Henry Drummond Character Analysis in Inherit the Wind | SparkNotes. The infamous criminal-defense attorney Henry Drummond arrives in Hillsboro vilified as an atheist but leaves, after losing the trial, as a hero. To the audience—and to many of the townspeople—Drummond makes a convincing case for the right of a human being to think. He accomplishes this feat by exposing …
Matthew Harrison Brady The prosecuting attorney. He is a talented orator and an experienced politician. He is a defender of fundamentalism and a self-proclaimed expert on the Bible. He is pompous and self-righteous and is reduced to a tragic figure and ultimately dies after Drummond questions him on the witness stand.
Nov 01, 2012 · Matthew Harrison Brady is the prosecuting attorney in the play,Inherit the Wind. Tom Davenport is M.H. Brady's assistant. In theplay, these two help defend the prosecuting side of …
Henry Drummond. A famous lawyer from Chicago whom the Baltimore Herald sendsto defend Cates. Drummond, a believer in human progress, argues for freedom of thought. Read an in-depth analysis of Henry Drummond.
Henry DrummondHenry Drummond A famous lawyer from Chicago whom the Baltimore Herald sendsto defend Cates. Drummond, a believer in human progress, argues for freedom of thought. Read an in-depth analysis of Henry Drummond.
Inherit the Wind In his mid thirties, E.K. Hornbeck is a brilliant newspaper columnist for the Baltimore Herald and is sent to Hillsboro to cover Cates' trial. His character shares traits with H. L. Mencken, a newspaper columnist for the Baltimore Sun who covered the Scopes trial. ... Hornbeck is a chorus character.
William Jennings BryanBrady is a caricature of the real-life prosecutor William Jennings Bryan. Like Brady, Bryan lost three presidential elections and died shortly after the Scopes Monkey Trial.
Henry Drummond, a thick, slouching man, enters. Seeing Drummond in front of the bright red of the setting sun, Melinda exclaims, “It's the Devil!” Hornbeck greets Drummond, saying “Hello, Devil. Welcome to Hell.”
Throughout the trial, he mocks Brady and his fundamentalist beliefs and the people of Hillsboro for their ignorant views about evolution. Bertram Cates The defendant in the trial, a quiet, modest 24-year-old science teacher who has been arrested for teaching evolution to his sophomore science class.
Drummond is sophisticated, charming, and idealistic. When he defends Cates, he is defending the freedom of thought and "the right to be wrong.". E.K. Hornbeck A newspaper columnist for the Baltimore Herald who is sent to Hillsboro to cover Cates' trial.
Hurdy Gurdy Man An organ grinder, accompanied by his monkey, who waits with the crowd of people for Brady's arrival. Timmy A young boy who excitedly announces to the crowd of people that Brady's train is coming. Mayor The mayor of Hillsboro.
Tom Davenport District Attorney who assists Brady during the trial. Jesse H. Dunlap A farmer and cabinetmaker who is interviewed but rejected for jury duty. George Sillers A man on the jury. Reuter's Man A reporter from Reuters News Agency.
She is a member of the Bible League and marches in the parade when Brady arrives. Elijah A hermit. He sells Bibles and voices his religious beliefs to the crowd of people awaiting Brady's train. He tries to sell a Bible to Hornbeck.
Matthew Harrison Brady The prosecuting attorney. He is a talented orator and an experienced politician. He is a defender of fundamentalism and a self-proclaimed expert on the Bible. He is pompous and self-righteous and is reduced to a tragic figure and ultimately dies after Drummond questions him on the witness stand.
Mrs. McClain A local woman who sells frond fans to people in the crowd awaiting the arrival of Brady's train. Mrs. Loomis Melinda's mother. Hawker A local man who sells hot dogs to the crowd awaiting Brady's arrival. Mrs. Blair Howard's mother.
An employee at the local feed store and a member of the jury. Drummond accepts Sillers as a juror after Sillers tells him that he focuses on making a living while his wife takes care of religious matters for both of them.
The Judge . The judge presiding over Cates’s trial. The judge conducts the trial impartially, although his personal views about the Bible’s legitimacy are in line with those of the rest of the townspeople of Hillsboro. At the mayor’s prompting, the judge gives Cates a lenient sentence after the jury’s guilty verdict.
An eleven-year-old boy who drowned while swimming in a river. Cates befriended Stebbins, who had a curious nature and enjoyed looking through Cates’s microscope. According to Reverend Brown, Stebbins was damned when he died because he was never baptized. Brown’s harsh condemnation of Stebbins disgusted Cates, who stopped attending church.
A soft-spoken and humble man, Cates has been arrested for teaching his students the theory of evolution from a biology textbook. His outlook on human knowledge is skeptical, and he wonders about the nature of the universe.
The local district attorney. Davenport assists Brady during the trial. He attempts to stop Drummond’s humiliation of Brady at the end of the trial, but by the time he objects, Brady has already made a fool of himself.
Howard Blair. A student in Cates’s science class. Howard grasps the idea of evolution in only a rudimentary way, as we see when he asks a worm in the play’s opening scene what it wants to be when it grows up. At the trial, Howard gives testimony that is used against Cates.
Henry Drummond. A famous lawyer from Chicago whom the Baltimore Herald sendsto defend Cates. Drummond, a believer in human progress, argues for freedom of thought. Read an in-depth analysis of Henry Drummond.
With Jones directing, Inherit the Wind premiered in Dallas on January 10, 1955, and received rave reviews.
Henry Drummond ( Spencer Tracy, left ) and Matthew Harrison Brady ( Fredric March, right) in the film version of Inherit the Wind (1960) Inherit the Wind is a fictionalized account of the 1925 Scopes "Monkey" Trial, which resulted in John T. Scopes ' conviction for teaching Charles Darwin 's theory of evolution to a high school science class, ...
The time is the day after the Brady/Drummond confrontation. It is early morning, and still very hot. Act Three consists of a single scene, and all the major characters are present. The courtroom is jammed with people, including several radio reporters and their bulky equipment. Cates asks Drummond if he will be found guilty. Drummond responds that when he was seven years old, he received a rocking horse named Golden Dancer as a gift. But it broke when he rode it the first time. Drummond advises him that appearances can be deceiving, and a clear-cut guilty verdict may conceal many things. He also implicitly criticizes Brady as all show and no substance. Their discussion ends. Before the trial begins, the Mayor speaks privately with the Judge in front of the bench. The mass media have been making the town look bad, and the Mayor asks the Judge to go easy on Cates should there be a guilty verdict.
Rachel convinces Meeker, the bailiff, to bring Bertram Cates out of his prison cell so that Rachel and Bert can talk. Meeker does so. Bert and Rachel's conversation tells the audience about why Bert taught evolution to his students. Rachel and Bert are in love, and hug.
Brady, increasingly uneasy with the tenor of Brown's sermon, interrupts him and quotes the Book of Proverbs: "He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind...". Brady dismisses the crowd by reminding them of Jesus Christ's command to forgive.
Scene Two occurs in the courtroom two days after the prayer meeting. It is afternoon, and very hot. The scene opens with the trial already under way. Brady examines witness Howard Blair. Afterward, Brady and Drummond exchange heated words about speech-making during the trial. Drummond attempts to cross-examine Howard, but Brady repeatedly objects to Drummond's questions (which the Judge sustains). Drummond presents a monologue in which he declares morality is meaningless but truth is valuable, then dismisses Howard from the stand.
Hillsboro, United States. Inherit the Wind is an American play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, which debuted in 1955. The story fictionalizes the 1925 Scopes "Monkey" Trial as a means to discuss the then-contemporary McCarthy trials.
Updated August 21, 2019. Playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee created this philosophical drama in 1955. A courtroom battle between the proponents of creationism and Darwin’s theory of evolution, Inherit the Wind still generates controversial debate.
The extremist views of the reverend allow Matthew Harrison Brady, the fundamentalist prosecuting attorney, to be viewed as more moderate in his beliefs, and therefore more sympathetic to the audience. When Rev. Brown summons the wrath of God, Brady calms the pastor and soothes the angry mob.
Drummond becomes involved in the trial to prevent Cates from being jailed, but Scopes was never in danger of jail time —in a letter to H.L Mencken and his own autobiography, Darrow acknowledged that he participated in the trial to attack fundamentalist thought. Cite this Article. Format.
Essentially, Hornbeck represents the lonely path of the nihilist. In contrast, Drummond is reverent about the human race.
This and other boisterous courtroom antics make Drummond disgusted with Brady.
Here are some highlights worth noting: In the play, Brady says he has no interest in "the pagan hypotheses of that book". Bryan was actually very familiar with Darwin's writings and quoted them often during the trial. Brady protests the verdict on the grounds that the fine is too lenient.
Drummond admits that he doesn’t care about what is “right.”. Instead, he cares about the “truth.”. He also cares about logic and rational thought; in the climactic courtroom exchange, he uses the Bible itself to expose a “loophole” in the prosecution's case, opening up a way for everyday church-goers to accept the concept of evolution.