640 Chapter 24 Postwar Society and Culture: Change and Adjustment
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to
breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore”—these
words of Emma Lazarus, inscribed at the base of the Statue of
Liberty, tell only part of the story. Most immigrants were young and
hopeful, like this family at Ellis Island; many were resolute and
ambitious. The restriction of immigration during the 1920s,
conceived to exclude misfits, also deprived the nation of people
such as these.Closing the Gates to New Immigrants
One indication of this was a tightening of immigra-
tion rules. In 1921 Congress, reflecting a wide-
spread prejudice against a huge influx of eastern
and southern Europeans, passed an emergency act
establishing a quota system. Each year 3 percent of
the number of foreign-born residents of the United
States in 1910 (about 350,000 persons) might
enter the country. Each country’s quota was based
on the number of its nationals in the United States
in 1910. This meant that only a relative handful of
the total would be from southern and eastern
Europe. In 1924 the quota was reduced to 2 per-
cent and the base year shifted to 1890, thereby
lowering further the proportion of southern and
eastern Europeans admitted.
In 1929 Congress established a system that
allowed only 150,000 immigrants a year to enter the
country. (In recent years, that annual number of legal
immigrants has been increased to 700,000.) Each
national quota was based on the supposed origins of
the entire white population of the United States in
1920, not merely on the foreign-born. Here is an
example of how the system worked:
The system was complicated and unscientific, for
no one could determine with accuracy the “origins” of
millions of citizens. More seriously, it ignored
America’s long history of constantly changing ethnic
diversity. The motto E Pluribus Unum—Out of Many,
One—conceived to represent the unity of the original
thirteen states, applied even more appropriately to the
blending of different cultures into one nationality.
The new law sought to freeze the mix, to turn the
American melting pot into a kind of gigantic ice cube.
The law reduced actual immigration to far below
150,000 a year. Between 1931 and 1939, for exam-
ple, only 23,000 British immigrants came to the
United States, far below Britain’s annual quota of
65,000. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of south-
ern and eastern Europeans waited for admission.
The United States had closed the gates. The
National Origins Actcaused the foreign-born percent-
age of the population to fall from about 13 percent in
1920 to 4.7 percent in 1970. (In 2010, the foreign-
born population had again increased to about 13 per-
cent.) Instead of an open, cosmopolitan society eager to
accept, in Emma Lazarus’s stirring line, the “huddled
Italian quota = Italian-origin population, 1920
150,000 White population, 1920
Italian quota = 3,800,000
150,000 95,500,000
Italian quota = 6,000 (approximately)
masses yearning to breathe free,” America now became
committed to preserving a homogeneous, “Anglo-
Saxon” population.
Distaste for the “new” immigrants from eastern
Europe, many of whom were Jewish, expanded into a
more general anti-Semitism in the 1920s. American
Jews, whether foreign-born or native, were subjected to
increasing discrimination, not because they were slow in
adopting American ways but because (being ambitious
and hardworking, as immigrants were supposed to be)
many of them were getting ahead in the world some-
what more rapidly than expected. Prestigious colleges
like Harvard, Yale, and Columbia that had in the past
admitted Jews based on their academic records now
imposed unofficial but effective quotas. Medical schools
also established quotas, and no matter how talented,
most young Jewish lawyers and bankers could find
places only in so-called “Jewish” firms.New Urban Social Patterns
The census of 1920 revealed that for the first time a
majority of Americans (54 million in a population of
106 million) lived in “urban” rather than “rural”