Its roots also preceded the 1910 / 1920 timeframe by several decades. The WCTU was founded in 1874, and the Prohibition party in 1869. Kansas enacted prohibition at the state level in 1880. Fundamentalism may have helped boost the idea to the point where a national referendum could carry, but the prohibition movement was significant all the way through the latter 19th century.
I can assure you that dinosaurs were popular with kids (boys, anyway) long before the '70s and '80s.
The prohibition movement brought together a variety of groups, sometimes with little else in common. However, a constant throughout the long buildup to Prohibition was the split between anti-liquor evangelical Protestants and pro-liquor Catholic European ethnics.
Because of the weird segmenting of political authority in the U.S., dryness was built up from the town level to the county level to the state level before the national law went through. You can look at the pattern of dry counties and see the correlation between them and Protestant dominance.
Even so, there was never a chance that the big heavily-Catholic northeast and midwest industrial states would vote themselves dry, even if some counties did. It took a national political thrust. Without the enormous pressure that built into what we would today call identity politics among the rural Protestant community there might not been enough oomph to make it a national issue that would destroy politicians voting against it. You can’t say that about any other single group in the dry movement.
Well, it’s just my perception I guess, but I certainly think dinosaurs as a common childhood obsession is a relatively new development. The wiki page "cultural depictions of dinosaurs (of course that’s a wiki page!) seems to agree with my perception that dinosaurs were mostly absent from pop culture from the 1930’s until they started to garner interest again in popular scientific literature in the 1970’s and then became a pop culture phenomenon during the 1980’s and 1990’s.
Creationists weren’t coming up with goofy dinosaur theories before that time for the same reason they’re not coming up with goofy trilobite theories today-- because nobody outside of the scientific community really cared.
Witness The Shy Stegosaurus of Cricket Creek, 1955.
Naw, just the purple ones.
Not true. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, and dinosaurs were very popular among kids at the time, including in books such as Danny and the Dinosaur (1958), and movies like The Lost World (1962). Dinosaurs were present in pop culture much earlier, such as in one of the earliest animated films Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), the silent version of The Lost World (1925), and of course King Kong (1933).
Have you never seen The Flintstones? (Ran from 1960.)
The Lost World was written in 1912, and first filmed in 1925.
Original Godzilla movie, 1954.
The Crystal Palace in London was decorated, for the public, with dinosaur sculptures in 1854, before The Origin of Species had even appeared.
Those are just random examples that came to mind. I am sure plenty more could be found by someone who took the least trouble.
And, like Colibri, I grew up in the '50s and '60s and was, for a while, very into dinosaurs. I had big picture books about them and learned their names and characteristics. It was not weird, either. Lots of boys were into dinosaurs.
Plus The Enormous Egg by Oliver Butterworth (1956).
Does that author-title combination make anyone else think of eggs fried in olive oil and butter? Or am I just hungry? (Coincidentally those are ingredients in what I’m cooking at the moment. Chickens count as dinos, right?)
The Sinclair Dinoland exhibit at the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair.
http://www.sinclairoil.com/history/worlds_fair_01.html
The T-Rex scared the living shit out of me, but I remember the others fondly.
While the general sense of what you’re saying here is true – Richard Owen coined the term “dinosaur” in 1842 – a specific clarification is in order: the term “Thunder Lizard” was post-Darwin.
Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859.
O. C. Marsh announced the discovery of the animal he dubbed Brontosaurus (“Thunder Lizard”) in 1879.
Not to mention One Million Years B. C. (Raquel Welch menaced by dinosaurs!), released in 1966.
Furthermore, the “dinosaur renaissance” began in the late 1960s – the modern conceptualization of dinos as warm-blooded, active animals and the realization that birds are essentially dinosaurs.