May 26, 1924: The Immigration Act of 1924

May 26, 1924: The Immigration Act of 1924 is signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge. It was intended to control the racial makeup of the United States by greatly restricting immigration.

People had long been coming to America from all over the world. In the late 1840s, the Irish Potato Famine brought in people from Ireland, to the point where, by the end of the 20th Century, there were more Irish people in America than in Ireland. The European Revolutions of 1848 also led millions of people, especially Germans, to flee. Most Americans don't realize it, but Germans are still the largest ethnic group in America -- ahead of African-Americans and Hispanics, let alone Irish and Italians.

The late 19th Century saw a great deal of immigrants from Southern Europe: Italy, Greece, and the Balkan countries in between that were then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These people were, at the same time, joined by many Jews fleeing Eastern Europe, including Austria, Romania and the Russian Empire, including present-day Poland and Ukraine.

The Southern Europeans were white, but darker-skinned than people from Germany and the British Isles. And they were Catholic, in many cases Eastern Orthodox, which seemed, to many Americans, to be even more "foreign" than the Roman Catholicism practiced by the Irish. Many of the Eastern Europeans were also Catholic, some Eastern Orthodox. And the Jews weren't even Christian.

These immigrants included my mother's paternal grandparents from Vilnius in Lithuania, before 1901, when their 1st child was born in Manhattan; and my father's Catholic paternal grandparents from Borki Wielkie in northeastern Poland, sometime between 1891, when my great-grandfather was born there, and 1914, when my grandfather was born in Newark, New Jersey. It's only recently that I was able to narrow it down that far, much less any further. (As for maternal grandparents, my mother's were English and my father's were Dutch, and they were already here before the American Civil War of the 1860s, but that's all I know so far.)

All this foreignness led to a backlash, which got to be disgusting. In 1896, one national magazine actually printed these words: "Europe is vomiting."

This cartoon had the same idea.

But it didn't stop. In 1907, immigration to America peaked, with 1.1 million people coming in. April 17 of that year was the busiest day New York's Ellis Island immigration station ever had.

White Anglo-Saxon anger over immigration, including agitation from the Ku Klux Klan -- who, let's not forget, were Protestant, and thus as much anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic as anti-black -- was a big reason why Prohibition was passed -- and a big reason why it passed when it did. Anti-immigrant and anti-liquor activists knew that, after the reapportionment from the 1920 Census, they'd never have another chance, so they had to get it done before then, to strike the blow they wanted against the Germans with their beer, the Italians with their wine, the Irish with their whiskey, and the Eastern Europeans with their vodka.

The 18th Amendment was ratified in 1919, and took effect in 1920. Of course, ethnic gangs got better organized, and bootlegged and sold booze, and the American Mafia as we know it was born. Prohibition totally backfired, and the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th in 1933. By that point, organized crime had anticipated this, and had increased their involvement in their other fields, including gambling and prostitution. Drugs soon followed.

The activists did not learn their lesson, and tried harder to restrict immigration. The Immigration Act of 1924 was also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, for its sponsors, Representative Albert Johnson of Washington, and Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania, both Republicans.

Johnson was not merely a racist, he was a eugenicist. In 1927, he justified the Act as a bulwark against "a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed." And Reed was an out-and-out fascist: On July 1, 1932, during the Bonus Army march on Washington, He took to the Senate floor, and said, "I do not often envy other countries and their governments, but I say that if this country ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now."

The Act prevented immigration from Asia, and set quotas on the number of immigrants from the rest of the world: 165,000 per year, and 3 percent of any country from their 1910 population. It also authorized the creation of the country's first formal border control service, the U.S. Border Patrol, and established a "consular control system," which allowed entry only to those who first obtained a visa from a U.S. consulate abroad.

Albert Johnson was defeated in the Franklin Roosevelt landslide of 1932. He died in 1957, a proud racist and eugenicist to the end. David Reed was defeated in 1934, in another Democratic landslide. He died in 1953. His house in Washington, D.C. is, with some appropriateness, now the Embassy of a nation of nonwhite people: The Asian nation of Laos.

The 1924 Act would define U.S. immigration policy for nearly three decades, until being substantially revised by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, and ultimately replaced by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

On November 6, 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Its most significant effect was that it allowed immigrants who had entered the U.S. illegally before January 1, 1982 to apply for legal status, provided they paid fines and back taxes. This provision, which Reagan himself referred to as “amnesty,” allowed around 3 million immigrants to secure legal status after paying $185, demonstrating “good moral character” and learning to speak English.

Conservative activists since Reagan, who have demagogued the issue of illegal immigration since the 1990s and especially since the 9/11 attacks in 2001, find it hard to believe that their favorite President of all time could have done such a thing, but he did. Say what you want about him, and I have, but the man did believe that immigrants made America stronger, not weaker.

And every President after him agreed: Both George Bushes, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama -- until Donald Trump, who was so anti-immigrant, he made Calvin Coolidge look like a believer in open borders. 

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May 26, 1924 was a  Monday. These baseball games were played that day:

* The New York Yankees beat the Detroit Tigers, 8-2 at Yankee Stadium. "Bullet Joe" Bush went the distance for the win. Babe Ruth hit a home run, and 2nd baseman Ernie Johnson went 4-for-4 with 2 home runs and 3 RBIs. Ty Cobb, by this point also the Tigers' manager, went 0-for-3 with a walk.

* The Boston Red Sox beat the Cleveland Indians, 10-9 at Fenway Park in Baltimore. Tris Speaker, by this point also the Indians' manager, went 2-for-5 with an RBI.

* The Philadelphia Athletics beat the St. Louis Browns, 2-1 at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. George Sisler, the Browns' greatest player ever, went 0-for-4.

* The Washington Senators beat the Chicago White Sox, 8-2 at Griffith Stadium in Washington.

* The St. Louis Cardinals beat the Cincinnati Reds, 4-3 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis. None of the other National League teams were scheduled for the day.