Scopes Monkey/ Inherit the Wind writers?

Question

The events of the scopes monkey trial differ from the events in the play "Inherit the Wind". Why do you suppose the writers made these changes?

Answer 1

For dramatic impact. The 1925 trial in Dayton, TN, had a number of extremely striking moments, but like all trials most of it was rather dull. In addition, there are no notable figures outside of Bryant, Darrow and Scopes, so it was necessary to invent additional characters and conflicts to diversify the story while keeping them tied to the major theme.

Answer 2

This might help explain:

"Playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee wrote Inherit the Wind as a response to the threat to intellectual freedom presented by the anti-communist hysteria of the McCarthy era. Lawrence and Lee used the Scopes Trial, then safely a generation in the past, as a vehicle for exploring a climate of anxiety and anti-intellectualism that existed in 1950.
Inherit the Wind does not purport to be a historically accurate depiction of the Scopes trial. The stage directions set the time as "Not long ago." Place names and names of trial participants have been changed. Lawrence and Lee created several fictional characters, including a fundamentalist preacher and his daughter, who in the play is the fiancé of John Scopes. Henry Drummond is less cynical and biting than the Darrow of Dayton that the Drummond character was based upon. Scopes, a relatively minor figure in the real drama at Dayton, becomes Bertram Cates, a central figure in the play, who is arrested while teaching class, thrown in jail, burned in effigy, and taunted by a fire-snorting preacher. William Jennings Bryan, Matthew Harrison Brady in the play, is portrayed as an almost comical fanatic who dramatically dies of a heart attack while attempting to deliver his summation in a chaotic courtroom. The townspeople of fictional Hillsboro are far more frenzied, mean-spirited, and ignorant than were the real denizens of Dayton.

Nonetheless, Lawrence and Lee did draw heavily from the Scopes trial. A powerful Darrow condemnation of anti-intellectualism, an exchange between Darrow and Judge Raulston that earned Darrow a contempt citation, and portions of the Darrow examination of Bryan are lifted nearly verbatim from the actual trial transcript.

Although Lawrence and Lee completed Inherit the Wind in 1950, the play did not open until January 10, 1955. The Broadway cast included Paul Muni as Henry Drummond, Ed Begley as Matthew Harrison Brady, and Tony Randall as E. K. Hornbeck (H. L. Mencken). The play received rave reviews and was a box office success.

Nathan Douglas and Harold Smith wrote the play into a screen script in 1960. The Douglas and Smith screenplay differs from the stage version in several respects, most notably perhaps in its downplaying of some academic and theological points, and its playing up of the trial's circus atmosphere."

and this is informative:

"Taking Liberties

Larson describes (p.225ff) how a popular history of the 1920s - Only Yesterday (1931), by F.L. Allen, editor of Harper's magazine - became the first published commentary in which the Darrow-Bryan confrontation was depicted as a defeat for Bryan and hence a defeat for anti-evolutionism.

In reality, however, Allen was no historian, and his account of the event was seriously flawed. For example, the teaching of evolution in American schools went rapidly downhill following the Scopes Trial (see Part 13 for details). Nevertheless, Allen's erroneous version of the facts was repeated in subsequent books of a similar nature for decades thereafter, eventually finding its way, in the late 1950s, into a college textbook on American history.

Playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee unintentionally helped to perpetuate the myth with their stage play Inherit the Wind, which went on to be re-written as a major film and two TV movies.

There is, however, an important difference between the two historical 'revisions'.
Where Allen's version of the trial and its aftermath came seriously adrift, as Larson demonstrates, was in his determination to make the facts fit his personal overview of the sociological significance of 20's culture. What happened thereafter, in the numerous books and articles that repeated the original errors, was that the later authors simply ignored - or weren't even aware of - the unreliability of Allen's version of the events.

By way of a contrast. Inherit the Wind, as we'll see in Part 2, was never in error, as such. And that is because, like Arthur Miller's pseudo-historical drama, The Crucible (ostensibly a depiction of the Salem witch hunts of the late 17th century), the Scopes trial was simply a literary device through which the authors could examine, and comment on, the nature and effects of McCarthyism (see A Word from the Authors in Part 2 for details). In short, it was never intended to be an accurate depiction of the original trial. There was, however, an additional irony in the choice to use the Scopes trial as a platform from which to mount an attack on the anti-Communist witch hunt of the early 1950's, for the board of the ACLU, from the time of its formation in 1920, through to the "house cleaning" of the early 1940's, was itself dominated by communists!

So what really happened at Dayton in July, 1925?
It appears that despite the constant references to it - by virtue of the ongoing confrontation over the teaching of evolution in America's public schools - most people, including many Americans, still have very little idea what really happened.
This must surely be due, at least in part, to the poor quality of the information about the trial taught in many educational organisations, and we can only wonder why some educators still present the play/film to their students as though it were some kind of documentary.

Indeed, as you can see in Part 3 - A Cult of Misinformation, it's quite amazing how widespread the misinformation about the Scopes "Monkey" Trial has become. Even the Encyclopaedia Britannica got some of its facts wrong on this one."

Answer 3

Artistic License. He wrote a play for entertainment. The trial wasnt particularly entertaining - nor was it meant to be. Pax - C

Answer 4

i think of the call refers to Hosea 8:7 "They sow the wind and gain the whirlwind."They sow the wind and gain the whirlwind." i'm acquainted with the play besides because of the fact the unique trial, and that i'm no longer quite confident why the playwright chosen the call.