 Furuseth was an important backer of the successful legislation known as the White Act of 1898, which among other things abolished corporal punishment on American-flag ships and abolished imprisonment for desertion in American ports.Together with Walter MacArthur, secretary of the Coast Seamen's Union, Furuseth compiled and published the so-called "Red Record", an inventory of the various brutalities and oppressions practiced upon seamen by officers and shoreside thugs.One of many examples was in 1897, when the British four-masted ship "Gifford" was lying at Port Townsend, Washington, about to depart to round Cape Horn.