The ‘20s: Culture, Consumption, and Crash 121cially spoke out against liquor and jazz, and with some success, as the amend-
ment to prohibit the manufacture and sale of alcohol showed. And while
many women felt liberated during the Jazz Age, most still held on to tradi-
tional views of modesty, with ambitions to be wives and mothers and thus
promote social morality. Meanwhile, few issues aroused the fear and anger of
traditional Americans as that of immigration [not unlike the 21st Century
controversies over Mexican immigration in the U.S. Southwest]. There had
long been opposition to immigrants, people coming from other lands to the
U.S., led by groups advocating nativism—the belief that the country was
founded and should be led by white Christians, probably conservative, and
that the number of outsiders should be limited and their behavior regulated.
Immigrants brought different religions with them—especially Catholicism—
and, as noted, enjoyed alcohol and other amusements more than those with
old puritanical views could accept. At various times, the government put
quotas on immigrants—Asians in California in the early 1900s were particu-
larly oppressed, for instance. However, there was a large and persistent need
for workers in the U.S., so immigration was in fact a labor issue, though many
saw it as a cultural, religious, or ethnic problem. Moreover, immigrants usu-
ally moved to cities, 23 million in the Northeast alone, where they would take
up industrial jobs. Once there, the general lack of sanitation, large families
crowded into small apartments, and crime added to the negative, and some-
times hysterical, attitudes about foreign-born people in the U.S.
White Protestant America and its new immigrants came into conflict in a
spectacular manner in South Braintree, Massachusetts in April 1920 when
armed men robbed the payroll of a shoe factory and killed the paymaster and
a guard during the crime. Just weeks later, police stopped two Italian immi-
grants who described themselves as anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo
Vanzetti, who were carrying loaded pistols. They arrested Sacco and Vanzetti
and charged them with the murder of the two men during the payroll robbery.
Their trial would become a national phenomenon [much like the O.J. Simpson
or Jodi Arias cases much later, without, of course, the advanced media atten-
tion]. The trial began in 1921, with Webster Thayer, a conservative, tradi-
tional, White, Ivy-Legue educated judge who often lectured about the evils of
Bolshevism and anarchism presiding. The facts of the crime were secondary
to Sacco and Vanzetti’s ethnicity, their political views, and the hysteria of the
Red Scare. Thayer’s political ideas, his biases really, were obvious from the