Last month I posted an excerpt from my eBook about Italian restaurants in this country that got some traction. It relayed the restrictions on immigrants passed in the 1920s that greatly limited newcomers from Italy and the rest of southern Europe and eastern Europe and excluded immigration from elsewhere in Asia that was already covered by the 1882 that barred Chinese immigrants. A fun article posted online at the New York Times today by Jennifer Schuessler, "What Makes a President Great? Clipping? Sipping? Slashing?" references a new website with some more humorous and insightful information: shittypresidents.com.
The self-proclaimed American history nerd and former history doctoral student who was prompted by the surprise current occupant of the Oval Office to create the site has a recent post about Calvin Coolidge's views on immigration and the immigration acts that were signed into law by him in 1924, National Origins Act and the Oriental Exclusion Act. Silent Cal, of course, is no sensible person's idea of good President and this post sheds additional light on those laws that limited immigration from Italy beginning in the 1920s. The National Origins Act was based on the number of peoples who were counted in "the 1890 census, which just so happened to be before Italians, Jews, and other undesirables started coming. Imagine a quota based on how many black people own Merle Haggard’s Greatest Hits."
These immigration laws lasted for four decades, and were not fully overturned until the The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that was signed by Lyndon Johnson at the base of the Statue of Liberty.
A political cartoon from the 1920s
The self-proclaimed American history nerd and former history doctoral student who was prompted by the surprise current occupant of the Oval Office to create the site has a recent post about Calvin Coolidge's views on immigration and the immigration acts that were signed into law by him in 1924, National Origins Act and the Oriental Exclusion Act. Silent Cal, of course, is no sensible person's idea of good President and this post sheds additional light on those laws that limited immigration from Italy beginning in the 1920s. The National Origins Act was based on the number of peoples who were counted in "the 1890 census, which just so happened to be before Italians, Jews, and other undesirables started coming. Imagine a quota based on how many black people own Merle Haggard’s Greatest Hits."
These immigration laws lasted for four decades, and were not fully overturned until the The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that was signed by Lyndon Johnson at the base of the Statue of Liberty.
A political cartoon from the 1920s
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