These Times

Kirk Ericson | Apr 24, 20250

The people of Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, which in 1913 covered people from our neck of Western Washington’s woods, elected a fellow to the U.S. House of Representatives that year who would become a supernova in our nation’s political firmament.

That Washington resident — who wasn’t born in this state like me, but let’s not hold that against him — helped craft and promote a piece of legislation that makes him seem a thoroughly modern American, now nearly 70 years past his death. U.S. Rep. Albert Johnson, a newspaperman-turned-politician who worked for several papers, including The New York Times, the St. Louis Globe Democrat, The Seattle Times, the Tacoma News and the Daily Washington in Hoquiam, deserves to be remembered.

Albert Johnson’s name came up in a recent conversation I had with someone whose identity I won’t reveal for reasons that will become apparent. Let’s call this person Mr. Y.

Mr. Y’s reference to the Johnson-Reed Act resurrected a memory from several years ago. I was in a synagogue, of all places, when the rabbi started talking about Rep. Johnson’s effect on immigration policy in this nation, and I filed the name Albert Johnson in the “this might be relevant someday” cranial file.

Someday has arrived.

I was talking last week with Mr. Y, who works for a federal agency back East, when the topic turned to talk of his ancestors, specifically an ancestor who immigrated to the United States in the early 1900s. My father’s father also immigrated to this country in the early 1900s.

Mr. Y works for a federal agency and doesn’t want to be identified with his full name or employer in a newspaper because it could impair his ability to keep his job. Expressing his opinion could draw the perilous attention of our nation’s “he’s not loyal” breed, a herd that treasures freedom of speech for them, not thee.

“My grandfather emigrated from Athens, Greece, to the United States around 1910,” Mr. Y wrote me. “During this time, there were strong anti-immigrant sentiments in many places, leading up to the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924, which set quotas on immigration. The law prevented immigration from Asia while severely restricting immigration from other countries, including Greece. The thought that my grandfather, a refugee born in Bulgaria, could not immigrate saddens me. The law’s purpose was to preserve what some people — the people in power at the time — considered the ideal of U.S. homogeneity: a white, Northern European and Protestant majority in the U.S.”

Our Albert Johnson was the Johnson of the Johnson-Reed Act.

Here’s something from Historylink.com, a credible site that publishes researched, edited and reviewed stories on Washington history:

“In his short biography of Congressman Johnson, Alfred J. Hillier correctly posited that the 1924 bill was ‘the most important immigration law to be enacted in the history of the country’ (Hillier, 208). Its wide-ranging nature can be seen by looking at its impact on Greeks, who came in their greatest numbers to the United States between 1900 and 1920. Under the limitations placed by the 1921 Act, 3,088 Greeks were allowed to enter the United States per year. After the Johnson-Reed Act passed three years later, that number dropped to 100, about 3 percent of the earlier figure. The law’s success exceeded even its most optimistic supporters’ expectations.”

Those Greeks. What did they ever do for Western civilization?

And here’s something Albert Johnson took the time to write, again according to Historylink.org: “The greatest menace to the Republic today is the open door it affords to the ignorant hordes from Eastern and Southern Europe, whose lawlessness flourishes and civilization is ebbing into barbarism.”

Any of you readers out there among those “ignorant hordes?”