Inherit the Wind Contrasting Regions Quotes

This stage direction takes great efforts to portray the people from Hillsboro as somewhat ignorant, but not totally stupid. Since the playwrights are so hard on ideologically intolerant people in this play, they have to be careful not to look like hypocrites; of course, city folk can be intolerant, too.

Hornbeck's comments are a perfect example of big-city snobbery. In these lines, we get the stereotype that rural areas do not have the comforts of the city; they are dirty little hovels. Of course, then, Hornbeck is also living out the stereotype that people from the city don't have manners. Nice.

Comparing the town of Hillsboro to the buckle on the Bible belt is a humorous way to let us know a lot about not only how important religion is in the small town, but also how the big city outsiders perceive it. It's so tiny and insignificant that it can't even be the belt; it has to be the buckle on the belt.

Brady is playing on old tensions between the north and south in the U.S. to show his audience that he's one of them—not an outsider like Drummond. Even though the Civil War was almost one hundred years old at the time the play was written, those old scars are still vulnerable. Especially if you're from the South, you know that there's some truth to this animosity between the northern and southern states, even today.

Sometimes you wanna go, where everybody knows your name. And sometimes you want to get out. That's small-town life for you.

Here, Hornbeck is poking fun at the Hillsboro residents' religious beliefs. He's likening his own city to the burned-down cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, which, in the Old Testament, were destroyed by God for their sinful ways. Obviously he doesn't think modernity is bad; he just wants to make the townspeople look like fools for their outdated and ignorant (in his opinion) beliefs.

Even Hillsboro's local paper is subject to Hornbeck's snooty commentary. Here he implies that people in small towns aren't as well informed as city slickers—even if those people happen to be journalists. Ouch.

Oh, no, he didn't. But he did… Drummond turns the tables on Brady in this back-and-forth, all over a pair of questionable suspenders. His point is that Mr. Brady isn't as much of a small town boy as he seems—he's after big money and big fame. So much so that he and Mr. Drummond, the accused "city slicker," share the same taste in suspenders.

The nickname "gentleman from Chicago" is an underhanded diss. It's all polite on the surface, but this comment really aims to highlight how weird Drummond is because he's an out-of-towner. Basically, Davenport's accusing him of being a snob who thinks he's too good for the little old town of Hillsboro; and, by doing so, he's hoping to turn the jury against him.

This run-away scene seems to show that the only way to live among open-minded people is to get out of the small town. What do you think about that? Are there a lot of free-thinking small towns out there, despite what Inherit the Wind seems to imply?