3 - The Perils of Plenty, or How The Twenties Acquired a Paranoid Tilt

Summary

As the twenties lurched back and forth between salvaging the old and embracing the new, a series of interrelated developments – including the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the long, divisive trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1920–27), and the passage of the National Origins Act of 1924 – exposed conflicts that gave the era a paranoid tilt. In the Black Sox scandal of 1919, the greed of gamblers and of Charles A. Cominskey, owner of the Chicago White Sox, merged with the resentments of the players to besmirch baseball, the “national pastime,” and ruin the careers of innocent as well as guilty players. A. Mitchell Palmer, Hoover’s attorney general, once a devout Quaker and prewar Progressive, took the lead in promoting postwar hysteria by accusing recent immigrants of bringing the nation to the edge of “internal revolution.” In his campaign, Palmer attracted a group of unlikely supporters, including avid nativists, resurgent fundamentalists, and men bearing distinguished names and occupying high offices. “The Nordic race” must fight “against the dangerous foreign races,” wrote Madison Grant, the patrician New Yorker who headed the Museum of Natural History, in The Passing of the Great Race (1916). Other socially prominent sorts, including Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, President F. A. Walker of MIT, Professor John W. Burgess of Columbia, and Professor N. S. Shaler of Harvard, voiced similar sentiments. An “alien usually remains an alien no matter what is done to him,” the less polished Hiram Wesley Evans wrote shortly after the war, no matter “what veneer of education he gets, what oaths he takes.”