The Cartozian Case Ruling (July 28, 1925)

A hundred year ago this day, a pivotal legal case, United States v. Tatos Osgihan Cartozian, came to an end with a conclusive victory for the defendant. The victory was not only for Cartozian, a prominent rug dealer in Portland, Oregon (pictured in the photo with his daughters), but also for the Armenian American community. 

The reaction against immigration in the post-World War I period was an extension of the process of racism and dehumanization that had been already present since the last quarter of the nineteenth century. First it was the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and then the virulent calls for restriction against the immigration from eastern and southwestern Europe and western Asia in the 1890s and 1900s. The Alien Land Law of California (1914) prohibited the ownership of land by Japanese and Indians.   

In the 1920s, the  control of the three powers by the Republican party brought forward the Emergency Quota Law of 1921, which was replaced by the National Origins Act. This law, passed by Congress with overwhelming majority in both chambers and signed by President Calvin Coolidge in May 1924, established quotas for every nationality, favoring the immigration from northwestern Europe (Great Britain and Scandinavia) over the rest of the continent. It would reduce the Armenian immigration to a trickling.  This race-based law lasted until its replacement with the Immigration Act of 1965.

Simultaneously, the Department of Labor, which had the Bureau of Immigration in its orbit, organized a series of test cases to determine whether a number of nationalities belonged to the white race, since this was the defining element for citizenship. Those nationalities who were not admitted as “free white persons,” according to the Naturalization Act of 1790, became second-class residents. 

Cases brought against Japanese (Takeo Ozawa) and Indian (Bhagat Singh Thind) nationals reached the Supreme Court, which in November 1922 and February 1923 respectively determined that both men were ineligible for U.S. citizenship for not being white.  

The strategy of the Department of Labor was subsequently applied in the Armenian case. Tatos Cartozian obtained citizenship in May 1923 in Portland, but his citizenship was challenged in November of the same year by the U.S. District Attorney based on his not being white. The case went to trial in May 1924 with the understanding that the case, regardless of the outcome, would go to appellate court and then to the Supreme Court. 

The Armenian American understood that the outcome of the case would affect every Armenian in the country. Indians had already started to be stripped of their American citizenship according to the Supreme Court resolution of February 1923. A committee organized in Boston and New York hired the best lawyers in New York and Portland, as well as the most important anthropologists in the country, and presented an impressive gallery of witnesses to demonstrate that Armenians were not only white but were able to integrate with the European peoples. The trial was held in Portland on May 8-9, 1924. 

The ruling of Judge Charles E. Wolverton from the District Court of Oregon, a Theodore Roosevelt appointee, was delayed for more than a year for unrelated reasons. When it finally came on July 28, 1925, it dismissed the case of the government. As it happened in a previous case in Boston (Halladjian et al., December 1909), Armenians had won again. Their victory was so conclusive, according to the ruling, that the federal government was unable to continue its plan and renounced its idea of taking the case all the way to the Supreme Court, since its chances of winning the case were assessed as negligible. 

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes, Mark Twain famously wrote.