A Divided Society: Prohibition, Crime, the Klan and the Red Scare
A Country at War with Itself
The 1920s did not just bring jazz and assembly lines. It brought the most ambitious social-engineering experiment in American history (Prohibition), the largest white supremacist movement the country had ever seen (the revived Klan), the tightest immigration laws in its history, and a panic about communism that produced one of its most controversial trials. These were all responses by older, white, Protestant, rural America to the changes covered in Lessons 1–4. The Boom split the country.
Four divisions defined 1920s America: Prohibition (1920–33, the 18th Amendment), the revived Ku Klux Klan (membership reached around 4–5 million by 1925), immigration restriction (Emergency Quota Act 1921, Immigration Act 1924) and the Red Scare, which culminated in the Sacco and Vanzetti trial of 1921.
Prohibition
Prohibition began in January 1920 with the 18th Amendment and the enforcing Volstead Act. Campaigners — the Anti-Saloon League, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, evangelical Protestant churches — argued that alcohol was destroying families, encouraging crime and ruining workers’ productivity. Their core support was rural, Protestant and white; they distrusted the saloons of the Catholic immigrant cities. Within months it was clear most Americans did not want to give up alcohol. The result was an enormous illegal economy.
Illegal bars known as speakeasies opened in every major city — New York alone had over 30,000 by 1929, more than the city had had legal saloons before Prohibition. Bootlegging stretched from rum-runners off the Florida coast to backyard stills in West Virginia. Federal Prohibition agents (only about 1,500 nationally) could not police a country that did not want to be policed.
Al Capone built a Chicago empire on bootleg alcohol, gambling and protection rackets. He bribed the mayor, the police chief and many federal agents; estimates put his gang’s 1927 income at around $60 million. Rival gangs fought over distribution — the St Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929 saw Capone’s men gun down seven Bugs Moran gangsters. Federal agents could not catch Capone for murder; in 1931 he was finally jailed for tax evasion. He had, however, demonstrated that Prohibition had handed an entire industry to organised crime.
The Ku Klux Klan Revived
The original Klan had been crushed in the 1870s. A new Ku Klux Klan was launched in Georgia in 1915, inspired in part by the Hollywood film The Birth of a Nation. Through the early 1920s it grew into a mass movement, its membership peaking at perhaps 4–5 million by 1925. Its targets were not just African-Americans but also Catholics, Jews and recent immigrants — anyone who did not fit the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) ideal. It dominated state politics in Indiana, Oregon and Colorado. Its hooded marches, cross-burnings and lynchings spread fear across the South and into the Midwest.
The Klan’s influence collapsed almost as fast as it grew. In 1925 D. C. Stephenson, the Grand Dragon of Indiana, was convicted of the rape and murder of a young woman, Madge Oberholtzer. The trial exposed the Klan’s violence and corruption, and membership halved in two years. By 1929 the Klan was a fraction of its 1925 size — though the prejudice that had powered it remained.
Immigration Restriction
For most of its history the USA had welcomed mass immigration. Between 1900 and 1914 around 13 million Europeans arrived. After the First World War, fear of revolution, the new Red Scare (below) and racism towards southern and eastern Europeans changed the politics. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 capped overall immigration at around 357,000 a year and set quotas favouring northern Europeans. The Immigration Act of 1924 went further: it cut overall immigration to 165,000 a year and pegged the quotas to the 1890 census — before most southern and eastern Europeans had arrived. Asian immigration was banned outright. The 1924 Act was the basis of US immigration policy for the next 41 years.
The Klan, Prohibition and the immigration Acts shared a base of supporters and a shared anxiety. By 1920 over half of all Americans lived in cities for the first time; the cities were full of southern and eastern Europeans, Catholics, Jews and African-Americans up from the South. The 1920 census made the change visible to anyone who read the figures. Older WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) America — rural, Protestant, north-western European in origin — saw its dominance slipping and reached for laws to reverse it. The 1924 Immigration Act was drafted by Albert Johnson, who openly cited ‘eugenic’ arguments about race; the Klan’s growth was strongest in midwestern states like Indiana whose populations had been shifting fastest; Prohibition aimed at the saloons of Catholic immigrant cities. Treat these as one connected backlash, not three separate stories.
The Red Scare and Sacco and Vanzetti
The 1917 Russian Revolution had terrified American business and government. The 1919 strike wave (over 4 million workers walked out, including the Boston police) and a series of anarchist letter bombs convinced Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer that communism was an immediate threat. The Red Scare peaked in the 1919–20 Palmer Raids: thousands were arrested, 556 immigrants were deported without trial. Civil-liberties campaigners protested, but the political climate had shifted decisively against the foreign-born and the political left.
In April 1920 a paymaster and a guard were shot dead in a robbery at a shoe factory in Massachusetts. Two Italian immigrants — Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti — were arrested. Both were known anarchists who had dodged the wartime draft. The evidence was thin and contradictory; the trial judge, Webster Thayer, openly described the men as ‘anarchist bastards’. They were convicted in 1921 and, after six years of appeals, executed in August 1927. The case became internationally famous as a symbol of how the Red Scare and immigration prejudice could combine to deny justice. The spec names Sacco and Vanzetti precisely because their case shows the intersection of three of this lesson’s themes: communism panic, immigration restriction and ethnic prejudice.
The Sacco and Vanzetti case (1920–27) is named in the spec because it captures three forces in one trial: anti-communist panic (Red Scare), prejudice against Italian-Americans, and the wider 1920s push to restrict immigration. Explain its importance in those terms rather than retelling the story.