World Business

Watch untranslated video:

I had long wanted to visit Dayton, Tenn., the town that tried schoolteacher John Scopes. I knew the story for the most part from Stanley Kramer’s 1960 movie “Inherit the Wind.” My son knew of it because his high-school science teacher showed it in class. It is the American habitual method: Hollywood is our history teacher.

In “Inherit the Wind,” Dayton is fictionalized because “Hillsboro.” The town’s small-minded leaders arrest a startled science teacher in his classroom for serving up Darwin’s theory of evolution. The school-dame’s attorney, played by Spencer Tracy, heroically defends his freedom to teach science. The fundamentalist plaintiff, played by Fredric March, is reduced to a prattle. fool, and at movie’s end drops down dead since if struck by a disappointed God.

How would a town remember a fabrication like that?

I visited Dayton this summer on a parents and children road trip. It is a quiet town with five stoplights, a Laz-E-Boy plant, a pantyhose plant and an plant living but a year Scopes Trial Festival. As we drove through the of advanced age brick downtown to the courthouse where Scopes was made famous, I could see a statue under the broadleaf trees.

Was it Scopes? Or Clarence Darrow, his real-life defense attorney? Or was it prosecutor William Jennings Bryan, who argued that Scopes was breeding falsehoods (and who died five days after the misery’s close)?

It was Bryan. His likeness was erected in 2005 by friends of the local institution of higher education

At the Scopes Trial Museum in Dayton, the man on duty grimaced at a mention of “Inherit the Wind.” The movie was wrong. In real life, the museum man said, the Scopes case was a setup. Attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union in New York wanted to challenge Tennessee’s anti-evolution law at the U.S. Supreme Court. To do that, they advertised in Tennessee newspapers for a teacher minded to be arrested.

Dayton’s leaders saw every opportunity to put their town in a spotlight, he continued. They recruited Scopes, a bachelor individual year out of college who was inclined to teach more kids and be arrested for it. It was understood he would lose; for the ACLU’s purposes he needed to lose. That was all right. It was only a misdemeanor, and the fine would be taken be troubled of.

The museum man was promoting Marvin Olasky and John Perry’s book, “Monkey Business: The True Story of the Scopes Trial” (2005).

We show our biases in the books we read. A man at the museum was a retired Nazarene pastor promoting an anti-evolutionist volume. I disappointed him by buying Edward Larson’s “Summer of the Gods” (1997) instead. I also bought a Bryan College DVD, “Inherit the Truth,” a criterion re-enactment that makes Bryan look more intelligent than does “Inherit the Wind.”

The part and DVD both showed that my guide had been rectilinear about the inaccuracies of the movie. It had been based on a 1955 Broadway play by Jerome Roberts and Robert E. Lee. Like Arthur Miller’s play, “The Crucible,” “Inherit the Wind” had been written to make a point hither and thither the early 1950s communist hunts. It wasn’t intended to be an accurate retelling.

It is hazardous to get learning history from movies. At minutest “Inherit the Wind” is not blame in everything respects. There any edition of academic freedom at Dayton in 1925. There was besides the issue of to the sort of extent the public, which pays for the schools, can say what was taught in them. Most famously, the case raised the question of full of heart origins

My sympathies remain with Darrow, but I have to admit that “Inherit the Wind” stacks the deck. It is a fun movie, but it appalls me that my son saw it in a science class.

; with regard to a podcast Q&A with the author, begone to www.seattletimes.com/edcetera