Breaking Unjust Laws: Clarence Darrow and Inherit the Wind

Note: This is the first part of a two-part post.

Several years ago, on some random television-surfing weekend, I happened upon an old black-and-white movie I’d never seen. I don’t remember why I stopped to watch, but I do clearly remember how it blew me away, how I found myself wanting to clap and cheer for attorney Henry Drummond as his portrayer Spencer Tracy delivered a brilliant performance, full of powerful oratory.

This new favorite — Inherit the Wind (1960), based on a stage play, based loosely on the Scopes monkey trial (the parallels are impossible to miss, but the drama is nevertheless heavily fictionalized at times) — was a simply remarkable film; I couldn’t get enough of it. And Spencer Tracy’s superb portrayal of Drummond, the film’s fictionalized Clarence Darrow, from whom the playwrights borrowed some of the lines given to Drummond, renewed my interest in the real-life late 19th- to early 20th-century lawyer. So what, you ask, do Inherit the Wind and Clarence Darrow have to do with animal rights? Plenty.

The arguments of the film’s impassioned defense attorney ask us to recognize some important truths.* Among those truths: discomfort with having our worldview challenged isn’t an excuse for covering our ears and closing our eyes to the evidence that we may be wrong; holding blindly and stubbornly to our beliefs or ways of living with little more than tradition as a reason is lazy and not an example of our best; and digging our heels in to the point of criminalizing people’s efforts to spread knowledge and effect change is dishonorable.

Were the real Clarence Darrow alive today and able to sit down and hear the arguments of animal rights advocates, I believe he’d be an angry, eloquent voice in opposition to the repression of nonviolent animal rights activists. I believe he would be appalled at such laws as the AETA. And I believe he would lend his support to activists who recognize that in movement after movement opposing oppression — from the anti-human-slavery movement to the gay rights movement — unjust laws have had to be not only challenged but outright broken.

In his essay “Theory of Non-Resistance,” Darrow wrote, “In modern society the controlling forces arrange things as they want them, and provide that certain things are criminal.” And that is as true today as ever; it is a truth that activists for social justice movements before this one have faced, and it is a truth that animal rights activists are seeing writ large today.

See part 2: “Breaking Unjust Laws: AETA, Fugitive Slave Acts, and Oppression Connections”

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Quotation retrieved from Clarence Darrow: Verdicts Out of Court, ed. and introd. Arthur and Lila Weinberg

Photo from the New York Public Library retrieved from Wikimedia Commons

*I think the film also lays out some important reminders that would serve animal advocates well in how we deal with, think of, and approach those with whom we disagree and want to reach, but I’ll save that for another time — this two-part post is full already.