Inherit the Wind 699mond’s questions about the Bible lead Brady to
feckless mumbling (“I do not think about things
that . . . I do not think about”), Drummond has a
devastatingly witty rejoinder: “Do you ever think
about things that you do think about?” (emphasis
in original). Here again, the line emblematizes the
play: It is not enough to think. We must, collectively,
challenge ourselves to be critical of our own views
and those of others, no matter how treasured they
may be—to think about, in short, the things we
think about.
Todd Pettigrew
hope in Inherit the Wind
In a crucial exchange near the end of Lawrence and
Lee’s Inherit the Wind, attorney Henry Drummond
muses that it might be nice to have cases that were
sure things, prompting Cates (the character who
represents Scopes) to joke that Drummond “sure
picked a long shot this time.” Cates’s status as a long
shot, in turn, leads Drummond to a dreamy recol-
lection of his “first long shot,” a childhood rock-
ing horse called “Golden Dancer.” As Drummond
relates, Golden Dancer was a beautiful toy that the
young Drummond coveted and when his working-
class parents managed to scrape together the money
to buy it for the child’s birthday, the horse turned
out to be worthless: “It split in two! The wood was
rotten, the whole thing was put together with spit
and sealing wax!”
In a drama played out in the shadow of the Bible,
the Golden Dancer story functions as a parable
of false hope. Like the inheritance of the prodigal
son, the rocking horse is too beautiful to resist but
ultimately worthless. At the same time, the gold in
Golden Dancer and the fact that it is an animal,
recall the Golden Calf made by the Israelites in the
wilderness, a false idol that tempts the true believers
away from the path of righteousness. Drummond
draws out the moral for Cates explicitly: “whenever
you see something bright, shining, perfect-seeming
. . . look behind the paint!”
At the same time, Golden Dancer is Drum-
mond’s “first long shot,” and though Drummond
admits that it is tempting to get rich by taking only
easy cases, the fact that he comes to Hillsborough to
help Cates, his most recent long shot, implies that,
while Drummond has learned the lesson of Golden
Dancer—do not be misled by false hopes—he has
not been embittered by his childhood disappoint-
ment either. One can still retain hope in truth and
in progress, according to the attorney; against the
childish infatuation with a shiny toy, the play juxta-
poses Drummond’s fervent belief “In a child’s power
to master the multiplication table,” which he claims
contains “more sanctity” than the empty prayers of
the Hillsboro faithful.
Inherit the Wind ultimately suggests that there
is a reason for hope in the world, even in a world
replete with false idols and false prophets. At the
same time, hope is always a risk, always a long shot
where one may, as Drummond says, “ride like fury,
just to end up back where I started.”
Todd PettigrewJuStice in Inherit the Wind
In a play that seems to be centered on justice—it
begins with an accusation, dramatizes a trial, and
ends with a verdict—what is most striking is the
drama’s suggestion that justice in any real sense
is largely impossible or, at the very least, always
deferred.
From the outset, it is clear that much of the
support for the case against the play’s central, if
not main, character, Bertram Cates, arises not from
a desire to see a legally fair outcome, but from the
fact that the case brings notoriety and that, as a
shopkeeper says in the first scene, “means business!”
Similarly, Matthew Harrison Brady’s decision to
prosecute the case seems to be as much about reviv-
ing his reputation as a defender of traditional values
as it is about justice. His status as a three-time
presidential candidate in days gone by is pointed out
early on by Meeker, and reporter E. K. Hornbeck
assesses Brady as a “Yesterday-Messiah” who has
come to Hillsboro merely “To find himself a stump
to shout from.” When others fear the arrival of
Henry Drummond, Brady welcomes him, because
he knows where a Goliath like Drummond fights,
“headlines follow.”
Even those on Cates’s side are not always
interested in justice, per se. Hornbeck uses the
trial to showcase his acerbic wit and to indulge his
own narcissism, calling himself the “most brilliant