3. • Immigrants must pass literacy tests in order to enter the country.
• They were to test whether or not an applicant could read or write,
but not necessarily in English.
• Passing these tests was highly dependent on the applicant’s
knowledge of American history and geography, effectively labelling
those who did not have knowledge of such things as less intelligent.
4. • Reduced immigration of Eastern and Southern Europeans to 3% of
each national group which already lived in the USA, as counted in the
1910 Census.
• There were exceptions to professionals such as artists, actors, singers
and nurses.
• Did not restrict immigration from Canada or Latin America.
5. • Reduced the number of Eastern and Southern Europeans allowed into
the country to 2% of those living in the USA based on the 1890
Census.
• Excluded Asians altogether; prevented immigration from China and
Japan.
6. • Maximum of 150,000 immigrants per year, with none from China or
Japan.
• The immigration acts passed in the 1920s led to immigration dropping
from 4,000,000 to 500,000 per year.
7.
8. 1) Several immigrant communities, such as the Italian-Americans, did
not wish to fight for America in the First World War, and this led
many Americans to view such communities as disloyal and
unpatriotic.
2) The war led to fears of immigrants from Austria and Germany, who
were quickly barred from entering the country.
3) Americans were shocked the war and desperately craved a ‘return
to normalcy’, which included the assimilation of immigrant
communities; many immigrants were unwilling to assimilate,
leading to a rising suspicion of such communities.
9. 1) The Russian Revolution in 1917 made America aware of radical
political ideas, and as the Bolsheviks had promised a ‘worldwide
revolution’, American capitalists feared the money they could lose if
Communism were to come to America.
• People were particularly worried about this when 16 bombs were found in a
New York Post Office addressed to ‘enemies of the revolution’.
2) Such radical ideas were associated with the immigrant working
classes after 4 million workers went on strike in 1919 and 1920, and
after a police strike in Boston.
10. 3) The Palmer Raids arrested 6000 people and deported 500, on the basis
that those punished held subversive political views.
• The General Intelligence Division investigated revolutionary activities, and arrested
people on little evidence.
4) Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested for a violent robbery in Boston (which
wasn’t that uncommon at the time) and had to sit un unfair trial with
circumstantial evidence and a biased judge, to be sentenced to death at
the end of it.
• A 14-year-old boy was called as a witness who had only seen the back of the person,
but claimed that he knew that they were a foreigner because of ‘the way they ran’.
• The biased judge had already presided over a case in which Vanzetti had been the
defendant.
11. • HOWEVER the Red Scare was mostly over by the summer of 1920,
and therefore could be considered as less of an important factor in
the passing of the immigration laws.
• HOWEVER Sacco and Vanzetti were not executed until 1927, and this shows
that the debates over the Red Scare were still present throughout the decade.
12. • The KKK were a group of white supremacists who disliked immigration and
reformed in 1915 as a response to the changes that had happened in
America over the past few decades.
• They had a massive political influence, having control of Maine, Indiana,
Louisiana and Colorado as well as support in Denver, Dallas and Detroit.
• At one point, both of the Georgia Senators were Klansmen and David Stephenson
had Illinois under his control.
• They stood for the changing of immigration laws, and their membership
began to decline after these had been passed, showing that they had ‘got
what they came for’. They also took the credit for the passing of many of
the immigration laws in the 1920s.
13. • By the 1920s, the majority of the immigrants coming from Eastern
and Southern Europe were unskilled, and it was thought by workers
that they would provide cheap labour that would undercut their
wages.
• The fact that the Quota Act 1921 had a clause to prevent the
immigration of unskilled labourers shows that, at least partly, the laws
were set up to protect workers and their wages.
