Today I had the good fortune to catch on TCM the end of [1] Inherit the Wind, the 1960 Stanley Kramer movie starring Spencer Tracy and Fredric March, based on the play of the same name. If you’ve never seen it, set your DVR sometime. It’s a compelling fictionalization of the Scopes Monkey Trial, with Tracy taking the Clarence Darrow role and March playing William Jennings Bryan (albeit with fictionalized names). It’s been quite awhile since I’ve seen it, and it was interesting to ponder the themes and symbolism in the context of our modern struggles.

The film deals with the tension between our obligations to our conscience and our need to conform to the mores of society at large, including our religious beliefs.

The tension is timeless, and we are still hashing out the particular conflict between Darwinism and religion that provided the premise for the trial, play, and movie. One of the ironies of our situation is that the same language that defended John Scopes (Bertram Cates in the play and movie) might also reasonably be used to defend the teachers who wish to inject creationism into the classroom today. My own opinion is that it was misguided to frame the teaching of Darwinism in terms of freedom of expression. It’s simply that it’s the correct scientific theory, and that the dead-end of revelatory creationism is not. Despite the crucial role of dissent in the advancement of science, science is not merely an exercise in freedom of expression, as theatre is.

The larger irony, though, is that the play / movie are not really “about” Darwinism at all. Like [2] The Crucible, the work was intended as a rebuke of McCarthyism. The noble Bertram Cates is meant to be a symbol of the “free-thinking” Communists who were persecuted by the closed-minded McCarthy and others during the “Red Scare”. As played by Fredric March, Matthew Harrison Brady (the Bryan / McCarthy character) is an insufferable demogogue, a manipulator of populist fears, and an all-around bête noire.

That Communists, of all people, fancy themselves advocates of human rights and free speech, conjoins the comic and the deeply tragic. And it has always been a puzzle to me whether the defenders of the [3] Hollywood Ten and their ilk do so out of a misguided understanding of Communism or an overestimation of the gullibility of their audience.

And we still struggle against [4] leaders who believe themselves to be above criticism, believers in the freedom only for speech that sanctifies their viewpoint.

The title Inherit the Wind comes from Proverbs 11:29, “He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind: and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart.” I’ve wondered about the significance of that choice, and what it has to do with the themes of the play/movie. I can’t quite shake the feeling that the playwrights, like so many in the nomenklatura, feel that the proper role of the “fools” like McCarthy (or Fox News!) is to be “servant to the wise of heart”, i.e. the wise central planners.

But I’d welcome an alternate reading.