Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,993

This is the grave of Francis Walter.

Born in 1894 in Easton, Pennsylvania, Walter grew up pretty well off and rose in society. He went to Lehigh University before attending both George Washington and Georgetown. He moved back to Pennsylvania, where he became involved in politics as a conservative Democrat. He was in both World War I and World War II in the Navy, though much less in World War II after FDR ordered members of Congress back to their jobs so they would quit preening for political gain by jumping into the military instead of doing their work. In any case, became director of a trust in Philadelphia, rose within the Democratic Party, and was elected to Congress in 1932. He would remain there for the next 30 years.

Now, this was a great year for the left and for New Dealers in 1932, but Walter was not that kind of Democrat. Mostly, he sucked. There are two things Walter is most known for. The first is being the chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee from 1955 to the end of his career. This was slightly after HUAC had reached its peak of influence and the nation was moving away from the redbaiting and life-destroy allegations that had characterized Congress just before this, but that’s not because of Walter, who was totally reactionary on issues around leftist politics. Plus there was still a lot of terrible things that happened to people because of HUAC.

Walter is even more known for his racist views on immigrants. In 1924, the U.S. had passed the Immigration Act that massively restricted immigration from eastern Europe and effectively banned it entirely from everywhere else except for northern and western Europe, except for a Latin American exception for farmers in the Southwest who wanted an exploitable labor supply. This became harder to defend after World War II, when the nation was in a very different position and needed to be a global superpower fighting the Soviets. But with peoples in Asia, Africa, and Latin America throwing off colonial or neocolonial chains, why would they unite with the U.S. when their people or Americans who looked like them were treated so awfully in this nation? This was a point the Soviets could make effectively.

Well, these restrictions on immigration were becoming a geopolitical issue. Some of the good people in Congress sought to fix the problem. That was led by the truly great New York congressman Emanuel Celler, who fought the brave pro-immigration fight for decades with his racist colleagues. He and his fellow New Yorker, Senator Herbert Lehman, introduced a bill that would have engaged in comprehensive immigration reform, stripping many of the horrible parts of the 1924 and reopening America to immigrants. But for men such as Walter and his buddy, the Nevada senator Pat McCarran, this was anathema. After all, according to McCarran, American needed to be protected from “Jewish interests” and communists. So Walter and McCarran worked up their own bill to make minor changes to the immigration act that would solve a few problems, but fundamentally still keep America as white as possible.

So what the McCarran-Walter Act did was increase the quotas for eastern Europeans, ended the old Chinese Exclusion Act barriers on contract laborers, allowed at least 100 visas per year per country (ooooooooooo….so many), and created the family reunification program by encouraging family members of those already here to come. It also repealed the restrictions that had denied Japanese Americans from being citizens, owning land, and all of that. Sounds OK, but as a whole, it was actually not really. It empowered the government to kick out those undermining American wages and stepped up deportation campaigns. The labor movement was not pro-immigration at this time, but it supported the Lehman-Celler bill instead of McCarran-Walter. Civil rights groups felt the same. But the bill passed the Senate. Now, Harry Truman, to his credit, vetoed it. He felt it discriminated against our potential allies in the Cold War, which is exactly what it did and that was the point. But Congress overrode the veto, as it did with Taft-Hartley. That postwar congress was not good. This issue certainly didn’t go away, but since the Eisenhower administration was generally pretty racist too, it had no real interest in taking on Walter here.

And in case you were wondering, well just how racist is Francis Walter? Well, Walter was also known as one of the directors of the Pioneer Fund, which was an outfit dedicated to eugenics and the belief that whites were genetically more intelligent than the rest of the world’s people. Among the outstanding contributions to the nation by the Pioneer Fund is funding the writing of The Bell Curve, though of course this is after Walter’s death. But yeah, this is a very yucky guy. With Walter partly in charge–the other big congressional ally was James Eastland, the more famous racist as senator from Mississippi–the Pioneer Fund funded anti-civil rights groups as well.

Among those good Democrats who loathed Walter was Adlai Stevenson, who stated that “It is this Walter who is inclined to regard every prospective immigrant as a potential subversive and everyone who disagrees with his views on immigration as a danger to national security.” And lets be clear, Walter sucked on most other issues too! He was a big proponent of wiretapping. He argued that those involved in military intelligence should have the power to arrest people without warrants. He wanted jurors to have to take loyalty oaths.

In 1963, Walter came down with leukemia and died. He was 69 years old. Think we can say there was no great loss to America there. In fact, it was Walter’s death that paved the way for the Immigration Act of 1965, which finally took away most of the racist barriers to immigration to this country. Congressional liberals were openly happy that he was dead.

Francis Walter is buried on the confiscated lands of the traitor Lee, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.

If you would like this series to visit other authors of American immigration legislation, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Pat McCarran is in Reno, Nevada and Benjamin Franklin Powell (who introduced what became the Naturalization Act of 1906 into Congress) is in South Amboy, New Jersey. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.