THE CULTURE WARS ★^803resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan had been reborn in Atlanta in 1915
after the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager accused of killing a
teenage girl. By the mid- 1920s, it claimed more than 3 million members, nearly
all white, native- born Protestants, many of whom held respected positions in
their communities. Unlike the Klan of Reconstruction, the organization now
sank deep roots in parts of the North and West. It became the largest private
organization in Indiana, and for a time controlled the state Republican Party. It
was partly responsible for the Oregon law banning private schools. In southern
California, its large marches and auto parades made the Klan a visible presence.
The new Klan attacked a far broader array of targets than during Reconstruc-
tion. American civilization, it insisted, was endangered not only by blacks but
by immigrants (especially Jews and Catholics) and all the forces (feminism,
unions, immorality, even, on occasion, the giant corporations) that endangered
“individual liberty.”
Closing the Golden Door
The Klan’s influence faded after 1925, when its leader in Indiana was convicted
of assaulting a young woman. But the Klan’s attacks on modern secular culture
and political radicalism and its demand that control of the nation be returned
to “citizens of the old stock” reflected sentiments widely shared in the 1920s.
The decade witnessed a flurry of legislation that offered a new answer to the
venerable question “Who is an American?” In 1924, Congress declared all
Native Americans born in the United States to be American citizens, although
many western states continued to deny the vote to those living on reservations.
Far more sweeping was a fundamental change in immigration policy.
Immigration restriction had a long history. The Naturalization Act of 1790 had
barred blacks and Asians from naturalization, with the ban lifted for the former
in 1870. Beginning in 1875, various classes of immigrants had been excluded,
among them prostitutes, the mentally retarded, and those with contagious dis-
eases. Nonetheless, prior to World War I virtually all the white persons who
wished to pass through the “golden door” into the United States and become
citizens were able to do so. During the 1920s, however, the pressure for whole-
sale immigration restriction became irresistible. One index of the changing
political climate was that large employers dropped their traditional opposition.
Fears of immigrant radicalism now outweighed the desire for cheap unskilled
labor, especially since mechanization had halted the growth of the industrial
labor force and the Great Migration of World War I had accustomed industrial-
ists to employing African- Americans.
In 1921, a temporary measure restricted immigration from Europe to
357,000 per year ( one- third of the annual average before the war). Three years
What were the major flash points between fundamentalism and pluralism in the 1920s?