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Monday
Watching Donald Trump rage posting while hunkered down in his Florida home, I am reminded of the final scene in Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee’s 1955 play about the 1925 Scopes monkey trial, which I read as a high school student. There we see a larger-than-life political figure collapse like a balloon with a slow leak.
Inherit the Wind is loosely based on the prosecution of biology teacher John T. Scopes for teaching Darwinian evolution in a Dayton, Tennessee high school. The main drama involves a clash between three-time presidential candidate and populist politician William Jennings Bryan (Matthew Harrison Brady in the play) and legendary defense lawyer Clarence Darrow (Henry Drummond). Darrow and Scopes lost the case—Scopes was fined $100—but won the publicity war. The verdict, meanwhile, would be overturned on a technicality.
In applying the play to our current political situation, Brady (Bryan) would be Donald Trump, carrying the flag for Christian fundamentalism, whereas Drummond (Darrow) is the Harris/Walz ticket, liberals arguing for science, free speech, and teachers.
While the parallels are hardly exact—unlike Bryan, Trump actually won a presidential contest—what strikes me is how diminished Brady (Bryan) is by the end of the play. He begins an imposing figure, descending upon this small Tennessee town to impose his values. Even though he wins his case, however, he himself has been humiliated on the stand and no longer towers over everyone else. He dreams of giving a grand speech at trial’s end but the judge rules it irrelevant (just as Trump’s Manhattan judge did) and postpones it to after the trial. Here’s the final scene, which begins with Brady objecting to what he regards as a ridiculously small fine:
Brady: Did your Honor say one hundred dollars?
Judge: That is correct. (Trying to get it over with) This seems to conclude the business of the trial.
Brady (thundering) Your Honor, the prosecution takes exception! Where the issues are so titanic, the court must mete out more drastic punishment…To make an example of this transgressor! To show the world—
The trial complete, the Judge invites Bryan to give his speech:
Judge (to public): We beg your attention, please, ladies and gentlemen! Colonel Brady has some remarks to make which I am sure will interest us all! (A few of the faithful fall dutifully silent. But the milling about and the slopping of lemonade continues. Two kids chase each other in and out among the spectators. annoying the perspiring Radio Man. Brady stretches out his arms, in the great attention-getting gesture.)
BRADY My dear friends … ! Your attention, please! (The bugle voice reduces the noise somewhat further. But it is not the eager, anticipatory hush of olden days. Attention is given him, not as the inevitable due of a mighty monarch, but grudgingly and resentfully)
Fellow citizens, and friends of the unseen audience. From the hallowed hills of sacred Sinai, in the days of remote antiquity, came the law which has been our bulwark and our shield. Age upon age. man have looked to the law as they would look to the mountains, whence cometh our strength. And here, here in this – (The Radio Man approaches Brady nervously.)Radio Man: Excuse me. Mr. – uh, Colonel Brady; would you … uh … point more in the direction of the enunciator …?
(The Radio Man pushes Brady bodily toward the microphone. As the orator is maneuvered into position, he seems almost to be an inanimate object, like a huge ornate vase which must be precisely centered on a mantel. In this momentary lull, the audience has slipped away from him again. There’s a backwash of restless shifting and murmuring. Brady’s vanity and cussedness won’t let him give up, even though he realizes this is a sputtering anticlimax. By God, he’ll make them listen!)
Brady (Red-faced, his larynx taut, roaring stridently): As they would look to the mountains whence cometh our strength. And here, here in this courtroom, we have seen vindicated – (A few people leave. He watches them desperately, out of the comer of his eye) We have seen vindicated –
Radio Man (After an off-stage signal): Ladies and gentlemen, our program director in Chicago advises us that our time here is completed. Harry Y. Esterbrook speaking. We return you now to our studios and “Matinee Musicale.” (He takes the microphone and goes off. This is the final indignity to Brady; he realizes that a great portion of his audience has left him as he watches it go. Brady brandishes his speech, as if it were Excalibur. His eyes start from this head, the voice is a tight, frantic rasp.)
Brady: From the hallowed hills of sacred Sinai … (He freezes. His lips move, but nothing comes out. Paradoxically, his silence brings silence. The orator can hold his audience only by not speaking.)
And then this:
(There seems to be some violent, volcanic upheaval within him. His lower lip quivers, his eyes stare. Very slowly, he seems to be leaning toward the audience. Then, like a figure in a waxworks, toppling from its pedestal, he falls stiffly, face forward…The sheaf of manuscript, clutched in his raised hand, scatters in mid-air. The great words flutter innocuously to the courtroom floor.)
Historically, Bryan died five days after the trial’s completion but in the play he dies at this moment, at which point the journalist in attendance (based on H.L. Mencken) makes some cynical remark. In response, Drummond unexpectedly defends Brady, noting that he was once a great man.
I don’t want to be premature here since Trump could still win the election, but I could well imagine him going out in a similar way. “Not with a bang but a whimper,” as Eliot puts it.
Trump, however, is no Bryan, who once defended midwestern farmers against rapacious east coast banks insistent upon maintaining the gold standard (“You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold”). For his part, Trump has never cared about anyone but himself. Rather than invoking “the hallowed hills of sacred Sinai,” he seethes with jealousy at his rival’s crowd sizes and tweets out things like the following:
Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? There was nobody at the plane, and she “A.I.’d” it, and showed a massive “crowd” of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST! She was turned in by a maintenance worker at the airport when he noticed the fake crowd picture, but there was nobody there, later confirmed by the reflection of the mirror like finish on the Vice Presidential Plane. She’s a CHEATER. She had NOBODY waiting, and the “crowd” looked like 10,000 people! Same thing is happening with her fake “crowds” at her speeches. This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING – And they’re even worse at the Ballot Box. She should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE. Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING!
[Narrator: “The photos weren’t faked and the crowd sizes were real.”]
A man who desires to command center stage and strike fear in his rivals risks becoming reduced to a weird sideshow. The more panicked Trump becomes, the more likely he is to lose an election to this woman of color—which for him would be the ultimate humiliation.
Or as Solomon puts it in Proverbs (CSB 11:29), “The one who brings ruin on his household will inherit the wind, and a fool will be a slave to someone whose heart is wise.”
