This week is the 100th anniversary of the infamous Scopes trial — where a plucky high-school teacher fought to teach Darwinian evolution against the wishes of a reactionary and unenlightened establishment. That, at least, is the impression you would get of Tennessee v. Scopes from Inherit the Wind, the greatly celebrated 1955 theatrical play on the trial, adapted for film five years later. The film stars Spencer Tracy as a fictionalised version of crusading defence attorney Clarence Darrow, who is portrayed as a paragon of common sense, using a blend of wit and biblical knowledge to humiliate his “anti-science” opponents.
More than the film’s heroes, though, Inherit the Wind matters most for its villains: especially “Matthew Harrison Brady”, the film’s anti-science prosecutor, a character clearly modelled on three-time Democratic Party presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. While brilliantly written on a line level, playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee used the Scopes trial as a vehicle to portray the future of the American nation as a fight between rural religious dogma and urban “free thought.” In doing so, it recasts William Jennings Bryan as a blustering, ignorant fundamentalist whose religious zeal borders on madness.
While Inherit the Wind acknowledges the critical importance of a church-state separation in public education, the lack of historical nuance in its portrayal of Bryan is, in retrospect, breathtaking. A deeply thoughtful man, Bryan helped prosecute the Scopes trial in large part because he opposed the eugenicism then popular across evolutionary thought. Not that this is simply about the posthumous reputation of a long-forgotten politician. In his radical ambitions to transform America, Bryan’s mistreatment has had grave consequences for the nation, not just in its seemingly endless culture war, but also for those hoping to again lead populist economic reforms.
Perhaps Inherit the Wind’s biggest disservice to Bryan happens in the film’s third act. It climaxes with his surrogate blathering like a fool, trying to give one last speech that no one’s interested in, and seeking Biblical verse as the answer for everything. And that’s not the worst of it. In terms of historical narrative, the greatest lies are those of omission. The fact is that, a century ago, many of America’s most prominent evolutionists were also Social Darwinists who, in the name of “progress”, advocated for the sterilisation of the poor, indigent, and disabled under the auspices of improving the “fitness” of humanity.
All this Bryan viewed as deeply immoral and anti-Christian, not to mention scientifically dubious. Certainly, that feels like an important detail to include about the man portrayed in cinema merely as a doctrinaire zealot of “Old-Time Religion”. Far from being a one-dimensional conservative fanatic, then, Bryan was an early champion of economic fairness. Long before the New Deal, he advocated for the use of the power of the state to level the playing field for ordinary Americans — especially workers and farmers — against the growing dominance of big business. His platform laid much of the ideological groundwork that Franklin Roosevelt would later use to build the New Deal coalition. While Bryan never won the presidency, his ideas didn’t disappear. They became the backbone of modern American “liberalism” — at least as that term applies to economics.
This is important in a broader sense, too. Without the New Deal — which Herbert Hoover once bitterly called “Bryanism under new words and methods” — many historians believe the country would have ended in some sort of revolution, as the Great Depression ground the Republic to dust. With many states suffering through unemployment levels as high as 25%, and the pre-FDR government proving completely unwilling to do anything to provide financial relief, tensions surely would have reached a boiling point. Certainly, that’s what happened everywhere from China to Spain during this same period. In that case, of course, there would have been no mass military intervention helping halt the Nazis, nor the heroic dismantling of Imperial Japan in the Pacific. And the Fifties golden era, which the Boomer Left wholly took for granted, would have never transpired without Bryan serving as the perfect mid-point of American reform and Christian tradition.
And if that explains Bryan’s role in the broad sweep of America’s 20th century, the man whose supporters affectionately called “The Great Commoner” matters in other ways too. Almost alone among his nation’s leaders, he helped America’s Anglo-Protestant majority to understand social support not as incompatible with America’s emphasis on individual liberty, as the Social Darwinists claimed — but rather as an indelibly Christian moral imperative. This is clear from Bryan’s programme. He argued that the state should counter the overweening power of the banks and industrial corporations by legalising strikes, subsidising farmers and taxing the rich. Well ahead of his time, Bryan also wanted to ban private campaign spending.
Watching or reading Inherit the Wind, one would never realise the essential contribution of Bryan to liberal reform. The message, especially in the film adaptation, is almost unmistakable. For the states to avoid regressing into Klan-like dictatorship, secular urban elites must band together to stop religious populism. In many ways, Bryan is treated less like himself and more like Strom Thurmond and Billy Graham — a manifestation of the Dixiecrat version of the Democratic Party.
Bryan, of course, was anything but a Dixiecrat. At his core, rather, he was what’s known as a producerist, believing that a healthy democracy depends on a strong base of economically independent citizens who own their labour and aren’t beholden to corporate bosses or government bureaucrats. Rather than concentrating power in massive corporations or distant state agencies, producerists envisioned an economy built around self-reliant individuals and families, whose livelihoods give them both dignity and political autonomy. The idea was simple but radically democratic. When most people have control over what they produce, no elite — financial or political — can easily coerce or silence them.
“When most people have control over what they produce, no elite can easily coerce or silence them.”
Producerism has deep roots. For Thomas Jefferson, it wasn’t just an economic preference, but a moral ideal. A nation of “hirelings”, as one late 19th century producerist put it, “can never be free.” Without economic independence, workers and consumers will inevitably be intimidated — if not blackmailed — by wealthy businessmen and elites. Bryan sympathised with these producerist notions, which is why he was chosen to head not just the Democratic Party’s presidential ticket, but also that of the then-surging People’s Party in the 1896 election, which explicitly attacked big monied interests.
Though his percentage of the vote went down slightly with every presidential election cycle, Bryan’s Christian-centred populism proved its appeal to a vast swathe of the American voting public. Had he not also been required to fight against the distortions of the press during the heyday of yellow journalism, he might have been president several times over. Of course, that’s not what Inherit the Wind and its condescending urban playwrights cared about. Read the play, or especially watch the film, and it’s clear the writers imagine Bryan and his supporters as a bunch of ignorant and vulgar fools, utterly resistant to thinking of anyone other than themselves. As “H.K. Hornbek” — the story’s avatar for H.L. Mencken — puts it: “These are the boobs making the laws in our democracy!” The writers of Inherit the Wind seemed to believe, as many now do on the progressive Left, that only the professional managerial class is fit to lead.
As if that wasn’t clear enough from the film’s premise, the protagonists of Inherit the Wind story are an alliance of urban lawyers, journalists, and educators, who openly act in cahoots with one another. They not only live in the same hotel suites, but pool their funds and strategise how to survive the confederacy of dunces they’re stuck sharing a nation with. The writers portray this as not only laudatory but self-sacrificing. As Inherit the Wind recounts, these elite urban protagonists work to deploy the full power of the federal legal system to override local democratic decision-making. What should come in its place? The answer, once more, is clear: democracy, yes, but with rigid safeguards, designed to protect the educated elite from the knuckle-dragging plebs.
If, in other words, Inherit the Wind unfairly assails Bryan for his obscurantism, even as it ignores his unassailable backing by the working classes, the film is ultimately an elitist assault on the very idea of representative democracy. And if that obviously has echoes today — just think of Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” framing — Inherit the Wind has an even starker legacy. After all, the snide condescension it evokes ultimately ensured the collapse of the New Deal coalition Bryan helped birth, allowing the pretentious college youngsters to take over the Democratic Party in 1972. The result then was George McGovern’s nomination and the worst electoral defeat in US history. Yet it’s also a thrashing that multiple generations have learnt the wrong lessons from — blaming McGovern’s loss on his economic policies rather than the social radicalism and class condescension of those who hijacked the party.
The opposite, it goes without saying, is true too. If Bryan had won any of his three presidential bids — or had his legacy not been tarnished by popular fiction — he might have given the American Left something it still lacks: a coherent identity rooted in the country’s own religious and producerist traditions. But as with Bernie Sanders, Eugene Debs, and other charismatic champions of economic justice, the American political establishment worked overtime to deny him office. First, they misled the public about his ideals and his goals. Then, with the help of progressive urban elites, they turned him into an object of ridicule — a George Wallace-like figure of backward rural resentment to “progress”.
There’s plenty of evidence, through all this, that Inherit the Wind had a real impact in practice. Other than perhaps To Kill a Mockingbird — which also boasts a similarly condescending regionalist framing — few works of 20th century US culture have had a greater influence on how progressives understand their own political culture. Widely assigned in mid-to-late 20th-century high school curricula across not only theatre, but also history and English courses, Inherit the Wind transformed Bryan from the Gilded Age’s most essential liberal reformer, a tireless advocate for labour and working-class economic fairness, into a one-dimensional “Bible-thumper”.
Yet behind this caricature of Middle Americans is a more consequential truth: Bryan was the American Left’s bridge — between Jeffersonian producerism and New Deal liberalism, between evangelical moralism and economic fairness, and between the nation’s deep-seated spiritual yearning and its often-contradictory democratic ambitions. For the American Left to recover a truly majoritarian project, one capable of appealing beyond the confines of graduate school seminars and NPR pledge drives, it must stop looking to turn the United States into a Western European-style social democracy and instead recover its own intellectual genealogy. That genealogy runs straight through the Great Commoner, an unrepentant Christian and an economic radical both.
