It was a charged time; the entire nation was frothing with anguish about its history and inheritance. The Roaring Twenties stood at the tail end of a historic surge of immigration to the United States. Between 1890 and 1924, nearly 10 million immigrants—Jewish, Italian, Irish, and Polish workers—streamed into New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, packing the streets and tenements and inundating the markets with foreign tongues, rituals, and foods (by 1927, new immigrants comprised more than 40 percent of the populations of New York and Chicago). And as much as class anxiety had driven the
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