Scopes Monkey Trial

A week after classes ended at ConVal, I started my summer job, rehearsing for a part in Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s classic courtroom drama Inherit the Wind, which opens at The Peterborough Players next Wednesday. It promises to be a ripsnorter, with James Whitmore as Matthew Harrison Brady squaring off against his son, James Whitmore Jr., as Henry Drummond in a fictionalized version of the 1925 ‘Scopes Monkey Trial.’
     That was the case in which a Tennessee high school teacher named John Scopes was brought to trial for violating a state law forbidding the teaching of evolution. It’s a great choice for this summer. Evolution is under attack -- again -- and with a vacancy on the Supreme Court, the issue of the separation of church and state is back on the front pages.
     But when we did the first read-through last Thursday, a single line of the play jumped out at me, and it had little to do with evolution. It comes at the climax, when Bert Cates, the character who represents John Scopes, says, ‘I’m just a schoolteacher.’
     A woman in the courtroom bursts out, ‘Not any more you ain’t!’
     At that moment, a chill ran down my spine.  Inherit the Wind is not just a play about evolution, I realized. It is about a schoolteacher who loses his job.
     It’s easy to forget that, and easier still to distance ourselves from that particular case. This is not 1925. We’re not living in a small town in Tennessee where the local minister is willing to condemn his own daughter to eternal damnation for speaking up in defense of a fellow teacher. And yet, 80 years later, in the supposedly sophisticated Monadnock Region, teachers remain vulnerable every day to attack, condemnation, and even the threat of dismissal for challenging the opinions and tastes of local citizens.
     Just a few weeks before school ended, one of my colleagues came down to the teachers’ room after a difficult meeting with some parents in the principal’s office. They were objecting to the lyrics of a song a student had chosen to sing in a concert -- the same song, by the way, that a grandmotherly elementary school principal from Massachusetts sang with the Boston Pops on the Fourth of July in front of a TV audience of millions.
     As we listened to his story, other teachers shared their own tales. I had one myself: a couple of years ago, I was asked to the principal’s office to explain an assignment I’d given in Mythology. We were comparing different cultures’ stories about the creation of mankind, and I’d asked the class to read the story of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis. Some parents had called the principal about it.
     ’Here we go,’ I thought. ‘Somebody’s upset that I’ve lumped the Bible in with mythology.’
 It turned out, however, that the parents were atheists. They were concerned that I might be forcing religion on their child.
 You can’t win, and you can’t predict what somebody will find offensive. I once met an attractive young teacher who told me that a parent claimed her child had failed this teacher’s course because he was distracted by her ‘erotic hair.’
      These were all unusual events, and the parents were well out of the mainstream of American opinion. However, the mainstream is always shifting. Many teachers feel they must be more cautious about what they say, more reluctant to pursue an interesting but controversial subject in class discussion. It’s too risky. If this trend continues, we could end up being the bland leading the bland.
 I’m not saying teachers should not be held accountable, or that parents have no right to question or complain about teachers’ behavior. But we shouldn’t have to check our constitutional rights at the classroom door. I’ve offended people, including some of my colleagues, by things I’ve written in this column. It’s not that I’m so brave. In fact, I hate confrontations. It just never occurred to me that a teacher might not have the same rights as any other citizen.
 Still, I could be wrong. John Scopes was convicted and fined one hundred dollars for the crime of teaching evolution. A Baltimore newspaper paid his fine, and the verdict was eventually overturned. But he never taught again.