Tom: One of the films that is so telling of the Hollywood establishment’s hostility to liberty is found in the otherwise excellent film, Inherit the Wind.  Pitting Clarence Darrow (Henry Drummond) against William Jennings Bryan (Matthew Harrison Brady) in the famous “Scopes” trial for the teaching of evolution, the film brings in H.L. Mencken (E.K. Hornbeck), treating him as little more than a superficial, wise-cracking, comic-relief newspaper man.  Mencken was a man of far greater intellectual depth than Darrow and Bryan combined, but he was also an anarchist, and there was no way Hollywood was going to allow someone like this man to direct frontal assaults on the state’s efforts to restrain free thought and speech.

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