700 Lawrence, Jerome, and Robert E. Lee
reporter in America today” and describing his article
on Cates as a “Brilliant little symphony of words.”
While other characters in this play speak prose,
Hornbeck speaks in verse.
If there is a hope for real justice dramatized
in Inherit the Wind, it is embodied in Drummond
himself. The play’s most moving speeches about
truth and civil liberties come from Drummond—“an
idea is a greater monument than a cathedral”—and
Drummond’s devastating examination of Brady
and his religious views unravels Brady’s case, his
standing, and ultimately his life. Though Brady
has described Drummond as a Goliath, it is Brady
himself who is exposed as an overvalued Philistine
mindlessly reciting the names of the books of the
Old Testament and whining about being laughed at.
Still, for all Drummond’s arguments and legal
agility, the verdict comes down against his client.
And while the sentence is so small as to be practi-
cally nominal, even that decision is not reached
through a thorough consideration of the legal issues.
Drummond himself knows that “A lot of people’s
shoes are getting hot” as the trial goes on, and the
judge’s sentence is clearly influenced by the mayor’s
reminder that “November ain’t too far off ” and that
it “wouldn’t do no harm to let things simmer down.”
The fine of $100, then, is not so much a meting
out of justice as a politically motivated compromise.
Cates is guilty but goes unpunished, and his murky
status is made all the murkier by Drummond’s
determination to appeal the decision, an appeal we
never see. Even Cates himself is left questioning,
“Did I win or did I lose?” And while Drummond
insists they have won in the court of public opinion,
the great lawyer still admits that there really is no
final justice: “You don’t suppose this kind of thing is
ever finished, do you?”
Todd Pettigrew
reliGion in Inherit the Wind
Religion wafts through nearly every line of Inherit
the Wind, from little Melinda’s denunciation of
Howard’s account of evolution—“You was a worm,
once” he taunts; “that’s sinful talk,” she scolds in
return—to Henry Drummond’s lyrical eulogy of his
former adversary: “Matt Brady got lost. Because he
was looking for God too high up and too far away.”
In between, the entire plot turns on a law that privi-
leges religion to the exclusion of science, and every
major character is described in religious terms one
way or another. E. K. Hornbeck wryly confesses to
be the worst kind of infidel, since he writes for a
newspaper, and where Bert Cates is vilified through-
out the play as a sinner, Drummond is denounced as
being “perhaps even the Devil himself !”
The locus of traditional religion in Hillsbor-
ough is the Reverend Jeremiah Brown. Brown’s
religion is fundamental and punitive, and his Old
Testament zeal is as intoxicating to his congrega-
tion as it is appalling to the audience. At the prayer
meeting he calls on the “Lord of Righteousness
and Wrath” to “Strike down this sinner, as Thou
didst Thine enemies of old, in the days of the Pha-
raohs!” Brown’s faith of violence and vengeance
is too extreme even for Brady who reminds the
Hillsborough congregation that “God forgives His
children. And we, as Children of God, should for-
give each other.” Brady’s gospel of forgiveness has
limits, though, for the next day finds him decrying
“the teachings of Godless science” and demanding
that the “full penalty of the law is meted out to
Bertram Cates” with nearly as much exuberance as
the local minister.
Brown’s opposite for much of the play seems to
be Drummond himself, who, though he is intro-
duced by Hornbeck as “the most agile legal mind”
of the century, can be understood by the stunned
townspeople only in religious terms: “agnostic,”
“Godless,” “an agent of darkness” are the preacher’s
words, and that account goes uncontradicted early
on. When he arrives, the real Drummond turns out
to be just as horrifying to the Hillsborough faithful
as the bogey-man that Brown sketches. Drum-
mond calls the Tennessee lawmakers “clockstoppers”
who want to dump “a load of medieval nonsense”
into American law. He calls Brown’s religion a
mere commercial “product,” and stuns the court by
claiming that “Right” has no meaning for him at
all. But during the climactic cross-examination of
Brady, Drummond makes it increasingly clear that
his supposed agnosticism is really a misunderstood
ecumenicalism. His problem with Brady is not that