““Regional tensions and differences, especially North versus South, remained profound. So did ethnic feelings. Laws from the 1920s had drastically reduced legal immigration, thereby cutting the percentage of foreign-born people in the United States in 1945 to around 8 percent. This was the lowest percentage—to that time—in twentieth-century American history. But the nation was still far from having become a melting pot in which ethnic and religious differences had fused into a common "American" nationality.14””
