Left alone in the courtroom, Drummond picks up the defendant’s copy of The Origin of Species and the judge’s Bible. After “balancing them thoughtfully, as if his hands were scales, ” the stage directions state, the attorney “jams them in his briefcase, side by side, ” and slowly walks off the now-empty stage.47 “A bit of religious disinfectant is added to the
agnostic legend for audiences whose evolutionary stage is not yet very high,” the radical Village Voice sneered in its review.48

  At the time, most published reviews of the stage and screen versions of Inherit the Wind criticized the writers’ portrayal of the Scopes trial. “History has been not increased but almost fatally diminished,” the New Yorker drama critic complained. “The script wildly and unjustly caricatures the fundamentalists as vicious and narrow-minded hypocrites,” the Time magazine movie review chided, and “just as wildly and unjustly idealizes their opponents, as personified by Darrow.” Reviews appearing in publications ranging from Commonweal and the New York Herald Tribune to The New Republic and the Village Voice offered similar critiques.49

  Both the play and movie proved remarkably durable, however, despite the critics. After opening at New York’s National Theater early in 1955, the stage version played for nearly three years, making it the longest-running drama then on Broadway. A touring cast took the play to major cities around the country during the late fifties. The script gained new life as a screenplay in 1960, resulting in a hit movie starring Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, and Gene Kelly. John Scopes attended its world premiere in Dayton, and thereafter promoted the movie across the country at the studio’s behest. “Of course, it altered the facts of the real trial,” Scopes commented, but maintained that “the film captured the emotions in the battle of words between Bryan and Darrow.” Sue Hicks, the only other major participant to attend the premiere, reacted quite differently to the film. He called it “a travesty on William Jennings Bryan” and nearly purchased television time to denounce it.50 Since its initial release, the movie has appeared continually on television and video, while the play has become a staple for community and school theatrical groups. By 1967, trial correspondent Joseph Wood Krutch could rightly comment, “Most people who have any notions about the trial get them from the play, Inherit the Wind, or from the movie.”51

  All of which bothered Krutch, who had led the liberal media to Dayton. “The play was written more than a generation after the event and its atmosphere is that of the 40’s and 50’s, not the 20’s. This makes for falsification because one of the striking facts about the whole foolish business is just that it was so characteristic of the 20’s,” he wrote. “That the trial could be a farce, even a farce with sinister aspects, is a tribute to the 20’s when, whatever the faults and limitations of that decade, we did not play as rough as we play today.” Bryan, for example, offered to pay Scopes’s $100 fine; McCarthy, in contrast, destroyed careers and wrecked lives without remorse. Left unchecked, fundamentalist intolerance might have worsened but, given their natures, Bryan and other fundamentalist leaders of the twenties simply were less malign than the McCarthyites. In history classrooms, however, Inherit the Wind became a popular instructional tool for teaching students about the twenties. In 1994, for example, the National Center for History in Schools published instructional standards. As a means to educate high school students about changing values during the 1920s, it recommended that teachers “use selections from the Scopes trial or excerpts from Inherit the Wind to explain how the views of William Jennings Bryan differed from those of Clarence Darrow.”52

  As Krutch noted in 1967, “The events [at Dayton] are more a part of the folklore of liberalism than of history.” The astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan recognized this when he observed that, even though the Scopes trial may have had little lasting impact on American culture, “the movie Inherit the Wind probably had a considerable national influence; it was the first time, so far as I know, that American movies made explicit the apparent contradictions and inconsistencies in the book of Genesis.” Calvin College scientist Howard J. Van Till, who led the fight against antievolutionism within the evangelical church during the later part of the twentieth century, also stated that “folklore [about the Scopes trial] has had a greater impact [on American culture] than the actual historical particulars have had,” but he does not so readily concede that Inherit the Wind monopolized that folklore. “While many members of the scientific academy might think of the Scopes trial as an episode in which Clarence Darrow artfully exposed the ignorant and narrow-minded dogmatism of North American Fundamentalism,” he suggested from his experience, “many members of the conservative Christian community might think of it as an episode in which William Jennings Bryan was skillfully manipulated by a skilled but unprincipled lawyer representing an antitheistic scientific establishment.”53

  Ever since Inherit the Wind first appeared, conservative Christians have displayed greater interest in countering the popular impression created by it than by the trial. Creation-science leader Henry M. Morris, for example, could attribute the troubles of Bryan at Dayton to his testimony about the age of the earth but, in Inherit the Wind, Brady espouses a reading of Genesis every bit as literal as Morris’s own. Reflecting on the problems this has caused his movement, Morris discussed a 1973 lecture tour that he gave in New Zealand. “There was a great deal of interest,” he complained, “but in city after city, either during my visit or immediately afterward, the government-controlled television channels kept showing the Scopes trial motion picture, Inherit the Wind, over and over.” Advocates of creation-science and critics of Darwinism have repeatedly attempted to explain how Inherit the Wind does not fairly represent their position.54 The trial itself became, as the historian of religion Martin E. Marty later described it, “One final irrelevancy,” by which he meant that it gained significance “as an event of media-mythic proportions”—that is, not for what actually occurred, but through its “acquired mythic character.” For the general public since 1960, that mythic character largely came through Inherit the Wind.55

  The mythic Scopes legend remained constant from Only Yesterday through post—World War II history textbooks to Inherit the Wind. The Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould summarized and criticized it as follows: “John Scopes was persecuted, Darrow rose to Scopes’s defense and smite the antediluvian Bryan, and the antievolution movement then dwindled or ground to at least a temporary halt. All three parts of this story are false.” Gould expressed greatest concern about the third error, which may have lulled evolutionists into a false sense of security. He noted in 1983, “sadly, any hope that the issues of the Scopes trial had been banished to the realm of nostalgic Americana have been swept aside by our current creationist resurgence.”56

  Yet the third part of this story had constituted the central lesson of the Scopes legend on which all versions concurred: The light of reason had banished religious obscurantism. In the 1930s, Frederick Lewis Allen presented the Scopes trial as a critical watershed, after which “the slow drift away from Fundamentalist certainty continued.” By the fifties, antievolutionism appeared to have safely run its course. “Today the evolution controversy seems as remote as the Homeric era to intellectuals of the East,” Hofstadter wrote. Lawrence and Lee left no doubts about their verdict on the Scopes trial. When the defendant asks if he won or lost, Drummond assures everyone, “You won.... Millions of people will say you won. They’ll read in their papers tonight that you smashed a bad law. You made it a joke!” Certainly the play’s actors had no doubts about this verdict. “When we did Inherit the Wind in 1955, the religious right was a joke, a lunatic fringe,” Tony Randall later wrote. Reviewing the movie version in 1960, The New Republic noted, “The Monkey Trial is now a historical curiosity, and it can be made truly meaningful only by treating it as the farce that it was.” While these secular interpreters of the trial contemplated the triumph of reason, however, antievolutionism continued to build within America’s growing conservative Christian subculture. As Randall ruefully observes, “Sometimes we wonder if anyone ever learns anything.”57

  —CHAPTER TEN—

  DISTANT ECHOES

  THE SCOPES legend notwithstanding, fundamentalism had not died in Dayton—and its adherents soon reentered the political fray with many of the same concerns as their spiritual forebears of the twenties. The political
landscape, however, had changed; by the late twentieth century, Americans had come to accept many of the basic notions of individual liberty championed by the ACLU during its early years. Under Chief Justice Earl Warren, the U.S. Supreme Court engrafted the ACLU view of free speech, due process, and equal protection onto the Constitution. American colleges and universities widely subscribed to the AAUP’s definition of academic freedom. New Deal Congresses had enacted labor laws fully as protective of workers as those sought by Baldwin, Hays, and other ACLU founders. These legal developments made antievolution statutes seem virtually un-American by the 1960s, and led fundamentalists to seek other avenues of recourse against Darwinian teaching. Equal protection for their ideas appeared more appropriate to some fundamentalists than censoring their opponents. Furthermore, a generally acknowledged breakdown of traditional Protestant values within public education and American society left them more concerned about including creationist theories in the school curriculum than excluding evolutionary concepts from it. Their freedom and America’s future demanded no less, so they thought; yet modern concepts of individual liberty made the public increasingly wary of efforts to impose religious-based rules on Americans generally. Clashes were inevitable, and recurrent.

  The developing Scopes legend left antievolution statutes particularly vulnerable by the 1960s. Those laws seemed peculiar enough in the 1920s, when Bryan offered them as a means both to preserve public morality from the alleged threat of Social Darwinism and to restore neutrality on the religiously sensitive topic of human origins by teaching nothing about it. According to the Scopes legend, however, the statutes resulted from a Quixotic crusade by fundamentalists to establish their narrow religious doctrines in the classroom. Even Bryan would have regarded such an objective with concern; certainly the Warren Court that reigned in Washington would do so as well, if given the chance. The major challenge for opponents was getting the High Court to review the old statutes. Changes in American civil liberties law during the intervening forty years had all but assured their unconstitutionality.