Chapter I

The background context for Inherit the Wind should have clued anyone in that this wasn’t a documentary on the Scopes Trial, but alas not everyone has their detail detectors switched on or in working order. Indeed, it may be argued that only a hopelessly naïve bumpkin should presume that any film about a historical subject could be taken as any more than accidentally close to the truth, as deftly documented by the assorted essays in Carnes (1995) ranging from Hollywood Biblical and costume epics to trendy liberal message pictures and Soviet agitprop.

Conflating the Scopes Trial with Inherit the Wind in this populist way, antievolutionists have been bristling over every deviation from the 1925 original. Idaho creationist Chuck Missler retread James Perloff (1999, 197-214) to this end as Perloff (2000), while Bill Morgan (2005ae-af) at Creation vs. Evolution expressed comparable concern that impressionable students would be exposed to this “very anti-Christian book and play” (book?) whose use of fictionalized characters was “a license to smear.”

Answers in Genesis offered in-house analysts David Menton (1996), and a DVD lecture and booklet revamp of Menton (1984) was recommended in turn by David Wright (2006) under “Inherit the Prejudice” at AiG’s website section to set the record straight on that “terrible anti-Christian movie” (without offering any specific criticisms of the film’s contents himself, though). Farther out on the secondary citation grapevine, a PowerPoint presentation lecture by Jobe Martin (2006) relied solely on Menton’s account. Interestingly, Martin never referred to the fictional characters’ by name, which may well have been because Menton (1984; 1996) had put BRYAN and DARROW in as the speakers in the excerpts from the play and film instead of calling them BRADY and DRUMMOND. Given Martin’s peculiar understanding of the “evolutionary science journalist” Milton in section 1.3 above, it may well have been that Martin hadn’t realized that the folk in the play and movie were in fact fictionalized.

For the Alpha Omega Institute, medical pathologist David Demick (2005a) sought to remind readers “of what really happened” in the trial as opposed to “the way in which this event has been distorted by humanists—especially through the well-known play and movie,” Inherit the Wind. For example, Darrow was “cited for contempt of court” (evidently forgetting that this incident was incorporated into the play and film) and “The Scopes trial reminds us that creationists are not only confronted by distortions of evidence and outright lies, but also by smear tactics, ridicule and unfair suppression.” Demick discussed none of the excluded scientific evidence that was being contended at the time (some early human evolution data and the example of fossil horse evolution were on the scene by then) so readers might get a glimpse as to what counted as “distortions,” nor any details of the “humiliating series of barbed and sarcastic questions in which Darrow did his best to heap scorn upon the Bible and conservative Christians.” Since all that was in the trial transcript, though, Demick had lots to choose from: from exactly how long the days of Creation were, whether the Sun actually did tarry for Joshua over Gibeon, or how Chinese history was supposed to be crammed into the Biblical picture.

Darwin critic Windchy (2009, 103-135) devoted a full chapter to “The Great Scopes Scam,” though his grip on the finer points was no tighter than the rest of The End of Darwinism. The McCarthy Era context of the play and film thoroughly eluded him, but as a film history buff I couldn’t pass up this gem on the casting of the film version: “Spencer Tracy, who won an Academy Award for his performance as the character based on the defense attorney Clarence Darrow,” and “Gene Kelly, better known as a dancer, who somehow was cast as the character representing the cynical, pro-Darwinian columnist H. L. Mencken.”

Sorry, Eugene, but Kelly was an accomplished dramatic actor who also could sing and dance (and eventually become primarily known for that through his films done at the Freed Unit at MGM), much like James Cagney who could hoof and emote with equal verve over at Warner Brothers. Stanley Kramer had indulged in a similar casting-against-type move the year before when he had fellow MGM hoofer Fred Astaire portray the guilt-ridden nuclear physicist in his moving 1959 doomsday film On the Beach. As for Spencer Tracy’s 1960 Oscar, that would be news to Burt Lancaster, who won that year for Elmer Gantry (Tracy was nominated though).

Over in ID apologia land, the mantel of Scopes as a teacher persecuted for bucking entrenched authority has proven an attractive trope for a group so anxious to be seen as the victim of Darwinist oppression. This was the tack taken by Family Action Counsel of Tennessee founder David Fowler (2011), for example, covered by Lebo (2011l, r-s) regarding an attempt to inject ID into the schools there under the guise of promoting critical thinking and academic freedom (a recurring theme in the antievolutionist controversy, as we shall see).

But peek behind the scholarly curtains and Intelligent Design has no less ideological a take on the details of the Scopes case as their YEC counterparts.

Starting at the top, Phillip Johnson (1997b, 24-36)—reprised for the Regent University Law Review (Regent University an institution founded by Kulturkampf warrior Pat Robertson) as Johnson (2001a)—cited Carol Iannone (1997), who had returned the back scratching by offering Johnson’s Darwin on Trial as her main prop for the idea that “the proof for Darwin’s theory remains spotty.” The Discovery Institute (2001a, 143-144) Viewer’s Guide to the PBS series Evolution also drew on Iannone. Johnson (2004) alluded to Inherit the Wind in an article for Touchstone magazine on the baneful frequency of evolutionary “propaganda” (part of a special issue on “Darwin’s Last Stand?”), condensing the Scopes Trial into a “farce” that was converted “into a moving tale of vicious persecution by Christian ministers that bears little resemblance to what actually happened.”

One may pause briefly over Johnson’s use of “ministers” in the plural: since there is only one antievolution minister in the play and film (inspiring lots of angry citizens), while another pro-evolution cleric is explicitly set to testify in court, Johnson’s trope showed how readily the imagery of the film could get dissolved into a fog of ideological nitpicking. Recalling from above that all of the scientific witnesses in the real trial were religious believers, Inherit the Wind was actually downplaying the participation of Christian evolutionists!

By the time Casey Luskin penned his 2009 Liberty University Law Review analysis (and that would be Jerry Falwell’s YEC-friendly Liberty University, remember) claiming evolution’s supporters were encouraging “violations of the Establishment Clause” by opposing the inclusion of Intelligent Design arguments in science education, Johnson’s treatment had petrified into iconic status, as Luskin (2009l, 403) specifically framed his coverage as one showing “the impropriety of the common ’Inherit the Wind stereotype.” A most curious place to start, as Luskin never alluded to the topic again, so that any reader wading through his eighty-seven page treatment would end their adventure none the wiser as to what this “Inherit the Wind stereotype” supposedly involved.

Likewise Edward Sisson (2004b; 2010, 77) in the Touchstone “Darwin’s Last Stand?” issue and article in the Evidence for God anthology edited by William Dembski and Michael Licona, twice summarily decreed how Inherit the Wind had shown the Darrow-Bryan exchange “in a false light” without supplying any examples of literary misdemeanor or corroborative documentation (many of the juiciest exchanges in Inherit the Wind were drawn directly from the trial transcript, such as the “I don’t think about things” example).

More revealing of the ultimately heterodox nature of ID apologetics, though, would be Wayne House (2008b, 179-190), revamped from a 2001 Regent University Law Review article. An ostensibly ID-oriented advocate, House nonetheless actively raided the explicitly creationist website bible.ca for what was by then the rather dated account by the creationist Menton (1984). Incidentally, Interactive Bible (1994) fulminated how Inherit the Wind constituted “Intellectual Pornography.”

Running in the opposite direction is YEC Jerry Bergman (2010a) stewing Menton, Perloff and Johnson together in his treatment, where the rabble-rousing evangelical crowds that had descended on Dayton were laundered down to a mild mannered “innocent minority” grievously maligned by the “grossly perverted events of the Scopes Trial to advance a specific social agenda.”

What all these treatments have in common is a most selective reading about what “inaccuracies” they want to complain about, and thus suggesting why they are going to the trouble. Take Carol Iannone declaring, “Bryan was not a biblical literalist.” It is quite true that the fictional Matthew Harrison Brady’s affirmation of literal 24-hour creation days was not the position of Day-Age believer William Jennings Bryan, though even that isn’t quite as it appears at first glance (where Bryan only appeared to accept geological time scales, but in practice clung to the tradition Ussher chronology for all major biblical episodes).

Henry Drummond’s folksy tolerance was also spared the scalding atheism of Clarence Darrow, whose attitudes got shunted instead over to the H. L. Mencken stand-in Hornbeck, as noted in Larson et al. (2008). Which brings us to another interesting point: where the film ended up. Of all the critics only Carol Iannone alluded to the concluding scene, which undermines the supposedly pro-atheist perspective claimed for it. After Brady’s death it is the Hornbeck character (played by Gene Kelly with deft cynicism, Windchy take note) who gets raked over the philosophical coals by Drummond, accusing Hornbeck of never rubbing two nouns together except to “blow something up,” and ultimately of not believing in anything.

But the dramatic license of the playwrights cut both ways, where the fictional characters hardly reflect all the bumpy aspects of their real life counterparts. While disapproving of the Klan’s hatred of Catholics and Jews, Democrat William Jennings Bryan was also very much a politician, and steered well clear of the race problem boiling over during his time, deciding eventually that segregation was part of the divine will, and even blocking criticism of the KKK in the 1924 Democratic party platform because it deflected them from defeating the Republicans (Calvin Coolidge running for his own term after becoming president after Harding’s death), Kazin (2006, 93-94, 227-228, 280-281, 284). In a piece for AiG on “William J. Bryan’s Fight against Eugenics and Racism in the Scopes Trial,” Jerry Bergman (2013b) invoked Kazin’s book on Bryan’s admiration for Jefferson and the American Republic, but successfully managed to overlook Bryan’s tacking around segregation and the KKK.

Incidentally, in the Coyne-Shapiro-Egnor flap above, Shapiro (2013d) had brought up Bryan’s maneuver on the 1924 anti-KKK plank along with recalling Tennessee’s school segregation history, prompting Egnor (2013h) to leap in defense of the state’s sullied honor by inserting different words into Shapiro’s mouth: “Tennessee was one of the minority of states that refused to pass a eugenic sterilization law. Shapiro slanders the good people who tried to prevent the teaching of racist eugenic swill to their children,” and “After insulting Tennesseans for rejecting Darwinian filth about human evolution and asserting that blacks liked being compared to apes by Darwinists, Shapiro tries to stick the KKK label on Bryan, who detested and fought the Klan all his life. Such is Shapiro’s ’scholarship.’ Carrying water for eugenics is no easy task, not pretty.”

Whether Egnor eventually castigates Kazin for his Bryan scholarship on those very matters remains to be seen. As for Egnor’s counterargument on the sterilization issue, while Tennessee never adopted a compulsory sterilization law, they still operated institutions for the feeble-minded—and not very well run ones according to Eugenics (2013a). If lynchings are taken as another indicator of a less than rosy racial environment among the “good people” of Tennessee, the state fell around average for Southern states (totaling 204 murdered from 1882-1968), Tuskegee (2013).

Which brings us to consider another character attending the theatrical Cates Trial, Mrs. Matthew Harrison Brady, Sarah, who in Inherit the Wind was a most gracious and wonderful woman, whom Drummond rightly held in the highest esteem. In a pamphlet on Bryan’s life and Inherit the Wind done for Bryan College, Cornelius (2007, 3) tersely reminded that “Instead of Bryan being mothered by his wife, he took care of her, for she was an invalid,” and “Bryan and his wife were on good terms, and she did not admire Clarence Darrow.” There was no hint of the rather tawdry bigotry of the real Mary Bryan, mentioned by Kazin (2006, 291-292): from her commenting on the Jewish attributes of lead ACLU lawyer Arthur Hayes (1881-1954) to her eugenical fears that the evangelical hoi polloi at Dayton were regrettably just the sort of people whose intermarrying threatened to weaken the American stock!

In its selective swipe at Inherit the Wind the creationist Interactive Bible (1994) reprinted an earlier version of the Cornelius piece, as well as John Morris (1995a) claiming the science of 1925 did not support evolution, and the inevitable Menton (1984), but honors for evasive bravado here fall on Jerry Bergman (2010a, 64). Even though directly citing Kazin (2006) two pages later, Bergman managed to miss the segregationist waffling of Bryan as well as the anti-Semitism and eugenics tint of Mrs. Bryan, and successfully avoided intimating that there might have been scads of racist Christians inhabiting the era (the KKK were no bastions of evolutionist atheism) in his haste to whittle the unapproved bad guy list to but one side: “The evolution of the 1920s that Bryan opposed was blatantly racist and sexist.”

These many differences between play and reality should have prompted the critics to consider the deeper relevance of what the authors of Inherit the Wind were up to: it is Hornbeck’s strident iconoclasm that is castigated at the end of the film, as much as the angry fundamentalism of the Hillsboro mob. That many audiences then and now could fail to catch the deeper affirmation of tolerance and thoughtfulness Inherit the Wind represented shouldn’t be that big of a surprise once you understand how many tortucans there are in the world. Although Harvard college audiences of the 1960s may have cheered at every jab at Brady, as Phillip Johnson (1997b, 30) complained, that may have been no deeper an enthusiasm as the cries with which later audiences would respond when the Millennium Falcon escaped Darth Vader by slipping into hyperspace in Star Wars.

The high irony of the Inherit the Wind revisionism is that while the views of the fictional Brady (a creation of the world in 4004 BC and every jot and tittle of the Bible being incontrovertibly true) were not representative of 1920s creationism, as Gregg Easterbrook (1999) pointedly reminded of Bryan in his criticism of Inherit the Wind, they are exactly the present day positions of Answers in Genesis, the website ID-friendly Mr. House so freely lifted his Menton article from, or the YEC Conservapedia (2012a) piece on the Scopes Trial that drew on Easterbrook secondarily.

Though at times even YEC advocates try to keep Bryan v. Brady on the back burner, such as a May 1, 2010 installment of the Days of Praise emails at the Institute for Creation Research on Inherit the Wind avoiding the subject while insisting the film depicts “creationists and Bible believing Christians as fanatical buffoons.”

The YEC journal Reason & Revelation has at least shown some consistency here, with Garry Brantley (1994) staunchly defending literal 24-hour creation days while Brad Bromling (1996) and John Morris (2011a) go against the YEC apologetic grain by criticizing Bryan for being insufficiently biblical in his willingness to accept long geological ages betwixt the Genesis acts as well as a localized Flood. “The end result? Christianity largely retreated underground and withdrew from the public arena,” harrumphed John Morris, which may be something of a surprise for the generations of very active Christians during this period of their supposed eclipse.

While it is disingenuous enough of the YEC side of the revisionists to criticize Inherit the Wind for not reflecting Bryan’s views when it is actually Brady’s position they believe in today, the deafening silence of the ID side here is far more telling. None have ventured whether the Biblical analysis proffered by modern creationists contains anything questionable.

Take Phillip Johnson. Although calling the play “a bitter attack on Christianity, or at least the conservative Christianity that considers the Bible to be in some sense a reliable historical record,” Johnson never tried to identify which Scripture (if any) being thrashed over by “Brady” and “Drummond” might have qualified as historically reliable (the stopping of the sun for Joshua at the Battle of Jericho, for instance). As for the many pseudoscientific arguments actually offered by Price or Rimmer back in the 1920s, reprised in fresh paint by today’s creationists, Johnson has ventured no farther than writing “some creationists really have made crazy arguments,” Johnson (1997b, 41) or offering purely descriptive comments on the popularity of Creation Science in Johnson (2008, 23-27).

It is precisely how one decides that something is a “crazy” argument that is at the heart of the creation/evolution debate, and Johnson’s studied reluctance to invade that area represents a profound measure of just how useless Intelligent Design promises to be from a methodological perspective. But hardly useless from the standpoint of religious apologetics, which is the ultimate reason why the Inherit the Wind revisionists are so exercised about its alleged distortions. Whether it is Johnson or Answers in Genesis, the revisionists are aiming for bigger game than factual accuracy in popular films. It involves nothing less than how people perceive themselves, their nature and ultimate purpose in life.

As noted by anthropologist Christopher Toumey, there was a deep theoretical division between 1920s creationism and its 1950s Flood Geology reincarnation. Those earlier creationists had focused on the issue of human descent, and did not (at least in theory) necessarily preclude significant evolution for everything else. Their objections hinged on the seeming determinism of evolutionary postulates, and the chief proponents of that were usually clergy. But a lot of scientific evidence had come along since the 1920s, and the new Scientific Creationism of Henry Morris faced a very different factual landscape. Evolutionary thinking had so completely integrated human evolution that it was no longer possible to keep the two separate.

Enamored now of “scientific” geological exposition, the new creationists affirmed those “slippery slope” implications of Darwinist thinking by opposing all significant naturalistic evolution. And in a fascinating about-face, Toumey (1994, 49) noted how it was now not the determinism of evolution that so bothered creationists, but it’s supposed randomness.

This extends to Intelligent Design advocates like William Dembski, expecting order not randomness to underlie God’s universe, Kern (2000). A twist to this thread concerns Dembski (2006d, 101-102) extoling eccentric libertarian Robert Ringer as a suitable “critic of Darwinism,” with subsequent communication leading to Ringer offering Dembski (2010; 2011) a platform for a Kulturkampf rant on “Saving Our Freedoms from Darwin” in which Dembski claimed “it’s easy to understand why so flimsily a supported theory commands such vast support, especially among our ruling elite. It provides an incredibly effective means of social control.” Offering not a shred of evidence that Darwin-inspired ideas have translated into any observable tool of “social control” (let alone an “incredibly effective” one, Dembski spotted the behaviorist chestnut of B. F. Skinner (1972) and the recent libertarian paternalism of Thaler & Sunstein (2008) as exemplars of those who see “utopia as just around the corner if only people can be properly herded into the right social, political, and economic environment.” To what extent the hypothesized herding instinct of behaviorist paternalism contributed to such actual social occurrences as the Wall Street meltdown of 2009 (or the popularity of Ken Ham at the Family Research Council) Dembski didn’t venture.

Ringer (2011b) meanwhile waxed metaphysical at WorldNet Daily that the universal snow globe would be devoid of free will-facilitating indeterminacy after the “so-called Big Bang” were it not for putative shaking by a “Supreme Power”—muddling notions of “infinite” and “random” when it came to earthquakes and hurricanes into a mix that Ed Brayton (2011) dubbed “gibberish.” Which may be contrasted with yet another antievolutionary contrarian: David Berlinski (2011) paddling up the determinism stream the other way, against the current, insisting random (but nonetheless natural) biological processes like genetic drift somehow repudiated general evolution.

Alas, Ringer or Berlinski notwithstanding, Schrödinger’s evidential cat had slipped out of that bag some time ago. As Laura Snyder (2011, 197) noted, early 19th century thinkers disliked the very idea of randomness as unscientific, but modern physics has had to embrace it as part of the fundamental fabric of the universe. And John Dewey recognized the importance of unpredictability when it came to evolution in a famed 1909 lecture, Milner (2009, 134-135)—a nuance overlooked by Nancy Pearcey (2001, 489-493) busily “deconstructing” Dewey’s pragmatic “instrumentalist” approach to knowledge as incongruent with the sort of “transcendent, eternal Truth” she believes in.

Whether antievolutionists like it or not (or think about it or not), Dewey’s insight has not been overturned by subsequent scientific investigation. Stochastic (random) effects pervade our lives, Mlodinow (2008), and biological processes are no exception. Some technical examples on gene expression: Smolen et al. (1999), Azevedo & Leroi (2001) contrasting McAdams & Arkin (1997) with Britten (1998), Fedoroff & Fontana (2002) re Elowitz et al. (2002), and Munsky et al. (2012). At the developmental level, Matheson (2010t) highlights the implications of Bénazéraf et al. (2010) on random motion in amniotic embryo elongation, while a commentator on Matheson’s piece called attention to Lizunov & Zimmerberg (2006) on the “Brownian ratchet” employed by bacterial cells. Similar stochastic processes contribute to cell division in plants, Prusinkiewicz (2011) re Besson & Dumais (2011).

Even more interestingly, order can emerge from the underlying genetic “noise” in a variety of contexts: Paulsson et al. (2000), Berg et al. (2000) and Buckee et al. (2011). The deeper structures of this process may be glimpsed in the theoretical modeling of Kepler & Elston (2001), Swain et al. (2002) and Sasai & Wolynes (2003). The downside is real too: such leaky randomness can be exploited by pathogens or otherwise lead to disease, Arkin et al. (1998) and Cook et al. (1998).

What this aside on randomness illustrates is the persistent disconnect between the range and depth of the existing scientific literature and the dollhouse version of it fielded by antievolutionists, too anxious to pigeon issues as philosophy instead of foraging as widely as possible among the facts of nature. It underscores also the deep logical imperative driving their tactical efforts: in order to rescue the traditional biblical worldview of humanity as special creation, antievolutionists cannot allow even the scientific camel’s nose under the tent. As we’ll be exploring in the chapters to come, discovery after discovery is elbowed aside to keep the design path clear of inconvenient factual debris. Ultimately the whole evolutionary shebang has to be junked, since at every stage it throws roadblocks in front of the Kulturkampf caravan.

Just as Scientific Creationism was the sanitized version of Adventist Flood Geology, Intelligent Design would offer a Creationism Lite that could appeal to anybody who balked at the naturalistic implications of current scientific thinking. No more would antievolutionists need to get into fights over geochronology. All that potential division could be flung aside in a Kumbaya “Teach the Controversy” unity that inevitably dispensed with most of the fiddly bits along the way.