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July 30, 2024
‘The Measure Should Not Be Called the Johnson Bill, but the Ku Klux Klan Bill’
When Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924 a century ago, The Nation issued a prescient warning to its readers.
This article appears in the August 2024 issue, with the headline “The Selfish Free.”
The 100th anniversary of the Immigration Act of 1924 came and went this spring with little fanfare. Perhaps that’s because it would have been difficult to tell a simple, linear story about the law, which severely limited immigration to the United States from Southern and Eastern Europe and much of Asia. The most egregious provisions were modified in 1965, but the quota system introduced by the bill remains in place today—while the nativism that fueled its passage has come surging back into American life.
The Nation immediately grasped the implications of the law. When eugenics advocate and Washington Representative Albert Johnson introduced it in Congress, the magazine warned that it was
expressly designed to restrict future immigrants virtually to the so-called ‘superior races’ of Teutonic, Scandinavian, and Anglo-Saxon countries…. The Johnson scheme is not only bad science and poor justice; it is definite discrimination against Roman Catholics and Jews. The measure should not be called the Johnson bill, but the Ku Klux Klan bill.
A subsequent editorial, “Land of the Noble Free,” began by noting that “Americans are all immigrants,” with the notable exception of Indigenous peoples.
There is no American race; there is not even the established claim of centuries to plead the primary right of any one stock…. Whence comes this myth that our country is the private property of some one racial stock? Whence come the arrogant assumptions of those who, like [Johnson], want to preserve a ‘racial homogeneity’ which has never existed?
The editorial continued,
It is a tragic thing that this country, built on the sweat and aspirations of immigrants, should so soon be fencing itself about with a wall. We are becoming the great example of national selfishness in all the world. While we bar human beings from our shores we bully weaker countries into granting American capital privileges alien to their national interests. We force Mexico to revise its oil laws, tell China how to use its customs, ask Russia to reconsider its view of private property, and everywhere proclaim the ‘open door’—for American capital—as an American policy. ‘Equal rights and opportunities, for capital, all over the world’—what a bitter slogan for America when a hungry peasant from South Italy, a persecuted Jew from Rumania, an Armenian whose home is a heap of ashes finds the door to America slammed in his face!
After the bill passed overwhelmingly in Congress and was signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge, The Nation published a letter from a reader suggesting that “a congressional committee be appointed and instructed to proceed to Bedloe’s Island, New York…and wrench from the base of the statue of the Goddess of Liberty the bronze tablet to Emma Lazarus”—the one bearing her words welcoming the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
“Either that,” the writer said, “or reverse the position of the goddess and turn her back to Europe.”
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Richard Kreitner
Richard Kreitner is a contributing writer and the author of Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union. His writings are at www.richardkreitner.com.