Celebrating Cultural Diversity in the 1920s

The decade brought the passage of strict immigration restriction laws, an upsurge in anti-Catholic sentiment, the entrenchment of Jim Crow segregation in the South, lynchings and racial violence, the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, the establishment of the border patrol to limit Mexican immigration, and anti-Japanese agitation on the West Coast. Cultural anxieties led many native-born white Protestants to seek ways to limit the influence of immigrants and racial minorities and to halt the social transformations that accompanied modernization.