Despite growing support for restrictive immigration policies in the early 20th century, some 800,000 immigrants, many from eastern and southern Europe, entered the United States in 1921. Two major pieces of legislation were aimed at restricting this immigration—the Immigration Act oe 1917 and the Quota Act of 1921—but the proportion of southern and eastern Europeans remained high. The 1921 Quota Act had attempted to severely limit the number of immigrants that annually could enter the United States. Many in Congress however, felt that the restrictions did not go far enough. By the early 1920s, many Americans felt that the country could no longer accommodate the nearly one million immigrants that had been arriving each year since the 1880s. Moreover, when northern industrial cities received a new source of labor with the influx of African Americans in the Great Migration that followed World War I, industrial leaders were no longer as apt to push for open immigration policies. Accordingly, one of the chief proponents of restrictive immigration policies, Senator Albert Johnson of the state of Washington, secured passage of far more restrictive legislation in 1924.
The National Origins Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, reduced the admissible number of immigrants from outside the Western Hemisphere annually to 165,000, less than a fifth of the average prewar level. The sponsors of the 1924 legislation essentially agreed with the findings of the Dillingham Commission, which contended that certain immigrant groups were better suited to assimilating into American society. In particular, the sponsors of the 1924 legislation argued that British, Germans, and Scandinavians were racially superior to other immigrants, and that, consequently, these groups should be allowed to enter the United States in greater numbers.
The 1921 Quota Act had attempted to control the origin of immigrants to the United States by using 1910 as
The base year for determining the number of immigrants from each country allowed to enter the United States. But by 1910, the number of southern and eastern Europeans already in the United States had reached such a level that the quotas did not achieve the results desired by anti-immigration forces. Accordingly, the Johnson-Reed legislation pushed the base year back to 1890. In crafting this new piece of legislation, lawmakers had selected 1890 because they knew that immigrant ranks then had been dominated by groups from Great Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia. Immigrants from Italy, Greece, Poland, and other areas were poorly represented. Under the 1924 National Origins Act, each nationality group was given a quota of 2 percent of its population in the United States according to the official census of 1890, with up to 160,000 total individuals (from all countries) allowed to enter the United States annually. In addition, the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act continued the long-standing policy of excluding Chinese immigrants. It added Japanese and other Asians to the list of ethnic groups that were altogether barred from entering the United States. This new formula for determining the number of immigrants eligible quickly achieved the results that the proponents of immigration restriction had been lobbying for since the early part of the century.
Further reading: John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925, 2d ed. (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988).
—David R. Smith
The assistant for parks; but without sufficient resources, the parks continued to deteriorate.
Although pressure to protect the parks had been mounting since 1908, it wasn’t until businessman and naturalist Stephen Mather became involved that there was a concerted effort to improve the park system. He spent much of his free time touring the various national parks and became increasingly alarmed at their condition. He expressed his concerns to Secretary Lane in 1914. Lane wrote back, “Steve, if you don’t like the way the national parks are being run, come on down to Washington and run them yourself.” Mather took Lane up on the offer and went to Washington to lobby for the creation of a National Park Service. Mather used his wealth and influence to convince Congress and President WoODROW WiLSON to pass the National Park Service Act in 1916 and to name him its first director. The Park Service’s mandate reflected the dual themes of conservationism and public recreation, which have subsequently shaped how the national parks have developed.
In the decades following its formation, the National Park Service continued to struggle to maintain the parks. The National Park Service Act was mandated only a small budget, and Mather found it difficult to both keep the parks maintained and to have them accessible to the public. He and Park Assistant Albright launched an aggressive and ultimately effective campaign to protect the parks by promoting tourism. Automobile ownership and tourism became increasingly common in the 1920s; and by 1930, the national parks began to attract millions of visitors each year.
See also ENVIRONMENT.
World History
