Every society goes through periods of change every so often. As various forces are at work among the people and conditions are altered, tensions mount and attitudes change. In the United States, the 1920's were just such a time of hesitation between new beliefs and traditional values. Between the drastic occurances of World War I and the stagnation of the Great Depression, many events showed this tension.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, American society was changing rapidly. Many of these changes helped produce the tension of the 1920's. The industrialization and mass-production techniques instituted drastically altered the lives of thousands of people. both their jobs and their lifestyles changed. because of industrialization, the urban population grew, and many new inventions were produced. the new fast-paced lifestyle loosened many of the old values pe
Tension between the old and new values occured every day. One of the great conflicts was the Scopes Monkey Trial. Not only was the trial a battle between fundamentalism and Darwinism, it was a fight between tradition and new social changes. The old belief was to accept what society dictated, such as Wm. J. Bryan's (the prosecuting attorney in the Monkey Trial) thought that "everything" in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there. This statement is recorded in The Worlds' Most Famous Trial: Tennessee Evolution Case, 1925, as is a retort by Bryan's opponent, Clarance Darrow, against blind acceptance. "Perfectly easy to believe that Jonah swallowed the whale?"
Another example of the dominance of new, looser morals came from marriage/divorce statistics. Up until the 1920's, the marriage rate had been growing much faster than the divorce rate. However, suddenly in the 1920's
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