For nearly a century, an open-door immigration policy had been the law of the land, a system that allowed anarchists, paupers, communists and free-love advocates to flood the United States. In the greatest movement of peoples in history, millions of Italians, Jews, Slavs, and Magyars flooded America with few skills relevant to an urban, industrial nation other than desperate hopes and a hardened work ethic. 

A New England college president thundered that America was accepting “beaten men from beaten races.” Old-stock Americans, confronted by terrorism, war, and religious conflict demanded an end to pell-mell immigration. Angry voters elected a Republican president who promised “a return to normalcy”and immigration reform. The date was 1920.