The leading writers of this era were F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Sinclair Lewis, the poems of Ezra Pounds and T.S. Elliot along with the plays of Eugene O"Neill expressed complete disillusionment. These writers scorned religion as hypocritical and delusional part of a business oriented culture. .
John Scopes, a high school teacher in Tennessee, challenged the constitutionality of the states laws stating that it was illegal to teach Darwin's theory of evolution in the public school. Mr. Scopes was defended by Clarence Darrow, and the opposition, the fundamentalists, was represented by William Jennings Bryan, a self-proclaimed and testified expert on the bible. During the scopes trial, a debate between fundamentalists in the rural south and the modernists of the northern cities, Fundamentalists were discredited by modernists, but the question of religion and public schools remained controversial and unresolved, even though Scopes was convicted.
Prohibition was another controversy that helped to define the 1920s. This was a controversy that helped to provide definition to the 1920s was the conflicting attitudes and concerns of the eighteenth amendment. The eighteenth amendment strictly prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, including liquors, wines and beers to conserve grain and maintain a sober workforce. The adaptation of the prohibition amendment and a federal law enforcing it - the Volstead act of 1919 - were the culmination of many decades of crusading by temperance forces. During this time it was extremely fashionable to defy the law - the eighteenth amendment - by going to clubs or bars known as speakeasies, where bootleg liquor was sold for enjoyment. Rival groups of gangsters, including a Chicago gang headed by Al Capone, fought for control of the bootlegging trade. Organized crime became big business, and millions of dollars were made from the sale of illegal prostitution, gambling, and narcotics in addition to the sale of smuggled liquors.
