 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 political dissidents in the 20th century, on December 21, 1919, and in his capacity as the chairman of the Immigration and Naturalization Committee, Johnson was one of the few 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 where they would board an old troopship, The Buford, for their voyage across the Atlantic to Europe.