Chapter 9
We can not have too much immigration of the right kind, and we should have none at all of the wrong kind.
—Theodore Roosevelt, 1903
LEANING OVER THE SECOND-STORY RAILING IN THE MAIN hall of the reception room at Ellis Island, H. G. Wells surveyed the mazelike rails herding immigrants through the inspection line. “You don’t think they’ll swamp you?” a concerned Wells asked his companion, the new Ellis Island commissioner, Robert Watchorn. Wells had taken the ferry trip to the island as part of research on a book about the future of America. Wells was pessimistic about the future in general, especially regarding technology. Yet as these two Englishmen debated the effects of throngs of southern and eastern Europeans on America, Wells’s question hit upon another uncertainty.
“Now look here,” Watchorn gently rebuked his famous literary guest, “I’m English-born—Derbyshire. I came to America when I was a lad. I had fifteen dollars. And here I am! Well, do you expect me, now I’m here, to shut the door on any other poor chaps who want a start—a start with hope in it, in the New World?”
Wells had cemented his reputation as the premier science fiction writer a decade earlier with a string of successes, including The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds. Now Robert Watchorn was hosting the famous writer at Ellis Island. Both Wells and Watchorn were sons of the British working class who had made good. After the visit, the two men continued on friendly terms. Wells entertained Watchorn on a number of occasions in England, and Watchorn proudly kept an autographed photo of Wells in his office for the rest of his professional life.
This perk of the job, rubbing elbows with the famous and powerful, appealed greatly to Watchorn, whose life story was truly one of rags to riches. It began in the English coal mines and continued through his arrival at Castle Garden in 1880, to his ascension to commissioner of Ellis Island in 1905, and would continue after his time in the immigration service.
Watchorn was the second of seven children born in Alfreton, Derbyshire, to a doting mother and an alcoholic coal-miner father. At age eleven, Watchorn himself went down into the coal pits, where he worked for the next ten years. An intelligent boy, he went to night school, and at the age of twenty-two left for America.
Once there, Watchorn ended up loading coal in the Pennsylvania mines. Soon after, he brought his family over and became involved in the local Knights of Labor chapter, where he befriended Terence V. Powderly, who would remain a lifelong friend and mentor. Watchorn then went on to become the first secretary-treasurer of the newly created United Mine Workers.
Filled with ambition and drive, Watchorn did not remain long with the union. Like another determined member of the working class, Edward McSweeney, Watchorn made the leap from labor activism to politics. The thirty-three-year-old Watchorn became the state’s first chief factory inspector under Robert E. Pattison, Pennsylvania’s first Democratic governor since the Civil War.
Driven to succeed as only one who had escaped the coal pits of both England and Pennsylvania could, Watchorn cleverly amassed important friends, including Powderly and the Pennsylvania senator Matthew Quay, the state’s Republican boss. Politically ambidextrous, Watchorn began his political career working in a Democratic administration but later became a staunch Republican. His ties to Powderly led to a patronage post as an inspector at Ellis Island. During the controversy there with McSweeney, Watchorn became an important ally and friend to Powderly, who later plucked Watchorn from the maelstrom at Ellis Island and promoted him first to Washington and then to Montreal, where he put Watchorn in charge of the immigration service along the Canadian border.
When Roosevelt was searching for a suitable replacement for William Williams in early 1905, he quickly settled on Watchorn, whom he remembered from his first visit to Ellis Island, when Roosevelt was police commissioner and Watchorn a mere inspector. Morally upright, Watchorn could be expected to continue the vigilance against corruption, patronage, and abuse at Ellis Island, but would accomplish it without the abrasive air of the patrician Williams. As an immigrant himself, Watchorn might enforce immigration law without Williams’s restrictionist touch. Also, Watchorn needed the job—unlike the independently wealthy Williams—and might be less difficult to manage.
On the issue of Joe Murray, Roosevelt only asked that Watchorn give him a fair shake. If Watchorn decided that Murray was incompetent, Roosevelt would transfer his friend. “You will be the absolute judge of his competency or incompetency,” Roosevelt wrote. Watchorn, who had not escaped a life in the coal mines by bucking authority, was not about to take the bait. “I shall respect your wishes, Mr. President, in regard to Mr. Murray, whom I know very well,” Watchorn responded. Murray would end up staying at Ellis Island for the rest of the Roosevelt administration.
Watchorn assured the president that they shared a common vision of immigration. Such agreement was important because America was about to witness its biggest wave of immigration ever. For the first time, more than 1 million immigrants entered the country. Roosevelt put this in historical perspective by noting that more people entered the United States in 1905 than had arrived in the 169 years between the first landing at Jamestown and the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Despite stringent laws, Roosevelt believed that a large number of immigrants were still undesirable because they came not of their own initiative, but were instead enticed by agents from steamship companies interested only in increasing their profits.
Roosevelt was adept at finding that perfect fulcrum of American opinion on immigration, melding fears of alien newcomers with respect for the country’s open-door tradition. “In dealing with this question it is unwise to depart from the old American tradition and to discriminate for or against any man who desires to come here and become a citizen, save on the ground of that man’s fitness for citizenship,” Roosevelt wrote. An immigrant’s character, not his ethnicity or religion, should determine whether he or she be allowed into the country. To him, a Slav of good character was far more preferable than an Englishman of poor character. Of course, the status of excluded Chinese immigrants complicated the president’s argument.
It was a fine statement of the assimilationist credo, but one that rested on the vigorous enforcement of immigration laws at the nation’s gates, with Roosevelt calling for “an increase in the stringency of the laws to keep out insane, idiotic, epileptic, and pauper immigrants.” He already had had four years to push for this, but achieved little more than banning anarchists and prostitutes. Now he wanted not just anarchists excluded, “but every man of Anarchistic tendencies, all violent and disorderly people, all people of bad character, the incompetent, the lazy, the vicious, the physically unfit, defective, or degenerate.”
If Roosevelt wanted a stricter application of immigration laws, Ellis Island was in the best shape since it opened to accomplish that. And just in time. From 1905 to 1907, some 3.5 million immigrants would come to America, nearly 80 percent passing through New York’s inspection station. Having visited at the beginning of this period, novelist Henry James called Ellis Island “a drama that goes on, without a pause, day by day and year by year, this visible act of ingurgitation on the part of our body politic and social, and constituting really an appeal to amazement beyond that of any sword-swallowing or fire-swallowing of the circus.”
With each passing week in the spring and fall—the peak arrival seasons for immigrants—a new record would be broken. In one week during April 1906, an estimated 45,000 immigrants arrived at Ellis Island. Ships seemed to pile one on top of the other, many forced to dock for two or three days as their passengers remained on board while they awaited inspection. Bigger steamships that could carry as many as 2,300 steerage passengers, like the White Star’s Celtic and Republic, brought these immigrants on a daily basis.
“Immigrant Type Low, But 1,100,735 Get In” read a Times headline about the record number of immigrants in 1906. Of that figure, Ellis Island processed roughly 880,000 immigrants, 10 percent of whom were detained for board of special inquiry hearings, and 7,877 were excluded, less than 1 percent of all those who arrived. Ellis Island witnessed 327 deaths, 18 births, 2 suicides, and 508 marriages that year.
If Americans thought 1906 was bad, the following year would be even worse. In fact, Americans would not see as many immigrants in one year as they saw in 1907 until 1990. Some days, the flood was unmanageable. On March 27, 1907, 16,000 immigrants entered New York Harbor; May 2 brought 21,755. Ellis Island had to process over a million people in 1907 alone, which came to over 2,700 per day, every day.
Robert Watchorn, who oversaw this flood, was a man apart from his predecessor. “A man of brawn, a man who knows how to use his hands in both the sporting and industrial sense of the phrase,” was how the Times described him. He repeated Roosevelt’s mantra that America could not have enough of the right kind of immigrant and too little of the wrong kind. Unlike Williams, however, Watchorn believed that America was largely getting the right kind of immigrants.
This was a bit of an intellectual shift for Watchorn, a man who would prove himself nothing if not flexible in his beliefs. While working under Powderly, Watchorn portrayed himself in favor of strict regulation of immigrants, especially regarding the contract-labor laws. Now, working under Roosevelt, the former United Mine Workers official changed his tune. He found himself harangued for his pro-immigration views while speaking before crowds of workers.
Watchorn told a Jewish audience on New York’s Lower East Side that “the immigrant has done as much for this country as the country has done for him.” While he supported a careful selection of immigrants to keep out those likely to become a public charge, he hated to order deportations. Even though the editors of the American Hebrew had praised William Williams, they noticed a change in tone at Ellis Island. “Since Mr. Robert Watchorn entered upon his duties as Commissioner, there is an entirely different atmosphere about the place,” the paper wrote. “The immigrant is no longer looked upon as one to be kept out, if the law is strained to do so.”
College professor Edward Steiner dedicated his sympathetic book about the new immigrants to Robert Watchorn.
He does not share the feeling that the immigration of to-day is worse than that of the past; in fact he will say quite freely that it is growing better every day. He has his fears and forebodings; but he knows that the miracle of transformation wrought on us, can still be wrought on this mass of clay in the hands of the potter, which may be moulded just as millions of us have been moulded, into the likeness of a new humanity.
Men like Steiner and Watchorn held a deep faith in the transformative power of America on European immigrants.
Watchorn had a chance to explain his views to a group of female college students visiting Ellis Island. Unanimously opposed to immigration, these well-off young women heard the case of a sixty-six-year-old Italian man heading to his son in Lynchburg, Virginia. They believed him too old and weak to be admitted, especially since the son was not there to pick up the father. In a scene out of Hollywood, the son showed up at the last moment to an emotional reunion with his father. Should the father be sent back to Italy, Watchorn now asked the young women? “No, no, no, certainly not,” was the unanimous response.
Those young women discovered the difference between discussing immigration in the abstract as opposed to dealing with the concrete—and very human—reality at Ellis Island. “There are those who vehemently protest against the landing of aliens on these shores en masse,” Watchorn later wrote, “so long as their protests are made in abstract form, but who, Pilate-like, say, on being brought face to face with the units of the mass, ‘I find no fault with him.’”
Watchorn’s tenure marked an evolution in how Roosevelt handled immigration. Practical politics played no small hand in this change. In 1906, William Randolph Hearst used his fortune to run for governor of New York as a Democrat. Roosevelt could not abide Hearst and resented his “enormous popularity among ignorant and unthinking people.” Hearst used the pages of his New York Journal to take on the mantle of defender of immigrants. He further expanded his reach to the city’s largest ethnic group by starting the German-language paper Morgen Journal. The populism of Hearst’s papers filled the patrician Roosevelt with disgust. He had to be stopped.
Roosevelt threw himself heart and soul into helping the Republican Charles Evans Hughes defeat Hearst. Hughes was a bit of a stiff, but enough of a progressive for Roosevelt—anything to keep Hearst from defiling Roosevelt’s old office. The path to stopping Hearst, Roosevelt soon realized, began with New York’s ethnic communities.
When an opening appeared for secretary of Commerce and Labor, Roosevelt jumped at an opportunity to make a point. Roosevelt conferred with Jewish leaders like New York banker Jacob Schiff and named Oscar Straus to the post. Roosevelt now had a Jew and a Catholic in his cabinet. (Charles Bonaparte, the grandnephew of Napoléon, was attorney general.)
At a dinner celebrating Straus’s appointment, Roosevelt explained that he had chosen Straus without regard to race, color, creed, or party. To that, an elderly and increasingly deaf Jacob Schiff nodded and said in his thick German accent: “Dot’s right, Mr. President. You came to me and said, ‘Chake, who is der best jew I can appoint Segretary of Commerce?’” Though probably apocryphal, the spirit of the story contains a germ of truth. Roosevelt had begun a long tradition, followed by most of his successors, of choosing cabinet members to satisfy various racial, ethnic, and religious groups.
Straus, along with Schiff, belonged to an earlier generation of German Jewish immigrants. Oscar Straus was born in Bavaria in 1850. His father, a Reform Jew and grain merchant, left for the United States in 1852, where he ran a general store in Georgia. Oscar, his brothers, and his mother followed him there two years later. The family’s future was not to be in the South, but rather in New York City. There, the Straus family ran a china and glassware store and later bought out Macy’s. Oscar, however, was not drawn to the world of commerce like his father and brothers. Instead, he opted for a career in law.
As part of his arrangement with Roosevelt, Straus agreed to stump for Hughes in New York, joining Schiff in blunting Hearst’s appeal to the Jewish community. In the end, Hughes squeaked by Hearst with just sixty thousand votes, and Straus took up work at his new job after the election.
The Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, as it was now called, was but one of twelve divisions of the Department of Commerce and Labor, but it was clearly the one that animated Straus the most. “Indeed, no subject in the department occupied my daily attention to the extent that immigration did,” he wrote in his autobiography. Immigration was the most difficult issue because “it is the most human” and “throbs with tearful tragedies,” Straus wrote.
On the morning of December 17, 1906, Straus sat at his desk in his new office and immediately threw himself into the heart-wrenching morass of appeals from immigrants waiting to be deported. He looked at some thirty cases that first day. “I was not surprised to find that most of these cases present difficult questions appealing to the humanity and judgment of the Secretary,” Straus wrote in his diary. Straus believed that the letter of the law must be tempered by humanity.
Some cases were easily disposed of, but others were more difficult. The power Straus possessed was enormous and would determine the futures of many individuals. It was a grave responsibility. “I felt that there was a domestic tragedy involved in every one of these cases, and as the law placed the ultimate decision upon the Secretary,” he wrote, “I decided this responsibility was one that should not be delegated; so day by day I took up these decisions myself.” So engaged was Straus that he brought a number of the toughest cases home with him that first night to examine in more depth.
“I would be less than human if I failed to interpret the laws as humanely as possible,” Straus wrote his brother Isidor. “I propose to remain on the side of the angels come what will, and I shall defy hostile criticisms—to do less would be cowardly.” Straus was especially sensitive to the plight of Russian Jewish immigrants, thinking it the height of cruelty to send Jews back to the nightmare of czarist Russia.
Straus made his first official visit to Ellis Island in February 1907, witnessing some 2,600 immigrants passing through that day. He appeared there again two months later, examining every detail of inspection from the time immigrants got off the ferries to the time they passed inspection.
Straus also heard a number of appeals cases, including that of a Scots-Irish family of seven ordered deported because one son was certified as feebleminded. The family was faced with a decision: Should they split up, with the mother or another sibling returning to Europe with the son and the others remaining in America? The family decided that they would all stick together—either the entire family would stay or the entire family would go back home. Straus thought the family, with the exception of the twenty-year-old feebleminded son, was “an exceptionally fine lot” and decided to allow the entire family to remain in America, including the son. Upon hearing the good news, the family burst into tears of gratitude.
Straus made yet another visit to Ellis Island in June 1908, joined by the commissioner-general of immigration, Frank Sargent, and other immigration and medical officials from East Coast inspection stations. Straus convened the conference to deal with medical cases that had caused him concern. They first took up the case of a fifty-nine-year-old Russian immigrant named Chena Rog, who was headed to her five children and thirty-six grandchildren in Reading, Pennsylvania. Rog had been diagnosed with trachoma, an infectious disease of the eye. Should she be ordered deported or held in a hospital for treatment?
When Straus asked Ellis Island’s chief medical officer, George Stoner, about his opinion on the case, an agitated Stoner answered: “Just what I have stated in my certificate.” Stoner and his staff had recommended deportation since trachoma was a contagious disease. They felt they were now being second-guessed by Straus. Can’t she be treated for the disease, Straus asked? Stoner was not optimistic, arguing that it would take an “indefinite period which must be counted by years rather than by months.” Straus kept pushing to see whether there was any way to avoid deporting Rog, who had no relatives back in Russia and whose children had become successful members of their community, as was attested by the presence of their congressman at the conference. Stoner became impatient by Straus’s line of questioning and argued that there was nothing in the law that said that the officials had to treat Rog or any other immigrant suffering from a loathsome or contagious disease.
Clearly, Straus wanted the woman admitted, but Watchorn and Sargent argued that any ruling allowing diseased immigrants to land would be seen by steamship companies as an invitation to relax their own standards in Europe. They also sensed that their boss had already made up his mind, so they put their concerns aside and agreed to have the woman treated at the Ellis Island hospital. Chena Rog was permitted to land for medical treatment, practically guaranteeing that she would not be deported.
Stoner was not happy with the decision and had to have the last word. “I doubt very much whether she will be in any different condition at the end of six months’ treatment than she is today,” the doctor said. In fact, he believed that her condition could worsen and any other diagnosis was sheer folly. Straus ignored Stoner’s speech and went on to the next case.
Schimen Coblenz was a forty-two-year-old butcher from Lithuania diagnosed with psoriasis, a skin condition. The disease was not particularly attractive, but in no way contagious. However, the law stated that immigrants could be deported for a “loathsome or dangerous contagious disease.” Watchorn ordered him deported because psoriasis was loathsome and would be problematic in his profession as a butcher. If Coblenz were a factory worker, Watchorn argued, the disease would not cause his exclusion.
The case hinged on whether the law required a disease to be both loathsome and contagious or whether an alien could be deported just for suffering from a loathsome disease. It was clear that the law read “or,” instead of “and,” meaning that a loathsome disease alone could certify an immigrant for exclusion. However, since loathsome was a subjective term, and not a medical one, it was at Straus’s discretion to decide the fate of immigrants diagnosed with such diseases. He was willing to read the law loosely and Coblenz was admitted.
Unfortunately, Straus could only appear at Ellis Island on rare occasions. Most of his influence would have to be exerted from Washington. While working late at night on immigration appeals in the library of his enormous Italianate villa on the capital’s stately 16th Street on Meridian Hill, Straus came up with an idea. While his sympathies led him to find every means to allow an immigrant to stay in the country, Straus was also bound by the law. Though faithfully executing the law, he felt pangs of guilt for his role in excluding and deporting immigrants. He knew the devastation such decisions caused. Many immigrants had sold all of their possessions to come to America. Those excluded would return home broken in spirit, as well as financially ruined.
With this in mind, Straus sent a personal check for several hundred dollars to Watchorn, instructing him to dole out the money to unfortunate immigrants excluded at Ellis Island. Watchorn was to use his judgment in disbursing the funds. The only stipulations were that he was to disburse the funds without regard to “creed, country or race,” and that the source of the money should remain anonymous. The move speaks volumes of Straus’s humanity, as well as the heavy weight on his conscience caused by his work.
By 1907, it was clear that a perceptible shift in immigration policy had occurred. While the law remained the same, the tone of those in charge of enforcing the law had changed dramatically. Only someone like Theodore Roosevelt could have pulled off such a transformation. The shift was also reflected in the president’s own rhetoric. In most of his earlier Annual Messages to Congress, Roosevelt reiterated his support for the strict regulation of immigrants. In his December 1906 message, he abruptly changed course.
“Not only must we treat all nations fairly,” Roosevelt wrote, “but we must treat with justice and good will all immigrants who come here under the law. Whether they are Catholic or Protestant, Jew or Gentile; whether they come from England or Germany, Russia, Japan, or Italy, matters nothing.” It was a far cry from his first message, five years earlier, when he called for weeding out immigrants of “low moral tendency” and “unsavory reputation.”
While many worried that immigrants dragged down the standards of civilization and morality, Roosevelt now saw a different threat. “It is the sure mark of a low civilization, a low morality, to abuse or discriminate against or in any way humiliate such stranger who has come here lawfully and who is conducting himself properly,” he argued. There would be no more talk of immigrants of the wrong sort or preservation of America’s national stock. “I grow extremely indignant at the attitude of coarse hostility to the immigrant taken by so many natives,” Roosevelt wrote editor Lyman Abbott.
Throughout the first decade of the new century, a more organized, pro-immigrant voice began to be heard. Political organizing on immigration had previously been the sole preserve of the Immigration Restriction League. In 1906, the National Liberal Immigration League was formed as a counterweight, opposing any further restrictions on immigration, as well as “all unjust and un-American methods of administering these [current immigration] laws.” Yet even the most liberal immigration defenders did not support a completely open-door policy. The group wanted “to preserve for our country the benefits of immigration while keeping out undesirable immigrants.”
The new organization’s board included luminaries such as Princeton’s president, Woodrow Wilson; Andrew Carnegie; and the president of Harvard, Charles Eliot. In addition, it was strongly allied with German-American organizations and received funds from German-owned steamship companies, lending credence to the charge that the pro-immigrant movement consisted largely of businessmen concerned with profits.
The pro-immigrant group also drew support from Jewish Americans, who wanted to make it easier for their coreligionists to escape religious persecution. Back in the 1890s, the German Jewish community had looked askance at the new immigrants from eastern Europe and many had even favored a strict interpretation of immigration laws. This stemmed partly from the snobbishness of cultivated and assimilated German Jews toward their poorer and more orthodox coreligionists, but also from the fact that needy Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe might become a burden on Jewish charities. It took repeated crackdowns in czarist Russia for America’s German Jews to throw themselves wholeheartedly into the battle against further restriction.
The public debate over immigration revolved around how strict the regulation of immigrants should be, not on whether there should be any regulations at all. It was hard to find someone arguing either for completely restricted immigration or for a completely open door. Oscar Straus came close when he told the National Conference on Immigration that “the right to move from one part of the earth to another is a fundamental part of personal liberty.” However, he prefaced the remark by saying, “We all agree there should be some restriction of unnatural immigration.”
Closer to the general consensus on immigration policy was a 1907 New York Times editorial.
It is well understood and admitted by all men of enlightened and unprejudiced opinions that selection, not exclusion, should be the guiding principle in any amendments of our immigration laws undertaken by Congress…. An immigrant capable of adding to the productive energy of the country is desirable. On the other hand, immigrants who are clearly beyond all dispute undesirable, who would be a burden or a source of danger to health, morals, and the public peace, are already under the ban of our statutes.
As an official devoted to upholding the law against undesirables as well as staying true to his belief in the positive contributions of immigrants, Robert Watchorn had to maintain a careful balance. As his friend Edward Steiner explained, Watchorn “must be both just and kind, show no preferences and no prejudices, guard the interests of his country and yet be humane to the stranger.” It was a tall task for any individual and perhaps unrealistic to expect anyone to satisfy.
Not only did Watchorn need to strike the right balance in enforcing American immigration law, but he also had to manage a difficult workforce. One who tried Watchorn’s patience was Marcus Braun, the president of New York’s Hungarian Republican Club who received his patronage position thanks to his friendship with Roosevelt. In fact, Braun increased his stature when Roosevelt agreed to attend a dinner in his honor put on by Braun in January 1905, which over four hundred people attended.
With pull like that, Braun was no ordinary inspector. Soon after his appointment, he was sent to Europe to investigate conditions there. He charged that officials of the Hungarian government were scouring the countryside, encouraging people to come to America and making money from steamship tickets, since the government owned the steamship company. Braun implicated high government officials, including Prime Minister Stephen Tisza.
The charges angered Hungarian authorities, who put Braun under constant surveillance. On a subsequent trip to Budapest in 1905, Braun caught a policeman opening his mail and slapped the man, leading to his arrest. After paying a fine, Braun was released and returned to the United States, where he made the episode public, turning the case into an international diplomatic incident and forcing his patron, President Roosevelt, to privately condemn him for acting with “extreme folly.”
Upon returning home, Braun was given a month’s leave from Ellis Island, after which time he would have to return to work. However, Braun had little desire for the mundane work of immigration inspection and instead asked for a year’s leave, which was denied. Upon returning to work, Braun refused to wear his blue inspector’s uniform. Instead, he resigned. “He didn’t like the uniform because it was a sign of a condition against which he revolted,” said a frustrated Watchorn.
Braun’s situation did not elicit much sympathy. The New York Times headlined its editorial on the incident “In Mockery of Marcus.” Yet his political patron, Theodore Roosevelt saved Braun. The president reinstated him to government service and transferred him to the Immigration Bureau along the Canadian border. In early 1906, Braun resigned yet again, only to be reinstated later that year. Only Roosevelt could say whether the support of the Hungarian Republican Club was worth the trouble of dealing with Marcus Braun.
Theodore Roosevelt showed more judgment when he named Philip Cowen, the editor of the American Hebrew and a second-generation Polish-Jewish-American, as a special inspector at Ellis Island in 1905. In doing so, he bypassed civil service regulations as he had with Joe Murray. For more than twenty years, Cowen would be a presence at the immigration station. When he retired in 1927, the occasion attracted attention from as far away as Germany, where Adolf Hitler called Cowen’s presence at Ellis Island proof that American immigration policy was under the control of “Pan-Jewry.”
Another appointment largely went unnoticed at the time. Unlike Cowen, this new interpreter at Ellis Island got his job in 1907 through a civil service exam, earning the top score among three test takers on the Croatian language test. In addition to Croatian, this twenty-four-year-old son of Italian immigrants also spoke Italian and Yiddish. Fiorello La Guardia earned $1,200 a year at Ellis Island while attending law school at night.
La Guardia was clearly a man on the make. At Ellis Island, he was one of the many men and women who served as an important link between English-speaking inspectors and confused, non-English-speaking immigrants. When a young child named Louis Pittman was forced to stay at the Ellis Island hospital for seventeen months until his trachoma healed, he received periodic visits from a short, round-faced La Guardia bearing gifts of chocolate for Pittman and other sick children.
La Guardia found his coworkers “kindly and considerate,” a big change from the earlier patronage era. His superiors found La Guardia a good worker who showed a keen interest in his job, even if he did manage to lose his official badge once, forcing Washington to send a replacement. In recommending La Guardia for a pay raise, Robert Watchorn described him as “energetic, intelligent, and familiar with a number of foreign languages.” Yet he also noted that La Guardia was “inclined to be peppery.” Perhaps the weight of troubles he witnessed at Ellis Island wore on La Guardia, since Watchorn noted that the young interpreter was “inclined to be argumentative” with members of the boards of special inquiry, no doubt in defense of immigrants.
An acquaintance of young Fiorello described his personality as “a magnificent unrest coupled with a desire to be a leader on his own terms.” La Guardia was a child of the new America and had little sympathy with the daily rigors through which his country put newcomers. “I never managed during the years I worked there to become callous to the mental anguish, the disappointment and the despair I witnessed almost daily,” he wrote years later. As a low-level bureaucrat, he chafed at his own lack of power and at an immigration system of which he was a part, but for which he had little respect. His uncompromising personality and budding social conscience, as well as his relatively low salary, made his position untenable.
After three years at Ellis Island and now armed with a law degree, La Guardia struck out on his own, hanging a proverbial shingle in a small downtown Manhattan law office. His early practice was largely made up of representing immigrants ordered deported, referred to him by his former colleagues. Though many lawyers who plied this trade took advantage of their greenhorn clients, La Guardia did not—not at $10 a case. Years later, many of his clients would pull the lever in the voting booth to make La Guardia mayor of New York City.
THE IMMIGRATION PROBLEM WAS a conflict between abstract laws and the individual tragedies those laws sometimes created. Thanks to technological improvements in photography, this human element could now be brought directly to average Americans as they sat at home reading the newspaper or one of the growing number of magazines aimed at middle-class audiences.
For Americans who did not have close contact with immigrants, their vision of these newcomers often came from cartoons drawn by unsympathetic hands. Cartoons featured negative characteristics drawn in an exaggerated manner to reinforce stereotypes: the sneering Italian with a dagger, the Jew with a hooked nose, the anarchist immigrant hiding a bomb. The immigrant’s foreignness was often highlighted, as was his general undesirability.
Jacob Riis, an immigrant and close friend of Theodore Roosevelt, had already showed the power of photos when his portrayals of life in New York’s tenement district were published in the 1890 book How the Other Half Lives. To arouse public sentiment for tenement reform or public parks, Riis portrayed the worst aspects of immigrant life—filth, overcrowding, and child exploitation.
In the early years of the twentieth century, middle-class readers began to encounter the faces of the masses that would be transformed into new American citizens. Sometimes these new immigrants would be staring straight into the camera, while others were photographed in profile. Few had smiles on their faces and many had hardened or faraway looks in their eyes. The immigrants were usually anonymous. Photo captions read simply “Russian bookbinder,” “Hungarian farm laborer” or “Pollack girls.” An exception was the Mittelstadt family from Germany—father Jacob, wife, daughter, and seven sons, all lined up from tallest to shortest. “Seven soldiers lost to the Kaiser,” proudly read the New York Times caption.
These men and women may have worn elaborate and strange native costumes and some of their faces may have betrayed a hard life that aged them beyond their years, but these photos hardly portrayed the grave threat to American society that critics feared. Instead, these subjects were proud and dignified, healthy and strong. These photos spoke of the singularity and individuality of the immigrant.
Lewis Hine was one of those photographers drawn to Ellis Island. Originally from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, he came to New York with a zeal for social reform. Though he would later gain fame with his photographic exposés of child labor and his iconic images of the construction of the Empire State Building, Hine’s first large-scale photographic project was Ellis Island in 1905.
It was no easy task to photograph amid the turmoil and chaos of Ellis Island. As Hine later described his difficulties:
Now, suppose we are elbowing our way thru the mob at Ellis Island trying to stop the surge of bewildered beings oozing through the corridors, up the stairs and all over the place, eager to get it all over and be on their way. Here is a small group that seems to have possibilities so we stop ’em and explain in pantomime that it would be lovely if they would only stick around just a moment. The rest of the human tide swirls around, often not too considerate of either the camera or us. We get the focus, on ground glass of course, then hoping they will stay put, get the flash lamp ready.
Then, with his five-by-seven camera on a shaky tripod, Hine would take his photo. The explosion of the flash pan blew smoke and sparks in the air, startling all those in the area.
The intrusiveness of the early photographic process, combined with the chaotic environment of Ellis Island, makes the subtlety and intimacy of Hine’s finished products even more remarkable. The photos provide visual examples of the daily experiences of immigrants: an Italian family looking for their baggage; a Slavic woman asleep on a bench, her kerchiefed head resting on her bags; children enjoying a cup of milk poured by an attendant. A “Young Russian Jewess” stares away from the camera with her big brown eyes, searching for something or perhaps thinking of what she left behind.
Hine’s photos were posed, yet this did little to take away from their immediacy. One photo was entitled “Italian Madonna.” An Italian woman sits on a bench, her head covered in a black shawl and her young daughter in her lap. The mother looks down at the child, while the child looks at the mother with adoring, yet somewhat fearful eyes. Hine interrupts this classical-and religious-themed photo by placing mother and daughter in front of a chain-link fence behind which a crowd of young and old immigrants is milling about slightly out of focus. In juxtaposing the idealized mother-and-child image with the reality of immigrants penned behind a fence, Hine captures the reality of Ellis Island.
More photographs made their way into newspapers and periodicals from the camera of Augustus Sherman, an amateur photographer and inspector at Ellis Island. Sherman’s subjects were largely anonymous, with captions mentioning little beyond ethnicity and occupation, such as “Romanian shepherds” and “Finnish girl.” Even more than Hine, Sherman was attracted to the picturesque—Albanians, Dutch, Greeks, Cossacks, all in their native dress. He also documented the exotic, almost freak-show quality of some immigrants: heavily tattooed German stowaways, a Russian giant, Burmese midgets, and microcephalic East Asians heading to the circus.
The photographs of Hine and Sherman may have helped humanize immigrants, but they did not convince all Americans. By Roosevelt’s second term, the IRL realized that its earlier faith in the president was misplaced. Roosevelt showed little desire to push for a literacy test. His appointments of Watchorn and Straus meant that the guardians of the gate were more likely to swing the door wide than hold it tightly closed. Like Oscar Straus, Prescott Hall realized that those entrusted to execute immigration law possessed a great deal of influence as to how those laws were carried out.
Labor leader Samuel Gompers also joined in the call for restriction. A Jewish immigrant from England, Gompers admitted to mixed feelings, yet the complaint about low-wage immigrant labor was a natural argument. He blamed big business and “idealists and sentimentalists” for opposing restriction, but the National Liberal Immigration League was more than willing to turn that argument around. “The selfishness of their [union] efforts is perfectly plain,” Harvard president Charles Eliot wrote. “As a rule they have only been a few years in this country themselves and are now trying, for their own supposed advantage, to keep other people out.”
The test for both sides would come in 1907 when Congress again took up the literacy test. Henry Cabot Lodge managed to get a bill through the Senate, but it got bogged down in the House. Though there was enough support in the House, the powerful Speaker, Republican Joe Cannon, managed an end run around the literacy test.
Cannon was a laissez-faire, pro-business Republican who opposed nearly every attempt by government to regulate private business. He was also adamantly anti-union, so it was natural for Cannon to support a steady stream of low-wage workers for which his business constituents clamored. He was also a member of the National Liberal Immigration League, which, in addition to German-American, Irish-American, and American Jewish groups, came out against the bill. Ultimately it was Cannon’s manipulation of the legislative process that won the day. In place of the literacy test, Cannon substituted the creation of a federal commission to investigate immigration.
The Immigration Act of 1907 was a victory for opponents of restriction in the sense that the literacy bill was defeated. In reality, the bill was much more complicated and restrictionists got far more than most people realized. The head tax on immigrants was raised to $4 per person, though some had wanted to raise it as high as $25. More importantly, Congress once again expanded the categories for exclusion. First, in addition to the insane and epileptics, feebleminded immigrants were now excludable. Second, Congress expanded the exclusion for prostitutes to include the “importation into the United States of any alien woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution, or for any other immoral purpose.” Lastly, any immigrant determined by doctors to be “mentally or physically defective,” and whose defect would “affect the ability of such alien to earn a living,” could be excluded. Loosely worded legislation opened up new grounds for debate over policies at Ellis Island. The key question boiled down to the definition of terms like “mental defective,” “immoral purpose,” “feebleminded,” or “ability to earn a living.”
As for the commission to investigate immigration, it combined two features of twentieth-century commissions. First, it would collect data and investigate various conditions throughout the country to give lawmakers better information. Second, it would allow short-term-minded politicians to postpone any further discussion of immigration, giving them cover on an increasingly sensitive issue.
President Roosevelt, who years earlier had criticized Grover Cleveland’s veto of the literacy test and who spoke earlier in his presidency in favor of one, was spared the agonizing decision of whether or not to veto such a bill. “When it came to a showdown,” Alabama congressman John Burnett said of Roosevelt’s behavior during the congressional fight, “the President was not to be seen, and his hand was not to be felt.”
Writing to Speaker Cannon, Roosevelt saw the commission as an opportunity to achieve restriction without jeopardizing his political capital. “I would want a Commission which would enable me…to put before the Congress a plan which would amount to a definite solution of this immigration business,” he told Cannon. He hoped this would occur after the 1908 election but before he left office. Roosevelt wanted legislation that would keep “out the unfit, physically, morally, or mentally.” These were words that came easily in private, but which the president was increasingly loath to speak publicly.
It would be four more years before this new commission would make its report to Congress. In the meantime, the focus of immigration left Washington and returned to the increasingly busy island in New York Harbor.
THE DEFEAT OF THE literacy test showed the growing influence of immigration supporters, but also led to virulent attacks against Oscar Straus and Robert Watchorn. Not surprisingly, one of their sharpest critics was Prescott Hall, who complained that Straus was reversing half of the exclusion cases that reached his desk on appeal and that such behavior was demoralizing the department. The first Jewish cabinet secretary also attracted complaints that he was less sympathetic to appeals from non-Jewish immigrants. By early 1908, there was such a steady drumbeat of protest that Watchorn complained to Straus about “the growing impression among many officials—both state, county, and municipal—that your administration is not disposed to execute the expulsion feature of the immigration laws.”
Hall took his case against Straus directly to President Roosevelt, who did not seem terribly disturbed by the charge. Nevertheless, he would pass along Hall’s criticism to Henry Cabot Lodge for further investigation.
Lodge had been a staunch ally of the IRL and the main point man in Congress for the literacy test. After looking into the charges against Straus, however, Lodge came away unimpressed. “Hall is both honest and able but he is extreme and does not understand that it is one thing to make general charges on hearsay and another to sustain them by proof,” he wrote to Roosevelt. Lodge admitted that Straus was “averse to the laws which affect the entry of poor Jews,” a fact he found unfortunate. Nevertheless, he could find no proof that Straus had ordered any easing of the enforcement of the law. In fact, Lodge told Roosevelt that reversals of deportation orders on appeal to Washington had not increased under Straus’s tenure.
Lodge, however, was not quite correct. In the first full year before Straus took office, almost 52 percent of immigrants who appealed their deportations to Washington lost their case. In 1908, Straus’s first full year as secretary, that figure dropped to 44 percent. In 1910, the first year after Straus left office, the number of lost appeal cases jumped to over 60 percent. On the whole, however, this relatively minor dip hardly proves a lax administration of the law.
That even Henry Cabot Lodge was defending Straus must have galled Hall. He later told Roosevelt that Straus “has deceived you time and again in regard to many immigration matters…he is one of the most subtly insidiously unscrupulous officials that ever breathed.” Such words would do little to dent Roosevelt’s admiration and respect for Straus.
Hall also aimed his fire at the man he saw as the other villain in this piece. “Watchorn has been a crook ever since he immigrated to this country,” Hall told Roosevelt. “His naturalization papers were fraudulent.” He also accused Watchorn of stealing the addresses of union members in a political campaign in 1890. “I am absolutely sure of Watchorn’s dishonesty and unscrupulousness,” he raged.
Roosevelt had sought to mollify Watchorn’s critics in late 1906 by asking IRL member James B. Reynolds to investigate operations at Ellis Island. When he had completed his report, Reynolds did not come up with an indictment of Watchorn’s administration, but instead issued a strong condemnation of the treatment of mentally ill immigrants in detention. This is not what Prescott Hall was looking for.
Part of Hall’s anger stemmed from the fact that Watchorn had tried to play both sides of the immigration debate. He accurately sensed a slippery nature to Watchorn’s personality. He had already proved himself a man a little too eager to please his superiors, someone who easily switched from Democrat to Republican when it suited his career. Watchorn appeared tough on immigration early in his term, but later trimmed his sails when he began reporting to Oscar Straus.
In July 1905, Watchorn wrote to Robert DeC. Ward, explaining that he had no qualms about separating families when one member was ordered excluded and the rest admitted. “What sort of protection would be afforded the United States,” wrote Watchorn, “if any such minor children, wife or parents are of the kind who are going to furnish as a legacy a progeny of the sort which you and I and all thoughtful persons must of necessity view with no little apprehension?” In words that would have shocked those who saw him as an advocate for immigrants, Watchorn told Ward that he wondered whether “misplaced sympathy is not responsible for more evils than the so-called callousness of which we are occasionally accused.”
Keeping up a correspondence with the Boston restrictionists, Watchorn wrote Hall in 1906 to discuss a paper that William Williams had recently delivered. Watchorn was hurt that Hall remarked that it was a shame that Williams was no longer at Ellis Island, implying that a lax enforcement now existed there. Watchorn was eager to correct that impression, writing that he was in near complete agreement with Hall and Williams, and that it was his “unremitting endeavor to prevent the landing of any and all such persons” defined as mental or physical defectives. Hall responded by calling Watchorn an “exceptionally capable and energetic official.”
That was before Oscar Straus. Now Prescott Hall was not the only one unhappy. Judson Swift of the American Tract Society wrote to Roosevelt to complain that Watchorn, supposedly under orders from Straus, was hampering the efforts of missionaries at Ellis Island. Protestant missionaries looked upon the crush of immigrants streaming through the inspection station not so much as a fearful deluge as an evangelical opportunity. In his 1906 book entitled Aliens or Americans? Baptist minister Howard Grose called the new immigrants an opportunity for evangelists and asked: “Will we give the gospel to the heathen in America?” Some were truly ministering to the newcomers, while others were busy targeting Catholics and Jews with Protestant pamphlets written in their native language.
Jewish leaders complained of the situation to Watchorn, who ordered missionaries to stop proselytizing to Jewish immigrants. Rumors began to circulate among Protestant churches in New York that Watchorn had threatened to banish from Ellis Island anyone using the name of Jesus Christ. Although Swift insinuated that Straus’s Judaism was the cause of Watchorn’s actions, Straus himself was unaware, though not unsupportive, of what his subordinate had done.
Roosevelt had little sympathy for the criticism and dispatched his secretary, William Loeb, to deal with Swift. Speaking for the president, Loeb chastised Swift for bringing Straus’s religion into the matter, calling it “unwarranted slander” to which “missionaries of the Gospel should be most averse.” Loeb also noted that Watchorn, a devout Methodist himself, could hardly be antagonistic toward religion since his own brother was a Protestant minister.
At the same time that Swift was complaining about the treatment of Christian missionaries, New York police commissioner Theodore Bingham blasted Watchorn for failing to deport immigrants convicted of crimes, calling on the president to appoint a new commissioner dedicated to keeping the “bars up against the criminal class.”
Watchorn noted that in the preceding year, warrants for deportation had risen almost 50 percent. Still, Bingham would not relent and repeatedly stressed the connection between immigration and criminality. He furnished Watchorn and Straus with a list of Italian immigrants in New York with criminal records, baiting officials to deport them. Straus told Watchorn he was “ready to cooperate in ridding the country of the class that can be deported under the immigration laws.” Warrants soon arrived from Washington for their arrest.
Immigration restrictionists saw further proof of the nefarious influence of Oscar Straus in the case of the commissioner-general of immigration, Frank Sargent. Many people noticed a change in Sargent after he began to report to Oscar Straus. Public Health Service official Victor Safford recounted the tale of a hearing in Boston. When the doctors recommended sending home a Swedish girl with trachoma, Sargent replied: “If you exclude this alien and the case comes to Washington on appeal, backed by the political influence which the relatives evidently can command, I can assure you that your decision will be reversed and the alien admitted to the country.” Safford noted that by early 1908, Sargent had become “discouraged, sick, entirely dependent upon his official salary and wondering what was to become of his family after he was gone.”
Samuel Gompers, another friend of Sargent, noticed that he had become so “disappointed and crestfallen” working under Straus that he sought reelection to his old post as president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. When he lost his bid, Sargent was faced with the realization that he had to remain in his government job. Needing money to support his family, he could not resign on principle and would have to continue upholding interpretations of the law that compromised his beliefs.
By the summer of 1908, the pressures began to get to Sargent. He struggled with severe stomach problems and would eventually suffer a stroke. After two more strokes and a serious fall, Sargent died in early September at the age of fifty-three. “If ever a man died of a broken heart it was he,” wrote Gompers, “because he found himself in a position which he deemed it necessary to retain and yet was unable to carry out his ideals of public service and righteous conduct.” Remarking on Sargent’s death in his diary, Oscar Straus spoke well of his subordinate, calling him, with a touch of mild condescension, “a good and conscientious official and whatever defects he had were not the result of lack of human sympathy, but education.”
Straus’s views on immigration also had an effect on another old labor restrictionist. Terence V. Powderly had been out of steady work for over three years. By 1906, Roosevelt had made amends with him and sent him on a fact-finding mission to Europe to investigate the causes of European immigration. After Powderly submitted his report, Roosevelt named him to a new position. The old union leader needed a steady government paycheck, but the man who once led Washington’s immigration office now had to take a subordinate position in the agency he once ran.
Powderly was now in charge of the new Division of Information. Its goal was to “promote a beneficial distribution of aliens admitted into the United States.” This was a reform supported by both sides of the immigration debate. In fact, the motto of the National Immigration Restriction League was “Distribution and Education Rather than Restriction.” What Powderly’s new organization did was more prosaic. It collected information on wages and employment throughout the country, put the data together, and got the information into the hands of immigrants at stations like Ellis Island.
It was a rather naïve view of how immigrants behaved. When most immigrants arrived in America, they usually stayed with friends and relatives from their homeland in immigrant ghettos. No matter how overcrowded and bleak these neighborhoods might seem to the outsider, they served as a safety blanket that provided the greenhorn with a foot into America’s golden door. The air of the familiar—language, newspapers, food, music—was more enticing than job opportunities elsewhere. The Lower East Side of Manhattan or the West Side of Chicago were more attractive than the steel mills of Alabama or the farms of Texas.
It is no surprise that Powderly’s efforts were relatively unsuccessful. Between 1908 and 1913 only 23,000 immigrants made use of Powderly’s information. Despite this seeming failure, labor leaders pounced on the new agency. Gompers, who never had much respect for Powderly, called the Division of Information “a strike-breaking agency.” The head of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen told Powderly that his division would only be a success if it could “convince the people of Europe to stay at home.” Gompers’s deputy, John Mitchell, told Powderly he wanted him to distribute unemployment statistics to immigrants to discourage them from coming.
The in-house journal of the Knights of Labor remarked that its former leader had once been known as a restrictionist until he started working for Oscar Straus. Powderly, the journal mused, “must feel greatly embarrassed, when to keep a job, he manufactures new speeches and opinions at variance with those of only yesterday.” It may have been a change of heart brought about by age, but the reality was that Powderly now reported to Oscar Straus. Desperate to keep his government paycheck and avoid another embarrassing dismissal, he quietly modified his views.
AMERICANS TRIED TO BALANCE concerns about newcomers with the country’s traditional role in welcoming immigrants. Allan McLaughlin, a doctor with the U.S. Marine-Hospital Service, was one of those who framed the immigration debate within the boundaries of the political center. The complete exclusion of immigrants, he argued, was “illogical, bigoted, and un-American,” while a completely open door was “an act of lunacy” and a “crime against the body politic.”
Instead, McLaughlin called for the strict enforcement of the present law. That was also Frank Sargent’s position. He made clear he had no desire to see a closed-door policy and believed that America had need of “a high class of aliens who are healthy and will become self-supporting.” The real question was how to divide desirable immigrants from the undesirable.
“The advocates of absolutely unrestricted immigration are too few to be taken into account,” noted The Outlook. Prescott Hall could only count about a handful of people who believed in a completely open-door policy, the most prominent being William Lloyd Garrison Jr., the son of the famed abolitionist. When pro-immigration lawyer Max Kohler debated restrictionist academic Jeremiah Jenks in 1911, he applauded the fact that twenty-four thousand immigrants had been rejected in the previous year, thereby proving the effectiveness of the law. He also wanted no restrictions on “healthy, willing, industrious immigrants, whom this country needs as much as they need this country.”
With remarkable flexibility, Theodore Roosevelt found himself operating within that debate. When immigration supporters complained about the restrictionist leanings of William Williams, Roosevelt named an ethnically diverse panel to investigate him. Later, when restrictionists complained about the lax enforcement of laws under Robert Watchorn, the president named an IRL member to investigate. Only Roosevelt could have pulled it off.
For all of his early bluster about immigration, Roosevelt was surprisingly mute about the issue in his final years in the White House. The young patrician who had once supported the literacy test and corrected a New York newspaper for calling him an opponent of restriction, was replaced by an older, more politically savvy man. Roosevelt began his presidency bemoaning the deficiencies of immigration law and calling for more categories of exclusion. In his last Annual Message to Congress, Roosevelt never once mentioned immigration.
Dr. Victor Safford struck at the heart of Roosevelt’s conflicted mind. A close friend of Edward McSweeney, the doctor believed that Roosevelt had discovered “that while it was good politics to have stringent immigration laws to point to, it was poor practical politics to enforce them impartially.”
This was how Roosevelt straddled the immigration question. In his openness to ethnic and religious groups, he satisfied immigrants and their defenders. In his rhetorical concerns about the quality of new immigrants, he satisfied restrictionists, but at the end of the day all of his talk about restriction was little more than bluster. On immigration, the straight-talking reformer blurs into an amorphous, but highly successful politician.
It was the kind of ideological flexibility and pragmatism that would have pleased George Washington Plunkitt.