From the movie “Inherit the Wind”, what does the title line mean relative to the movie story?
Best,
Sally
It’s a biblical quotation from Proverbs. In the play, Brady (the William Jennings Bryan character) warns Rev. Brown (the fundamentalist minister who’s whipped the townspeople up against evolution). Brown’s daughter is Cates (the Scopes character)'s fiance, and Brown preaches a sermon damning Cates and all of his supporters and the people who want to forgive him to hell, and one of those supporters is his own daughter. Brady tells Brown and the congregation that Christ’s message is about forgiveness for everybody and that it’s Brown’s duty as a minister to save souls, not call for their damnation.
Huh. I always thought it meant that if you irritate your near and dear, your family members will taunt you by answering “I fart in your general direction”.
I could never figure out why inheriting the wind was supposed to be a bad thing. Having the ability to control the wind would be AWESOMELY COOL.
Why yes, I do read a lot of comics.
I think that’s the point. No one can control the wind, and no one can own it.
I always thought it meant that if you trouble your own house and make your own family hate you, you inherit the wind; i.e. nothing.
I think of the term “wind” in this case as a euphemism for severe wind = storm.
In olden times even moderate storms were a pretty destructive force. It could rip your tents, scatter your gathered crops & scatter your livestock. In short, make a fairly comfortable middle class peasant suddenly destitute.
I see the quote as meaning “If you stir up family trouble, the supernatural will punish you with bad weather. So don’t do it.”
I’d thought it to be a reference of the larger jist of the story, that troubling your own house was the willingness to question the status quo, in this case that evolution, not God, was the creator of man. Doing so put you at risk of being subject to a great deal of backlash and strife from belivers.
This of course would be as it pertains to the story and not its biblical intent. However, I’ve not seen the movie in a long, long time.
Specifically, Proverbs 11:29. Here’s the verse as it appears in several different translations/versions of the Bible, some of them less literal than others (thanks, biblegateway.com!):
I think I saw the movie within the past two or three years, but I agree with lieu’s main point and would add that the outcome of this particular “troubling of the house” would be to have to accept the dreaded concept that we are descended from apes (as if that were a bad thing). Such ideas were not popular in the 20’s and may still lack a wholesale acceptance by a more enlightened populace of our day. 
Middle-class peasant?
The peasantry *were *the middle class in those days. The great bulk of typical Joe Shmoes of that time & place.
And my point is that some guy living about as well as he expected his & most other folks’ lives to be could lose it all to a severe thunderstorm.
Them and the bourgeois serfs.