Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Another Famous Act of 1965:

Immigration Since 1965

There has been a lot of attention this year to the 50th anniversary of Selma and the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. But there is another law that was passed in October of that year that garners little attention in history classes. Yet it had a profound effect on American society.

President Johnson signing the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act
on Liberty Island in New York City.

As I have said over and over again on this blog, we cannot teach everything and we have to cut content often to avoid our class becoming a laundry list of one battle, one piece of legislation or one presidential election after another.

But the Hart-Celler Immigration Act, also known as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, is the foundation for the mosaic of ethnic and racial diversity in the United States today.

As I looked out at the faces of my students last spring--nearly half had parents or grandparents from the Middle East and South Asia-- I realized how important it is to teach about this piece of legislation that is usually forgotten in the curriculum. Depending on where you teach, you might also have many students who would not be in your class were it not for this law, as it led to a dramatic increase in the numbers of immigrants coming to the U.S. from Latin American and Asia in particular. Most of teach about the dramatic increase in immigration during the period 1880-1920. Common sense would suggest we should teach about 1965, too, no matter what the ethnic background is of our students.

A few posts ago, I discussed the importance of including art, literature and music in our history course. But we also need to include basic sociological and geographic data. For example, check out the pie charts below:

Image above from teacher.scholastic.com. Click on link for additional numeric data on immigration and questions teachers can use with students to analyze the data. And check out this document with teaching ideas.

You may have introduced students to the 1921 and 1924 immigration acts which preceded this law, if you spend any time discussing nativism, either in your unit on late 19th century immigration or when you got to the 1920s. But if not, you should introduce students to that legislation. No need to get into the nitty gritty details, but they need to understand what the old quota system was. I touched on this briefly in an earlier post. And see here for a handy table showing the quotas (the rest of the lesson has some good stuff, too!)

When researching for this post, I learned 3 really interesting things I did not know about the 1965 act (one of the many reasons I love doing this blog):

1. Prior to 1965, 70 percent of all immigrants to the U.S. came from just three countries!! Can you guess? The answer is at the end of this post.
2. If you read the end of Johnson's speech about the law's passage, you will see that he concludes with an appeal to Cubans seeking asylum in the United States. He asks Congress for $12.6 million to do it. More on Cuban immigration here.  
3. Surprisingly, nobody in the government thought that the law would dramatically change the composition of U.S. immigrants! Obviously, if you look at the graphs above and link to the additional ones, a lot of people were wrong. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, for example, commented on the possibilities of large numbers emigrating from India:

The present estimate, based upon the best information we can get, is that there might be, say, 8,000 immigrants from India in the next five years ... I don't think we have a particular picture of a world situation where everybody is just straining to move to the United States ... There is not a general move toward the United States.

Boy, was he wrong! According to the Center for Immigration Studies article where I found the above quotation, there were nearly 28,000 immigrants from India in the next five years--more than 3 times what Rusk had predicted. It would be interesting to discuss with students how such incorrect predictions (and the not-so-subtle racism that motivated the assurances) allowed an otherwise unpopular measure to pass. Read or listen to more on that in this story from National Public Radio.

Additional resources on the law itself:

• Lyndon B. Johnson's speech at the signing- text of full speech
• my edited version of the speech
• Actual text of the law - can't imagine using with students, but fyi
• Three Decades of Mass Immigration: The Legacy of the 1965 Immigration Act - This article, was published on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the bill by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a non-partisan research organization. It offers good background for teachers. You can also find other data and articles from the Center here.
• Lesson Plan from CUNY - good materials here (including a chart with questions that can be used with students, some political cartoons,  and quotations from politicians about the law) that are adaptable for your students.

Additional resources about immigration in general & statistical data:

• Migration Policy Institute - all kinds of articles, fact sheets, and statistics on contemporary immigration
• If you've never been to the U.S. Census website, it is time! There is so much stuff on this website, it's hard to know where to begin, so check out these infographics for starters. (Just 'cuz I think they're pretty cool.) But if you're here for the immigration info, start here.
• Google things like "immigration statistics," "immigration demographics" and include the name of your state, region or city and you will find information specific to your community. Also check out this interactive map.
• ReImagining Migration lesson plan on 1924 law (see elsewhere on this site, too)

Additional resources about Latino Americans, Asian Americans and immigration from Africa:

• Article on impact of 1965 law on Asian Americans - This website seems to an excellent resource if you are looking for more information about Asian Americans in general. Written by C.N. Le, a sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, there are articles about demographics, different Asian American groups from Bangledshis to Hmong to Vietnamese, and lots more. This happens to be Asian Pacific American History Month, so if you are interested in that, AsiaSociety.org is another useful resource.  
• PBS.org Lesson plans on Latino Americans - I haven't had a chance to look through any of these, but I figured I'd include the link anyway. One of the things on my summer to-do list is to watch at least some of the 6 hour PBS series on Latino Americans, so I'm not just including Latinos in the curriculum in 1965!
• Overview essay: "An Historic Overview of Latino Immigration and the Demographic Transformation of the United States" by University of California-San Diego historian David Gutierrez. (Page 6 is where the post-1965 info begins.)
• I found the above essay from the National Park Service website, of all places. Click here for info about the NPS American Latino Theme Study. 
• Immigration from Africa
• Facts on Central American Immigration

Answer to point #1 above: 70% of immigrants to the U.S. came from the United Kingdom, Ireland and Germany. Did you guess right?

The Roaring 20s and Its Dark Side

Students seem to love it when you get to the 1920s. It seems so glamorous to them.  But there is more doom and gloom, I think, in the twenties than they realize. I usually begin my unit on the twenties (which I combine with the Depression of the thirties) with the quotation below from Woodrow Wilson. It is eerily prophetic in light of the Red Scare and race riots of 1919:

Once lead this people into war and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of the ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street. Conformity would be the only virtue, and every man who refused to conform would have to pay the penalty.

Mary Simkhovitch, the founder of the New York settlement house, Greenwich House, had a similar observation, but after the fact (the quotation is from her memoir published in 1938):

There were two great evils facing us in 1917. One was to go into war, and the other was to stay out. Whatever the outcome, war was bound to bring in its train not only loss of life and the destruction of property, but also new social alignments, a re-evaluating of customs, habits and outlooks, a redistributing of wealth and power.

Of course, both of these quotations address the year or so just after the war, which is technically before 1920. But the problems perceived continue into the twenties. So one way to begin is to set up this dichotomy of the 1920s:

Or this note I found in my files is also useful:

So then (after a day on the Red Scare) I spend a day or two on "Fords, Flappers & Fanatics."  And the fourth "F," films. This involves a collection of brief readings, a bit of lecture and some video clips (see below) about different aspects of the 1920s. See here for a worksheet you could use to do this. For the sources the students need, see below.

To find your own, check out the Digital History website has a good starting place for all kinds of resources about the 1920s (and every other topic in U.S. history, if you haven't seen this resource before). And another teacher, John D. Clare, maintains a website rich in overviews, including this one of the 1920s.

The sources I use:

• For the "Ford" box, I have usually given a brief lecture (5-10 min.) about Henry Ford and the Model T. I don't have it in a handy, shareable form, but it came from notes I took from an article by Roderick Nash, "Henry Ford: Symbol of an Age" which you can find here. The article points out the irony that a man who was as nostalgic and committed to "traditional American values" as Ford was also responsible for popularizing the automobile which so profoundly changed society. He was also profoundly antisemitic. He owned a newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, which published a series of
  
  articles called, "The International Jew," and later, the infamous (and fake) "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." (You can read more about this in the Jewish Virtual Library.) Both works blamed the world's problems on Jews, and echoed many of the ideas later espoused by Adolf Hitler. In fact, Ford received the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle from Hitler on the occasion of Ford's 75th birthday.  This was in 1938, when Hitler's views were widely known. Hitler greatly admired Ford. Check out this photo of Ford receiving the honor. Read the info there, too. I didn't realize this, but it mentions that Ford is mentioned in Hitler's, Mein Kampf, and a portrait of Ford hung in Hitler's office. 
• The political cartoon to the right comments on how the cheap price of the Model T and creating new models regularly led to Ford's success and the auto's proliferation.

For the "Flapper" box, check out these sources:

•  "Me and My Flapper Daughters" - wonderful reading about a man describing his daughter. Use your best judgement because the reading talks about smoking cigarettes and alludes to what goes on in cars when men and women date. It may or may not be appropriate for less mature students. But it can lead to some great discussions about life today. I can imagine a father writing a very similar thing today. I have included a few discussion questions at the end. This would work great as a read aloud, or for students to read on their own.
• Here is another reading on flappers I found you may prefer. It includes an excerpt from the above.
• And here is a really good powerpoint I found online comparing the "Gibson Girl" to the flapper. This could easily be its own lesson, along with this resource from Firstladies.org.

For the "film" box:

•  I use this speech from U.S. Senator about concerns about the movie industry - I have included 3 versions here: the first is probably longer than necessary, but at least you've got the whole thing. The second version (p. 3) is edited to be shorter. And p. 4 is even shorter. I cut parts and included some vocabulary, making it workable for middle schoolers and/or weaker readers. Or if you just want something shorter.

You might also want to actually show some 1920s film clips and incorporate some music. (How can we teach the Jazz Age without playing any jazz?!) The youtube videos below are somewhat repetitive of each other but do a good job of depicting the "roaring" part of the 20s.

• To Live in the 1920s - this one is a nice overview with music. (5:57 min.)  
• Flappers in the 20s - this one is good for giving students a sense of the style, music, fashion, dancing and the changing role of women. Keep in mind this is for the white and the wealthy. (6:24 min)
• 1920s Dancing (2:13 min)
• This one is kind of silly: lots of crazy 1920s inventions (4:43 min)

For "Fanatics," I focus on the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in new areas of the country.

• Here is a decent site to read more about that. 
• Check out this chart to see how the KKK grew dramatically in Indiana, Ohio and Illinois and declined in the South. If you use it in comparison it to the growing cities of that region, students will be able make the connection that to the KKK expanding from an anti-black organization to an anti-immigrant one (remind students that that many of the "new" immigrants of the 1880s-1920s were Catholic and Jewish). 
• More info on the Klan of the 1920s here and here and here.
• And check out this recent blogpost from Slate's history blog about the 1920s membership application. This would be a great primary source to examine with students.
• You can also use this quotation with students, from a speech attributed to Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans:

"Our unity is threatened by hordes of immigrants . . . who bring foreign ideas and ideals into our land. Two things must be done: first, we must stop influx of foreigners; second, we must through education, bring all people to common program of acting and thinking."

I also usually like to spend part of a period discussing what I suspect is not as widely taught as it should be: the 1924 Immigration Act, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act. Check out the chart here that depicts the quotas. And read here for more background. I often teach this as a conclusion to my late 19th century/early 20th lesson on immigration and nativism. But even when I do, I bring it back up in the 1920s. It's also useful as a reminder when you get to the Holocaust and need to explain why the U.S. didn't do more to help the Jews of Europe.

To conclude this lesson, help students connect the dots between the items below:

• rising urban population
• increase of automobile, movie industry
• increased immigrant population
• prohibition (I bet there's a good clip in Ken Burn's series on Prohibition)
• increase of crime
• revival of KKK, esp. in North/Central U.S. where the immigrant population is
• changing fashion, music, styles, social mores
• changing role of women

Immigration Today, Immigration Then

Like many of you, I had the best of intentions during the last week or so, but the holidays, kids, travel plans, etc. all got in the way.

So, I decided to go ahead and post an incomplete post. I will be back with more good things after the New Year. Enjoy the school break and the holiday.

Teaching about Nativism

If you're going to talk about late 19th century immigration to the U.S., you also have to talk about anti-immigration sentiment, or nativism. You won't have any trouble finding current examples of nativism, even if that's not the term we use anymore, so you could start with the present and then look backwards.

But if you prefer to start with the past, one way to teach about nativism is by having students read some primary sources and look at political cartoons to come up with their own definition. I created this document for that purpose. I have followed up this in-class activity up by using some of the political cartoons collected here. See here for more Thomas Nast cartoons, especially on the Chinese Exclusion Act. And here is a google doc presentation I found online with more political cartoons about nativism. Also see this short, readable essay that has good background information for the teacher or older students, including a connection to the post 9/11 surge in anti-immigrant sentiment.

Teaching about Contemporary Immigration

For contemporary statistics and other information on current U.S. immigration:

• From the U.S. Census Bureau: see graphics (charts and maps) and Information on foreign-born population. The graphics link has maps and charts that show the top 10 countries where immigrants came from in 1960 compared to 2010. You can also see this interactive map based on U.S. Census data from the Migration Policy Institute. It has data on each state.
• For recent news from the White House about Obama's actions on immigration, click here. See here for the story from The Atlantic Monthly.
• U.S. Department of Homeland Security
• frequently requested statistics from Migration Policy Institute (a non-partisan Washington think tank)
• You can find a variety of resources from another non-partisan Washington think tank, the Immigration Policy Center.