Unit 8B: Intolerance

Notes

• America experienced a new wave of nativism

• Rural Americans thought of immigrants as “un-American”, non-Protestant, anarchists, socialists

• The Red Scare, union strikes and growth of Eugene Deb’s socialist Party spread fears of a Russian style socialist revolution.

• During the Red Scare, immigrants were under attack

• in 1920, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were arrested and charged with robbery and murder

• In response to nativism, Congress passed new immigration restrictions in 1921 and 1924

• These laws created quotas that placed a maximum number of how many immigrants could enter the U.S. each year

• These laws targeted those immigrants who came from southern and Eastern Europe or Asia

• The 1920’s saw an increase in the Ku Klux Klan

• The KKK promoted traditional “American” values and used violence and fear to attack immigrants, African Americans, Catholics, Jaws, socialists

• Rural Americans found comfort in religious fundamentalism (a literal interpretation of the bible)

• The Scopes “Monkey Trial” was a national sensation

  • ACLU attorney Clarence Darrow defended Scopes; Represented urban America, science and modernity

  • William Jennings Bryan served as prosecutor; Represented Christianity and rural values

  • Scopes was found guilty, but evolutionists belived they won because Darrow got Bryan to admit that the world might not have been made in six 24 hour days.

• America in the 1920’s experienced a decade of change

  • Increases in consumerism

  • Government policies favored business and isolationism

  • Women and African Americans experienced new freedoms while immigrants came under attack

  • Cars, radios, entertainment