The early 1920s found
social
patterns in chaos. Traditionalists,
the older Victorians, worried that everything valuable was ending.
Younger
modernists no longer asked whether society would approve of their
behavior,
only whether their behavior met the approval of their intellect.
Intellectual
experimentation flourished. Americans danced to the sound of the Jazz
Age,
showed their contempt for alcoholic prohibition, debated abstract art
and
Freudian theories. In a response to the new social patterns set in
motion
by modernism, a wave of revivalism developed, becoming
especially
strong in the American South.
Who
would dominate American culture--the modernists or the traditionalists?
Journalists were looking for a showdown, and they found one in a
Dayton,
Tennessee courtroom in the summer of 1925....[CONTINUED] |