A Divided Society in 1920s America: Immigration, the Ku Klux Klan and the Red Scare

The America of the 1920s that welcomed jazz and the motor car also shut its doors to immigrants, tolerated lynching, and jailed people for their politics.

Immigration and nativism

• After the war, nativism grew, meaning the favouring of native-born Americans over immigrants, and newcomers from southern and eastern Europe were treated as a threat.
• The Emergency Quota Act (1921) capped immigration at 3% of each nationality already in the US in 1910, and the Johnson-Reed Act (1924) cut the limits further and favoured northern Europeans.
• Immigrants' languages and religions (for example Catholicism and Judaism) were painted as un-American, feeding demand for "100% Americanism".
• New arrivals were blamed for competing with American workers for low-paid jobs, heightening resentment in hard economic times.
• The quota laws greatly reduced arrivals from countries like Italy, Poland and Russia, closing the era of near-open immigration.

Racial tensions and the Ku Klux Klan

• The Great Migration brought over a million African Americans from the rural South to northern and midwestern cities for work and to escape the Jim Crow segregation laws, which strained housing and jobs and stoked hostility.
• Discrimination followed them north: restrictive covenants and redlining (refusing loans and homes in white areas) forced black families into overcrowded areas, with "last hired, first fired" practices keeping them poor.
• Violence was common, from lynchings to race riots such as the 1921 Tulsa massacre, in which white mobs destroyed a prosperous African American district.
• The Ku Klux Klan revived after the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, preaching white Protestant supremacy and targeting African Americans, Catholics, Jews and immigrants.
• Klan membership reached around 4 million by the mid-1920s and swayed local politics, before scandal and corruption cut numbers late in the decade.

The Red Scare and Sacco and Vanzetti

• The Red Scare was a panic that communists and radicals were about to overturn America. It was set off by the 1917 Russian Revolution, a wave of strikes, and anarchist bombings in 1919.
• In the Palmer Raids of 1919-1920, Attorney General Mitchell Palmer arrested over 6,000 suspected radicals, many without warrants, and hundreds of foreign-born people were deported.
• Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrant anarchists, were convicted of a 1920 robbery and murder on weak evidence, in a trial coloured by prejudice against their origins and beliefs.
• Despite global protests they were executed in 1927, and the case became a symbol of how anti-immigrant and anti-radical feeling could bend justice.
• Historians still disagree about the case:
  • Some read it as a miscarriage of justice driven by xenophobia.
  • Others stress the era's real fear of anarchist violence and argue the verdict fit the evidence and legal standards of the time.