Local Opinion: Lessons for today from 1920s culture wars

How about this political agenda? Condemning most immigrants as mentally defective disease carriers poised to “replace” the white race, Congress restricts migration to “acceptable” racial and ethnic groups. Uncomfortable with scientific discoveries, many states adopt school curricula conforming to the Christian Bible. To eradicate “immoral behavior,” Congress and the states amend the Constitution. Amidst these actions, tens of thousands of hooded activists march towards Congress.

Sound extreme or familiar? These examples describe actual events and policies adopted a century ago.

During the 1920s, as the nation became more urban, technologically modern, and ethnically diverse, a “culture war” raged between religious “traditionalists,” primarily Protestants in the South and Midwest, and “coastal elites,” clustered in cities along the East Coast and upper Midwest. Traditionalists felt besieged by the cultural innovations identified with radio and Hollywood, and the surge of Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Jewish immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. These new arrivals, explained the popular writer Madison Grant in “The Passing of the Great Race,” threatened to “replace” so-called Nordic Americans descended from the British isles and Western Europe.

Congress responded by enacting increasingly severe quotas and by 1924 barred nearly all immigrants except those from Western Europe. For good measure, all Asians were excluded, as the Chinese had been for decades. To help enforce the law, Congress created a new police force, the Border Patrol.

Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians fought back against Darwinism by regulating curricula. Tennessee, like numerous states, outlawed teaching evolution in public schools. Its 1925 law barred teachers from presenting “any theory that denies the divine creation of man” as revealed in the Bible or to assert that humans “descended from a lower order of animals.”

For decades, anti-alcohol groups such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and Anti-Saloon League had successfully lobbied several states to limit or ban the manufacture of alcohol. These largely Protestant reformers identified drinking with disorderly immigrants and immorality. Shifting to a national strategy, they steered the 18th Amendment to ratification during 1919 and its implementation in 1920. The Prohibition amendment, along with enabling legislation, outlawed the production, sale, and consumption of alcohol. The “Noble Experiment” as proponents called it, was unique among constitutional amendments for restricting, rather than expanding, personal freedom.

In support of these measures, and as a warning to wavering politicians, a newly revived Ku Klux Klan recruited 5 million members during the 1920s. Adding Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and bootleggers to their enemies list, over 40,000 hooded Klansmen marched in front of the Capitol in 1925.

The 1920s holds up a not-so-distant mirror illuminating recent debates over the role of religion in public life, the constitutional basis of privacy and reproductive rights, the value of immigration, and whether sex education or “critical race theory” should be taught in schools. Some of these earlier policies shaped American life for decades.

Immigration opponents during the 1920s espoused views nearly identical to those of, say, Donald Trump or Tucker Carlson. They warned that migration from poor countries spread disease, boosted crime and threatened white supremacy. Their “replacement theory” ignored data showing that immigrants are less likely than the native-born to commit crimes or take public assistance. Throughout American history immigrants spurred, not impeded, economic growth while they and their children are among the most entrepreneurial citizens. Yet the rigid quota system remained largely intact until 1965. Today’s restrictionists openly admit their desire to turn back the clock.

Prohibition’s critics correctly predicted that instead of compelling morality, it would drive drinking underground, promote organized crime and encourage smuggling from Canada and Mexico. By 1933, most Americans grew weary of the “Noble Experiment.” Federal and state officials were especially eager to reclaim the tax revenues from alcohol sales. Congress and the states repealed Prohibition via the 21st Amendment in record time.

The public relations fiasco of the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925 dealt a blow to anti-evolution laws. When Tennessee indicted science teacher John Scopes for teaching evolution, his trial became a national sensation. Fundamentalist groups hired William Jennings Bryan — a three time Democratic presidential candidate — as special prosecutor, while the American Civil Liberties Union sponsored Clarence Darrow as defense counsel. Hundreds of journalists and radio commentators flocked to Dayton, Tennessee, and portrayed the trial like a grudge match between faith and science. Largely ignoring Scopes, Bryan allowed himself to be grilled as a religious expert by Darrow. Bryan came across as a sanctimonious blowhard unable to explain the Bible’s many textual contradictions and factual errors. Although Darrow lost the jury (Scopes’s conviction was later overturned), he persuaded most Americans that faith and science each had a proper place, but not in teaching biology.

Over the next several decades, the Supreme Court overturned most anti-evolution laws as violations of the separation of church and state. But much like dormant anti-abortion laws, many similar statutes remain on the books awaiting rulings by a Supreme Court increasingly sympathetic towards religious expression in public life and openly skeptical of the 14th Amendment’s promise of due process, privacy, and bodily autonomy.