Analyze the cultural conflicts of the 1920s, including Prohibition, nativism and immigration restriction, the revived Ku Klux Klan, and the clash between fundamentalism and modern science (Louisiana Student Standards for Social Studies, US History Standard 4: Becoming a World Power through World War II).

What this topic is asking

The same decade that "roared" with modern culture also seethed with conflict between old and new ways of life. Standard 4 (Becoming a World Power through World War II) wants you to analyze the cultural conflicts of the 1920s: Prohibition, nativism and immigration restriction, the revived Ku Klux Klan, and the clash between fundamentalism and modern science. LEAP often uses a Prohibition photograph, a quota-law chart, or a Scopes Trial excerpt as the source.

Prohibition and its failure

Nativism and immigration restriction

The fear of foreigners that had surged during the war and the Red Scare hardened into law.

Congress passed immigration quota laws in the early 1920s that sharply reduced immigration and set quotas based on national origin. The quotas deliberately favored immigrants from northern and western Europe and restricted those from southern and eastern Europe, while barring most Asian immigration almost entirely. The goal was nativist: to preserve the older ethnic makeup of the country by keeping out "new" immigrants seen as harder to assimilate. These laws ended the era of large-scale open immigration that had built industrial America.

The revived Ku Klux Klan

The Ku Klux Klan, dormant since Reconstruction, was revived in the 1910s and grew explosively in the 1920s, reaching millions of members and spreading well beyond the South. The new Klan still targeted African Americans but now also attacked immigrants, Catholics, and Jews, presenting itself as the defender of "old-stock" white Protestant America. Its power faded later in the decade amid scandal and corruption, but its rise shows how widespread the backlash against change had become.

Fundamentalism and modern science

The decade also pitted traditional religion against modern science.

A divided decade

The exam reward is recognizing the tension at the heart of the 1920s. The same years brought the modern consumer culture and the cultural backlash, the flapper and the Klan, jazz and Prohibition. The "Roaring Twenties" was not simply a carefree boom; it was a society arguing fiercely over what it should become.