e of immigration after 1880, however, is that it became evident that the nature and definition of the immigration phenomenon had changed. Whereas the earlier immigration had originated primarily in northern and western Europe, the later groups of immigrants came largely from southern and eastern Europe--from Italy, Poland, and Russia in particular.
In the popular imagination of America, as well as in the halls of power, these "new immigrants," as they were called (Kraut, p. 2), seemed to be a national menace. The most striking expression of this perception was that a new nationalism (i.e., nativism, xenophobia), stimulated by World War I but not only attributable to it, was directed against these immigrants. As Kraut puts it (p. 171), the war "lent new authority to the restrictionist movement launched years earlier." In any case, restrictionist ideas about immigration did not collapse. In 1916, for example, writer Madison Grant deplored "the passing Of the great (Nordic) race," using that phrase as the title of a book on the subject (Kraut, p. 153). Others wondered if democracy was safe in view of the influx, and this found expression in the 1920s in the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italians with anarchist (i.e., radical) political views (Barkan, p. 19; Kraut, p. 170). The national membership of the Ku Klux Klan, which marched through Washington, D.C., in full regalia in 1920 (Kraut, p. 107), peaked in the 1920s (Barkan, p. 19), and their main anti-immigrant targets (hatred of black people belonged to a more important but rather different exercise for the KKK) were Catholics, Jews, and the politically dangerous (Kraut, p. 164). And all of this coincided with the Palmer Raids in the 1920s, the name given to Attorney General Mitchell Palmer's authorization of arrest, prosecution, and deportation of radical aliens and other political subversives on account of the Red Scare in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution in Rus...