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February 11, 2007

‘Inherit the Wind’ Meets ‘Dr. Strangelove’

This is my first post here, though I’ve been hanging around for a while. I’m Stuart Ewen. I’m a swimmer in the morning, an artist in the afternoon and a critical critic at night. Mary Jeys and Deron Bauman invited me to join up. Mary thought some of you might be interested in looking at my blog,
http://stereotypeandsociety.typepad.com,

And she also encouraged me to post some stuff here. So…..

On March 19th, a new theatrical production of the classic “Inherit the Wind” will open at the Lyceum Theatre in New York City. Starring Christopher Plummer as Henry Drummond (based on Clarence Darrow) and Brian Dennehy as Matthew Brady (based on William Jennings Bryan), the play is derived from the famous 1925 “Monkey Trial” where a high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was prosecuted for teaching evolution to his classes in Dayton, Tennessee. Written in 1955, at the height of McCarthyism, the play offered a cautionary metaphor against the dangers of small-mindedness. No doubt, the new production was inspired, in part, by present day assaults on the teaching of evolution.

While the Scopes Trial is usually seen as a simple battle between the enlightenment of evolutionary theory vs. antediluvian creationism—an interpretation brought to the stage in Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s 1955 play, “Inherit the Wind,” and further popularized by Stanley Kramer’s star-studded film of 1960—the science and politics of the day made the issues somewhat more complex.

In teaching evolution, Scopes also taught eugenics, a thought-system linking Darwin’s theory to notions of innate racial and ethnic inequality, and that proposed the need to protect the “Nordic” American gene pool against an onslaught of feeble-mindedness, found among immigrants, blacks and the poor. This should not be surprising. Evolutionary theory in the twenties was widely employed as a scientific justification for closing off immigration, legalizing forced sterilization, and upholding laws against miscegenation (race mixing). Evolution was used as a justification for the need to encourage breeding among Anglo-Americans and limit sexual reproduction among those deemed by eugenics movement leaders as “unfit.

Because of this, the theory of evolution disturbed William Jennings Bryan, “The Great Commoner” who had been the Democratic candidate for President in 1896. In “Inherit the Wind” the Bryan character is depicted as a know-nothing, Bible thumping windbag, but an examination of evidence from the time shows that his opposition to evolution was, in large part, propelled by its link to an active and powerful eugenics movement in the United States.

Due to Scopes’ last minute plea of guilty, which was designed to bring the case to appeals court, Bryan was never able to deliver his planned summation. Newspapers and magazines published it, however, and it was widely read at the time. It also appeared in pamphlet form.

To bolster his case against the teaching of evolution, Bryan’s summation quoted at length from Darwin’s Descent of Man to demonstrate the extent to which evolutionary theory gave support to the idea of eliminating “the weak” from the human stock. He included the following passage from Darwin:

“With savages the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of everyone to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized society propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man… We must, therefore, bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving…”

Current uses of evolution, Bryan argued, went “against the public welfare,” and were callously applied as an argument against the progressive principle of social improvement. He wasn’t wrong about this. The hereditary determinism of the 1920s routinely argued that the human lot was predestined, impervious to programs for social change. Given this context, Bryan responded that evolution could only obliterate people’s sense of possibility and hope.

“Evolution is deadening to spiritual life of a multitude of students… [T]he evolutionary hypothesis is that, by paralyzing the hope of reform, it discourages those who waiver for the improvement of man’s condition. Every upward looking man or woman seeks to lift the level upon which mankind stands, and they trust that they will see beneficent changes during the brief span of their own lives. Evolution chills their enthusiasm by substituting aeons for years.”

In his indictment of evolution, the specter of eugenics and of the amoral nature of science was an underlying theme. As he wrote in the planned summation, “science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine.” Evolutionary theory’s “only program for man is scientific breeding,” he added, “a system under which a few supposedly superior intellects, self-appointed, would direct the mating and the movements of the mass of mankind…”

Bryan’s Christianity—while scriptural—was also infused with a staunch belief in social justice, in the democratic principle of the common good. He was also an anti-imperialist in an age of American empire. His recurrent invocation of Christ provided—for Bryan—a compassionate moral compass, that were, and often continue to be, absent in the cold calculations of science and power.

None of this is to question the monumental importance of Darwin’s discoveries, or to defend the small-mindedness that presently seeks to marginalize them in the teaching of science. It is only to remind us that history, when presented as an easily consumed morality tale, can rob us of deeper understanding of issues. It is also a reminder of the intrinsic dangers of scientific research when its application is not guided by an overarching concern for the greater good of society. We ignore this at our own peril.

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