Kyle Carey
1920s Research paper
Mrs. Staples
March 17, 2015

The 1920s was a time of prosperity and economic growth. It was a time right after the end of WW1 which was a factor in the immigration controversy during this time period. There was a large amount of controversy on immigration in the 1920s, many of it because of WW1 the thought of our enemies living in our own country scared us. Although there were some negative things that happened in the Roaring Twenties, there were many positive things that happened. Women started getting jobs that only men had before, and the assembly line made it easier to mass produce household appliances and cars, and instead of those things being luxuries like they had been before, they became necessities. After the war people started perceiving the world in different ways. The First World War had a tremendous impact on the women in the 1920s. Because when many men were off to the war someone had to fill those jobs, those people turned out to be women. This made women realize that they could do the same things as men; it made them want the same rights. They reacted to this realization by protesting about how they weren’t represented in government because of their inability to vote. One of the main suffragettes was Alice Paul, she began her push for women’s suffrage in America in the early 1900s with The National American Woman’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA).Then she eventually decided they weren’t doing enough years later, so she created her own group the National Woman's Party (NWP), formed in Chicago at convention of female voters. Then On January 10, 1917, several suffragists from the NWP marched in a single-file line down Pennsylvania Avenue until they arrived in front of the gate to the White House where the newly re-elected President Woodrow Wilson resided. These women stood outside of the gate silently holding banners that stated things such as (Anna) “Mr. President – What will you do for woman’s suffrage?”(Christine)There were thousands of women ranging in age, class, race, and even from different states, who volunteered their time to stand on the picket lines in front of the White House. The government reacted to the protests by eventually giving them the right to vote. Immigration was another problem that both the people of our country and the Government had to react to. The reason that it was a problem was that the war had just ended and all we knew was that people who weren’t from our country were willing to kill people who were, this led to widespread Xenophobia. The way the government reacted was by passing The Quota act of 1924 which limited the number of yearly Immigrants to 2 % of the overall population, the number of immigrants in 1923-1924, which was 357,803 dropped to about 150,000 immigrant’s in1924-1925. This law succeeded in its original goal. This greatly affected our culture and it showed the way that we wanted to keep it safe it also helped to reassure hundreds of thousands of citizens that they were free from communism. We were scared of the communists especially as they had overthrown the royal family of Russia, and murdered them the following year. (Web) The government did not want alcohol to change the culture of our country ; they reacted to this by passing the prohibition law. The prohibition law was a controversial law that made transporting, selling, and buying of alcohol illegal. It did not necessarily end with its goal being achieved. Individual citizens reacted to this by doing those things illegally. Them doing this helped fuel the initial start of organized crime becoming common. The reason it helped organized crime become common was because it gave people a crime to commit. Another original goal that was not achieved in theory that is was keeping soldiers who were returning from the war from turning to alcohol, which didn’t happen because of how many illicit drinking places there were. Although the concept of prohibition was very smart the process of carrying it on was difficult. In conclusion our government was tested, in some cases they were successful and in some cases they weren’t. They were successful in preventing our culture from being diluted by foreign influence. They were not successful from saving our culture from being diluted by alcohol because they eventually had to repeal the prohibition law. Individuals were also tested in this time period. When it came to women’s suffrage and no one wanted to pass women’s suffrage Alice Paul reacted and made President Wilson think twice about it. The same thing happened with organized crime and prohibition. The 1920s was a time of prosperity and economic growth and the government and the citizens did their best to make this happen.

Works Cited

Christine Lunardini, From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights: Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party (Lincoln, NE: toExcel Press, 1986), 104.
"The Red Scare in the 1920". HistoryLearningSite.co.uk. 2014. Web.

Anna Reiter, “Fearless Radicalism: Alice Paul and Her Fight for Women’s Suffrage,” Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History 3, no. 3 (Nov. 2013).