126 ChaPter 3
the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the edu-
cation of the United States.”
Eventually, Darrow tricked Bryan into admitting some religious beliefs
might be open to interpretation. Scopes was eventually found guilty and fined
$100 but the trial was a travesty and widely mocked all over the country,
making fundamentalists look like ignorant fools in many eyes. It was espe-
cially tragic for Bryan, who died less than a week after the trial ended, in large
part due to the stress and the ridicule it brought down upon him.
Fundamentalism had come into conflict with more “worldly” forces before—
think of Salem in 1692—and continues to do so today. In recent years, fun-
damentalists have stepped up their attacks on “secular humanism”—the belief
that humans act according to reason and that education should be based on
verifiable facts and ideas, not biblical claims—and demanded that “creation-
ism” be taught alongside evolution in public schools. Indeed, as this is written
in 2014, the noted astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has come under attack
from many religious groups for hosting the television series Cosmos, which is
a detailed examination of the way the world was created based on long-
standing scientific evidence and rejects biblical claims for the origins of the
universe. Despite Scopes, America was more secular than ever, and ready to
escape the trauma of the war, in large measure by buying more things.Culture and Economic Growth
Many of the cultural shifts in the 1920s resulted from a fundamental transfor-
mation and growth of the American economy after the Great War. As noted,
the U.S. came out of the war as a creditor nation, and government bureaucra-
cies like the War Industries Board and War Labor Board provided new ideas
on government-business cooperation that would expand and create an even
more vast economy. Indeed, we can refer to this as a political economy, a system
in which the government and private economic interests are fully intercon-
nected and working together for the same purposes [as we will see below, for
instance, in discussing trade associations]. This, rather than the mythical system
Americans are told about, one in which individual companies brutally com-
pete against each other for market shares while the state is supposed to sit on
the sidelines, is how capitalism works. And in the 1920s, especially due to the
efforts of Herbert Hoover, the U.S. developed what some called “the new
capitalism” and others termed “the corporate state.”