Albert Johnson (congressman)

Born in Springfield, Illinois, Johnson attended the schools at Atchison, Kansas and Hiawatha, Kansas. He worked as a reporter on the St. Joseph (Missouri) Herald and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat from 1888 to 1891, as managing editor of the New Haven Register in 1896 and 1897, and as news editor of The Washington Post'' in 1898.

To edit the Tacoma News he moved to Tacoma, Washington in 1898. He became editor and publisher of Grays Harbor Washingtonian (Hoquiam, Washington) in 1907.

Albert Johnson was elected as a Republican to the Sixty-third and to the nine succeeding Congresses (March 4, 1913 – March 3, 1933), but was defeated in a bid for reelection in November 1932.

While a Member of Congress, Johnson was commissioned a captain in the Chemical Warfare Service during the First World War, receiving an honorable discharge on November 29, 1918. He served as chairman of the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization (Sixty-sixth through Seventy-first Congresses), where he played an important role in the passage of the anti-immigrant legislation of the 1920s.

According to his critics, Johnson was “an outspoken anti-Semite, a Ku Klux Klan favorite, and an ardent opponent of immigration.” At the time of the first mass deportation of foreign-born anarchists and communists in the 20th century, on December 21, 1919, he was the chairman of the Immigration and Naturalization Committee. Johnson was one of the members of Congress who, (along with the 24-year-old J. Edgar Hoover, recently appointed by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer as the head of the Department of Justice’s newly-created Radical Division), accompanied the deportees on the short boat trip across the harbor from Ellis Island to Brooklyn. There they would board an old troopship, The Buford, for their voyage back across the Atlantic to Europe. [from “Obstruction of Injustice,” by Adam Hochschild, “The New Yorker” magazine, November 11, 2019]

Johnson appointed one of the leading eugenicists of the era, Harry Laughlin, associated with the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, as the committee's Expert Eugenics Agent.[1]

Johnson was the chief author of the Immigration Act of 1924, which in 1927 he justified as a bulwark against "a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed."[2] Johnson has been described as "an unusually energetic and vehement racist and nativist."[3] From 1923 to 1924, he was the president of the Eugenics Research Association, an organization of eugenics researchers and supporters which opposed interracial marriage and also supported the program of forced sterilization of the mentally disabled.[4] In support of his 1919 proposal to suspend immigration he included this quote from a State Department official referring to the recent wave of Jewish immigrants as "filthy, un-American, and often dangerous in their habits."[5]

Johnson retired from the newspaper business in 1934. He died in a veterans hospital at American Lake, Washington, January 17, 1957. He is buried in Sunset Memorial Park, Hoquiam, Washington.

• Daniels, Roger. Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882. Boston & New York: Hill and Wang, 2004.
• Goings, Aaron. Johnson, Albert (1869–1957) - HistoryLink.org Essay 8721.
• United States Congress. "Albert Johnson (id: J000114)". Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.

• Media related to Albert Johnson (congressman) at Wikimedia Commons
• Albert Johnson at Find a Grave