21-1 Changing Ways of Life
pp. 612-617
EQ: What life/lifestyle changes had the most profound effects on Americans in the 1920s?
Subquestions:
a. What was important about Billy Sunday? How big an influence did he have?
b. What were the important differences between urban and rural lifestyles?
c. Describe American fundamentalist? Who were some of its most colorful characters?
d. What was important about the Scopes trial?
Starter Sources:
· **ClassZone ch. 21**
· Lots of good Google.com videos on Aimee Semple McPherson and Billy Sunday--can't play most in school but you can access at home.
· Scopes Trial as a play and film: Inherit the Wind. This link is not fantastic, but the feature film with Spencer Tracy and Fredric March (plus an outstanding supporting cast) is a knockout. Here's my favorite scene: **favorite scene about creationism versus** evolution. It's 8:44 long. What can you find that corresponds with the Danzer text??
SQ C
ReplyDelete"Fundamentalism was a Protestant movement grounded in a literal, or nonsymbolic, interpretation of the Bible." (Danzer 616)
Fundamentalism - "a movement in American Protestantism that arose in the early part of the 20th century in reaction to modernism and that stresses the infallibility of the Bible not only in matters of faith and morals but also as a literal historical record..." (dictionary.com)
According to Danzer, Aimee Semple McPherson "used Hollywood showmanship to preach." foursquare.org explains that McPherson went through a time in her life where she became very sick, and she believed it was due to the fact that she was "not being obedient to the call to preach the gospel." Apparently during this time, she hear God ask her "Now will you go?" and decided it was either time to listen to God or time to die." She chose to follow the word of God and was healed very soon after that decision. (foursquare.org)
After being so close to death and believing she had had an encounter with God, it is not a surprise to me that she would want to take the words of the Bible literally.
Sources
The Americans
http://www.foursquare.org/about/aimee_semple_mcpherson/p2
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fundamentalism
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ReplyDeleteThe Scopes Trail is important because it represented the “clash” between science and religion. For example science said that humans had evolved to our present state from one celled organisms while religion showed the exact opposite, that God had created man and the world in 6 days. Science backed Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, where species evolve over millions of years. But religion opposed this theory for multiple reasons. First it violated the aforementioned idea that God had created man and the world in 6 days. And it implied that the Earth was millions of years old, while the Church believed that the Earth was created in 4004 B.C., which would have made the earth 5929 years old, not anywhere near 1 million years. The Scopes trials meant much more than just whether or not John Scopes had taught evolution because Scopes readily admitted that he had, and a case like that would not draw men like Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan unless it stood for something bigger. And it did, Clarence Darrow stood for science. and therefore the Theory of Evolution, while Bryan stood for religion and the Bible. (Danzer 616)
ReplyDeleteIn the book there is a question and answer from Darrow’s questioning of Bryan about the creation of the earth, it reads as follows.
Q: “Do you think that the earth was made in 6 six days?”
A: “Not six days of 24 hours.” (Danzer 617)
This line of questioning on the creation of the earth was resumed later on during thetrial, that section is included below.
Q- All right. Does the statement, "The morning and the evening were the first day," and "The morning and the evening were the second day," mean anything to you?
A- I do not think it necessarily means a twenty-four-hour day.
Q-You do not?
A-No.
Q-What do you consider it to be?
A-I have not attempted to explain it. If you will take the second chapter--let me have the book. (Examining Bible.) The fourth verse of the second chapter says: "These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth, when they were created in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens," the word "day" there in the very next chapter is used to describe a period. I do not see that there is any necessity for construing the words, "the evening and the morning," as meaning necessarily a twenty-four-hour day, "in the day when the Lord made the heaven and the earth."
Q-Then, when the Bible said, for instance, "and God called the firmament heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day," that does not necessarily mean twenty-four hours?
A-I do not think it necessarily does.
Q-Do you think it does or does not?
A-I know a great many think so.
Q-What do you think?
A-I do not think it does.
Q-You think those were not literal days?
A-I do not think they were twenty-four-hour days.
Darrow tried to show that some of the stories in the Bible are unrealistic by having Bryan admit he believed God had created the man in 144 hours. But Bryan managed to defend himself by pointing out Darrow’s flawed reasoning, because the length of the day is relative to the speed at which the earth rotates on its axis. And God is not subject to these 24 hour days unless he is on Earth. Even events on earth can cause variation in the length of a day. The Japan earthquake shifted the distribution of mass on the earth to the point where our day is now 1.8 microseconds shorter (a microsecond is a millionth of a second). So even if God was subject to these same days they could have been longer in 4004 B.C. than they were in 1925.
Sources:
The Americans
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/day7.htm
Subquestion A:
ReplyDeleteBilly Sunday was an ambitious social reformer, primarily he fought for the ban of alcohol, because he thought it was sinful and sought a "new age of morality and sobriety" (Danzer 612). Ambitious because he said this,"The reign of tears is over! The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs..." (Danzer 612). He was all about a righteous America without any corruption and no need for prisons because there would be no crime, because there's no corruption. Many advocates against alcohol believed that alcohol was responsible for all the crime and domestic abuse in America.
Although the 18th Amendment was passed, which banned alcohol in the 1920s, by the end of the decade many Americans continued to drink just as much, and it was very difficult to enforce. So it was repealed eventually, but Billy Sunday was a very successful rallier (is that a word?) of troops for the ban of alcohol and a persuasive speaker who was well-respected, as shown by his autographed pictures of WIlson, Harding, Taft, Roosevelt, Pershing and many others-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVZ-J3c8_AY.
Carrying on from Jessica’s post, I continued research into the life of Aimee Semple Mcpherson. Turns out she was pretty much history’s craziest celebrity.
ReplyDeleteAt this site, http://www.usc.edu/libraries/archives/la/scandals/aimee.html, I found out how Aimee made some of today’s movie stars and their fans seem tame. As an evangelist whose celebrity status was rapidly rising, especially with radio broadcasting, she decided that the usual tricks like faith healing and speaking in tongues were not doing it for her. No, instead in 1926 she disappeared while swimming in Los Angeles. She then reappears in Arizona claiming that she had been kidnapped and tortured, even though she disappeared in her swimming suit, then reappeared fully clothed. Also, multiple witnesses say she had been seen having an affair in a hotel with a radio operator.
She continued to claim that she had been kidnapped.
The worst part of the whole ordeal is that when she first disappeared, members of her congregation went out looking for her on the beach she was last seen at. The church-goers were so devoted, multiple members died from drowning and from exposure. Woah.
In the end her tactics seem less like what you would see on Broadway, and more like a modern Hollywood action thriller. “Coming this summer. A pulse-pounding story of deceit and lies: The Tele-Vangelist”
Source:
http://www.usc.edu/libraries/archives/la/scandals/aimee.html
Danzer Text
Sorry this is a little late......................:(
ReplyDeleteI thought that in 21-1 the book didn't really say how well liked and influential billy Sunday really was. Billy Sunday actually started off as a baseball player. He gave up his 400 dollar per month salary for a 94 dollar salary. Ball teams offered him 500 to come back but he declined. In terms of social reform, Billy was pretty important.He would travel around the country to preach american interventionism, progressive social justice, and conservative culture behavior. People listened to him because they thought he was down to earth. His was most known for promoting prohibition. You could say he started the age of prohibition. Today he may not be so influential but back then in the 1920 he did a lot for the country.
sources:
http://captnsblog.wordpress.com/2010/12/22/the-evangelical-outfielder-billy-sunday’s-rise-from-the-national-league-to-the-national-consciousness/
http://www.billysunday.org/
http://www.ameshistoricalsociety.org/residents_sunday.htm
The americans by Danzer
Well I caved and finaly decided to do this.
ReplyDeleteokay so the importance of billy sunday is that he was an evangelical preacher that helped spread enangelism through what was known as the kerosine circuit. The kerosine circuit is just a bunch of towns without electricity that he preached to. How big an influence he had is stricly opinionated and no one person can determine how big of influence (or how small of an influence) hes had. However my opinion is that he did have a pretty big influence. You see, billy sunday was a major legue (im sorry i dont know how to spell legue) baseball player. This is part of the reason why he brought such big crowds to his sermons/ preachings (or whatever you want to call them). He used his fame as a ploy so people would come to these things. and unfortunetly it worked. many people came, listend to and believed his preachings.