This paper examines how "Inherit the Wind" was written by playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee as a response to
the threat to intellectual freedom presented by the anti-communist panic of the McCarthy era. The film does not claim to be an historically accurate depiction of the Scopes trial and place names and names of trial participants are changed. It analyzes how the movie promotes a stereotype of the public
debate about the creation and
evolution that gives all virtue and intelligence to the Darwinist.