Explain the causes of the First Red Scare, the 1924 Immigration Act, and the revived Ku Klux Klan, and evaluate the Sacco and Vanzetti case even-handedly.
The same decade that produced Harlem's cultural flowering also produced a sharp backlash against immigrants, radicals, and racial and religious minorities. A wave of anarchist bombings in 1919, including one at U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's own home, triggered the First Red Scare: fear that Communist or anarchist revolution, like Russia's in 1917, might spread to America. Palmer's Justice Department, with a young J. Edgar Hoover coordinating intelligence, conducted the Palmer Raids (1919-1920), arresting thousands of suspected radicals, many of them immigrants, often without warrants and with little evidence -- a serious civil-liberties overreach by nearly any modern legal standard, even though a smaller number of genuine anarchist bombings had, in fact, occurred. That same fear and prejudice shaped the 1924 Immigration Act, which set strict quotas favoring immigrants from northern and western Europe while sharply restricting southern and eastern Europeans and virtually excluding immigration from Asia entirely, building on the earlier 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.
Racial and religious backlash took organized form in a revived Ku Klux Klan, which by the mid-1920s claimed several million members nationwide -- not only in the South -- and targeted Black Americans, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants alike, wielding real political power in some state governments before scandal and internal corruption sharply reduced its membership by decade's end. The 1921 murder trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrant anarchists convicted of an armed robbery and murder, became a global cause celebre: even people who accepted the physical evidence against them argued the surrounding prejudice against immigrants and radicals made a genuinely fair trial impossible, a concern that persists among historians even today about the case's fairness, regardless of the defendants' actual guilt or innocence. Both men were executed in 1927. A different kind of cultural clash played out in the 1925 Scopes Trial in Tennessee, where attorney Clarence Darrow defended a teacher's right to teach evolution against prosecutor William Jennings Bryan's defense of a state law banning it -- a real and still-unresolved tension between scientific education and religious tradition that this course simply describes rather than settles.
Mastery looks like: They can explain the Red Scare's cause and the Palmer Raids' civil-liberties problems, state the 1924 Immigration Act's effect, and articulate both sides of the Sacco and Vanzetti fairness question without collapsing it into a simple guilty/innocent verdict.
Common stumbles: Assuming 1920s intolerance was confined to the South or to one group, or resolving the Sacco and Vanzetti case into a simple verdict instead of holding the guilt question and the fairness question separately.