1. Immigrants and the Red Scare…
The 1920s
Immigrants and the Red Scare…

2. President Warren G. Harding promotes a return to “normalcy”
Renewed isolationism
Resurgence of nativism
Trend toward political conservatism

3. A New Threat to Normalcy
After the Russian Revolution, the newly formed American Communist Party in the United States attracts some members
What does this lead to?
How do Americans feel about communism today?

4. Communists advocate worldwide revolution
Encourage the overthrow of all capitalist systems and the abolition of free enterprise and private property
In response to the widespread Red Scare, the government hunts down suspected Communists, socialists, and anarchists.

5. “ The blaze of revolution was sweeping over every American institution of law and order… eating its way into the homes of American workman, its sharp tongues of revolutionary heat… licking at the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes,… burning up the foundations of American society.”
-A. Mitchell Palmer

6. Palmer Raids A. Mitchell Palmer: Attorney General of the United States
August 1919: J. Edgar Hoover appointed to head the antiradical division of the Justice Department (a.k.a. The F.B.I.)
Government officials sent to hunt down suspected Communists, socialists, and anarchists
Civil Rights are trampled…

7. Sacco and Vanzetti
The Red Scare feeds people’s suspicion of foreigners and immigrants, sometimes leading to ruined reputations and wrecked lives…
Sacco and Vanzetti, two anarchists and Italian immigrants are executed for a crime they may not have committed

8. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are Italian immigrants and anarchists who evaded the draft during WWI.
April 1920: factory paymaster and his guard are shot, $15,000 is stolen
Witnesses say the perpetrators appeared to be Italian
3 weeks later, Sacco and Vanzetti are arrested
Provide alibis
Evidence is circumstantial
Judge makes several prejudicial remarks
Jury still finds them guilty and they are sentenced to death.
August 23, 1927: Both men are executed in the electric chair amid international protest

9. The Immigration Act of 1924 Establishes quotas
Discriminates strongly against people from outside Western Europe

10. The re-emergence of the KKK
Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan use anti-communism as an excuse to harass ethnic and religious minorities

11. The New Klan Devoted to “100% Americanism”
1924: Membership rises to 4.5 million “white male persons, native-born gentile citizens” who believed in keep blacks “ in their place,” destroying saloons, opposing unions, and driving Roman Catholics, Jews, and foreign-born people out of the country.

12. Threatened by the changes happening in society.
Resent small advances made by African Americans during WWI
Feel moral values are being attacked by urban intellectuals
Fear job competition from immigrants
Convinced foreigners are going to overthrow the American way of life.

13. The KKK asserts power Racial violence
Try to influence national and state politics
Indiana

14. The Ku Klux Klan: A Legacy of Hatred