Prohibition, Scopes, and the Quotas

The 1920s look contradictory: flappers and jazz on one side, bans on alcohol and evolution on the other. Both sides came from the same source. Industrialization, immigration, and the rise of cities had changed who America was, and a large bloc of native-born, rural, Protestant Americans felt they were losing control of the country's culture. Prohibition, the 1919 constitutional ban on making and selling alcohol, was supposed to end crime and poverty by closing saloons. Instead it created a massive black market: bootleggers smuggled liquor, speakeasies sold it openly, and organized crime figures like Al Capone grew rich and powerful because enforcement was underfunded and demand never disappeared. By 1933 the amendment was repealed.

The same anxiety shaped immigration law and the Scopes trial. The 1924 National Origins Act set quotas based on the 1890 census, before the heaviest waves of southern and eastern European and Jewish immigration, which slashed future arrivals from Italy, Poland, and Russia while leaving northern European quotas generous. The revived Ku Klux Klan fed on identical fears, but unlike the Reconstruction Klan's near-exclusive focus on terrorizing Black Americans in the South, this version spread nationwide and targeted Catholics, Jews, and immigrants too. The Scopes trial fit the pattern differently: it pitted a Tennessee law banning evolution instruction against modern science, with John Scopes convicted and fined, a technical win for the law, but the trial's national coverage mocked the anti-evolution cause so thoroughly that it came out looking backward.

Together these fights set up the cultural battle lines that carry into the Great Depression, when economic collapse would briefly override the culture war but never fully erase it.