The motto of the United States of America is "E Pluribus Unum" meaning 'Out of one, many'. It neatly recognizes that although America may be a single nation, it is also one originally made up of immigrants who arrived not only from Europe and Asia, but forcibly as slaves from Africa and of Native Americans. Its population is the most racially and culturally diverse in the world and for that reason is often referred to as a "Melting Pot".
During the 1920's, racial tensions in American society reached boiling point. New non-protestant immigrants like Jews and Catholics had been arrived in their masses from south-east Europe since early on in the century. Together with Orientals, Mexicans and the Black population these minorities suffered the most at the hands of those concerned with preserving the long established White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (W.A.S.P.) values that were an integral part of American life. Prejudice and racism reared its ugly head in many areas of society, with people showing a tolerance for racist views in the media, literature and towards organizations like the Ku Klux Klan.
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Bartolomeo Vanzetti (left) and Nicola Sacco in han...Also the language, living and working conditions and Government legislation that ethnic minorities were subjected to is further evidence that the twenties was an openly discriminatory decade. It was also during this period of grave hostility directed at ethnic groups that America's 'open door' attitude of "Give me your tired, your poor" towards immigration, officially became a part of history.
In the 1920's Anti-Immigration Organizations that had been founded in the latter parts of the first decade of the twentieth century began to receive much larger and an increasingly influential following. The Immigration Restriction League was one such group, it claimed to have 'scientific' evidence that the new immigrants from Southeast Europe were racially inferior and therefore posed to...