Experiences of immigrants

• The vast majority of Americans were either immigrants or descendants of recent immigrants
• Immigration to the USA was at an all-time high from 1901 to 1910
• Immigrants to the USA during 1901-1910


  • Jews from eastern Europe and Russia fleeing persecution
  • People from Italy fleeing poverty
• Many Italian immigrants did not intend to settle in the USA, but hoped to make money to take back to their families in Italy
• The United States had always prided itself on being a 'melting pot'
• In theory, individual groups lost their ethnic identity and blended together with other groups to become just 'Americans'
• In practice, this wasn't always the case
• Established immigrant groups competing for jobs and housing in USA's big cities

  • Irish Americans
  • French Canadians
  • German Americans
• Attitudes of established immigrant groups towards more recent immigrants

  • Looked down on eastern European and Italian immigrants
• Attitudes of eastern European and Italian immigrants towards other groups


  • Had nothing but contempt for African Americans and Mexicans
• In the 1920s racist attitudes towards immigrants were made worse by an increased fear of Communism
• The USA watched with alarm as Russia became Communist after the Russian Revolution of 1917
• In 1919 America was hit by a wave of strikes and riots, the main cause being economic hardship after men were laid off due to falling wartime production levels
• Many Americans saw these disturbances as the work of Communists or other radical political groups such as anarchists
• They feared that many of the more recent immigrants from eastern Europe and Russia were bringing similar radical ideas with them to the USA
• Red Scare

  Reaction to fear of Communism combined with prejudice against immigrants
• Many immigrants in the USA did hold radical political beliefs
• Anarchists published pamphlets and distributed them widely in American cities, calling for the overthrow of the government
• In April 1919 a bomb planted in a church in Milwaukee killed ten people
• In May, bombs were posted to 36 prominent Americans
• In June more bombs went off in seven US cities, and one almost succeeded in killing Mitchell Palmer, the US Attorney General
• The government reaction was quick and harsh
• J. Edgar Hoover was appointed by Palmer and built up files on 60,000 suspects
• In 1919–20 around 10,000 individuals were informed that they were to be deported from the USA
• It later emerged that only 556 out of the thousands of cases brought by Hoover had any basis in fact
• All those known to have radical political beliefs were rounded up, they were generally immigrants and the evidence against them was often flimsy
• Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti became a long-running and notorious case
• They were accused of two murders during an armed robbery at a shoe factory in Massachusetts
• The case against them was very shaky
• After the trial, the judge referred to the two as 'those anarchist bastards'
• Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted on flimsy evidence
• Explaining the verdict, a leading lawyer of the time said: 'Judge Thayer is narrow minded ... unintelligent ... full of prejudice. He has been carried away by fear of Reds which has captured about 90 per cent of the American people'
• After six years of legal appeals, Sacco and Vanzetti were eventually executed in 1927, to a storm of protest around the world from both radicals and moderates who saw how unjustly the trial had been conducted
• The case illustrates the extent to which some influential people in the USA had moved away from the open society of pre-1914
• By the time of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, government measures on immigration were already in place
• In 1917 the government had introduced a literacy test for immigrants to check that they could read basic English
• In 1921 the government brought in a system of immigration quotas, with further restrictions in 1924
• These quotas reduced the number of immigrants to a maximum of 150,000 per year, compared with more than a million in the years before 1914
• The restrictions also ensured that most immigrants came from north-west Europe rather than from areas where the language and culture were different from the dominant culture in US society
• Immigrants who did arrive were frequently disappointed that they did not share in the boom of the 1920s