The red scare 1920s
What happened
Types of immigrants
Legislation against immigration
Societal concerns - Immorality:
Societal concerns - scopes/monkey trial:
Sacco and Vanzetti case study:
Palmer raids:
Old immigrants: Immigrants that conform to social norms in America (melting pot immigrants). For example Eastern EUropean.
New immigrants: Those who do not conform to social norms (mosaic model) for example: Italian, Irish and Asian cultures.Leads to this mosaic culture where they cling together forming communities for example little Italy and Chinatown.
Emergency Immigration law (1921): This limited the amount of people that could come in from Europe, limiting it to 3% of the nationals from the country living in the USA in 1911. This favoured white protestants - old immigrants.
Johnson-Reed Immigration Act (1924): This banned immigration from Japan (other asian groups were barred earlier). Allowed only 150,000 immigrants in per year however this did not apply to mexicans.
Concerns mainly focusing on city life
New culture that had come about for women 'flappers' who worse short skirts, smoked and went to speakeasies. These women were looked don upon by the older generation.
Jazz culture which encouraged new music and new dancing like the Charleston
The president of Florida actually spoke out and complained about the number of women wearing shorter skirts
1925
Laws were put in place to prevent the teaching of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in schools in 6 states as it contradicted the bible.
Fundamentalists attacked Darwin's book.
A biblical conference was held to campaign against the use of Darwin's book in school - they were especially against the idea that man and monkey evolved from the same creature. They won this across several states.
John Scopes and the ACLU (The American Civil Libereties Union) in Tennessee were outraged by this and so taught from the book anyway. He was arrested for this.
This was called the Butlers Act
Scopes went to court against the fundamentalists.
They came to the conclusion that not enough people agreed and so it was irrational, Scopes was found guilty and fined $100, - Fundamentalists won.
The states who held these laws were called the bible belt and were found in the south.
Bolshevik revolution 1917
This was a Russian revolution where the poorest people of Russian took over and killed the monarchy
America feared that the same thing would happen to them and with a flood of Eastern Europeans coming in they were even more scared.
A left wing organisation 1919-20
Mitchell Palmer organised the raids
Palmer spread rumours about the red scare - stating that 150,000 communists were living in America (0.1% of the population).
He stated that they worked for the government to spread communism.
This resulted in around 6,000 being arrested and held in prison without a hearing - hundreds of these were then deported.
the Palmer Raids were a response to imaginary threats most of these immigrants were peaceful people.