Quick questions on African Americans, women, immigration 1919-1941: HSC Modern History USA

The 1920s and 1930s produced the most restrictive American immigration regime in the country's history.

Around 1.5 million African Americans moved from the rural South to northern industrial cities between 1916 and 1930. New York's Harlem grew from around 30,000 Black residents in 1910 to around 200,000 by 1930. Chicago's Black population rose from 44,000 (1910) to 234,000 (1930).

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (founded 1909, led from 1931 by Walter White) pressed for federal anti-lynching legislation. The Dyer Bill (1922) passed the House and was filibustered to death in the Senate. The Costigan-Wagner Bill (1934 to 1935) was also filibustered.

The South remained segregated under Jim Crow laws. The poll tax, white primaries, and literacy tests disenfranchised Black Southerners. The second Ku Klux Klan peaked at around 4 million members in 1925 before collapsing after the Stephenson scandal of 1925.

African American voters were 70 per cent Republican (the party of Lincoln) in 1932 and 71 per cent Democrat in 1936. Roosevelt's Black Cabinet (around 45 advisers under Mary McLeod Bethune) and Eleanor Roosevelt's advocacy (her resignation from the DAR in February 1939 over Marian Anderson's exclusion from Constitution Hall) gave the symbolic openings. But the New Deal compromised on civil rights: Social Security excluded farm and domestic workers; the CCC was segregated; the AAA accelerated Black sharecropper displacement; anti-lynching bills were filibustered.

Voter turnout among women lagged men's through the 1920s. Women voted broadly along the same partisan lines as men. The expected "women's bloc" did not materialise; politicians moved to ignore the women's vote.

The Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act (1921) provided federal grants for maternal and child health (the first federal welfare program); it expired in 1929. The Cable Act (1922) allowed American women to retain citizenship after marrying a foreigner. The Equal Rights Amendment was first introduced by Alice Paul on 3 December 1923 and was opposed for decades by women's groups that supported protective labour legislation.

Women's labour force participation rose from around 21 per cent in 1920 to around 26 per cent in 1940, mostly in clerical, retail, teaching, and nursing roles. Earnings were around 60 per cent of men's for comparable work. Margaret Sanger's American Birth Control League (founded 1921, renamed Planned Parenthood in 1942) campaigned for legal contraception.

The flapper became the visual shorthand of the new urban woman. Around 25 per cent of women smoked by 1930. Cinema and advertising marketed beauty products on a national scale.

Section 213 of the Federal Economy Act (1932) required that married couples both employed by the federal government give up one of their jobs; around 1,600 women were dismissed by 1933. Many local authorities and school boards followed with their own marriage bars. By 1939 around 78 per cent of school boards refused to hire married women.

Frances Perkins (Secretary of Labor, 1933 to 1945) was the first woman Cabinet Secretary. Mary Anderson headed the Women's Bureau. Around 13 per cent of WPA jobs went to women.

Annual immigration capped at 357,000. Each European country received a quota of 3 per cent of its nationals resident in the United States in the 1910 census. The Act was a temporary measure pending a permanent law.

Cut the annual cap to 165,000. Quotas were 2 per cent of each country's nationals in the 1890 census (the earlier census favoured northern Europeans, who had been the dominant population then). Asians were barred entirely (an exception to the 1907 Gentlemen's Agreement with Japan), which produced lasting Japanese resentment.

Immigration fell from around 800,000 a year before the First World War to around 150,000 by the late 1920s and to around 50,000 a year through the 1930s. The act of immigrating became, by the late 1920s, a process measured in years.

Without legal authority, federal, state, and local agencies pressured around 1 million people of Mexican descent (around 60 per cent of them US citizens) to "voluntarily" return to Mexico, framed as a response to Depression-era unemployment. Children born in the United States were sent with their parents. The Repatriation has been the subject of state apologies (California, 2005) and continuing reparations debates.