Chapter 11
The more humanely the immigrant is treated at Ellis Island, the more humanely he will deal with us when he becomes the master of our national destiny.
—Edward Steiner, 1906
A saint from heaven actuated by all his saintliness would fail to give satisfaction at this place.
—Robert Watchorn, 1907
GEORGE THORNTON HAD THE GOOD FORTUNE TO ARRIVE at Ellis Island in October 1910. The Welsh miner and widower was accompanied by his seven children, ranging in age from two to nineteen. The family had over $100 with them and was headed to George’s sister in Pittsburgh. However, George was missing fingers on one of his hands, suffered from a hernia, and was therefore certified as likely to become a public charge. He and his family were ordered excluded.
It was Thornton’s luck that when William Williams heard the family’s appeal, sitting in the commissioner’s office was all three hundred and twenty pounds of the president of the United States. Theodore Roosevelt had handpicked William Howard Taft to be his successor and continue his policies, so it is no surprise that Taft emulated his predecessor and paid a presidential visit to Ellis Island. If Roosevelt braved torrential rains and near-hurricane-force winds to arrive at Ellis Island, Taft had to make his way by ferry across New York Harbor through dense fog. Once there, Taft threw himself into the visit, spending almost five hours examining the entire process.
Taft listened to a number of appeals that day and took a special interest in the nicely dressed Thornton family. He proceeded to question the elder Thornton, who was unaware of the identity of his new interrogator inquiring about the singing abilities of the Thornton children. Taft then asked George if he knew who the head of the U.S. government was. “The President,” replied George. Did he know his name? “Mr. William H. Taft,” responded George. The scene must have given the president a good laugh, as he then revealed his identity to the shocked Thornton. “It appears to me that this respectable-looking family…will all grow up to be good, self-supporting citizens of the country,” Taft concluded. The family was allowed to land.
The poignant story of the Thornton family barely saved from deportation by the intervention of the president of the United States was enough of a public-interest story to make the newspapers. However, some people in Wales heard the story and wrote to Williams stating that George Thornton had left the country without paying his debts. When Williams contacted George two months after his arrival, he admitted that he had not been able to secure work and his sister was unable to support the family. So George asked to be deported back to Wales, a wish Williams was no doubt happy to fulfill.
But President Taft’s personal judgment was on the line, having publicly vouched for the promising character of the family. Therefore, the secretary of Commerce and Labor, Charles Nagel, who had accompanied Taft to Ellis Island on that foggy October day and also strongly urged that the family be allowed to land, intervened to help Thornton find work. The results of Nagel’s efforts were disappointing. “In the Thornton case I have ignominiously surrendered,” Nagel wrote Taft only a few weeks later. “I find that he does not feel able to do work and that the doctors at Ellis Island evidently knew more about the case than we did.”
These were hard words for Taft to hear. Members of the American Association of Foreign Language Newspapers visited Taft at the White House in January 1911 to voice their concerns about the treatment of immigrants at Ellis Island. In response, the president told the group about his visit there a few months earlier. “I have since followed those cases in which I influenced him [Williams] against his better judgment,” he told the group, “and I am obliged to make the humiliating confession to you that the outcome vindicated him and showed that my judgment was at fault for lack of experience.
“There are certain parts of this Government that I understand very well, but immigration is new to me,” Taft further admitted, “and it is a subject to which I must give as much study as I can, being dependent, however, on the men whom I have selected to administer the law.” Such humility clearly marked Taft a different political animal than Theodore Roosevelt. It also led Taft to place even more faith in William Williams.
For the remainder of his term, no matter how heated the criticism got, Taft always stood behind his fellow Yale man. “In selecting Mr. Williams, I have selected a man whom I thought to be a very just and kindly man, and that is what you need there,” Taft told the foreign-born newspapermen. Moreover, Taft offered a mild criticism of the group, noting that when one is “continually pulling a man’s coattail when he is making a speech you can’t expect anything but a poor speech, and so it is with reference to the administration of the Federal law.” As for the Thornton family, Nagel wrote to Taft shortly after this meeting at the White House to inform the president that he had just “reluctantly signed the warrant for his deportation.”
Never again would Taft meddle in another immigrant case. However, immigrants at Ellis Island did not lack for vocal defenders. During Williams’s second tour of duty, the more he tried to tighten the enforcement of the law, the louder the roar from his critics. In his own mind, William Williams was a fearless upholder of the law who ran Ellis Island as a bulwark against undesirable immigrants. The foreign-language press had other ideas. To them, he was a dictator ruling over his fiefdom with an iron fist, enforcing his will upon powerless immigrants and servile employees. He was Czar Williams.
“AWAY WITH CZARISM AT Ellis Island,” screamed an editorial from the German-language newspaper Morgen Journal. “Bestiality Rampant in the Name of the Law,” cried another. The English-language Evening Journal chimed in with an editorial castigating “Brutality at Ellis Island.” Both papers were owned by William Randolph Hearst and were part of a relentless drumbeat of criticism that Williams would face during his second term at Ellis Island.
The Morgen Journal listed almost two dozen German-language papers from Baltimore to Cincinnati, from Buffalo to Denver, from Davenport, Iowa to Sandusky, Ohio, that ran editorials condemning the Ellis Island administration. The Chicago Abendpostcomplained that the members of the boards of special inquiry were “mostly ossified and grouchy bureaucrats of the first order to whom the dead letter of the law is more precious than sound common sense.” The protests against Williams’s rule went beyond the German-American community. A Hungarian paper in Cleveland, the Szabadsag, described “The Terrors of Hell’s Island: The Calvary of an Old Hungarian Couple.”
O. J. Miller of the German Liberal Immigration Bureau sent out a mass mailing to “Citizens of German Blood” calling attention to the “bias and prejudices of ignorant government hirelings” and the “tyranny” they practiced at Ellis Island. Noting that Jews had “organized a powerful system for the shielding of immigrants of their race from political ruffianism and from the chicane and bias of the immigration officials,” Miller called for German-Americans to do the same. He called for every German organization in the country to demand the resignation of William Williams.
Groups such as the Alliance of German Societies of the State of Indiana, the Deutsch-Amerikanischer National Bund of East St. Louis, Illinois, and the German-American Alliance of Hartford, Connecticut, all joined the calls for Williams’s resignation. The Brooklyn League of the National German-American Alliance (NGAA) pronounced “the tyrannical and inhuman practices of Commissioner Williams and his staff of inspectors a blot upon civilization.”
Likening Williams to a “czar” or “pasha” turned the Ellis Island commissioner into a brutal authoritarian who used his power to suppress helpless immigrants. It was imagery designed to raise the hackles of those who had escaped czarist Russia or other monarchical regimes. The use of terms such as “inquisitors,” “star chamber,” and “catacombs” were also meant to hit the raw historical nerves of foreign-born Americans.
At first, Williams was surprised by all the heat he was taking from German groups. “If this hostility were confined to papers representing south Europeans I could at least understand the philosophy of it all,” he wrote to Charles Nagel. “But we are so fond of Germans, so anxious to have them come here, and we send back and detain such a negligible quantity of those who arrive, that we must look for this hostility elsewhere than in the application of the immigration law to Germans.”
Nor could Charles Nagel understand it. The overall rate of rejection of immigrants was “smaller than the general public is prepared to hear,” Nagel told President Taft’s secretary. He believed that Germans and Jews, the two ethnic groups complaining the loudest about Williams, “have fared if anything better than any other race.”
German immigration had slowed. Between 1900 and 1913, nearly 1 million Germans entered the country, but that was only 7.7 percent of all immigrants. In the great divide between old and new immigrants, Germans fell on the right side of the equation. By the early twentieth century, most Americans saw Germans as hearty pioneers who were easy to assimilate, especially when compared to Italians, Greeks, or Russian Jews. Teutonic blood was seen as relatively compatible with that of Anglo-Saxons, as people like Henry Cabot Lodge remembered the origins of their beloved Saxons.
German immigrants had a slim chance of being excluded and were kept out at a rate lower than the average. Between 1904 and 1912, less than 1 percent of all German immigrants were excluded. German-Americans would have noticed that the percentage of exclusions was increasing, although that began before William Williams returned to Ellis Island. Still, this was hardly a crusade against German immigrants. There had to be some other reason for these ferocious attacks on Ellis Island.
Harper’s Weekly asked: “Who Is Stirring Up the Germans?” William Williams and the magazine both agreed that the answer could only be explained by the influence of German-owned steamship companies. As Williams stepped up deportations, each one cost the steamship companies $100 in fines, plus the cost of shipping the excluded immigrant back home. Williams may have contributed to the heart-ache of immigrants concerned about passing through the inspection process, but he was also making a dent in the finances of the steamship companies.
The stricter enforcement of immigration law may not have seriously affected German immigrants, but there was no denying that Williams was now turning away more immigrants at Ellis Island. He believed that Robert Watchorn, with the approval and oversight of Secretary Oscar Straus, had kept the gates at Ellis Island wide open.
Between 1907 and 1909, less than 1 percent of all immigrants arriving at Ellis Island were rejected. Williams had set out to rectify that situation, and the numbers demonstrate his success. In 1910, Williams’s first full year back at Ellis Island, the rate of exclusions doubled to 1.8 percent of all arrivals. That would decrease over the next three years but never dip below 1 percent, as it had under Watchorn. Immigrants faced tougher scrutiny at Ellis Island than they would at any other major inspection station in the country, with the exception of those along the Mexican and Canadian borders.
Nor was it just a question of immigrants having a tougher time getting through inspection at Ellis Island. Those already landed could be deported within three years of their arrival if found to be public charges, prostitutes, criminals, anarchists, feebleminded, or any one of a number of categories that would have labeled them as undesirable under the law. Such deportations were steadily increasing over the years and continued under Williams. During Williams’s second tenure at Ellis Island, over 6,000 immigrants found themselves returned to Ellis Island and deported back to their homelands.
Even with the stricter enforcement of the law and increasing number of deportations and in spite of Williams’s rhetoric about undesirable immigrants, over 98 percent of all who arrived at Ellis Island were eventually admitted. This speaks to the powerful legal, political, social, economic, and ideological consensus that allowed America to accept millions of new immigrants despite the grumbling of those made uneasy by the disruptions that this human wave brought. Every exclusion was a personal tragedy; in 1910 there were over 14,000 such tragedies at Ellis Island. However, when compared to the hundreds of thousands who easily passed through, it is hard to describe Ellis Island as a restrictionist nightmare.
What is not fully known is how many potential immigrants were stopped at European ports from emigrating in the first place. Steamship companies set up their own inspection process there to weed out individuals they felt were not qualified to land according to American immigration law. If someone did not pass that inspection, he or she could not purchase a ticket. It was simple economics for the steamship companies, who did not want to incur fines and the added expense of transporting rejected immigrants back to Europe. In many ways, that inspection was much tougher and more intrusive than the one immigrants experienced at Ellis Island.
It is hard to come by official figures on the number of people rejected by steamship officials at European ports. Journalist Broughton Brandenburg investigated the conditions of immigrants on both sides of the Atlantic and found that at the ports of Hamburg, Bremen, Liverpool, Naples, and Fiume, from which most American immigrants sailed, some 68,000 people were refused steamship tickets during 1906. At Naples, roughly 6 percent of immigrants seeking passage to America were turned away in 1906. The following year, Robert Watchorn estimated that a total of 65,000 immigrants were barred at all European ports.
For some immigrants, their obstacle course to the New World began even earlier. Russians had to first make their way to German ports like Hamburg or Bremen. Since most of these Russians were Jews, German officials were not happy about having them tramp through their lands, although they were more than willing to have German steamship lines take their passage money. Therefore, Russians could not enter Germany unless they had a ticket to America and a sufficient amount of money on their persons. To enforce the law, Germany erected a series of fourteen border stations in the east. According to one estimate, German border guards turned away some 12,000 Russians in 1907.
An American congressional committee toured these border stations and found that things were even worse for Russian Jews who were deported. Since Germany did not want them in their country, the law demanded they be returned to their villages in Russia. Agents from steamship companies met these unwanted individuals at the Russian-German border because, according to the congressional report, “if emigrants so rejected were turned over to the Russian frontier guards they would be severely treated and subjected to great hardships.” For these Russian Jews, the tragedy of rejection at Ellis Island was just the beginning of their hardships, which is why organizations like the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society fought so hard against many of the deportation orders.
WILLIAM WILLIAMS WAS NOT the only one to feel the sting of criticism from ethnic groups. Secretary Nagel felt the barbs more keenly because he was the son of German immigrants and a member of St. Louis’s large German-American community. His continued support for Williams made him a villain among his own landsmen. He told Williams that he was “sick and tired of being accused of prejudice against people when my position is such that suspicion, if any, might well come from the other side.”
Nagel won no friends among restrictionists since his natural inclination, like that of his predecessor Oscar Straus, was to side with immigrants in appeals cases. “I am frank to say that my sympathy is all for the human side,” Nagel admitted. “I have sometimes felt that I forgot my own country and the law of my country in my desire to help out and to relieve the hardships of individual cases.” He was sensitive to the power he possessed in controlling the fate of tens of thousands of individuals. “I can send back anybody,” he remarked. “It is an awful power, but I try to use it to the best of my ability.”
This was not the kind of introspection that occupied the mind of William Williams. Yet Nagel still maintained good relations with Williams and continued to defend his work. As a sympathetic contemporary noted, Nagel was “never liberal enough to suit the one group, although he became almost a law-breaker in the eyes of others.”
The agitation among German-Americans led New York congressman William Sulzer to offer a resolution in the House of Representatives to investigate the affairs at Ellis Island. Before allowing a vote on the resolution to come to the House floor, the Rules Committee began hearings on the matter in late May 1911. Sulzer began the hearing by noting the “deplorable condition” of the immigration service and calling attention to the “atrocities, cruelties, and inhumanities practiced at Ellis Island.”
The committee then heard from a procession of German-Americans who had been vocal critics of Williams. Gustave Schweppendick, a journalist for the Morgen Journal, admitted that while Ellis Island officials were not specifically targeting German immigrants, he and his colleagues felt the need to stick up for other immigrant groups. Ernest Stahl of the National German-American Alliance described his opinion of an immigrant’s Ellis Island experience. “He goes through hell,” he told the committee, “that is the only expression that I know of.” He called the inspection process “barbarous.” Alphonse Koelble, of the United German Societies, complained both about the odor that pervaded Ellis Island and the increasing percentage of exclusions under Williams.
The ubiquitous Marcus Braun also testified, calling Williams “one of the ablest and most honorable men in the service,” even though he disagreed with the commissioner about immigration. “The great trouble with Mr. Williams is that he is too strict,” Braun said, “not only with the enforcement of the law, but also too strict with his subordinates.” Perceptively, Braun noted that Robert Watchorn had “played to the galleries and Mr. Williams does not.”
Before the hearings had taken place, Williams tried to play down the criticism from the German press, calling them “so silly and extravagant as to make it seem beneath one’s dignity to notice them.” He told Prescott Hall that while the charges might poison the minds of “ignorant persons” concerning the operations at Ellis Island, “on the whole I have paid little or no attention to this matter.”
Williams was much more thin-skinned than he let on. He obsessively kept detailed records of the attacks against him by the German press, having each article translated into English. He answered nearly every allegation of abuse against an immigrant at Ellis Island, usually in letters or memos to his superiors in Washington.
Still, while the earlier criticism had been merely irritating, the charges made against him before a congressional committee caused Williams to fume. He had not been present at the May hearing, but had received a transcript of the hearing from Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. “I may feel differently tomorrow but just now I am outraged at the falsehoods told about my administration,” he wrote to Charles Nagel. “These criticisms pass the bounds of decency and in some manner the persons making them ought to be told what decent people think about them.” He would not appear before the committee until it reconvened in July, but promised not to let the accusations go unanswered.
“The law is a difficult one to administer,” Williams claimed in his written opening statement to the committee, “particularly in regard to the determination of who is ‘likely to become a public charge.’” While recounting some of the accusations against him, Williams said it was all part of the uncertainty and vagueness of immigration law that bedeviled those sworn to execute it. However, he resented “as wholly untruthful the use of such words as those quoted to characterize the work at Ellis Island.” He produced details of specific cases of deported immigrants that had appeared in the German press and contradicted the claims of administrative misconduct, all while defending the necessity to tighten the inspection process in the name of enforcing the law.
Williams again repeated his standard line regarding his personal views of 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 said. Daniel Keefe and Charles Nagel both appeared and defended Williams. Unlike Williams, Nagel was torn by the human tragedies that daily crossed his desk. “It is well enough to make a rule under lamplight,” Nagel told the committee, “but it is very hard to enforce that rule when you see a pair of eyes looking at you.”
In Williams’s previous two years at Ellis Island, most of the criticism came from German-and Jewish-American groups. One of the bitterest witnesses against him at the hearing, however, was one of those few Anglo-Saxons who sometimes passed through Ellis Island. The Reverend Sydney Herbert Bass, a minister from England, told the committee about what he was forced to endure while temporarily detained at Ellis Island. “I, too, have photographs,” he testified, “but mine are engraved on my mind and heart and burned into my soul as by a red-hot iron.”
He had arrived in January 1911, headed for a new congregation in Pennsylvania. Bass traveled in steerage—“for purposes and reasons of my own”—on the White Star’s Adriatic. The steerage passengers were marched single file into the main building of Ellis Island. As they headed up the stairs towards the Great Hall, Bass remembered that an inspector yelled at them: “Anyone who comes steerage is cattle, you will soon have a nice little pen.”
Bass was then marked in chalk with “2 hieroglyphics” on his overcoat that designated him for further inspection. After a quick examination, a doctor found that Bass suffered from “atrophy and partial paralysis of right leg; deformity of right foot; shortening of right leg and lameness due to old poliomyelitis,” defects that would affect his ability to earn a living. To this diagnosis, Bass responded, “If that were so it was fortunate that my brains were the other end and I earned my living with them as I did not preach and lecture with my feet.”
He would remain at Ellis Island for almost thirty hours, an experience that enraged and deeply scarred the British preacher. He was placed in a holding room with some six hundred immigrants from various nationalities. Although freezing outside, the overcrowded room was steaming hot. Bass took off his overcoat, placed it on the floor, and sat on it. Only when he arose later did he notice that the coat was now stained with “a portion of Italian phlegm, as large as a silver dollar piece.”
“The noise alone was a diabolical experience to sensitive people,” Bass later remembered, “and I shall never doubt again the literal truth of Scriptures especially with reference to the Tower of Babel.” No matter what he did, Bass could not escape the rabble with whom he now found himself detained. “I was standing hemmed in on all four sides by Italian immigrants very taller than I,” he told the committee. “They were eating garlic and you can imagine how offensive it was…. It made it difficult for me to breathe. The smell was worse than I ever smelled before.”
Forced to put up with such conditions, Bass complained to officials, “as any self-respecting Englishman, or American, or those self-respecting Germans…would do under similar conditions.” That injury to pride and racial superiority, more than the loss of a day at Ellis Island, seemed to drive Bass’s anger. What particularly galled him was the treatment of those “delicately nurtured English ladies of much culture and refinement” placed with the rest of the rabble in detention. The whole place was so shocking that it reminded him of Dante’s Inferno and the Black Hole of Calcutta.
Bass would get a chance to explain himself before a board of special inquiry the following day. Meanwhile, he was forced to spend the night at Ellis Island. Bass successfully appealed to an official to have all of the detained Englishmen—and one “perfect French gentleman”—put together in the same room, while four English women, a French woman, and a Swedish woman were kept together in another room.
The men slept on canvas hammocks, suspended from the ceiling, numbering three from top to bottom and nine rows for a total of twenty-seven “beds.” The canvas mats were damp, and the men were left without blankets for hours. To add insult to injury, these English and French gentlemen were not alone in their dormitory room. “The insects were fearful, and I think I can safely say the English at any rate were all a mass of bug bites,” Bass said about the bedbugs.
He was released the following day. Hearst’s muscularly populist New York Evening Journal, always happy to give Ellis Island officials a black eye, ran Bass’s story with the headline: “Pastor Calls Ellis Island Hell on Earth.” The publicity brought Bass’s plight to the attention of Washington, as he complained to the British consulate.
Williams explained his decision to Charles Nagel, calling Bass “an undersized, badly crippled man.” He noted that Bass was showed special consideration at Ellis Island, considering the fact that he was a steerage passenger. Williams concluded that he thought “that this badly crippled alien was fortunate in securing admission,” a view seconded by Nagel, who told Taft’s personal secretary that Bass “was lucky to get in, or rather that we were unlucky to get him in.” Now, seven months after his ordeal, Bass was telling his story to a congressional committee and demanding a full investigation of Ellis Island.
At the end of the second hearing, Sulzer testified that Ellis Island could be improved for the benefit of immigrants and that its problems were not the fault of Secretary Nagel or Commissioner Williams. The fault was with the government for not appropriating more money to expand the facilities and hire more inspectors. Despite the hearings, the House Rules Committee never acted on Sulzer’s resolution and there was no full-scale congressional investigation of Williams and Ellis Island.
With the failure of Congress to do more than give lip service to their complaints, German groups did not give up the fight. At its annual convention in 1911, just a few months after the end of the congressional hearing, the National German-American Alliance lashed out against William Williams. Henry Weisman, president of the Brooklyn branch of the organization, called Williams’s interpretation of the law “arbitrary” and claimed that he excluded many desirable immigrants. The NGAA called for the removal of Williams. Weisman, a lifelong Republican, declared that if Taft did not remove Williams from office, he would never again vote for another Republican for president. A few months later, the Morgen Journal demanded: “Williams Must Go.” When that did not happen, the newspaper followed up with another editorial asking: “How Much Longer, Mr. Taft?”
Williams had his defenders. In the midst of the congressional hearing, Harper’s Weekly called Williams “a resolute, upright person, a terror to all scamps who try to plunder the immigrants, and a considerable terror to the steamship companies, who know him as a man not to be trifled with.” The editorial concluded that the “suggestion that he is brutal does not match with anything in his record or with his known character.”
Arthur von Briesen, president of the Legal Aid Society and chair of the committee that had looked into conditions at Ellis Island during Williams’s first term, wrote President Taft about his organization’s recent investigation. A member of the Legal Aid Society was sent to Ellis Island in 1911 to see if there had been any changes there since von Briesen’s 1903 report. He told Taft that the investigators “were filled with admiration at the manner in which the business was being conducted and the manner in which the immigrants were treated.” The facilities at Ellis Island were still too small and the detention quarters too cramped, causing great discomfort for detainees. However, von Briesen’s investigators absolved Williams of blame.
Williams’s most steadfast ally and friend turned out to be President Taft. “I want you to know that every day, as I think over the Government, I rejoice that I have a commissioner like you in the place you fill,” Taft wrote to Williams in November 1911. He then set out to dispense some advice to his fellow Yalie. “Now, brace up!” he wrote. “Life is not so infernally serious that we can not take an interval at time for enjoyment.” Taft thought his friend “too darn conscientious” and in working so hard to save the Republic from the evil influences of undesirable immigrants, “you are neglecting your own health, thus defeating the very objects you have in view by curtailing your usefulness in a short time through a break-down.”
In his own way, Taft was both bucking up the spirits of a friend and telling him to ease off a bit. Taft saw Williams as faithfully executing the nation’s immigration law, but he did not share his overall view of the world. Taft loved his country no less than Williams, but did not find that the procession of aliens streaming into the country marked the downfall of the Republic. “Don’t let each trouble weigh on you with its intrinsic weight,” advised the weighty president. For Williams there would be no letup. It was not in his makeup. He was, as Taft would later write jokingly, “a severe old bachelor.”
Williams continued with his work despite the criticism. While he was making headlines—and enemies—with his strict policies, he also displayed a more typical bureaucratic mentality. Williams wanted a bigger budget from Congress. “I have repeatedly asked for more money and Congress usually has given me only from one-third to one-half of what I asked,” he complained. This plaint became a staple of his yearly annual reports, with Williams ever concerned about Washington’s “false economy.”
The Immigration Service was supposed to be self-supporting, since it received a head tax of $4 for every immigrant, paid by steamship companies but passed along in their ticket prices. During 1910, the United States welcomed over 1 million immigrants, which meant over $4.1 million for the federal government. However, the head tax receipts simply went into the federal government’s general operating fund. In fact, in 1910 Congress only appropriated a fraction of that money—$2.6 million—for the operations of the immigration service. Washington was making a profit from immigration.
The economic effects of immigration went beyond the head tax. Immigrants brought more than $46 million with them to the United States in 1910 and sent back roughly $154 million to their relatives in Europe. From 1890 to 1922, GNP increased by nearly 400 percent, as millions of immigrants lent their labor to the factories, mines, and construction crews that built industrial America and created the near unprecedented wealth upon which the American Century was built.
When the U.S. Commission on Immigration, chaired by Vermont senator William Dillingham, finally released its report in 1911, it concluded that immigration was largely an economic issue. It found an oversupply of unskilled labor that lowered the standard of living for American wage earners. Newer immigrant groups, the commission concluded, no longer came over for the idealized reasons that supposedly drove previous immigrant groups. Instead, complained economist Henry Parker Willis, who served as an adviser to the commission, many new immigrants came only “to temporarily take advantage of the greater wages paid for industrial labor in this country.”
“Voluminous.” “Encyclopedic.” “Multitudinous.” These were some of the adjectives used to describe the forty-one volumes of the final report of the Dillingham Commission. Clocking in at just under 29,000 pages, it still stands as one of the most impressive reports ever conducted by the U.S. government. How many Greek bakers came to America in 1907? Seventy-three. How many Polish Jewish boys were in the fifth grade of Chicago’s public schools? One hundred and thirty-two. The Dillingham Commission had the answers for these questions and many, many more.
The commission’s findings were hardly the stuff of hard-core restrictionists, and its data debunked many myths about immigration. It ultimately recommended that immigrants convicted of a crime within five years of entering the country be deported and that immigrant banks and employment agencies be more strictly regulated. It also considered barring unskilled immigrants who arrived without a wife or family, as well as limiting the number of immigrants per year by “race.” However, the commission’s favored method of restriction, after almost 30,000 pages of data, three years of research, and $1 million in expenses was…the literacy test.
Theodore Roosevelt had been a staunch supporter of the literacy test in his younger days, but had done little to secure its passage in his seven years as president. In 1912, Roosevelt was again running for president as the leader of the newly formed Progressive Party. Despite Roosevelt’s long record on immigration, there would be no talk of literacy tests, undesirable immigrants, or any kind of immigration regulation during his campaign.
His new party’s platform contained one section on “The Immigrant” that concerned itself only with dealing with the problems immigrants faced once here. It promised to secure greater opportunities for immigrants; denounced the “fatal policy of indifference and neglect” that left immigrants prey to abuse; recommended a policy of distributing immigrants away from overcrowded urban ghettos; and called for promoting assimilation. Considering that it was Roosevelt who first brought William Williams to Ellis Island, it can only be described as pure political chutzpah when the Progressive Bulletin, the mouthpiece for Roosevelt’s new party, denounced Taft’s appointment of Williams and his “reign of terror at Ellis Island.”
The candidate who was forced to confront immigration most directly during the campaign was the Democratic candidate. Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey, a former political science professor and president of Princeton University, had published a five-volume history of the United States in 1901. In the final volume, the professor delved into immigration. Fitting with the tenor of the times, he condemned the “alteration of stock” brought about by the “multitudes of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland, men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence,” thereby lowering the American standard of living. Wilson contrasted these “sordid and hapless” individuals with Chinese immigrants who, despite possessing “many an unsavory habit,” were at least more intelligent, harder working, and driven to success.
Thanks to newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, who despised Wilson, these long-forgotten words now became front-page news across the country. Wilson was soon put on the defensive and tried to explain away his words. He wrote letters of apology to Italian, Polish, and Hungarian groups. “America has always been proud to open her gates to everyone who loved liberty and sought opportunity,” Wilson declared in one of these letters, “and she will never seek another course under the guidance of the Democratic Party.” He pointed to his membership in the National Liberal Immigration League and began to speak positively about the contribution of immigrants on the campaign stump. “I should be an ignorant man, indeed,” Wilson said, “if I did not realize that America has been built up by the blood and the sinews and the brains of those born in the Old World who recognized an opportunity for freedom denied them there.”
Despite the controversy, Wilson won by a plurality of votes. Taft came in third, and the lame-duck president had one more issue to deal with after his defeat. The Dillingham Commission provided the momentum for another attempt by Congress to pass a literacy test, which it did in early 1913. It was now up to Taft to decide the bill’s fate. The president, whose earnest and guileless temperament was better suited to the judicial bench than the White House, was conflicted about the literacy test. Two years earlier, Taft told Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell that while he had once been in favor of a literacy test, “I am not quite so clear in my mind now.”
For two decades, those who wanted to restrict immigration looked to the literacy test to achieve their goals. However, 122,735 immigrants would have been excluded if the law had been in effect in 1911. Though a large number, it represented only 14 percent of all immigrants that year. Over 90 percent of those who would have been barred as illiterates in 1911 came from eastern and southern Europe. Even still, the proportion of immigrants from these areas would have only dropped from 68 percent to 63 percent. The literacy test would have done little to stem Jewish immigrants; in 1911, only 6,400 who entered the United States were illiterate.
The numbers support the contention of opponents who argued that it was a poor judge of the worth of incoming aliens. “The literacy test is an admirable test of a man’s ability to read, and it tests nothing else,” said noted rabbi Stephen Wise. Others observed that the law would exclude many a “hard-working industrious man who can add to the country’s wealth by his labor,” yet “admit many a shifty, adroit, and conscienceless scamp who will add merely to our sufficient supply of gamblers, grafters, and thieves.” Nor would it keep out educated anarchists and radicals.
With only a few weeks left to his presidency, Taft finally announced his veto with “great reluctance.” In defense of his decision, he appended a long memo from Secretary Charles Nagel, a longtime opponent of the measure, laying out the weaknesses of the literacy test. “To Hell with Jews, Jesuits, and steamships,” a depressed Prescott Hall wrote to himself in the wake of Taft’s veto.
A few weeks before Taft’s veto of the literacy test, Woodrow Wilson paid a visit to Ellis Island. Accompanied by his wife, two of his daughters, and a number of friends from New Jersey, the president-elect was ushered around the inspection station by William Williams. Whereas Roosevelt and Taft had thrown themselves into every aspect of the process on their visits to the island, injecting themselves into the decision-making process and even interrogating immigrants, Wilson was remarkably passive during his trip. “If Mr. Wilson was impressed or otherwise moved by what he saw he did not show it,” one newspaper reported. The president-elect asked few questions and his responses to Commissioner Williams were monosyllabic. Upon leaving Ellis Island, Wilson declined to comment about what he had seen. It was his “day off,” he told the reporter and he was there “for information and not for thought.”
Wilson was far more interested in issues like the tariff, antitrust regulation, and reforming the nation’s banking system than he was in immigration, especially after the drubbing he took on the issue during the campaign. It would have made sense for him to ask immediately for the resignation of Commissioner Williams, which would have been the kind of sweeping statement that would have reassured foreign-born Americans concerned about the new president. Wilson chose not to take that politically expedient path and allowed Williams to remain in office.
In his first month in office, Wilson split the Commerce and Labor Department into two separate cabinet posts. The Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization would reside in the newly created Labor Department. Woodrow Wilson chose the former United Mine Workers official and Scottish immigrant, William B. Wilson, as the first secretary of the new department.
Ethnic groups were heartened by the choice of Secretary Wilson, but concerned that after a few months in office, in the words of the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, he had “not moved a finger in order that the brutal government at Ellis Island may come to an end.” Keeping Williams in office would “brand President Wilson as an enemy of immigration of the same type as Williams is in his heart.” Yet nothing had been done to end Williams’s “reign of terror,” which had turned Ellis Island into an “Island of Horrors.” Therefore, the paper called for Wilson to clean out the immigration service “In the Name of Humanity.”
Throughout the 1912 campaign season and into 1913, the foreign-language press kept hammering away at Williams, who continued to catalog and counter every charge. One representative article appeared in the Yiddish paper Warheit: “A Victim of the Murderous Acts on Ellis Island: A Detained Child Held Up for Stammering Dies in Williams’ Catacombs.”
The Deutsches Journal told a tale of “Son Torn from His Mother’s Arms: Was ‘Too Educated’ and ‘Not Muscular’ Enough.” Aron Mosberg had left his home in Galicia to come to America to join his sixty-year-old mother. The twenty-six-year-old bookkeeper was listed at four feet, eight inches tall. Though he had enough money to travel second-class instead of steerage, his allegedly “poor physique,” not his financial situation would lead to his deportation. “Not muscular enough” and “marked curvature of spine and deformity of chest” read Mosberg’s medical certificate. The newspaper admitted that Mosberg had no “Jack Johnson shoulders,” but lamented that it now appeared that “in America men are measured by their bone-structure.”
“Sir, You are the murderer of my child, Emilia.” Those were the only words contained in the letter that William Williams received in early May 1913 from a Chicago man named John Czurylo. The man’s wife and two young children had arrived at Ellis Island on March 29. With both eight-year-old Stanislaw and six-year-old Emilia suffering from chronic inflammation of the lymph nodes, all three were forced to remain at Ellis Island. One month later, John, still in Chicago awaiting his family, received a telegram announcing the death of Emilia. Filled with grief, he fired off the letter to Williams.
Williams took the time to reply to Czurylo and explain the circumstances of Emilia’s death. He believed that the father had fallen victim to the misrepresentations of the foreign-language press eager to use such tragedies to attack the government. John wrote back to apologize to Williams for “writing you such nonsensical trash.” Touchingly, he ends his letter by asking Williams to have his wife, still in detention, send him a letter since he had not heard from her in a while. Whatever the merits of the policies enforced at Ellis Island, stories like the Czurylos’ were heartbreaking.
Williams, though, was not a sentimentalist. He displayed little outward angst about the fates of people like Mosberg or the Czurylos. He would probably answer that his first duty was to execute the immigration laws fairly and without bias, which meant that Mosberg had to be deported and the Czurylo family had to remain at Ellis Island until the children had been healed. Williams thought sentiment got in the way of public duty. If exceptions were made, as the foreign-language press continually demanded, then the law would become meaningless.
In an April 1913 letter to Washington, Williams said that the personal attacks from the German press did not bother him much. “I attach no importance to them,” he wrote somewhat unconvincingly. Rather, it showed the effects of “foreign influences at work in our midst.” In a few short years, more Americans would join Williams in his concern about “foreign influences” on American politics, especially that of Germans.
Despite all his outward stoicism both to the pain of families such as the Czurylos and to the constant barrage of criticism against him, Williams had had enough of Ellis Island. He tendered his resignation in June 1913 to President Wilson, who accepted it and expressed his appreciation for Williams’s “peculiarly intelligent service.” Williams had served a total of six and a half years under three presidents. Wilson named no immediate replacement, so Williams’s deputy, Byron Uhl, took over as acting commissioner, a move that promised no immediate change in the execution of immigration law at Ellis Island.
The uncertainty as to who would succeed Williams highlighted the fact that in almost twenty years of agitation in favor of greater restrictions on immigrants, Prescott Hall and his colleagues had precious little to show for their efforts. The Immigration Restriction League’s silver bullet, the literacy test, had twice failed to become law over presidential vetoes. The one sliver of hope for Hall and his comrades had been the work of William Williams. “In a world which does not suit me in many ways,” the melancholic Hall wrote to Williams, “your work at Ellis Island is a bright spot.”
Others remembered Williams not for his restrictionist views but rather for his efforts to improve life at Ellis Island. A letter signed by representatives of twenty-four missionary organizations noted their “high esteem” for Williams, calling him “just always” and “charitable when necessary.” Their letter noted: “Even the most casual observer must be conscious of the great improvement in Ellis Island under your guidance, both physically and officially…. We believe that those who have attacked your administration have done so either in ignorance or malice.”
Others took issue with this sentiment. Unsurprisingly, the Morgen Journal shed no tears at the resignation of the man they dubbed the “Czar of the Isle of Tears” who made immigrants “dance to his whip.”
Although no one would have known it at the time, the incessant attacks against Williams represented the high point of German-American ethnic identity. Though they did not succeed in removing Williams from office, German-Americans were the leading voice for opposition to immigration restriction. Both the German-language press—shrill and exaggerated—and William Williams—crabbed and snobbish—kept each other in check as the nation navigated this unsettling era of mass immigration. Within a short time, that delicate balance would be destroyed and immigration policy would never fully recover. Nor would the German-American community.
William Williams, however, would move on to other things. In February 1914, the new reform mayor of New York City, John Purroy Mitchell, named Williams commissioner of Water Supply, Gas, and Electricity. After this stint in city government, he returned to the military at the age of fifty-five as a lieutenant colonel during World War I, stationed with the army’s procurement division in Washington.
After the war, Williams returned to his law practice in lower Manhattan, where he regularly went to work right up until his death in February 1947 at the age of eighty-four. He made few public remarks on immigration in the decades that preceded his death. We will never know if he lived long enough to temper his views about some of the “scum” who arrived at Ellis Island during his tenure.
TWO MONTHS BEFORE HIS 1910 visit to Ellis Island where he learned from the Thornton family a lesson in the perils of meddling in immigration cases, President Taft found himself dragged into the case of the Pocziwa family. Benjamin Pocziwa lived in Passaic, New Jersey, where he owned his own store. Earning $20 a week and having saved some $500, Benjamin was now able to bring over his wife, Mine; his six-year-old daughter, Anna; and his nine-year-old son, Lipe. All three arrived at Ellis Island in July 1910.
“This child is an imbecile and it is obvious to the layman that he is one,” declared William Williams, and young Lipe was ordered excluded by law. His mother, Anna, was also ordered excluded so as to accompany her son back to Russia. Officials with HIAS requested that the deportation be delayed so that the mother could find someone else to escort Lipe back.
Benjamin sought the legal help of Leonard Spitz, who also lived in Passaic and practiced law in Manhattan. Spitz filed a habeas corpus petition on behalf of Lipe. He admitted that little Lipe was “not everything that one of his age should be; his appearance is dull,” but explained that the boy had been pampered by his mother and “not allowed by her to run around like the ordinary children of his age, she considering him very precious and always having fear for his welfare.”
Local newspapers took up the case of this shy and sheltered country boy frightened by his arrival in America. Spitz spoke about the case with Victor Mason, a businessman who had an office in the same building as Spitz. Mason happened to be a friend of Taft and would be visiting the president at his summer home in Beverly, Massachusetts, in early August. There, Mason explained the case to the president, who ordered that the child not be deported until Secretary Nagel returned to Washington from his extended vacation.
A few days later, Taft reversed himself. “The President has decided not to interfere in the matter of the deportation of Lipe Pocziwa,” read the telegram from Taft’s secretary, Charles Norton, to the Department of Commerce and Labor. Victor Mason again wrote the president asking him to reconsider his decision, and Taft dutifully changed his mind yet again. “Would the Department be embarrassed in any way if the request were sent down to hold up the deportation of Lipe Pocziwa and his sister and mother until Secretary Nagel’s return,” Norton again telegrammed Washington.
The Pocziwa family was neither rich nor famous, nor infamous, yet the president of the United States had become involved in their case. For immigration officials, however, Taft’s interference and vacillation must have been irritating. Acting secretary of Commerce and Labor Benjamin Cable wrote back to Norton that he would again stay the deportation until Nagel’s return, but warned that his boss would not return until sometime in mid-September; this would mean that the family would have to remain in detention at Ellis Island during the dog days of August.
When Nagel returned in September, he ordered that the mother and daughter be allowed to enter the country and rejoin Benjamin; however, young Lipe would have to be sent back to Europe with a suitable attendant. His decision was based on the medical certificate that Lipe was an imbecile, and not a shy and frightened child, and therefore excluded. The law was the law, and it said that no one medically certified as an imbecile could enter the country under any circumstance.
William Williams called on government “to make far greater efforts than it does to prevent the landing of feeble-minded immigrants,” since mental deficiencies were “becoming more and more important in civilized countries and the nature and bearings of this taint are being carefully studied by scientists.” A feebleminded immigrant would not just become a public charge, he feared, but “may leave feeble-minded descendants and so start a vicious strain that will lead to misery and loss in future generations.”
Ellis Island officials would increasingly find themselves drawn into the uncharted territory of using science to determine the mental capacity of those who knocked at America’s gate. The Pocziwa family was on the receiving end of those efforts. Even the president of the United States could do nothing about it.