Which of the following problems do you consider to have been the most serious threat facing American society in the 1920s: a) Organised crime b) Racial and religious intolerance c) The growing divisions between the rich and poor.

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Which of the following problems do you consider to have been the most serious threat facing American society in the 1920s: a) Organised crime b) Racial and religious intolerance c) The growing divisions between the rich and poor.

        This essay will investigate the threats facing American society in the 1920s and it will come to a conclusion about which threat was the most serious. The threats that I will talk about are organised crime, intolerance of race, region, religion and political view, and the growing divisions between the rich and the poor.

        America is the ‘Land of opportunity.’ It stands for a fresh start, liberalism, free speech, freedom to worship, freedom from persecution, the welcoming of different immigrants, equality and fairness. The American dream was not closed to anyone. However during the course of the 1920s this completely tolerant view was threatened. Crime and intolerance increasingly grew in America. By the end of the 1920s America had gained a reputation for diverting from its completely tolerant ideal and becoming an intolerant country. The problems I will now explain are threats these values and therefore American society.

The first section I will talk about is intolerance of race, region, religion and political view.

        The war ended in 1918 and the USA emerged from this with many problems. There was unemployment, strikes, fear of radicalism and race riots. The war had also started the communist revolution in Russia. In 1919 two communist parties were established in America, a strictly capitalist country. There was also a wave of bomb attacks by anarchists known as the reds. Between 1914 and 1919 prices had doubled, yet wages had hardly risen at all. Workers demanded higher wages but their employers new that they had the upper hand due to the high amount of unemployment at the time. Employees were not hard to find and jobs could easily be filled, especially due to the 4 million soldiers returning to America trying to find work. Violent waves of strikes happened during 1919 as a result of this problem. These strikes made the American population worried that these workers would cause a communist revolution in America. This was known as the ‘Red Scare’ in America which happened during 1919-1921. The Attorney-General called Mitchell Palmer had a bomb blow up a part of his house which he believed was due to the reds. He set up the Palmer Raids in which between 4000 and 6000 suspected reds were arrested and 556 were deported. Some people used these raids as an excuse to attack any groups they disliked such as Catholics, Jews, Blacks or new immigrants.

        These groups had a hard time in the 1920s. The Black population suffered from 23 race riots across the USA in 1919. A lot of the Blacks which had moved to the Northern Cities from the South after 1910 found themselves under attack from the white population around them. The Ku Klux Klan was a group of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who believed that they were the supreme race. They were anti-communist, anti-negro, anti-Catholic and against all foreigners. By 1920 they had 100,000 members and by 1925 claimed they had 5 million members. However the main group they targeted were the blacks, especially in the South.        

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        The Klan was a too extreme version of what some of the American population were thinking at the time. They were becoming more and more intolerant towards immigrants as time passed. They wanted an end to this open-door policy for immigrants. By 1900 there was not as much land available and the need for workers had declined. Americans also believed that the quality of immigrants had declined as illiterate people came from came into the USA. Anti-foreigner feeling had increased during the war, especially against Germans. They brought in a literacy test where immigrants had to read a 40 ...

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