5.3 The 1920s Cultural Clash: Modernism, Nativism, and the Red Scare

One clash, several statutes

Independent OpenExamPrep teaching groups the early 1920s as a cultural-constitutional unit: liberalism and conservatism as public languages, immigration as statute, and civil liberties as the thing wartime laws and postwar panics put at risk. Do not file “the 1920s” only under jazz and Model Ts (those are 5.4). This section is the First Red Scare, national-origins restriction, the second Klan, Scopes, and Prohibition—the exam’s checklist for nativism versus modernism.

Palmer Raids, the Buford, Sacco and Vanzetti

The Bolshevik Revolution (1917), a wave of 1919 strikes (Seattle general strike, Boston police strike, a massive steel strike), and mailed and planted bombs in 1919—including one that wrecked Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s Washington house on 2 June 1919—convinced many officials that a revolutionary left was about to seize American cities. Palmer and a young J. Edgar Hoover, running the Justice Department’s Radical Division, answered with the Palmer Raids of November 1919 and January 1920: coordinated arrests of suspected anarchists and communists, often without the warrants and counsel later generations would treat as baseline. On 21 December 1919 the army transport Buford—the “Soviet Ark”—sailed with 249 deportees, among them Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. January 1920 raids in dozens of cities took thousands more into custody. Most were never shown to be bomb-plotters. The scare ebbed when Palmer’s prediction of a May Day 1920 uprising failed and when lawyers, including the young American Civil Liberties Union (1920, grown from the wartime Civil Liberties Bureau), publicized the abuses.

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian-born anarchists, were arrested in May 1920 for a South Braintree, Massachusetts, payroll robbery and murders (15 April 1920). Convicted in 1921 before Judge Webster Thayer, they were executed on 23 August 1927 after years of appeals and international protest. Whether they were guilty of the holdup remains contested; what is not contested for exam purposes is that the case became a symbol of nativist and anti-radical prejudice in the justice system. Do not turn them into Palmer Raid deportees on the Buford—they died in Charlestown, years later, after a state trial.

Quotas: 1921 and 1924

Wartime and 1919 race riots already showed how migration and job competition could turn violent. Congress then closed the Atlantic gate that had defined 1890–1914 “new immigration” from southern and eastern Europe. The Emergency Quota Act (19 May 1921) limited most nationalities to 3 percent of the number of that nationality counted in the United States in 1910. The Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act) cut the formula to 2 percent and shifted the baseline to the 1890 census—when fewer Italians, Poles, Russians, and Jews had yet arrived—so the math itself was a nativist tool. The 1924 law also ended the Gentlemen’s Agreement pathway and excluded Japanese immigrants, completing a longer Asian-exclusion arc that already included the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and the 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone. A U.S. Border Patrol was created. Western Hemisphere immigration (Mexico, Canada) was not placed under the same numerical quotas—an exception exam options often erase. A later national-origins ceiling near 150,000, delayed in implementation, refined the system at the decade’s end; the political meaning was already set in 1924: the United States would engineer its ethnic future by statute.

Second Klan, Scopes, and the dry decade

The Ku Klux Klan of Reconstruction had been a Southern terrorist campaign against Black voting. The second Klan, inspired by D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) and organized by William J. Simmons after a 1915 Stone Mountain ceremony, became something broader in the 1920s: a mass fraternal politics of white Protestant nationalism. Under Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans it enrolled members across the Midwest and West as well as the South. Enemies on the letterhead were African Americans, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants; the product was parades, boycotts, night violence, and local slates. Membership estimates for the mid-1920s commonly run into the millions (a figure near four million is widely cited and also debated). A 1925 Washington, D.C., parade showed the organization’s public confidence. Decline followed exposure of graft and the D. C. Stephenson scandal in Indiana (1925), which destroyed the Klan’s claim to be a respectable civic order. Do not reduce this Klan to a handful of rural night riders only; its 1920s peak was electoral and urban as well as violent.

Fundamentalism versus modernism split Protestant churches. The Fundamentals pamphlets (1910–1915) and later Baptist and Presbyterian fights defined fundamentalism as insistence on biblical inerrancy, the virgin birth, and a rejected Darwinian account of human origins. Urban modernists such as Harry Emerson Fosdick (“Shall the Fundamentalists Win?,” 1922) treated higher criticism and science as compatible with faith. The courtroom condensation was the Scopes trial (July 1925) in Dayton, Tennessee. The Butler Act forbade teaching that humans descended from a lower order of animals. The ACLU backed a test case; teacher John T. Scopes stood in the dock. Clarence Darrow defended; William Jennings Bryan—still the Democratic moralist of 1896, now a fundamentalist celebrity—aided the prosecution. Scopes was convicted and fined $100; the Tennessee Supreme Court later overturned the conviction on a technicality while leaving the statute standing. H. L. Mencken’s coverage sold the trial as village ignorance versus cosmopolitan science. For the exam, the pairing is Darrow / modernism / evolution versus Bryan / fundamentalism / Butler Act, not a Supreme Court incorporation case and not the 1924 quota debate.

Prohibition was a Progressive-era constitutional victory that the 1920s then had to live with. The Eighteenth Amendment was ratified 16 January 1919 and took effect in January 1920. The Volstead Act (National Prohibition Act, 28 October 1919), passed over Wilson’s veto, defined intoxicating liquor at 0.5 percent alcohol and set federal enforcement rules. Speakeasies, bootlegging, and bribed precincts followed. Al Capone’s Chicago Outfit became the textbook face of organized crime under a dry law. Rural and small-town Protestants often read the amendment as Christian reform; many urban ethnics read it as an attack on their sociability. Repeal in 1933 (Twenty-first Amendment) is later chronology; this chapter needs the 1920s fact pattern: a constitutional ban, a statutory definition, and a black market.

Civil-liberties through-lines: wartime Espionage/Sedition habits fed Palmer’s methods; quota laws wrote racial hierarchy into admissions; Scopes showed majoritarian control of classrooms; Volstead showed how a moral statute could generate police discretion and crime. The ACLU’s existence is itself a 1920s institutional answer. Sacco and Vanzetti kept the Red Scare’s questions about fair trial alive into 1927. Consumer plenty and Harlem’s arts (next section) grew in the same decade as these restrictions—that simultaneity is the point, not a contradiction you have to dissolve.