Part IV
Chapter 14
We must not forget that these men and women who file through the narrow gates at Ellis Island, hopeful, confused, with bundles of misconceptions as heavy as the great sacks upon their backs…these simple, rough-handed people are the ancestors of our descendants, the fathers and mothers of our children.
—Walter Weyl, 1914
I have seen so much of the human wreckage of Europe pass through Ellis Island during the past two years.
—Frederic C. Howe, 1916
AT A FEW MINUTES PAST 2 O’CLOCK IN THE EARLY MORNING of July 30, 1916, Peter Raceta, the captain of a barge docked at a Jersey City pier, found himself tossed some twenty feet in the air by the force of a blast he could only describe as something akin to the explosion of a Zeppelin and what others likened to the sound of the firing of a large cannon. Raceta landed in the waters of New York Harbor many yards from his boat, which was now on fire. He was stunned, but unhurt, apart from a severe burn on the back of his head. The other two men on Raceta’s small boat were missing.
Just a few miles away, on Central Avenue in Jersey City, the very same explosion threw two-and-a-half-month-old Arthur Tossen from his bed. Unlike Raceta, little Arthur did not survive. He died from shock.
On Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Jewish immigrants were jolted from their sleep by the explosion and streamed out of their tenements in panic and fear. Amid the chaos, a young mother named Dveire, who had recently escaped the war in Russia, calmly took her family into the cellar of their East Broadway tenement to ride out the confusion. Accustomed to the noise of battle, Dveire stayed calm, but many of her neighbors did not, as the sounds of shells exploding in New York Harbor made them fear that war had followed them to the New World.
Throughout the New York metropolitan area and extending as far south as Philadelphia, people were awakened by what they thought was an earthquake. Residents of northern Maryland called their local police to complain. But this was no earthquake.
The epicenter of the explosion that had disturbed the sleep of so many people was a place called Black Tom Island. Though once a small island in New York Harbor, Black Tom had since been connected with the mainland of New Jersey by landfill, making it a peninsula that jutted out nearly a mile into the harbor. Piers and warehouses were built along its shoreline and railroad tracks connected them to points west.
A fire had started sometime after midnight on board one of the barges docked at the National Dock and Storage Company’s facility at Black Tom. Dozens of these boats were lined up along the piers at Black Tom, while locomotive cars waited at the terminal, their contents to be loaded onto those boats the following Monday. Some were filled with sugar and tobacco, but most were stocked with dynamite, ammunition, shells, and other tools of war headed for Britain, Russia, and France.
Two hours after it began, the fire eventually reached one of the ships filled with munitions, setting off the great explosion that had awakened so many people for miles around. For three hours after the first blast, more explosions followed and the fire spread to other ships. Huge towers of flames lit the early morning sky. Shrapnel dug huge pits in the Statue of Liberty on Bedloe’s Island, some two hundred yards from Black Tom.
Thousands of windows in the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan were blown out; the buildings looked as if “they had been targets for scattering handfuls of rocks from some great giant.” The Brooklyn Bridge swayed. Smoldering embers continued to explode shells as late as twenty-four hours after the first explosion, causing firemen and others surveying the wreckage to duck for cover. Twelve people in Manhattan were taken to local hospitals to be treated for cuts from shattered glass.
Almost the entire Black Tom facility was reduced to rubble. Warehouses became piles of large splinters, stacked almost a hundred feet in the air. Railroad cars from the Lehigh Valley Railroad Company were now burning hulks. Rails that helped speed goods to the dock were now gnarled and twisted pieces of metal pointing in all directions. Six piers had become smoking ruins, along with thirteen warehouses, eighty-five fully loaded railroad cars, and over one hundred barges.
The explosion was felt on Ellis Island, just a few hundred yards northeast of Black Tom. The New York Times described it in the wake of the blast as “a war-swept town.” Almost every window on the island was shattered by the concussive effect of the explosions. Shrapnel and other debris were strewn across the island. The terra-cotta ceiling of the main hospital had caved in. The iron-bound door of the main building was jammed inward, as if hit by a direct dynamite blast. An Ellis Island doctor, watching the fire on Black Tom, was thrown fifteen feet against a wall by the power of the blast.
The few barges filled with explosives that did not blow up from the fire had been set loose from their moorings and drifted threateningly toward Ellis Island. Two of them hit the pier there, but softly enough to prevent another explosion. Workers at the island doused the ships with water.
Over three hundred immigrants spending the night at Ellis Island were evacuated to Battery Park, but the mentally ill detainees were kept on the island. They were brought out to the east side of the island, where they were treated to a pyrotechnic extravaganza as rocket shells continually shot over the island like flares, exploding in a large arc of fire. These patients, not aware of what had happened or the danger involved, “clapped their hands and cheered, laughed and cried, thinking it was a show which had been arranged for their particular amusement.”
It took Jersey City authorities little more than twenty-four hours to make their first arrest. The city’s commissioner of public safety, Frank Hague, ordered the arrests of the head of the National Dock and Storage Company and the local agent for the Lehigh Valley Railroad on charges of manslaughter. Hague was upset that the blast had killed one of his own men, Jersey City patrolman James Dougherty, who died when a warehouse collapsed on top of him while he was investigating the original fire.
Authorities were adamant that there was no evidence that foreign plotters were to blame. Officials from the Lehigh Valley Railroad went so far as to chalk up the fire to spontaneous combustion. Never mind that the destruction of so many military explosives would have cheered the German kaiser. Americans were cozily snug in their cocoon, secure in the thought that the vast Atlantic Ocean would buffer them from Europe’s deadly storms. The war in Europe, already two years old, was a distant event for most Americans.
But the nearly $50 million worth of damage caused by the explosion was not a mere accident or spontaneous combustion; rather, it was the deliberate act of human hands. Just before midnight, two German saboteurs, Lothar Witzke and Kurt Jahnke, arrived by rowboat at the lightly guarded Black Tom facility. A third man, Michael Kristoff, joined them by land. The three then lit several small fires and set a number of timed explosives in the boxcars and barges filled with ammunition and shells. Within fifteen minutes, the watchmen at Black Tom began to see fires throughout the complex, which would soon burn out of control. Two hours later, these fires would set off the massive explosions that rocked the New York area.
Witzke, Jahnke, and Kristoff were part of a larger plot by the German government to sabotage the Allied war effort. Though technically neutral, the United States had been aiding its friends in Europe, and now Germany responded by waging a quiet war of sabotage against the United States.
Although the explosion’s immediate effect on Ellis Island was measured mostly in broken windows, its long-term effect would be felt with grave consequences for the way that America viewed immigrants. Americans of English stock would be dismayed by the reaction of German-and Irish-Americans who sympathized with Germany against England. Alien immigrants would morph into alien enemies.
The road to the Japanese internment camps of World War II began at Black Tom Island and continued right through Ellis Island. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was serving as assistant secretary of the navy in 1916, reportedly told an aide after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor: “We don’t want any more Black Toms.”
IT WAS GOOD FRIDAY, April 6, 1917, when Congress declared a state of war with Imperial Germany. After three years of avoiding ethnic squabbles that were ripping apart Europe, and less than a year after the devastation at Black Tom, the United States was officially at war. Two million American soldiers would soon be heading for France, many of them country boys from small-town America who had never ventured far from home.
However, President Woodrow Wilson went beyond simply declaring Germany the enemy of America. More than half of his war proclamation dealt not with affairs in Europe but with a class of individuals he termed “alien enemies.”
Any male over the age of fourteen born in Germany, residing in the United States, and not a naturalized U.S. citizen, overnight became an alien enemy, part of a potential fifth column ready to strike America on behalf of the kaiser. Such individuals were banned from possessing any weapons or operating a plane. Alien enemies were barred from living within half a mile of any military base, aircraft station, navy yard, or munitions factory. Such aliens could not “write, print or publish any attack or threat against the Government or Congress of the United States.” Above all, no enemy alien could give aid or comfort to Germany, assist its war effort, or disturb the “public peace or safety of the United States.” Anyone suspected of violating these orders was subject to summary arrest and confinement. No trial or hearing was necessary.
This action was not unprecedented, but was based on the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which stated that if the United States was ever at war with a foreign nation, all adult males from that country residing in the United States who had not become naturalized citizens were deemed “alien enemies” and “shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured and removed.” The legislation was part of a series of laws known collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts, pushed through by members of the Federalist Party as the nation prepared for a possible war against France. While the other parts of the Alien and Sedition Acts either expired or were repealed, the Alien Enemies Act still remains law more than two hundred years later.
After Wilson’s proclamation, the government wasted little time in exercising its prerogative. America’s first wartime action took place not in Europe but on American soil, using agents from the Immigration Service. On the night of Wilson’s war proclamation, federal agents began rounding up German alien enemies and taking them to Ellis Island for indefinite detention. Literally overnight, Ellis Island’s role changed from an immigrant inspection station to a military detention facility.
As for targets, officials did not have to look far. Less than a mile up the Jersey coast from Black Tom stood Hoboken: the “Mile Square City,” the self-proclaimed birthplace of baseball and the hometown of Frank Sinatra, who was just a sixteen-month-old toddler when America declared war on Germany. In 1916, the tiny city had a large German population, thanks in part to the fact that the North German Lloyd and Hamburg-American steamship lines docked at Hoboken.
With war declared against Germany, steamships owned by German companies docked at American piers on April 6, including the President Lincoln and President Grant, were seized by the federal government. All German nationals working on those ships or on the docks were rounded up and taken to Ellis Island.
These men who made their living bringing immigrants to the United States now found themselves in detention. The ships whose steerage sections once carried immigrants would soon be shuttling American troops to the European front. A year later, German torpedoes would sink the President Lincoln off the coast of France.
The German officers and crew members were not prisoners of war and did not receive trials. Deemed alien enemies, they were rounded up and detained using the administrative apparatus of immigration law. The almost 1,500 Germans caused little trouble during their stay on Ellis Island, although they complained that they could not get beer. The men filled their days with calisthenics, games, and reading. The commissioner of Ellis Island found the men “obedient to discipline” and resigned to their situation.
One exception was the case of George Begeman, an officer on the North German Lloyd’s steamship George Washington. Begeman, along with three other colleagues, was granted a leave to visit a dentist in Hoboken. While the guard was getting a sandwich, Begeman fled the dentist’s office. He was last seen in a Hoboken bar downing huge schooners of beer and “calling down the curse of the ghost of Mohammed’s black dog on all prohibitionists.” All that was left by the time police arrived was a line of empty beer steins on the bar. “Ach Himmel,” the bartender told police of Begeman, “he vas a great drinker.” Begeman would never be captured.
Another detainee at Ellis Island was thirty-seven-year-old William Hausdorffer, the acting captain of the steamship Bohemia. Hausdorffer, his wife, and two small children lived in nearby Bayonne. The Hausdorffer children were born in the United States and therefore citizens, but their parents had not yet become naturalized. Hausdorffer had lived in America since 1906, and his wife since 1899, and the family considered themselves American. Hausdorffer’s crew had even derisively nicknamed him “the American” because he sympathized with the United States over the land of his birth. His wife told officials that her husband was even willing to enlist in the U.S. Army. Nevertheless, Hausdorffer was not a naturalized citizen, and his position with a German company was enough to make him an alien enemy.
Not everyone felt the same way as Hausdorffer. William Koerner, who served as a machinist on the Vaterland, was also taken to Ellis Island. When questioned as to which country he sympathized with in the war, his answer was Germany. Koerner, like many of the steamship company workers, also served in the German naval reserve. Though not officially in the military, the status of Koerner and his comrades was enough to convince American officials to hold them as alien enemies.
Over 1,500 German detainees would spend some time at Ellis Island. For some, their detention would be short. Albert Meyer, who worked as a cook on the steamship Vaterland, had been caught up in the dragnet of April 6. He was detained at Ellis Island for two weeks before he could prove to authorities that he was a citizen of Switzerland and therefore not an alien enemy.
Most were not so lucky. In early June, government officials began transferring the German detainees to an internment camp at Hot Springs, North Carolina. First went 470 officers, the captains, engineers, and chief warrant officers. The rest, 1,100 or so crew members and sailors, would follow their officers to North Carolina later. One could have easily mistaken the place for a summer camp, with tidy cabins in a rustic setting, but it was a militarized facility where detainees were not allowed to leave unless given permission. In total, some 2,300 Germans taken into custody throughout the country would be interned at Hot Springs during the war. Thirty-six Germans accused of being spies remained at Ellis Island and would later be removed to Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia.
Some wives of the detainees, not considered alien enemies because of their gender, petitioned the government for the freedom of their husbands. William Koerner’s wife, Paula, was five months pregnant when her husband was taken to Ellis Island. Not only did she lose her husband, but she also had to give up her job making handbags. To help with their situation, Paula and the other wives of steamship crew members received a monthly stipend from their husbands’ employers. Thanks to his wife’s pleadings, Koerner received a three-week parole in August 1917 to be with his wife as she gave birth.
Other cases were more tragic. Herman Byersdorff, the chief engineer of the Kaiser Wilhelm II, had been caught in the first roundup of Germans on April 6 and taken to Ellis Island. War had already touched the Byersdorff family. His only son had been killed in battle in France while serving in the German army in 1914, driving Herman’s wife to a nervous breakdown. She was then brought to America to join her husband, which seemed to calm her nerves.
Byersdorff’s detention once again sent his wife down an emotional spiral. A doctor in Hoboken diagnosed her with severe mental depression bordering on melancholia. From his internment camp in North Carolina, Byersdorff asked to be paroled to be with his distraught wife. As the paperwork for his parole made its way through the federal bureaucracy, Mrs. Byersdorff moved to Hot Springs to be closer to her husband.
Finally, in February 1918, the stress and grief proved too much for Mrs. Byersdorff, who committed suicide almost a year after her husband was taken into custody. Herman received a temporary leave to attend her funeral in Brooklyn, but had to return to North Carolina after two weeks. In June 1918, four months after his wife’s suicide, Herman Byersdorff’s paperwork finally landed on the right desk and he was granted a parole, a small consolation with his wife and only son dead.
It is unclear why Byersdorff’s parole should have taken so long. As early as February 1918, William Hausdorffer was paroled. That spring, more paroles followed as the fear of German sabotage subsided. William Koerner left Hot Springs in April 1918.
The militarization of Ellis Island continued after the German detainees were gone. With immigration from Europe slowing to a trickle because of the war, the army took over the island’s hospital for wounded troops, while the navy took over the baggage and dormitory building and used them to quarter sailors waiting for their assignments. At times, as many as 2,500 military men were stationed at Ellis Island, most for no longer than two weeks. At the same time, American soldiers wounded at the European front were also sent to recover at Ellis Island’s hospital. Young American doughboys who had survived the trenches of the Western Front, often at the cost of an arm or a leg, could be seen wandering the grounds of Ellis Island as part of their convalescence.
The man in charge of Ellis Island during this turbulent period was Frederic C. Howe. He knew little about immigration before assuming the job and later admitted that the topic did not interest him greatly. Unlike Ellis Island’s first commissioner, John Weber, whose life was forged in the combat of the Civil War, Howe’s formative experience as a young man was graduate school at Johns Hopkins, where he studied under Professor Woodrow Wilson. Although Howe later became a lawyer, his graduate years instilled in him an idealistic temperament and a restless intellectual curiosity. His job prior to coming to Ellis Island in 1914 was head of the People’s Institute, a debating society for liberal intellectuals in New York.
Whereas William Williams was comfortable, if not smug, with his position in society and his relationship with his ancestors and background, Howe spent most of his life, in his words, “unlearning” the values of his childhood. Raised in a comfortable middle-class, churchgoing, Republican family in western Pennsylvania, Howe worked to rid himself of the lessons and values of his small-town childhood as he moved up in the world and became engaged in politics.
Howe was a Progressive, a man driven to public service to reform a society reeling from the effects of industrialism, mass immigration, and urbanization. Both Williams and Howe possessed a moralism that stoked the engines of reform. Both men saw the world divided between good and bad. For Williams, the good consisted of people of his class and background, the descendants of the Puritan forefathers. The bad were the undesirable new immigrants whose presence brought crime, disease, and political machines and threatened the Republic that Williams’s ancestors had built.
Howe’s heroes were those liberals who also had unlearned the values of their youth and committed themselves to changing the world. His villains were selfish and narrow-minded people who pursued economic self-interest at the expense of the public interest. Unlike William Williams, whose progressivism was based on ideas of efficiency, Howe was a humanist who defined his type of reform as “sentimentality, or the dreaming of dreams.” No one would have ever accused William Williams of being a dreamer.
Howe sought to humanize Ellis Island, a not-too-subtle dig at his predecessor, and saw his new job as “an opportunity to ameliorate the lot of several thousand human beings.” He sought to spruce up the Great Hall, mixing in some Americanization with beautification. Potted plants were placed throughout the grand, yet sterile hall. Photos of American presidents and paintings of important events from American history hung from walls and large American flags from the balcony. Howe also placed suggestion boxes around the station where immigrants, visitors, or employees could voice their complaints.
“I was struck by the dreadful idleness of these poor people,” Howe said of the detainees. “Some three hundred of them were detained here, compelled to sit hour after hour on hard benches in a bare room.” Instead, Howe ordered that benches be brought out of storage and placed on the lawn outside so that immigrants previously cooped up in indoor cells could now enjoy the outdoors. A playground was created for detained children, with an adult supervisor in charge of ball games and jump rope. Sewing materials, periodicals, and toys were now available. English classes were offered, as was schooling for children. One day, an Italian group brought over Enrico Caruso to entertain the detainees for a Sunday afternoon concert.
Despite their differences, Howe and Williams agreed on one thing. Both sought to end discrimination between steerage passengers and those traveling in first-and second-class cabins. The former were always sent to Ellis Island for inspection, while the latter were inspected aboard ship and were only in rare circumstances ordered to Ellis Island.
“Aliens traveling in the cabin are no more exempt from the immigration laws (which apply to all aliens) than they are from the customs laws,” Williams wrote. “Some of the most objectionable of the prohibited classes are likely to have means sufficient to enable them to buy a first-class ticket.” Criminals, pimps, and prostitutes were sometimes found in first-class cabins, and steamship officials sometimes listed aliens as citizens, which meant, to the cost-conscious Williams, that the government coffers were being deprived of its $4 immigrant head tax.
In January 1912, ninety-two first-and second-class passengers on the Carmania were having a pleasant dinner when immigration officials boarded their ship. They were ordered to stop eating, form a line, and answer questions. The inspection lasted forty-five minutes and netted six people who were sent to Ellis Island for further hearings, including four suspected prostitutes and one notorious embezzler.
News of this inspection provoked outrage. A letter signed “One of the Upper Class, Newport, Rhode Island,” complained to the editor of a New York newspaper. “We of the better class consider the action of the immigration authorities a gratuitous insult,” the indignant writer protested. “There is nothing to my mind that strikes a more violent blow at our ‘position’ and ‘caste’ than…the intimation that ‘first-class’ passengers are not one whit better in the social scale than those horrid people who cross the Atlantic in the nauseating and ill-smelling steerage.”
Fred Howe would go a step further and ask for permission to send all second-class passengers through Ellis Island, along with steerage passengers. Steamship companies complained and forced a public hearing on the matter. “There has always been maintained in this country that distinction between the cabin and the steerage,” said a representative of the steamship companies. “Most of the people who travel second-cabin are most self-respecting people.”
Steamship passengers paid a premium for that distinction. The average cost in 1915 for a first-class passage was between $85 and $120; for second-class passage, $50 to $65; and for steerage, $35 to $46. “A man in the first-cabin might consider it almost a joke to be, as he would express it, put with immigrants,” said the man from the steamship company. “A person in the second cabin would regard it as a very serious protest in his own mind.” The fear that such a measure would cut into the profits of steamship companies, as well as ingrained class prejudice against steerage passengers, meant that the reforms of Williams and Howe went nowhere, and nearly all first-and second-class passengers would continue to bypass Ellis Island.
By this time, however, there were more pressing matters. Most of Howe’s reforms came during a unique period in Ellis Island’s history. For most of his five-year tenure, war raged in Europe. During 1914, 878,000 immigrants came through Ellis Island; the following year the war had brought that number down to 178,000. During Howe’s entire administration, only about half a million immigrants passed through Ellis Island.
While the pressure to inspect large numbers of immigrants had subsided, war created other problems. Those denied entry and ordered deported could not be sent back because of the war. Many of Howe’s reforms were meant to ease conditions on Ellis Island for these men and women stranded because of the violence and destruction at home, yet blocked from legally entering the United States.
Whereas a strict segregation of sexes had been the rule at Ellis Island, Howe allowed men and women to mingle throughout the day on the grounds and in the common detention hall—with matrons keeping an eye out for any illicit activity.
With Ellis Island overflowing with detainees, Howe took a more liberal approach to enforcing the law. He released on bond a number of immigrants designated as feebleminded. A special report by the New York State Department of Labor condemned the move from both an economic and a eugenics standpoint. “The precipitation of feeble-minded females or [sic] marriageable age without restrain into the community, is to be condemned in the strongest possible terms,” the report complained.
With the controversy over detainees swirling around the island, Howe also tried to reform the operations of Ellis Island. He believed that the money exchange, the railroads, and the food concession all exploited immigrants. When the contract for the food concession expired, he pushed for the federal government to take over the responsibility of feeding immigrants. Deeply suspicious of private enterprise, Howe had previously championed the public ownership of railroads and utility companies. Here was a chance, on a much smaller scale, to push his ideas about the inherent justice and efficiency of public ownership of business. Private business, argued Howe, should not make money off immigrants on government property.
Like many reformers, Howe had a tin ear for politics. He was apparently unaware that New York congressman William S. Bennet was the lawyer for Hudgins & Dumas, the food concessionaire. Bennet was no reactionary; he was the lone dissenting voice on the Dillingham Commission to oppose the literacy test and was an opponent of immigration restriction. However, Howe had touched a nerve—or Bennet’s pocketbook—and the congressman used an amendment to a House bill to block Howe’s plan.
At Bennet’s urging, Congress began an investigation of Howe in the summer of 1916. It focused heavily on the issue of the sexual morality of female immigrant detainees. Bennet charged gross immorality under Howe’s watch, calling him “a half-baked radical” who supported free love.
Even more pointed was Bennet’s charge that Howe was lenient toward immigrant women of questionable morality. The white slavery hysteria meant that more suspected prostitutes were taken to Ellis Island and stranded because of the war. Bennet complained that prostitutes were allowed to mingle during the day with other detainees and that detained Chinese sailors were gambling and cavorting with detained prostitutes.
One case that aroused congressional interest was that of a suspected prostitute named Ella Lebewitz. Officials accused her of having sex with a nineteen-year-old Brazilian male, also in detention. Lebewitz denied the charge and argued she would be foolish to ruin her chances of being allowed into the country. A Labor Department official called her “absolutely incorrigible,” “subnormal or abnormal,” and “positively a degenerate.” Though Howe claimed he had been aware of Lebewetz, he doubted any sexual impropriety.
At the hearing, Texas congressman James Slayden asked Howe: “What percentage of the people who are detained at Ellis Island are downright immoral people?” Howe responded that the figure was around 20 to 50, out of the 400 to 600 detained at any one time.
Not only was Howe determined to ease the pain of detention; he was also willing to reconsider deportation orders. He sent a team of female social workers to investigate some of the cases. Howe believed that “the great majority of women were casual offenders who would not have been arrested under ordinary circumstances. In many instances their misfortunes were the result of ignorance, almost always of poverty.” In his autobiography, he mentions the case of an immigrant named Sarah, who lived in St. Louis and whose drunken husband abandoned her and her infant. In despair, Sarah sold herself to a man on the street, was arrested, and sent to Ellis Island to be deported.
Alice Gouree was not a prostitute, but she still encountered problems at Ellis Island. Having lived in New York since 1906, the thirty-one-year-old Frenchwoman returned to New York from France the same day that Congress declared war on Germany. Gouree was preceded upon her arrival by an anonymous letter to Ellis Island warning officials that she had had an affair with a married man.
Thanks to the letter, Gouree was detained at Ellis Island and questioned about her sexual past. She admitted to having had sexual relations with the man and that he had paid for her apartment, although she claimed not to know he was married. She also admitted to an affair with another man years earlier who had also paid her rent, as well as a third relationship with another married man. After her hearing, the board ordered Alice excluded as an immoral woman. With deportations suspended until the end of the war, Howe was not interested in keeping Alice detained indefinitely and advised that she be admitted. His superiors in Washington ruled against Howe, calling Gouree a “self-confessed courtesan with very warped ideas of moral uprightness,” and ordered her detained until she could be deported. However, the number two person in the Labor Department, Louis Post, agreed with Howe and ordered Alice paroled to her sister.
But Gouree was not free from the long arm of immigration officials. Investigators monitored her situation, reporting that she had worked as a maid in a hotel after her release from Ellis Island, but that she was fired after a few months for improper behavior with a married waiter named Muhlenberg, who had left his wife and three children to live with Gouree. Seven months later, Gouree was back at Ellis Island to answer for her sexual promiscuity. She admitted to the affair with Muhlenberg, but said she believed he was going to leave his wife to marry her.
In tune with the anti-German hysteria sweeping the country and faced with deportation back to France because of the affair, Gouree told officials that she broke up with Muhlenberg not because he was married and wouldn’t leave his wife, but because he was German. She also informed officials that she believed that Muhlenberg, a German citizen, had not properly registered with the government as an enemy alien. The newly patriotic Gouree begged officials to allow her to stay, admitting her mistake and saying that she had found another job as a maid for a Park Avenue matron.
When it looked as if patriotic, anti-German appeals were not going to win her the right to stay in America, Gouree lashed out. “I have done nothing wrong and was brought back to Ellis Island for no good reason,” she said. “Why should I be kept here?” One can only imagine Gouree’s humiliation at having to discuss her sex life in front of male authorities. It was all too much. Although she was released on bond again in February 1918, she told officials that when the war was over, she would return to France at her own expense. “This sort of treatment will make a bad woman out of any good woman,” Gouree wrote. In 1919, when officials sought Alice’s deportation, they were informed that she had already kept her promise and left America.
Then there was Giulietta Lamarca. Sent to Ellis Island for prostitution in the summer of 1915, Lamarca remained there for months, unable to be deported back to her native Italy. Her case was one of those that attracted Howe’s attention. “This woman has conducted herself with propriety,” Ellis Island matrons informed Howe. “She has kept away from the men. She has a son in Italy and she wants to make a little money in order to bring him over here.” Howe believed that an abusive husband had forced Giulietta into prostitution and decided to give her a chance.
“I have, I admit, thought of the poor, ignorant, immoral women detained at the Island as human beings entitled to every help to a fair start in the world,” Howe wrote in response to his critics. Working with charitable groups, he sought to find homes that would help rehabilitate these women. Giulietta was released on bond to work as a servant in the home of an Ellis Island doctor who lived in New Jersey.
Giulietta seemed to be a good worker. A year after she left Ellis Island, she was working for another government official living in New Jersey, a man named S. L. Norton. Lamarca only worked for Norton for four days before leaving. Inspector Frank Stone was sent to look into Norton’s complaints against his former employee.
Norton was angry that Lamarca had left his employ early. Giulietta claimed she was hired to be a cook for Norton, but instead had to clean up after Norton’s wife, who was suffering from an ailment that forced her to wear a diaper. Norton took after Lamarca with a vengeance. He told Stone that Giulietta had had indecent contact with his two dogs. His proof: when the dogs left Giulietta’s company, they were panting and excited, which to Norton showed “that she had committed some crime against nature with them.”
Norton also complained that the former prostitute was corrupting the morals of the decent young women of Cranford, New Jersey. Because of her past, Lamarca’s relationship with men was open to investigation. Stone found that although Giulietta had had some conversations with an Italian chauffeur and an Italian garbageman, she had “conducted herself properly while in Cranford.” He concluded that Norton’s charges were “inspired by malice and vindictiveness” and anger at Howe’s policy of releasing prostitutes from detention at Ellis Island.
Ellis Island officials allowed Giulietta to remain free. She continued to live and work in New Jersey. Howe argued that he had found that out of the hundreds of women paroled, “not more than a dozen” had reverted to their former lives of prostitution. Howe possessed a positive view of human nature, that men and women were victims of their environment and that rehabilitation was an exercise in humanity, not futility.
With cases like Giulietta’s seemingly to have turned out so well, Congressman Bennet’s hearings went nowhere. The specific complaints were dropped, the former prostitutes were out on parole, the food concession remained in private hands, and Howe remained in office. At least one of Bennet’s criticisms, though, was on the mark.
Bennet charged that Howe spent less than half of the working week at Ellis Island, making him “the most absentee commissioner” in the station’s history. As if to prove the point, Howe could not be reached for comment on Bennet’s charge because he was vacationing for a week in Nantucket.
Howe described his daily schedule for the congressional committee. He would arrive at Ellis Island sometime between 8:30 and 10:00 A.M., depending on which ferry he caught. Usually, he got to his office around 9:30 A.M. His days on Ellis Island would end around 4:15 P.M., but he admitted that “many days I leave before that when I clean up all the work and there is nothing more to do.”
Howe’s inattention was due less to laziness than to overextension. Howe still spent a great deal of time dabbling in personal intellectual and political pursuits, few of which directly related to immigration. He was more likely to make news for his views on unemployment, the nationalization of railroads, or public ownership of utilities than on immigration policy. Most of his letters to Woodrow Wilson dealt with recommendations on everything from who should serve on the new Federal Trade Commission to what kind of peace Wilson should seek when the war in Europe ended.
Howe spoke out about the conflict in Europe, giving a speech in lower Manhattan in 1915 in which he warned against rushing into war, since he believed that “wars are made by classes and privileged interests.” This was a far cry from what his boss, President Wilson, was saying.
Even the Times, a defender of Howe against attacks from Bennet, called Howe “a glib spokesman of glittering and ignorant theories, a thinker of vealy thoughts, an individual whose public utterances are often of the half-baked kind.” It encouraged Howe to continue his humanitarian work at Ellis Island, but “stay off the lecture platform.”
There was a deeper issue at work. Not only did Howe know little about immigration, but he was also growing increasingly disillusioned with government. Whereas William Williams wielded the powers of his office comfortably—perhaps too comfortably—Howe seemed uneasy with his role at Ellis Island. More a thinker than a doer, he had difficulty administering the station and admitted that his superiors in Washington often ignored his suggestions and left many of his letters unanswered.
Howe had also grown disillusioned with government workers, finding them nothing more than petty clerks. “The government was their government,” he wrote. The great success of the Progressive Era was the creation of the administrative state that would regulate private business in the public interest. In theory, civil service reform helped staff that bureaucracy with professionals instead of hack politicians. Yet Howe found that this bureaucracy “moved largely by fear, hating initiative,” caring only about “its petty unimaginative salary-hunting instincts.” He felt that his position at Ellis Island was not just irrelevant, but unnecessary. Howe had no desire to preside over what the Times called the “petty Czarship” of Ellis Island commissioner and saw little need to weed out the desirable from the undesirable.
Howe’s career indicated a steady change in American liberalism, an evolution from the progressivism of earlier years to a more modern form of liberalism. The Great War only brought more disillusionment with the state, as liberals increasingly emphasized individual rights and humanitarianism.
Even Howe’s choice of a home made a statement. When they arrived in New York in 1910, Howe and his wife, Marie Jenney Howe, chose to live in Greenwich Village. There the couple mixed with a growing band of bohemians and political radicals. Marie became active in the Women’s Suffrage Party and helped found the Heterodoxy Club, a debating society for women that served as an incubator for early feminism. Despite his continual “unlearning” of the conservative values of his childhood, Fred Howe could never fully come to grips with his wife’s feminism, which put a strain on their marriage. When Marie read her husband’s autobiography, she reportedly asked him, her voice dripping with sarcasm: “Why, Fred, were you never married?”
The 1910s were an exciting time in Greenwich Village. One man who helped give the area its bohemian feel was a hunchbacked dwarf named Randolph Bourne, who walked the streets dressed in a black cape. Bourne, who had suffered from spinal tuberculosis as a child and whose difficult delivery as an infant left his face misshapen and disfigured, became a prominent voice among liberal intellectuals.
Much of the immigration debate had been fought over the idea of the melting pot, a phrase made popular by Israel Zangwill in his 1908 play of the same name. Whether immigrants could be absorbed into American society was the question that divided Prescott Hall from Oscar Straus, a dividing line that the politically agile Theodore Roosevelt danced along for his entire political career.
Randolph Bourne believed that the melting pot had failed, but he turned the idea around on the Prescott Halls of America. No group, Bourne argued, clung more tenaciously to the virtues of the old country than Anglo-Saxons who worshipped everything British and whose allegiance to England was getting the United States dangerously close to participating in the faraway war in Europe.
Bourne also complained that assimilation was a one-way street, accomplished only on the terms set by Anglo-Saxon Americans. Bourne feared that assimilation would take the distinctiveness of the nation’s ethnic communities and wash them “into a tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity.” Assimilation, Bourne argued, was bad for immigrants and turned them into people “without a spiritual country, cultural outlaws, without taste.”
For Bourne, America’s strength was that it was a “world-federation in miniature.” He was the prophet of multiculturalism, a hunchbacked John the Baptist laying out arguments that would not gain currency for more than sixty years. Perhaps only a misfit like Bourne could have foreseen this trend in American society. In 1916, these ideas found few adherents beyond the streets of Greenwich Village. Bourne’s colleagues at The New Republic argued that if America continued to be fractured ethnically, “we cannot expect to attain the homogeneity of feeling and action essential to our position of power with international rights and obligations.” The editors of this newest liberal magazine argued in favor of stricter regulation of immigration to end the “wholesale transplantation upon our soil of alien communities.”
The war raised questions about ethnic loyalty. Were German-Americans going to support the kaiser? Were Irish-Americans so hateful toward the British that they would side with Germany? Such concerns led to a new enemy on American soil, one so tiny and seemingly insignificant, yet fraught with peril for the entire nation. It was not a person or an organization, but a lowly punctuation mark, a short horizontal line used to connect two words: the hyphen. Irish-Americans, German-Americans, Polish-Americans. “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism,” Theodore Roosevelt warned in 1915.
War in Europe and fears of ethnic disloyalty at home recharged the case for immigration restriction. Since the 1890s, the literacy test had been the gold standard for restrictionists. Congress again took up the cause in the waning months of 1916. Both chambers overwhelmingly passed the bill. A week after Wilson gave a speech to Congress calling for “peace without victory” in the war in Europe and only days before Germany resumed its submarine warfare in the Atlantic, the president vetoed the literacy test. It was Wilson’s second veto of the bill since becoming president and the fourth veto of a literacy bill since the 1890s.
The president had few strong feelings on the issue, but had promised ethnic groups during his 1912 campaign that he would veto any literacy test to make amends for his earlier anti-immigrant writings. Wilson called the test a radical departure from traditional policy. Unlike other justifications for the exclusion of immigrants, Wilson argued, the literacy test was not a “test of character, of quality or of personal fitness,” but instead penalized those who lacked opportunity in Europe. Wilson’s arguments were moot. Within days, both the Senate and the House had easily overridden Wilson’s veto. The literacy test was finally law.
The new law would require all immigrants over the age of sixteen to be able to read a short text in their native language. In a nod to America’s traditional role as an asylum for refugees, those fleeing religious persecution were exempt from the literacy test. To give a sense of how far restrictionist sentiment had evolved, the 1917 Immigration Act contained twenty-six different exclusionary categories for aliens. In contrast, the 1891 law contained only seven.
The literacy test consisted of about forty words from the Bible in the immigrant’s native language. The decision to use the Bible had little to do with evangelizing and more to do with the fact that the Bible was the most translated book in the world. Assistant Commissioner Uhl said that the biblical verses were a “non-controversial matter in every case and are practically all from the Old Testament.”
Instead of rejoicing at victory, Prescott Hall believed that the work of restriction had just begun, hinting that a literacy test would have little effect on immigration. Since, between 1908 and 1917, some 1.6 million illiterate immigrants had entered the country, many had assumed that the new law would bar a large number of aliens. Yet in its first five years, a mere 6,533 people were barred by the literacy test. After a quarter-century of political agitation, this was at best a tepid victory for restrictionists.
The enactment of the literacy test coincided with America’s entry into the Great War, when hostility toward immigrants was channeled toward German-Americans. War propaganda painted the murderous and rapacious Hun as a virulent enemy. Anti-German hysteria spread across the continent as schools stopped teaching German, and German-language newspapers folded. Anything remotely German was suspect: Americans went so far as to rename sauerkraut as “liberty cabbage.”
The war greatly strengthened the hand of prewar restrictionists. Charles Warren served as assistant attorney general during the war. He had been a founding member of the Immigration Restriction League and though not as prolific a pamphleteer as some of his colleagues, he perhaps had a greater influence in the long term.
At the Justice Department, Warren began work to resuscitate the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to give the government greater control over German alien enemies. Warren was also the architect of the Espionage Act, which passed Congress in 1917 and was designed to go after domestic opponents of the war effort. While Prescott Hall could merely fulminate against the inferiority of the new immigrants, Warren quietly changed the law affecting thousands of people.
The targeting of Germans was also tied to German-owned steamship companies, which had been responsible for much of the immigrant traffic to America in the past quarter century. Otto Wolpert, superintendent of the Hamburg-American docks in Hoboken, and Paul Koenig, the chief detective for Hamburg-American, were accused of assisting German saboteurs and bomb makers. Though only a small percentage of steamship employees were involved in Germany’s covert war effort, it was enough of a link to reinforce negative views of steamship companies and tie wartime sabotage directly to immigration.
Then there was the case of the increasingly hapless Marcus Braun, the former head of the Hungarian Republican Club in New York and sometime friend of Theodore Roosevelt. Braun had pushed his way into a patronage job at Ellis Island in 1903, which led him to his native Hungary to investigate the causes of immigration. After leaving the immigration service, he started his own newspaper, Fair Play.
Braun’s career took a strange turn during the war. In 1915, he was discovered carrying documents from the Austrian consul general in New York to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vienna. Though not illegal, Braun’s activities reinforced notions that foreign-born Americans still held loyalties to their mother countries and were willing to assist them in wartime.
It was later revealed that Count Johann von Bernstorff, Germany’s ambassador to Washington, had secretly purchased Braun’s newspaper. It became apparent that Braun had been a shill for the German government since 1915. Von Bernstorff’s activities went beyond buying up American newspapers and extended to overseeing the whole operation of German propaganda and sabotage—including the Black Tom explosion.
Braun somehow escaped punishment, but found his reputation and career in ruins. His name came up a number of times during 1918 congressional hearings looking into the relationship between German-American brewers and German propaganda during the war. The man who had dined with President Roosevelt, inspected immigrants at Ellis Island, and investigated white slavery in Europe had been publicly disgraced. After the war, he moved to Vienna, bought another small newspaper, and passed away unnoticed in 1921.
SITTING IN HIS OFFICE after Armistice Day in 1918, Fred Howe must have thought that the worst of his troubles had passed. The war was now over. Detained immigrants could be released from their Ellis Island imprisonment. But the end of the Great War would not bring peace either to Ellis Island or America.