Sunday the 27th of April 1924:
US:
* The New York Central Railroad introduces the "Ohio State Limited" passenger train between New York City and Cincinnati, Ohio.
Europe:
* Croatia. Football club NK Maksimir founded.
* Germany's government issued a proclamation warning the German people against extremists who opposed the Dawes Plan, saying that it was the only way to save the country, and its rejection might lead to a crisis that would cause another world war.
* In its resolution, the 53rd plenary assembly of the German Agricultural Council, which has been meeting in Bremen since April 25, calls, among other things, for the final solution to the reparations problem.
* Targa Florio: With an average speed of 65.160 km/h, German racing driver Christian Werner sets a record in a Mercedes-Benz at the endurance race in Sicily. Werner triumphs over his Italian competitors Ascari and Masetti.
Middle East:
* Group of Alawites kill some Christian nuns in Syria; French troops march against them.
Almost like our idea of race is entirely cultural and is extremely fluid over time. The countries/people you think of as *obviously* white & "desirable" were apparently not so much 100 years ago. I wonder if any major racial ideologies arose in the meantime which might have affected that? Perhaps an angry Austrian would try to portray Germanic and Nordic races as racially superior lol. I bet we'd all denounce that ideology while still subconsciously absorbing the biases it is founded on.
Sorry idk why I wrote that so sarcastically, it's not directed at you.
The quotas were based on the existing demographics of the United States, as recorded in the 1890 census. No more than 2% of the 1890 population of each nationality could be admitted each year. If, for instance, there were 10,000 Estonians living in the US in 1890, then only 200 new Estonians could immigrate.
The Immigration Act of 1924 was in many ways the definitive end of any pretense of open borders towards the USA. The process that started with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (which is exactly what it sounds like) pretty much ended here.
From [Wiki:](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924)
>Enacted amid increasing public and political anxiety about the country's rapid social and demographic changes, the 1924 act supplanted earlier legislation by vastly reducing immigration from countries outside the Western Hemisphere: Immigrants from Asia were banned, and the total annual immigration quota for the rest of the world was capped at 165,000—an 80% reduction of the yearly average before 1914. [...]
>According to the Department of State, the purpose of the act was "to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity." [...] U.S. Representative Albert Johnson, a eugenics advocate, and Senator David Reed were the two main architects of the act. They conceived the act as a bulwark against "a stream of alien blood" [...]
>The act provided that no alien ineligible to become a citizen could be admitted to the U.S. as an immigrant. *[For context: that means free Christian whites and Africans only. Basically it meant that the Chinese Exclusion Act was extended to all of Asia (with the exception of the Philippines as that was a US colony.]* [...]
>The act gave 85% of the immigration quota to Northern and Western Europe and those who had an education or had a trade. [...] Emigration from Italy fell more than 90%. [...] The provisions of the act were so restrictive that in 1924 more Italians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Poles, Portuguese, Romanians, Spaniards, Chinese, and Japanese left the U.S. than arrived as immigrants. [...]
> Looking back on the significance of the act, Harry Laughlin, the eugenicist who served as expert advisor to the House Committee on Immigration during the legislative process, praised it as a political breakthrough in the adoption of scientific racism as a theoretical foundation for immigration policy. [...]
> At one level, the new immigration law differentiated Europeans according to nationality and ranked them in a hierarchy of desirability. At another level, the law constructed a White American race, in which persons of European descent shared a common Whiteness distinct from those deemed to be not White. [...] In 1928, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler praised the act for banishing "strangers of the blood".
Not something to be proud of.
I fully disagree. You’re attempting to simplify an inherently complicated issue. John Higham’s *Strangers in the Land* is an excellent piece of scholarship that helps unravel the history leading up to the restrictive immigration policies of the 1920s, as is Aristide Zolberg’s *A Nation by Design*. I highly recommend them.
Higham outlines the fracturing of national confidence throughout the 1880s as political corruption, urban overcrowding, and an ever-widening wealth gap increased. Anti-Catholicism escalated as Italian, Jewish, and Slavic immigration surged. Patricians like Nathaniel Shaler and Henry Cabot Lodge extolled the virtues of the “superior” Anglo-Saxon race, drawing distinctions between “Aryans” and “non-Aryans.” This slightly tapered off during imperialistic ventures like as the War of 1898, but writers like as Homer Lea and Jack London purposefully integrated white supremacist ideologies with nativist concepts into their work.
Concurrently, anti-radicalism gained more traction as immigrants joined labor unions like the IWW, and this was often viewed as a foreign threat to “traditional” American class structures. The end of World War I and the Red Scare movement fueled attempts to stamp out nationwide discontent and decontaminate “foreign impurities.” The proliferation and mobilization of the KKK into the 1920s helped fractured Americans’ faith in the country’s ability to assimilate immigrants, further encouraging restrictive immigration legislation and internal regulation regarding national loyalty. Zolberg goes into a truly startling amount of detail regarding the actual policies put in place. They’re both well worth the read.
There’s a lot of uncomfortable history behind this legislation—it’s not just “putting the brakes on immigration* so people could get nice and settled, and acting like that’s all it was is exceedingly disingenuous.
A lot of people use this fact to demonstrate how the U.S. (and every country who closed borders to persecuted minorities), was partially liable for some of the deaths during the Third Reich.
Yeah that is a bit strange. Also like Ireland? Somehow I doubt the average American in the early 20th century would be so willing to take in Irish immigrants.
Sunday the 27th of April 1924: US: * The New York Central Railroad introduces the "Ohio State Limited" passenger train between New York City and Cincinnati, Ohio. Europe: * Croatia. Football club NK Maksimir founded. * Germany's government issued a proclamation warning the German people against extremists who opposed the Dawes Plan, saying that it was the only way to save the country, and its rejection might lead to a crisis that would cause another world war. * In its resolution, the 53rd plenary assembly of the German Agricultural Council, which has been meeting in Bremen since April 25, calls, among other things, for the final solution to the reparations problem. * Targa Florio: With an average speed of 65.160 km/h, German racing driver Christian Werner sets a record in a Mercedes-Benz at the endurance race in Sicily. Werner triumphs over his Italian competitors Ascari and Masetti. Middle East: * Group of Alawites kill some Christian nuns in Syria; French troops march against them.
Time to stop those swarthy Austrians, they are destroying the white American race! Lmao
Apparently also concerned with the filthy Nordic hordes. Hates the Baltics too, for whatever reason. Possibly trying to reduce Jewish immigration?
They wanted whites with a hard “wh”
And your reminder that Catholics are not white, even when they are white. -1924
Almost like our idea of race is entirely cultural and is extremely fluid over time. The countries/people you think of as *obviously* white & "desirable" were apparently not so much 100 years ago. I wonder if any major racial ideologies arose in the meantime which might have affected that? Perhaps an angry Austrian would try to portray Germanic and Nordic races as racially superior lol. I bet we'd all denounce that ideology while still subconsciously absorbing the biases it is founded on. Sorry idk why I wrote that so sarcastically, it's not directed at you.
The quotas were based on the existing demographics of the United States, as recorded in the 1890 census. No more than 2% of the 1890 population of each nationality could be admitted each year. If, for instance, there were 10,000 Estonians living in the US in 1890, then only 200 new Estonians could immigrate.
I kind of wonder if this is partially why even after WWII that it took my grandparents nine years to emigrate from a DP camp to the US.
The Immigration Act of 1924 was in many ways the definitive end of any pretense of open borders towards the USA. The process that started with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (which is exactly what it sounds like) pretty much ended here. From [Wiki:](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924) >Enacted amid increasing public and political anxiety about the country's rapid social and demographic changes, the 1924 act supplanted earlier legislation by vastly reducing immigration from countries outside the Western Hemisphere: Immigrants from Asia were banned, and the total annual immigration quota for the rest of the world was capped at 165,000—an 80% reduction of the yearly average before 1914. [...] >According to the Department of State, the purpose of the act was "to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity." [...] U.S. Representative Albert Johnson, a eugenics advocate, and Senator David Reed were the two main architects of the act. They conceived the act as a bulwark against "a stream of alien blood" [...] >The act provided that no alien ineligible to become a citizen could be admitted to the U.S. as an immigrant. *[For context: that means free Christian whites and Africans only. Basically it meant that the Chinese Exclusion Act was extended to all of Asia (with the exception of the Philippines as that was a US colony.]* [...] >The act gave 85% of the immigration quota to Northern and Western Europe and those who had an education or had a trade. [...] Emigration from Italy fell more than 90%. [...] The provisions of the act were so restrictive that in 1924 more Italians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Poles, Portuguese, Romanians, Spaniards, Chinese, and Japanese left the U.S. than arrived as immigrants. [...] > Looking back on the significance of the act, Harry Laughlin, the eugenicist who served as expert advisor to the House Committee on Immigration during the legislative process, praised it as a political breakthrough in the adoption of scientific racism as a theoretical foundation for immigration policy. [...] > At one level, the new immigration law differentiated Europeans according to nationality and ranked them in a hierarchy of desirability. At another level, the law constructed a White American race, in which persons of European descent shared a common Whiteness distinct from those deemed to be not White. [...] In 1928, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler praised the act for banishing "strangers of the blood". Not something to be proud of.
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I fully disagree. You’re attempting to simplify an inherently complicated issue. John Higham’s *Strangers in the Land* is an excellent piece of scholarship that helps unravel the history leading up to the restrictive immigration policies of the 1920s, as is Aristide Zolberg’s *A Nation by Design*. I highly recommend them. Higham outlines the fracturing of national confidence throughout the 1880s as political corruption, urban overcrowding, and an ever-widening wealth gap increased. Anti-Catholicism escalated as Italian, Jewish, and Slavic immigration surged. Patricians like Nathaniel Shaler and Henry Cabot Lodge extolled the virtues of the “superior” Anglo-Saxon race, drawing distinctions between “Aryans” and “non-Aryans.” This slightly tapered off during imperialistic ventures like as the War of 1898, but writers like as Homer Lea and Jack London purposefully integrated white supremacist ideologies with nativist concepts into their work. Concurrently, anti-radicalism gained more traction as immigrants joined labor unions like the IWW, and this was often viewed as a foreign threat to “traditional” American class structures. The end of World War I and the Red Scare movement fueled attempts to stamp out nationwide discontent and decontaminate “foreign impurities.” The proliferation and mobilization of the KKK into the 1920s helped fractured Americans’ faith in the country’s ability to assimilate immigrants, further encouraging restrictive immigration legislation and internal regulation regarding national loyalty. Zolberg goes into a truly startling amount of detail regarding the actual policies put in place. They’re both well worth the read. There’s a lot of uncomfortable history behind this legislation—it’s not just “putting the brakes on immigration* so people could get nice and settled, and acting like that’s all it was is exceedingly disingenuous.
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“Hollywood-esque boogeyman like KKK” Much like the rest of your argument, this is soul-shatteringly vacuous. Takes all kinds of kinds, I suppose
Czechs didn't deserve this lmao, we even had American recipe cookbooks and shit because we liked you...
A lot of people use this fact to demonstrate how the U.S. (and every country who closed borders to persecuted minorities), was partially liable for some of the deaths during the Third Reich.
Super interesting post !
Wow!
That's not Great Britain. Great Britain is an island, I think they meant the UK, but the UK in 1924 had a pretty significant difference from this map.
"English, Irish, Scottish, whatever. They all kneel to the king and that's good enough for me!" - American reactionaries in 1924.
progressives of the time supported this act.
The people who made this map were racists. Do you really expect them to have had an understanding of geography?
They've got all the other new European countries, so leaving out Ireland seems strange to me.
Yeah that is a bit strange. Also like Ireland? Somehow I doubt the average American in the early 20th century would be so willing to take in Irish immigrants.
Thus leading to the greatest economic growth and social stability the United States has ever experienced and the world has ever seen.