Scopes and Wind, Part II

I read Inherit the Wind for the first time about twenty years ago, the summer of 1987 I believe. The introduction of my edition indicated that the play's authors--mentioned in the NY Times article I posted earlier--specifically did not write a historical recounting of the Scopes Trial in 1925. They clearly indicated the borrowing of certain exchanges from the trial transcript, but their emphasis--in the 1950s--had to do with the spectre of McCarthyism then engulfing the country.
In other words, the play never was intended to be "history" as much as a commentary on contemporary events through the medium of art. It draws rigidly clear lines of Right and Wrong, portrays characters in overly stark manners and creates too much pathos through Matthew Harrison Brady's death while trying to make the speech defending his principles the day following his losing battle under cross-examination by Henry Drummond. William Jennings Bryan's actual death one week after the trial didn't make for the sort of climactic drama that both stage and screen visualized through the play.

For that matter, except in the most allusive of ways, the play did not refer to Clarence Darrow's defense of Leopold and Loeb--the University of Chicago students who planned in Nietzschean style the "perfect" murder--only a few years before he travelled to Dayton for "The Trial of the Century" (at least before the OJ Simpson disaster). The play also mentioned nothing about John Scopes actually volunteering to be arrested and tried for breaking the Tennessee statute against teaching evolution. In other words, the entire historical episode was designed (intelligently if you will) to create just the sort of confrontation that happened between Darrow and Bryan. The result rested on Darrow's use of Bryan's ego against himself in order to get him away from speech-making (Bryan's best forte) to cross-examination (Darrow's).
None of those complexities, however, have mattered in the 72 years since the trial. None of the biblical, theological, historical (the Civil War played a large, hovering role in the events that led to the trial), social, economic, and cultural factors are explored in the play or, except for sparsely-read books, throughout the culture. Nothing is mentioned about Higher Biblical Criticism and its--more or less--beginnings in 1835 and the efforts by many Christians to accept the new discoveries of science with their proclamation of faith throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. Some, but perhaps not many, folks are aware that if Bryan had given his post-examination speech, what he wanted to express was a fear of Social Darwinism that he understood as the logical consequence of evolution and materialism. Even given its performance in the 1950s, the play does not even hint that the historical H. L. Mencken all but advocated racial and social policies in much the same manner as the Nazis did throughout the 30s and 40s. The somewhat apparently awkward choice between defending either a narrow--and idolatrous--biblicism and barely restrained Social Darwinism does not leave one feeling too good about either who "won" or who "lost" at Dayton.

Unfortunately, the image of Darrow reducing Bryan to phrases such as "I don't think about the things I don't think about" is all that most people remember about a very complex series of events and an equally important set of questions. Proclamation of faith, in any manner of which I am aware, is not an easy way to live in an age of technology and--all too common--condescending skepticism. Each manifestation of faith, including secularists, makes various claims of Absolutism with the result of creating suspicion and alienation with people in other proclamations. Much bloviating and little listening takes place; we seem less and less capable of even agreeing to see things differently and, as a former professor of mine interpreted the Abraham and Lot story, to say "you go your way and I'll go mine." What we refuse to recognize is that any claim to Absolutism roots itself in the ambiguities of history, context and circumstance. That does not mean Absolutes aren't somehow "real." I, for one, believe in the Absolute I call God and experience in some way through Jesus of Nazareth. I recognize--at my best--my own context, history and cultural background that shaped my ability to make my profession of faith and subsequent inability to experience the Absolute in any other manifestation. I have Moslem, Buddhist and Christian friends who are much more conservative in their approach than I in mine. I believe God is with them as God is with me.

The American playwright Eugene O'Neill is credited with saying that the search for God rests at the center of life. He did so from the standpoint of a lapsed Roman Catholic and Lord knows he had good reason to be lapsed and to search. I search from the vantage of a "recovering Baptist." Whether my reasons pass muster I don't think matter ultimately. What matters is the search itself.