Albert Johnson is Born

Today in Masonic History Albert Johnson is born in 1869.

Johnson was born in Springfield, Illinois on March 5, 1869. The family moved to Kansas where he attended the public schools and high schools in Atchison and Hiawatha, Kansas.

He started as a reporter on the St. Joseph Missouri, Herald and from 1888-1891 worked with the St. Louis Missouri Globe-Democrat. He was the managing editor of the New Haven Register in 1896 and 1897 and then went to Washington D.C. to become news editor of The Washington Post for a short period of time before moving to Tacoma, Washington in 1898. There he took the editorship of the Tacoma News which he continued to edit until 1906. In 1907 he relocated to southwest port and lumbering town of Hoquiam to become the editor and publisher of the Grays Harbor Washingtonian. He supported President William Howard Taft, women’s suffrage, was very much opposed to monopiles as well of labor unions. He wrote numerous editorials critical of labor organizations, in particular the Wobblies who were very active in the forest and lumber industries.

He was elected to congress in 1912 and served from March 4, 1913 until March 3, 1933. His terms were in two different congressional districts but in the same area when the State re-districted. The 1932 Democratic/Roosevelt landslide election ended his try for a twelfth term in the Seventy-third Congress. During WWI, while in congress, he was a captain in the Chemical Warfare Service. It was during the special session of the new Sixty-Seventh Congress called by newly elected President Warren G. Harding, as chairman of the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization he proposed a total ban on all immigration into the country.

He was chief author of the now infamous and bigoted 1924 Immigration Act known as the Johnson-Reed Act. It effectively banned all immigration from the Asia Pacific region, then referred to as The Orient, along with other areas such as eastern Europe, and the Russian Pale. It also created the Border Patrol. He justified the Act as a bulwark against "a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationship of the governing power to the governed" He justified his effort to suspend immigration by quoting a State Department official writing about the wave of Jewish immigrants as "*** filthy, un-American, and often dangerous in their habits."

He was president of the American Eugenic Research Assn; a national organization opposed to such things as interracial marriage plus support of the forced sterilization of the mentally disabled. Critics described him as "an outspoken anti-Semite, Ku Klux Klan favorite and an ardent opponent of immigration, an unusually energetic and vehement racist and nativist." Eugenics theory was the basis of the Nazi Aryan Race propaganda.

He retired from the newspaper enterprise in 1934. He died January 17, 1957 in the Fort Lewis Veterans Hospital at American Lake. He is buried in the Sunset Memorial Park in Hoquiam.

He was a member of Hoquiam Lodge #64 but was raised by courtesy in George C. Whiting Lodge #22 in the Grand Lodge of the District of Columbia. The Washington Grand Lodge records don’t list the actual date of his Master Mason degree.

This article provided by Brother Coe Tug Morgan – Honorary Grand Secretary, Past Grand Historian Grand Lodge F. & A. M. of Washington.