[84]The committee took a very important step in recommending a permanent percentage law and thus recognizing the principle that the United States should never keep its doors wide open. Second, the percentage is based on the census of 1890 instead of the census of 1910, as in the present law. The new measure thus aims to change the character of our future immigration by cutting down the number of aliens who can come from southern and eastern Europe. In other words, it is recognized that, on the whole, northern and western Europe furnish the best material for citizenship.
The total immigration, therefore, was reduced from 357,000 to 164,667 and the emigrants have to be deducted from this to ascertain the actual annual increase. The Italian quota was reduced from 42,000 to 3,845; the Russian from 24,000 to 2,200; the Polish from 30,000 to 6,000. On the other hand, the German quota was reduced only from 67,000 to 51,000; the Norwegian from 12,000 to 6,400; the British and Irish from 77,000 to 62,500. The bill carried out radically the intentions of its sponsors, to cut down the flood of immigration and to discriminate against the racial and religious groups which they consider inferior because they appear externally to be different. It is a group reaction of the same order and motivation as the Ku Klux Klan.
6.
A concurrent phenomenon, arising from the same group mind but essentially different in manifestation, is the suppression of civil liberties which began during the war and continued afterward, an expression of the same impulse toward compulsory like-mindedness, but taking its criterion from the economic rather than the cultural, religious or racial aspects of the differing groups. As Father Ryan put it:
[85]These deplorable phenomena are three-fourths due to war legislation and surviving war hysteria and one-fourth due to industrial factors.... By means of clever, unscrupulous and wholesale propaganda, nine-tenths of the American people were led to believe that the steel strike of 1919 was revolutionary, bolshevistic, and aimed immediately at the overthrow of the government. As a matter of fact, there was no more bolshevism in that contest than in any one of a dozen important disputes that have occurred in the last ten years. Attorney General Palmer asserted that there was an organized attempt to overthrow the government of the United States sufficiently widespread to merit the attention of Congress. As a matter of fact, there was no such danger.
[86]Dr. Harry F. Ward of Union Theological Seminary, in the same Proceedings of the American Sociological Society, has a fine summary of the “Repression of Civil Liberties in the United States (1918–23).” He enumerates the new Supreme Court interpretation of the free-speech clause of the first amendment to the Constitution, by which a “clear and present danger” justifies its violation; the state laws on syndicalism or sedition or anarchy; the attacks on the right of labor to strike; the use of the Department of Justice of the United States to repress radical economic movements; the mob violence increasingly widespread and regular; and the national organizations engaged in repression, such as the National Civic Federation, the National Security League, and the Better American Federation.
The material is too wide in range and too full of important instances to be even cursorily examined here. The trend, however, was definitely a part of the post-war attitude of the American mind, the breaking up into violently opposing groups, each claiming to assert the true American spirit. The same attitude of repression appears in the churches in the form of heresy trials and an aggressive Fundamentalism. It appears in the form of legislative acts to prohibit the teaching of evolution in the state universities of several Southern states (most of which failed of passage). Dr. Ward feels that the
Mob attacks, lynchings and prosecutions involving the use of free speech reached their peak at the end of 1922, declining rapidly in. 1923. Interference with meetings by public authorities and private groups reached a peak at the end of 1921, fell sharply in 1922, and then went up again to a midway point in 1923.... [87]We have a manifest abatement of post-war repression, but that experience has left us a heritage of repressive laws and ordinances and a technique of administrative illegality all ready to be used on due occasion. It has also strengthened our lynching habit of mind, with its determination to enforce its type of goodness, and our traditional demand for conformity already overstimulated by the increasing standardization of life. The occasions for the use of those qualities and instruments of repression are increasing rather than diminishing.
Attempts were made during the height of the anti-Russian and anti-radical movement to connect Jews with Bolshevism in Russia and with radicalism in the United States, so that this movement also has its anti-Semitic phase. Thus anti-Semitism is bound up with the Ku Klux Klan, with the immigration bills, with the economic repression,—it is an integral part of the group reaction from national unity, and appears in every phase of the post-war group reactions.