Objective: To examine the impact of the Red Scare on American society.

1
Objective To examine the impact of the Red Scare
on American society.
2
Describe the political climate in the US between
1914 and 1920
Date Fact
5-8 Aug. 1920 In West Frankfort, Illinois, mobs burned the homes of foreigners, clubbed and stoned immigrants on the streets. 5000 state police were called out to restore order.
May 1920 Henry Ford launched anti-Jewish propaganda campaign.
1920 Georgia politician Tom Watson won a seat in the US Senate. Major plank anti-Catholicism
1919 Alabama state legislator passed a convent inspection law
Sep 1920 5,000 immigrants p/day passed through Ellis Island, NY
1918 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (a document created by Semitic Russian secret police, purporting to prove a Jewish plot existed for world domination) 1st appeared in the US
1919-1920 Postwar economic recession afflicted the US. Agricultural depression began in 1920
Oct 1915 The new Ku Klux Klan was founded by William Simmons.
1919 The 18th Amendment is ratified
1914 The Menace (an anti-Catholic weekly) had a circulation of nearly 1.5 million
1917 Beginning of Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. The US refused to recognize the Bolshevik government.
1919 Red Scare in the US. Fearing infiltration and influence, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer was extremely active in hunting suspicious person

• Four facts
• Ku Klux Klan. We believe that the American
  stock, which was bred under highly selective
  surroundings and should not be mongrelized
  automatically and instinctively developed the
  kind of civilization which is best suited to its
  own healthy life and growth and this cannot be
  safely changed except by ourselves and along the
  lines of our own character. .
• .
• ..
• .

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Summary
What is the political climate in the US between
1914 and 1920?

• Anti-immigrant and violence erupted
• Henry Ford prominent American very anti-semitic,
  anti-catholic, and anti-African American
• Americans saw anarchists and communists as threat
  to government.

How does the political climate change after 1917
and why?

• Bolshevik Revolution Czar overthrown
• Russia becomes U.S.S.R. with a Communist
  government
• America fears anarchists and communists will
  overthrow government in U.S.
• America leaves our troops in U.S.S.R to fight
  Lenin refuses to recognize the Soviet
  government.

4
Fear of Radicals
People feared a communist revolution would
occur in the U.S.
5
Labor Unrest
People blamed communists and Anarchists for
labor strikes, labor problems
6
Since many anarchists were immigrants,
discrimination against immigrants increased.
7
Post-War American Attitudes Following WWI
deep social tensions aggravated by high wartime
inflation
Food Prices Clothing Prices
deep social tensions aggravated by high wartime
inflation
Steel Strike (1919) Organized Labor had won
8-hour workday due to war time production
(contract work) By 1919 ½ workers had a 48-hour
work week Unions on decline because seen as a
direct connect to radicals immigrants rise in
violent labor strikes discriminatory (women or
African Americans) made strides in
work-hours farmers in industrial work used to
working alone
8
Study Table B analyze the numbers under the
quota acts
Country Quota Under 1921 Law Quota Under 1924 Law Relative Percentage
UK 77,342 34,007 44.0
Germany 67,607 51,227 75.8
France 5,729 3,954 69.0
Norway 12,202 6,453 52.9
Sweden 20,042 9,561 47.7
Poland 21,076 5,982 28.4
Austria 7,451 785 10.5
Yugoslavia 6,426 671 10.4
Czechoslovakia 14,557 3,073 21.1
Hungary 5,638 473 8.4
Italy 42,057 3,845 9.1
Rumania 7,419 603 8.1

• Quota 1921 law numbers ___total Northwestern
  Europe ____total Eastern and
  Southern Europe
• Quota 1924 law numbers _____ total
  Northwestern Europe ____ total
  Eastern and Southern Europe
• Overall trends and reasons for the laws

Table 4.1 Compiled from House of Representatives
Report No. 1621, 1924, p.190 United States
Bureau of Immigration. Annual Report of the
Commissioner General of Immigration. 1924. pp24
ff.
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StudyImmigration and National Origins (doc C)

1. What were the intended purpose of the Immigration
   Act of 1921 and the National Origins Act of 1924?
2. Describe the attributes/fears that the immigrants
   instilled in the authors of the laws.
3. How did the laws change and why?
4. The day the National Origins Act of 1924 went
   into effect was marked as Humiliation Day in
   Japan, the beginning of a major Hate America
   campaign. What are two reasons that the Japanese
   reacted this way?

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Read the excerpt Immigration and National Origins

• In the decade before World War I, more than 10
  million people flooded into the United States.
  Unlike the old immigrants, who had come from
  northern and western Europe in the 1800s, these
  new immigrants were primarily from eastern and
  southern Europe. They were not Anglo-Saxon, nor
  were they Protestants.
• For various reasons, including prejudice, many
  Americans wanted to limit the number of these
  immigrants. Some citizens believed that the
  newcomers did not have adequate job skills to be
  self-sufficient. Many worried that the
  immigrants would not be able to adapt to the
  American way of life. Labor unions feared that
  immigrant laborers would work for lower wages
  than their union workers. This would make it
  difficult for union members to find work at the
  higher wage they desired. Labor unions therefore
  headed the drive for more restrictive immigration
  laws.
• In 1921, Congress passed the first Immigration
  Act to establish an effective quota system.
  Three percent of the total of each nationality
  already in the country, based on the census of
  1910, would be admitted. The maximum quota for
  all nationalities combined was to be 375, 803 per
  year.

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This proved to be a temporary measure. Continued
opposition to immigrants from eastern and
southern Europe led to the passage of the
National Origins Act of 1924. This was designed
to prevent any major racial or ethnic changes in
the population of the United States. By the
terms of this new law, the quotas were set at 2
percent of each nationality based on the census
of 1890. Most of the immigration from eastern
and southern Europe began after 1890. The
maximum quota for all immigration was to be
164,667. Canadians and Latin Americans were not
part of the quota system in this or future acts.
The Japanese were specifically excluded from all
future immigration as aliens ineligible to
citizenship. The law of 1924 was a slap in the
face to the Japanese. It marked the beginning of
disintegration in United States-Japanese
relations. In 1929, a second National Origins
Act was passed. The 1929 act established quotas
of 2 percent of each nationality based on the
census of 1920 but limited to a maximum quota of
153,714 of all nationalities. The years of
unlimited immigration had ended long since.
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Closing the Golden Door
The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 set up a quota
system allowing only a certain number of people
from each country into the U.S.
13
The Door gets locked?
The National Origins Exclusion Act and the
Immigration Act of 1924 Superseded the 1921
Emergency Quota Act further aimed at
restricting Southern and Eastern Europeans and
prohibited East Asians.
14
The law favored Protestant nations from
Northern Europe.
However, people from the Western Hemisphere
were unaffected by the quota, and thousands of
Mexicans and Canadians entered the U.S.
15

1. What problems did immigrants pose?
2. Why did the quota law, 1921, seem to be
   satisfactory?
3. If these were satisfactory why did the
   restrictions become more strict?
4. Where did the older type of immigration come
   from and provide?
5. What drain on society did immigrants cost?
6. What would the US lack by imposing strict
   immigration restrictions?

Homework Reading print from Aeries
Keep on Guarding the Gates
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More Post-War American Attitudes Following WWI
Period of Disillusionment

1. veterans, artists, and intellectuals
2. Society was lacking idealism and vision
3. Sense of personal alienation
4. Americans were obsessed with materialism and
   outmoded moral values.

Safeguarding America for Americans In this brief
review of the work which the Department of
Justice has undertaken, to tear out the radical
seeds that have entangled American ideas in their
poisonous theories, I desire not merely to
explain what the real menace of communism is, but
also to tell how we have been compelled to clean
up the country A. Mitchell Palmer
17

• The Palmer Raids
• Several cities across the country
• Mitchell Palmer and John Edgar Hoover
• found no evidence of a proposed revolution
• numbers of suspects, many of them members of the
  Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) were held
  without trial.
• Many suspects were deported
• In New York, five elected Socialists were
  expelled from the legislature.

Palmer Raids