Angela Tocco

The difficulties of WWI revealed a new American society filled with rivaling values. Americans reacted to the war with new political principles, extreme views of religion, and emerging social changes. Increased tensions were demonstrated by how Americans reacted to new social trends. The roaring 20’s manifested these societal differences in courtrooms, national politics, and in civil rights movements.
When the theory of evolution was introduced into the high school curriculum it enraged fundamentalist Christianity and created tension over the separation of church and state. Evolution versus creationism became a representation for the larger debate over religion happening in the United States. The Scopes Monkey trial was the main headline for religious tension throughout the era. Modernists like Scopes challenged the notion that everything in the bible should be literally interpreted, this lead to anti-evolutionist groups like the Anti-Evolution League, petitioning against the conflict of hell in the high school (Doc 4). Unfortunately for evolutionists the Scopes Monkey trial ended with a guilty verdict and Scopes failed to get an appeal.
However many white fundamentalists’ fears were not assuaged by the anti-evolution’s apparent success, a new terror group, the KKK, served to intimidate blacks, Jews, and Catholics who challenged the legality of segregation. Lynchings occurred in almost every state in the 1920s, not just in the Deep South. Groups like the KKK began outside of the government’s command, demonstrating the grass root movement’s strength in the country. The Klan believed they represented “real Americans” and operated with nostalgia and yearning for the “old” America (Doc 3).
Black and non-Christian people were not the only individuals mistreated in the 20’s, immigrants became the new scapegoats of post-WWI society. Immigrants were shunned and expected to ruin America, even depicted as “ticking time bombs” in a cartoon from the Chicago Tribune (Doc1). The common opinion was that a