The idea of America being the land of peace and opportunity was true to a certain extent. Immigrants could come from almost any other country in the world and be amongst thousands of people from the same country. There were jobs available to anyone, no matter what race, culture or religion.
Immigration had made the USA a very mixed society; it was like a ‘melting pot’ of different cultures. Immigrants were invited to lose their old identity when they arrived in America, and become Americans. The first European settlers, mostly from Britain, Germany and Scandinavia, tended to hold the most political power, the most money and the best jobs. This was the way Woodrow Wilson had wanted things to be, he wanted the “WASPs” (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants) to hold influence as they were from the same cultural and religious background as him.
By 1919 most of the native Americas, who had originally lived spread across the whole of the continent, had been confined to reservations and forced off their land. This was to make room for the homesteaders who “needed” to fence off their property and lay claim to the un-taken land.
In the 18th and 19th centuries millions of Africans were brought to America as slaves, by 1919 there were 11 million lack people living in America.
In the late 19th and early 20th century many Japanese and Chinese immigrants moved to America. These immigrants generally ended up on the west coast or in the Midwest working building the Trans-American railways.
There was a large increase in the percentage of Hispanics in the American population after 1921 when the quota act was brought in. This act meant that there was a limit on the number of immigrants allowed into the USA, the limit was calculated by country of origin, and was based on the percentage of the population taken up by immigrants from that country. However there was no limit on emigrants from Mexico, thus there was a large increase in the Hispanic population after 1921.
For most of the immigrants the tone of excitement and opportunity gradually faded. Life became harder as the cities became crowded and there were less paying jobs than willing workers. After World War I many bitter soldiers returned to find women or even worse, Negroes had filled their jobs. This sparked a lot of racial and social unrest, groups like the ku klux klan grew in strength, especially in areas of the deep south, where jobs were even more sparse and the population of black people was more dense.
More social conflict was sparked in 1919 in the “Palmer Raids”. After the Great War high inflation caused industrial unrest, during 1919 an estimated 4,000,000 workers went on strike. Many people followed the idea that these ‘strikers’ were being led by communists, looking to revolutionise the USA in the same way they had taken over in the USSR. Anyone who had recently emigrated from southern or eastern Europe became targets, as they were believed to be communists and attempting to overthrow the American government. The situation was amplified by bombings by anarchists in 8 different American cities. This “red scare” led to 6,000 arrests, known as the palmer raids, named after the attorney general of the time, Mitchell Palmer. He had become very famous and popular from his exposure of “communist activity”. However from these arrests, he only ever deported 249 American residents, and even these were illegal immigrants who had less rights than actual citizens. As he was gradually made to look the fool, when evidence of communists failed to materialise, it became clear that his fight against “communists” was a publicity stunt, which he had hoped would win him the presidency.
The idea that America was a land of opportunity in 1919 is certainly true, when compared to the countries of origin from which most of the emigrants arrived. However, this depended heavily on race, culture and religion because although there were jobs available to most races they were generally the jobs offered in their own communities. For example a black man would not have been offered a job to work in a Jewish jewellery shop in New York. People from the same country or ethnicity tended to stick together, and it would have been very hard to be accepted into a group that one did not “belong to”.
The idea that America was a land of peace is a completely different matter. I do not feel that America in 1919 was any more peaceful than the revolutionary Russia that was so feared in America at the time. With the amount of racial hatred and discrimination that was commonplace across the country, America cannot be called peaceful even to a tiny extent. However, America still managed to attract millions of immigrants in a relatively small amount of time, so the attraction of opportunity and illusion of peace must have been successful.
