Society between 1919 and 1941, including African Americans and the Great Migration, the changing role of women, and immigration restriction

What this dot point is asking

NESA expects you to give an integrated account of the experience of African Americans, women, and immigrants between 1919 and 1941. Strong answers integrate the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance, the Nineteenth Amendment and the changing public roles of women, the immigration restriction acts of the 1920s and the Mexican Repatriation of the 1930s, and the partial inclusion offered by the New Deal.

The answer

African Americans

The Great Migration. 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 Migration was driven by Southern agricultural decline (the boll weevil from 1917), wartime labour shortages in the North, the legal terror of Jim Crow, and the prospect of higher wages.

The Migration produced a sharp Black urban culture. The Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, James Weldon Johnson) flourished from around 1920 to the early 1930s. Musicians (Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Fletcher Henderson) crossed jazz into mainstream popular music.

Political mobilisation. 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. Lynchings fell from around 76 in 1919 to around 8 to 12 a year by 1939; the highest profile case was the Scottsboro Boys (Alabama, 1931 onwards), nine Black teenagers falsely accused of rape, defended by the NAACP and the Communist Party-linked International Labor Defense.

Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (founded in Jamaica 1914, in Harlem from 1916) was the other major Black movement. At its 1920 peak the UNIA claimed around 4 million members across 30 countries. Its newspaper "Negro World" had a circulation of around 200,000. Garvey was convicted of mail fraud in 1923 and deported to Jamaica in 1927.

Continued oppression. 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. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study (begun 1932 by the US Public Health Service, ended 1972 after newspaper exposure) deceived 600 Black men in Macon County, Alabama, denied them treatment, and is now treated as a foundational case in research ethics.

The New Deal coalition. 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.

The Selective Service Act of 16 September 1940 segregated the armed forces. A. Philip Randolph's March on Washington Movement (1941) threatened a mass protest unless defence industries were desegregated. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 on 25 June 1941, banning racial discrimination in defence industries and creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee.

Women

The Nineteenth Amendment was passed by Congress on 4 June 1919 and ratified on 18 August 1920. The amendment was the culmination of the National American Woman Suffrage Association under Carrie Chapman Catt and the more militant National Woman's Party under Alice Paul.

Suffrage outcomes. 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.

Legislative gains. 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.

Work and family. 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 Comstock Laws (1873) banning birth control through the mails were partially struck down only by United States v. One Package (1936).

Social change. 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. The new freedoms were largely urban; rural and working-class women's lives changed less.

Depression-era rollbacks. 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.

The New Deal openings. 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. Ellen Sullivan Woodward administered the WPA's women's programmes. Eleanor Roosevelt held women-only press conferences (from March 1933) and used her column and radio broadcasts to advocate for women's causes.

Immigration restriction

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

The Emergency Quota Act (19 May 1921). 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.

The National Origins Act / Johnson-Reed Act (26 May 1924). 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. The Western Hemisphere (Latin America and Canada) was not subject to quotas.

The 1929 National Origins Formula refined the quotas to allocate immigrants by share of the 1920 white American population. Effective annual quotas: Britain 65,721, Germany 25,957, Italy 5,802, Poland 6,524, Greece 307, Soviet Union 2,712.

The effect. 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.

The Mexican Repatriation (1929 to 1936). 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.

The Bracero precursor. Mexican agricultural labour returned under the Bracero Program (1942 to 1964) as wartime labour demand revived.

The Wagner-Rogers Bill (10 February 1939). Senator Robert Wagner of New York and Representative Edith Rogers of Massachusetts proposed admission of 20,000 German Jewish refugee children, outside existing quotas, on 5,000 a year for four years. The Bill was killed in committee in June 1939 after restrictionist opposition led by Representative John Rankin of Mississippi and the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies.

The St Louis incident (June 1939). The German ocean liner SS St Louis arrived off Florida with around 935 Jewish refugees from Germany. The State Department refused entry. The ship was turned away from Cuba and the United States and returned to Europe; around 254 of the passengers eventually died in the Holocaust.

Historiography

Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns, 2010) is the standard recent history of the Great Migration.

Harvard Sitkoff (A New Deal for Blacks, 1978) is the standard on African Americans and the New Deal.

Nancy Cott (The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 1987) is the standard on inter-war American feminism.

Susan Ware (Beyond Suffrage, 1981) is the standard on women in the New Deal.

Mae Ngai (Impossible Subjects, 2004) is the standard on the Johnson-Reed Act and its legal consequences.

Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez (Decade of Betrayal, 1995) is the standard on the Mexican Repatriation.

David Wyman (Paper Walls, 1968) and Richard Breitman and Allan Lichtman (FDR and the Jews, 2013) study American refugee policy.

Common exam traps

Treating the Nineteenth Amendment as the end of the women's story. Section 213, marriage bars, and the failure of the ERA matter.

Treating the 1924 Act as a closure of all immigration. Latin America was not capped; Mexican immigration rose, then was reversed by Repatriation.

Treating the New Deal as a civil rights breakthrough. It was incremental and constrained by Southern Democrats; the breakthrough came under Truman (1948) and Kennedy and Johnson (1960s).

In one sentence

Between 1919 and 1941 African Americans were transformed by the Great Migration (1.5 million north between 1916 and 1930), the Harlem Renaissance, Garveyism, the NAACP's anti-lynching campaign, and the realignment into the New Deal coalition (Black vote from 70 per cent Republican in 1932 to 71 per cent Democrat in 1936); women won the Nineteenth Amendment on 18 August 1920 and the symbolic Cabinet appointment of Frances Perkins in March 1933, but faced marriage bars and unequal pay; immigrants encountered the most restrictive regime in American history through the Johnson-Reed Act of 26 May 1924, the Mexican Repatriation of 1929 to 1936, and the killing of the Wagner-Rogers Bill in June 1939.