The Evolution vs. Creationism argument is at the center of the
Jerome Lawrence-
Robert E. Lee Broadway play
Inherit the Wind.
Lawrence and
Lee's
inspiration was the 1925 "Monkey Trial," in which Tennessee
schoolteacher John Scopes was arrested for teaching Darwin's theory of
evolution in violation of state law. Scopes deliberately courted arrest
to challenge what he and his supporters saw as an unjust law, and the
trial became a national cause when The Baltimore Sun, represented by the
famed (and atheistic) journalist H. L. Mencken, hired attorney Clarence
Darrow to defend Scopes. The prosecuting attorney was crusading
politician William Jennings Bryan, once a serious contender for the
Presidency, now a relic of a past era. While Bryan won the case as
expected, he and his fundamentalist backers were held up to public
ridicule by the cagey Darrow. In both the play and film versions of
Inherit the Wind,
the names and places are changed, but the basic chronology was
retained, along with most of the original court transcripts. John Scopes
becomes Bertram Cates (
Dick York); Clarence Darrow is Henry Drummond (
Spencer Tracy); William Jennings Bryan is Matthew Harrison Brady (
Fredric March); and H. L. Mencken is E. K. Hornbeck (
Gene Kelly).
Dayton, Tennessee is transformed into Hillsboro -- or, as the
relentlessly cynical Hornbeck characterizes it, "Heavenly Hillsboro."
