On this day in U.S. history

The Immigration Act of 1918, also known as the Alien Anarchists Exclusion Act of 1918, was signed into U.S. law by President Woodrow Wilson on October 16, 1918. It expanded upon the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903 to further target anarchists, anti-war protesters and members of radical labor unions.

The 1903 law had come in response to the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. The assassin, Leon Frank Czolgosz, was a 28-year-old born in Detroit to a Polish-American family. Colgocz moved with his family to Alpena in 1880 and to Posen in 1883.

He began his working life in a Pennsylvania glass factory at the age of 16. At 17 he found work at Cleveland Rolling Mill Company in Ohio.

He worked there through an economic crash and labor strikes in 1893 and more violent strikes in 1898, before going to live as a recluse on a farm his father had bought in Warrensville, Ohio.

President McKinley himself was born and raised in Ohio to English and Scots-Irish parents, whose families were early settlers of Pennsylvania.

He began working as a postal clerk and teacher in 1860 but then enlisted to fight with the Union in June 1861 after the start of the Civil War. He rose to the rank of major by way of brevet commission at the war’s end in 1865.

Following the war, McKinley married and established a law practice in Canton, Ohio. He got into politics in 1867, speaking on behalf of an Army friend who was running for governor. McKinley was elected prosecuting attorney of Stark County, Ohio in 1869.

His prominence continued to rise and he took on a high profile case, pro bono, representing miners accused of rioting during a labor dispute.

By 1876, he was elected to represent Ohio’s 17th congressional district. His Army buddy, Rutherford B. Hayes, was elected president.

McKinley went on to serve a term as governor of Ohio from 1892 to 1896. He was beginning his second term as president when Czolgosz shot him in the abdomen with a pistol. President McKinley later died of complications resulting from an infection related to the wound Sept. 14, 1901.

“I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good people — the good working people. I am not sorry for my crime. I am sorry I could not see my father,” said Czolgosz before being executed by electrical shocks Oct. 29, 1901.

“When compared with the suppression of anarchy, every other question sinks into insignificance,” said a newly inaugurated President Theodore Roosevelt.

He urged Congress to pass legislation, casting anarchism as a foreign threat.

“I earnestly recommend to the Congress that in the exercise of its wise discretion it should take into consideration the coming to this country of anarchists or persons professing principles hostile to all government,” he said in his first address to Congress on Dec. 3, 1901. “They and those like them should be kept out of this country; and if found here they should be promptly deported to the country whence they came.”

President Wilson’s Department of Justice and Bureau of Immigration created the amended Act of 1918, defining non-citizen anarchists as any “aliens who believe in, advise, advocate, or teach, or who are members of, or affiliated with, any organization, association, society, or group, that believes in, advises, advocates, or teaches:

1. the overthrow by force or violence of the Government of the United States or of all forms of law, or
2. the duty, necessity, or propriety of the unlawful assaulting or killing of any officer or officers, either of specific individuals or of officers generally, of the Government of the United States or of any other organized government, because of his or their official character, or
3. the unlawful damage, injury, or destruction of property, or
4. sabotage.”

By 1925, some sources report 991 people had been deported under the act, which evolved to become the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which still forms the basis of immigration policy in the United States today.