Tomorrow is the one hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Immigration Act of 1924. Notoriously racist, it severely diminished the flow of legal immigration for half a century, sent Jewish refugees to a certain death, and continues to be felt to this day in bad reasoning that fails to go away.
I grew up among migrants. My favorites were two older French women, members of our church. Brother Pechet had passed away earlier, but his wife and her sister, Sister Malenie Stahl, were like members of our family.
They gave land to our church, and Sister Malenie, who had worked as a cleaning lady in France, insisted on volunteering housework for my parents who were both active as pastors in the church. Sister Pechet and Sister Malenie were the reason I took French in high school, in spite of the French teacher, Mrs. Muenzer.
By far the largest immigrant demographic in our town was people from Eastern Europe who had fled their home countries between and following the two world wars and escaping as the Iron Curtain fell. They were my classmates in school, fellow parishioners in my church, and leaders in my community.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Ukrainian Pentecostal Assembly thrived across town, and various Orthodox churches (Greek, Ukrainian, and Russian) were scattered about our largely Methodist community. The neighboring town boasted the largest Pentecostal church in the area – made up primarily of Puerto Ricans (a significant population in that town, and by citizenship not immigrants). And just north of that was the Italian Assembly in Malaga.
Immigrants filled our church, just as did migrants from Appalachia who moved up to work in the mills that gave our town its name. Accents were thick in the air. But even immigrants who lacked any useful English, such as one elderly Romanian couple, found a safe haven in our pews and where they were welcome to praise God in their mother tongue or in Pentecostal tongues like the rest of us. Cries of “Slava Bogu” (Praise God!) by Slavic immigrants were common. The Sunday school attendance rolls were a United Nations of surnames – or as we liked to say, a foretaste of heaven.
Public Domain photo: Slavic Immigrant at Ellis Island 1907
But 1970 was the low point of immigration in the U.S., the year that less than 5% of everyone in the nation was foreign-born. The door had been shut off four decades before, opening just enough to let in my neighbors, many of whom came directly from Nazi concentration camps and Soviet takeovers.
One hundred years ago this month, on May 26, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Johnson-Reed Act into law, culminating fifty years of a concerted and highly racist effort to keep America pure. Its national origin quota system would not be dismantled until 1965.
I have a hard time imagining my hometown without its Irish, Italian, and Eastern European influences when I was growing up. I ate it in our church potluck suppers. I watched it in the heroic acts on our ball fields. I heard it in the politics of city hall. Some of them were the most patriotic citizens in town, but when they first arrived, they were deemed unAmericanizable.
Exclusionary acts had begun in the 1870s and 1880s with the door shutting on Chinese immigrants, followed by all Asians. The Irish, who had fled the famine of 1847, had faced similar otherising in their earlier days of arrival because they were originally considered nonwhite as well. By the turn of the century, Italians and Eastern Europeans were the new nonwhite.
But unlike Asians, these Europeans eventually blended in. Supreme Court cases in the 1920s determined that Asians could not be naturalized (receive citizenship) because of the color of their skin. While Filipinos were given free entry because their country had been colonized by the U.S., they could not become citizens.
Immigrants who were not from northwestern Europe (for example, Great Britain and Germany) were considered to have unredeemable physical, mental, and moral characteristics. Because of their different phenotype (observable traits) – DNA wouldn’t be discovered until 1984 – Italians, Poles, Russians, Hungarians, as well as darker-complected people were seen as lazy, impulsive, stupid, and lawbreakers. They could never rise to the level of Anglo-Saxons, who were progressive, rational, brave, and hardworking – in short, civilized.
Even Germans, otherwise considered of good Nordic breeding, were held at arms-length during both world wars while Germany was the enemy. Generations of immigrants had continued to speak German, but for that season their mother tongue was frowned upon, if not outrightly verboten.
Several factors contributed to this growing nativism in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Pseudo-science in the form of scientific racism, Social Darwinism, and the Eugenics Movement all contributed to the idea that people from the wrong breed were unfit to be Americans. Social Darwinism saw race as a matter of fixed characteristics – people, especially groups of people, could not be changed. The eugenics movement went so far as to ensure that, through sterilization and abortion, inferior people did not reproduce.
At the same time, the Ku Klux Klan was experiencing a revival. After spreading terror among the American Black population for decades following the Civil War, the reincarnated Klan in 1915 added Jews, Catholics, and immigrants from southern and eastern Europe to its hateful scope. Georgia’s Governor Clifford Walker, in addressing his fellow Klansmen at their national convention in 1924, urged the membership to advocate for a “wall of steel, high as heaven” to keep immigrants out.
Anti-immigrant stories filled the news. By far the most notorious story was of Leon F. Czolgosz, son of Polish-speaking immigrant parents, who assassinated President McKinley in 1901. Immigrants were always spoken of with derogatory modifiers: “greedy” Jews, “inscrutable” Chinese, “drunken” Irish.
The Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed) was straightforward in its racist intent. Earlier barriers to Asian immigrants were extended to immigrants from southern, central, and eastern Europe. Persons of obvious color, who could not become U.S. Citizens were banned. On the other hand, Mexicans, whose labor was needed and who often passed as white, were admitted albeit with strong restrictions.
In essence, the Johnson-Reed Act shut off the flow of Italians, Poles, Russians, Hungarians, and Jews in general. These populations, who had accounted for more than three hundred thousand immigrants in 1908, fell to a mere thirteen thousand by 1928.
Meanwhile, the chaos caused by the extensive redrawing of national boundaries throughout Europe following World War I became a paperwork nightmare for many immigrants, much like the story of Victor Navorski, portrayed by Tom Hanks in the movie, Terminal. (Terminal was inspired by the true story of an Iranian caught in immigration purgatory.)
Particularly, Eastern Jews faced the challenges of this paperwork nightmare. Labeled as “Hebrews” in 1908, they were given a unique, albeit highly restricted standing in 1924. Even as the flow of Jews seeking asylum in the U.S. increased dramatically during World War II, they were limited to the almost negligible number of arrivals from 1890.
Refugee status, with its ways of working around dysfunctional governmental paperwork in times of chaos, would not be a thing until the 1960s. Meanwhile, untold numbers of Jews – and other groups – met certain death as they were turned away from entry into the U.S. during the Second World War. Even as we liberated them from concentration camps, we blocked them from safety in our own country.
When Hitler published Mein Kampf in 1925, he used the U.S. Immigration Act of the previous year as a model for his program of racial purification. The Nazi program of eugenics, begun in 1933 to “improve” the German population through forced sterilization and marriage controls, also overtly drew on the U.S. example.
We think of the 1920s as the Roaring Twenties, a time of national prosperity, when in actuality these early decades of the twentieth century were fraught with economic uncertainty. And the Great Depression hadn’t even hit yet.
There were also fears of political radicalism. 1919-1920 saw the Red Scare and the Palmer Raids, in which members of President Woodrow Wilson’s administration, under Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and the new FBI head, J. Edgar Hoover, targeted Italian, Russian, and Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Reminiscent of the later McCarthy era, Palmer was accused of “seeing red” by his own President.
But the biggest concern with immigrants was the dual perception that they could not assimilate culturally or worse that they would change the American culture, overrun it even. Immigrants were considered urbanites who would not fit into the agrarian and small-town nation that the U.S. still perceived itself as. Old country ways were inferior. Even supporters of immigration spoke of the immigrants as coming from backwards places. The difference between pro- and anti-immigration advocates is that the latter believed that immigrants could not be lifted up.
Public Domain photo: Immigrant children being examined by city health officer upon arrival at the Battery from Ellis Island during Typhus scare.
Contrast all that with a different perspective, one that repudiated the notion of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority. Horace Kallen had immigrated in the 1880s to the U.S. from Central Europe as a child, the son of an Orthodox Rabbi. He wrote that all immigrants had the ability to assimilate, but that they also brought with them value from their own ways that could enhance the American experience.
Likewise, journalist Randolph Bourne asserted that, just as with immigrants from before the very founding of the nation, immigrants of the day had much to offer. Bourne envisioned “‘a cosmopolitan America,’ where the newcomers could be both American and whatever they had brought from their premigration home.”[1]
What intrigues me is that the same anti-immigrant arguments have been used generation after generation – even by those whose very own ancestors were hated immigrants. A hundred years after the Immigrant Act of 1924, we are having the same discussion with the same talking points.
Go back four hundred years and the conversation remains unchanged. According to family lore, my ancestors left England for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, dominated by Puritans. I have no idea what religious persuasion my forebears were. I only know that they then left the Boston area for what we know today as Rhode Island.
Anglican-cum-Puritan-cum-Baptist preacher Roger Williams founded the colony of Rhode Island because the powers-that-be in Massachusetts wanted to keep their land pure for their breed of Puritanism. Williams sought a place where anyone would be welcomed. And he insisted on paying Native Americans for their land, unlike the customary usurping of ownership. Freedom for him meant freedom for all.
I like to think this openness is why my ancestors left England in the first place – and why they followed Roger Williams and settled the town of Kenyon in western Rhode Island. Little is left of their footprints in that state; even the town has all but disappeared. My part of the clan eventually moved on to upstate New York. We are a migrating people. I hope we will always be welcoming of other migrants.
Our world today is filled with much polarizing rhetoric. In contrast, important and essential issues are best dealt with in a thoughtful, factual, and engaging way. If what you’ve read here is the kind of information and perspective you’d like to find in your inbox on a regular basis, you are welcome to sign up for a free subscription here. And, as always, you are welcome to respond to today’s post in the comments section below – even if you disagree. A select few references on the issue of immigration are listed on my resource page.
[1] Bon Tempo, pp. 157-158