As Americans headed into the 1920s, the future looked bright. The United States had emerged victorious from World War I, and, at least for Americans, this postwar decade promised to be a time of prosperity, modernity, and gaiety. It was the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, the time of flappers and speakeasies and the decadent excess described by the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. Yet beneath the surface, all was not as glamorous as it seemed. For black Americans and immigrants, it was all too often a time of discrimination and violence. A decade of Prohibition led to the formation of large-scale, violent, organized crime. Culture wars created deep rifts between those who saw themselves as representatives of modernity and science and those who saw themselves as defenders of tradition, morality, and Christianity. By the close of the decade, the frivolity and excesses of the 1920s would end in the worst economic collapse in American history.