The ‘20s: Culture, Consumption, and Crash 123all Asians. All were huge decreases from the late 1800s and early 1900s when
millions of people from other lands poured into America to take up low-wage
industrial jobs and create immense wealth for a small number of capitalists.
Along with the political assaults on alcohol and immigration, religious
Americans fought a war against science. Just as “creationists” today try to
prevent the science of evolution from being taught in schools, conservative
Christians fought against evolution in the early 20th Century, leading to
another sensational court case, as part of a much larger crusade for fundamen-
talism. From the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species in
1859, and into the 20th Century, American Christians were alarmed at the
scientific notion that humans evolved naturally rather than from the hand of
God. Many intellectuals and educators, often called “Modernists,” accepted
Darwin’s ideas and began to teach them to the broader public and in schools.
Fundamentalists, with long-time American ancestries and often living in rural
areas, however, believed the Bible contained the absolute and literal truth—
God had made the world and rested on the 7th Day, and so forth.
Some fundamentalist ministers gained huge followings. The Evangelical
Minister Billy Sunday, a former professional baseball player, renounced gam-
bling and became a prohibitionist. He toured the South and West, and
preached in churches or pitched tents where the flock would attend his hell-
fire and brimstone services, with sermons telling them to accept the Bible and
abandon booze or risk going to hell. “I’ve stood for more sneers and scoffs
and insults and had my life threatened from one end of the land to the other
by this God-forsaken gang of thugs and cutthroats because I have come out
uncompromisingly against them” on the issues of gambling, liquor, and danc-
ing, Sunday claimed.
As famous as he was, Billy Sunday was nowhere near the celebrity that Aimee
Semple McPherson was. “Sister Aimee” was the head of a Pentecostal church in
Hollywood, the perfect place for her religious services which often appeared to
be nightclub acts—with her “speaking in tongues,” conducting “faith healings”
[curing the ill with her religious powers], and performing other miraculous
feats. In her flowing white robes and with a charismatic personality, she was a
trailblazer in using the media to spread her religious message, with her sermons
broadcast over radio across the nation and her church becoming so popular a
new temple had to be built to accommodate crowds of 5,000. McPherson was
indeed an expert at getting attention and publicity. In 1926, she disappeared