United States society in 1917 was one filled with much fear and misunderstanding. The end of the Progressive Era and its Social Gospel message of reform, the onset of World War I, and the Bolshevik Revolution raised anxieties in the minds of many Americans. One significant manifestation of this fear was the rise of xenophobia; Americans grew wary of outsiders. The nation, which was built on the sweat and blood of immigrants, now turned its back on these very same people. Beginning as early as 1882, ideas of immigrant restriction had been circulating with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act. A decade later, the Immigration Restriction League, founded in Boston in 1894, argued that the best way to keep out "undesirables" was a literacy test. The campaign bore no real fruit at the outset…