Chapter 19
Once I had set foot again on Ellis Island, I knew that I had come to one of God’s places, and that those of us who had been there were tied to it forever.
—Mark Helprin, Ellis Island and Other Stories
LINO ANTHONY IACOCCA HAD MUCH TO BE PROUD OF on the night of July 3, 1986. At age sixty-one, he already had a successful career in the auto industry, running Ford Motor Company before guiding Chrysler out of bankruptcy—with a little help from Uncle Sam. His recently published autobiography had sold more than 5 million copies. He received as many as five hundred letters a day from average Americans asking him for advice or thanking him for providing inspiration in their own lives. Newspapers called him a folk hero for the 1980s. And he had just overseen a nationwide campaign that raised almost $300 million for the renovation of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.
On this patriotic Fourth of July weekend, Iacocca presided over a glitzy celebration in New York Harbor that featured the relighting of the newly refurbished Statue of Liberty on its hundredth anniversary. Politicians, celebrities, and other dignitaries filled the stands to watch the fireworks display. President Ronald Reagan was on hand to pull the switch that would light the statue. It arguably could not have been done without Iacocca, and the shrewd salesman was not shy in letting everyone know it.
That was not a shabby record for the son of Italian immigrants who had grown up in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Iacocca was an Italian-American mix of Horatio Alger and Dale Carnegie. With his craggy features and gravelly voice, Iacocca was an icon of modern-day America. Had they been alive, immigration restrictionists Francis Walker or Prescott Hall would have been shocked at the presence of an Italian-American head of a major U.S. corporation.
Some wondered how a private businessman ended up in charge of the restoration of public icons like the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. It was partly a matter of timing. The federal government had neglected Ellis Island for thirty years. Then Ronald Reagan rode into the White House on a wave of antigovernment sentiment. “Government is the problem, not the solution,” he said, tapping into a national mood that had less faith in government after the social, political, and economic turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s. Rather than relying on the public sector, the Reagan administration pushed for what it called “public-private partnerships.”
In this vein, the National Park Service began to solicit private assistance to raise funds to restore Ellis Island in 1981. Richard Rovsek, a marketing executive who produced the Easter egg rolls at the Reagan White House, founded the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation to raise private money to restore both monuments in New York Harbor. Thus, the private half of the public-private partnership was born.
To oversee the fundraising efforts, Interior Secretary James Watt created the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Centennial Commission in 1982. Here was the public half of the equation. As implied by the commission’s name, it was hoped that the Statue of Liberty could be restored by its hundredth anniversary in 1986 and Ellis Island by its hundredth anniversary in 1992. Watt named Lee Iacocca to chair the new commission. Not happy with the largely advisory role of the Centennial Commission, Iacocca soon maneuvered to become head of the private foundation as well.
Iacocca also maneuvered to make the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation the sole fundraiser for the project, despite the existence of other organizations, such as Philip Lax’s Ellis Island Restoration Commission. In the end, Iacocca had become the boss of both the fundraising and the restoration efforts.
Although restoration of the two monuments was linked, it was clear that Ellis Island would play second fiddle. The centennial anniversary of the Statue of Liberty in 1986 made its renovation a more pressing matter, but also it was far better known to the public. “Ellis Island, in the public mind, was a poor cousin to the Statue of Liberty,” wrote F. Ross Holland, who was involved in the fundraising and restoration effort. “The foundation had publicized Ellis Island, but it was evident the public was more interested in the Statue of Liberty.”
The Statue of Liberty therefore became the center of Iacocca’s fundraising. A master salesman, he wasted no time. While individual donations would be important, he knew that if he wanted to raise $200 million he would need to solicit corporate sponsorships—which he did. Coca-Cola, USA Today, Stroh’s Brewery, Chrysler, Kodak, Nestlé, Oscar Mayer, and U.S. Tobacco were all granted exclusive rights to use the Statue of Liberty in their advertisements. The public seemed to respond to the fundraising effort. When American Express promised to donate a penny from each purchase, AmEx card use jumped by 28 percent.
The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island were now bound up with the larger political and ideological controversies of the day. It was the height of the Reagan Revolution, whose championing of free-market capitalism and the entrepreneurial spirit did not sit well with everyone.
In November 1985, the left-wing magazine The Nation began a series of articles by journalists Roberta Gratz and Eric Fettmann attacking Iacocca and his fundraising campaign. The first article, “The Selling of Miss Liberty,” was accompanied by a cover featuring a cartoon of Iacocca dressed as the Statue of Liberty, smoking a cigar and holding a money bag in place of the usual torch. Gratz and Fettmann argued that the fundraising effort was trashing an American icon. “What follows is the story of a corporate takeover of a national shrine at a time when corporate raids are an everyday occurrence,” Gratz and Fettmann wrote.
Despite the criticisms, fundraising continued at a record pace, culminating in the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty on the night of July 3, 1986. The event was a huge spectacle. While Iacocca’s efforts had made the night a reality, television producer David Wolper was in charge of the entertainment. The producer of Roots put together a star-studded lineup for the weekend that included Frank Sinatra, Helen Hayes, Neil Diamond, Gregory Peck, and José Feliciano. There were song-and-dance numbers as well as historical films, fireworks, tall ships in the harbor, and the release of balloons and doves. Chief Justice Warren Burger swore in 2,000 new citizens—including Mikhail Baryshnikov—at Ellis Island, while 38,000 more participated by video hookup. All 40,000 would simultaneously join in the singing of “America the Beautiful.”
For some, it was all too much. Jacob Weisberg, in a dyspeptic anticipatory piece for The New Republic, wrote that the celebration was “likely to be remembered as the most revolting display of patriotic glitz and tacky pageantry in this country’s history.” Despite this, most Americans seemed happy with what they saw of the newly refurbished Statue of Liberty. The criticisms of Iacocca, however, did not end.
Months before Liberty Weekend, Secretary of the Interior Donald Hodel, who replaced Watt, had fired Iacocca from the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Centennial Commission. The businessman still remained as head of the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation. Some suggested that Republicans feared that the politically ambiguous Iacocca might use his celebrity as a platform to run for office as a Democrat. Others suggested that the administration was not happy with Iacocca’s plans for Ellis Island.
Whatever one thought of the Liberty Weekend extravaganza or of Iacocca, there was still more work to do. Ellis Island was still far from being ready for its public unveiling. By March 1987, Iacocca’s foundation had raised over $300 million from private sources. By 1991, the figure would reach $350 million.
If the public seemed to be more captivated by the Statue of Liberty, Iacocca made it clear that the driving force behind his work was Ellis Island. For him, the statue was “a beautiful symbol of what it means to be free,” but Ellis Island was the “reality.” If you want to prosper, Iacocca wrote, “there’s a price to pay…. Apply yourself…. It isn’t easy, but if you keep your nose to the grindstone and work at it, it’s amazing how in a free society you can become as great as you want to be.” For Iacocca, Ellis Island had become a symbol of immigrant success and American greatness.
His father, Nicola Iacocca, had come to America in 1902 at the age of twelve and eventually ended up in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Nineteen years later, Nicola returned to Italy to bring back a wife. When the newlywed couple arrived at Ellis Island, according to Iacocca family lore, the bride was sick with typhus fever and had lost her hair. When inspectors tried to hold her for further examination, Nicola, an “aggressive, fast-talking operator,” convinced them she was just suffering from seasickness. It worked and the couple was allowed to land. It is not a terribly plausible story—especially considering the fear that typhus fever had caused in the past—but one that Iacocca often repeated.
Because Ellis Island had great meaning in the Iacocca household, Lee saw his fundraising work as a “labor of love for my mother and father.” For him, the Great Hall took on near-religious significance. It was “a cathedral, a churchlike setting, a place to pray. It brings tears to your eyes.” Iacocca wrote in his autobiography that Ellis Island “was part of my being, not the place itself, but what it stood for and how tough an experience it was.”
“Hard work, the dignity of labor, the fight for what’s right—these are the things the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island stand for,” Iacocca argued. Although the Iacocca family’s experience at Ellis Island was one of potential pitfalls and tragedy averted, it had now become a symbol of pride and success for the descendants of immigrants who passed through there. For Iacocca and many others with similar backgrounds, Ellis Island was increasingly entwined with their vision of the American Dream.
To others, that vision had distinct political and ideological implications. Some historians did not want the museum’s theme to be about the old melting pot, but rather about cultural pluralism. Gratz and Fettmann, who criticized the fundraising for the Statue of Liberty, also took on the restoration of Ellis Island. “Should Ellis…portray the history of the great immigration wave, warts and all, or will it become…‘an ethnic Disneyland’?” The authors worried that its history might be “prettified” and wondered how “historical appropriateness” would be balanced with “commercial hucksterism.” Deeply suspicious of the private sector, Gratz and Fettmann could only see the “logoization” of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. “As often happens when private control is substituted for public accountability, the unifying power of the public good is diminished,” they wrote. “A great opportunity was lost to place our common heritage above private gain.”
A historian made a similar point, worrying that the new museum would reflect corporate values and become nothing more than “a Disney-like ‘Immigrant Land’—with smiling native-garbed workers selling Coca-Cola to strains of ‘It’s a Small World After All.’” Even worse, the museum might actually end up glorifying Ellis Island immigrants in a kind of “ethnic populism.”
How should the old immigration station be remembered? Two 1984 letters to the New York Times symbolized this conflicted memory. The first called Ellis Island a “best forgotten” symbol. “It offered neither welcome nor haven,” the writer continued. “Like the Bastille, it has not been missed.” The second letter argued that it was the “struggle and eventual triumph” of immigrants “that Ellis Island rightly commemorates.” How people interpreted the meaning of Ellis Island was becoming more important than what had actually occurred there.
The former inspection station was well on its way to becoming a national shrine, which meant linking Ellis Island to that original founding place of memory: Plymouth Rock. This formulation not only elevated the dreary former inspection station into the nation’s symbolic pantheon; it also resonated with the idea that newer immigrant groups were supplanting the nation’s Pilgrim founders. Much as groups like the Society of Mayflower Descendants helped to establish their claim to ownership of America, the descendants of Ellis Island immigrants were now claiming their place. Ellis Island was the new Plymouth Rock and the immigrants who passed through it were the Pilgrims of a modern, multicultural America.
This process began much earlier than most people believe. One can trace Ellis Island’s evolution into a national icon as far back as 1903 when Jacob Riis pronounced it “the nation’s gateway to the promised land.” Two years later, the Boston Transcript dubbed it “the Twentieth Century Plymouth Rock,” while The Youth’s Companion wrote about “The New Plymouth Rock.”
In 1914, a writer named Mary Antin argued that the “ghost of the Mayflower pilots every immigrant ship, and Ellis Island is another name for Plymouth Rock.” For a Russian Jewish immigrant like Antin, linking Plymouth Rock to Ellis Island was a forthright way to express her Americanness and rebuke opponents of immigration.
That an immigrant like Antin would have the temerity to equate Plymouth Rock with Ellis Island was too much for the novelist Agnes Repplier. “Had the Pilgrim Fathers been met on Plymouth Rock by immigration officials, had their children been placed immediately in good free schools, and given the care of doctors, dentists, and nurses,” she asked, “what pioneer virtues would they have developed.” To equate Plymouth Rock with Ellis Island assumed that modern immigrants were the equal of the original settlers and their descendants, a leap of judgment that was just too far-fetched for Repplier.
Other native-born Americans nervously saw the passing of the baton from Plymouth Rock to Ellis Island as inevitable. A New York City schoolteacher in the early twentieth century was unable to get her largely first-and second-generation pupils to answer basic questions about U.S. history. When all else failed, she asked: Where is Ellis Island? She had finally hit upon the right question, as every hand in the room was raised and “the light of intelligence gleamed from every pair of eyes.” While the teacher had always looked with veneration upon Plymouth Rock, the history of these schoolchildren and millions of new Americans now began at Ellis Island.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, a Slovenian immigrant named Louis Adamic traveled the country giving a speech entitled “Plymouth Rock and Ellis Island.”
The beginning of their vital American background as groups is not the glorified Mayflower, but the as yet unglorified immigrant steerage; not Plymouth Rock or Jamestown, but Castle Garden or Ellis Island or Angel Island or the International Bridge or the Mexican and Canadian border, not the wilderness of New England, but the social-economic jungle of the city slums and the factory system.
With the United States heading toward involvement in another European war, Adamic hoped the inclusion of Ellis Island into America’s historic pantheon would help unify the diverse nation. “Let’s make America safe for differences,” he exhorted his audiences. “Let us work for unity within diversity.”
After the war, Ellis Island fell off the nation’s collective radar, finding itself uncomfortably in the news with the detentions of enemy aliens during World War II and suspected radicals during the Cold War. However, the revival of white ethnic identity during the late 1960s and 1970s helped bring more attention to Ellis Island.
In deeply nostalgic tones, Leo Rosten wrote an article for Look in 1968 entitled: “Not So Long Ago, There Was a Magic Island.” Around the same time, Senator Ted Kennedy, a descendant of pre-Ellis Island Irish immigrants, penned a piece in Esquire about Ellis Island and those who passed through it. “They came—creative, industrious, unafraid,” Kennedy wrote. “Today Ellis Island stands as a symbol, in new glory, of the oldest theme in our history. It reminds us all that the nobility to which America has risen was born of humble origins.” In 1975, National Parks Service historian Thomas Pitkin published the first comprehensive history of Ellis Island. “There is nothing really fanciful in calling Ellis Island, as has been done, the Plymouth Rock of its day,” Pitkin wrote in conclusion. “There is no single point in the country where American social history for a generation and more comes to a sharper focus.”
In the late 1970s, a group of Armenian-Americans gathered at Ellis Island “to express gratitude to their adopted land of freedom.” Set Charles Momjian, one of the event’s organizers, captured its meaning for Armenians and other immigrants. “For many, Ellis Island was a sad and disconcerting beginning to life in the United States,” Momjian wrote. “It is therefore a measure of our success as Americans that we return to this place, no longer afraid, intimidated, or bewildered, but confident and grateful for the blessings we have experienced in this country.” The novelist William Saroyan described how his grandmother was almost excluded upon arrival because of poor eyesight. Though Saroyan was born in the United States, he wrote that Ellis Island was in his “very marrow.”
Riding this wave of nostalgia and ethnic pride, Peter Sammartino, a university official and son of Italian immigrants, began the Restore Ellis Island Committee in hopes of eventually opening it to visitors. It succeeded in getting Congress to appropriate $1 million for the effort, as well as $7 million to rebuild the island’s seawall. Thanks to Sammartino’s efforts, the National Park Service opened the main building to the public for a limited number of guided tours in 1976, but the island was still a mess. Journalist Sydney Schanberg called it “about as romantic as a row of hollow buildings in the South Bronx.” Ellis Island was closed again for repairs in 1984.
In that same year, Geraldine Ferraro became not just the first woman from a major American political party to run on a presidential ticket, but also the first Ellis Island descendant. Walter Mondale’s selection of Ferraro as a running mate signaled the importance of ethnic identity to the campaign. So did the choice of Mario Cuomo, another New York Democrat, to give the keynote address at the party’s convention.
“The Battle for Ellis Island” is how political writer Michael Barone dubbed the campaign. “What’s important in 1984 is not how each ticket appeals to specific ethnic groups,” Barone wrote, “but which is more successful in appealing to the Ellis Island tradition generally.” Republicans would point to free-market capitalism as instrumental in the success of Ellis Island immigrants, while Democrats would argue for the importance of the New Deal in making second-and third-generation Americans part of the middle class.
In 1988, the Democratic Party nominated another child of Ellis Island as its presidential candidate. Running against blue-blood Republican George H. W. Bush, Michael Dukakis played up his background as the son of Greek immigrants. In his acceptance speech, the Massachusetts governor made prominent mention of his late father, “who arrived at Ellis Island with only $25 in his pocket, but with a deep and abiding faith in the promise of America.” During the campaign, Dukakis made a red, white, and blue appearance at Ellis Island, where he discussed his parents’ arrival decades earlier. “Their story is your story,” he said. “It is our story; it is the story of America.”
Ferraro and Dukakis were political losers, but as Newsweek’s Meg Greenfield noted, Ellis Island “has become the East Coast equivalent of the log cabin, poor farm-boy upbringing and the rest of that Americana unavailable to so many people with exotic surnames.”
Now firmly entrenched in the nation’s psyche and historical memory, Ellis Island was once again ready to take its place on the public stage. After years of restoration and fundraising by the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation, a renovated Ellis Island was finally reopened on September 9, 1990. An economic recession that year led to a far more restrained event than the glitzy 1986 unveiling of the refurbished Statue of Liberty.
At the cost of over $150 million, the main building on the island’s north side was opened to the public as an immigration museum. Visitors disembarking from the ferry would stroll up the path toward the building just as many of their ancestors had. Arriving in the first floor, they would then make their way up a set of stairs, a replica of the original, where inspectors and doctors once closely examined immigrants as they wound their way upstairs. Visitors would then enter the Great Hall.
Though once filled with immigrants marching toward clerks waiting to question them, the renovated Great Hall was starkly empty. Side rooms contained explanations of the immigration inspection process. Tourists could visit a hearing room used by the boards of special inquiry, as well as the detention rooms where immigrants slept in canvas bunk beds stacked three to the ceiling, hanging from wires. The renovation of the main building won rave reviews from New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger, who called it “skillfully designed, brilliantly executed.”
On many levels, the restoration of Ellis Island has been a success. Many visitors come not just to see the renovated main building and museum, but also for something called the American Immigrant Wall of Honor. Iacocca took this idea from the Wall of Sixteen Million that appeared in Philip Johnson’s 1960s design, but he added his own salesman’s twist. With his philosophy of “Give ’em a piece of it,” Iacocca decided to charge people to put their names or the names of their ancestors on the wall. By 1993, the wall had raised more than $42 million, with the potential for more money from more names on expanding walls in the future.
By accident, Iacocca added to the confusion of Ellis Island. Most visitors believe that the Wall of Honor lists the name of every immigrant who passed through the island. Many are upset when they do not find their ancestor’s name on the wall. The reality is that an immigrant’s name appears on the Wall of Honor only after their descendants donate at least $100. No money, no name.
More confusion followed. Samuel Freedman found that his grandparents are listed twice since both his father and an uncle or aunt had separately given money to list their parents’ names. To confuse matters even more, when visitors see the Wall of Honor, they are liable to find scattered among the over 700,000 names (as of 2008) such “immigrants” as Miles Standish, Paul Revere, and Thomas Thayer, whose name was added thanks to the donation of one of his descendants, former First Lady Barbara Bush.
At the other side of the historical spectrum, Ellis Island immigrants share space on the walls with people like Shin Ki Kang, a Korean immigrant who came to America in 1977 and Parvis Mehran, a recent arrival from Iran. The grab-bag nature of the Wall led a reporter to describe it as the “apotheosis of the American dream, allowing anyone and everyone to purchase a place in American history.”
What name does one put on the wall? One woman complained that she would have loved to have her grandfather’s name on the Wall of Honor, but did not know which name to use? Should it be Nehemiah Nohr, his given name at birth, or “the name assigned by the authorities at Ellis Island and by which he would be known for the next 50 years as a naturalized American, Jacob Friedman?” This woman complained that the Nohrs had vanished into history, “obliterated…without known reason, creating a dilemma that those Ellis Island clerks could hardly have foreseen.”
The connection between Ellis Island and the issue of names remains tightly drawn in the public mind. As in the mind of the daughter of Jacob Friedman, Ellis Island has become synonymous with the changing of immigrant names.
The most famous story of an Ellis Island name change is that of Sean Ferguson. This Jewish immigrant was reportedly given his Scottish-sounding name by inspectors who, after asking the confused immigrant his name, received a response in Yiddish: Schoen vergessen, meaning “I forgot.” Thus was baptized Sean Ferguson.
The stories multiply. Immigrants from Berlin received the last name Berliner from officials. Then there is the story of a Jewish orphan who told inspectors he was a yosem, an orphan, and found his new name as Josem. Another immigrant was supposedly told by officials to “Put your mark in this space” and found his name had become Yormark. In the HBO series The Sopranos, a mobster named Phil Leotardo complains at a family gathering that the family’s original name was Leonardo—after Leonardo Da Vinci—but was changed to Leotardo at Ellis Island. When his grandchild asks why, Phil responds: “Because they are stupid, that’s why. And jealous. They disrespected a proud Italian heritage and named us after a ballet costume.” A popular 1994 children’s book is entitled If Your Name Was Changed at Ellis Island.
In an interview later in her life, Sophia Kreitzberg retells the story that her stepfather told her about his time at Ellis Island. Officials asked him his name and he replied Kogan. “Kogan Shmogan,” the inspector allegedly told Sophia’s stepfather, “that’s not an American name,” and the official renamed him Sam Cohen. “They gave everybody the name of Cohen or Schwartz or something,” she said. “That’s why you find so many Jewish people with the same ethnic names. They were given those names by the people in Ellis Island.”
Then there is the joke about the Chinese laundry owner named Moishe Pipik. When asked how a Chinese man got such a strange name, Pipik explained: “At Ellis Island, I stand in line behind man named Moishe Pipik. When my turn come, man ask my name, I say ‘Sam Ting.’” That a Chinese immigrant would easily pass through Ellis Island, despite the Chinese Exclusion Act, signals the apocryphal nature of the story.
Nearly all of these name-change stories are false. Names were not changed at Ellis Island. The proof is found when one considers that inspectors never wrote down the names of incoming immigrants. The only list of names came from the manifests of steamships, filled out by ship officials in Europe. In the era before visas, there was no official record of entering immigrants except those manifests. When immigrants reached the end of the line in the Great Hall, they stood before an immigration clerk with the huge manifest opened in front of him. The clerk then proceeded, usually through interpreters, to ask questions based on those found in the manifests. Their goal was to make sure the answers matched.
The only time immigration officials at Ellis Island wrote down names was when immigrants were held for hearings or medical help. Officials would include aliases and possible permutations of the names of such immigrants on their paperwork. However, these were not official documents, just internal paperwork, and did not have the power to change an immigrant’s name officially.
Name changes largely occurred either on the other side of the Atlantic, when steamship officials recorded names in their manifests, or after Ellis Island, when immigrants filled out naturalization papers or other official documents. Often immigrants voluntarily chose to Americanize their names to adapt to their new home.
There is at least one instance of a name change at Ellis Island, however. Frank Woodhull, who had been born a woman named Mary Johnson, but had lived the previous fifteen years of her life passing as a man, arrived at Ellis Island listed as Frank Woodhull on the ship’s manifest. After spending one day in detention while authorities figured out whether to admit him, Woodhull was finally allowed to proceed to New Orleans, but not before officials crossed out Woodhull’s name on the ship’s manifest and penciled “Mary Johnson” in its stead. But this was clearly an exceptional case.
Yet the name change story lives on as urban legend. Many Americans are convinced of its truth because their grandparents told them the story. It is a convenient myth that emphasizes the traumatic nature of Ellis Island and the supposed rough treatment of immigrants, as well as the facility’s role in Americanizing immigrants, often against their will. The story serves as a convenient cover for the uncomfortable fact that many immigrants voluntarily discarded their Old World names in an effort to assimilate into American society. Better to blame insensitive immigration officials than Grandpa for the fact that your name is Smith and not Hryczyszyn.
The inclusive nature of the Wall, encompassing Massachusetts Puritans and Korean businessmen, as well as those who actually passed through Ellis Island, brings up larger questions about the memorialization of Ellis Island. Should it be seen as a shrine to celebrate the experiences of those who passed through it? Should it represent immigrants from every era of American history? Or should it commemorate the experiences of everyone who came to America in myriad ways, from eighteenth-century slave ships to early nineteenth-century coffin ships to modern immigrants who arrive at airports?
Even though the restoration of Ellis Island has drawn public acclaim, many scholars have been critical of its evolution into a national icon. Their concerns revolve around three issues. First, the memorializing of Ellis Island should not be used to make negative comparisons with newer immigrant groups. Second, the refurbished Ellis Island should not lead to ideological celebrations of the free-market or “up-by-the-bootstraps” homilies. Last, critics contend that the “nation of immigrants” saga embodied in the Ellis Island story leaves out groups that did not voluntarily emigrate to the United States, namely American Indians and the descendants of African slaves.
Historians are supposed to clear out the fog created by the construction of historical memory, but too often their work betrays an attempt to construct a historical memory that serves an ideological purpose. For example, historian Mike Wallace complained about the lack of “fresh thinking” at the island’s museum and helpfully suggested exhibits on “the effect on immigration flows of actions taken by the International Monetary Fund, major multinationals, and the Central Intelligence Agency.” He believed that the new immigration museum had nothing that would help people probe contemporary anti-immigrant attitudes. “It would be perfectly possible to leave Ellis,” Wallace writes, “with warm feelings toward the old migrants and preexisting resentments of gooks, spicks and towel-heads left intact.”
In addition, Wallace and other leftists were concerned that the restoration of Ellis Island abetted the rise of American conservatism. “At the heart of the Reagan/Iacocca reading of the history of immigration was the ‘up-from-poverty’ saga of the model of white ethnics,” wrote Wallace. This amounted to nothing more than an “antigovernment screed” that facilitated the contemporary policies of the Reagan administration.
Art professor Erica Rand sees Ellis Island through the edgier prisms of gender and queer studies. Her 2005 book Ellis Island Snow Globe devotes space not only to predictable denunciations of commercialism, but also to more entertaining discussions of same-sex eroticism, with chapters such as “Breeders on a Golf Ball: Normalizing Sex at Ellis Island.” Rand is also concerned about the exclusionary nature of the site, which she sees as privileging the historical narrative of one group. She worried that the “claim that the Ellis Island museum honors all immigrants, all migrants, or even all who ‘people America’ also functions to mask the inequity involved in the concentration of heritage resources at a site that honors and documents primarily white people.”
It is hard for some to disentangle the memory of Ellis Island from discussions of race. Many black Americans felt left out of the celebrations of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, even though few Americans seem aware that black nationalist Marcus Garvey, social scientist Kenneth Clark, and Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay were among the roughly 143,000 black immigrants—mostly from the Caribbean—who came through Ellis Island between 1899 and 1937. The disconnect was exemplified by black historian John Hope Franklin, who admitted that the renovation of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island was “a celebration for immigrants and that has nothing to do with me. I’m interested in it as an event, but I don’t feel involved in it.”
David Roediger’s Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs exemplifies this unease. What makes the journey from Ellis Island to suburbia so “strange” is not immediately apparent, but it has something to do with the idea that immigrants had to consciously “become white” in order to move into the mainstream of society, and in doing so they bought into ideas of white supremacy, turned their backs on African-Americans, and failed to place themselves in the vanguard of the proletariat for a revolution against capitalism. Apart from the title, Ellis Island barely makes an appearance in the book, but serves as a convenient symbol for Roediger’s ideological tract.
For historian Matthew Frye Jacobson, the memorialization of Ellis Island is tied to the troublesome idea of America as a “nation of immigrants.” This idea is problematic because it excludes from our national mythology those black Americans and American Indians not descended from immigrants. Just as bad for Jacobson, “the immigrant myth and immigrants’ real-life descendants contributed to the swing vote that rendered the Republicans the majority party in the electoral realignment beginning in 1968,” an outcome that he abhors. Jacobson implies that the arrival of European immigrants was a bad deal for civil rights. Channeling Malcolm X, he writes: “We didn’t land on Ellis Island, my brothers and sisters—Ellis Island landed on us.”
Another group was also feeling left out of the whole “nation of immigrants” celebration. To describe the United States in that way, says political scientist Samuel Huntington, “is to stretch a partial truth into a misleading falsehood.” Huntington is speaking for white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, whose ancestors, he argues, were settlers, not immigrants. On a similar note, the author of a history of Plymouth Rock argues that, as they visit the Ellis Island museum, “the descendants of Pilgrims do not have to be told that this is a society to which they need not apply.”
These criticisms suggest another question about the rehabilitation of Ellis Island. As the federal government originally created the inspection station to exclude undesirable immigrants, is the National Park Service now practicing another kind of exclusion in its celebration of the immigrants who came through there?
In the years since, the National Park Service and the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation have made great efforts to be historically inclusive. “It doesn’t matter whether your family arrived on the Mayflower or recently got off the airplane from Honduras,” explained Gary G. Roth, the National Park Service’s project manager for the immigration museum. “Ellis Island is a symbol of four hundred years of immigration. The story of it all is told here, including that of Native Americans and of forced immigrations, the slaves who were brought here against their will.”
In 2006, the foundation began fundraising for a project entitled “The Peopling of America Center.” The new museum will show “the entire panorama of the American experience,” and look beyond the traditional tale of immigration, which excludes those brought over in slave ships and native peoples residing on the continent prior to European colonization. As if to emphasize the inclusive nature of the project, as opposed to the allegedly narrow and exclusionary nature of the current museum, which focuses almost exclusively on Ellis Island immigrants, the center’s motto is: “It’s About All of Us!”
ELLIS ISLAND’S ICONIC STATUS is ever-present. When the online brokerage firm TD Ameritrade launched a new advertising campaign, it chose as its theme the celebration of America’s independent spirit. To embody that spirit, it picked Ellis Island immigrants. “When immigrants came to Ellis Island they carried a dream,” intoned the company’s spokesman, Sam Waterston: “Work hard and opportunity will follow.” The company’s newspaper ad featured Waterston standing next to a large photo of an immigrant family standing on Ellis Island and looking at the Statue of Liberty, as well as a copy of the famous painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In big letters, the ad stated, “Independence is the spirit that drives America’s most successful investors.”
In an episode from the fifth season of The Apprentice, those vying for the opportunity to work for Donald Trump were given the task of creating a new souvenir booklet for visitors to Ellis Island. “Yes, even Donald Trump seems to appreciate the historic importance and magical allure of this great national monument to freedom and opportunity,” proclaimed the newsletter of the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation.
The island takes a prominent role in movies like Godfather II, Hitch, Hester Street, and Brother from Another Planet. The 2006 Italian film Nuovomondo, titled Golden Door in its American release, deals with Sicilian immigrants who pass through Ellis Island. The film is evocative of the dislocation and confusion of the inspection process; however, it is also historically inaccurate. It shows all immigrants undergoing rigorous physical and mental testing. In reality, the relatively small staff at Ellis Island meant a hasty inspection for most who passed through. Only if immigrants were suspected of having some deficiency did they undergo the full battery of mental and physical testing. William Williams only wished that he could have inspected every immigrant as closely as we see in Golden Door.
In the 1990s, New York and New Jersey fought a protracted legal battle for jurisdiction over Ellis Island. In 1998, this battle eventually made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in a 6-3 decision that all but three acres of the site belonged to New Jersey. The Court’s majority relied on an 1834 agreement between the two states that granted the then three-acre island to New York while allowing New Jersey to retain the rights to the surrounding waters and submerged land. Some of that land was eventually added to Ellis Island as it expanded.
Despite the rhetoric from both sides, the fight had little to do with lofty issues and more to do with who would control the development of the rest of the island and the taxes it would generate. Beginning in the 1980s, there had been talk of redeveloping the south side of the island, which used to house medical facilities. The new plan included demolishing some of the abandoned buildings and replacing them with a hotel and conference center, with the money from the commercial sites paying for the restoration of the rest of the buildings. New Jersey wanted to build a footbridge from its side of the Hudson to the island. Lee Iacocca had other ideas, including a nebulous plan for an “ethnic Williamsburg,” an exhibition center devoted to ethnic arts and crafts and food.
In the end, none of the plans was approved and the southern half of the island remained fallow as preservationists staunchly opposed the idea of commercial development. Unfortunately, they had little money with which to restore the decaying southern section of the island. At this point, the National Park Service stepped in and entered into an agreement with a newly formed nonprofit organization called Save Ellis Island, which was now authorized to raise money for the rehabilitation of the island’s southern section.
“Establish the Ellis Island Institute and Conference Center in the thirty unrestored buildings on Ellis Island,” its mission statement declares. “The Ellis Island Institute and Conference Center will capture the power of place to become a world class facility for civic engagement and life long learning on the topics of immigration, diversity, human health and wellbeing, the themes of Ellis Island.”
To help with fundraising and raise awareness of the project, the clothing maker Arrow launched a nationwide public relations effort. It created a high-production-value advertising campaign with television spots and posters featuring actors Elliot Gould and Christian Slater, pro-football Hall of Famer Joe Montana, American Idol finalist Kathryn McPhee, and cast members from The Sopranos. Everyone was fashionably dressed—no doubt in Arrow clothing—as they walked through the abandoned buildings of the island’s south side to the haunting notes from a string orchestra. To support the effort, the public can buy “Save Ellis Island” T-shirts and leave their family’s immigrant stories on a website.
For those wondering what a clothing maker has to do with immigration, Arrow created the slogan: “Ellis Island. Where the World Came Together and American Style Began.” Posters reinforced the link between Ellis Island, the American Dream, and the themes of family, opportunity, and freedom. Although Christian Slater’s ancestors were decidedly old immigrants from Ireland and England and it is not clear whether they came through Ellis Island, his poster reads: “Ellis Island represents our foundation—a place of possibility and new beginning.” To Kathryn McPhee, Ellis Island is about “the collective heritage of the American Dream.” For Joe Montana, it is about his Italian immigrant ancestors who worked in the mines of Pennsylvania to create opportunity for their family. “Triumph against the odds,” his poster reads. “That’s authentic American style.”
In a different context, the National Park Service’s superintendent of Ellis Island supported the restoration for just the opposite reasons. “It is haunting,” Cynthia Garrett said of the island’s abandoned south side, whose hospital buildings witnessed many tragedies of disease and death. “It tells us that our history isn’t all positive stories and success.”
Whether Ellis Island is a story of uplift and success or harrowing tragedies, it has evolved into something akin to a national shrine. In an editorial on the Supreme Court case, the New York Times referred to “Ellis Island’s sacred history.” In 2001, New York City’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani, summed up this trend when he said at a naturalization ceremony on the island: “Ellis Island is a wonderful place, it’s a sacred place, and it’s hallowed ground in American history.”
Such talk would no doubt have amused William Williams, Frederic Howe, and so many others who had worked at Ellis Island during its heyday. It would have baffled those immigrants who had to navigate the obstacle course at Ellis Island and probably saw little of the sacred in their experiences.
It was not preordained that Ellis Island should end up as a national shrine. San Francisco’s Angel Island holds none of the same allure for descendants of Chinese immigrants, who received a much harsher reception than European immigrants. The Hotel de la Inmigración in Buenos Aires, known as Argentina’s Ellis Island, pales in comparison to its northern namesake. Though it has also been turned into an immigration museum where modern Argentines can trace their ancestors who arrived a century earlier, it receives few visitors and is nestled off the city’s beaten path.
Having said that, each generation makes its own history and there is nothing wrong with the descendants of Ellis Island reclaiming a historic site that was created, in part, to exclude their ancestors. Too many critics, eager to score political points, ignore the ways that the memorialization of Ellis Island stands as a sharp rebuke to nativists, both past and present.
That said, the historical memory of Ellis Island, like all memory, has been created over time, and that memory will continue to evolve in the future. What exactly this historic site symbolizes can be a matter of debate even with the same family.
After visiting the restored Ellis Island in 2004, a woman sought out her grandmother’s name on the Wall of Honor. This successful New York professional called her grandmother, who had passed through the facility many decades earlier, to share the moment. “What are you doing there,” her grandmother testily responded from the other end of the phone line. The grandmother clearly did not share the same positive thoughts that her granddaughter associated with Ellis Island.
By the dawn of the twenty-first century, Ellis Island’s former life as an immigrant inspection station had given way to its latest incarnation as a national shrine and icon, a modern-day Plymouth Rock. As this transformation occurred, America was in the midst of another wave of mass immigration. What kinds of lessons—if any—could Americans learn from how immigrants were treated a century earlier?