Who Belongs in America?: Presidents, Rhetoric, and Immigration

Chapter 6. Immigration and the Red Scare

CHAPTER 6 Immigration and the Red Scare Robert H. Ferrell THE NOTABLE RESTRICTIONS on immigration in the temporary Act of Congress of 1921, which increased and were made permanent in the Act of 1924, derived from a change in the national temper that became clear during World War I and rose to its height in 1919 and 1920, at the time of the Red Scare. These legislative acts were, alas, entirely in accord with the new spirit of the time. Restrictions on immigration were of course not the only signs of the change in national temper. During and after the war, there was a remarkable interference with civil liberties by the federal government. Another evidence was the growth—rejuvenation is a better word—of the Ku Klux Klan, always an ugly institution, which flourished for a few years in the early 1920s and culminated in the great march of 1925 down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. There, forty thousand members of the Klan, not hooded but dressed in their spectral robes and peaked hats, paraded from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. They swung along audaciously, considering what they stood for, row after serried row. But the most important indications of a new temper within the American nation were the immigration acts. In a seminal book of nearly half a century ago, Robert A. Divine describes the move away from the grand idea of America as a refuge for the oppressed of Europe to a notion that the country could not take much more Immigration and the Red Scare | 135 immigration, especially from the countries of Eastern Europe, including Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Italy.1 Divine points out, and rightly, that two ideas were gathering followers throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century and that these thoughts were the basic causes of the excessively nationalistic remarks of America’s leaders before and during World War I, of the Red Scare that followed, and of the restrictive legislation of the 1920s. The perhaps primary idea behind all that followed was racism. In this respect, the belief of most Americans today and during the past two generations, back to the 1960s, that people are created equal and deserve equal treatment is a very modern notion. From the beginning of American history there was racism, and, for that matter, it flourished in Europe well before the voyages of discovery and colonization. At virtually the beginning of settlement of the English colonies in the New World, the need for labor was acute, for the wilderness was such a challenge; the need to clear land and plant crops that would support settlement either through providing food or providing crops that could be exchanged for food was pressing. Thus, the importation of African slaves was quickly justified as necessary, and the work of those slaves required keeping them in the fields rather than allowing upward mobility or permitting them to rise both in education and in the trades and professions. Racism, easily expressed, had this undeniable purpose. In the decades-long estrangement of the colonies from their faraway mother country, and with the increasing impulses of the government in England to advise and, more often, to instruct the colonists in their duties as well as in the privileges required of all subjects of the crown, there was an undeniable surge of feeling among the colonists—no longer that, the residents—of America that they possessed something special, something that allowed them to stand apart. After all, the Bay Colony itself had been populated by sifting the choice grain, so as to establish (to use the Puritan phrase) a city on a hill. This feeling of apartness, of special merit, became a force not merely in the American Revolution but in later years. One might venture to say that it was akin to, if not the same thing as, racism. Then the nineteenth century, with its two enormous accretions of territory to the men and women of the republic, almost invited racism—a sense that Americans were destined to overspread the entire subcontinent, described by a publicist of the 1840s as “manifest destiny.” This they 136 | ferrell promptly did with the Louisiana Purchase and, forty-odd years later, with the annexation of Texas and acquisition of the West, including California, in the treaty of peace following the Mexican War. The Oregon country, which included not merely the later state of that...