The Roaring Twenties and the Struggles of Immigrants, Farmers, and Other Interest Groups
Immigrants to the United States had been much maligned since the New Immigration of the 1890s. Cities had swelled with immigrants from South and Eastern Europe, taking jobs from “natives” Americans and space for further geographic growth. The anger by many Americans towards immigrants since the Know-Nothings seemed to swell during the 1920s. The rise of communism in Russia and fears of communist incursion into America were very high following the Russian Revolution. Considering the rise of Eastern European and Russian immigration in the late 19th century, many Americans saw the solution to communism in America as two fold. First, the immigration of undesirable immigrants needed to be blocked. This was accomplished to the satisfaction of many with the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921, which imposed a quota system.
The second part of the solution was to wipe out existing Bolshevism at home. A. Mitchell Palmer, the attorney general under Woodrow Wilson and Warren Harding, raided suspected anarchist and communist homes to put fear into possible insurgents. If this did not work in fact, it at least worked as a public relations tool of the government. The main problems of immigration in the eyes of the public were being solved. This was to the detriment of millions of immigrants that had nothing to do with anarchism of Russia. Not only were immigrants slowly coming to America but labor unions distanced themselves from immigrants and the ideas of social welfare were abandoned largely for the ideas of rugged individualism.
Farmers were also facing a difficult time but it was something that came very new to them. World War I had seen the rise in productivity of farmers in order to meet rising demand at home and overseas. This was caused by greater efficiency in farming methods, better technology and government encouragement. This would change, however, in the 1920s. Farmers kept producing at wartime rates to a peace time consumer market. This created wasted surpluses and lower prices paid to farmers. With the vagaries of nature and farming to deal with, farmers could not afford to make less and less money each year. With over efficiency and a decreased demand, farmers were placed in a difficult position.
Lobbying efforts by various groups attempted to remedy the problem. The Nonpartisan League, largely in Minnesota and Iowa, supported pro-farm candidates but had difficulty taking off nationally. An agricultural credit bill was passed, establishing farm credit businesses which would provide low interest loans to farmers. The Farm Bloc attempted to negotiate for large groups of farmers better prices, but to no avail. The problem of overproduction was seen as secondary to issues of business in the 1920s. An important factor in understanding this ambivalence towards farming was the growth of cities and the city centered culture of the 1920s. While many politicians were from rural areas, they had not plowed fields for a long time and they were more worried about issues of war and maintaining status quo. One of the few efforts by the government to remedy the problem was to increase tariffs. Instead of protecting an already over saturated farm market, it decreased business with overseas markets and damaged farmers even further. The rest of the American public was enamored with cosmopolitan lifestyle and did not have the same connection to the land that they had only twenty years earlier.
There are certainly other groups that merit mention in a discussion of those forgotten in the 1920s. African Americans struggled to find a united voice while contending with hate mongering Ku Klux Klan members. Workers had to decide where they stood on unionization issues and how they should organize to protect their livelihoods. But immigrants and farmers seem to point out the major fault lines of 1920s politics: rural and urban, American and anti-American, business and farmer. These two groups show the major characteristics of the Roaring Twenties.
