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 waveof
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]
