Immigration and the Red Scare
The Open Door: Immigration Before 1920
In the decades before the First World War, the United States operated what was often called an open door policy on immigration. Between 1880 and 1914, approximately 20 million people arrived in the United States, many of them coming through Ellis Island in New York harbour. The majority came from southern and eastern Europe — Italians, Poles, Russians and Jews fleeing poverty or persecution. Many settled in crowded urban neighbourhoods, taking low-paid factory work. By 1910, over a third of the United States’ population was either foreign-born or the children of immigrants.
Not everyone welcomed this wave of newcomers. Many native-born Americans feared economic competition for jobs and wages. Some held deeply racist beliefs, arguing that immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were racially inferior to those from northern and western Europe. These views fed a growing demand for restrictions on immigration.
Between 1880 and 1914, roughly 20 million immigrants entered the United States. The majority came from southern and eastern Europe, and many passed through Ellis Island. This huge influx fuelled a nativist backlash that eventually produced major immigration restrictions in the 1920s.
Restricting Immigration: The Acts of 1921 and 1924
Congress responded to anti-immigration pressure with two landmark laws. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 introduced national origin quotas for the first time, capping each nationality’s annual intake at 3 per cent of that nationality’s population already in America as recorded in the 1910 census. This reduced total immigration to around 357,000 per year — a sharp drop from the pre-war peak of over a million annually.
Three years later, the Immigration Act of 1924 tightened restrictions further. It cut the quota to 2 per cent of each nationality’s 1890 census figure — a deliberate choice, because far fewer southern and eastern Europeans lived in America in 1890. The act also set an annual cap of 164,667 immigrants and imposed a near-total ban on Asian immigration. The practical effect was to favour immigration from Britain, Germany and Scandinavia while drastically limiting arrivals from Italy, Poland and Russia.
Behind the quota system lay nativism — a fear that immigrants were changing the character of the United States. Influential works such as Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916) argued, using pseudo-scientific racial theory, that immigration from southern and eastern Europe would lead to racial and cultural decline. Such ideas had a real influence on legislators and public opinion during the 1920s.
Economic anxieties also played a role. After the First World War, many returning soldiers found that immigrants had taken their factory jobs. Trade unions, particularly the American Federation of Labor, lobbied for restrictions to protect wage levels. The combination of racial prejudice and economic competition made immigration restriction broadly popular across American society.
The Red Scare, 1919–1920
The end of the First World War brought a new fear to the United States: communism. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 had brought a communist government to power, and in 1919, a wave of strikes and bomb attacks across American cities stoked alarm that a similar revolution was being plotted at home. This period of panic became known as the First Red Scare.
In April 1919, postal workers intercepted packages containing letter bombs addressed to prominent politicians and businessmen. In June, simultaneous bombings in eight cities targeted government officials. Although the perpetrators were never fully identified, the attacks were widely blamed on anarchist and communist immigrants. Fear of foreign-born radicals merged with the existing anti-immigration mood.
The Palmer Raids of November 1919 and January 1920, led by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, resulted in the arrest of approximately 10,000 suspected radicals across 33 cities. Hundreds were deported without trial. The raids alarmed civil liberties groups and were later criticised as unlawful.
The Palmer Raids
Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer responded to the bombing campaign by launching a series of raids on suspected radical organisations. The Palmer Raids took place in November 1919 and on the night of 2–3 January 1920. In the January raid alone, agents arrested approximately 3,000 people in 33 cities in a single night. Many were held without charge; some were deported without trial. The most prominent deportee was the anarchist Emma Goldman, who was sent to Russia in December 1919.
The raids were eventually condemned by legal experts and civil liberties groups. In May 1920, a group of twelve eminent lawyers published a report describing them as a systematic violation of constitutional rights. Palmer’s credibility collapsed when his predicted uprising on 1 May 1920 failed to materialise. The raids were significant, however, in linking immigration, radicalism and foreignness in the public mind — a connection that shaped the immigration restrictions of the 1920s.
In April 1920, a paymaster and a security guard were murdered during a robbery at a shoe factory in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Two Italian-born anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were arrested and charged with the murders. Both men denied the charges but were convicted in July 1921 after a trial widely criticised for bias: witnesses who provided alibis were dismissed, and the judge made prejudicial remarks about the defendants’ anarchist beliefs and foreign origins.
The case became an international cause. Protests were held across Europe and Latin America. Intellectuals and writers condemned the trial as a miscarriage of justice rooted in anti-immigrant prejudice and anti-anarchist hysteria. After several appeals failed, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed on 23 August 1927. Their case remains the most famous symbol of American nativism and the dangers of political prejudice in the justice system during the 1920s. Massachusetts officially acknowledged in 1977 that they had not received a fair trial.
The United States as a Nation of Contrasts
The immigration restrictions of the 1920s reveal one of the deepest contradictions in American life. The United States had built its wealth and identity on immigration, yet it moved decisively to close the door — driven by racial prejudice, economic anxiety and political fear. For millions of would-be immigrants, the American dream became inaccessible. For those who were already there, the Red Scare and the Sacco and Vanzetti case showed how quickly rights could be stripped away when fear and prejudice dominated public life.