The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
He would have supported Donald Trump’s wall. That much is certain. After all, Albert Johnson once decried “a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed.”
Now, as the United States eschews important debates about immigration in favor of incendiary rhetoric from both sides, Johnson stands as a fascinating figure.
Sure, he has been dead for 62 years. But in many ways Johnson presaged the xenophobia that fuels modern politics. He was a congressman, representing Washington’s 3rd Congressional District from 1913-1933, and he was a leading voice against immigration. Then, as now, Washington’s 3rd Congressional District included Clark County. The district was larger, with Washington having only six districts as opposed to 10 today, and Johnson’s hometown of Hoquiam now sits in the 6th District.
Somewhere in his travels from a boyhood in Kansas to being a newspaper reporter in Missouri to becoming editor and publisher of the Grays Harbor Washingtonian, Johnson developed an intense suspicion of immigrants. In an essay for HistoryLink.org, Aaron Goings writes, “the two defining characteristics of both his life in Hoquiam and his service as congressman were his militant opposition to radical labor unions and his hatred of immigrants.”
That was manifested when Johnson became chair of the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization and appointed eugenicist Harry Laughlin as the committee’s Expert Eugenics Agent.
Why a House committee needed an Expert Eugenics Agent is not clear, but Laughlin believed that certain classes of people — namely, whites of Northern European descent — were inherently superior to others, and he supported compulsory sterilization laws. You know, kind of like Nazi Germany.
Actually, exactly like Nazi Germany. According to a paper from Truman State University: “In 1936, Harry Laughlin was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Medicine from the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Laughlin received the degree in large part due to his own work on policies regarding the sterilization of the unfit.”
In other words, Laughlin might not have been the guy you want influencing immigration policy. But he was just the guy Johnson needed to provide justification for anti-immigrant policies.
And so, Johnson authored the Immigration Act of 1924. It limited arrivals to the United States, banned Asian immigration and established a “national origin” quota based on the number of people from each country who resided in the U.S. as of 1890. Notably, this preceded the arrival of large numbers of Italian and Slavic immigrants, largely limiting future immigration to the British, Irish and Germans.
The law had broad support in Congress, passing the House, 323-71. The years following World War I were a time of widespread nativism in the United States, with fear about communism, Catholics and foreigners resulting in bigoted state legislation and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan throughout the country.
An Oregon law eliminating private education was passed and then overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in Pierce v. Society of Sisters. The ruling has served as precedent for hundreds of 14th Amendment cases since then, and the Society of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary still operates St. Mary’s Academy, an all-girls high school in downtown Portland.
Through all this, Johnson articulated his position: “The character of immigration has changed and the newcomers are imbued with lawless, restless sentiments of anarchy and collectivism. … Then anarchy becomes rife among them.” Other countries, apparently, were not sending their best people.
All of which might sound surprisingly familiar. Or maybe it isn’t surprising. And as nationalism increasingly becomes a political cudgel, it’s not far-fetched to think that Albert Johnson could be elected these days. But it would be more uplifting to think we have evolved in the past 95 years.
Greg Jayne is the editorial page editor of The Columbian. 360-735-4531; greg.jayne@columbian.com; Twitter.com/col_gjayne
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