This Day in Labor History: May 26, 1924. President Calvin Coolidge signs the Immigration Act of 1924, effectively shutting America's doors to the global working classes. Let's talk about the last time a Republican administration wanted to whiten the nation.
Between 1880-1920, well over 10 million people came to the US to look for a better life. Largely from southern and eastern Europe but in fact from many places, from Japan to Syria, they became the working class of industrializing America.
But like immigrants today, they were hated by many white people. That included organized labor, who saw immigrants as a threat. The first major national law that came out of the labor movement? The Chinese Exclusion Act, in 1882. That's the legacy of race and labor in America.
Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe seemed to threaten American values for reasons outside their funny religions, peasant clothing, and garlic-eating ways.
Most people came to the U.S. for the precise reason they do today: to make money for their families back home. Like Mexicans and Guatemalans today, many hoped to make money and then return and maybe buy some land and build a little house in their home village.
And many did that–for groups like the Italians and Greeks there was significant out-migration.
But some of these immigrants also believed in the need for a better world. That was especially true among the immigrant group least likely to return to Europe–Jews. They, and to a lesser extent other groups such as the Italians, Greeks, and Finns, had been introduced to socialism
The Jewish women leading the Uprising of the 20,000 against apparel company exploitation in 1909 and after the Triangle Fire in 1911 were the cheap labor the department stores and clothing designers wanted but they also had radical tendencies of standing up for their rights.
Employers brought in competing ethnic groups to undermine workplace solidarity (not to mention basic communication). This could be successful but as companies found out at Lawrence, Paterson, and Ludlow, diverse workforces could unite for decent wages and living conditions.
And individual acts like Russian Jewish immigrant Alexander Berkman trying (and failing) to assassinate plutocrat Henry Clay Frick after Homestead or the native-born but son of immigrants Leon Czoglosz killing William McKinley was a sign of the violence capitalism spawned.
I will observe as well that Berkman's failure to kill Frick even though he had a knife and a gun shows that an anarchist can't do anything right.
While unions like the Industrial Workers of the World embraced these new workers, mainstream organized labor considered them competition for jobs already poorly paid and thus disdained them, a choice that was as much cultural and racial as it was about principles of labor.
The American Federation of Labor strongly supported all anti-immigration legislation despite being headed by an English immigrant by the name of Samuel Gompers.
But of course Gompers and others came out of an older Protestant immigration that had caused little tension in American history, outside of some anti-German sentiment around the time of the American Revolution.
Gompers would have no patience for these southern and eastern Europeans and especially those with ideas about labor movements more radical than he. Which given how un-radical he was, it meant he didn't like immigrants much at all.
Despite the strikes many of these new immigrants engaged in, for most corporate leaders, the need for cheap labor won out over concerns about radicals. The plutocrats buying the Republican Party managed to keep the door open long after nativists wanted it shut.
But the events of World War I changed the equation. Tainting the IWW with pro-Kaiser sentiment (the IWW in the U.S. only opposed the war in theory, allowing their members to take whatever position they felt right) meant that immigrants were more suspect than ever.
This is also how the 18th Amendment also finally gathered the necessary support to pass since even beer drinking was now German. How this nation came to criminalize beer is something I will never quite wrap my head around.
The Espionage and Sedition Acts, the Bisbee Deportation, the Centralia Massacre, the Palmer Raids and Red Scare, and the deporting of 566 radicals including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman all helped influence a more comprehensive solution to middle class fears of immigrants
This trend had been coming for some time and the 1924 act, properly known as the Johnson-Reed Act, was only the final straw.
The Immigration Act of 1917, passed over Woodrow Wilson’s veto, barred “undesirables” from entering the U.S., a category which included "criminals," the insane, and alcoholics, and imposed a literacy test which led to 1,400 immigrants being denied entry in 1920 and 1921.
Perhaps the most notable feature about the Immigration Act was setting the racial quotas to 1890 level. The quotas of immigrants from each country would be based upon their numbers in the United States according to the 1890 census.
It meant that Germans, Irish, and English could still come over in relatively undiminished numbers. It meant basically no Asians, which eliminated the rather sizable immigrant stream of “Syrians” (what we would call today Lebanese Christians).
There was one exception to the Immigration Act, which was Mexicans providing cheap farm labor in the Southwest. This would begin a long history of American labor law making exceptions for farmworkers, eventually creating long-term inequality that continues today.
Was the end of immigration the boon for organized labor that its proponents claimed it would be? Not really. The same conservative movement that ended immigration also crushed organized labor.
The powerful union movement flexing its muscles in 1919 was at a low point a mere decade later. And that was before the Great Depression created 25 percent unemployment and another 25 percent underemployment.
In 1927, Albert Johnson said of the act he sponsored that it protected America from “a stream of alien blood, with all its inherent misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed.” Or in other words, people who would challenge capitalism.
The nation would finally revise its racist immigration policy with the Immigration Act of 1965. Of course, in the meantime, the US decided not to let in very many refugees from Nazi Germany. After all, they were Jews and might be socialist.
The relevance of this history to today is hardly something I need to explain. Once again, Americans, led by the Republican Party, is seeking to engage in the ethnic cleansing of the nation, using language about supporting "American workers," by people who hate American workers.
Calvin Coolidge, who signed this act, became Harding's VP candidate only because he had busted the 1919 Boston Police Strike, showing how tough Republicans would be against striking workers. He was basically Mike Pence stepping into the throne, and just as vile.
Today, we look back on the Immigration Act and sigh that America once again failed in its mission of being the beacon of hope and freedom it claims to stand for. It prioritized racism over justice. And it does the same in 2018. Future historians will once again sigh.
Supporting Donald Trump, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, the fascists at ICE, the Border Patrol, and all the elements of the current ethnic cleansing regime makes one just as bad as those who supported putting the Japanese in concentration camps in 1942.
It remains a sad reality that many pro-worker people believe that immigration is bad for American workers. It is not. Moreover, in a global world, all problems must be solved globally. You can be on the side of the world's workers, or you can be a racist. Those are the choices.
Back on Tuesday to talk about the United Farm Workers' lettuce boycott.
