Immigration, the Red Scare and nativism
Fear of Radicals: The Red Scare
In the aftermath of the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, a wave of anxiety about Communist and anarchist subversion swept the United States. In 1919, a series of mail bombs targeting government officials — including a device sent to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer — and a bomb explosion outside Palmer’s home in June 1919 intensified demands for action against radicals. The result was one of the most significant attacks on civil liberties in American peacetime history.
The Palmer Raids took place in two main waves: November 1919 and January 1920. In the January raids alone, around 10,000 people were arrested across 33 cities. Many were held for days without charges. Evidence was often minimal or fabricated. Several hundred people, mostly foreign-born, were deported to the Soviet Union. The head of the Bureau of Investigation’s General Intelligence Division, J. Edgar Hoover, compiled files on thousands of suspected radicals. He would go on to lead the FBI for the next five decades.
The Sacco and Vanzetti Case
In May 1920, two Italian-born anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were arrested for the murder of a paymaster and his guard during a robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts in April that year. Their trial in 1921 became a cause célèbre. Critics argued that the prosecution was driven by their immigrant background and political beliefs rather than the evidence. The judge, Webster Thayer, made comments about the defendants’ politics that suggested prejudice.
Despite international protests — demonstrations were held in Europe, South America, and across the United States — both men were executed on 23 August 1927. In 1977, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation declaring that Sacco and Vanzetti had been unfairly tried and condemning the atmosphere of prejudice that had surrounded the case. Their guilt has been debated for a century: ballistics evidence later analysed in the 1980s suggested Sacco’s gun may have been used, while Vanzetti’s guilt appears even less certain. The safest description is that their trial was procedurally flawed, not that their innocence is proven.
A more permanent expression of nativist sentiment was the National Origins Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act. It set immigration quotas at 2 per cent of each nationality’s presence in the 1890 census — a year chosen deliberately because it pre-dated the mass immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. The effect was to sharply reduce immigration from Italy, Poland, Russia, and other countries, while largely preserving immigration from Britain and Western Europe. Immigration from Asian countries was effectively banned entirely. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 had already begun this process; the 1924 act made it permanent and stricter.
Responses: NAACP and UNIA
Prejudice was also challenged from within Black America. The NAACP, led by James Weldon Johnson as executive secretary from 1920 to 1930, campaigned tirelessly for federal anti-lynching legislation and challenged segregation through the courts. Its magazine The Crisis, edited by W.E.B. Du Bois, reached a circulation of around 100,000 by the early 1920s, documenting racial violence and intellectual Black life.
Marcus Garvey’s UNIA offered a separatist vision: Black economic self-sufficiency, pride in African heritage, and ultimately the creation of an independent Black nation in Africa. Garvey’s movement attracted millions of followers in the early 1920s, particularly among working-class African Americans in northern cities. Du Bois and the NAACP were deeply critical of Garvey’s separatism, which they saw as accepting rather than challenging racial inequality. Garvey was convicted of mail fraud in 1923, jailed in 1925 and deported to Jamaica in 1927, which ended his American movement.
The Palmer Raids were eventually halted by a combination of legal challenges and political embarrassment. Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis Post cancelled thousands of deportation orders on due-process grounds. By 1920, Palmer’s prediction of a major Communist revolution on May Day had proved completely wrong, damaging his credibility. The American Civil Liberties Union, founded in 1920, emerged partly in response to the abuses of the Palmer era and would go on to challenge repressive laws throughout the decade. Palmer’s hoped-for presidential run in 1920 came to nothing.