US History II

The Red Scare and immigration policy. In the first few years after World War I, the country experienced a brief period of antiradical hysteria known as the Red Scare. Widespread labor unrest in 1919, combined with a wave of bombings, the Communists in power in Russia, and the short‐lived Communist revolt in Hungary, fed the fear that the United States was also on the verge of revolution. Under the direction of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, thousands of suspected radicals were arrested in 1919 and 1920; those that were aliens were deported. Although the Red Scare faded quickly after 1920, it strengthened the widespread belief in a strong connection between foreigners and radicalism. The bias against foreigners was exemplified in the Sacco and Vanzetti trial. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian‐born, self‐admitted anarchists who, in 1920, were indicted for robbery and murder in Massachusetts; they were found guilty and sentenced to death in July 1921. Their supporters claimed that they were convicted for their ethnic background and beliefs rather than on conclusive evidence. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in August 1927 after all their appeals were exhausted.

Hostility toward foreigners was also reflected in a fundamental change in American immigration policy. In 1920, the flow of new immigrants approached pre‐war levels. Congress responded in 1921 with the Quota Act, which set the maximum number of immigrants entering the United States annually at 350,000, apportioned at 3 percent of each nationality living in the country in 1910 (based on the 1910 census). However, this act still allowed for a significant immigration from southern and eastern Europe, alleged hotbeds of radicalism. Consequently, the National Origins Act of 1924 reduced the total number of immigrants to 150,000 a year, with quotas set at 2 percent of each nationality's population in the United States in 1890. Under this formula, the quota was less than 4,000 for Italy and around 6,000 for Poland, while the quotas for Great Britain and Germany were 34,000 and 50,000 per year, respectively. In addition to limiting immigration as much as possible, the intent of the legislation was to allow the “more desirable” immigrants from northern and western Europe to come into the United States in higher numbers.

The Ku Klux Klan. The Ku Klux Klan, an organization formed by white southerners during Reconstruction, was revived in Georgia in 1915. The new Klan was particularly strong in the Midwest and Southwest as well as in cities such as Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, and Indianapolis. According to its supporters, it stood for law and order, “old time religion” and the moral values associated with it, immigration restriction, and opposed groups who were not 100 percent American — foreigners, Catholics, Jews, and African‐Americans. The KKK was open only to native‐born white Protestants and drew its strongest support from the working class members of that group who were in competition with blacks and new immigrants for jobs and housing. A potent force in American politics in the mid‐1920s with between three and eight million members, the Klan controlled the legislatures in Indiana, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Texas and was key to the election of several governors and numerous local officials. The Klan declined rapidly after 1925 due to scandals involving its leadership and the drop in immigration numbers caused by the National Origins Act.

Prohibition was one of the programs the Klan supported. When the Eighteenth Amendment became effective in January 1920, Congress passed the Volstead Act to implement it. Although alcohol consumption in the United States did drop by as much as half during the '20s, people who wanted to drink found it easy to do so either by brewing their own alcohol (which was legal, as long as it was not sold) or by buying “bootleg” liquor in illegal saloons known as speakeasies that had sprung up everywhere. Enforcement of Prohibition was never adequately staffed or funded, and the illicit trade in alcohol contributed to the growth of organized crime. By the end of the decade, many Americans recognized that Prohibition may well have caused more problems than it solved. A national debate was joined during the 1928 presidential campaign when Smith called for an end to the “noble experiment.” Prohibition was finally repealed in December 1933 with the ratification of the Twenty‐first Amendment.

The fundamentalist revival. Fundamentalist Protestants felt their beliefs challenged in the 1920s. Secular culture of the time seemed to have little place for religion, and church attendance was in decline. A movement to defend traditional religion by emphasizing a literal interpretation of the Bible gained momentum in the '20s and especially targeted Darwin's theory of evolution as a symbol for what was wrong in modern society. By the mid‐1920s, a number of states had enacted laws prohibiting the teaching of evolution. The law was challenged in Tennessee by a young high school biology teacher named John Scopes.

Popularly known as the monkey trial, Scopes's trial was the first ever broadcast over radio and became a national event primarily because of the notoriety of the attorneys representing each side. The American Civil Liberties Union brought in Clarence Darrow, the most famous defense lawyer in the country, for Scopes, while the World Christian Fundamentalist Union engaged William Jennings Bryan, three‐time presidential candidate and the former secretary of state, to assist the prosecution. The trial was a clash between these two men and the beliefs they represented. The high point came when Darrow called Bryan, a recognized lay authority on the Bible, as a witness, and Bryan admitted on the stand that it was possible that creation may not have taken place in six, 24‐hour days, thereby refuting a literal interpretation of the Bible. Nonetheless, the jury found Scopes guilty of violating the state's anti‐evolution statute and fined him $100.