Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,933
By This is the grave of David Reed.
Born in 1880 in Pittsburgh, Reed grew up well off. His father was a federal judge. He went to the fanciest schools Pittsburgh offered before college at Princeton. He graduated in 1900, then did a law degree at the University of Pittsburgh, which he completed in 1903. He was admitted to the bar shortly after and practiced until 1917. He was also interested in the issue of workplace safety and was named to head the Pennsylvania Industrial Accidents Commission. He resigned from that and stopped his law practice when the nation joined World War I. He joined the Army and was commissioned as a major, working in field artillery. He was in some serious action and was decorated several times, earning the Victory Medal, The Distinguished Service Medal and the France Order Legion Honor Knight Cross.
Reed went home to Pittsburgh in 1919 as well connected war hero. So, in 1922, when William Crow died and Pennsylvania needed someone to send to the Senate, they chose Reed. Now, Reed wasn’t really a politician and had never even run for elected office before, but whatever. Reed sure did have an agenda though. This man hated immigrants. He thought the waves of eastern and southern European immigrants who had come by the millions to the United States were a great evil. Of course many of them had located in Pittsburgh because of the steel industry. So he had many, many constituents who were immigrants or their children increasingly. Moreover, the steel industry wanted this to continue. After all, cheap labor was great for them. But Reed was a fanatic on this. So, as such, he co-sponsored what became known as the Johnson-Reed Act, or as its more commonly known, the Immigration Act of 1924.
It’s worth remembering just how horrifying this law was. The law set the yearly quota for a nation’s population to immigrate to the U.S. at 2% of its U.S. population in the 1890 census. Beginning in 1927, immigration would then decline even further, to 150,000 total. This law put an end to the immigrant flows to the U.S. that had provided the labor force for the nation’s stupendous industrial growth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also demonstrates the great discomfort many Americans had with the diversity that became a byproduct of the need for such an expanding labor force.
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, even if they just wanted to work, 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 socialist ideas in Europe and brought them to the United States. 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 had radical tendencies of standing up for their rights that was definitely not what the capitalists wanted. The corporations intentionally brought in different and 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 in spectacular fashion) to assassinate plutocrat Henry Clay Frick after Homestead or the native-born but son of immigrants Leon Czoglosz killing President William McKinley was a sign of the very real violence that some would commit in the cause of punishing capitalists.
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.
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. The unfair equation of the IWW with pro-Kaiser sentiment (absurd on the face of it and 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 and that everything about them needed watching. This is also how the 18th Amendment also finally gathered the necessary support to pass since even beer drinking was now German. 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 the fears middle class Protestants had of what this nation was becoming, which was just ending immigration almost entirely.
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 core exception to the Immigration Act, which was Mexicans crossing into the U.S. to provide 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 in the sector that continues today, or did until Donald Trump and the Republican Party decided David Reed was their kind of historical figure.
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, Washington senator 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.
Being an anti-immigrant fanatic did not hurt Reed. What did is that he became an outright fascist in the early 30s. He was able to win reelection in 1928. But the Great Depression really threw him. He began to admire Mussolini, to the point that he talked publicly of how great it would be if someone like that ruled the United States. He stated, “I do not often envy other countries and their governments, but I say that if this country ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now.” This wasn’t some offhand remark. This was a speech on the Senate floor in 1932. He also became a member of the American Liberty League, a protofascist organization of the wealthy who hated Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
So….Reed was very much not reelected in 1934. Pennsylvania was far from one of the New Deal stalwart states. In fact, Hoover had won it in 1932 and only the most Republican states made that choice. But it would not make that mistake again until 1948. Reed huffed back to his law practice in Pittsburgh and was locally prominent but nationally irrelevant through the rest of his life, which ended in 1953, at the age of 72. I’m sure he huffed and puffed his way through the rest of his life about this evil evil New Dealers. But hey, at least he could say he whitened America, so he won that round.
David Reed is buried on the confiscated lands of the traitor Lee, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington National Cemetery.
If you would like this series to visit some of the other scumbags involved in the American Liberty League, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Jouett Shouse is in Lexington, Kentucky and Irénée Du Pont is in Wilmington, Delaware. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.