Senator David Reed (R-PA) was awfully pleased with himself. He had just joined forces with Rep. Albert Johnson (R-WA) to implement the strictest immigration laws in United States history - the Johnson-Reed Act, or the Immigration Act of 1924, significantly reduced immigration to the United States.
Or at least it reduced immigration to the United States from very specific areas, which was sort of the point. The Johnson-Reed Act finalized a long history of Congress trying to homogenize the United States. It started with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which, for the first time, blocked people of a specific ethnic background from coming to the United States "on the premise that it endangered the good order of certain localities."
If you were coming to the United States from China after 1882, you had to get certified by the Chinese government that they were actually qualified to immigrate. That proved to be somewhat problematic - a feature, not a bug - as the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited Chinese workers both "skilled and unskilled...and Chinese employed in mining." That effectively shut out Chinese immigration. And what if you were from China and had already moved to the United States? If you went back to China for a visit, you had to obtain a new certificate from the Chinese government. If you stayed in the United States, you could not be granted citizenship but you could still be deported. It wasn't a great time, inclusion-wise!
Notable to the Johnson-Reed Act was that the Chinese Exclusion Act was set for a ten-year period, expiring in 1892. Keep an eye on that year. Congress then in 1892 passed the Geary Act, which extended the Chinese Exclusion Act another ten years, after which made it a permanent thing.
Prior to World War 1, European immigration to the United States was increasing dramatically thanks to the conditions that would eventually lead to the Great War itself (Militarism, Alliances, Imperialism, Nationalism) to the tune of about one million people per year arriving to the United States through Ellis Island, 98% of whom were approved (the requirements for approval were essentially, "are you healthy?" "have you done crimes?" and "will you be a problem here?").
During and immediately after World War I, fear among white Americans rose, thinking about all of those immigrants who had come from Europe to the United States: was that German guy problematic? Is that Irishman supporting Germany, because Germany's victory would harm England? Is that Russian immigrant secretly a communist who wants to do Commie Things here?
In 1917 Congress passed the Immigration Act, which said that immigrants to the United States at least had to be able to read and write in their native language, putting literacy tests on the Immigration Service's to-do list. In October of the following year Congress passed the Dillingham-Hardwick Act, or the Immigration Act of 1918, that allowed President Wilson to more easily deport anarchists, communists, labor organizers, or any other such undesirable activist.
In April 1919, the wake of Russia's fall to communism, the first Red Scare surfaced in the United States. Senator Thomas Hardwick (D-GA), who put the Hardwick in the Dillingham-Hardwick Act, received a package wrapped in brown paper. Inside was a cardboard box wrapped in bright green paper stamped with the popular Gimbel Brothers Department Store logo. If you opened the box on the end marked "Open," then a spring would be released that allowed a vial of sulfuric acid to drip onto a blasting cap that would detonate a stick of dynamite.
Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson - who had made headlines by opposing a general strike - received one of these packages, but one of his staff opened the wrong end and the vial of sulfuric acid dropped harmlessly on the table. He took the box to the police, who notified the post office. Back to Hardwick, on April 29, 1919 his housekeeper could actually follow instructions and opened the package on the right end, which resulted in her hands getting blown off and significant injuries to the face and neck of Hardwick's wife. (She would survive, Hardwick would go on to serve as Governor of Georgia from 1921-1923 and lose the next election because he opposed the Ku Klux Klan.)
The news of the Hardwick bombing caught the attention of a savvy New York City postal worker who had removed 16 similarly-designed and -labeled packages for insufficient postage. These - and more discovered in June - were addressed to, among others, John D. Rockefeller, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Postmaster General, the governors of Mississippi and Pennsylvania, the mayor of New York City, U.S. District Judge and future Commissioner of Major League Baseball Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a senator from Utah, and Albert Johnson - a member of the House of Representatives from southwest Washington State who was also chairman of the Immigration and Naturalization Committee. He's the Johnson in Johnson-Reed Act. I'll come back to him in a minute.
Two of these bombs were earmarked for the new Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. One of which did actually detonate - too early, which was likely a surprise for Carlo Valdinoci, the anarchist who was in the process of placing the bomb at Palmer's house. The bomb blew out the front windows and front door, and scared the mess out of Palmer's across-the-street neighbors, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.
Palmer - who had his eye on the presidency in 1920 - responded to this wave of bombings with what is known as the Palmer Raids in late 1919 and early 1920. Palmer used previous legislation - mainly the Sedition Act of 1917 - as well as a small investigative team led by a young Justice Department lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover to try to root out this threat in the United States. As a result, the Constitutionally-questionable Palmer Raids rounded up thousands of suspected anarchists/communists (though 75% would later be released) and deporting many to the Soviet Union. As a result, the American Civil Liberties Union would be established and their first action was to challenge the Sedition Act of 1917.
The following year Congress passed Sen. Dillingham's Emergency Quota Act of 1921, which for the first time established a numerical restriction on immigrants coming to the United States. By the time it passed both the House and the Senate only 3% of the total number of people that had been accounted for on the 1910 census would be allowed into the United States annually, and 355,000 immigrants total. So, for example (just for math's sake) if 1,000 people originally from Serbia were listed on the 1910 census, the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 would only allow 30 people from Serbia each year. If you were the 31st person from Serbia that year, you would be turned around at Ellis Island and sent back.
After the bombing attempt on his own life, Rep. Johnson pushed for a moratorium on all immigration in 1919, which was subsequently and handily defeated in the House of Representatives. But by the time the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 had expired, President Calvin Coolidge (who came to national prominence in September 1919 when he, as Governor of Massachusetts, called out the militia to stop the Boston Police Strike) called on Congress to come up with a plan to limit immigration completely.
Congress obliged with H.R. 7995. The Johnson-Reed Act aka National Origins Act aka Immigration Act of 1924, was written and co-sponsored by Rep. Johnson, and Pennsylvania Senator David Aiken Reed. It limited immigration to the United States to just 2% of foreign-born residents listed on not the 1910 census, but the 1890 census - eight years into the term of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Immigration from China and Japan all but vanished, a popular sentiment in Johnson's home state of Washington. The Johnson-Reed Act capped total annual immigration to the United States at 165,000 - less than half of the total number in the Emergency Quota Act of 1921.
Johnson was, and I'm sure you'll find this shocking, described as "an unusually energetic and vehement nativist and racist." He didn't even try to hide his anti-Semitism, referring to Jews as "abnormally twisted," and enthusiastically responded to a State Department report calling Jews "filthy, un-American, and often dangerous in their habits."
Johnson was a noted supporter of Eugenics - a disgraced scientific movement designed to prove Social Darwinism. He served as president of the Eugenics Research Association, which campaigned against interracial marriage and advocated for forced sterilization of anyone who might be labeled mentally disabled, and Johnson was all-in on it. The KKK, in particular, was a big fan of Johnson's. Three years after its passage Johnson continued to defend the Johnson-Reed Act, noting that it protected the United States against "a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed." It should tell you something that his immigration legislation passed so easily. The Eugenics movement was considered extremely cutting-edge and extremely beneficial for the country as a whole and, by the whole, of course I mean "white people."
Sen. Reed, son of prominent Pittsburgh judge James Hay Reed, who opened a law office with four-time presidential cabinet member Philander C. Knox known as Knox and Reed. They represented Andrew Carnegie as he formed US Steel - the world's first billion dollar company, and also represented Andrew Mellon, the Heinz company, Westinghouse, among other notable clients, and are today Reed Smith LLP, employing over 1500 lawyers in the USA, Europe, Middle East, and Asia.
Anyhow, Reed was appointed to the Senate in August 1922 to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Sen. William E. Crow, who himself was appointed to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Reed's father's former law partner Philander C. Knox. Crow died less than a year after his appointment. Reed was summarily re-elected for his own term later that autumn.
On April 27, 1924 - after the Johnson-Reed Act passed the House of Representatives 323-71, Reed penned an editorial in the New York Times regarding the purpose of the bill before the Senate, saying:
America was beginning also to smart under the irritation of her "foreign colonies" - those groups of aliens, either in city slums or in country districts, who speak a foreign language and live a foreign life, and who want neither to learn our common speech nor to share our common life. From all this has grown the conviction that it was best for America that our incoming immigrants should hereafter be of the same races as those of us who are already here, so that each year's immigration should so far as possible be a miniature America, resembling in national origins the persons who are already settled in our country...
...In my opinion, no law passed by Congress within the last half century compares with this one in its importance upon the future development of our nation. Its adoption means that America of our grandchildren will be a vastly better place to live in. It will mean a more homogenous nation, more self-reliant, more independent and more closely knit by common purpose and common ideas.
It passed in the Senate, 69-9. Eighteen Senators did not vote. Calvin Coolidge would sign the Johnson-Reed Act, draped in nativism and fake science, into law less than a month after. Less than 18 months later, tens of thousands of members of the Ku Klux Klan, in the midst of enjoying a resurgence, marched unmasked down Washington DC's Pennsylvania Avenue.
Sen. Reed would be re-elected for a second term of his own in 1928. On the floor of the Senate on July 1, 1932, as the Great Depression dragged into its third year, Reed gave a speech in which he lamented the lack of stronger leadership within the government, and mentioned a pointed preference. "I do not often envy other countries and their governments," Reed said, "But I say that if this country ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now....Leave it to Congress, we will fiddle around here all summer trying to satisfy every lobbyist, and we will get nowhere. The country doesn't want that. The country wants stern action."
Because when you're looking towards someone to lead you out of a crisis you naturally turn to a fascist dictator. But maybe that's what Reed actually wanted. Towards the end of his second Senatorial term Reed joined the American Liberty League. Founded by John J. Raskob, former head of the Democratic National Committee and VP of Finance of Du Pont and General Motors (who would later sell his stock in GM after a political disagreement with the Extremely Republican Alfred P. Sloan and use the money to build the Empire State Building), Raskob came to resent FDR's New Deal and spent considerable money on former Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge, hoping he would run against FDR in the Democratic primary in 1936 as a Southern Anti-New Deal candidate. He didn't, choosing instead to unsuccessfully run for an open Senate seat. At one point, reports are that membership in the American Liberty League topped 125,000 people by the middle of 1936.
When FDR set a record for the most lopsided presidential election in history, winning the Electoral College 523-8, the backlash against Raskob and the American Liberty League was pointed. Characterized as the privileged elites - their supporters were a lot of business executives and corporate lawyers (like Sen. Reed, who not long before had spoken glowingly of the need for a Mussolini in America) who were out of touch with what the average American was dealing with in the worst financial crisis in American history, Raskob took a step back from the spotlight but continued to support anything to reduce the size and scope of the federal government under FDR, and anything opposed to FDR himself. The American Liberty League, too, took a significant step back in terms of their membership following the 1934 elections.
It is possible that Sen. Reed's outpouring of support for fascism on the Senate floor was indicative of the American Liberty League itself. A New York Times article from November 21, 1934 - after the midterm elections in which Democrats went from a majority in Congress to a super-majority, possibly the most successful midterm election for a party already in power - dropped a Page One bombshell:
