Modern America (1914-1929)
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In the years after World War I, American workers sought to consolidate and expand the gains they had achieved during the war years. In September 1919, some 350,000 steelworkers went on strike, seeking higher wages, shorter hours and better working conditions. Steel companies, often with assistance of local governments, responded with violent…

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Item Type: Pamphlet
Date: 1919

In July 1919, Chicago suffered a terrible race riot. An African-American teenager swimming in Lake Michigan floated into a "white" area and drowned after being stoned by a white crowd. Violence spread rapidly. Black Chicagoans, including World War I veterans, fought back. By the riot's end, 23 people had been killed and more than five hundred…

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Item Type: Photograph
Date: 1919

The steel strike of 1919 saw some 350,000 workers walk off the job, temporarily bringing the steel industry to a halt. The U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor investigated, interviewing striking steelworkers such as Slavic immigrant Andrew Pido. In his testimony to the committee, Pido tells of his abuse at the hands of local police, the…

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Item Type: Government Document
Date: 1919

After World War I a "Red Scare" broke out as anxieties about political extremists and radicals led to widespread demonization and political persecution of leftists and immigrants. A series of high-profile events from the late-nineteenth century on, such as the Haymarket Square bombing and the assassination of President McKinley by Leon Czolgosz,…

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Item Type: Cartoon
Date: 1919

After Congress approved the 19th Amendment in June 1919, the amendment had to be ratified by three fourths of the states. Fortunately, suffragists were well organized at the local level to pressure state legislatures into approving the amendment. To keep track of the amendment’s progress, the National Women’s Party created a…

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Item Type: Photograph
Date: 1920

In the early twentieth century, African Americans had plenty of reasons to leave the rural South: disfranchisement, segregation, poverty, racial violence, lack of educational opportunities, and the drudgery of farm life. As the cartoon below from The Crisis magazine shows, lynching stood out as particularly horrific and unjust. Violently…

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Item Type: Cartoon
Date: 1920

Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant, was the leader of the largest black mass movement in the nation's history. His Universal Negro Improvement Association, which had chapters throughout the U.S., the Caribbean and Africa, promoted race pride, economic self-sufficiency in the black community, and pan-Africanism. At its height, the U.N.I.A. boasted…

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Item Type: Newspaper/Magazine Article
Date: 1920

Ernestine Alvarado, of New York's YWCA, sharply criticized Americans who disparaged Mexico and did not welcome Mexican immigrants. She defended Mexican immigrants, calling them "bold dreamers," and castigated nativist stereotypes and unwelcoming labor unions.

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Item Type: Speech
Date: 1920

In the summer of 1919, violence broke out between whites and African Americans in Chicago. The five-day riot left thirty-eight people dead and more than five hundred people injured. The city formed a Commission on Race Relations to study what happened during the riot and what conditions in the city contributed to the violence. As part of that…

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Item Type: Book (excerpt)
Date: 1922

Proponents of eugenics believed that various forms of "social inadequacy", including mental illness, criminality, and physical handicaps, were the result of inherited genetic traits. Some studies, such as this one from 1922, attempted to link these tendencies to specific nationalities and ethnic groups, including people of African and Asian descent…

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Item Type: Quantitative Data
Date: Circa 1922