DBQ 1920's
...believe Bryan’s fool ideas (Doc. C). However, although many people, even the Christians, believed in the scientific theory, it is not necessarily that no Christian on earth believes the bible or Bryan’s interpretation of the Bible. The decline in religious practices is also apparent in the ratio of marriages to divorces. According to the significant increase in divorces, it is conspicuous that the Christian moral against divorce was not well respected (Doc. D). Moreover, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union encouraged scientific research rather than their traditionally religious viewpoint into the effects of nicotine as shown in “Women Smokers”, an article from the New York Times (Doc. G). Therefore, tension between new and changing attitudes manifested through the issue of the religion versus the Evolution Theory changed the religious practices. The tension between traditional and modernism was also manifested through media. For example, in Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, published in 1922, he writes of “These standard advertised wares – toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water- heaters –” (Doc. A). This shows that the new products were more accepted. Therefore, the society preferred being comfortable with new things. Media also played a very important and significant role during the Scopes Trial of 1925. This trial was the first United States trial to be broadcasted on national radio, meaning that citizens who cannot participate in the trial could listen to the radio. What was important was that both traditional and modern ideas could be spread through the radio so that both sides can have public support. Selling copies of William Jennings Bryan’s book ‘Hell and the Highschool’ also helped gain public support of Bryan’s interpretation of the Bible. In the 1920’s, African-American writers such as Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston utilized publication to draw attention of the whites to the feeling of being black in a white world, which changed whites’ feelings about African-Americans. Like Langston Hughes and Mary B. Mullet states, blacks did not longer feel fear to be black and they rather felt pride and honor for being Negro (Doc. E and F). Therefore, the media affected the American society, especially the African-American society, significantly in the 1920’s. Tension between traditionalism and modernism was also manifested largely in many forms of arts, especially in jazz. African-American painters painted with several themes such as African-American identity, primitivism, vitality of an African community, racism, sexuality, religion, nightlife, family life, internationalism, etc. which made white people to change their beliefs about t...