Ellis Island is one of the greatest human nature offices in the world; no week passes without its comedies as well as tragedies.
—William Williams, Ellis Island Commissioner, 1912
Ellis Island was the great outpost of the new and vigorous republic. Ellis Island stood guard over the wide-flung portal. Ellis Island resounded for years to the tramp of an endless invading army.
—Harry E. Hull, Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1928
BY 1912, THIRTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD FINNISH CARPENTER. Johann Tyni had had enough of America. “I wish to go back to Finland. I didn’t get along well in this country,” he admitted less than three years after he and his family had arrived. The married immigrant with four children was depressed and unemployed. “I worked too hard and I am all played out,” he said. “I am downhearted all the time and the thoughts make me cry.”
The Reverend Kalle McKinen, pastor of Brooklyn’s Finnish Seamen’s Mission, had had enough of Johann Tyni. For the previous year and a half, Finnish charities had been taking care of the Tyni family. “This man has been crazy since he landed here,” McKinen wrote immigration officials. “It is to be regretted that his family were [sic] ever admitted to this country.” He also complained that Tyni’s wife was not very bright and could no longer care for her children. Out of a mixture of desperation, pity, and anger, Reverend McKinen brought the Tyni family to Ellis Island.
After observing Johann on the island’s psychiatric ward, immigration officials decided that they too had had enough of the Tyni family. Doctors at Ellis Island diagnosed Johann with “insanity characterized by depression, sluggish movements, subjective complaints of pain in the head and a feeling of inefficiency.” They also declared that Johann’s nine-year-old son, John, was a “low grade imbecile” who showed “the characteristic stigmata of a mental defective.”
The family had originally arrived at Ellis Island under much happier circumstances. With three children in tow, Johann and his wife arrived with $100 and presented themselves to authorities in good physical and mental health. Less than three years after coming to America, Johann, his wife, two Finnish-born sons, and two American-born children were deported back to Finland from Ellis Island, anxious to get back to Johann’s mother-in-law to rebuild a life that did not make sense in America.
Something had clearly happened since they arrived. Though two more children were born after their arrival, the Tynis lost their two-year-old Finnish-born son, Eugen, while living in Brooklyn. Perhaps the shock of his son’s death, combined with a new, harsh, and unfamiliar environment, was enough to push Johann Tyni into a deep psychological abyss.
Immigration officials were not interested in the reasons for Tyni’s mental illness. They were only concerned that he could no longer work and support his family. In the official terminology, the entire Tyni family was deemed “likely to become public charges,” a designation that allowed officials to deport them back to their native Finland. Two-year-old David and infant Mary, both citizens by reason of their birth on American soil, were not technically deported and could have remained in the country, but obviously joined their parents and siblings on the return trip to Finland.
By this time, the government could not only exclude immigrants at the border but also deport them after their arrival if they came under an excludable class. The specter of Ellis Island haunted not just those newly arrived immigrants awaiting inspection but also those who managed to land initially who could be threatened with deportation for three years after.
Unlike the Tyni family, some immigrants never got the chance to set foot on the American mainland before being sent back home. Eighteen-year-old Hungarian Anna Segla arrived a few months after the Tyni family in 1910. After the inspection at Ellis Island, doctors certified her as possessing “curvature of spine, deformity of chest,” as well as being a dwarf. They believed that those physical defects would prevent Anna from gaining meaningful employment in America. Anna Segla was ordered excluded.
Anna had been headed to live with her aunt and uncle in Connecticut. The childless couple had promised to take care of Anna and offered to post a bond for her release. For nearly two weeks, Anna was detained at Ellis Island while her case was appealed to officials in Washington. In a letter most likely written by her aunt and which Anna signed with an X, Anna eloquently made her case for admittance. “I beg to say that the hunchback on me never interfered with my ability to earn my living as I always worked the hardest housework and I am able to work the same in the future,” the letter stated. “I pray Your Honor permit me to land in the United States.” Despite her pleas, Anna was sent back to Europe.
Other immigrants were detained for even longer periods of time at Ellis Island, although many were eventually allowed to enter the country. When Louis K. Pittman came through Ellis Island in 1907 as a young boy, doctors discovered that he suffered from trachoma, a mildly contagious eye disease against which medical officials were especially vigilant. Rather than being deported, Pittman was allowed to stay in the island’s hospitals while doctors treated his condition. Decades later, Pittman remembered his stay at Ellis Island as “very pleasant,” with toys, good food, playmates, and very lax supervision by adults. After seventeen months in custody at Ellis Island’s hospital, Pittman was allowed to rejoin his family on the mainland.
Others, luckier than Pittman, were detained for shorter periods. Frank Woodhull’s experience at Ellis Island began in 1908 when he returned from a vacation to England. The Canadian-born Woodhull, who was not a naturalized American citizen, was heading back to New Orleans where he lived. As he walked single file with his fellow passengers past Ellis Island doctors, he was pulled aside for further inspection. The fifty-year-old was of slight build with a sallow complexion. He wore a black suit and vest, with a black hat pulled down low over his eyes and covering his short-cropped hair. His appearance convinced the doctors to test Woodhull for tuberculosis.
Woodhull was taken to a detention ward for further examination. When a doctor asked him to take his clothes off, Woodhull begged off and asked not to be examined. “I might as well tell you all,” he said. “I am a woman and have traveled in male attire for fifteen years.” Her real name was Mary Johnson. She told her life story to officials, about how a young woman alone in the world tried to make a living, but her manly appearance, deep voice, and slight mustache over her thinly pursed lips made life difficult for her. It had been a hard life, so at age thirty-five Johnson bought men’s clothing and started a new life as Frank Woodhull, working various jobs throughout the country, earning a decent living, and living an independent life. Mary Johnson’s true sexual identity was a secret for fifteen years until Frank Woodhull arrived at Ellis Island.
Johnson requested to be examined by a female matron, who soon found nothing physically wrong with the patient. She had enough money to avoid being classified as likely to become a public charge, was intelligent and in good health, and was considered by officials, in the words of one newspaper, “a thoroughly moral person.” Ellis Island seemed impressed with Johnson, despite her unusual life story. Nevertheless, the case was odd enough to warrant keeping Johnson overnight while officials decided what to do. Not knowing whether to put Johnson with male detainees or female detainees, officials eventually placed her in a private room in one of the island’s hospital buildings.
“Mustached, She Plays Man,” said the headline in the New York Sun. Despite her situation, officials deemed Johnson a desirable immigrant and allowed her to enter the country and, in the words of the Times, “go out in the world and earn her living in trousers.” There was nothing in the immigration law that excluded a female immigrant for wearing men’s clothing, although one can imagine that if the situation had been reversed and a man entered wearing women’s clothing, the outcome might have been different.
Before she left for New Orleans, Johnson spoke to reporters. “Women have a hard time in this world,” she said, complaining that women cared too much about clothes and were merely “walking advertisements for the milliner, the dry goods shops, the jewelers, and other shops.” Women, Johnson said, were “slaves to whim and fashion.” Rather than being hemmed in by these constraints, she preferred “to live a life of independence and freedom.” And with that Frank Woodhull left Ellis Island to resume life as a man.
But the vast majority of the 12 million immigrants who passed through Ellis Island between 1892 and 1924 did not experience any of these hassles. Roughly 80 percent of those coming to Ellis Island would pass through in a matter of hours.
For these individuals, Arthur Carlson’s experience is probably closer to their own. A Swedish immigrant who arrived in 1902, Carlson spent about two hours at Ellis Island before being allowed to land. “I was treated very well,” Carlson reminisced later in his life. “Nothing shocked me. I was so thrilled over being in a new country.” Destined for New Haven, Connecticut, Carlson originally planned to travel there by boat, but officials suggested that the train would be faster. Soon thereafter, Carlson had his train ticket and was on his way to be reunited with his brother.
Each of these people experienced Ellis Island in a different way. Their experiences ran the gamut of stories: admitted (Carlson), detained then admitted (Woodhull/Johnson), hospitalized then admitted (Pittman), admitted then deported (the Tyni family), and excluded (Segla).
No one story encapsulates the Ellis Island experience; there are literally millions. For most immigrants, Ellis Island was a gateway to a new life in America. It was an integral part of their American passage. It would become a special place for some immigrants and their families, while others retained only faint memories of the place or saw it as a site of unimaginable emotional stress filled with stern government officials who possessed the power to decide their fate. For a small percentage of people, Ellis Island was all they would see of America before being sent back home.
For immigrants like the Tyni family, Frank Woodhull, Arthur Carlson, Louis Pittman, and Anna Segla, why did the passage to America have to run through this inspection station on a speck of an island in New York Harbor, and why did their experiences differ so dramatically?
IN 1896, THE MAGAZINE Our Day published a cartoon entitled “The Stranger at Our Gate.” It featured an immigrant seeking entrance into America. The man makes a pathetic impression: short, hunched over, sickly, toes sticking out of his ragged shoes. Literally and figuratively, he is carrying a lot of baggage. In one hand is a bag labeled “Poverty” and in the other a bag labeled “Disease.” Around his neck hangs a bone with the inscription “Superstition,” signifying his backward religion and culture. On his back are a beer keg with the words “Sabbath Desecration” and a crude bomb labeled “Anarchy.”
The man has come upon a gate that provides entry past a high stone wall. A pillar at the gate reads: “United States of America: Admittance Free: Walk In: Welcome.” Standing in the middle of the gate is Uncle Sam. Much taller than the immigrant, the unhappy Uncle Sam is decked out in full patriotic regalia. He is holding his nose, while looking down contemptuously at the man standing before him. Holding one’s nose implies the existence of a foul odor, but it also means that one is forced to do something that one does not want to do. And that’s just the fix that Uncle Sam is in.
“Can I come in?” the immigrant asks Uncle Sam.
“I s’pose you can; there’s no law to keep you out,” a disgusted Uncle Sam replies.
According to this cartoonist, the gates to America were wide open to the dregs of Europe, and the government could do nothing to stop them. Although a powerful idea to many Americans, by 1896 this notion had become outdated. Congress was now creating a list of reasons that immigrants could be excluded at the nation’s gates, and that list would grow longer as the years passed.
To enforce those new laws, the federal government built a new inspection station. Almost 80 percent of immigrants to America passed through the Port of New York, and this new facility was located on an island in New York Harbor called Ellis Island.
The symbolism of the gate is important. Each day, inspectors, doctors, and other government officials stood at the gate and examined those who sought to enter the country. They deliberated over which immigrants could pass through and which would find the gate closed.
At the gate, Ellis Island acted as a sieve. Government officials sought to sift through immigrants, separating out the desirable and the undesirable. America wanted to keep the nation’s traditional welcome to immigrants, but only to those it deemed desirable. For undesirables, the gates of America would be shut forever. Federal law defined such categories, but the enforcement and interpretation of those laws were left up to officials at places like Ellis Island.
The process at Ellis Island was not a happy event, wrote Edward Steiner, but rather “a hard, harsh fact, surrounded by the grinding machinery of the law, which sifts, picks, and chooses; admitting the fit and excluding the weak and helpless.” To another observer of the process, this sifting process resembled “the screening of coal in a great breaker tower.”
The central sifting at Ellis Island occurred at the inspection line. All immigrants would march in a single-file line toward a medical officer. Sometimes having to process thousands of immigrants a day, these officials had only a few seconds to make an initial judgment. They would pay careful attention to the scalp, face, neck, hands, walk, and overall mental and physical condition. The immigrant would then make a right turn in front of the doctor that allowed a rear and side view. Often, doctors would touch the immigrants, feeling for muscular development or fever, or inspect hands that might betray more serious health concerns. They might also ask brief questions. Doctors developed their own methods of observation. As one noted, “Every movement of the body has its own peculiar meaning and that by careful practice we can learn quickly to interpret the significance of the thousand-and-one variations from the normal.”
After 1905, all immigrants would then pass before another doctor whose sole job was to perform a quick eye exam. If any of these medical officers found any sign of possible deficiency, they would use chalk to mark the immigrant with a letter. L stood for lameness and E stood for eye problems, for instance. Those chalk-marked immigrants, some 15 to 20 percent of all arrivals, would then be set aside for further physical or mental testing.
Immigration officials largely based their decisions of the desirability of immigrants on their mental, physical, and moral capacities. To modern ears, the notion of classifying any human being as “undesirable” is an uncomfortable one that smacks of discrimination and insensitivity, but we should be careful not to judge the past by modern-day standards. Instead, it is important to understand why Americans went about classifying people in this manner, however unpleasant that process might seem to us.
First, they were concerned that immigrants would become “public charges,” meaning they would not be able to take care of themselves. In the days before a federal welfare system and social safety net, this meant being wards of private charity or local institutions like poor-houses, hospitals, or asylums. If immigrants were to be allowed into the country, they needed to prove they were healthy and self-sufficient.
Second, immigrants were meant to work. Specifically, they were to be the manual labor that fueled the factories and mines of industrial America. Such tough work demanded strong physical specimens. Sickly, weak, or mentally deficient immigrants were deemed unlikely to survive the rigors of the factory.
Lastly, scientific ideas that would reshape the modern world were beginning to seep into the public consciousness in the late nineteenth century and affect the way Americans saw immigrants. Darwin’s theory of evolution and primitive genetic theory offered Americans dark lessons about the dangers of the wrong kinds of immigrant. Many Americans considered poverty, disease, and illiteracy to be hereditary traits that would be passed on to future generations, thereby weakening the nation’s gene pool and lowering the vitality of the average American, not just in the present, but for generations to come.
All of these ideas assume that it is acceptable for a nation to exclude immigrants it deems undesirable. Then, as now, Americans have grappled with the question: Is everyone in the world entitled to enter America? This question lies at the heart of the history of Ellis Island. At the time, most native-born Americans believed that they had the right to decide this as a matter of national sovereignty. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts summarized this view in a 1908 speech:
Every independent nation has, and must have, an absolute right to determine who shall come into the country, and secondly, who shall become a part of its citizenship, and on what terms…. The power of the American people to determine who shall come into the country, and on what terms, is absolute, and by the American people, I mean its citizens at any given moment, whether native born or naturalized, whose votes control the Government…. No one has a right to come into the United States, or become part of its citizenship, except by permission of the people of the United States.
Even though Lodge was an unabashed believer in the superiority of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, his ideas about national sovereignty strike at the heart of how any nation deals with those who knock at its gates.
The nation’s immigration law was predicated on the idea that a self-governing people could decide who may or may not enter the country. But that idea came into conflict with other ideals, such as America’s traditional history of welcoming newcomers. More importantly, it conflicted with the idea that the rights guaranteed in the Constitution were universal rights. How could the Declaration of Independence’s basic creed that all individuals were created equal mesh with the idea that some immigrants were desirable and others undesirable? That conflict between American ideals is central to an understanding of why Ellis Island was created in the first place.
TRADITIONAL HISTORIES OF THE Ellis Island period, like John Higham’s classic Strangers in the Land, focus on the rise and fall of nativism, which the historian defined as the “intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground of its foreign…connections.” Yet Higham would soon come to see the shortcomings of his own analysis. Shortly after the publication of his book, he asked: “Shall I confess that nativism now looks less adequate as a vehicle for studying the struggles of nationalities in America, than my earlier report of it, and other reports, might indicate?” He later admitted: “Repelled as I was not only by the xenophobias of the past but also by the nationalist delusions of the Cold War that were all around me, I had highlighted the most inflammatory aspects of ethnic conflict.”
The “nativist theme, as defined and developed to date, is imaginatively exhausted,” Higham concluded. By overemphasizing the psychological interpretations of American attitudes toward immigrants, he diminished the rationality of individuals and reduced their reactions to complex social changes down to primitive and primordial emotional reflexes. That does not mean downplaying the often ugly anti-immigrant sentiment that has characterized certain periods of American history. Higham is mostly correct that such feelings were rising in the late nineteenth century as the demographics of immigration shifted from northern Europeans to southern and eastern Europeans. He is also correct that World War I brought a significant opposition to foreigners.
However, both of these periods also saw a larger shift in American society. The former occurred during the dawning of the era of Progressive reforms, with the beginnings of the federal administrative state designed to enact those reforms. The latter occurred at a time of great disillusionment with reform and government in the wake of the Great War. As the Progressive impulse to regulate society ebbed, Americans instead tried to restore a lost world that had been overtaken by the rise of modern, industrial America.
By looking past the mere expressions of anti-immigrant sentiment and focusing on the implementation of immigration policy, we find that much of the debate surrounding Ellis Island was not as polarized as we might imagine. Despite the heated rhetoric, this debate took place within the proverbial forty-yard lines of American political life. There was considerable consensus about immigration. Most Americans found themselves in the political middle on the issue. That debate took place most famously at Ellis Island for more than three decades.
Few Americans argued for a completely open door to all immigrants and few argued for their complete exclusion. Allan McLaughlin, a doctor with the U.S. Public Health Service, put forth the parameters of the debate:
There are extremists who advocate the impossible—the complete exclusion of all immigrants or the complete exclusion of certain races. There are other extremists who pose as humanitarians and philanthropists and who advocate an act of lunacy—removing all restrictions and admitting all the unfortunate—the lame, the halt, the blind and the morally and physically diseased—without let or hindrance. Neither of these extreme positions is tenable. The debarring of all immigrants, or the unjust discrimination against any particular race, is illogical, bigoted and un-American. On the other hand, the indiscriminate admission of a horde of diseased, defective and destitute immigrants would be a crime against the body politic which could not be justified by false pretense of humanity or a mistaken spirit of philanthropy.
Americans rarely challenged the government’s right to exclude or deport immigrants, but rather fought over the legitimate criteria for exclusion and how strictly government should enforce those laws at immigration stations like Ellis Island.
Take the opinions of two men active in the debate during this time. Max Kohler was a lawyer for the American Jewish Committee who doggedly defended the rights of Jewish immigrants and criticized the strict enforcement of the law at Ellis Island. Nevertheless, he admitted that the immigration law at the time was appropriate in barring those deemed undesirable. “We do not want aliens to be admitted of any race or creed,” Kohler said, “suffering from loathsome or contagious diseases, mentally or morally defective, contract laborers or paupers or persona likely to become public charges in fact.” What he opposed was both the stricter enforcement of the law and the passage of any more restrictive measures by Congress to exclude immigrants.
On the other side was Commissioner-General of Immigration Frank Sargent. The former labor leader favored closer inspection and tighter restriction of immigrants, but conceded that he “would not advocate a ‘closed-door’ policy…as we still have need for a high class of aliens who are healthy and will become self-supporting.” For him and other like-minded individuals, the present law was fine, but needed to be more strictly enforced. The debate, then, was not one over the restriction of immigrants, but instead over the regulation of who may be allowed to enter the country.
“We desire to emphasize at this point that the immigration laws of the United States,” noted the American Jewish Committee in recommendations it made to the U.S. Immigration Commission, “have always been enacted to regulate immigration.” Both sides of the immigration debate agreed on the need for the United States to continue to accept immigrants and for the need to sort through those who arrived and reject those deemed undesirable. They differed, however, in how strictly to regulate immigration. In practice, this allowed almost three decades of continuous immigration, mostly from Europe, at levels that remain historic highs in American history. For all the talk about exclusion and restriction, less than 2 percent of individuals who knocked at its gate were ultimately excluded at Ellis Island.
The laws that dealt with European immigrants, as well as smaller numbers of Middle Eastern and Caribbean immigrants, were in marked contrast to the law directed toward Chinese immigrants. For the Chinese and other Asians, American immigration policy was one of restriction. This proved the exception to the larger rule of immigration regulation, and Americans at the time were quite conscious of this differential treatment and at pains not to replicate it with other immigrant groups. For Asians, their near-complete exclusion from the country was based on race; for all others seeking entry, officials would try to weed out supposedly undesirable immigrants based not on race, but rather on individual characteristics. Prejudice against southern and eastern Europeans certainly existed, but it was not written into the law until the quotas of the 1920s.
CONTRARY TO MUCH THAT is written about American immigration, this book does not see this history strictly through the jaundiced interpretive lens of nativist sentiments or the sentimental notions of Ellis Island as a chronicle of American bounty and frothy idealism. Instead, this book looks at how actual people created, interpreted, and executed immigration laws at Ellis Island.
This is a story about the growing pains of a modern nation that was struggling with vast and seemingly disturbing changes. In response, America engaged in a debate about who could become an American. It was heated, loud, and often nasty. Raw emotions and blunt opinions were expressed in language that is often discomforting to modern readers.
In response to this debate, Congress translated these concerns into laws that were carried out at Ellis Island and other, smaller immigrant inspection stations around the country, where officials were confronted with the very real mass of humans who washed upon America’s shores daily.
Guarding the borders became the key to defining the character of the nation itself. Ellis Island represents the dawning of a new age: the rise of the United States as a modern nation-state. After the Civil War, it would become an industrial powerhouse, achieve a unified nation from coast to coast, and expand its power on the world stage by extending its sphere of influence into Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. To manage this economic, military, and political behemoth, a new federal government had to be created almost from scratch. Immigration control should be placed in the context of the rise of this modern state.
The immigration service that ran inspection stations like Ellis Island was one of the country’s first large government programs. The strong federal government that we know today was in its infancy in the late 1800s. As the federal government devoted more time, energy, money, and manpower to inspecting immigrants, it created a larger and larger administrative system. Such a system created its own set of rules.
Instead of seeing the work of Ellis Island in terms of immigration restriction, it is better to see it as a form of regulation. The relatively unobtrusive federal government of the nineteenth century evolved into a system of greater regulation by the twentieth century, one that did not end capitalism, but sought to control its excesses. Over that same period, the laissez-faire attitude of the federal government gave way to a system that did not end immigration, but regulated it in the public interest.
The impulse behind immigration control was the same impulse that banned child labor, regulated railroads and monopolies, opened settlement houses, created national parks, battled the corruption of urban political machines, and advocated for temperance. It was these reforms of the Progressive Era that drove the expansion of the federal government to ensure that it would regulate private business in the public interest.
In this sense, immigration control fits well as a Progressive reform. To many reformers, big business, together with selfish steamship companies and aided by corrupt political bosses, sought to keep the faucet of immigration open full blast as a source of cheap labor to power the new industrial economy and provide voters for urban political machines. Reformers wanted to temper this by regulating immigration, not ending it. They believed that a large industrial and urban society needed to be actively molded and shaped, and that the older laissez-faire philosophy of the nineteenth century was inadequate to deal with the problems of the modern era.
Much of the political history of twentieth-century America was a battle over the extent of government regulation. Historians generally agree that the spirit of Progressive reform temporarily died out after World War I, and it is no surprise that this period also sees the end of the kind of immigration regulation practiced at Ellis Island for three decades. This regulatory approach to immigration would be replaced by the blunt instrument of immigration quotas by the 1920s. This new mechanism would not try to sift desirable from undesirable immigrants, but instead severely limit immigrants based on where they came from. America did not completely shut down immigration from Europe, as it had done earlier to immigration from China, but the era of mass immigration was effectively ended. Ellis Island had lost its raison d’être.
When a new spirit of reform came with the New Deal and the federal government again began to intervene actively in the private sector, immigration was left out of the equation. The nation’s conflicting views toward government power would find itself mirrored in its immigration laws.
Ellis Island would become little more than a prison for enemy aliens during World War II and for noncitizen aliens with radical beliefs during the Cold War. In the flush of postwar prosperity, the government abandoned Ellis Island in 1954 and left it to rot. Not until the 1980s, when the nation began to witness the rise of a new era of mass migration, did the country again pay attention to Ellis Island. By then, the former inspection station had evolved into an emotional symbol to millions of Americans, a new Plymouth Rock. Parts of the old facility were rehabilitated and reopened as a museum of immigration history. Ellis Island had now entered the realm of historical memory.
THIS BOOK IS A biography, not of a person, but of a place, of one small island in New York Harbor that crystallized the nation’s complex and contradictory ideas about how to welcome people to the New World. It traces the history of Ellis Island from its days of hosting pirate hangings in the nineteenth century to its heyday as America’s main immigration station where some 12 million immigrants were inspected from 1892 to 1924. The story continues through the detention of aliens at Ellis Island during World War II and the Cold War and concludes with its rebirth as an immigration museum and a national icon. Long after Ellis Island has ceased to be an inspection station, the debates that once swirled around it continue to be heard.
Today, Ellis Island has become a tired cliché for some, a story about the pluck and perseverance of those “poor huddled masses yearning to be free” who found freedom at the end of the inspection line. It is a nostalgic ode to our hardy ancestors who achieved success in spite of their experiences at the infamous Isle of Tears, where bigoted officials made their lives miserable and changed the family’s name from something with six syllables and no vowels to Smith.
In reality, Ellis Island was the place where the United States worked out its extraordinary national debate over immigration for more than three decades. Inspectors, doctors, and political appointees wrestled every day with the problems of interpreting the nation’s immigration laws while being personally confronted with hundreds of thousands of living, breathing individuals. The dry enterprise of executing the law came into direct conflict with the mass of humanity seeking to make new lives in America.
Ellis Island embodies the story of Americans grappling with how best to manage the vast and disruptive changes brought by rapid industrialization and large-scale immigration from Europe. It is the story of a nation struggling with the idea of what it meant to be an American at a time when millions of newcomers from vastly different backgrounds were streaming into the country.
Americans need a history that does not glorify the place in some kind of gauzy, self-congratulatory nostalgia, nor mindlessly condemn what occurred there as the vicious bigotry of ugly nativists. Instead, this book seeks to understand what happened at Ellis Island and why it happened.
This island, so small in size, has imprinted itself on the minds of so many Americans. It is a gritty and tumultuous history, but one that helps to explain why millions of immigrants had to make their American Passage through Ellis Island and how that passage in turn helped shape this nation.