The Birth of Modern America, 1914 - 1945. John McClymer. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: John McClymer
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
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Жанр произведения: Историческая литература
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781119081449
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opportunities and an escape from segregation, discrimination, and lynching. They were successful in finding jobs because the war effectively cut off immigration from Europe. The jobs paid considerably more than these people had earned in the South.

      Blacks took jobs that previously had gone to Poles, Italians, Lithuanians, and other southern and eastern European newcomers. Whites, especially immigrants and their children, bitterly resented the African Americans. They saw them as potential strikebreakers. They complained that the competition for housing drove up rents. Race relations became more and more volatile. The 1917 riot in East St. Louis was a bloody indicator of things to come. Ida Wells‐Barnett, famed for her long campaign against lynching, went to the city at the behest of a black organization in Chicago. Historians have not had to correct her account:

       the rioting started on the morning of July 2nd, when the workers were coming off the 11 o’clock shift at the factories and packing plants. The cause was alleged to be the killing of two white police officers who had been shot by colored men when they went into the Negro district on the Denver side to quell a supposed riot. These colored men said that an automobile had gone through the neighborhood firing right and left into the windows of the houses and of the church. A bell was rung and the men rapidly came together at the church to plan for resisting other attacks of similar character. When a second automobile came on the scene very soon after, they thought it were the same parties, and fired into it after a parley, wounding two officers who afterwards died.…

       When the officers were killed in the unfortunate mixup of July 1st, it gave excuse for the breaking out of the mob composed largely of union workers and the Negro haters who gathered from small towns surrounding, and even from the South. Horrible stories were given both by eye witnesses as well as by others, the saddest part of them all being, that in every instance, as the mob set upon men coming from their work at 11 o’clock in the day, the soldiers or the police held up the black men, searched them and even took their pocket knives, then left them at the mercy of the mob. In all that disgraceful twenty‐four hours of rioting, murder and arson, not a shot was fired by the militia.

      There would be dozens of similar race riots, the worst being in Chicago in 1919 and in Tulsa in 1921.

      Also in 1917, copper companies in Bisbee, Arizona, “deported” workers who had joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a radical union that opposed American entry into the war, to New Mexico. Local sheriffs deputized volunteers, who then rounded up IWW supporters, herded them into a baseball field, and then marched them to the railroad station and packed them into freight cars. The federal government investigated and found that the companies’ actions were illegal, but that they violated state rather than federal law. No one was ever convicted. Many of those deported were immigrants from Europe; many others were Mexicans or Mexican Americans.

      Nativist hostility only increased. Over President Wilson’s veto, Congress passed an immigration restriction bill. It imposed a literacy test. A large percentage of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe could not read or write. When passed in 1917, the law was largely symbolic because the war had brought immigration to a virtual halt. When it resumed in the latter part of 1919, the literacy test proved to be entirely ineffectual. Immigrants had learned to read; they knew that otherwise they would be turned away. The literacy test would be replaced by the Emergency Quota Act, which established quotas for countries sending emigrants to the United States. The Johnson‐Reed Act of 1924 set permanent quotas using the 1890 Census. Why 1890 and not 1920? The year 1890 marked the start of the so‐called new immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Advocates of restriction wanted to reduce the total number of immigrants; they especially wanted to reduce the numbers of Italians, Poles, Russian Jews, Greeks, and other supposedly inferior peoples.

      Immigration Quotas under the Johnson‐Reed Restriction Act


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Northwest Europe and Scandinavia Eastern and Southern Europe Other Countries
Country Quota Country Quota Country Quota
Germany 51,227 Poland 5,982 Africa (other than Egypt) 1,100
Great Britain and Northern Ireland 34,007 Italy 3,845 Armenia 124
Irish Free State (Ireland) 28,567 Czechoslovakia 3,073 Australia 121
Sweden 9,561 Russia 2,248 Palestine 100
Norway 6,453 Yugoslavia 671 Syria 100
France 3,954 Romania 603 Turkey 100
Denmark 2,789 Portugal 503 Egypt 100
Switzerland 2,081 Hungary 473 New Zealand and Pacific Islands 100
Netherlands 1,648 Lithuania 344 All others 1,900
Austria 785 Latvia 142