Johnson-Reed, Trump, and Us

Like Laura de Jong yesterday, I’m too rocked by this week’s Christian Reformed Synod to speak to it. Maybe next time. But for now, a piece of American history that bears more than a little resemblance…

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Today’s the first day of summer, but we shouldn’t put spring 2024 to bed without marking the centennial of one of the most telling pieces of legislation to have passed Congress in the twentieth century. “Telling” as consequential and, especially today, “telling” as revelatory. 

The bill was the Immigration Act of 1924, colloquially named after its sponsors, Congressman Albert Johnson (R-WA) and Senator David Reed (R-PA). You can google the details or read a good summary of the bill by Jay Green, a historian at Covenant College, whose post brought the anniversary to my attention.  The header photo above is the headline from the Fiery Cross, the Ku Klux Klan newspaper, April 25, 1924.

Unwashed and Undeserving 1924

In a nutshell, the Johnson-Reed Act accomplished four things. It cut off Asian immigration entirely (except from the Philippines, then an American colony). It radically reduced immigration to 165,000 per annum, about one-sixth the average of 1,000,000 new arrivals who poured in every year from the turn of the century to the outbreak of World War I. It then allotted those slots by a quota system geared to the 1890 census, heavily favoring northern- and western-European newcomers over those from southern and eastern Europe. (The Italian influx, for instance, was reduced from over 200,000 to 4,000 a year.) And it established the U.S. Border Patrol and for the first time required applicants to arrive with immigration visas in hand. 

The presenting causes of the bill—which passed by overwhelming margins in both houses of Congress and from both parties—were race and fear of recession. The U.S. economy’s exit from World War I had been choppy indeed, and although the famous 1920s boom was well underway by 1924, the memory of the postwar recession and fear of labor competition led the country’s largest union, the American Federation of Labor, to support the measure. 

Even more enthusiastic was the Ku Klux Klan, for the racism behind Johnson-Reed was open and adamant. Johnson himself was an outspoken eugenicist, and the theory and (cooked) data behind the Act had been cultivated by Ivy League scholars as well as small-town soap-boxers since the 1890s. It was high time to stop the “mongrelization” of America’s proud Anglo-Saxon race, they cried. Time to staunch the “alien blood” being brought in by “races” (namely Slavs and Jews and “Mediterraneans”) at once cowardly and violent, inferior and threatening. Time to cut off the sorts of people who were born criminals, incapable of education, morally primitive, lacking either sympathy or qualification for American liberty.   

Anti-Asian sentiment had been ensconced already in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the informal anti-Japanese “Gentlemen’s Agreement” of 1907. World War I with its crusades against foreigners, radicals, and dissenters added new measures to the mix. Johnson-Reed tied it all up in one package and stamped it on American society for the next forty years, until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 reopened the doors.

Unwashed and Undeserving 2024 

Donald Trump wants to slam them shut again. He inaugurated his 2016 campaign with a racist rant against supposed raping hordes of Mexican lowlifes pouring across the southern border, and he continues today with charges that illegal immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”  Yet, being himself the son of an immigrant mother and the spouse of two immigrant women, his subconscious needs to draw distinctions, and they are quite like the quota system of 1924. There are good “Nordic” countries of the lily white whose children are welcome here, and there are “sh*thole countries” of the black and brown who should be turned away.   

The key issue here is not Donald Trump’s potty-mouth but why so many Americans agree with him. Not just the WASPs of 1924, either. Polls seem to indicate that some Hispanic Americans wouldn’t mind having the door shut on their cousins. To assume inter-, even intra-, group solidarity is to miss a recurrent pattern in American history: newcomers can be a profound embarrassment to group members who have just established their bona fides in the host country. Thus it was German-descended Jews in America whose denigrations of their Eastern-European co-religionists turned into standard antisemitic slurs. Closer to home, the Dutch-immigrant family I’ve had the good fortune to marry into caught plenty of condescension from the goody-goody Christian Reformed of Holland, Michigan upon arriving in the late-1950s. It was the big Irish family down the block that was friendly.

White-washing History

Then there’s ignorance, or the willful forgetting, of history. It is FOX-News descendants of Irish immigrants, once deemed the death of America, who pioneered and mainstreamed the current right-wing mania. They should know better. More forgivable but much more numerous are people whose last exposure to American history came in an early-hour class sophomore year in high school. Thus when my wife once posted a charming picture of her family as new immigrants along with a heartfelt tribute to her parents’ courage, a niece riposted yes, but those were hardworking people unlike the criminal scum arriving today. This from a woman whose husband’s surname has sixteen letters, three of them vowels—that is, a grandchild of exactly the “mongrels” targeted by Johnson-Reed. 

It’s not just status anxiety or historical ignorance at work, however. I think scapegoating is going on, the yearning for a target to blame, for someone to bear away the real worries of our parlous times. The syndrome was obviously at work in 1924 and for good reason. Disappointments over a failed war. Resentment and fear over the government’s draconian measures during that war. A quickly repressed memory of the worst pandemic of the century. Four ancient empires toppled abroad, Victorian mores eroding at home, the great prosperity of Wall Street leaving rural America behind. Who was at fault? Where was relief? Ahh, drive the unclean ones from the gates of the city and we shall be healed. 

Fathoming the Unfathomable

The parallels to our own recent accumulation of traumas leap out. Failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the blown promise of Savior America. Another pandemic and the draconian government interventions it called forth. A rocky post-COVID economy. Ozzie & Harriet gone over to Harry & Barry. Obscene inequality translated, with some sleight of hand, into cities scorning the countryside. Easy again to blame the outsider and try to wash their putative pollution out of the system.  

Some of our recent traumas have been fully aired—indeed, beaten to death—among the commentariat, but some not. We have not come close, I think, to reckoning with the effects of COVID—medical, economic, political, and especially social-psychological. All parties Left and Right agree that it’s time to move on. Yet the deep fear, a proper fear, lingers on unbeknownst to ourselves, individually and collectively. How do we fathom something that, for all the complicity of our human systems therewith, remains (choose one) an act of nature, the fickle finger of fate, the mysterious will of God?

Repressed or ignored, the question is too haunting, too scary to deal with. At least for Wall Street and Main Street, for Capitol Hill and Silicon Valley. It does seem made to order for churches, however. Rene Girard famously theorized that the death of Christ could put an end to scapegoating. Can Christians today rise above the tumult and the shouting to name our fear, to own our blame-placing, and to carve out a channel for grace?