ABSTRACT
The decades after the enactment of the Johnson-Reed Act were the time when the racial and ethnic hierarchies that had been generated in earlier eras took their firmest hold on the body civic. Over the course of two generations, the immigrant stream was vastly reduced, and took on precisely the shape that the framers of the JohnsonReed Act had hoped for: almost all White people, and those mainly Northwest Europeans and Canadians. Life inside the United States for peoples of color was not pleasant, as segregation ruled the lives of most African Americans, attacks were mounted on Indian tribes’ right to exist, Mexican Americans’ freedom to stay in the United States was circumscribed, and Japanese Americans suffered mass imprisonment on account of their race. But cracks gradually appeared in White hegemony in the two decades following the Second World War, until finally the racist system of immigration limitation was overturned in 1965.
