Another event was to rock the nation, not just in 1920 when the event occurred, but over the next seven years as the nation – and even the world – debated the event and the way it was handled by the American justice system.  On April 15, 1920 robbers held up and killed one of two men transporting the company payroll of the Slater Morrill Shoe Company in Braintree, Massachusetts.  Suspicions went immediately to a group of local Galleanist anarchists, of whom Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were arrested and charged with the crime.

The only real evidence to work with were the casings of bullets used in the attack. Testimonies by witnesses were confused and claims were made that the police had manipulated the evidence.  Also there was a rush to judgment by the presiding judge, which later would become a major point of those who claimed that the two men were unfairly tried and sentenced for the murder the following summer (July 1921).

Almost immediately the court case became something of the case of the century. Writers, academics and even artists got into the act, protesting the probable innocence of the two Italians, citing the growing xenophobia (fear/hatred of foreigners) of Americans as the only driving force behind the conviction.

For the next six years the case was debated widely as the case was appealed through the American court system.  Even the world got in on the act. Americans were widely understood to be cowboys when it came to justice, and the assumption arose that this was all nothing more than a typical vigilante lynching for which Americans were famous.  Even the Pope intervened on Sacco and Vanzetti's behalf, asking Americans to check their motives.  Then when finally in 1927 the sentence of death was issued for the two accused, protests (even riots) broke out in a number of the world's major cities.  Nonetheless in August of 1927 the two were put to death in the electric chair.³

³The case continued however to draw the interest of journalists, artists and political activists over the decades that followed.  In 1977 the liberal Massachusetts Governor Michel Dukakis issued a formal proclamation that the case was clearly unjust and that Sacco and Vanzetti's names should be cleared of the crime.  However subsequent statements (most recently in 2005) by Italian colleagues of both men made it fairly clear that Sacco had indeed done the shooting and Vanzetti had been involved … though only in the robbery portion of the event.

But undoubtedly the most dramatic confrontation of the decade between the two cultures occurred over the issue of the teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution in the public schools.

In 1925 the two sides, liberal urban America and conservative rural America met for something of a showdown in Dayton, Tennessee, over the question of teaching Darwinism in Tennessee’s public schools.  The battle was over the fundamental question: was man descended, as Darwin stated, through the evolutionary process of natural selection ("survival of the fittest") from some early version of a primate (something of an early "monkey" specie) – or was he, as the Bible states, created fully as a man by God in a single event?

The confrontation came to pass when in May of 1925, a group of Dayton civic leaders met at F.E. Robinson's Drugstore and decided to challenge Tennessee's new statute forbidding the teaching of Darwinist evolution.  One motivation for holding the trial in Dayton was to revive the town's flagging economy.  They knew that this would somehow put Dayton on everyone's map (and indeed it did!).

The mastermind behind this event was George Washington Rappleyea, an engineer and geologist who managed the Cumberland Coal and Iron Company.  Rappleyea was widely credited with suggesting that Dayton challenge the new anti-evolution statute.  Cooperating in this venture was the twenty-four-year-old John Thomas Scopes.  He was teaching at the local high school, his first job after graduating from the University of Kentucky in 1924.  He taught algebra and physics, served as athletic coach, and occasionally substituted in biology classes at the Rhea County High School.  The idea was that he would teach Darwinist biology – at least once – in violation of the state’s law prohibiting the teaching of Darwinism.  This act would then set up the opportunity for the legal world in Tennessee to decide whether such a law was indeed constitutional.

During the extremely hot summer of 1925 the "Scopes Monkey Trial" riveted the attention of the nation as newspapermen from all around the country crowded into the steaming courthouse to follow the trial.

The old political warhorse, William Jennings Bryan, represented WASPish America, with its fervent dislike of Darwinism.

Representing the Darwinists was Clarence Darrow, the celebrity New York lawyer who had dazzled the nation with his clever defense of two society boys who had killed a young fourteen-year-old neighbor in order to see what it would be like to commit the ultimate crime and to prove their Darwinian superiority (Darrow blamed their actions on the extravagantly wealthy socio-economic circumstances that had distorted their moral sensitivities).  Darrow also represented the fast-rising urban, secular culture which ridiculed the superstition of the traditional Christian culture.

Backing up Darrow was the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which was to become the leading voice behind a movement to replace WASPish Christianity with Secular-Humanism as America’s cultural-religious underpinning.

Which side actually won the 1925 contest depended on the natural sympathies of the person giving answer to the question.  From pulpits, anti-Darwinism seemed vindicated by the fact that the judge decided to support the law prohibiting the teaching of Darwinism in the Tennessee public schools.  But the up-East urban newspapers celebrated the quite obvious (obvious to them anyway) intellectual victory of the scientific Darwinists over the superstitious, backwoods fantasies of the anti- Darwinists.

Closing arguments were not allowed (defense attorney Darrow refused and thus prosecuting attorney Bryan was not permitted to do so either) and the sentence of guilty was quickly decided in matters of only minutes on July 21.  But Bryan published his proposed closing argument subsequently.  It is well worth the read because it is actually prophetic:

Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine.  It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm-tossed human vessel.  It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the ship of its compass and thus endanger its cargo.  In war, science has proven itself an evil genius; it has made war more terrible than it ever was before. Man used to be content to slaughter his fellowmen on a single plane, the earth's surface. Science has taught him to go down into the water and shoot up from below and to go up into the clouds and shoot down from above, thus making the battlefield three times as bloody as it was before; but science does not teach brotherly love.  Science has made war so hellish that civilization was about to commit suicide; and now we are told that newly discovered instruments of destruction will make the cruelties of the late war seem trivial in comparison with the cruelties of wars that may come in the future.  If civilization is to be saved from the wreckage threatened by intelligence not consecrated by love, it must be saved by the moral code of the meek and lowly Nazarene.  His teachings, and His teachings alone, can solve the problems that vex the heart and perplex the world.

This deep urban-rural cultural divide also registered itself as a deepening split within the Christian community itself.  There were a number of issues that were behind this split, though one, the matter of biblical inerrancy, was definitely the most important.  Almost everything else about the Liberal-Fundamentalist split followed from the ongoing issue of biblical inerrancy.

In the early 1900s the question of biblical inerrancy gathered force as a divisive issue, first within the Presbyterian denomination and then soon within the other mainline denominations.  Heresy trials abounded as theologians and pastors lined up on one side or the other of the issue.  For a time the Presbyterian denomination favored the Conservative view, demanding that all pastors adhere to five basic doctrines in order for their ordination to be in good standing with the denomination.  But Liberals or "modernists" were gathering strength within the denomination.  And with the unification with the Cumberland Presbyterian denomination, the Presbyterian Church shifted strongly toward the Liberal side of the debate.

Meanwhile, Presbyterian layman, Lyman Stewart, sponsored a new series of publications entitled The Fundamentals published between 1910 and 1915.  This would become a rallying point for a number of Conservative theologians of a wide number of Christian denominations.  In 1915 the Conservative journal, The Presbyterian, finally published a declaration entitled "Back to Fundamentals." And thus the term '"Fundamentalist" was brought into greater use to describe Conservative Christian theology.

At the same time the Liberal side of Christianity was taking a broader (Conservatives claimed shallower) approach to the faith, admitting that there was more than one road to God, that God’s love extended to the saved and unsaved alike, and that Christians ought to be more ecumenical among themselves (ignoring doctrinal differences among Christians of all types) and more accommodating in their outreach to other cultures.

The gauntlet was thrown down in 1922 when the Liberal preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick presented a sermon at the First Presbyterian Church of New York City entitled "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?"  So incensed was the General Assembly (sort of a Presbyterian Congress) at what it considered an attack on the fundamentals of the faith that it considered removing Fosdick from the pulpit (he was defended by the New York Lawyer, John Foster Dulles, who would serve as America’s secretary of state during the Eisenhower presidency in the 1950s).  But Fosdick instead simply resigned his position (John D. Rockefeller would subsequently select Fosdick to pastor the prestigious Riverside Church that he personally had funded!).

On the other hand, one of the foremost of the believers in the Christian Fundamentals and thus a major opponent of Christian Liberalism was J. Gresham Machen, New Testament professor at Princeton Seminary.  Among the several books he published was Christianity and Liberalism (1923), in which he claimed that Christian Liberalism was not even Christianity, but some other religion.  He was distressed that Christian Liberals believed (like Unitarians) that Christ was not primarily a personal savior but instead a personal teacher, setting moral examples which all, Christian and non-Christian, ought to follow.  And Liberalism tended to view Christianity as simply one of many ways that led to the Fatherhood of God.

But the Liberal-Conservative balance of power was shifting within the Presbyterian denomination during the 1920s.  When in 1928 the Presbyterian General Assembly voted to move Princeton from a traditionally Conservative theology to a more Liberal position, Machen and two other Princeton professors withdrew from the seminary to start a new one in nearby Philadelphia: Westminster Seminary.

Actually, all this fascination with the exciting world of massive materialism and unlimited personal freedom seemed at times even to urban America to exist simply to cover over a darker suspicion about life, a suspicion that lurked just below the surface of all this hoopla.

The Great War – and its inevitable outcome of nothingness – had shaken the moral foundations of the American nation (as it did with every other participating nation) to the very core of what the society understood as being right and wrong. A form of cultural cynicism set in following the collapse of the Wilsonian dream in America.  Many Americans (and Europeans) took the attitude that you had better enjoy life while you had it.  "Eat, drink and be merry today because tomorrow you may die." Further, be wary of the high Idealism of those who want to invite you into some kind of higher world.  Their world is only a fiction. The only world that really exists – or matters – is the one immediately in front of you.  Such an attitude was considered being truly "realistic," and sophisticated.

In keeping with this mood of rampant cynicism, the general understanding was that there were no rights and wrongs, only just human impulses that people needed to be socially free to follow out.  Whether these impulses were right or wrong (unless they were obviously self-destructive) was a matter that no one was supposed to be in a position to be a judge, either of themselves or of others.

Thus free-thinking artists and intellectuals boasted of their escape from the intellectual tyrannies of excessive patriotism and superstitious piety.  They proudly professed belief in nothing except the immediacy of their own personal existence – and were quick to mock those who held higher ideals, whether founded on the past or the future.  Philosophically they referred to themselves sometimes as Humanists, sometimes as Existentialists – but always as scientific.

But actually, as pure secularists (believing only in the reality of the immediately surrounding material order), they tended to be simply hedonistic cynics.  They supported no causes – nor did they pay much attention to the social requirements of the larger social order.  Those expected to lead the post-war societies got little or no support from this self-indulgent social group.

Thus it was that despite all this freedom, despite the material glitz and glamor of the 1920s, there was beneath it all a spiritual emptiness, one that led Gertrude Stein – the grand patroness of the large number of American authors and poets who gathered in Paris to search for meaning to life – to call her literary flock gathered there the "Lost Generation."  This group included such Americans as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, and Dorothy Parker.

The pointless brutality of the war had stolen from this generation the optimism that had characterized Western culture during the Progressivist Era.  True, the material level that the people were able to live at was unparalleled in history.  But this now seemed to be very small comfort to these intellectuals, who felt the necessity to plumb the depths of the human soul for some kind of new direction that would be worthy of the kind of commitment to life that they had felt before the war.  But mostly they found no such direction or worth.

The cynics.  The spirit of these lost souls was summed up in such works as Hemmingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) and Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise (1920), The Beautiful and Damned (1922) and The Great Gatsby (1925).  This last-mentioned novel was highly representative of this Jazz Age mood: behind all the wealth, the fast life, the visible material achievements was a spiritual emptiness and social confusion that results in the murder of the gifted but corrupt young Gatsby and the collapse of the small social group that had once surrounded the Great Gatsby.  Likewise, Hemmingway's novels seem to turn on the issue of hopes that lead nowhere because of life's complex, countering circumstances that the human will seems unable to overcome.

The "Reds."  Meanwhile other intellectuals, repulsed by the failure of American Progressivism to deliver on its promises, turned to other philosophies in the hope that they might find something more substantial to build their social hopes on. Marxism proved to be particularly popular, as the news coming out of Red Communist Russia (tainted by careful manipulation of that news by the Communists themselves) seemed to be working quite well once the Russian Civil War was over and Lenin's Communists had full mastery over the Russian situation, moving the country from feudal backwardness into something quite modern – and quite humane because it was supposedly so very communal.  To a group of socially empty intellectual Westerners, this certainly was bound to have a very, very strong appeal.

Then there was the degree of comforting logic that seemingly could be found in the psychological theories of the Austrian doctor Sigmund Freud.

Though none of his theories were derived through the exacting rigors of the scientific method by which the rest of science accepted or rejected new truths, Freud's theories went unquestioned in much of urban America – and in fact were widely accepted as absolute Truth, because they made sense (when little else did)! That is to say, Freud's speculations about the motives and behaviors of humans seemed to offer an explanation to a culture, to a lifestyle, to a worldview that otherwise seemed shallow and mindless and beneath the dignity of human reason. Freud revived some element of hope that what the post-war, post-Christian culture was doing was actually logical.

Basically, Freud explained that we humans did things that made no sense because we were driven by even deeper, unexplored urges that ran beneath the level of what our conscious minds were capable of understanding and thus directing our actions in a logical manner.  Freud speculated that these subconscious urges were formed in our early childhood out of sexual urges that had to be repressed in order to form us into reasonably well-functioning social creatures – that is, responsible members of society.  Freud held to the idea that by going back in our earliest memories and revisiting the events of our early childhood that were part of this repressive experience, we might be freed from such repression, and find indeed fuller, more rewarding lives socially than the ones we were typically experiencing during the Roaring Twenties!

Freud mocked the idea of there being any ultimate truths that directed human existence, only socially useful ideas by which we humans were indoctrinated into society.  Religion was chief among these socially useful ideas.  Religion in itself could not be said to be true, for in exploring the many religious beliefs around the world it became clear to Freud (and most other intellectuals of those days) that the truths of religion were simply cultural explanations offered as comfort (such as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny) to societies trying to make logical sense of an existence that otherwise had no particular logic to it.  In short, to Freud, religion was a neurosis, or a useful illusion we fed ourselves in order to comfort ourselves in the face of a very difficult existence.  To Freud, and to the hundreds of thousands of hip (cool) Freudian followers that believed Freud to be the supreme prophet of modern times, religion in itself was completely unrelated to Truth, and indeed was the source of some of the most illogical and cruel of human acts in history.⁴

However the followers of Freud failed to observe the fact that Freudian psychology itself was valued so highly by them only because "it made sense," ... which thus put Freudianism in the same category as the religions Freud mocked because they could be said to be true only because they too made sense to their religious followers.  Freud himself made it clear that just because something made sense did not make it true.  It merely made it socially useful.

And thus it was that Freudian followers followed Freud religiously!  Indeed, in all this, Freud and his Freudian followers were helping to construct a new cultural Truth, contributing greatly to a new post-Christian religion within Western society, the Secular Humanism that was sweeping the intellectual circles of Europe and America.

⁴Certainly to the followers of Freud, the experience of the recent "Great War" exposed such dangerous religious folly, in that each of the contending parties in the war claimed "Gott mit uns" (God is with us).  Surely God was with no one during the war, unless God was indeed some kind of cruel monster delighting in watching "God-fearing" soldiers slaughter other "God-fearing" soldiers in vast numbers.