Transcript The 1920s - Kettering City School District

The 1920s
Immigrants and the Red
Scare…
President Warren G. Harding
promotes a return to “normalcy”
Renewed isolationism
 Resurgence of nativism
 Trend toward political conservatism

A New Threat to Normalcy

After the Russian Revolution, the newly
formed American Communist Party in
the United States attracts some
members
– What does this lead to?
– How do Americans feel about communism
today?

Communists advocate worldwide
revolution
– Encourage the overthrow of all capitalist
systems and the abolition of free enterprise
and private property

In response to the widespread Red
Scare, the government hunts down
suspected Communists, socialists, and
anarchists.
Sacco and Vanzetti
The Red Scare feeds people’s
suspicion of foreigners and immigrants,
sometimes leading to ruined reputations
and wrecked lives…
 Sacco and Vanzetti, two anarchists and
Italian immigrants are executed for a
crime they may not have committed

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti
are Italian immigrants and anarchists
who evaded the draft during WWI.
 April 1920: factory paymaster and his
guard are shot, $15,000 is stolen

– Witnesses say the perpetrators appeared
to be Italian
– 3 weeks later, Sacco and Vanzetti are
arrested
• Provide alibis
• Evidence is circumstantial
• Judge makes several prejudicial remarks
– Jury still finds them guilty and they are sentenced to
death.
– August 23, 1927: Both men are executed in the
electric chair amid international protest
The Immigration Act of 1924

Establishes
quotas
– Discriminates
strongly against
people from
outside Western
Europe
“ The blaze of revolution was sweeping over every
American institution of law and order… eating its way
into the homes of American workman, its sharp
tongues of revolutionary heat… licking at the altars of
the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell,
crawling into the sacred corners of American
homes,… burning up the foundations of American
society.”
-A. Mitchell Palmer
Palmer Raids

A. Mitchell Palmer: Attorney General of
the United States
– August 1919: J. Edgar Hoover appointed to
head the antiradical division of the Justice
Department (a.k.a. The F.B.I.)
• Government officials sent to hunt down
suspected Communists, socialists, and
anarchists
• Civil Rights are trampled…
The re-emergence of the KKK

Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan use
anti-communism as an excuse to
harass ethnic and religious minorities
The New Klan

Devoted to “100% Americanism”
– 1924: Membership rises to 4.5 million “white male
persons, native-born gentile citizens” who believed
in keeping blacks “ in their place,” destroying
saloons, opposing unions, and driving Roman
Catholics, Jews, and foreign-born people out of
the country.
Threatened by the changes happening
in society.
 Resent small advances made by African
Americans during WWI
 Feel moral values are being attacked by
urban intellectuals
 Fear job competition from immigrants
 Convinced foreigners are going to
overthrow the American way of life.

The KKK asserts power
Racial violence
 Try to influence national and state
politics

– Indiana