The Scope Monkey Trials

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how "Inherit the Wind" was written by playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee as a response to the threat to intellectual freedom presented by the anti-communist panic of the McCarthy era. The film does not claim to be an historically accurate depiction of the Scopes trial and place names and names of trial participants are changed. It analyzes how the movie promotes a stereotype of the public debate about the creation and evolution that gives all virtue and intelligence to the Darwinist.

From the Paper:

"Rachel and her father are fictitious additions to the historic reality of the trial in order to draw the audience to the side of the authors more enlightenment. The slap in the face to Rachel by Mrs. Bryan is also impossible due to Rachel's nonexistence as wells as Mrs. Bryan's crippling arthritis which confined her to a wheelchair. The nightmare prayer meeting did not happen since Reverend Brown is the author's character added to stereotype fundamentalists as vicious, ignorant, Bible thumping bigots."

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