#1,046: After a Century, We Are Still Inheriting the Wind

Clarance Darrow & Wm. Jennings Bryan (1925)

Off and on for the past several months, I have been spending a lot of my “free time” (?!) boning up on the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial,” which pitted renowned defense attorney Clarance Darrow, against the “Great Commoner” (and Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson) William Jennings Bryan. The case at hand, State of Tennessee versus John Thomas Scopes, dealt with whether or not Scopes, a substitute high school science teacher and football coach at a public high school in Dayton, Tennessee, had violated the state’s recently passed Butler Act (which declared unlawful the teaching of any doctrine denying the divine creation of man as taught by the Bible) by teaching his students Darwin’s theory of Evolution . . . despite the fact that he never mentioned Darwin by name, and was teaching out of a state-approved textbook entitled Civic Biology.

Tracy, Morgan & March in “Inherit the Wind” (1960)

My “boning up” on the case - one of several “trials of the century” I am covering in an 8-week course entitled “From Court Room to Cinema” also includes the showing of Stanely Kramer’s 1960 masterpiece Inherit the Wind, starring two cinematic warhorses: Spencer Tracy (as the Darrow character, now named Henry Drummond) and Frederic March (Matthew Harrison Brady). Included in the all-star cast are Gene Kelly (playing a fictionalized H.L. Mencken now named E.K. Hornbeck), Dick York as Bertram T. Cates (Scopes) and Harry Morgan as Judge Mel Coffey.

In preparing for this 2-part lecture, I have also read myself ragged. Among the books I have devoured are:

Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion by Edward J. Larson (1997)
Monkey Business: The True Story of the Scopes Trial by Marvin Olasky (2005)
The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power by Jeff Sharlet (2008) and the latest (and in my opinion the best):
Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy and the Trial That Riveted a Nation, by Brenda Wineapple (2025).

The more I have been researching and thinking about the era in which the Scopes trial took place – as well as the personalities, cultural, political, economic and religious trends of the time – the more I have been astonished at how many similarities there are. The late teens and 1920s were a time of increased political and moral bifurcation. It was a time of fear: the fear of immigrants, of moral relativism, of "commies and socialists” (on the part of smalltown and rural Americans) and fear of what Mencken referred to as the ‘booboisie’ . . . a swathe of the American public he characterized by what he termed “the banal ideas and cautious, stupid habits of mind of the great masses and inferior men. [sic]. He saw them as complacent, conforming, and susceptible to mass delusions. It was the age of barnstorming evangelists and radio preachers such as Billy Sunday, Aimee Semple McPherson and William Jennings Brian - people exemplified and satirized by Sinclair Lewis in novels like Babbitt, Main Street and Elmer Gantry. It was an age of Prohibition - except for those who had enough money to have it shipped across the Canadian border; a “Jazz Age” the young fans of F. Scott Fitzgerald who rolled their stockings, bobbed their hair, petted in rumble seats and always had a hip flask hidden on their person.

Ecstatic fundamentalism - in which the literal word of the “authorized” Holy Bible (the specific version likely depending on the church and pastor) - and the necessity of converting as many "heathens” as humanly (or divinely) possible, were keystones of the era. This necessity was perhaps best summed up by Wm. Jennings Bryan at a rally the night before the Scopes Trial was to begin, in which he told more than 3,000 devoted believers that "The Christian church should wake up and carry the gospel until everyone shall know the truth.”

Anti-Immigration and eugenics walked hand-in-hand to make sure that America would remain a white Christian nation. President Calvin Coolidge maintained, in his simple folksy way, that “America must be kept American.” There were too many immigrants, too many foreign-language speakers and foreign-language newspapers, and too much miscegenation. The “melting pot” (a term coined by the Anglo-Jewish playwright Israel Zangwill for his 1908 Broadway hit of the same name) was, to millions, a false theory. While the eugenicists were planning to eliminate, through breeding the “bad” aspects of human character in order to generate a utopia populated by the “better” sort of humans, politicians and paramilitarists were doing their darndest to rid America of unwanted aliens . . . frequently through mass raids and illegal deportation. Combining Christian Nationalism with eugenics, well-known leftwing journalist McAlister Coleman satirically noted “The new front is the religious front, and there will be no peace until every last girl and boy in every last public school is taught to believe, with no mental equivocation, that the Fundamentalist whale swallowed a White, Nordic, Protestant Jonah.”

The prototype for our current Attorney General, Pam Bondi, was A. Mitchell Palmer, who served under President Woodrow Wilson. Palmer (1872-1936) was best-known for spearheading the eponymous raids whose sole purpose was to round up those he claimed were “reds” (i.e. anarchists, communists, socialists and other political radicals) and then deport them back to Russia . . . and generally without a trial. Most of those he and his troops rounded up were Jews from Eastern Europe. To do so, Palmer created a small division within the D.O.J. to gather intelligence on the radical threat and placed a young (24 years old) Justice Department lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover in charge. Hoover collected and organized every scrap of intelligence gathered by the Bureau of Investigation (the FBI’s predecessor) and by other agencies to identify anarchists most likely involved in violent activity. The apex of Palmer’s time as Attorney General (and that which he believed just might get him elected POTUS in the 1920 election) was his “Soviet Ark” campaign of 1919 and 1920.

On June 15, 1917, Congress passed the Espionage Act, which became the primary instrument for prosecuting opponents of American involvement in what was then known as “The Great War” (WWI). The law included a provision making it a crime to interfere with military operations, which included the draft. This provision was broadly interpreted to mean that criticizing the war was illegal because it would encourage young men not to cooperate with the draft. The Espionage Act was amended and strengthened, on May 16, 1918, by the Sedition Act, which in even broader terms also made it a crime to criticize the government. On December 21, 1919, the ship USAT Buford (renamed the “Soviet Ark”) left New York City, carrying 249 alleged alien radicals, the best-known of whom were birth-control advocate Emma Goldman and her longtime companion, the anarchist Alexander Berkman who, in July 1892 had unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, general manager of the Homestead steel plant.

Indeed, the anti-science, anti-immigrant, anti-intellectual, pro-Christian nationalist 1920s, are hauntingly similar to the age of IT and MAGA. Up until a week ago, I had not entertained any thought of turning my research on the Scopes “monkey trial” into a blog post. But that changed this past Monday, July 28, when I read in The Hill about a memo released that morning by The Regime that aimed to “protect religious expression among federal workers.” According to the 5-page memo, released by the Office of Management and Budget, federal workers "can attempt to persuade coworkers about why their religious beliefs are 'correct.’” The memo further outlined that such actions should not result in disciplinary or corrective action, including displaying in the office bibles, religious artwork, jewelry, posters displaying religious messages and other indicia of religion such as crosses, crucifixes and mezuzah. (Actually for sake of both consistency and correctness, the last word should have been 'mezuzot,’ the plural of mezuzah.)

The memo, which listed the OMB Director Scott Kupor (who is Jewish) as its primary author, also said one or more employees should be allowed to engage in individual or communal religious expressions and that employees can engage in conversations on religious topics “. . . including attempting to persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views, provided that such efforts are not harassing in nature . . . . During a break, an employee may engage another in polite discussion of why his faith is correct and why the non-adherent should re-think his religious beliefs. However, if the nonadherent requests such attempts to stop, the employee should honor the request,” the memo added. “An employee may invite another to worship at her church despite being belonging to a different faith.”

It seems to me that the Regime has dressed up the memo as a victory for religious freedom. But advocates for religious freedom of speech and even people of faith (myself included) see it as yet another step toward something far more sinister. As much as OPM, Scott Kupor, the task force to “eradicate anti-Christian bias” (headed by A.G. Bondi) and the White House faith office (headed by televangelist Pastor Paula White) is selling this as giving federal workers legal cover for talking about their religion, it is, in truth, the implementation of Christian Nationalism in this country. William Jennings Bryan would be proud.

The vast majority of the examples of permitted activities in the memo are related to Christianity, such as instructions that an employee may display crosses, rosary beads, or invite colleagues to church for an Easter service. There is one mention each of an employee displaying the Star of David and a mezuzah, symbols of Judaism. No other religions are mentioned. The memo’s focus is overwhelmingly on the ability of Christians to promote their religion without pushback, despite the fact that Christianity is already the dominant religion in the United States: 63% of American adults identify as Christian as of 2024, according to Pew Research. That’s because in the MAGA version of Christianity, the rights of white conservatives and IT supporters, who are likely to be evangelicals, are of the most importance and they’re the ones under attack.

We all should have seen this coming. Back on February 6 of this year, PumpkinPunim announced plans to establish the above referenced taskforce and a presidential commission to protect Christians from religious discrimination. The announcement came as he was addressing the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, where he laid out multiple steps he was planning to take to address what he described as attacks on religious liberty and on Christians in particular. “While I’m in the White House, we will protect Christians in our schools, in our military, in our government, in our workplaces, hospitals and in our public squares,” he said. “And we will bring our country back together as one nation under God.” At the same time, he announced that he was creating a White House Faith Office to be led by the Rev. Paula White, who had been serving as his “religious advisor” for several years.

As both a practicing and reasonable well-read Jew, this sort of thing halts me in my tracks and sends chills up my spine. For those of us who are Jewish, the very idea of someone - anyone - attempting to interest us in joining their religion is both frightening and anathema. We belong to a tribe that has rarely - if ever - engaged in proselytization. Our feeling has long been that “Judaism is the best religion in the world . . . for Jews.” We simply have too many collective historic memories of forced conversions. It has happened to the Children of Israel time and time again in our past, and by G-d, we will do everything in our power to make sure it never happens again.

On Tuesday August 12, beginning at 2:30, I will be delivering a 2-hour lecture on the Scopes Trial at Florida Atlantic University in Jupiter. 1 week later (August 19), I will be showing the 1960 film Inherit the Wind in its entirety. On Thursday August 14 and 21, I will be delivering the same lecture and film at the FAU’s Boca Raton Campus beginning at 3:00. If you are interested, please contact FAU’s Lifelong Learning Division.

The title Inherit the Wind comes from a verse found in the Biblical book Proverbs (11:29). In Hebrew it reads:

עֹכֵ֣ר בֵּ֭יתוֹ יִנְחַל־ר֑וּחַ
(aykhayr baytoe, yin-na-kha-ruakh), which translates to say:
”The one who brings trouble on his house will inherit the wind.”

The classic commentary understands this to mean that “A fool who spends his/her life trying to be in charge of everything and everyone in his/her life will end up troubling those who are closest, and at the end of life, will have nothing to show for it. It was just as true in the time of King Solomon (who history tells us was the author of Proverbs) as it was in the time of William Jennings Bryan and A. Mitchell Palmer who sought to determine who was a worthwhile human being, what should be taught and in what manner should we pray until our very time . . . when the forces of plutocracy are once again enacting the sins of the past.

President Wilson said that his motivation was to “Make the world safe for democracy.” I fear that the current regime, to borrow a pun from H.L. Mencken, unknowingly seeks nothing more than to “Make the world safe for hypocrisy.”