Scopes Trial

The 1920’s experienced many wonderful and chaotic changes.   This roaring time period brought on new inventions, unheard of technology advancements, and life was fun and easy-going. Something that stands out though was the Butler Law.   This was passed in the state of Tennessee.   The law stated that it is illegal to teach the theory of evolution in school.   This law eventually led to the arrest of John Scopes, a high school biology teacher, in 1925.   John Scopes was accused of teaching that humans descended from a lower class of animals. Due to this trial the 1920’s cultural of flappers, gangsters, African Americans, teachers, and the Prohibition of Alcohol all were related to the trial.
With the jazz age came new rebellious women called flappers.   These women danced to jazz music, dressed in shortened skirts, cut their hair into a bob, and disregarded rules.   Since the issue of prohibition was going on, many found it convenient to go to parties, usually at clubs, and dance the night away.   During this time period people had a sense of freedom, and were not bound by what their religion guided. Therefore, these women went out to the clubs a lot. According to Father Hugh L. McMenamin, “When young girls can sit beside their youthful escorts and listen to suggestive drama, their idle hours absorbed in sexsaturated fiction; when women, both married and single, find their recreation in drinking and petting parties; when mothers clothe their daughters in a manner that exposes their physical charms to the voluptuous gaze of every passing libertine, then surely the “New Woman” is different, and it is libel on the generation that has gone to hold the contrary…”   Women where becoming to become more independent, exactly what the Scopes Trial was trying to prevent. With these party, smoking, drinking, scandalize young ladies starting to become a problem, there was about to be time for a change. There would be change and what better way than getting religion back involved and...