How did society change during 1920s

The 1920s were a period of dramatic changes. More than half of all Americans now lived in cities and the growing affordability of the automobile made people more mobile than ever. Although the decade was known as the era of the Charleston dance craze, jazz, and flapper fashions, in many respects it was also quite conservative. At the same time as hemlines went up and moral values seemed to decline, the nation saw the end of its open immigration policy, the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, and the trial of a Tennessee high-school teacher for teaching evolution.

The Red Scare and immigration policy. In the first few years after World War I, the country experienced a brief period of antiradical hysteria known as the Red Scare. Widespread labor unrest in 1919, combined with a wave of bombings, the Communists in power in Russia, and the short-lived Communist revolt in Hungary, fed the fear that the United States was also on the verge of revolution. Under the direction of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, thousands of suspected radicals were arrested in 1919 and 1920; those that were aliens were deported. Although the Red Scare faded quickly after 1920, it strengthened the widespread belief in a strong connection between foreigners and radicalism. The bias against foreigners was exemplified in the Sacco and Vanzetti trial. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian-born, self-admitted anarchists who, in 1920, were indicted for robbery and murder in Massachusetts; they were found guilty and sentenced to death in July 1921. Their supporters claimed that they were convicted for their ethnic background and beliefs rather than on conclusive evidence. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in August 1927 after all their appeals were exhausted. Hostility toward foreigners was also reflected in a fundamental change in American immigration policy. In 1920, the flow of new immigrants approached pre-war levels. Congress responded in 1921 with the Quota Act, which set the maximum number of immigrants entering the United States annually at 350,000, apportioned at 3 percent of each nationality living in the country in 1910 (based on the 1910 census). However, this act still allowed for a significant immigration from southern and eastern Europe, alleged hotbeds of radicalism. Consequently, the National Origins Act of 1924 reduced the total number of immigrants to 150,000 a year, with quotas set at 2 percent of each nationality's population in the United States in 1890. Under this formula, the quota was less than 4,000 for Italy and around 6,000 for Poland, while the quotas for Great Britain and Germany were 34,000 and 50,000 per year, respectively. In addition to limiting immigration as much as possible, the intent of the legislation was to allow the "more desirable" immigrants from northern and western Europe to come into the United States in higher numbers. The Ku Klux Klan. The Ku Klux Klan, an organization formed by white southerners during Reconstruction, was revived in Georgia in 1915. The new Klan was particularly strong in the Midwest and Southwest as well as in cities such as Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, and Indianapolis.