Albert Johnson and Immigration Act of 1924 Albert Johnson & The Immigration Act of 1924

This paper will discuss the role of Albert Johnson, a congressman from the state of Washington from 1912 to 1932, in the formulation and passage of the Immigration Act of 1924. The first part of the paper will briefly examine the life of Johnson, up through the time he was elected to Congress. The second part of the paper will discuss the background to the racial philosophy behind the immigration laws passed in the early 1920s. The third part of the paper will discuss the passage of the laws themselves, concentrating upon the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924.

Albert Johnson was born in 1869 in Springfield, Illinois. Soon after his birth, his parents moved to Hiawatha, Kansas, where his father farmed and ran unsuccessfully for district judge. Albert's interest in news reporting surfaced early in his life and he became a reporter in his hometown while he was still a minor. He quickly moved on to the larger cities in the Midwest, where he covered many major events for their larger newspapers. Early in the 1890s, he moved to Washington D.C., where he picked up reporting jobs with the Washington Morning Post; he moved on to the New Haven Register, where he was made managing editor in 1896. He briefly returned to the Post before being offered the position of managing editor of the Tacoma News in 1898. He jumped at the opportunity to head a newspaper in a growing part of the country and his fortunes grew. In 1909, he purch

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r numbers would deprive young Americans of the opportunity to do the same. He mentions that the I.W.W. was intent upon destroying capitalism and government and notes that it was largely made up of non-citizens. He also dwells upon the effects of the strikes on Northwestern industry. These examples would tend to indicate that he was more concerned with the parochial effects of immigration on the Northwest. This focus on his constituency is borne out by his opposition to the lowering of tariffs which protected lumber and other Northwest industries; although tariff reduction was a staple issue with his party, he noted that the Underwood tariff bill destroyed tariff reciprocity between the United States and Canada, causing lumber companies to move out of Washington and into Canada (12 August 1934: 4). Historians and journalists, on the other hand, have asserted that Johnson was a vehement racist and white supremacist, a charge which may have been partially validated by the individuals called to speak before the House Committee on Immigration, which he chaired beginning in 1919. According to John Higham (who drew upon unpublished documents of the Immigration Restriction League and scrapbooks in the Hoquiam Public Library), Johnso
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Approximate Word count = 4254
Approximate Pages = 17 (250 words per page)