Major Events of 1925: The Scopes Trial, the Roaring Twenties Peak

The year 1925 was the cultural peak of the Roaring Twenties. The economy was in its third straight year of expansion. The New York skyline was rising. The new medium of radio was reaching millions. A new style of decoration — Art Deco — was beginning to take shape in the great cities of Europe and America. And the country’s two loudest cultural voices, science and religion, fought one of the defining battles of the century in a small town in Tennessee. To see the larger pattern, see the timeline of the 1920s; to compare with the other pivotal years, and the key events of 1927.

The Scopes “Monkey” Trial

The single most publicized American event of 1925 was the Scopes Trial, held in Dayton, Tennessee, in July. The case arose from the Butler Act, passed by the Tennessee legislature in March 1925, which made it a misdemeanor to “teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible” in any public school. The American Civil Liberties Union offered to defend any teacher willing to challenge the law, and John T. Scopes, a 24-year-old high school science teacher, agreed.

The trial was an international sensation. The prosecution was led by William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic presidential candidate, and the defense by Clarence Darrow, the country’s most famous defense attorney. The trial ran for eight days in July, and the heat in the small Rhea County courthouse was so oppressive that the judge moved the proceedings outdoors. Darrow’s cross-examination of Bryan on the seventh day was a defining moment in American intellectual history: Bryan, a national political figure for almost thirty years, was forced to defend the literal truth of scripture on a public stage. The exchange was broadcast live on radio — the first time a major American trial had been — and the transcript was published in full in newspapers across the country. Scopes was convicted and fined $100, but the verdict was overturned on a technicality the following year. The trial has been read as a referendum on modernism vs. religious fundamentalism, and the iconic clash between Darrow and Bryan has come to represent the larger cultural shift of the 1920s. The full arc of the political period that produced the trial is in our Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover page.

The Great Gatsby

On April 10, 1925, Charles Scribner’s Sons published The Great Gatsby, the third novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The book sold modestly — only about 21,000 copies in its first year — and Fitzgerald would die in 1940 believing himself a failure. But Gatsby has since come to be considered the definitive novel of the Roaring Twenties, the great portrait of the decade’s glamour and its underlying emptiness. The book was also an elegy for a particular kind of American innocence: published near the peak of the decade, it was written in the past tense, looking back at the early 1920s with a sense of loss. The novel’s last line — “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” — is a judgment on the Roaring Twenties that the rest of the twentieth century has largely accepted.

F. Scott Fitzgerald Coins “Jazz Age”

In a 1925 essay for The New Republic, Fitzgerald acknowledged that he had popularized the term “Jazz Age” in a 1921 story for Metropolitan Magazine, but he also announced that the phrase was no longer adequate: “It is borrowed time anyhow — the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.” The essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” would be his most famous retrospective on the decade. The Jazz Age label had become a cliché by 1925, but the music itself was still a powerful cultural force. Duke Ellington was leading his band at the Cotton Club in Harlem. Louis Armstrong was recording with his Hot Fives in Chicago. Bessie Smith was the most famous blues singer in America. Jazz had become, in the words of the critic H.L. Mencken, the “anthropology of the future.”

The New Yorker Begins

The first issue of The New Yorker appeared on February 21, 1925, founded by Harold Ross with backing from Raoul Fleischmann, a wealthy yeast magnate. The first issue was a famously shoddy 32-page pamphlet with three cartoons and a partly blank cover, but the magazine survived its rocky start, and within a few years it had become the most influential literary periodical in the country. Early contributors included E.B. White, James Thurber, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, and Alexander Woollcott — writers who would define the voice of American sophistication for the rest of the century.

The Chrysler Building Breaks Ground

On September 19, 1928, ground was broken at 405 Lexington Avenue in Manhattan for the Chrysler Building, which would become the most famous example of Art Deco architecture in America. The building was designed by William Van Alen for Walter Chrysler, who wanted a structure that would symbolize the new automotive age. The building was completed in 1930, and for 11 months — until the Empire State Building topped out in 1931 — it was the tallest building in the world. Its 77 stories rose 1,046 feet, crowned with the famous terraced stainless-steel spire that was assembled in secret and raised into place in a single day in October 1929. The building was the architectural expression of the 1920s: its ornament included hubcaps, mudguards, and hood ornaments, and the lobby featured a ceiling mural of transportation and the cosmos. To see the visual language of the 1920s in its full expression, see our Art Deco design page.

Mein Kampf and the First Motel

In 1925, an obscure German political prisoner named Adolf Hitler published the first volume of Mein Kampf, the political manifesto that would become the founding document of the Nazi Party. The book was dictated to his deputy Rudolf Hess while Hitler was imprisoned in Landsberg after the Bierkeller Putsch of November 1923. Few readers in 1925 took it seriously; the book would become a bestseller only after Hitler came to power in 1933. The book’s appearance is a reminder that 1925, even in its American cultural climax, was a year in which the international system was already beginning to fracture.

The same year, Arthur Heineman opened the Motel Inn in San Luis Obispo, California, on U.S. Route 101. The word “motel” was a portmanteau of “motor hotel,” and Heineman’s single-story complex of rooms with adjoining garages was the ancestor of every motel chain that would follow. The motel was one of many services invented to support the new automobile industry in the 1920s.

A. Philip Randolph and the Sleeping Car Porters

On August 25, 1925, A. Philip Randolph was elected president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first major Black labor union in the United States. The porters were Black men who worked on the Pullman sleeping cars of the nation’s railroads — long hours, low pay, and a posture of cheerful deference to white passengers that amounted, in practice, to a form of servitude. Randolph’s organizing campaign would force the Pullman Company to the bargaining table a decade later. The Brotherhood was part of the larger Harlem Renaissance, the wave of African American cultural and political achievement that defined the middle of the decade.

A Year of Cultural Climax

By the end of 1925, the Roaring Twenties had reached their high tide. The economy was in its fourth straight year of expansion. The automobile, the radio, the motion picture, and the talking film were reshaping American life. The battles of the early 1920s — over Prohibition, over immigration, over race — were still unresolved, but the country had reached an uneasy equilibrium. The next two years would see the peak of the Jazz Age and the beginning of the slow decline that would end in the crash of October 1929.