Chapter 10
In many important respects, indeed, the foreign immigrant is the very anti-type of the pauper…. Their very presence here shows the desire for bettering one’s condition and the energy to set about it that is so characteristically a lack in the true pauper.
—Kate Holladay Claghorn, 1904
It is therefore high time that aliens of poor physique should be debarred from our shores. When we raise horse or cattle or dogs or sheep, we select good, strong healthy stock. If we have any concern for the physical development of our race, we should certainly be no less careful in the selection of our human stock.
—Robert DeC. Ward, 1905
BY FEBRUARY 1910, THEODORE ROOSEVELT HAD RETURNED from his post-presidential big-game hunting trip to Africa. A private citizen now ensconced in the Manhattan offices of his new employer, The Outlook magazine, the fifty-one-year-old Roosevelt was not a man accustomed to retirement. His discomfort was made even worse by his increasing annoyance with his handpicked successor, William Howard Taft.
One day, the former president received some friends, including Robert Watchorn, at his new office. Pulling him aside by the arm and leading him to a quiet corner away from the others, Roosevelt asked: “Tell me, Mr. Watchorn, why did you leave your post at Ellis Island?”
“Because you left the White House,” Watchorn responded. “Or in other words because you are a friend of mine,” the former president said with a mischievous grin, receiving the confirmation he had sought. Watchorn’s answer reinforced Roosevelt’s belief that Taft had been forcing out Roosevelt loyalists. Yet Roosevelt was also suffering from a bit of selective memory. As president, he had brushed aside complaints about Watchorn’s supposed lax enforcement of immigration laws, but not the charges of corruption that had surfaced by 1908.
While he had expressed a desire to renew Watchorn’s appointment, Roosevelt also asked Herbert Knox Smith, solicitor of the Department of Commerce and Labor, to look into the accusations. The charges were relatively minor, dealing with accusations that Watchorn had forced the owner of the food contract at Ellis Island to cater private parties for him without charge. Watchorn denied the accusation, claiming he reimbursed the company except where “extravagant and extortionate charges” were made. Roosevelt seemed uneasy about the arrangement, but did not ask that formal charges be brought and renominated Watchorn. The request died in the Senate before Taft’s inauguration.
Prescott Hall had been filling Roosevelt’s ear with negative stories about Oscar Straus and Watchorn. Now he turned his attention to the incoming president, telling Taft that Roosevelt had been deceived in appointing Straus to his cabinet, calling him a man who “has done all in his power to interpret and apply the existing laws in such a way as to practically nullify some sections entirely and to weaken and demoralize the whole service.” As for Watchorn, Hall doubted his sincerity in enforcing immigration laws.
Despite the criticism, many people entreated Taft to renominate Watchorn. That was not to be. Noting that those around Taft were “not only not friendly to me but were distinctly unfriendly,” Watchorn knew his days were numbered. Taft had already eased out Straus as secretary of Commerce and Labor by naming him ambassador to Turkey and replacing him with Charles Nagel, a German-American lawyer from St. Louis. With Roosevelt and Straus gone, Watchorn lost his strongest defenders. When it became clear that Taft would not renominate him, he resigned. The official White House statement noted that Taft had found Watchorn’s administration “unsatisfactory.”
The personal attacks took their toll on Watchorn. When a reporter asked him after his resignation to comment on affairs at Ellis Island, Watchorn bluntly declined: “When I left the island I cut all connections. There has always been trouble down at that place and always will be. I’m out of it.” As late as 1913, Watchorn was still seething over his dismissal, complaining to Taft’s chief aide that he had been “very shabbily treated in the manner of my elimination from the service.”
If Watchorn was upset with Taft, the president complained that conditions at Ellis Island were “not what they ought to be” and sought out a man who could put them “on a proper basis.” Much as Roosevelt had been disgusted with the Powderly-McSweeney imbroglio when he took office, Taft seemed unhappy with the controversy that surrounded Watchorn.
Just as Roosevelt had done seven years earlier, Taft turned to William Williams to put things in order at Ellis Island. Williams, four years younger than the new president and a fellow graduate of Yale, was reluctant to reenter public service, but eventually agreed to return. One of Williams’s first orders of business upon coming back to his old job at the end of May 1909 was to declare that Assistant Commissioner Joe Murray, his former nemesis, would be leaving. Replacing him would be Byron Uhl, who had been working at Ellis Island since its opening in 1892.
Now that Williams was returning to Ellis Island, he was eager to get to work on what he felt was the most pressing concern: tightening the sieve that would strain out larger numbers of undesirable immigrants.
Even after leaving Ellis Island in early 1905, Williams continued to be an outspoken advocate for greater restriction. Writing in the Journal of Social Science, he charged that the immigration law was good as far is it went, but failed to sift out “a certain minority of immigrants who are generally undesirable because unintelligent, of low vitality, almost, though not quite, poverty-stricken.” He argued that roughly 25 percent of immigrants currently admitted were “not wanted.” He called them “the undesirable minority of immigrants.” Williams carefully pointed out that he was not against all immigration. “I will say that I have as little sympathy with those who would curtail all immigration as I have with those who would admit all intending immigrants, good, bad, or indifferent,” he wrote.
Part of his concern with this “undesirable minority” was with what he called its “racial effects.” Immigrants flocking to the United States in the early twentieth century were different from earlier settlers and immigrants. “We owe our present civilization and standing amongst nations chiefly to people of a type widely different from that of those now coming here in such numbers,” Williams wrote. Those older immigrant groups largely hailed from northern Europe and consisted “mainly of the rugged types that were kindred to the native stock.” These groups were “as good as the new immigrants are bad,” he told the New York Times after returning to Ellis Island.
Although he questioned whether newer immigrants could ever be assimilated into American society, Williams found it “impracticable to legislate directly or discriminate against any race or locality of Europe as we have done in the case of the Chinese.” Even he understood that any exclusion of Europeans based on nationality or ethnicity, as had occurred with the Chinese, would violate America’s basic understanding of immigration. However, Williams’s emphasis on this difference between new and old immigrants foreshadowed drastic changes to come.
The letter of the law, which Williams deeply respected, forced him to accept even those immigrants he believed would bring down the nation’s standard of living and weaken American democracy. Working within these legal and ideological confines, Williams set out to do what he could to protect the Republic. Seven days after taking over, he distributed the following note to his staff:
It is necessary that the standard of inspection at Ellis Island be raised. Notice hereof is given publicly in order that intending immigrants may be advised before embarkation that our immigration laws will be strictly enforced, and that those who are unable to measure up to its requirements may not waste their time or money in coming here, only to encounter the hardships of deportation.
Williams had now put everyone—from inspectors to politicians to immigrants—on notice. America was receiving too many “low-grade immigrants” and “riffraff,” he insisted. The country’s present laws, in his opinion, kept out “only what may be termed ‘scum,’ or the very worst elements that seek to come here.” William Williams was determined to do something about it.
If Taft thought his appointment of William Williams would quiet the storms at Ellis Island, he was sorely mistaken.
HERSCH SKURATOWSKI ARRIVED AT Ellis Island in late June 1909 with $2.75 in his pocket. The twenty-nine-year-old Russian Jewish butcher appeared to be a desirable immigrant in every way. He was in good health, literate, intelligent, and neither a criminal, a polygamist, or an anarchist. Yet Skuratowski was ordered excluded by officials at Ellis Island because he was deemed “likely to become a public charge.”
This little phrase became a stumbling block for many individuals coming to America. Between 1900 and 1907, 63 percent of all immigrants barred from the country were kept out because officials deemed them likely to become public charges.
The public charge clause had been a feature of American immigration law since 1882, although the law originally barred those “unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” In 1891, that was changed to “likely to become a public charge.” With this new phrasing, the government could bar paupers, who were already dependent on public funds for support, as well as those whom immigration officials suspected might end up as public charges in the future.
The clause embodied a basic American belief: immigrants should be able to take care of themselves. Although this was an era before the federal welfare state, persons were considered a public charge if they were being taken care of by either private charities or local government institutions such as poorhouses or asylums.
It also possessed another characteristic of American immigration law: it was vaguely defined. As one legal scholar would write in the 1930s: “Likely to become a public charge is used as a kind of miscellaneous file into which are placed cases where the officers think the alien ought not to enter, but the facts do not come within any specific requirements of the statutes.” It was the responsibility of officials at Ellis Island to decide which immigrants were likely to become public charges.
Realizing this, and wanting to tighten inspection standards as he stated in his first notice to Ellis Island employees, Williams issued a second one at the end of June.
Certain steamship companies are bringing to this port many immigrants whose funds are manifestly inadequate for their proper support until such time as they are likely to obtain profitable employment…. In the absence of a statutory provision, no hard and fast rule can be laid down as to the amount of money an immigrant must bring with him, but in most cases it will be unsafe for immigrants to arrive with less than twenty-five dollars ($25) besides railroad ticket to destination, while in many instances they should have more. They must in addition, of course, satisfy the authorities that they will not become charges either on public or private charity.
The money test had occasionally reared its head in the past. In his first Annual Message to Congress, Theodore Roosevelt called for immigrants to show “proper proof of personal capacity to earn an American living and enough money to insure a decent start under American conditions.” Williams had informally tried such a money test during his first administration, but Watchorn disavowed it when he took over.
Now Williams was reinstating the test. Recognizing that he was entering murky legal territory, he said that the $25 requirement was not a fixed rule, but instead “a humane notice to intending immigrants” that they should have a certain amount of money on them when they landed. As for Hersch Skuratowski, he had arrived on June 22, six days before Williams issued his new rule. Further stretching the law, officials kept Skuratowski in detention until his board of special inquiry hearing, which was conveniently held on the same day that Williams made his $25 edict.
Twenty-five dollars was a significant amount of money in 1909. In 2007 dollars, it would equal roughly $570. Add to that steerage tickets that cost between $30 and $40, and the cost of coming to America would now become an onerous financial burden.
Williams’s edict had an immediate effect. On its first day of enforcement, 215 of the 301 passengers on Holland-Amerika’s Ryndam liner were detained for possessing less than $25. Most would not be sent back, but the burden of proof would now fall on immigrants to convince authorities they would not become public charges.
Conditions worsened as more immigrants piled up because of the new rule. “Trouble Feared from the Excluded,” read a New York Times headline, “The 800 Immigrants Held on Ellis Island Not Taking Deportation Easily.” One of the detainees was a twenty-three-year-old Russian medical student named Alexander Rudniew, who was ordered deported as likely to become a public charge because he arrived with less than $25. At one point, a frustrated Rudniew lashed out in Yiddish at Ellis Island officials, who feared that the doctor might stir the detainees to take over the station. A night watchman pulled a gun on Rudniew, which seemed to settle down the crowd. Rudniew would eventually be admitted into the country.
On July 4, Rudniew was one of a hundred detained Russian Jews, ranging in age from eight to fifty-eight, to sign a letter to the Forward, New York’s Yiddish-language newspaper, complaining of crowded conditions at Ellis Island. The editors printed the letter on page one. “Everyone goes around dejected and cries and wails,” the letter read. Many of the detainees had deserted from the Russian army and feared deportation. They called Williams’s $25 rule an “outrage” and “nonsense” and hoped to alert fellow Jews as to “how we suffer here.” The American Hebrew sent a correspondent to Ellis Island and found that none were sick, although most were pale and flustered from their ordeal.
Williams was unmoved by the protests and thoroughly unapologetic. “I have enforced the laws,” he told a reporter. “Why shouldn’t I? That’s what I am here for.”
Many Americans were glad that Williams was there. Russell Bellamy, a member of the Immigration Restriction League, told him his “appointment is most agreeable because we know you will enforce the laws your predecessor and his Chief so shamefully ignored.” Chiming in from Boston, the gloomy Prescott Hall was cheered by Williams’s appointment: “Nothing has made me as happy for a long time as feeling that you are there and seeing, as far as I do from the papers, how you are cleaning things up.”
Eighty-two-year-old Orville Victor, a leading editor in the world of dime-novel publishing, was less genteel. Calling himself an American “of early colonial ancestry,” Victor congratulated Williams on his appointment and wrote: “What a stench in the nostrils of true Americans are the dirty Jew lawyers who rush to the ‘defense’ of their kin whom you would exclude…. More power to you, and success to your efforts to keep out the dirty scum of European fields, bogs and warrens.” William Patterson, who described himself simply as an “obscure American,” wrote Williams that “God only knows what havoc is going to be brought upon the United States by the influx of Europe’s scum…. You cannot render the country a greater service than by restricting the inflow of worn-out, decadent, and impoverished Europeans.”
Not all of Williams’s correspondents were as sympathetic. An anonymous student from PS 62 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side complained to Williams in ungrammatical, yet heartfelt, prose:
You don’t realize what you are doing. You kill people without a knife. Does money make you a person? A person who has a mind and hands and has not $25 cash is not a person? Has he to be killed? Here is the free America. People how much do they suffer until they come here. [sic] If you would have conscious [sic] in you would not do such things. You think that they are not people but animals…. I do not see what do foreigners do harm [sic].
PS 62 had opened its doors a few years earlier to deal with the massive influx of mostly Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side, a neighborhood bursting with overcrowded tenements. Though Williams’s edict may have looked like a patriotic gesture in the Upper East Side, it had a very different effect on those living on the Lower East Side.
The child who wrote that letter was not a lonely voice, as groups such as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) worked to assist Jewish immigrants. Irving Lipsitch, the organization’s New York representative, worked closely with Ellis Island officials, while Simon Wolf lobbied Washington.
For Jews who fled anti-Semitic oppression in Europe, protest in America had to be carefully calibrated so as not to stir up ancient hatreds here. However, there was a change in the way American Jewish groups approached immigration. In the 1890s, they had been largely deferential to authorities during the typhus fever and cholera crises. During Williams’s first term at Ellis Island, Jewish groups were cautiously supportive, but not without concerns. By 1909, however, some took a more oppositional approach. To Max Kohler, a lawyer working for the American Jewish Committee, the courts seemed a more appropriate place to challenge immigration law.
The HIAS took on the cases of Hersch Skuratowski and fourteen other Russian Jews detained for possessing less than $25. The organization was unable to prevent the deportation of eleven of them, but did convince Kohler and another lawyer named Abram Elkus to file habeas corpus petitions with U.S. District Court Judge Learned Hand for Skuratowski and the other three—Nechemie Beitz, Meyer Gelvot, and Gershon Farber—who arrived together on the steamship Raglan Castle from Rotterdam.
They argued that the $25 rule had created an extra-legal means of exclusion. “The retroactive character of these regulations makes them all the more unjust and oppressive,” according to the brief. They countered the idea that these men were likely to become public charges. Skuratowki was a butcher by trade, literate, and had a cousin and other family in the country. He left behind his wife and two children in Russia, where he owned his home, as well as a cow and some farming equipment. This was hardly the profile of a pauper. Similar cases were made for the other three men, two tailors and a baker.
The lawyers were not just arguing the merits of these four immigrants; they also set out to attack much of the administrative and legal apparatus for making decisions at Ellis Island. They claimed that the men did not receive due process and were not allowed the benefit of counsel during their hearings. The brief also charged that members of the board of special inquiry were not “free agents,” because they were also subordinates of Williams and felt pressured to carry out his orders. “The officers here are afraid to decide cases on their merits,” Kohler said. It was as if assistant district attorneys were sitting in judgment of cases brought to court by their boss, the district attorney.
There was something else that bothered Kohler and Elkus. Toward the end of their petition, the lawyers included a lengthy section decrying the “unconstitutional classification and discrimination…as to his Russian nationality and his Hebrew religion.” Official government documents had referred to Skuratowski as a “Russian Hebrew.” Kohler and Elkus contended that Ellis Island officials “illegally and without authority took into consideration the fact which they spread upon their minutes that applicant is a Russian Hebrew.” They did not accuse Williams and his staff of overt anti-Semitism, but argued that “things foreign to our own conception produce at least a subconscious feeling, and that we may entertain prejudices of which we have no distinct consciousness.” Religious classification by government authorities was unconstitutional and un-American, the lawyers claimed, a situation only made worse by the fact that Judaism was the only religion to be so defined by immigration officials.
The controversy over the classification of immigrants had begun with an 1898 report by then commissioner general of immigration Terence Powderly, Ellis Island assistant commissioner Edward McSweeney, and Victor Safford, a doctor at Ellis Island. Officials had been unhappy that immigrants were being classified solely by country of origin, which meant large multi-ethnic political divisions such as Russia or the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Lost within those groupings were myriad ethnic identities. People coming from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for instance, could have been German, Jewish, Polish, Magyar (Hungarian), Bohemian (Czech), or Croatian.
In its place, the commission recommended that all immigrants be classified by their nationality and their race. That is why officials marked Hersch Skuratowski as a Russian Hebrew. As Powderly explained, “an Englishman does not lose his race characteristics by coming from South Africa, a German his by coming from France, or a Hebrew his, though he come from any country on the globe.”
Powderly made clear that officials were using race in the “popular rather than in its strict ethnological sense.” Basically, they meant to use the word as modern Americans would use the term “ethnicity,” while they used the term “color” for what is now called race. However, that qualification did little to settle the controversy.
Powderly and his colleagues also made clear that their endeavor had nothing to do with targeting undesirable immigrants based on their race. Instead, they hoped that better classifications of ethnic backgrounds would assist officials in understanding the nature of immigration, especially as it related to labor issues. “It is not intended as a history of an immigrant’s antecedents but as a clew [sic] to what will be his immediate future after he has landed,” the report concluded.
As Safford noted, Russian Jews had been coming to the United States in larger numbers in the 1890s. “They have for the most part entered well defined fields of labor here and have given rise to special labor problems,” he wrote to Powderly in 1898. “The Immigration Bureau fails to give a clew [sic] to the size of this movement. They are lumped up with Poles, people of a distinct race and of different capacities and who have gone into entirely different fields of industry.” Officials sought better information about who was coming to America, what kinds of work they did, and where they were heading.
For Jews, this new classification was a double-edged sword. Over his many years with HIAS, Simon Wolf protested the Hebrew classification to government officials, arguing that Jews were not a distinct race. However, when he sought to compile the opinions of leading Jewish authorities on the matter, he found that his views were not universally shared. Many Jews, especially Zionists, did consider themselves a “race or people” and had no objection to the government’s classification scheme.
Decades later, even Max Kohler had a change of heart. Such a system, he explained, enabled “the Government to furnish Yiddish-speaking interpreters quickly in the majority of Jewish cases pending before the immigration officials,” he wrote, and “it enabled the Jewish immigrant aid societies quickly to identify their prospective protégés.”
Now it was William Williams’s turn to offer a point-by-point rebuttal of the lawyers’ brief. He defended not only his $25 rule but also the entire structure of administrative law at Ellis Island. He admitted to “certain shortcomings” on the part of the boards of special inquiry, but argued that better training of those who sat on the boards was the answer, not legal challenges. Not only were the lawyers wrong about the law, Williams believed, but their real goal was not the improvement of immigration regulation, but rather “to facilitate the admission of one particular class of immigrants,” no doubt referring to Jewish immigrants.
Williams was not happy about having to defend himself in court. He resented that the court case was brought by “four ignorant aliens who do not know a word of English” and was indignant at the “objectionable manner” in which Kohler and Elkus put forward their critique of his administration. Williams claimed that even before he received the petition, he had already delayed the deportation of these four men in order to rehear their cases. Now that the case was going to court, he told a representative of HIAS that if he was “expecting to compel the granting of a rehearing through the threat of habeas corpus proceedings, I assure you that you will not succeed.”
Williams assumed that the petitions would be quickly dismissed. After he had won in court, he would grant a rehearing to the four men and most likely allow them to land. “Any other course,” Williams wrote, “might place the immigration authorities in the attitude of wishing to be vindictive.” However, government officials were receiving some disturbing news. Simon Wolf told the assistant commissioner-general of immigration, Frank Larned, that he hoped that the immigration service “would act in such a way as not to embarrass itself.” He gave confidential information that led Larned to believe that if the government did not relent on these cases, “the Government’s exclusive control of these matters might be put in hazard to a certain extent.” Perhaps Judge Hand was not going to dismiss this case.
A court decision could have upended the entire inspection and exclusion apparatus at Ellis Island and opened up every decision to a judicial appeal. Not wanting to risk this, Williams immediately ordered a new hearing for the four immigrants before Judge Hand could make a ruling. Witnesses appeared vowing employment for the four men, money was deposited in their name by Jewish organizations, and Williams declared himself satisfied that, especially in light of the publicity surrounding the case, the four would not become public charges. All were allowed to land and their petitions withdrawn. “We have now shown them that the immigration authorities can do full justice without the necessity of the intervention of the courts,” Williams wrote somewhat disingenuously. “What has now happened is exactly what would have occurred sooner had they not rushed to the court.”
After the resolution of the case, Secretary Charles Nagel came to Ellis Island with Elkus and Simon Wolf. In public, Nagel was supportive of his commissioner, but the visit signaled that he took the charges against Williams seriously. In private he made his displeasure known, albeit in a cautious and respectful manner. Nagel told Williams that his $25 rule—which Nagel had just a few weeks earlier approved—had already served its purpose to warn immigrants and steamship companies that the supposedly lax policies of the Watchorn years were over. He believed the rule was now “of no value, but on the contrary is calculated to give you and the Bureau and the Department trouble.”
“There is no more need for making suggestions as to the amount of money than there is for saying how short a leg must be to constitute lameness,” Nagel wrote after his visit. He was also concerned that the $25 rule was operable at Ellis Island but not at other inspection stations and would create confusion if each station created its own rules. In conclusion, he reminded Williams that “we can well afford even to err on the side of fairness and toleration.” The $25 rule appeared to be history. Though a personal victory for Hersch Skuratowski and his friends, it was no victory for Kohler and others who sought to liberalize the process at Ellis Island.
The following year, the U.S. District Court heard another habeas corpus petition challenging the detention and deportation of Vincenzo Canfora. The sixty-year-old Italian bookbinder had lived in America with his wife and six children since 1895, but he got sick and had his leg amputated below the knee. He then returned to Italy for a brief visit with his mother. Before his arrival at Ellis Island, a letter arrived from one Joseph Ruggio alerting officials to Canfora’s arrival and alleging that he had been a public charge when recovering from his amputation at Bellevue Hospital, where doctors performed the surgery for free. Upon his arrival, Canfora was ordered excluded as suffering from a physical defect that would likely make him a public charge, despite his skill as a bookbinder, his $200 in savings, and the presence in America of his family, including self-supporting children.
The judge called the deportation order against Canfora “an act of cruel injustice,” yet he ruled that he was “compelled to dismiss this writ,” since immigration laws “confer exclusive power upon the immigration officials to determine such questions” as to the admissibility of immigrants. As long as officials were following the law and their own procedures, the judge had “no jurisdiction to interfere” with the decision to deport Canfora. Having said that, the judge expressed his personal hope that officials would reconsider Canfora’s deportation. Officials did just that and Vincenzo Canfora was allowed to rejoin his family.
These cases show that while a noncitizen living in the United States would be covered by constitutional protections, noncitizens stopped at the gates of Ellis Island were not. This was upheld in a 1905 Supreme Court decision dealing with the due process rights of a Chinese-American named Ju Toy. Writing for the majority, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared that at stations like Ellis Island, an immigrant, “although physically within our boundaries, is to be regarded as if he had been stopped at the limit of our jurisdiction and kept there while his right to enter was under debate.”
In essence, the Court created a legal fiction that Ellis Island was not part of the United States. Immigrants arriving at Ellis Island may have thought they were on American soil, but by law they had not technically crossed the border until they were officially declared “free to land” by officials. Ellis Island had become the nation’s premier border; few immigrants standing in the Great Hall would have realized that, in the eyes of the courts, they were still on the wrong side of that border.
This peculiar legal situation brought up another issue. Is a child born to an immigrant woman detained at the hospital at Ellis Island and not yet legally admitted to the country, an American citizen? According to the Fourteenth Amendment, it would appear that the child would be. In granting citizenship to freed slaves, that amendment defined citizens as “persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Hence the idea of birthright citizenship, that birth on American soil automatically conferred U.S. citizenship.
However, the Department of Commerce and Labor issued a legal memorandum stating that such a child would not receive automatic citizenship solely by being born at Ellis Island or any other inspection facility, if the mother had not yet been legally admitted to the country. Focusing on the words “subject to the jurisdiction,” officials argued that although the mother had offered her allegiance to the United States by attempting to enter the country, “her offer has been refused and she does not acquire even a momentary residence.”
Such rulings, combined with Supreme Court precedents, would create a legal twilight zone around Ellis Island where immigrants had the potential for being trapped in limbo, having forsaken their native country and been rejected by their desired adoptive country. The creation of this legal fiction would pose challenges to American law, national security, and concepts of human rights for decades to come.
DESPITE THE SETBACKS, WILLIAMS would not completely give up on his monetary test. In March 1910, he was still announcing that “immigrants will not be allowed to land without funds adequate for their support until such time as they are likely to find employment.” He did not mention any specific dollar amount, but referred people to his earlier memo laying out the $25 rule. Williams was nothing if not stubborn. However, he needed to find other tools with which to weed out undesirable immigrants. Now officials began to focus more closely on immigrants who possessed “poor physiques” or were suffering from “low vitality.”
These supposedly weak and listless new immigrants would never make it in industrial America. Their lack of strength would mean unemployment and poverty. Some Americans believed that the poor physiques and low vitality of immigrants indicated a genetic disposition, not caused by environment or circumstances. Those genes would be passed down to their children and grandchildren, lowering the overall vitality and strength of the American people for generations to come.
In 1902, commissioner-general of immigration Frank Sargent warned William Williams that an immigrant should be excluded unless it “was positive from appearance and the physical condition of the aliens that they could immediately obtain employment, with good wages, whereby they could support themselves and not become public charges.” Hinting at a monetary test, Sargent wrote that, “sturdy Scotchmen, Irishmen, or Germans who land at Ellis Island with but a few dollars can enter immediately and find employment.” Those of other nationalities with little money, however, “should not be permitted to enter unless they produce satisfactory proof of their ability to work and support themselves.”
Medical officials initially classified immigrants with “poor physique” as those suffering from what was called “chicken breast” or displaying symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis, but not necessarily the disease itself. Immigration officials, however, wanted to stretch out the term to encompass a wider range of alleged physical defects.
Sargent defined a “poor physique” as those who were “undersized, poorly developed, with feeble heart action, arteries below standard size…physically degenerate.” An immigrant with a poor physique was not just more likely to become a public charge; he would also “transmit his undesirable qualities to his offspring.”
William Williams agreed that a broader interpretation of the term “poor physique” might achieve greater restriction within the law. “I am glad that you approve of my remarks as to the low vitality of many immigrants,” Williams wrote Prescott Hall. “I would like to see some steps taken to keep out immigrants who do not come up to some proper physical standard.”
He had been quite taken with an article written by Allan McLaughlin, a doctor at Ellis Island who noted that “thousands of immigrants of poor physique are recorded as such by the medical inspectors at Ellis Island.” The problem, as McLaughlin understood it, was that nothing in the law mandated that immigrants of poor physiques be excluded, therefore “this mere note of physical defect carries little significance under the present law, and the vast majority of them are admitted by the immigration authorities, because it does not appear that the physical defect noted will make the immigrant a public charge.”
Doctors with the Public Health and Marine Hospital Service were conflicted about the term “poor physique.” Dr. George Stoner, who was stationed at Ellis Island, listed a number of physical maladies that might constitute a poor physique, including respiratory problems, “deficient muscular development,” poor circulation, and an inadequate proportion between height and weight. However, he was concerned that the term itself “does not imply a clinical or pathological entity.” Surgeon General Walter Wyman agreed. “Poor physique is not a diagnosis,” he said.
The Immigration Act of 1907 would provide restrictionists with a way to shoehorn “poor physique” into immigration inspection. Many immigration defenders thought the bill a great success for what was not included: a literacy test. However, the new law expanded classifications for excluding aliens, including one that allowed doctors to certify immigrants with a mental or physical defect that might affect their ability to earn a living. In effect, the new law would allow immigrants to be excluded from entering the country if their physical appearance was poor, to the extent that officials felt they would not be able to survive in America.
This did not mean loathsome diseases or dangerous and contagious diseases (such as trachoma), which were already excludable under the law. Medical officers certified immigrants with these diseases, as well as those suffering from insanity, epilepsy, and low intelligence, as Class A, which meant they were automatically excluded by law. Immigrants with poor physiques and other physical deficiencies were certified as Class B, which meant that their exclusion was at the discretion of immigration officials.
In the first full year that the new law was in effect, 870 immigrants were barred from the country under this new clause. By 1912, that number would grow to over 4,200. However, this did not satisfy Prescott Hall. He wrote to Robert Watchorn, commissioner of Ellis Island at the time, that only 34 percent of immigrants initially classified as having a poor physique were deported, while the rest were allowed to enter on bond or on appeal. Watchorn responded that most of those admitted were older parents coming to stay with their adult children already in the United States, and therefore “not prospective progenitors, for the most part.” There is, of course, something comical about the gaunt and sickly Prescott Hall complaining about the poor physiques of incoming immigrants.
When Williams took over in 1909, he focused more closely on the new law. He made a long list of ailments that might qualify an immigrant for exclusion. It included ankylosis (stiffness) of the joints; arteriosclerosis; chronic inflammation of lymph glands; hernia; goiter; lupus; and varicose veins. Even otherwise productive and healthy immigrants who were deaf or mute might be excluded under the new rules. All immigrants “not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to land” would be pulled aside for a hearing, but only those with ailments “in aggravated form,” to the extent they would affect their ability to earn a living, would find themselves excluded.
In his first annual report since returning to Ellis Island, Williams noted that many of the previous year’s detentions were due to “serious physical defects discovered by our surgeons,” placing these immigrants under what Williams termed the “excellent provision of the law of 1907.” Williams did not believe that these ailments were randomly assigned across the racial and ethnic spectrum. “Relatively few immigrants from Northern Europe are so held,” he wrote. “It is those coming from the other parts of Europe (particularly the southern and south-eastern parts) that constitute the great majority of the doubtful cases.”
The amount of work being done was astounding. In 1911, there were 70,829 board of special inquiry hearings. That came to almost two hundred hearings a day, seven days a week, twelve months a year. Ellis Island possessed a staff, not including medical officials who did not sit on the boards, of 523 workers, although that included many, such as watchmen and maintenance staff, who did not perform inspection duties.
Williams worried about the ability of his staff to carry out that work. “Some of these men will never understand the meaning of the phrase ‘likely to become a public charge’ or how to apply it,” he wrote to Daniel Keefe, the new commissioner-general of immigration. “The fact is we are executing here some of the most difficult laws in the world with much green material.” Ellis Island was running as many as eight board hearings at any one time, necessitating more than thirty officials to sit on those boards. “We have not 32 men here who are qualified to do good Board work,” Williams lamented.
To the thousands of immigrants who passed in front of those boards, like Wolf Konig, Williams’s strict enforcement of the law had real consequences. The seventeen-year-old arrived at Ellis Island alone and penniless in June 1912; doctors certified him as “afflicted with lack of physical and sexual development for age claimed which affects ability to earn a living.” Wolf was headed to his uncle, Nathan Waxman, in Chicago, who owned a stationary store and property worth $3,800. Nathan signed an affidavit that he would support Wolf so that he would not become a public charge.
Irving Lipsitch of HIAS took up the case. He argued that Wolf was sixteen years old and therefore not underdeveloped for his age. “We believe that he can improve himself and his development with the assistance of his relatives who are prepared to help him to get better nourishment and exercise,” Lipsitch told officials. “Being a young boy, and not accustomed to travel, it is quite natural that this first long journey should cause him to become fatigued and to look poorly developed when examined.” Nathan Waxman enlisted the help of two Chicago-area congressmen to write to Secretary Nagel about their interest in Wolf’s fate. Ultimately, though, Williams stood his ground. “This boy is frail and obviously weakling [sic],” he concluded. Unfortunately for Wolf, Nagel was away from his office when his appeal reached Washington. In his place, Solicitor General Charles Earl agreed with Williams and ordered the boy back to Galicia.
Michele Sica was also a victim of the new regime at Ellis Island. He was a “bird of passage,” an immigrant who would come to America for a number of years to work and then return to his wife and children back home in Italy with the money he had saved. This would have been Sica’s fourth time in the country, having first arrived in 1901. He had lived in America for seven out of the last ten years.
On his fourth visit, in June 1911, Sica ran into problems. Though he arrived with $21, had a brother-in-law and friends in New York, and had resided in the country for a number of years over the previous decade, Sica was declared likely to become a charge. He was now forty-five years old and diagnosed with a hernia. “Although there are some favorable features in the case, he is certified to be physically defective,” wrote Assistant Commissioner Byron Uhl, “his general appearance is not good, he is considerably older than when previously in this country and there is great doubt as to his ability to earn a livelihood, afflicted as he is, as a laborer.”
Sica was ordered deported, but his expulsion was postponed until September. That meant Sica would spend the entire summer cooped up at Ellis Island, where temperatures would often rise to over 100 degrees in the poorly ventilated dorm rooms. In the meantime, Sica hired Fiorello La Guardia to argue his case. One year out from his work as an interpreter at Ellis Island, La Guardia now had his own small practice dealing with cases like Sica’s. If Williams believed that too many undesirable immigrants were getting into the country, La Guardia thought that too many desirable immigrants were being kept out.
La Guardia appealed Sica’s case to Washington. During Sica’s last stay in New York, he had worked for a Manhattan lumber company for more than three years and would be rehired if admitted. La Guardia could not claim that Sica already had a job lined up with the firm, since that would mean he was in violation of the contract-labor law. “Considering all these facts it is clear that the medical certificate cannot even incidentally be the cause of this alien’s becoming a public charge,” La Guardia concluded. “He is now in good physical condition and well able to secure and keep profitable employment.” However, La Guardia’s efforts were for naught. After three months in detention, Sica was shipped back to Italy.
Although much younger than Sica, sixteen-year-old Bartolomeo Stallone also faced exclusion. Arriving from Italy in September 1911, Stallone was headed for his brother’s home in St. Louis, where he would work as a barber. At Ellis Island, Dr. E. H. Mullan certified the young man as “afflicted with flat deformed chest, lack of muscular development (poor physique), which affects ability to earn a living.” Stallone appealed his case, but Augustus Sherman, acting in place of William Williams, reaffirmed the deportation order, noting that Stallone was “quite frail in appearance.”
When Stallone’s case landed on the desk of Secretary Nagel, he ordered that the immigrant be admitted on a $500 bond, most likely posted by his brother. After three weeks in detention at Ellis Island, Stallone was released. Two years later, Bartolomeo requested that the bond be canceled. He had to report to officials in St. Louis, who found that the young man was making $12 a week as a barber. Though he had no savings, he told officials: “I live well, dress well, and send money home to my father and mother in Italy, so I haven’t anything saved up.” Impressed by the now-eighteen-year-old, officials canceled the bond and declared him: “Physically fit for admission and that there is little or no likelihood that he will become a public charge.”
Williams himself was not completely hard-hearted in his application of the law. Jacob Duck, a twenty-one-year-old Turkish Jew, arrived in March 1910 headed to a cousin who owned a wholesale lace business on New York’s Lower East Side. Doctors certified Duck as lacking in physical development, and Williams agreed that “he does not present a very robust appearance.” On the other hand, Duck arrived with $47. Williams personally interviewed him and found him intelligent and unlikely to become a public charge. The commissioner agreed to admit Duck, even though he was “the type of immigrant that I care not to see come into this country.” It was a startling admission, both that Williams would put his personal prejudice against Jewish immigrants on an official document and that he still felt compelled to follow the law despite that prejudice.
Though Williams may have occasionally shown leniency, he found that his superiors in Washington often had a different interpretation of the law. In January 1912, Chaie Kaganowitz arrived at Ellis Island with her nine children, ranging in age from three to twenty. Williams declared that the forty-two-year-old Russian Jewish widow with poor eyesight and her youngest children were likely to become public charges. The older children were also ordered excluded for poor physical development. Williams was sitting in his office with Commissioner-General Keefe when he asked to see the family. Both Keefe and Williams agreed with the decision owing to “their extremely poor appearance.” The two older sons were carpenters, but Williams found them to be “frail appearing” and not very “robust.” Only the oldest daughter, a seamstress, made a favorable impression upon Williams and Keefe.
The family appealed its exclusion to Secretary Nagel. As confident as Williams and Keefe were that the Kaganowitzes were undesirable, Nagel thought them to be admissible. Apart from the mother’s poor eyesight, there was not a single medical certificate against any family member that would have classified any of them as excludable. All that officials had stated was that the Kaganowitz family looked poor and weak. Nagel was impressed that “every member of this family who is old enough to work does work.” What more was needed to prove that this family was self-supporting? he argued. “This evidence of a willingness and capacity to work is worth more than all the ordinary money tests that may be applied,” he concluded, in a direct slap at Williams’s beloved monetary test. After almost a month in detention at Ellis Island, the family was admitted, although the six youngest children were released on bond.
Meier Salamy Yacoub, a thirty-seven-year-old Syrian Jew, arrived at Ellis Island three days after the Kaganowitz family. Williams found him to be “an undersized man and his appearance is not good.” He ordered him excluded as likely to become a public charge. “The indications are that he has come here with the expectation of entering that non-producing class of peddlers of which there are now so many,” Williams wrote. For him, the pushcart peddlers who crowded the streets of the Lower East Side and other immigrant ghettos were a nuisance and the nation did not need any more of them. While Keefe agreed, Assistant Secretary Benjamin Cable, acting in place of Nagel for the day, overturned the decision and allowed Yacoub to land. “I do not see how this man is likely to become a public charge,” Cable wrote. Yacoub was allowed to leave Ellis Island after only five days there, leaving behind the Kaganowitzes as they awaited word on their fate.
Jewish groups were sensitive to charges that Jewish immigrants were being certified as having poor physiques, especially peddlers like Yacoub. Simon Wolf defended peddlers, calling them “the pioneer merchants of our country at one time,” adding that “there is no telling what a peddler might become in the course of time, or at least his children, as evidence of what a rail-splitter and a tailor had accomplished when they finally were located in the White House.” Wolf continued with his critique before the National Jewish Immigration Council. “If the immigration officials at the ports of entry and some of those in the Bureau had a little more imagination and a little more red blood percolating for the human species,” Wolf said, “there would not be so many likely to become public charges…which provoke a smile and not a tear—that is hernia and double hernia, diseases that never prevent a man from labor if properly cared for.”
A few months after Williams took office, the New York Times featured a story about complaints that the immigration law was being directed at Jews. “I found that Jews were being singled out among immigrants of other nationalities and the rule of physical development applied to them rigorously,” a reporter for a local Jewish paper told the Times. Assistant Commissioner Uhl admitted that for “some unknown reason there has lately been an unusual number of young men of the Jewish faith who were unable to come up to the physical requirement,” but denied that it was due to any discrimination.
Whether Uhl was being honest or not, it was not unusual to find arguments about the alleged physical weakness of Jews. “On the physical side the Hebrew are the polar opposites of our pioneer breed,” claimed social scientist Edward Ross. “Not only are they undersized and weak-muscled, but they shun bodily activity and are exceedingly sensitive to pain.” Besides fighting against these stereotypes, Jewish groups also argued that since many Jews were not headed for coal mines or steel mills, great physical strength was not always a necessity. Some, like Meier Yacoub, would become peddlers. Still others, like Solomon Meter, were tailors, a job that required delicate skill rather than physical brawn.
Meter was detained at Ellis Island when doctors certified him as suffering from “atrophy, partial paralysis, club foot, shortening and lameness of right lower extremity which affects ability to earn a living,” and therefore likely to become a public charge and ordered excluded.
Irving Lipsitch tried to intervene on behalf of Meter. He admitted that the diagnosis at first appeared damning, but went on to note that “if reduced to plain language,” it “simply means that the immigrant is slightly lame.” Lipsitch claimed that Meter was a good tailor and his was an occupation “which does not require him to make much use of his lower extremities, nor does it mean that he has to stand on his feet for any length of time.” Officials did not buy Litsitch’s argument and Meter was deported.
While HIAS continued to appeal immigrant cases, Max Kohler stepped up his criticism of immigration officials in harsh tones. In a well-publicized speech, he declared that America was “in the midst of a new ‘Know-Nothing Era’ and only a campaign of education can safeguard the best interests of the country and maintain the ‘open door’ to continued national prosperity.”
He noted that the exclusion rates of Jewish immigrants were increasing, although still less than 2 percent of all arrivals. More than two-thirds of Jewish exclusions were deemed likely to become a public charge. That number was roughly in keeping with overall rates for all groups, but to Kohler it was occurring because “of ever newer misconstructions of the law, furtively forced upon inspectors at Ellis Island, day by day, breaking down their judicial attitude and creating an atmosphere of uncertainty and anarchy and cowed timidity.” Kohler was not going to let Williams off the hook.
Not all Jewish leaders followed the adversarial lead of Kohler. Responding to Kohler’s speech, an editorial in the Times stated that it would have “been more effective if he had adopted a somewhat less controversial tone.” Others went even further. Nissim Behar, one of the leaders of the National Liberal Immigration League, defended Williams. “Nothing is gained by making absurd charges,” Behar warned. “No man could please everybody and do his full duty.”
Simon Wolf also defended Williams, saying he placed “no stock” in the accusations against him. He instead urged Jewish leaders to work more closely with immigration officials, rather than antagonize them. Irving Lipsitch, who had to deal on a daily basis with Williams, counseled against appealing every case of Jewish immigrants ordered deported. He worried that such an aggressive move might backfire. “I believe that if that were done,” he wrote, “we would lose the privilege.”
HIAS President Leon Sanders expressed the same fear, telling Kohler there was “much discontent” among officials in Washington with Jewish immigrant aid societies. “It has been hinted also that Jewish societies are making themselves obnoxious by calling upon the Department frequently and repeatedly for trivial matters,” wrote Sanders.
Secretary Nagel, who showed himself sympathetic to immigrant appeals, urged immigrant aid societies to work with, not against, government officials. “Your societies are, of course, carrying out your individual views,” he said in a speech before a Jewish group, “but you cannot expect me in my official capacity to accept anything that they say.” He pointed to Simon Wolf as a model for cooperation between government and immigrant advocates. “The way Mr. Wolf approaches us is calculated to get best results because he comes to us fairly, good-naturedly, and when he is defeated he recognizes our point of view,” he lectured the audience. “This is the spirit in which you ought to come.” He also joked about Wolf’s continual presence in Nagel’s office. “If we ever miss him,” Nagel said, “we think the world is going to stop.”
Jewish groups attempted a kind of détente with William Williams when they invited him to address the HIAS annual meeting in January 1910. Jacob Schiff led the applause for Williams, setting “the example of paying due respect to a government official by rising and the audience followed him,” the American Hebrew reported. In turn, Williams extended an olive branch to the crowd. He repeated his basic philosophy of immigration: whereas some Americans believed all immigrants should be let in and others believed few should be allowed to enter, “I agree with neither.” In a surprising turn, the blue-blood Williams told the crowd that he particularly disagreed “with the latter, especially when I see what promising citizens the Jewish immigrants make.”
The warm feelings did not last long. Following Williams to the podium was a rabbi who addressed the crowd in Yiddish and criticized the debarment of immigrants with poor physiques. “The strong man by his very strength may be a menace to the peace of the country,” the rabbi said, “but the man physically weak may be mentally strong and able to help build up the nation.” Williams “seemed to be under the impression that he was being criticized, which was not exactly the case,” according to the American Hebrew, and grew visibly angry. This cultural and linguistic misunderstanding seemed to have negated any of the initial good will.
After that, Williams’s relationship with the Jewish community continued to deteriorate. In his 1911 annual report, Williams spoke dismissively of new immigrants, singling out the crowded Italian and Jewish ghettos of lower Manhattan.
The new immigrants, unlike that of the earlier years, proceed in part from the poorer elements of the countries of southern and eastern Europe and from backward races with customs and institutions widely different from ours and without the capacity of assimilating with our people as did the early immigrants. Many of those coming from these sources have very low standards of living, possess filthy habits, and are of an ignorance which passes belief. Types of the classes referred to representing various alien races and nationalities may be observed in some of the tenement districts of Elizabeth, Orchard, Rivington, and East Houston Streets, New York City.
In response, members of the “Citizens Committee of Orchard, Rivington, and East Houston Streets” fired off a letter to President Taft. They called Williams’s remarks “false,” “libelous,” and a “gratuitous insult” and maintained that “no public official should be permitted with impunity to malign a large and populous section of this great city.” Williams denied that he was targeting Jews, but was only stating “economic, industrial, and sociological facts which are open to the observation of anyone.” However, in a 1912 letter to Theodore Roosevelt, Williams complained that many Jews put “the interests of their race before those of their country.”
HIAS officials continued to lobby the government on behalf of Jewish immigrants. At Ellis Island, immigrants were too often reduced to words on a sheet of paper: transcripts of hearings, summaries of fact by officials, and medical inspection records. Immigrant aid societies were able to add the human element to this often two-dimensional bureaucratic story. Though immigrants were barred from having lawyers represent them at board of special inquiry hearings, men like Irving Lipsitch served as combination defense attorney and lobbyist.
While it was the job of William Williams and his inspectors to execute the law faithfully, immigrant aid societies became the immigrants’ advocates, tilting the scale in the immigrants’ favor when no one else would.
WILLIAM WILLIAMS SET OUT to rigorously enforce the law against those he considered undesirable, especially those deemed likely to become public charges. Rather than focusing on markers of personal character to determine desirability, as Theodore Roosevelt had encouraged, Williams increasingly linked undesirability to southern and eastern Europeans. As the enforcement of the law at Ellis Island became tighter and the rhetoric of the commissioner more pointed, opposition to Williams was building. More and more people came to believe that something had to be done to stop “Czar Williams.”