Hey there and welcome back to Heimler’s
History. We’ve been going through Unit 7 of the AP U.S. history curriculum and
in the last video we talked mainly about the new manufacturing and communication
technologies that arrived on the scene, and in this video we’re staying in the
1920s but we’re going to focus on culture and politics. So if you’re ready to get
them brain cows milked, let’s get to it. So by 1920 more than half of Americans
lived in cities. And with this shifting of American demographics, new opportunities were
opened up for women, international immigrants, and internal migrants, and I’m kind of in the
mood to look at those one at a time. First, new opportunities opened up for women. Generally
speaking, most middle class women were expected to have babies make the home a haven of rest.
But for those women living in urban centers, more opportunities to enter the workforce were
available, especially in jobs like nursing and teaching. And women also worked unskilled
labor jobs in factories, but don’t worry, they usually received a fraction of the
wages men did for performing the same job. Some women also threw off convention
during this era by cutting their hair short and smoking and drinking, and
showing their ankles in public. They were known as the flappers and they were a kind
of symbol of women’s liberation during the 20s. Next up on the opportunity train were
international immigrants. So after World War I was over there was yet another
large influx of immigrants, especially from southern and Eastern Europe and Asia. And do
I even need to tell you what the response was? Who can tell me what the response was? Oh me?
That’s right it was yet another backlash of nativism. This same thing happened in
the immigration wave of the 1840s and then again in the 1880s and now in the 1920s
it’s happening again. Nativists be nativists, and they’re always going to react strongly when
people who are not like them start flooding the American shores. And just to remind you, nativism
is the effort to protect the rights of native-born citizens (especially White Anglo-Saxon Protestant
natives) against the interests of immigrants. And the truth is, the nativist fears were the same
as they were in previous periods. Workers feared they’d lose their jobs to immigrants who would
work for lower wages, and there were others who worried about the pollution of the white race.
Now this nativist backlash actually produced some legislation in the form of two immigration
quota acts. First. Was the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 which limited immigration to 3% of the
population measured by the 1910 census. And second was the National Origins Act of 1924
which restricted immigration even further. Okay, third, let’s talk about internal migrations
and the big one to know during the 20s was the Great Migration. This was just part two of
the Exodusters movement that we dealt with in the last period. Huge numbers of the southern black
population left the south in order to settle in the North and Midwest. No small portion of them
settled in New York, and especially Harlem. And there, something magnificent occurred, namely,
the Harlem Renaissance which was a revival of the arts and intellectual pursuits of the recently
migrated black population. Under this heading we see the birth of jazz in the hands of musicians
like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. Writers like Langston Hughes and Claude McKay put
words to the black experience in America. Another group of writers you should know
during this period were called by Gertrude Stein the Lost Generation. In this group
you had folks like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Some of their main themes
were the pervasive materialism that plagued American culture and the waste of life
and resources expended in World War I. Okay, now let’s shift and talk about
a different kind of cultural crisis, namely the growing division between urban and
rural Protestants. Urban Protestants considered themselves modernists whose faith was large
enough to embrace the changing culture with respect to gender roles and Darwin’s increasingly
popular evolutionary theory of origins. Rural Protestants considered themselves fundamentalists
who condemned the degradation of morals they saw in the cities. And probably the main reason they
could not abide such changes was because they believed that every word of the Bible must be
taken literally. At least, that’s how they’re commonly portrayed. But many fundamentalists
weren’t as dumb as that makes them sound. They understood that not every word of the Bible
is taken literally. When God says that he will gather his people under the shelter of his wing,
fundamentalists don’t think that God is a giant cosmic chicken. I think what fundamentalists
would say about themselves is not that they take every word of the Bible literally, but that
they take every word of the Bible seriously. However, they did take the six-day
creation presented in Genesis 1 literally, and that led to a great clash that gives us
a kind of paradigm for this fight between modernists and fundamentalists. The event I’m
speaking of is the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925. So in Tennessee it was illegal at that time to
teach Darwin’s theory of evolution. But a saucy teacher by the name of John Scopes decided it
was a dumb law, began teaching Darwin, and was subsequently arrested. The case was immediately
seized upon by the media and it became a highly publicized proceeding. Clarence Darrow defended
Scopes and the prosecuting attorney was populist hero and thrice-failed presidential candidate
William Jennings Bryan. Now I’m not going to give you a play by play of the proceedings, but
essentially what you need to know is that under the incisive questioning of Darrow, Bryan
and the fundamentalism he defended ended up looking as if it was unable to defend itself
against the onslaught of modernism. In the end, Scopes was indeed convicted for breaking
the law, but his conviction was overturned on a technicality. But what’s important about
this case is that as America watched it unfold, the general sentiment is that modernism
had triumphed over fundamentalism. Alright, that’s it. If you need help getting an
A in your class and a five on your exam in May, want me to keep making these videos, I’m
not going to be a fundamentalist about it, but you should subscribe. Alright, Heimler out.