If you were to cast your gaze across the America of a hundred years ago, the America of 1925, you would have had many reasons for despair. That was the year that the Second KKK reached its all-time high in membership. The previous year, immigration to the US from all Asian countries was banned, and immigration from southern and eastern Europe (home of Italians, Jews, Poles, and other undesirables) was drastically limited. And behind all that stood the Red Scare, in which Jews, Italians, anarchists, socialists, communists were drummed out of American life in an orgy of violence, mass arrests, and deportations. Just ten years later, those same forces that had been put on their back feet in the 1920s […]