- [Narrator] During the Gilded Age,
the population of the United States had started
to shift sharply towards living in urban
rather than rural environments.
In 1900, 1/3 of the American population lived in cities,
drawn by the wide availability of factory jobs.
But by 1920, the scales finally tipped,
and for the first time the majority
of people in the United States lived in cities.
It was the beginning of a new modern era.
We've talked in other videos about
the economic opportunities that the cities provided
for both international immigrants and internal migrants,
like the half a million African Americans
who left the South in the years surrounding World War I
in search of a better life in the North.
Although factory jobs were subject
to dangerous working conditions and wages were low,
for both immigrants and Southern African Americans,
the pay and the standard of living
was usually an improvement on their previous circumstances.
The transition to life in the modern industrial city
also offered new opportunities for women.
With the rise of big corporations
doing business across time zones and countries,
there was an increasing need for clerical workers,
like secretaries and typists.
White women began to take on these roles.
And by the end of the 1920s,
about 25% of women worked outside the home.
Women also began to fill the ranks in employment categories
that were beginning to be defined as female professions,
like nursing and teaching.
And a growing number of women continued
to work even after they were married.
These kinds of clerical jobs were generally closed
to minority women whose options for work outside the home
were limited to domestic service or agricultural labor,
although some African American women began
to train in segregated institutions
for service in segregated institutions,
for example, going to black nursing schools
in order to work in black hospitals.
The mass production techniques of the 1920s also meant
that the price of consumer goods dropped
so that average people could afford
to buy appliances and even cars.
People had enough disposable income
to go to the theater or to an amusement park
or to a speakeasy illegally selling alcohol.
After the prim and proper Progressive Era
and the trauma of World War I,
many people embraced a carefree attitude
of self-fulfillment through leisure and consumption
or, in other words, having fun and buying stuff.
But not everyone was thrilled
with this new modern era of diverse city living.
During World War I, an emphasis on 100% Americanism
squelched dissenters who protested against the draft
or questioned U.S. involvement in the war.
Then, after the Russian Revolution,
labor strikes and a series of bombings in 1919 led to fears
that radical communists were threatening the country.
These incidents,
combined with the flawed racial pseudoscience of the day
that cast all people other than those descended
from Northern and Western Europeans as less evolved,
led to a growing sense among native-born, white Protestants
that the country was becoming less and less American.
In 1915, the Ku Klux Klan experienced a resurgence
in the United States that lasted for about 10 years.
Unlike the Reconstruction Era KKK,
in this time period, the Klan had large membership numbers
in northern and western cities,
and they targeted Jews and Catholics,
many of whom were recent immigrants
from Southern and Eastern Europe,
in addition to African Americans.
These fears led to the passage
of new immigration restrictions in the 1920s.
In 1921, Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act,
which limited the number of immigrants allowed
from Europe to 350,000,
or about a third of pre-World War I levels.
Then, in 1924, Congress limited immigration even further
with the Immigration Restriction Act.
This act set quotas of immigrants
who could arrive from each nation.
The quotas heavily favored immigrants
from Northern and Western Europe
and slashed the numbers of Southern
and Eastern European immigrants down to as little as 1%
of their pre-World War I yearly numbers.
Africans from all countries were limited
to just 1,000 immigrants per year,
and Asians were completely barred from entry.
The law did not limit the immigration of Mexicans
whom western farmers relied upon for seasonal labor.
Interestingly, in 1924, Congress also passed a law
establishing that all Native Americans
were now U.S. citizens, although they often had difficulty
accessing the rights of citizenship from reservations.
What do these quotas and efforts
at defining the racial makeup of the United States
tell us about who was considered eligible
to be part of the American people in the 1920s?
As we move forward into talking about
the Great Depression and World War II,
keep thinking about the ways that citizenship is defined
and how that definition changes over time.