“radical” foreign ideas and “un-American” lifestyles. 2. The “Red Scare” of 1919-20 resulted in Attorney General
A. Mitchell Palmer (“Fighting Quaker”) using a series of raids to round up and arrest about 6,000 suspected Communists. 3. In December of 1919, 249 alleged alien radicals were deported on the Buford. 4. The Red Scare severely cut back free speech for a period, since the hysteria caused many people to want to eliminate any Communists and their ideas. * Some states made it illegal to merely advocate the violent overthrow of government for social change. * In 1921, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were convicted of murdering a Massachusetts paymaster and his guard. The two accused were
Italians, atheists, anarchists, and draft dodgers, and the courts may have been prejudiced against them. 5. In this time period, anti-foreignism (or “nativism”) was high. 6. Liberals and radicals rallied around the two men, but they were executed.
II. Hooded Hoodlums of the KKK 1. The new Ku Klux Klan was anti-foreign, anti-Catholic, anti-black, anti-Jewish, anti-pacifist, anti-Communist, anti-internationalist, anti-revolutionist, anti-bootlegger, anti-gambling, anti-adultery, and anti-birth control. 2. More simply, it was pro-White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) and anti-everything else. 3. At its peak in the 1920s, it claimed 5 million members, mostly from the South, but it also featured a reign of hooded horror. * The KKK employed the same tactics of fear, lynchings, and intimidation. * It was stopped not by the exposure of its horrible racism, but by its money fraud.
III. Stemming the Foreign Flood 1. In 1920-21, some 800,000 European “New Immigrants”
(mostly from the southeastern Europe regions) came to the U.S. and
Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act of 1921,