Immigration Act Of 1924 Essay
Although the Immigration Act of 1924 was mainly the unfortunate result of discriminatory racial theories of nativism and antiforeignism, other factors influenced also Congress to pass the restrictive act, including the rising Red Scare and the spread of the new Ku Klux Klan.
The largest factor in the Congressional passing of the Immigration Act of 1920 was the fundamental American belief that native Americans were superior to foreigners, including the 800,000 immigrants who flooded the country in 1920-1921. About two-thirds of them were from southern and eastern Europe. The one-hundred-percent Americans, recoiling at the sight of this resumed New Immigration, were disgusted at the influx of sickly Europeans. Senator Ellison D. Smith expressed his nativist concerns in …show more content…
Spreading anti-foreign, anti-Catholic, anti-black, anti-Jewish, anti-pacifist, anti-Communist, anti-internationalist, pro-Anglo-Saxon, pro-native American, and pro-Protestant sentiments, the Klan led an extreme, ultraconservative uprising against many of the forces of diversity and modernity that were transforming American culture. The KKK spread with astonishing rapidity, especially in the Midwest and the Bible Belt South, wielding potent political influence and an attachment of nearly 5 million dues-paying members. As Hiram W. Evans explained in The Klans Fight for Americanism from The North American Review, we are intolerant of everything that strikes at the foundations of our race, our country or our freedom of worship. Evans felt threatened by any attempt to use the privileges and opportunities which aliens hold only as through our generosity as levers to force us to change our civilization. The Klan was indeed an alarming manifestation of the intolerance and prejudice plaguing people anxious about the dizzying pace of social change in the 1920s; the last thing they wanted was unrestricted
The largest factor in the Congressional passing of the Immigration Act of 1920 was the fundamental American belief that native Americans were superior to foreigners, including the 800,000 immigrants who flooded the country in 1920-1921. About two-thirds of them were from southern and eastern Europe. The one-hundred-percent Americans, recoiling at the sight of this resumed New Immigration, were disgusted at the influx of sickly Europeans. Senator Ellison D. Smith expressed his nativist concerns in …show more content…
Spreading anti-foreign, anti-Catholic, anti-black, anti-Jewish, anti-pacifist, anti-Communist, anti-internationalist, pro-Anglo-Saxon, pro-native American, and pro-Protestant sentiments, the Klan led an extreme, ultraconservative uprising against many of the forces of diversity and modernity that were transforming American culture. The KKK spread with astonishing rapidity, especially in the Midwest and the Bible Belt South, wielding potent political influence and an attachment of nearly 5 million dues-paying members. As Hiram W. Evans explained in The Klans Fight for Americanism from The North American Review, we are intolerant of everything that strikes at the foundations of our race, our country or our freedom of worship. Evans felt threatened by any attempt to use the privileges and opportunities which aliens hold only as through our generosity as levers to force us to change our civilization. The Klan was indeed an alarming manifestation of the intolerance and prejudice plaguing people anxious about the dizzying pace of social change in the 1920s; the last thing they wanted was unrestricted