Chapter 17
I would never go back to Ellis Island. I spent too much time facing the back of the Statue of Liberty. I always felt that even though she had welcomed immigrants promising the American dream, she turned her back on us just because of our ancestry.
—Eberhard Fuhr, German enemy alien detainee
Government counsel ingeniously argued that Ellis Island is his “refuge” whence he [Mezei] is free to take leave in any direction except west. That might mean freedom, if only he were an amphibian.
—Justice Robert Jackson, Shaughnessy v. Mezei, 1953
“HERZLICH WILLKOMMEN! HEIL”. THOSE WORDS ON A large poster greeted visitors to Room 206 at Ellis Island in 1942. This was the headquarters of a small clique of pro-Nazi German nationals who had been detained by the U.S. government as enemy aliens. Even before the United States entered the war, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt was drawing up lists of suspicious aliens to be arrested and detained if and when the country joined the war effort against the Axis powers. J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation spent a great deal of time between 1939 and 1941 collecting information on noncitizens living in the United States who were suspected of sympathizing with Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. In October 1941, the attorney general warned officials at Ellis Island to prepare for an avalanche of wartime detainees.
Hoover had run into bureaucratic difficulties during the Red Scare because the power to detain and deport aliens resided in the Labor Department. Now he would have no such problem. The Immigration Service had been moved to the Justice Department in 1940. Immigration was now officially a law enforcement issue.
On December 8, 1941, as the nation was reeling from the previous day’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Major Lemuel Schofield, head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), wrote to Hoover with a list of individuals “considered for custodial detention” because of their views about Germany and Italy. This information gathering had begun before either of these countries had actually been declared enemies of the United States.
More disturbing still, Schofield’s list included “American citizens sympathetic to Germany” and “American citizens sympathetic to Italy.” In all, over four thousand individuals were under consideration for detention.
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt issued three presidential proclamations declaring nonnaturalized Japanese, Germans, and Italians living in the United States to be enemy aliens. The proclamation against Japanese civilians was issued on December 7; the other two were issued on December 8, 1941, three days before the United States was technically at war with Germany and Italy.
The government wasted little time in rounding up alleged enemy aliens. On December 8, the attorney general ordered Hoover to immediately arrest “alien enemies who are natives, citizens, denizens or subjects of Germany.” They were to be arrested and delivered to the INS for detention. Hoover’s FBI moved at lightning speed. On December 9, 1941, working off the lists it had been compiling for the past two years, FBI agents arrested and detained 497 Germans, 83 Italians, and 1,912 Japanese enemy aliens. The following day saw more than 2,200 additional arrests. Some of these individuals would be quickly released, but a month later the government was holding nearly 2,700 enemy aliens in facilities across the country.
Some of the internees had belonged to organizations like the German-American Bund. Others made comments, whether to neighbors or in letters to the editor, opposing America’s entry into the war. Informants would report to the FBI if they noticed a picture of Hitler in the home of German-Americans or if they overheard comments favorable to the Nazis or opposing the Allies.
This internment of enemy aliens was distinct from the relocation and internment of Japanese and Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, which began in February 1942. Under FDR’s Executive Order 9066, certain zones in the United States could be designated as military areas, off limits to any or all unauthorized personnel. Later that spring, military officials ordered everyone of Japanese ancestry who resided on the West Coast moved to camps in the nation’s interior. This was accomplished by a new agency called the War Relocation Authority. Unlike the military relocation and internment of Japanese-Americans, enemy aliens were rounded up under the auspices of the INS.
A large number of enemy aliens were initially detained at Ellis Island. Four days after Pearl Harbor, 413 German enemy aliens found themselves in detention at Ellis Island. “For the time being,” the New York Times wrote of Ellis Island’s new role, “New York has a concentration camp of its own.”
The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the nation’s newly formed wartime intelligence agency, took an interest in the detainees at Ellis Island. In the summer of 1942, it placed an undercover agent there for three weeks. When the unnamed agent filed his report, he told his superiors of a large chink in America’s security. “Ellis Island is undoubtedly a major information spot for the Axis, both for getting it and sending it,” the agent wrote. “There is every reason to suppose that they regard Ellis Island as an important transmission center.”
The OSS report described a tightly organized and disciplined “Nazi clique” among some detainees at Ellis Island. Their informal headquarters was Room 206. They sang the “Horst Wessel Lied” and other Nazi songs and plastered their rooms with drawings and articles mocking the American war effort. “They act as though it were inevitable that Germany win this war,” the report noted. The Nazi sympathizers who congregated around Room 206 “can carry on effective propaganda and intimidate the weak.”
Were these few hundred Germans, Italians, and Japanese held at Ellis Island in the summer of 1942 a major threat to the American war effort? The OSS agent certainly thought so, believing that it “would be strange, indeed, if such well-organized and fanatical Hitlerites only carry on harmless activities. The chances for conspiracy are practically limitless.” He argued that German detainees kept watch on the shipping activity on the docks of New Jersey and reported this information back to Germany. Yet even the OSS agent had to admit that this was largely speculation and that in his three weeks among the detainees, he had found “no actual instance of this happening.”
By the fall of 1942, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was hearing gossip about this OSS report and demanded that an underling get a copy immediately. What angered Hoover was not the far-fetched claims that Nazis were operating an intelligence gathering operation for the Third Reich from Ellis Island. What really concerned him was that the report criticized, in Hoover’s words, “the incompetent and venal custodial practices at Ellis Island.” He wanted all such talk of lax security immediately “scotched.”
Hoover was right. The OSS report was absolutely blistering in its depiction of the guards. “The system of supervision and control is inadequate to cope with experienced conspirators,” the report concluded. The guards were “unpolitical and unobservant.” Most were only interested in their weekly paychecks, sports, food, and drink. “Race prejudice, especially anti-Semitism among the guards, is conspicuous,” the report noted.
The report painted many of the guards as easily corruptible by the petty payoffs and gifts of the detainees. Some of the guards could be found cavorting with detainees, sharing cigars and drinks. Much of the blame for the corruption of officials was placed at the feet of one detainee: William Gerald Bishop. For the remainder of the war, no detainee would give the government more headaches than Bishop.
One Justice Department official called Bishop “one of the most unreliable individuals with whom I ever came into contact,” while another called him one of Ellis Island’s “worst sources of mischief-making and corruption of employees.” Bishop was accused of encouraging guards to violate rules, leading to the dismissal of a number of them. He constantly bullied uncooperating guards and officials by threatening them with his “political influence.” At various times, he incited a hunger strike among the detainees, stole food from the dining hall, and was accused of abusing and cursing Jewish guards. It was reported that Bishop had three white poison tablets hidden in a pencil that he said were meant for Jewish guards. “If I can’t make them leave the Island one way, I will make them leave another,” Bishop is reported to have told a fellow detainee.
Not only did Bishop enjoy many privileges on the island, but he also spent a great deal of time in Manhattan on leave. A friendly eye doctor would require Bishop to make weekly appointments for exams. Guards would accompany him to the doctor’s office, but were easily paid off in food, drinks, and cigars, and would allow Bishop to visit friends and do as he pleased until it was time to return to the island.
Although Bishop was taken to Ellis Island on February 27, 1942, his problems had actually begun back in January 1940, when J. Edgar Hoover held a press conference to announce that the FBI had arrested seventeen members of an organization known as the Christian Front for plotting to bomb various buildings in New York. Hoover claimed that the plotters had hoped these bombings would eventually lead to the overthrow of the U.S. government. “Plots were discussed for the wholesale sabotage and blowing up of all these institutions so that a dictatorship could be set up here, similar to the Hitler dictatorship in Germany,” Hoover dramatically claimed. The alleged plotters were going to start their revolution with eighteen cans of explosives, twelve Springfield rifles, and assorted other guns and ammunition. One of their leaders was William Gerald Bishop.
During the spring 1940 trial of the Christian Front plotters, all of his fellow codefendants turned against Bishop, portraying him as a hothead who wanted to commit violence against the government, a man whose rhetoric was so extreme some of them believed he had to be a government informant. It was Bishop who admitted stealing many of the weapons and ammunition from a National Guard armory. In keeping with later government reports, the trial also showed Bishop to be suffering delusions of grandeur. He asserted that prominent politicians, such as Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, were among his supporters. He also claimed to have fought in the 1930s with Spanish rebels in North Africa, where he served as secretary to General Francisco Franco.
In June, the jury came back with its verdict. In a slap to the government, it acquitted nine of the men, while the cases of five others, including Bishop, ended in a hung jury. (Two men found their cases dropped before coming to trial and one committed suicide.) Shortly thereafter, the government quietly dropped its case against the five remaining defendants.
However, Bishop’s troubles had just begun. During the trial, his citizenship had become a subject of debate. At various points, he referred to his birthplace as Salem, Massachusetts; California; Switzerland; and Vienna, Austria. At trial, he finally admitted that he was born abroad and had entered the country in 1926 as an illegal stowaway, leaving him vulnerable to the much looser rules of immigration law. Immediately after Bishop’s legal case ended in a hung jury, officials issued a warrant for his deportation. Because of the war in Europe, the government suspended the order and Bishop remained free.
By February 1942, Bishop faced another threat. He was now considered an enemy alien, since authorities declared his place of birth as Austria, though this was unusual since Austrian citizens were generally not considered enemy aliens. He was now brought to Ellis Island with hundreds of other accused enemy aliens.
Though Bishop was vocal about his support for Nazi Germany, the OSS report was careful to note that many of those imprisoned on the island were not Nazis and several were “on the verge of a nervous breakdown only because of this intolerable Nazi atmosphere.” These unfortunate individuals had been caught up in a bureaucratic dragnet based on false accusations.
One of them was the forty-nine-year-old Italian opera singer Ezio Pinza. The leading basso at the Metropolitan Opera, Pinza was arrested at his home in suburban New York in March 1942 as an enemy alien. The news of his arrest made the front page of the New York Times. Pinza would spend nearly three months in detention at Ellis Island and feared that his career was over.
The FBI had talked to a number of informants willing to peddle salacious stories about Pinza, including a fellow opera singer who resented him and former girlfriends jealous that he had recently married another woman. The case against Pinza rested on a number of allegations: he had owned a ring with a Nazi swastika on it; he had a boat from which he broadcast secret radio messages to Europe; he was friends with Mussolini and was even nicknamed after the dictator; he sent out coded messages during his performances at the Metropolitan Opera; he had organized a collection of gold and silver at a benefit for the Italian government in 1935. Only the last charge had any merit. Pinza, along with other Italians working at the Met, contributed to a benefit for Italy, but less out of sympathy for fascism than for patriotic support for their homeland. The benefit occurred after Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, which Pinza, like most Italians, supported at the time.
Thanks to a good lawyer and the dogged persistence of his wife, Pinza was able to prove his innocence. He was even able to enlist the aid of New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia, whose dentist was Pinza’s father-in-law. He was eventually released on parole from Ellis Island in June and had to report weekly to his local doctor, who acted as his sponsor. On Columbus Day 1942, a few months after Pinza’s release, the Roosevelt administration lifted the enemy alien designation from Italians living in the United States, but it was not until 1944 that Pinza received his unconditional release.
Ironically, three years after his release, Pinza was invited to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at a welcome-home celebration for General George Patton at the Los Angeles Coliseum. In 1950, Pinza won a Tony Award for his role in the Broadway musical South Pacific. Yet he never completely got over the heartbreak of his wartime detention. His widow, Doris, charged that his imprisonment worsened his heart condition and helped speed his early death in 1957 at the age of sixty-four.
Ezio Pinza’s story was just one of thousands. By September 1942, some 6,800 aliens of German, Japanese, and Italian ancestry had been arrested by the Justice Department. Of those, half were quickly released or paroled, like Pinza. The other half remained in detention, including the Neupert family. In the summer of 1942, Emma Neupert was taken to Ellis Island as an enemy alien. Her husband, George, was a naturalized U.S. citizen and her nine-year-old daughter, Rose Marie, was a U.S. citizen by birth. By December, Rose Marie was taken to Ellis Island to be with her mother. A few months later George had his citizenship revoked, and he too found himself in detention with his wife and child.
Young Rose Marie remembers that the internees spent most of their days in the Great Hall of the main building, which by 1942 had become “dingy, dirty, and grey with age.” To make matters worse, “every time anything would be moved, the roaches would scurry about.” The food was “almost inedible.” At night, Rose Marie shared a small dormitory room crowded with eight women and two children. During the daytime, the female detainees crocheted, knitted, and sewed to pass the time.
Most of the detainees would be transferred from Ellis Island to other internment camps throughout the country. Many would be joined by their spouses and children—some of whom were American citizens like Rose Marie—who voluntarily agreed to be detained with their family. The Neuperts were sent to a camp in Crystal City, Texas. Other Ellis Island detainees, including William Gerald Bishop, were taken to Fort Lincoln in Bismarck, North Dakota.
The end of the war in the summer of 1945 should have meant the release of the remaining enemy aliens. However, that was not to be. In July 1945, President Harry S. Truman issued Presidential Proclamation 2655, which ordered that all enemy aliens presently detained and found “to be dangerous to the public peace and safety of the United States” be deported. Most of these so-called enemy aliens challenged their deportation orders.
By March 1946, Ellis Island was again filled with enemy aliens, as the government closed down other internment camps around the country and shipped the remaining detainees back to New York, where they waited for the resolution of their cases. Officials from the Red Cross and the State Department inspected the facilities at Ellis Island and found them wanting. The old inspection station was inadequate to hold so many people for such an indefinite period. Morale among detainees was low, their futures uncertain, and a growing number were in need of psychiatric help.
One of those not holding up well under the strain was Helene Hackenberg. She had arrived in the United States from Germany in 1926 and married a fellow immigrant named Rudolf in 1937. Both were accused of belonging to pro-Nazi organizations. Rudolf was arrested in January 1943 and Helene in November of that year, and both taken to Ellis Island. From there they were sent to the Crystal City camp and then transferred back to Ellis Island in early 1946. They would remain there for two and a half years while they fought their deportation orders. Although that time was punctuated by a number of paroles to arrange personal affairs, as well shopping trips for female detainees to Fifth Avenue stores, Helene’s depression deepened and she began talking of suicide.
Hundreds of these enemy aliens remained at Ellis Island while they petitioned the courts to cancel their deportation back to war-ravaged Germany. As months went by, their cases lingered in the courts. At the beginning of 1947, almost a year and a half after the cessation of all military conflict, over three hundred still remained at Ellis Island, including William Gerald Bishop, who had been transferred back to New York from North Dakota after the war. For some of them, repatriation would have meant living in Soviet-occupied Germany where, one detained couple feared, they would “be placed in a concentration camp where we will be held indefinitely.”
The Fuhr family arrived at Ellis Island from Crystal City in 1947. Carl and Anna Fuhr had come to America from Germany in the 1920s, bringing their sons, Julius and Eberhard. They settled in Cincinnati, Ohio, where the family added a third son, Gerhard. The Fuhrs never became U.S. citizens. Like a number of nonnaturalized Germans, they came to the attention of the FBI in 1940, when informants, many of them anonymous, accused Carl of being a member of the German-American Bund and the Friends of New Germany, of being a strong critic of the United States and supporter of Hitler, and, of saying that his oldest son would return to Germany to “fight for Hitler.”
The Fuhrs remained free until the summer of 1942, but more reports had filtered into the FBI by that time. Carl and Anna were arrested in August 1942 and sent to an internment camp in Texas along with their youngest son, the American-born Gerhard. Julius and Eberhard joined the family at the camp in March 1943.
While in custody, the family continued to make statements that reinforced the government’s decision to hold them. Julius and Eberhard told authorities they would refuse to serve in the U.S. military. The senior Fuhr, according to officials, possessed “the mind of a man who continues to believe in the Nazis,” while Julius was found to be “completely Nazi.” In keeping with Truman’s postwar orders on German detainees, the family was ordered repatriated back to Germany in the spring of 1946.
However, the family had changed its mind about America and decided to fight the deportation order. They argued that their recalcitrance while in custody was due in part to their anger at the internment. They slowly came to discover that they were more American than German and wanted to remain in the country. The uncertainty of returning to war-devastated Germany no doubt also played into the family’s desire to remain in the United States.
By 1947, the family was transferred to Ellis Island to await deportation. Eberhard Fuhr remembers the facility as “cramped, dirty and stultifying.” Despite the poor conditions, the Fuhrs made a favorable impression on authorities. “A definite reformation has taken place,” according to one report. By now, it was more than two years after the end of hostilities in Europe and more than two hundred individuals, including the Fuhrs, were still being held in custody.
These men and women found a champion in the form of Senator William Langer of North Dakota, who convinced Justice Department officials to form a committee to hear the cases of those still stuck in political and legal limbo at Ellis Island. Throughout the summer of 1947, Langer made several trips to Ellis Island with the committee and held hearings for every single German detainee.
Langer introduced a bill in Congress to cancel the deportation orders of 207 German detainees, including Rudolf and Helene Hackenberg, George Neupert, and the Fuhr family. The bill stalled in Congress, but at the end of the summer of 1947 the Fuhrs managed to secure their release from Ellis Island and headed back to Cincinnati to rebuild their lives. They were the exception. Despite Langer’s efforts, by the fall of 1947, some two hundred German enemy alien detainees were still stuck at Ellis Island.
One of those not on Langer’s list was William Gerald Bishop. In fact, Langer had already introduced a separate bill in April 1947 calling for the cancellation of Bishop’s deportation. Not only did Langer believe that Bishop had been deprived of his rights during five years of detention, but he argued that sending enemy aliens like Bishop “to Communist controlled territory would subject them to the purge, enslavement or liquidation, which according to reports being received daily from Europe affect all persons disliked by Communists.” Langer’s efforts failed and Bishop was finally deported back to Austria in October 1947.
As for the remaining German detainees at Ellis Island, in June 1948 the Supreme Court rejected their petitions for release from custody. Defense attorneys had argued that Truman’s proclamation was invalid since the United States was no longer at war with Germany. The Court’s majority was not interested in that issue, but instead decided the case on much narrower grounds, concluding that the habeas corpus petitions were invalid since they were filed in Washington, while the detainees were held in New York.
At the end of June 1948, three years after the end of the war, 182 Germans were still held at Ellis Island, including 9 “voluntary detainees,” American citizens who had joined family members in detention. One couple, Marie and Eugen Zimmerman had actually conceived a child, George, while in detention at Ellis Island.
In the following weeks, government officials would work to settle the cases of these unfortunate individuals. On July 8, fifty-seven detainees lost their fight and were sent back to Germany. A few, including Helene and Rudolf Hackenberg, avoided repatriation by voluntarily leaving for a new life in Argentina. (They would finally receive visas to reenter the United States in 1960.) Most of the remaining detainees were released or paroled from Ellis Island and allowed to restart their lives in America, including the Zimmerman family and George Neupert, who was now able to rejoin his wife and daughter. By August 1948, the government had disposed of all the cases of detained German enemy aliens at Ellis Island with the exception of Frederick Bauer, a former U.S. Army sergeant arrested in late 1945 and charged with being a German spy.
Although exact numbers vary, the FBI arrested over thirty thousand German, Japanese, and Italian enemy aliens during the war. Roughly one-third were interned in government camps for some period of time, including a few thousand German and Japanese nationals deported from Latin America to the United States for detention.
By 1948, German enemy aliens had become an anachronism. The enemies of the previous war—Germans—were evolving into new allies, while the allies of the last war—Communists—had become the new enemies. Those last few German detainees at Ellis Island in June 1948 found themselves sharing quarters with men like Gerhard Eisler, Irving Potash, and John Williamson, Communists who were detained and ordered deported for their politics. The Cold War had begun, but the intersection of national security and immigration would continue to run through Ellis Island.
WITH AMERICA ONCE AGAIN at war in the fall of 1950, this time on the peninsula of Korea, Congress passed the Internal Security Act. Spear-headed by Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, the law would force Communists and other subversives in the United States to register with the federal government.
The bill also granted government greater powers to exclude aliens from the United States. Going beyond already existing laws banning anarchists and Communists, the new law would bar all those who not only advocated totalitarianism but were affiliated with any organization that advocated any form of totalitarianism.
President Truman came out strongly against the bill. On September 22, he gave a lengthy explanation of his reasons for vetoing it. He said there was no need for changes regarding the admission of aliens since the present law was already strong enough to keep out suspected subversives and Communists. He also warned that the bill would require the government to bar foreigners from “friendly, non-Communist countries” such as Spain. Refusing to heed Truman’s warnings, both the House and Senate overrode his veto by overwhelming majorities.
Embarrassed at having his veto soundly overridden, Truman decided to get even with his congressional opponents. In a fit of pique, the president declared that if Congress wanted such a law, his administration would strictly enforce it. Attorney General J. Howard McGrath ordered that the Internal Security Act be applied not just to members of the Nazi, Communist, or Fascist Parties, but to anyone who had ever been forced to join such organizations, “regardless of whether or not he may now be harmless, anti-totalitarian, pro-American, or the circumstances under which he was a member.” Five years after the end of the war, Germans, Austrians, Italians, and other Europeans who may have been forced to join Nazi or fascist organizations were now barred from entry.
Ellis Island once again found itself in the firing line. Twenty-year-old Viennese pianist Friedrich Gulda, who would later become a renowned avant-garde musician, was one of the first detained under the new law because he had belonged to the Nazi Youth as a preteen during the war. He was in New York for his Carnegie Hall debut.
Gulda arrived at Idlewild Airport in Queens shortly before midnight on October 6. After being detained at the airport and questioned, he was taken to Ellis Island in the early morning hours. It was unclear whether Gulda would ever make it to Carnegie Hall. At Ellis Island, he practiced on an old piano until Steinway & Sons received permission to send a concert grand piano to the island. After three days in detention, Gulda was released and was able to perform at his concert. He was given until the end of the month to stay in the country, but left shortly after his concert.
The Metropolitan Opera was concerned that eight of its singers for the fall season would be barred from the country. One of them was Fedora Barbieri, a twenty-five-year-old Italian mezzo-soprano heading for her debut in Verdi’s Don Carlo. She was briefly held at Ellis Island because as a young girl she had attended Fascist schools in Italy. Of course every Italian schoolchild in the 1930s and early 1940s had gone to Fascist-controlled schools. Victor de Sabata, the conductor at Milan’s La Scala, was also temporarily detained at Ellis Island. Even the great conductor Arturo Toscanini was questioned, though he escaped detention and was allowed to land.
The law also affected average Americans recently married to Europeans. For seven months, Arthur Sweberg, an American serviceman living in New York, had to live apart from his new bride, a German national who had been a member of the Nazi Youth as a child. Josephine Mazzeo, of Evanston, Illinois, married an Italian national in October 1949. Because of the new law, her Italian husband could not enter the country because he had belonged to a Fascist youth organization during the war.
George Voskovec watched this whole scene unfold before him. The forty-five-year-old Czech playwright and actor had been held at Ellis Island since May 1950, before the passage of the new law. Voskovec had lived in the United States from the late 1930s until the end of the war and was married to an American. He had been a vocal anti-Nazi and worked for the Office of War Information during the war. Upon returning to America in May 1950 to apply for citizenship, he was detained at Ellis Island. Authorities were concerned that Voskovec had been allowed to leave Communist Czechoslovakia legally, setting off alarm bells as to his political sympathies. Now he was joined on Ellis Island by hundreds of other suspected subversives.
As Truman predicted, the strict interpretation of the Internal Security Act made the law look foolish, but it was the price he was willing to pay to embarrass Congress into at least tightening the law. And it worked. By late March 1951, Congress amended the Internal Security Act to exempt those who may have been members of a totalitarian organization, but who were under the age of sixteen at the time, were “involuntary members” of the organization, or had joined the group “for purposes of obtaining employment, food rations, or other essentials of living.”
George Voskovec’s detention at Ellis Island would end shortly after Congress revised the Internal Security Act. After ten months and seventeen days at Ellis Island, he was a free man. Only one witness had come forward to accuse him of being a Communist. On the other side, a number of prominent Czechs and Americans vouched for his character, including the playwright Thornton Wilder.
Upon his release, Voskovec noted that none of the inmates at Ellis Island had been mistreated. However, that did not ease the frustration at his imprisonment. Speaking of his situation, he told a reporter that a detainee “isn’t told the particulars of his offense, his accusers are nameless, and the weeks and months pass, as if human beings were no more to be considered than ciphers in a manila folder.” Even more bluntly, Voskovec said of Ellis Island: “I want to go on record that it’s a disgusting place—a prison.”
Voskovec would later dramatize his imprisonment at Ellis Island in a made-for-television play. I Was Accused aired in November 1955, the same year he gained his U.S. citizenship. Voskovec’s career would later take him to Hollywood, where he made a living as a character actor in movies and television, most famously starring as one of the sweaty and stressed-out jurors in the classic film 12 Angry Men.
When Friedrich Gulda was taken to Ellis Island in October 1950, he found nearly two hundred people held there, including George Voskovec and a European war bride. Most likely Gulda was referring to Ellen Knauff, already on her second stay at Ellis Island. Her first detention began when she arrived in New York in August 1948.
She was born Ellen Raphael in 1915 in Germany. In the 1930s, she moved to Prague and married a Czech man named Boxhorn. Being Jewish, Ellen escaped from Prague—and the marriage—after the Nazi invasion and made her way to England, avoiding the fate that befell much of her family in Nazi concentration camps. During the war, she worked as a Red Cross nurse and then served in the Royal Air Force. After the war, she made her way back to Germany, where she landed a job as a civilian with the U.S. military government, first working for the Civil Censorship Division and then as a secretary in the Signal Corps.
In February 1948, Ellen married Kurt Knauff, a naturalized U.S. citizen and an honorably discharged army veteran working as a civilian for the military occupation. After the war, the U.S. government passed the War Brides Act, which allowed U.S. servicemen to bring back foreign-born brides without regard to either the strict mental and physical requirements required of immigrants or the national origins quotas.
When Ellen arrived in New York in August 1948, however, she was not greeted with any celebrations. Instead, she was ordered detained at Ellis Island. No explanation was given. When a government official told her, “I am sending you to a place where they will look after you,” Ellen broke down in tears. She had lost family members in the Holocaust and the detention order caused her to fear that she too was heading to some kind of concentration camp. Ellen was not allowed a hearing, nor was she informed of the charges against her. Therefore, she was stuck at Ellis Island with no apparent way to prove her innocence and gain entrance to America.
The government’s case against Ellen was as follows: When she was employed by the army’s Civil Censorship Division in Germany, she furnished Czech agents with secret information, including copies of telephone conversations that her department was monitoring. She was also accused of warning the chief of the Czech Liaison Section in Frankfurt against using telephones since they were being tapped by the Americans. She was also alleged to have described to Czech agents the type of decoding machines used by American intelligence.
All of this took place before the 1948 Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, so the charges were not that Ellen was a Communist, although later witnesses would testify that they saw Ellen enter Communist Party headquarters in Frankfurt. The major source of the charges against Ellen was an unnamed “former highly placed Czech official” who had defected and was now assisting the American military. Two other Czechs also provided testimony against Knauff.
Though still flush with wartime victory, Americans were growing increasingly insecure and vulnerable regarding national security threats at home. Ellen Knauff was ordered detained just nine days after Alger Hiss appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to deny falsely that he had been a Communist spy.
It would be more than two more years before Ellen would hear these details, since they were kept classified to protect confidential intelligence sources. She would remain in detention at Ellis Island for the next nine months while her lawyers submitted a habeas corpus petition. In her letters to her husband, who was still working in Germany, Ellen told of her “bitter disappointment in the Ellis Island version of American freedom.” She called it “a concentration camp with steam heat and running water” and said the food there was only “fit for pigs—if you were not particular about what your pigs ate.” For all of her anger, Ellen had nothing but good things to say about the men and women who worked at Ellis Island.
Eventually, her case reached the Supreme Court. While the Court was deciding the case, it allowed Ellen to be released on bond. The Court reached a decision in January 1950. By a vote of 4 to 3, it rejected Knauff’s request. Two justices did not take part in the case, including newly appointed Justice Tom Clark, who had been attorney general and was technically the authority who had detained Knauff in 1948.
The Court relied on the plenary power doctrine that had long given the executive branch tremendous latitude in its treatment of aliens. In familiar language, the Court reiterated that “an alien who seeks admission to this country may not do so under any claim of right. Admission of aliens to the United States is a privilege granted by the sovereign United States Government.”
The War Brides Act of 1945 may have superseded some aspects of immigrant law, but it did not override national security concerns. Though the plenary power doctrine was well-trod legal ground, the Court also outlined the little-known history of recent presidential proclamations and regulations that led to Knauff’s exclusion. The paper trail began with FDR’s May 1941 declaration of an “unlimited national emergency” in dealing with the threat posed by the European war, even if America still technically remained on the sidelines.
Congress then allowed the president to impose additional restrictions upon those entering the country during times of national emergency. This was followed by Presidential Proclamation 2533 in November 1941, which ordered that no alien should be allowed to enter the country if his presence was “prejudicial to the interest of the United States.” This was followed by a Justice Department regulation that allowed the attorney general to deny a hearing to an excluded alien if the evidence was confidential.
Justice Robert Jackson, who had served as chief prosecutor during the Nuremberg Trials, delivered the dissenting opinion. He called Ellen’s exclusion without a hearing “abrupt and brutal.” The Court, Jackson wrote, basically told Kurt Knauff, an American citizen and army veteran, that “he cannot bring his wife to the United States, but he will not be told why. He must abandon his bride to live in his own country or forsake his country to live with his bride.”
While much of the majority decision followed precedent on immigration law, it showed how much Roosevelt’s administration had expanded executive power, both before and during wartime. No one, though, seemed to comment on the oddity that the authority for the denial of a hearing to Ellen Knauff and other aliens was based on the unlimited national emergency declared by FDR in 1941. Was the government implying that this emergency was still in effect nine years later during peacetime?
Having lost in the Supreme Court, Ellen Knauff now headed back to Ellis Island to await deportation. Twice in the spring of 1950, she had her deportation stayed by the courts. The second time, Justice Jackson stayed her deportation just twenty minutes before Knauff’s flight back to Germany was set to take off from Idlewild Airport. Yet the reprieve did not mean freedom. Knauff was returned to detention at Ellis Island.
In the meantime, her case had aroused such interest among the public that Knauff was not out of options. A young woman in her thirties, Knauff made a convincing and sympathetic victim. After all, Ellen was the war bride of an American GI, a woman who had lost family members in the Holocaust, and someone who worked for the U.S. military as a civilian in occupied Germany. Newspapers like the St. Louis Post-Dispatch took up her case.
Congress also took notice. Her cause was taken up by Senator Langer, who had previously fought for the rights of German enemy aliens, and Congressman Francis Walter, an anti-Communist Democrat who would later chair the House Un-American Activities Committee. Both introduced bills in Congress to free Knauff.
In the spring of 1950, Ellen was invited to Washington to testify before a congressional committee investigating her case. “That whole day was a true American fairy tale,” Ellen later wrote. “A prisoner on Ellis Island woke up one fine morning to be flown to Washington, D.C., to be heard before a congressional subcommittee in an effort to make truth prevail.” The Justice Department was invited to present its evidence against Knauff, but refused to cooperate on the grounds that it would compromise confidential sources. Despite her treatment as the guest of Congress, by day’s end Ellen would find herself on a plane, headed back to confinement at Ellis Island. Following the hearings, the House unanimously passed a bill to allow Knauff to remain in the country, although a similar bill stalled in the Senate.
The press attention in Harry Truman’s home-state newspaper helped bring Ellen Knauff’s case to the president’s attention. In mid-June 1950, Edward Harris of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch argued to Truman that Ellen was the only war bride ever to receive such treatment, and that she was entitled to a hearing at least, “in view of her own war record and her husband’s valorous combat service.” Harris correctly noted that it was within the power of the president or the attorney general to change the regulations so that every alien was entitled to receive a hearing except in time of “actual warfare.” Within days, Truman personally asked his aide, Steve Spingarn, to look into Ellen’s case “and see if anything can be done to straighten it out.”
The Justice Department stalled in releasing the Knauff file, but finally relented. In September 1950, Spingarn detailed his findings to the deputy attorney general. He was deeply unimpressed by the case against Knauff. “It seems to me most meager despite the seriousness of the allegations,” he wrote. “Indeed it all boils down to a few paragraphs in an Army Intelligence report repeated several times in Immigration Service and FBI reports.” He recommended that the Justice Department grant Knauff a hearing in camera, which would allow her to answer the charges but would preserve the confidentiality of the intelligence sources.
However, the Justice Department ignored Spingarn’s suggestion and Truman, preoccupied with the war in Korea, seemed disinclined to interfere. The Justice Department also ignored congressional calls for her release. Instead, it pushed ahead with her deportation. Edward Shaughnessy, the district director of immigration in New York, summed up the rationale for debarring Knauff. The attorney general, he said, “decided she is not the type of person wanted in this country and that is all there is to it. It was felt prejudicial to the best interests of the country to let her stay here.” Understandably, Ellen did not want to return to postwar Germany. Instead, she told her lawyer: “I am ready to stay on Ellis Island till doomsday.”
In January 1951, almost a year into Ellen’s second stint at Ellis Island, Kurt Knauff received a leave from his job in Germany, where he worked as an assistant chief of supply at an American army base, and arrived in New York. The Justice Department granted Ellen temporary parole into her husband’s custody and she was free again, but her troubles were far from over.
In March 1951, more than two and a half years since she was first detained at Ellis Island, Ellen Knauff received her first hearing in front of immigration officials. The government was under no obligation to hold such a hearing, but the publicity forced the issue. Ellen finally was able to see the evidence against her. She vigorously denied all of the charges, stating that she never gave away secrets and went to the Czech mission only to get an extension on her passport.
It took the board members only an hour to deliberate the case. Ellen Knauff was to be barred from entry into the United States because her presence was deemed “prejudicial to the national security.” Ellen’s parole was revoked and she was once again sent to Ellis Island to await the results of her appeal to Washington. If it failed, she would again face deportation.
By the end of August 1951, a board of immigration appeals made its ruling. By a two-to-one vote, the board overturned the decision to exclude Ellen Knauff and recommended that she be allowed to enter the country. “There is no charge that Mrs. Knauff is or has been a Communist,” the majority concluded. “There is not the faintest thread of traditional party line thinking or Marxist philosophy apparent in her background.” In fact, they determined that Knauff’s politics were conservative. She was a supporter of Churchill and an opponent of England’s Socialist Party and believed that Soviet Russia was as evil as Nazi Germany. The dissenting member of the board continued to argue that the testimony against Knauff was sufficient to exclude her from the country.
Now Ellen Knauff’s fate rested in the hands of Attorney General McGrath. He was well acquainted with the case and had previously showed no inclination to admit Knauff. But in November 1951, McGrath ordered that Ellen Knauff be admitted to the United States. It is unclear why he changed his mind.
McGrath released his decision at 6:00 P.M. on November 2. Fifteen minutes later, the phone at Ellis Island rang with the good news. Ellen quickly gathered her belongings in time to make the 7:30 ferry to Manhattan. The media was waiting for her at the Manhattan pier, snapping photos of a jubilant and beaming Knauff standing on the ferry. First, she wanted to call her husband with the news. Then, she told reporters, “I want to have a lobster dinner.” Kurt and Ellen had spent more time apart than they had together and now had to decide whether they would make their home in New York or if Ellen would join Kurt while he remained in Germany working for the military.
In total, Ellen Knauff spent nearly twenty-seven months imprisoned on Ellis Island while fighting for her right to become an American. During that time, she penned a book about her case, which was published a few months after her release. Although it contained no new information, it helped to solidify the public impression that she had been a victim of a security-obsessed nation.
However, there were serious charges against Knauff. Though she vigorously denied the accusations and no further evidence was produced to corroborate her accusers, it is still unclear why three Czech refugees would deliberately lie about her. Ellen theorized that the refugees testified against her in an effort to receive U.S. citizenship. She also believed that rumors of her alleged espionage were being spread in Germany by one of her husband’s old flames, who in a fit of jealousy reportedly said that she would do her best to ruin Ellen’s arrival in the United States.
Though she ultimately won her battle against the U.S. government, the victory came at the cost of her marriage, which did not survive the 1950s. With Ellen detained at Ellis Island and Kurt working in Germany, the first three and a half years of their marriage could hardly be termed a honeymoon. After her divorce, Ellen remarried. With her new husband, William Hartley, she cowrote a number of children’s books. Ellen Raphael Boxhorn Knauff Hartley lived a quiet life in America until she passed away in Florida in 1980.
Ellen Knauff’s plight had gained nationwide publicity. But her case also brought attention to the fact that individuals could be detained and deported without benefit of an official hearing and without any knowledge of the evidence against them.
The widespread sympathy that Ellen Knauff’s case elicited did not mean any slackening of the nation’s anti-Communism. Ellis Island would continue to serve as a detention center for suspected Communists and other political radicals. One of them was a middle-aged Trinidadian writer named Cyril Lionel Robert James. He was arrested and taken to Ellis Island in June 1952 for his political affiliations and because the government alleged that he had entered the country illegally in the 1930s. Immigration authorities had spent a number of years trying to sort out his immigration status and his political proclivities. Now he was at Ellis Island awaiting deportation.
Following in the footsteps of Emma Goldman and Ellen Knauff, who both used their detention at Ellis Island to write about their plights, C. L. R. James also devoted his time as a prisoner to writing. His unlikely topic was Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. James’s experience at Ellis Island profoundly influenced his reading of Melville’s classic. He would sit at his desk and write, sometimes for twelve hours a day, all the while suffering from painful ulcers made worse by the stress of his confinement. Within a few weeks of his detention, James was living on milk, boiled egg yolks, soft bread, and butter. He was then taken to the U.S. Marine Hospital on Staten Island (in a cost-saving measure, the hospitals on Ellis Island had recently been closed), where he would recuperate under twenty-four-hour guard.
In the final chapter of his Melville book, James wrote what he called “A Natural but Necessary Conclusion.” It was in part the story of his detention at Ellis Island, but more importantly it was James’s attempt to convince the government that he was not a dangerous subversive and should be allowed to remain in the country. James was not in fact a Communist, but a Trotskyite, and a harsh critic of Stalin and the Soviet Union. “I denounced Russia as the greatest example of barbarism that history has ever known,” James wrote. When he arrived at Ellis Island he was placed in a room with five Communists. Because of his past criticisms of Stalin and the Soviet Union, James feared for his life among these men, “conscious of their murderous past, not only against declared and life-long enemies, but against one another.”
The U.S. government was not interested in parsing the internecine battles among Marxists, sorting out Trotskyites from Stalinists. As far as it was concerned, James was a Marxist critic of capitalism and author of books such as World Revolution 1917–1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International and A History of Negro Revolt. There was enough revolution there to expel him from 1950s America.
As much as he played up his anti-Soviet and anti-Stalinist views in the hopes of being allowed to stay in the country, James pulled no punches when it came to government officials. “Hence on Ellis Island, in particular, the arbitrariness, the capriciousness, the brutality and savagery where they think they can get away with it,” James wrote, “the complete absence of any principle except to achieve a particular aim by the most convenient means to hand.” For his guards, however, he had nothing but kind words. “They were a body of men in a difficult spot,” James wrote, “yet they remained, not as individuals but as a body of men, not only human but humane.” Although the government continued to refer to individuals like him as detainees, James thought it “a mockery for me to assist them in still more deceiving the American people.” He and the others at Ellis Island were nothing less than prisoners.
James was freed on bail in October 1952 after four months in detention. His Melville book, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, was released the following year. Despite the fierce anti-Communism that only a Trotskyite could muster, James was eventually deported to England in 1953. There, he made a living as a writer on cricket. He also traveled back and forth to his native Trinidad, where he became involved in local politics. James eventually returned to the United States for extended visits in the 1970s, when Ellis Island was a dim memory and the Cold War a growing embarrassment for Vietnam-fatigued Americans.
C. L. R. James died in relative obscurity in 1989. Posthumously, James’s reputation would grow as one of the leading black social critics of the twentieth century. Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways would be republished after his death and garner attention in academia and beyond. Ellis Island inspired millions of true-life sagas of joy and heartbreak among the many who passed through there. Few could imagine that it also inspired a major work of literary criticism.
At least C. L. R. James had a home country to which he could be deported. The same could not be said for fifty-two-year-old cabinetmaker Ignatz Mezei. Arriving in February 1950, after a visit to Europe, Mezei was detained at Ellis Island and refused readmittance to the country he had called his home for over twenty-five years. Like Ellen Knauff, Mezei was also refused a hearing because the charges against him were based on confidential information.
Mezei was not a random immigrant to America. He had made his home in Buffalo for a quarter century before returning to Europe in 1948 to visit his dying mother in Romania. However, he ended up detained in Hungary and never managed to make it to see his mother. While in Hungary, his common-law wife, Julia Horvath, arrived from America and the two of them officially married. They then returned to the United States in 1950. While Horvath was allowed to return to Buffalo, Mezei was detained at Ellis Island and ordered excluded. He was denied a hearing and not allowed to see the specific charges against him. The basic accusation was that he had been a member of a Communist-affiliated group while residing in America.
Mezei was ordered deported, but to where? As a court would later declare, “there is a certain vagueness about [Mezei’s] history.” He had arrived in the United States illegally in 1923, having gone overboard in New York Harbor from a ship on which he served as a seaman. He was born in 1897 on a ship off the Straits of Gibraltar, but raised in Hungary and Romania. In his twenty-five years in the United States, Mezei had never become a naturalized citizen. All of this left his actual citizenship uncertain.
This was a dilemma for U.S. officials deciding where to send Mezei. When the government deported him back to France, that nation turned him away. The same thing happened when Mezei was sent to England. The State Department then asked the Hungarian government to take him, but it refused. Mezei wrote to twelve Latin American countries asking for entry, but not one would accept him. Ignatz Mezei was stuck at Ellis Island, a man without a country.
The next step was for Mezei to file a habeas corpus petition. Eventually, his case reached the Supreme Court. While the judicial process unfolded, Mezei was released on a bond in May 1952, after nearly two years imprisoned at Ellis Island. He returned to Buffalo and tried to earn a living as a cabinetmaker while the courts untangled his case.
In March 1953, the Court came to a decision. In a 5-4 ruling that relied heavily on Knauff, it declared that the exclusion without a hearing and subsequent detention of Ignatz Mezei at Ellis Island was constitutional. The Court agreed with the Justice Department that Mezei was not actually imprisoned at Ellis Island, since he was free to leave at any time to any country that would accept him. “In short, respondent sat on Ellis Island because this country shut him out and others were unwilling to take him in,” wrote Justice Tom Clark.
The Court again reiterated the plenary power doctrine that recognized that “the power to expel or exclude aliens” was “a fundamental sovereign attribute exercised by the Government’s political departments largely immune from judicial control.” Even though Mezei had previously lived in the United States and was currently on American soil, the Court recognized the legal fiction that Mezei had not formally and legally “entered” the United States and was therefore not eligible for constitutional protections such as due process. “Neither respondent’s harborage on Ellis Island nor his prior residence here transforms this into something other than an exclusion proceeding,” Clark wrote.
In his dissent, Justice Hugo Black complained that Mezei was being excluded at the “unreviewable discretion of the Attorney General,” noting that such powers were more likely found in totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. As he did in Knauff, Justice Jackson also dissented in Mezei. “Because the respondent has no right of entry, does it follow that he has no rights at all,” Jackson asked. “Does the power to exclude mean that exclusion may be continued or effectuated by any means which happen to seem appropriate to the authorities?” If so, what would stop the government from ejecting Mezei “bodily into the sea or to set him adrift in a rowboat?”
A defeated Mezei returned to Ellis Island in April 1953. His only hope was that Congress might act on his behalf. He arrived at the ferry slip carrying his clothes, his tools, and a bag of apples. “I feel as if I was walking to death,” he said. Mezei still vigorously denied that he was a Communist. “If I were a Communist I would stay in Hungary,” he said, “plenty of jobs in Hungary for Communists.” The prospect of indefinite detention understandably weighed heavily on Mezei. “You don’t do nothing on Ellis Island,” he complained, “you go crazy.”
Unlike Ellen Knauff, Mezei did not elicit a great deal of sympathy from the public, the press, or Congress. Knauff had seen her family die in the Holocaust, had served in the British military during the war, had worked for the American military after the war, and was married to an American GI. Mezei, on the other hand, had arrived in the United States illegally, had lived in the country for twenty-five years without becoming a citizen, and had married Julia Horvath, an American citizen, while in Hungary under suspicious circumstances, most likely in hopes of easing his entry back into the country. “But when we come to this guy,” wrote one of Justice Jackson’s clerks and future Supreme Court chief justice, William Rehnquist, “I have some trouble crying.”
While there was not a great deal of public sympathy for Mezei, much had changed in the United States by the summer of 1954. The new president, a Republican war hero, Dwight D. Eisenhower, successfully sought an end to the unpopular stalemate in Korea. Though the new president had been cautious in his public comments about Senator Joseph McCarthy, it was clear that Eisenhower wanted to cool the domestic anti-Communist fires of the past few years. His new attorney general, Herbert Brownell, would set a new tone in the Justice Department. Mezei would receive his first hearing in February 1954, nearly four years after he was initially detained.
In an unusual move, Brownell created a three-man board to hear Mezei’s case, which consisted not of immigration officials but of outside lawyers, including law professors from Columbia University and New York University.
The government had a strong case against Mezei. The evidence against Ellen Knauff was scant and she could not be directly tied to any espionage. Mezei, however, had been a member of the Hungarian Workers’ Sick Benefit and Education Society, which later merged with the International Workers Order, which the government considered a Communist organization. Mezei admitted to being a leader in his local lodge, but denied being a Communist.
Unfortunately for Mezei, the government had a number of witnesses who contradicted his story. Two former Communists testified that they had seen Mezei at Communist Party meetings and one told the hearing that he had personally recruited him for the party. Three other witnesses told officials that they had heard Mezei making pro-Communist statements. In addition to his political problems, Mezei had also been convicted of petty larceny and fined $10 in his earlier stay in Buffalo. While the crime was rather minor, having to do with his possession of bags of stolen flour, this did mean that Mezei could be excluded under the moral turpitude clause.
Whereas Knauff was articulate and made an excellent case for herself, the same could not be said for Mezei. “His testimony was riddled with inconsistencies, and he seemed to have great difficulty understanding and answering many questions,” according to one sympathetic account. “Several of his statements lacked credibility.” Mezei had also repeatedly lied on government forms about his place of birth.
Not surprisingly, the board unanimously voted to exclude Mezei as a security risk in April 1954. He appealed the decision to Washington, but a board of immigration appeals upheld the decision to exclude him in August. Just two days later, however, the government reversed itself and announced that it had released Mezei on parole.
The special three-man board that had affirmed Mezei’s exclusion also recommended in private to Attorney General Brownell that he use his authority to release Mezei, since his role in the Communist Party was minor. That is exactly what he did. Mezei would return to his wife and stepchildren in Buffalo, where he would live an unassuming life until his wife died in 1969. In that year, he sold his house and mysteriously moved back to Communist Hungary, where he lived until his death in 1976.
Mezei’s release occurred at the same time that the career of Senator Joe McCarthy was quickly unraveling, thanks to the public humiliation caused by his unwise investigation of alleged Communism in the U.S. Army in the spring of 1954. As Mezei was released from Ellis Island, censure proceedings against McCarthy were about to come to the floor of the Senate. Anti-Communism was not dead, but its rough edges were being sanded down. The Eisenhower administration had no need to burnish its anti-Communist bona fides and could therefore tone down the government’s antiradical crusade.
By 1954, Ellis Island had been tainted by its unfortunate connection to the Cold War detention of aliens, which was increasingly becoming a public relations problem. It was being referred to as a concentration camp, and the United States’ role as the leader of the free world in opposing Communist tyranny made its detention policies untenable. “Unlike the totalitarians and despots,” wrote the New York Times, “we Americans abhor imprisonment by administrative officers’ fiat.”
In this political environment, the Eisenhower administration began to consider closing Ellis Island for good. Publicly, it sold the move as a cost-saving measure. The federal government could move its immigration offices to Manhattan and would no longer have to keep up the many buildings on the twenty-seven-acre compound. But there is little doubt that the public attention of the Knauff and Mezei cases helped seal Ellis Island’s fate.
On Veterans Day 1954, Attorney General Brownell spoke before two massive naturalization ceremonies in New York City. He used the occasion to set out a new policy on immigrant detentions. Those whose admissibility to the United States was under question would now no longer be detained while their cases were decided. Only those deemed “likely to abscond” or whose freedom would be “adverse to the national security or the public safety” would be held. The others would be released under conditional paroles or bonds until their cases were cleared. Brownell estimated that authorities had in the past year temporarily detained some 38,000 people, of whom only 1,600 were excluded from entering the United States. Holding so many individuals in detention had become an administrative, civil liberties, and public relations nightmare.
As part of this new policy, Brownell announced the closing of six detention facilities run by the government, including Ellis Island. Washington would save nearly $1 million a year by shuttering it and moving its offices to Manhattan. No longer needed to inspect and process hundreds of thousands of new immigrants, Ellis Island was now no longer wanted as a detention facility.
Ellis Island closed its doors to little fanfare just a few days after Brownell’s speech. From now on, those lucky enough to qualify for admission, after filling a quota position and proving they were not subversives, would no longer concern themselves with the little island in New York Harbor. After decades of attention from journalists, politicians, missionaries, and immigrant aid societies, Ellis Island was now drifting off the nation’s radar screen. With only 5 percent of Americans claiming foreign birth, the heyday of Ellis Island—with its inspection process, its medical and mental tests, its boards of special inquiry, its hasty wedding ceremonies, its tearful family reunions and even more tearful family separations because of deportation—was over.
Ellis Island’s last detainee was Arne Peterssen. The Norwegian seaman was not an immigrant in the traditional sense, but someone who had overstayed his shore leave. Under the newly relaxed immigration rules, officials released Peterssen on parole with a promise that he would rejoin his ship and return home.
“They rewarded with magnificent gifts the country that had received them with such magnificent hospitality,” declared a New York Times editorial looking back with pride at the achievements of immigrants who had passed through Ellis Island. “Perhaps some day a monument to them will go up on Ellis Island,” it continued, admonishing its readers that the “memory of this episode in our national history should never be allowed to fade.”
In the glow of postwar prosperity, assimilation, and suburbanization, few cared to keep that memory alive. That would have to wait for another day.