Maya Angelou once advised, “If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude.” However, in Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s Inherit the Wind, one journalist, E.K. Hornbeck, is intent on challenging and ridiculing his surroundings rather than reflecting upon his own moral footing. While the play’s plotline, an allegory of the 1925 Scopes’ Trial, follows the religious town of Hillsboro as a schoolteacher, Bert Cates, goes on trial for teaching evolution to his class, contemptuous E.K. Hornbeck– a journalist from The Baltimore Herald and also arguably Lawrence and Lee’s only static personality– arrives to provide heavily biased, primo-geneticist commentary on the trial. Hornbeck’s intolerance, superiority complex, and flippant humor display evolutionists’ unwillingness to change their beliefs.
Furthermore, Hornbeck’s intolerance is a direct result of the immutability of his beliefs.
After the
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Before Drummond tells him the proverb, Hornbeck regards Drummond as one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century because he is fighting the case for evolution. Yet, afterwards, when Hornbeck realizes Drummond does not share his the exact same perpetual contempt for fundamentalists, he subjects him to ridicule. Because Hornbeck abandons Drummond as his hero after this event, he reveals that he will not change his attitudes, or even accept other attitudes even if Drummond, whom he idolizes, thinks differently than him. Hence, Hornbeck’s intolerance even expands to other evolutionists. Therefore, Hornbeck’s unchanging beliefs prevent him from accepting anymore who does not share the exact same immutable beliefs as him, whether it be Drummond or
He was a mysterious unknown figure in the shadows; a slithering serpent in the courtroom. The defense attorney for the Scopes Monkey Trial was a cunning man. Clarence Darrow had difficulty defending his client, John T. Scopes, against his opponent, William Jennings Bryan. To everyone’s surprise however, he proved that he could prevail, even if he was under pressure from the world around him. Though Scopes was found guilty under Darrow, he surprisingly only had to pay a fine of one hundred dollars. With such a minor sentence, Darrow is said to be the person who actually won the trial. In the play Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, the character, Henry Drummond, parallels his real-life counterpart, Clarence Darrow, through intelligence, bitterness, and determination.
In Charles Darwin’s life he had helped make a significant advancement in the way mankind viewed the world. With his observations, he played a part in shifting the model of evolution into his peers’ minds. Darwin’s theory on natural selection impacted the areas of science and religion because it questioned and challenged the Bible; and anything that challenged the Bible in Darwin’s era was sure to create contention with the church. Members of the Church took offense to Darwin’s Origins of Species because it unswervingly contradicted the teachings of the book of Genesis in the Bible. (Zhao, 2009) Natural selection changed the way people thought. Where the Bible teaches that “all organisms have been in an unchanging state since the great flood, and that everything twas molded in God’s will.” (Zhao, 2009) Darwin’s geological journey to the Galapagos Islands is where he was first able to get the observations he needed to prove how various species change over t...
... The “Doubting Darwin”. Newsweek.com - "The New York Times" 07 Feb 2005. 44. eLibrary.
In this book, many fallacious quotations were used to support Skousen’s viewpoints. These quotations were blindly accepted due to the attached name without proper insight into the context of the quotation. It seemed as if Skousen frequently misinterpreted his sources purposely to authenticate his argument, often without proper justification or a well-reasoned argument. The audience was ultimately misled to believe flimsy assertions with unproven conclusions; Skousen achieved this by supporting axioms that will be widely accepted and by jumping to conclusions with which we have
Primarily, Bert Cates, a 10th grade teacher, struggles to obtain his right to have an open-mind, and encourages others to do so. The defendant, simply tries to teach a lesson in his Hunter’s Civic Biology, but while doing so is hastily over charged by the bigots of Hillsboro, Tennessee. As he explains himself to a fellow school teacher: “I did it because...I had the book in my hand...and read to my sophomore science class chapter 17, Darwin’s Origin of Species...All it says is that man wasn’t stuck here like a geranium in a flower pot; that living things come from a long miracle, it didn’t just happen in seven days”. It seems odd, or even bizarre that this premise is so hard to accept in Hillsboro. All in all, Cates is merely opening another aspect to the beginning of time.
The 1920’s were a time of change. New ideas were becoming more readily experimented with and even accepted by large portions of the population. Some of these included jazz music and the fight against the alcoholic prohibition. The radical idea I will focus on in this paper, however, is Evolution. It is a theory that had been around for over half a century before the 20’s but had only more recently caught on in the US. It contradicted the Christian theory of Divine Creation as described in the Bible. This caused many religious fundamentalists to fight against it. They took their battle to the law books, and they were challenged by pro-evolution modernists in the Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925.
America is the proud author of many timeless novels. Fitzegerald’s The Great Gatsby, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men all reveal a glimpse into previously unseen worlds to their audiences. But few of them has so profound an impact as Nelle “Harper” Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. This captivating novel enthralled the country and made it reexamine its preexisting perceptions about childhood, bravery, and morality. In spite of the importance of these concepts, the most far-reaching theme is how prejudice and education coincide, or, more accurately, how prejudice and a lack of education coincide (Theme 1). In To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee explores how a normally rational person’s ability to reason can be tainted by prejudice, even subconsciously. Rarely do the characters in Lee’s novel make an effort to be cruel, but in the 1930s South, prejudice was less about an active effort to hurt others, but instead was an affliction brought about by an unconscious combination of upbringing, culture, and social or economic status.
The Scopes Trial, which was also known as ‘The Monkey Trial’ or The State of Tennessee vs. Scopes, was a very popular legal dispute in court that was between the theory of evolution and creationism, and played a major role which shaped the 1920’s. What was just as popular was the interpretation of the case, if not more than the actual result of the dispute. This case received world-wide attention and the media coverage produced many different opinions world-wide. A major factor of why the Scopes trial had received so much attention in such an insignificant town was because of the stage the trial was played out on. The Butler Act is what made the Scopes trial possible. The Butler Act stated that it was prohibited for public schools in Tennessee from teaching evolution, or to go against the words of the Biblical story of creationism. The Act made it ‘unlawful for any teacher in in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the state which are supported in whole or in part by the public funds of the state, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible and to teach instead that man has described from lower order of animals’.
I am an invisible man. With these five words, Ralph Ellison ignited the literary world with a work that commanded the respect of scholars everywhere and opened the floodgates for dialogue about the role of African-Americans in American society, the blindness that drove the nation to prejudice, and racial pluralism as a forum for recognizing the interconnection between all members of society regardless of race.
John Thomas Scopes, a math teacher and football coach for Rhea County High School in Dayton, Tennessee, was pressured into taking the challenge by a friend, George Rappleyea, who saw the advertisement. With the school’s biology teacher out for the last two weeks of class, Scopes took over and began teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution. Soon after, he was arrested and charged with a violation of the Butler Act. Contrary to popular understanding, the worst punishment for this crime was a small fine.
“Today in Dayton, they are selling more books on evolution than any other kind and the bookshops in Chattanooga and other cities of the state are hardly able to supply the demand for works on evolution. The trial has at least started people to thinking.” (Lienesch, 2007, p. 168)
Certain criminal proceedings have had an enormous impact in the ideal American character. One example was the 1925 Monkey Scopes Trial in which John Scopes was being prosecuted for teaching Evolution. In a similar vein the speeches led by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the trials known as the “Red Scare” enraged many American authors and producers, leading these individuals to spread their own ideas and to defend civil rights. Two playwrights who lived through the “Red Scare” trials, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, addresses the oppression of the McCarthy trials by a meek character called Bert Cates throughout their play named Inherit the Wind. A nationally recognized lawyer, Henry Drummond, uses his gift of freedom of speech to support Cates. Cates love interest, Rachel Brown, grows intellectually and portrays the change that Lawrence and Lee want to see in Americans. Furthermore, Brady comes to prosecute Cates for teaching Evolution throughout the schools in Tennessee. In this allegorical play Lawrence and Lee’s use of symbolic characters challenges the status quo and inspires American intellectual growth.
simple terms: either Darwin or the Bible was true.” (265) The road to the trial began when Tennessee passed the Butler Act in 1925 banning the teaching of evolution in secondary schools. It was only a matter of time before a young biology teacher, John T. Scopes, prompted by the ACLU, tested the law. Spectators and newspapermen came from all over to witness whether science or religion would win the day. Yet, below all the hype, the trial had a deeper meaning.
Klin, Candyce. “Darwinism as A Cultural Issue” Cedar Crest College, 2 June 2001. Web. 17