Commentary Sheet – Paul Kengor
Date 03.26.13
Day Tuesday
Air Time 6:13
Title:
“Inherit the Propaganda”
Bio:
Paul Kengor is professor of political science and director of the Center for Vision & Values
at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania. He is author of several books, including
God and Ronald Reagan, God and George W. Bush, and The Crusader: Ronald Reagan
and the Fall of Communism.
More Info:
www.visionandvalues.org or www.faithandfreedom.com
One of my favorite channels, Turner Classic Movies, recently showed the film, Inherit
the Wind. The 1960 movie is about the showdown between Clarence Darrow and William
Jennings Bryan over the Scopes Monkey Trials, an epic battle over evolution vs. creationism in
public schools.
It’s an awful movie. As I pondered clicking the channel to suffer through a scene, I tossed
up my arms in frustration as I read the short description on the guide. It said: “A fundamentalist
orator opposes a liberal lawyer defending a Darwinist teacher in the 1920s South.”
I’m sure that description conjures up all sorts of pleasing, self-satisfying images in the
modern 20-something secular-progressive mind. But not so fast.
Who, in truth, was the “fundamentalist orator,” and who was the “liberal lawyer?”
First off, the “fundamentalist lawyer” was one of the greatest progressive Democrats. He
was William Jennings Bryan, who, remarkably, was the Democrats’ nominee for president not
once, not twice, but three times. He favored government intervention and regulation, and was
vehemently anti-Big Business, anti-Big Bank, and anti-Republican. He was a leading
progressive in the days when progressives warmly embraced religion and insisted on its
presence in the public square.
Today’s aggressively secular progressives are probably befuddled to hear this, given what
they are taught (or, more important, not taught) today.
So, that’s William Jennings Bryan, the so-called “fundamentalist orator” of Inherit the
Wind.
What about the “liberal lawyer?”
In the movie, the liberal lawyer—one Clarence Darrow—cleverly eviscerates the
“fundamentalist,” and thus, for liberals, is the undaunted, unparalleled hero.
In truth, however, the full Darrow isn’t so simple.
Behind the image of the wise-cracking, supremely brilliant fount of wisdom portrayed by
Hollywood, Clarence Darrow was an ACLU lawyer used and abused and rolled and duped by
American communists, who adored him for his atheist work in the Scopes Monkey Trials.
These American Leninists also adored Darrow because he defended them and their Marxist
leadership in a series of dramatic court cases in the 1920s. These American Bolsheviks, having
sworn their loyalty to the Soviet Comintern, were being properly pursued—by the
liberal/progressive Woodrow Wilson administration, no less—for supporting armed revolution
against the American system, which they planned to replace with a so-called “Soviet American
republic.”
In these trials, Darrow didn’t hesitate to soak up and parrot the propaganda line of the
American Communist Party. Not only were American communists not loyal to the USSR,
insisted Darrow in the courtroom, but they were the embodiment of the American Founding
Fathers!
For this outrageous performance, the communists were eternally grateful to Clarence
Darrow, who they misled so nicely and so easily.
Naturally, Hollywood has never made a movie about this Darrow fiasco. And, of course,
the open-minded champions of “liberal learning” in our schools and colleges haven’t touched it
either. Google the various on-line encyclopedia references on Darrow. They omit all of this.
Predictably, Hollywood’s glorification of Clarence Darrow in Inherit the Wind offers just the
opposite image. It portrays Darrow as an unrivaled genius, while showing Bryan as a stupid,
slack-jawed fundamentalist preacher.
Sadly, an entire generation of popular culture was schooled on the Monkey Trials by this
movie, a mis-education that hasn’t ended.
For Moody Radio, I’m Paul Kengor, and that’s my view.