Volume 16 , Issue 14

The Early 1920s

It was the early 1920s we find social patterns were in chaos. Traditionalists (older Victorians) worried that everything valuable was ending. Then we have the younger Modernists no longer asking whether society would approve of their behavior.

The Modernists and the Traditionalists would dominate American culture during the early 1920s. The Modernists were asking whether their behavior met the approval of their intellect. Intellectual experimentation flourished during that time. Americans danced to the sound of the Jazz Age, showed their contempt for alcoholic prohibition, debated abstract art and Freudian theories. With the wave of modernism, another wave of revivalism developed in the American South, becoming strong.

It was also a time when journalists were looking for a showdown, finding one in a Dayton, Tennessee courtroom in the summer of 1925. It was the Scopes Trial with a jury to decide the fate of John Scopes, a high school biology teacher charged with illegally teaching the theory of evolution. The meaning of the trial emerged through its interpretation as a conflict of social and intellectual values.

William Jennings Bryan led a Fundamentalist crusade to banish Darwin's theory of evolution from American classrooms. Bryan cared deeply about equality, but worried that Darwin's theories were being used by supporters of a growing eugenics movement that was advocating sterilization of inferior stock.

Bryan, the Great Commoner, came to his cause out a concern that the teaching of evolution would undermine traditional values he had long supported, and because he had a compelling desire to remain in the public spotlight. A spotlight Bryan had occupied since his famous Cross of Gold speech at the 1896 Democratic Convention.

During the Scopes trial, Bryan had transformed himself into a sort of Fundamentalist Pope. It was in 1925, Bryan and his followers had succeeded in getting legislation introduced in 15 states to ban the teaching of evolution. It was in February, 1925, that Tennessee enacted a bill introduced by John Butler making ti unlawful to teach any theory that denied the story of divine creation as taught by the bible and to teach instead that man was descended from a lower order of animals.   |  View or Add Comments (0 Comments)   |   Receive updates ( subscribers)  |   Unsubscribe

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