Everyone knows that the events of the Dayton, Tenn., trial of 1925 were premeditated and staged to create and promote the town’s businesses and economy.
It was a project put together around the local drugstore table by Dayton personages with nothing else to do on a hot summer day. It snowballed and worked. The media descended upon the town and county, along with lots of other folks. It was a circus-like. It made fame and money for all the townspeople and newspapers.
Now Hollywood and the playwright think to keep the period piece and issues going, although the science itself is now at an end and has become the new mythology. The conflict is between science and mythology, not with religion. I suppose the play about the issue (“Inherit the Wind”) makes good theater.
However, it is in fact a rather demonic error to smear two famous historic persons, William Jennings Bryan and Henry Drummond. Not only Bryan but Drummond was a great 19th-century natural scientist and Christian evangelist, a man of the stature of Charles Darwin, T.H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer, all of them contemporaries. And you really can’t associate Henry Drummond with the agnostic attorney Clarence Darrow. It is a travesty, a burlesque parody upon history. Henry Drummond was no agnostic.
Furthermore, Charlies Darwin himself would be adverse to lending his name and influence to be used in such a manner as presented in the play and the 1960 version. Igive it a PG-2002 (providential guidance advised).
— R.D. Earnhardt
Spencer
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