Chapter 15
The worst dump I have ever stayed in.
—Emma Goldman, referring to Ellis Island, 1919
ON THE MORNING OF FEBRUARY 6, 1919, SOME 65,000 workers in the city of Seattle began a general strike that would shut down the city for the next five days. Mayor Ole Hanson feared that his city was in the grip of a political and social revolution. Tensions ran high, but revolution never came. The strike ended five days later, after federal troops arrived to restore order.
Even before the strike began, government officials had their eyes on the immigrant radicals of Washington State. On the day that the strike began, some forty-seven suspected radical aliens from Seattle, Spokane, and Portland found themselves on a train headed for Ellis Island instead of manning the barricades. Most were Wobblies, members of the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), but a few belonged to the Union of Russian Workers. Newspapers eagerly dubbed the train the Red Special.
As the train approached Montana, some one thousand Wobblies were waiting for it in Butte in hopes of freeing their comrades, but the Red Special bypassed the city by way of Helena and avoided any problems. In Chicago, the train picked up seven more suspected radicals headed for deportation. The Times called the group a “motley company of I.W.W. troublemakers, bearded labor fanatics, and red flag supporters.”
The train arrived at Hoboken, New Jersey, and its fifty-four passengers were hustled onto a waiting barge for Ellis Island, where a melee erupted after an argument between a guard and one of the prisoners. This was one exception to a fairly peaceful trip, although the radicals did heap abuse and insults upon their guards throughout. As the guard in charge of the Red Special explained to his boss in Washington, it “went against my grain, as well as every guard aboard the train, to handle them without force, as they were very insulting at times.” One guard said the detainees needed gags, not handcuffs. “This is a musical gang,” he told a reporter. “They sing foreign songs for hours. Some of ’em wake up in the night to do it.”
When the Red Special radicals arrived at Ellis Island, Fred Howe was not there to greet them. He had been away since December accompanying President Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference. In his absence, Byron Uhl was acting commissioner, faithfully carrying out deportation orders from Washington. The fifty-four suspected radicals were held incommunicado. Neither their relatives nor their lawyers could see them. The headline from the socialist paper New York Call read: “Mystery Thick Around Exiles in Ellis Island: Keepers of New Bastille Terribly Fussy About Even Relatives Seeing Inmates.” Officials soon relented and allowed lawyers to review the cases.
Attorneys Caroline Lowe and Charles Recht led the fight to free the detainees. However, they were unfamiliar with immigration law. “A sovereign state has the right to deport every alien, under any laws or rules it pleases,” an astounded Recht later remembered in his autobiography. “An alien deportee cannot invoke the Bill of Rights or the Constitution, for these do not apply to him.”
In contrast to the depiction in newspapers, Lowe saw her clients as admirable citizens of high character, “clean cut, upright, intelligent, educated.” All were literate and could speak English. Americans had been so worried about the pernicious effect of illiterate immigrants that it had enacted a literacy test, yet these radicals would have had no problem passing such a test. The stereotype of the anarchist and radical was usually the Jewish Socialist or the Italian with a bomb, but most of the immigrants on the Red Special were English or Scandinavian.
The detainees were a random lot of IWW organizers, political radicals, and eccentrics. Among them was thirty-four-year-old E. E. McDonald, who had been born in Denmark and had come to the United States when he was eight. A local newspaper called the picturesque McDonald the poet laureate of the Ellis Island detainees. He even composed a poem there called “Song of the Alien Deportees.”
In the shadow of the statue
That Bartholdi’s hand designed
We are waiting for the mandate
That will make us leave behind
All the friends and kin and loved ones
We have here on this fair shore
We are waiting to be exiled
From this land forevermore.
McDonald and the other passengers of the Red Special were still at Ellis Island when Fred Howe returned from Europe. When Howe complained about the status of the detainees, his superiors told him to mind his own business and follow orders. Howe was also dismayed that his colleagues at Ellis Island were “happy in the punishing power which all jailers enjoy, and resented any interference on behalf of its victims.”
Howe was swimming against the tide when it came to the country’s attitude toward radicals. Congress had added anarchists to its list of excluded groups back in 1903, and the 1917 Immigration Act expanded the definition of excluded or deportable immigrants to include not just anarchists, but also “persons who believe in or advocate the overthrow by force or violence of the Government of the United States.” The following year, Congress gave officials more latitude to define alien radicals. Undesirable immigrants were now defined as those “opposed to all organized government,” who advocated or taught “the unlawful destruction of property,” and who belonged to an organization that advocated any of the above measures.
This expansion of the law allowed Anthony Caminetti, commissioner-general of immigration, to launch a personal crusade against foreign-born, nonnaturalized radicals living in the United States. One of his first targets in 1918 was the Home Colony, a radical commune on the west side of Puget Sound some forty miles from Seattle. An investigation by government officials showed that the Home Colony was a kind of utopia-turned-sour whose middle-aged members seemed more interested in free love than revolution. It was small potatoes when compared to the IWW.
Though he was out of step with American anti-radical laws, Fred Howe did have one trump card at his disposal. He simply postponed all deportations, allowing the IWW lawyers to present their case to Washington. With additional time to hear the cases, the acting secretary of labor, John Abercrombie, overruled Caminetti and issued a memorandum to all immigration officials stating that the department had never declared the IWW to be an anarchistic organization and therefore its members could not be deported. In all future cases, he declared, a Wobbly’s actions, and not simply his membership, would be the basis for deportation.
Using this new standard, the department took up the case of James Lund, an immigrant from Sweden and a member of the Seattle IWW. The Labor Department found, contrary to earlier findings, that there was little evidence that he advocated the overthrow of the U.S. government. Therefore, it ordered Lund released on his own recognizance, or in effect paroled. The cases of eleven others were deemed to be similar to Lund’s and they too were paroled on March 17. In the next six weeks, eleven more alien radicals were set free. One suspected radical escaped from custody, while four others were discharged outright and one was found to be an American citizen.
For those Red Special radicals still in custody at Ellis Island, attorneys Lowe and Recht pursued a round of habeas corpus writs to free the detainees. Judge Augustus Hand ruled in the case of Sam Nelson that he could only find that the detainee believed in an “irreconcilable conflict between employer and employee.” This was not enough, in the eyes of Hand, to justify Nelson’s detention or deportation. Using Nelson’s precedent, more Red Special detainees were paroled. Later in June, Judge Hand ruled on seven more cases, allowing the deportation of six men while freeing one: Ellis Island’s poet laureate, E. E. McDonald.
Martin de Wal was one of the unlucky ones whom Judge Hand ruled against. After three months of the tedium of detention, de Wal sent a letter to the editor of The Survey asking readers to send books and other reading material to them. By June, de Wal again wrote to thank readers for the apparently large number of books and pamphlets they had sent, although de Wal noted that they could not tell how many books had actually been sent, since officials at Ellis Island withheld material so as “not to spoil our morals further by allowing us radical or truthful books.” Hopefully, de Wal had enough reading material, for he was to remain at Ellis Island until the end of September.
As de Wal and his colleagues whiled away their time in detention, more than thirty bombs were being mailed to prominent Americans like J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. Postal officials intercepted most of them, but one package they missed arrived at the home of former Georgia senator Thomas Hardwick where it exploded and blew off the hands of Hardwick’s maid. In June, another bomb exploded in front of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s Washington home, damaging the house and killing the man who planted the bomb. To Americans, these seemed like dangerous times.
Meanwhile, despite the hoopla surrounding the big roundup of radicals from the Red Special, only nine of the detainees had actually been deported. Most of those taken from Seattle to Ellis Island were eventually released on parole. The big Red roundup had actually been a bust.
In the middle of this was Fred Howe, a public servant with impeccably bad timing. Not only were suspected radicals being released from his custody, but just a few days before the bomb exploded in front of Palmer’s home, Howe had presided over a Justice to Russia rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden. His presence attracted the attention of Senator William King of Utah, who demanded that Howe be fired. “I don’t think a man who has sanctioned Bolshevism, as he did by presiding at that meeting, is fit to remain in office,” King said. “If there is any hint of Bolshevism at Ellis Island, through which the immigrants of the world pour into the United States, it must be wiped out.” Howe was unapologetic and denied that the meeting was “pro-Bolshevist” or “pro-Soviet.” Yet a Times article claimed that participants cheered for Trotsky and Lenin, while booing the mention of Woodrow Wilson’s name.
Howe was not a Communist, but a Labor Department report showed that he had been solicitous of the comfort of the Red Special detainees. When the radicals complained that they had to get up at six thirty in the morning, but could not eat breakfast until eight thirty, Howe ordered that their mandatory wake-up be postponed closer to breakfast. Howe also allowed detainees to receive such IWW periodicals as The Rebel Worker and The Red Dawn.
The attacks on Howe also came from an unexpected source: Fiorello La Guardia. The former Ellis Island translator, who had recently returned to his House seat after serving in the army during the Great War, lashed out at Howe on the floor of Congress. La Guardia was a liberal and sympathetic to the plight of immigrants at Ellis Island, but was disgusted enough to condemn Howe as a radical and complain that he had allowed anarchist literature to be available to detainees. While Senator King proposed impeaching Howe, La Guardia merely wanted to cut his pay by 50 percent.
In the midst of the criticism, Howe resigned in September 1919. He was mostly guilty of a political tin ear, a victim of political naïveté and poor judgment. The irony is that despite his sympathy for the radicals, one of the intercepted explosive packages sent by anarchists in the spring of 1919 was addressed to Howe, perhaps because he was technically in charge of the detention of IWW radicals.
This did not prevent Congress from initiating three days of hearings in November 1919 at Ellis Island to look into charges that Howe’s administration was lax, especially regarding suspected radical detainees. Howe had already weathered one congressional hearing dealing with his alleged lenient treatment of alien prostitutes.
During this second hearing, Congressman John Box of Texas called the inspection of immigrants at Ellis Island a farce, a characterization that Howe’s deputy, Byron Uhl, did not dispute, saying that it had become “largely a matter of checking names.” The committee chairman, Albert Johnson, asked Uhl whether it was Howe’s desire to turn Ellis Island into “a place of individual government, letting everyone do as he pleased.” Uhl had been fairly taciturn in his responses, but answered that that had been his impression. In addition, he admitted that nearly all employees at Ellis Island were of the opinion that Howe’s policies were “utterly improper.” Uhl admitted that under Howe each detainee at Ellis Island could just about do as he or she pleased.
The committee also released at letter from anarchist Emma Goldman to Howe in 1915, addressed to “My Dear Fred.” Critics argued that the letter implied a friendship between the two, yet another piece of evidence that Howe was soft on radicals.
Howe was present during the hearings at Ellis Island, but was not on the witness list. At a number of points during proceedings, he tried to answer charges but was silenced by the chairman. Later, Howe made his case to the press outside the hearing, explaining that he had never released anyone from Ellis Island without the explicit order from the Labor Department. In a literal sense, what Howe said was true. The decision to parole or release detained radicals was made by his superiors, but it was Howe’s intercession that stalled the proceedings and allowed the radicals a second chance to make their case to Washington.
Back inside the hearing, the congressmen seemed particularly bothered that not only were the Red Special detainees, as well as others held at Ellis Island, released on their own recognizance, but the government had no idea where they were. “Whereabouts now unknown,” was the phrase that attached itself to name after name of suspected radicals. In the course of the hearings, it came out that 697 warrants of arrest had been issued for the deportation of suspected radicals between February 1917 and November 1919. Of that number, only 60 had actually been deported.
The press had a field day with the revelations. The most colorful, if overwrought, description came from the Cleveland News, which described Ellis Island as a “government institution turned into a Socialist hall, a spouting ground for Red revolutionists…a place of deceit and sham to which foreign mischief-makers are sent temporarily to make the public think the Government is courageously deporting them.” The New York World complained that Ellis Island was in danger of becoming a “perpetual joke,” where a workforce of guards consisting of “one-legged, one-armed or decrepit old men” was in danger of losing control to anarchists.
The case of the Red Special detainees was a false start in the government’s battle against suspected alien radicals. The next round of arrests and deportations, which were already underway during the Howe hearings, would be much different.
The next series of roundups had their genesis on the desk of A. Mitchell Palmer, the attorney general. But there was a problem: the power of deportation lay not with the Department of Justice but with the Department of Labor. William B. Wilson, who headed the newly created department, reminded Palmer of this fact in a letter, temporarily derailing Palmer’s crusade. But Wilson had become increasingly disengaged from his job and was in no position for bureaucratic infighting. His wife had recently suffered a stroke, so he took an extended leave from his job to care for her. Adding to his burdens, Wilson himself fell sick and was rarely seen in his office throughout most of 1919.
With Secretary Wilson turning over effective control of his department to subordinates, Palmer saw an opportunity. Commissioner-General Caminetti had already shown that he was committed to the idea of rounding up alien radicals. In Secretary Wilson’s absence, Caminetti made an end run around his superiors and worked directly with Palmer and the Justice Department. His liaison was the twenty-four-year-old head of the General Intelligence Division, J. Edgar Hoover, whom a congressman referred to as a “slender bundle of high-charged electric wire.” A direct phone line to Hoover’s Washington office would be installed at Ellis Island.
If the earlier roundups of suspected radicals consisted of mostly obscure figures from the West Coast, the main targets of the fall 1919 campaign were the country’s most notorious radicals: Emma Goldman and her former lover Alexander Berkman. Goldman was a notorious nonconformist known for her fiery rhetoric and anarchist beliefs. The U.S. attorney Francis G. Caffey referred to her as a “continual disturber of the peace.” Berkman’s claim to fame was his attempted murder of industrialist Henry Clay Frick, for which he served fourteen years in jail.
Both Berkman and Goldman had been born in Russia. Goldman had arrived at Castle Garden in 1886. Berkman was not a citizen, but Goldman claimed citizenship via a brief 1887 marriage to Jacob Kershner, a naturalized Russian immigrant. Goldman’s citizenship should have left her immune from deportation, but that was not to be.
Beginning in 1907, immigration officials began to monitor Goldman closely. Commerce and Labor secretary Oscar Straus began going after anarchists, in part to compensate for the criticism he was receiving from restrictionists. “There is no doubt about it that Emma Goldman, who is a woman of the French Revolution type, is dangerous by reason of her incendiary ability,” Straus wrote in his diary. Secret Service agents monitored Goldman’s public speeches.
For two years, Straus vacillated on the Goldman case. At one point, he ordered Robert Watchorn to take her into custody at Ellis Island for an administrative hearing. Yet that never happened. Straus claimed that Goldman’s speeches were “very skillfully worded so as not to be actionable.” He argued that although she was an anarchist, arresting her would only add to her prestige among radicals.
As Straus continued to debate action against Goldman, a federal judge revoked her ex-husband’s citizenship as fraudulent. It was a peculiar move. By 1909, Kershner was dead and it was not readily apparent why the government thought it necessary to pull the citizenship from a corpse. The move was not really about Kershner, who had been little more than a poor factory worker. The real target was Emma Goldman. In revoking Kershner’s citizenship, the government also revoked Goldman’s. By this dubious legal move, Goldman was now subject to deportation under the immigration law.
This did not put Goldman in immediate jeopardy, although she was more than capable of getting into trouble on her own. Before World War I, she was arrested for lecturing on birth control. Her real problems began after the United States entered the war, as officials continued to monitor her speeches for criticisms of the war effort. In 1917, Goldman and Berkman were arrested under the Espionage Act for speaking out against the draft. They were sentenced to two years in prison.
As Julius Goldman was about to find out, the mere attendance at an Emma Goldman speech could place one in legal jeopardy. No relation to Emma, Julius was a nineteen-year-old deli clerk on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He had been in the country since 1913. One night after seeing a movie, he walked down East Broadway for dinner when he saw a large crowd at Forward Hall, the headquarters of the city’s Yiddish-language, socialist paper. Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were speaking. After their speech, all men in the audience were stopped by police and asked to show their draft registration cards. Having been caught up in the crowd, Julius Goldman was interrogated by police. Was he an anarchist, one policeman asked? More questions followed: “Do you believe in the overthrow of law and government by force? Do you believe in organized government? Do you believe in free love?” Because he had admitted to being an anarchist and since he was a nonnaturalized immigrant, Julius was sent to Ellis Island.
Officials quickly realized that Julius was hardly a bomb thrower. His lawyer argued that Julius’s appearance “does not stamp him as one who has been given over to too much study.” He had simply wandered into the meeting and mistakenly said he was an anarchist out of fear. Caminetti called Julius a “somewhat unsophisticated lad” with no knowledge of anarchism and he was released on bond. Julius had come to find that even a random association with Emma Goldman could be dangerous to one’s liberty. A short time later, with government officials and policemen monitoring their every utterance, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were arrested and convicted of obstructing the draft by speaking out against the war. The two were each sentenced to two years in jail.
When released from jail in September 1919, Goldman, stripped of her citizenship for a decade, knew that deportation was a possibility. She was ordered to appear at Ellis Island for a hearing on October 27 to answer charges that she was actively advocating anarchy and the violent overthrow of the government. At the hearing, Goldman asserted her citizenship, going so far as to state that her name was Emma Goldman Kershner. She submitted a long statement for the record, denouncing the “star chamber hearing,” and then proceeded to refuse to answer most of the questions officials put to her. To question after question, Goldman responded: “I refuse to answer.” A subsequent hearing in November produced much the same result, and officials recommended deportation.
Goldman and Berkman were asked to arrive at Ellis Island on December 5 to await their imminent deportation to Russia. There they joined eighty-eight other suspected radical aliens. For more than two weeks, Goldman and Berkman would remain in detention, to be joined by more radicals rounded up by the government. After thirty-three years here, Ellis Island was to be Emma Goldman’s last home in America.
Detained at Ellis Island alongside Goldman and Berkman was Joseph Poluleck, who had already been there for almost a month. While Goldman was famous or infamous, Poluleck was an anonymous figure. A packer at the American-European Distributing Company on the Lower East Side, he had arrived in America from Russia six years earlier. He was arrested in early November while attending math classes at the People’s House night school run by the Union of Russian Workers, one of the radical organizations targeted by government officials.
At his hearing, Poluleck adamantly denied being an anarchist and claimed to like the United States and support the country. “There is not a word of truth in the charges,” he told immigration officials, “I am not an anarchist and I am not affiliated with any organization of that kind.” He had only been taking classes at the People’s House since September and the only organization he belonged to was the Methodist Episcopal Church.
The case against Poluleck was weak. Even Byron Uhl admitted there was no evidence to substantiate the main charges against him. The government’s case rested on the fact that each student at the school received a book from the Union of Russian Workers, which implied membership in the organization. Though Labor Department officials had declared earlier that mere membership in a radical organization was not grounds for deportation, by late 1919, the Justice Department reversed the policy and Poluleck was ordered deported.
Meanwhile, Goldman called the conditions at Ellis Island “frightful” and argued that little had changed in the treatment of immigrants since she had arrived at Castle Garden more than thirty years earlier. While in detention, Goldman suffered an attack of neuralgia, a painful condition affecting her jaw and teeth. The Ellis Island doctor could not help with the pain and, as she later put it, for “forty-eight hours, my teeth became a federal issue.” Eventually, officials allowed her to visit a dentist in New York, accompanied by a male guard and female matron. Goldman called her ailment “very timely,” since the visit allowed her friends a chance to visit her. At Ellis Island, detainees were allowed only occasional visits conducted behind screens and with the oversight of guards.
Apart from the minidrama with Goldman’s dental pain, there was little else for detainees at Ellis Island to do but wait for their day of deportation, which was kept secret from them. To pass the time, Goldman did something she was especially good at. She wrote. Most of her efforts were directed toward a pamphlet she was writing with Berkman entitled “Deportation: Its Meaning and Menace,” further subtitled, accurately but melodramatically as the “Last Message to the People of America by Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman.”
Afraid that officials would confiscate their material, they wrote in their cells at night while their roommates kept watch for guards. On their morning walks, the two would discuss the material and trade suggestions for the next night’s writing. The pamphlet included an introduction by fellow radical and political cartoonist Robert Minor, who called the impending deportation, the first effort of “the War Millionaires to crush the soul of America and insure the safety of the dollars they have looted over the graves of Europe.” A mixture of melodrama, grandiosity, and conspiratorial history pervaded the pamphlet. Goldman and Berkman saw their tribulations as nothing less than another form of czarism. “Now reaction is in full swing,” they wrote. “Liberty is dead, and white terror on top dominates the country. Free speech is a thing of the past.”
While Goldman was angry at her detention, she was especially saddened to find out that Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis Post had signed her order of deportation. The seventy-year-old Post had been a noted liberal journalist and possessed none of the traditional starchy appearance of most public men of the time. With his thick, unkempt head of hair, bushy, gray Van Dyke beard, and thin wire-rimmed glasses, at a quick glance Post looked a little like an American-born Trotsky. More philosopher than bureaucrat, he called himself a rational spiritualist and had been an early supporter of Henry George’s single-tax theory, a plan popular with utopian thinkers disheartened by the vast accumulations of wealth in the industrial age.
Years earlier, Post had come to Goldman’s defense when she was accused of involvement in President McKinley’s assassination. Not only did he defend her in the pages of his magazine, but Goldman had also once been a guest in his house.
In his waning professional years, Post went to work in the Wilson administration. Like Howe, he was uncomfortable having to enforce laws that went against his beliefs. Coming to the Labor Department in 1914, Post had hoped to work on issues dealing with the condition of workers, but instead found that some 70 percent of the department’s appropriations and more than 80 percent of its staff went toward enforcing the immigration laws. One of the nation’s few advocates of an open-door policy for immigrants, Post had little interest in this work, which put him in a depressive mood for the rest of his tenure. “I found myself moving about in a cloud of gloom from the beginning to the end of my service in the Department of Labor,” Post later wrote.
Post complained about the administrative nature of immigration law. While serving as assistant secretary, he published an article arguing that the exclusion or deportation of aliens “should not be determined finally by administrative decision.” It was unusual for a serving political appointee to write in an academic journal criticizing policies he was bound to uphold, but Post had few good options.
Still in office in late 1919 and taking on more responsibility with the continuing absence of his boss, Labor Secretary Wilson, Post was faced with the cases of the radical detainees. The decision to deport Goldman rested in his hands. He spent a great deal of time contemplating her case and came to the conclusion that the only issue that mattered under the law was whether or not Goldman was an anarchist, not whether she had ever participated in revolutionary or violent actions. On that question, Post could only answer yes; the result had to be deportation. Post signed the order.
Post found that he had to enforce the law even if it clashed with his own beliefs. To do otherwise would be a violation of his oath of office and, as he wrote, “essentially repugnant to the developing democratic principles of our Republic.” Such thinking did not impress Emma Goldman, who thought Post had another option open to him: resignation. Since he chose to remain in office and carry out the deportations, Goldman “felt that Post had covered himself in ignominy.”
Post, however, could do something for Goldman. The deportation called for her to be brought back to Russia, where the civil war was raging. To send Goldman back to areas controlled by White Russians would have been a death sentence, so Post ordered her deported to Soviet-controlled Russia.
In the early morning hours of December 21, Emma Goldman was in her cell, which she shared with two other female detainees. She was doing what she had been doing for most of her detention: writing. At the sound of guards approaching their cell, Goldman hid her notes under her pillow and pretended to be asleep. The guards were there for another reason. The hour of deportation—that inevitable, yet carefully guarded secret—had finally arrived.
Collecting their things, the three women were marched into the Great Hall, where they joined 246 men, including Alexander Berkman, shivering in the cold. In a short time, the group would march single-file through the main building and outside to a waiting ferry that would take them on the first leg of their journey. Walking through the bitter air of an early December morning with snow covering the ground, the band of ragged, sleepy, and dispirited radicals made their way to the ferry under the watchful eyes of armed soldiers and a group of federal officials, including J. Edgar Hoover and Congressman Albert Johnson, chairman of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. “Scores of cruel eyes staring us in the face,” was Goldman’s recollection of the event. As Goldman was boarding the ferry, someone yelled sarcastically: “Merry Christmas, Emma,” to which the anarchist thumbed her nose.
Colorado congressman William Vaile was also on hand. He described the deportees as having “rather stupid faces” and being “degraded and brutalized men.” Vaile believed that the deportations were perfectly justified. “Deportation is merely the act of ridding ourselves of foreigners who are not eligible for residence here under our laws,” he wrote. Though the government could not expel citizens for holding anarchist views, he believed that “a nation has the right to refuse its privileges and protection to any class of aliens whom it may consider undesirable residents.”
Vaile shared his cigarettes with a few of the deportees as they waited to board the ferry, but stopped after listening to their conversations, filled with a “bitter sneer.” Disgusted with these radicals, Vaile was overwhelmed by feelings of loathing and decided that “the rest of my tobacco should go to Americans.”
From the Ellis Island pier, the 249 deportees were first taken to Fort Wadsworth in Staten Island. Goldman and the other two female deportees were segregated from the men during the two-hour ferry ride. As the ferry passed the Statue of Liberty, it crossed paths with another ferry crowded with incoming immigrants headed for Ellis Island, who let out a cheer upon seeing the other boat, not realizing the destination of its passengers. Goldman, with her typewriter case beside her and holding a few sprigs of holly, engaged Hoover in conversation. America’s time was coming to an end, she told him matter-of-factly. Just as a new day was dawning in Russia, Goldman believed, so too would revolution come to the United States.
It must have been an odd sight, with the middle-aged anarchist and the young federal agent engaged in political conversation. The thin veneer of civility between Goldman and the authorities was a sign of the anarchist’s defeat. Goldman was still bitter at Hoover for not informing her lawyer about the deportation, and she let the young government official know it. “Haven’t I given you a square deal, Miss Goldman?” a defensive Hoover responded. “Oh, I suppose you’ve given me as square a deal as you could,” she replied. She could not refuse one final dig at her adversary: “We shouldn’t expect from any person something beyond his capacity.”
Upon arrival at Fort Wadsworth, the passengers were transferred to the Buford, a thirty-year-old army transport ship that had been in use during the Spanish-American War. Only 51 of the Buford’s passengers were deemed anarchists, including Berkman and Goldman. Some 184 of the deportees were members of the Federation of the Union of Russian Workers, a group designated as advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government. This included Joseph Poluleck, the Methodist whose major offense was that he took math classes at the wrong place. Finally, 9 of the passengers were excluded as likely to become a public charge, while 5 others had violated other parts of the immigration law.
The press was quick to give the Buford a new name, one that would stick throughout history: the Soviet Ark. The Pittsburgh Post called Goldman and the other passengers “the unholiest cargo that ever left our shores.” Because of the supposedly dangerous nature of the Buford’s human cargo, the army provided a contingent of sixty-four soldiers and officers to provide protection and prevent a mutiny, joined by nine officials from the Immigration Service.
Goldman and the others elicited little sympathy from Americans. Contrary to what Goldman and Berkman wrote, their deportation did not signify the beginnings of czarism or the end of freedom in America. Rather it was one of the many big and small events that, when taken as a whole, helped break apart the national consensus on immigration and herald a new era when Ellis Island—and the immigrants who once streamed through its doors—were less relevant to America.
“One could not imagine a more quiet movement of so many people,” Commissioner-General Caminetti reported the next day.
FROM THE BLACK TOM explosion to the deportation of Emma Goldman, Ellis Island found itself witness to the traumas of the Great War and its aftermath. The war was now over, but the debate over the power of exclusion, detention, and deportation remained.
A few years before Goldman was expelled, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes succinctly summarized the government’s view on deportation. It is not a punishment, Holmes wrote, but instead “simply a refusal by the government to harbor persons whom it does not want.”
The sailing of the Soviet Ark, which forever banished the country’s number one anarchist, emboldened the Justice Department to make further arrests. While the Buford was still on the high seas, hundreds more suspected alien radicals were rounded up as part of the Palmer Raids and brought to Ellis Island for deportation, many of whom belonged to the Communist Party. At the Labor Department, Louis Post tried to rein in the Justice Department’s excesses. With Secretary Wilson still ill, much of the burden fell on Post’s shoulders. He did not save Emma Goldman, but now, at the end of his career and with little to lose, Post ordered the release of over two thousand suspected radicals across the country, although he did uphold the deportations of a few hundred individuals.
Post made enemies with his actions, not the least of whom was J. Edgar Hoover. The young Justice Department official had dug up an affidavit that Post had signed in 1904 in support of anarchist John Turner. In Hoover’s files was a poem entitled “The Bully Bolshevik,” which was “disrespectfully dedicated to ‘Comrade’ Louie Post.” It is not clear whether Hoover wrote the ditty, but it certainly summed up his views:
The ‘Reds’ at Ellis Island
Are happy as can be
For Comrade Post at Washington
Is setting them all free.
The anger toward Post extended to Congress. Six months earlier it had been Fred Howe who was being grilled for his sympathy toward radicals. Now it was Post’s turn. In May 1920, the House Rules Committee began impeachment hearings against him. By then, the Red Scare had petered out almost as quickly as it had begun. When Palmer’s dire warnings of a May Day revolution failed to come true, the public lost interest in the crusade. Congress quietly dropped its proceedings against Post.
At the height of the Red Scare, between November 1919 and May 1920, warrants were issued for 6,350 aliens suspected of radical activity, leading to around 3,000 arrests. Of that number, only 762 were ordered deported and only 271 were actually deported, including the 249 who left on the Buford. In the year after May 1920, an additional 510 alien radicals were deported.
The roundup and deportation of alien radicals were merely a continuation of longstanding immigration policy. For years, immigrants safely landed in the United States were at risk of deportation if they were subsequently found to qualify under one of the categories of exclusion. Between 1910 and 1918, almost twenty-five thousand immigrants already residing in the United States found themselves rounded up by authorities and deported back to their homelands for various reasons. After World War I, the government focused its attention more closely on radical aliens, but the mechanism it used was largely the same as had been used to deport immigrants before the war.
While the deportation process that characterized the Red Scare had long been part of the immigration law and would be used for decades more to come, the emotions that fueled this particular spasm of anti-radical sentiment quickly died out. In hindsight, this period was a disjointed blip, a hiccup of tension and conflict. To the American mind of 1919 and 1920, however, the world seemed ablaze with danger.
A global flu outbreak had erupted before the armistice and continued into 1919. The worldwide death toll has been estimated at anywhere from 20 million to as high as 100 million. Many in the United States referred to it as the Spanish flu, reinforcing the alien nature of the disease and the danger of foreign entanglements. Some one-quarter of all Americans came down with the flu, and 675,000 died in less than one year, including Randolph Bourne, who passed away in December 1918. To many Americans, war and pestilence seemed their grim reward for becoming a world power.
During 1919, Americans were on edge. Some 4 million workers across the country went out on nearly 2,600 strikes. Steelworkers, miners, even Boston policemen walked out on their jobs during that tumultuous year. The American Communist Party was formed that year. And it was not just the United States that was in turmoil: following the lead of the Russian Bolsheviks, Communist uprisings occurred in Bavaria and Hungary.
The Great War turned the world upside down and dashed the optimism of a generation. Modern civilizations tore each other up on the battlefield as new technologies like airplanes, machine guns, and poison gas made the traditional destruction of war that much worse. The number of military dead was staggering: around 2 million Germans and Russians each, and around 1 million English, Austrians, and French each, not to mention the wounded, maimed, or shell-shocked. In a little over one year of war, America lost more than 115,000 men, with more than 200,000 wounded.
When the war ended, people on both sides of the Atlantic began to ask why and received few answers. The victorious Allies carved up the map and took their war booty, while Woodrow Wilson’s romantic vision of a League of Nations that would end war forever would have to function without the participation of the United States, when the Senate failed to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. When Americans asked what the war had been for, some answered that it had been fought only to fatten the pocketbooks of big business.
The scars of war remained on the American psyche and disabused many of their positive feelings for government. For liberals, the disillusionment was even more pronounced. They were the ones who had built up the federal government, who hoped to use it to counteract the power of corporations and provide protections for workers and consumers. The government, run by educated, middle-class professionals, was supposed to rescue America from an orgy of commercialism and ignorance, but instead it bumbled into a bloody European war for no apparent reason, stirred up ethnic hatred at home, and used its new police powers to quash dissent.
No one felt this disillusionment more than Fred Howe. “I hated the new state that had arisen, hated its brutalities, its ignorance, its unpatriotic patriotism, that made profit from our sacrifices and used its power to suppress criticism of its acts,” he wrote in his autobiography. The man who once argued that government should take control of public utilities now changed his tune. “I became distrustful of the state,” he complained, “And I think I lost interest in it, just as did thousands of other persons…who were turned from love into fear of the state and all that it signified.”
To Howe, the brutality of the state was on display at Ellis Island. A few weeks after the Buford left New York Harbor, Howe penned a scathing critique of U.S. immigration laws, the same laws he had been sworn to carry out for five years. The article’s title said it all: “Lynch Law and the Immigrant Alien.” He condemned deportations as cruel and criticized the secret hearings held at Ellis Island to determine the fate of immigrants. He painted a dark picture of European immigrants living in a “state of panic” and “perpetual fear.” He ominously pronounced: “We have made Americanization impossible.” Of course, in retrospect Howe was wrong. The policies at Ellis Island and the Red Scare had few long-term effects on the attitudes of immigrants to their adopted country, but they certainly scarred Fred Howe.
His disillusionment can also be seen in his shift away from the idea of government control over business and utilities toward the idea of a cooperative “producers’ state,” where workers participated in the management and ownership of business. After leaving Ellis Island, Howe tried to put this idea into practice as the executive director of the Conference on Democratic Railroad Control.
When Howe left in September 1919, he was at the depth of despair. He had been condemned on the floor of the House of Representatives. He had survived one congressional investigation, and another one loomed. He despised his superiors and lost faith in his fellow citizens. He had begun work at Ellis Island hoping “to make it a playhouse for immigrants.” When he left, he found it a prison for aliens deemed unworthy by the government, but it had also, as Wendell Phillips once said about slavery, “made a slave of the master no less than the slave.”
Before leaving Ellis Island for the last time in the fall of 1919, Howe gathered up all of the personal papers that he had been saving to use for a book on his experiences there. Instead of taking them with him, he sent for a porter and the two men carried the materials to the island’s engine room where they threw the papers into the flames.