1920 s Essay

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Jessica Roberts
Mrs. Angeli
American Culture Honors
03 October 2014
1920s
For the United States of America, the decade following the end of World War I was a time of profound change. The prosperity of the 1920s was a time for the growing nation to experience crucial transformations in the way it earned its keep, organized work affairs, and enjoyed leisure activities. Attributes like technology, business corporations, organized crime, women’s rights, equality, and media were developing and becoming more prominent aspects of daily life in the 1920s. There were multiple people and organizations that were pushing rapid change in the American society, but there were also those who were resisting the alterations.
Both the supporters and the opposers had to put up a fight in order to try and have their voice be heard about the rapidly changing roaring twenties, and both sides were not going to back down on their opinion easily.
Change was coming, but people like creationists did not want to accept it. During this time period, groups of people were really starting to support the idea of evolution rather than the typically believed in creationism; these people were called evolutionists. Creationists and evolutionists would bash heads continuously over which theory was correct, but neither really attempted to try and compromise. Creationists were very strong believers in religion and the idea that God was the reason for everything that existed and still exists today. With evolutionists coming along and saying that science and the “big bang” was the reason for every living and

nonliving thing, anti­evolutionists were getting furious. Public schools and colleges were booming during the post­war time, and the biology textbooks being used often times gave the
American youth their first introduction to evolution. Conservative preachers, politicians and parents were shocked that evolution was moving into the schools of America, and members of the creationist community were concerned that teaching evolution as a fact instead of a theory was going to discourage student’s faith in the Bible and endanger their participation in religious practice. It was clear to the creationists that the evolutionists would probably not back down from their theories, so the creationists continued to resist the change. As much as they resisted, it did not falter the the evolutionists push for science to be incorporated into peoples beliefs.
Two other opposers of change in the 1920s were the American Federation of Labor and just some society members in general. The American Federation of Labor, or AFL for short, was completely opposed to women in the workforce. The 20th century was a time that women were fighting for equality (which will be mentioned later in this paper) and women empowerment.
The AFL thought that a woman’s place was at home, and not in a factory taking what should be a man’s job. Members of society were also resisting the changing roles of women right along side of the AFL. On top of entering the workforce, women were starting to stray away from the traditional garb which upset and disturbed the older generations. Their new ways of flaunting themselves was unladylike; they would drink, party, participate in petting and necking, dance, and even smoke. As part of the resistance, some states went to the severe lengths of passing bills in order to prevent “inappropriate” types of dress. Members of society thought that women were trying to be like men, which they did not understand or want to allow to happen. The resistance

of women’s equality did not stop with the AFL and members of society in the 1920s, it still happens today as does another type of resistance.
Organized crime boomed in the 1920s. Some of the gangsters were viewed as heroes who were “sticking it to the Man” and resisting the changes the government was making. The 18th amendment was one major reason that organized crime increased
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