What does nativism say about America in the 1920s?

Different people could answer this question in different ways.  My own response is that nativism says three things (two of which are closely related) about America in the 1920s.  First, the country was undergoing great changes.  Second, the changes caused some people to worry about the future of the country.  Finally, it says that the United States was not a completely inclusive society at that time.

The first, and obvious, answer is that nativism shows intolerance and bigotry.  However, this is really not much of an answer.  All societies are to some degree insular.  We human beings prefer our “own kind” to others.  This appears to be natural and inescapable so it does not seem to be a very useful thing to say about the US in the 1920s.

The more interesting question is why Americans felt this way at this particular time and not at others.  The major reason for this was that the country was changing.  This was the time of the Jazz Age and of flappers.  It was the time of Prohibition and the rise of organized crime.  It was the time when people were coming to have more leisure time and their lives were more focused on fun than they had been before.  It was a time of growing wealth and of growing inequality in wealth. It was a time when the cultural center of America was moving from rural towns to cities. All of these things made the 1920s a decade of upheaval in the United States.

Major changes always hurt at least some segment of the population.  People feel threatened by these changes.  They like the old ways and they (and “their kind”) prospered under those ways.  They feel they have nothing to gain through change and they feel that they are losing their country (this may sound familiar, as many people feel this way today).  In situations like this, they look around for someone to blame.  In this case, immigrants made sense as the villain.  This was a time when immigration rates had been high for a long time (for perhaps 30 years leading up to WWI).  Immigrants were still very visible and had not yet been well assimilated into mainstream society.  Immigrants congregated in the cities, where the changes in American society were most visible. Therefore, it was at least somewhat natural that people would blame immigrants for the uncertainty and fear that they felt.  In my view, these are the most important things that the nativism of the 1920s can tell us about America at that time.