ABSTRACT
Progressivism had appealed to many Americans because it promised stability to a nation experiencing rapid change. In 1929, Americans suddenly entered a chamber of economic horrors that transformed them, their world, and their progressivism. American capital was also the key to relations with Latin America. Social reformers found that the most pressing domestic issues of the decade were precisely those on which they were most bitterly divided, such as immigration restriction and Prohibition. In the summer of 1925, the town of Dayton, Tennessee, witnessed an event that symbolized the decade's cultural conflicts: teaching theory of evolution in public schools. For women, the decade after World War I was decidedly a new era, though in ways unanticipated by suffragists of the Progressive years. Intellectuals in the 1920s, while by no means apologists for Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, were more often incensed by the materialism and conformity they found at all levels of society.
