Anti American Modernism

With the Great War finally over after four years of fighting, postwar America sought to return to normalcy under the presidency of Harding. Republicans with the support of President Harding decided to overturn the many progressive era laws and oblige to the policy of isolationism. With this focus on returning to the old days before the progressive movement, Americans were afraid that they were losing their traditional identity, therefore they resisted any changes that they perceived as un-American. This helped revitalize the KU KLUX KLAN whose membership ranged to the millions at its peak in the mid-1920s. The KKK reflected the identity of the people who were pro-Anglo-Saxon, pro-natives, and pro-Protestant and believed that foreigners and

They helped lay the new foundation that was based on the idea of modernism which challenged the old teachings of social conventions and traditional views. These traditional style of writing and of the arts were influenced mainly by Protestant New Englanders which had controlled American culture since the founding of the nation. Modernism brought forth a new set of morals and a clearer understanding of the world. One writer who reflected modernism in his literature was F. Scott Fitzgerald who wrote This side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby. His books were able to capture and vividly describe the 1920s. He wrote about the flappers and how society became less conservative as many taboos were ignored and freely broken. Fitzgerald preached in his books his central claim that the search for a material success often lead to a sense of confusion and tragedy which was illustrated with the death of Gatsby in his book The Great Gatsby. Another writer whose novels defined the roaring twenties and represented a group of writers from the Lost Generation was Ernest Hemingway. Due to being exposed to the horrors of World War 1, Hemingway used his novels as a way to criticize

The south was especially against the idea of Darwinism being taught in school because they believed it would unravel or undermined their faith in God and the bible, and it would be responsible for a moral breakdown of the youth. These people were known as fundamentalists campaigned for the government to pass laws that prohibited the subject of evolution being taught in schools. They were able to secure a major victory in three southern states known as the bible belt. The stage was set when a high school teacher, John T. Scopes, decided to teach evolution in a public which was a crime in the state of Tennessee because Tennessee was one of the three states to pass laws on banning the teaching of evolution. The famed trial came to be known as the “Monkey Trail.” Luckily for Scopes, his attorney was criminal lawyer Clarence Darrow, while William Jennings Bryan helped the prosecution. Mr. Scopes became a shadow in his own case as the focus was on the duel between Darrow and Bryan. After this debate between theology and biology ened without a definite, clear result, Scopes was still found guilty, proving a hazy, fuzzy victory for the fundamentalists. This case did not support the fundamentalists’ cause that American culture should only be influenced by religious customs and teachings and