During the 1920s Americans were questioning whether to stick with the traditional views on life or go with the new modern views. The 1920s or the Roaring Twenties was a period in American history in which the economy grew massively, new inventions and ideas came about, and values were changing. Americans in the 1920s were divided by two very different viewpoints, traditional views like prohibiting alcoholic beverages in the United States and the belief in fundamentalism, however, the modern views of the new flapper and the theory of evolution were more appealing to Americans and would eventually transform American values because the ideas were new and it was an act of rebellion against their parents. Traditional Americans believed that …show more content…
The flapper was the new modern young women, who wore shorter dresses, cut her hair shorter, drank alcohol and smoked in public, casually dated men, and talked openly about sex with was very different from traditional women’s values. Women were also getting more education which led to more high paying job opportunities for them. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels including This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby show how the life of the young women was changing, by casually dating men, drinking, smoking, and dancing. These were all were examples of how the young women were disregarding traditional values and started living by their own values. Another new modern view was the belief in evolution. The theory of evolution was advanced in the nineteenth century by Charles Darwin. It states that plants and animals have evolved over millions of years and stating that humans evolved from apes, very different from the fundamentalists view that God created the world and everything in it. Now that science was improving, scientists could now prove that evolution actually happened. It was a national controversy in 1925 in the Scopes trial. In this trial a biology teacher named John Scopes was teaching evolution in Tennessee after a law was passed making teaching evolution taught in public schools illegal. Clarence Darrow was hired to defend Scopes and William Jennings Bryan was the prosecutor. In the end Darrow proved