ABBREVIATIONS
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AH |
American Hebrew |
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ANY |
Archives of the Archdiocese of New York, St. Joseph’s Seminary, Yonkers, New York |
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BG |
Boston Globe |
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BH |
Boston Herald |
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CC |
Calvin Coolidge Papers, Library of Congress |
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CN |
Charles Nagel Papers, Yale University |
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CR |
Charles Recht Papers, Tamiment Library, New York University |
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EG |
Emma Goldman Papers, University of California, Berkeley |
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FLG |
Fiorello La Guardia Papers, La Guardia and Wagner Archives, La Guardia Community College, City University of New York |
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HW |
Harper’s Weekly |
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HP |
Herbert Parsons Papers, Columbia University |
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HST |
Harry S. Truman Papers, Official File, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Independence, Missouri |
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INS |
Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85, National Archives, Washington, DC |
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IRL |
Papers of the Immigration Restriction League, Harvard University |
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JAMA |
Journal of the American Medical Association |
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LD |
The Literary Digest |
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LOC |
Library of Congress |
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MK |
Max Kohler Papers, American Jewish Historical Society |
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NAR |
North American Review |
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NMB |
Nicholas Murray Butler Papers, Columbia University |
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NYHS |
New York Historical Society |
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NYM |
New York Medical Journal |
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NYPL |
New York Public Library |
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NYS |
New York Sun |
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NYT |
New York Times |
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NYTM |
New York Times Magazine |
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NYTrib |
New York Tribune |
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NYW |
New York World |
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OS |
Oscar Straus Papers, Library of Congress |
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PSM |
Popular Science Monthly |
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RMN |
Richard M. Nixon Papers, National Archives, College Park, Maryland |
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SG |
Samuel Gompers Papers, University of Maryland, College Park |
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SP |
Saturday Evening Post |
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TR |
Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Library of Congress |
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TVP |
Terence V. Powderly Papers, The Catholic University of America |
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WC |
William E. Chandler Papers, Library of Congress |
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WGH |
Warren G. Harding Papers, Library of Congress |
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WL |
William Langer Papers, University of North Dakota |
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WSJ |
Wall Street Journal |
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WHT |
William Howard Taft Papers, Library of Congress |
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WP |
Washington Post |
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WW |
Woodrow Wilson Papers, Library of Congress |
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WW-NYPL |
William Williams Papers, New York Public Library |
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WW-Yale |
William Williams Family Papers, Yale University |
INTRODUCTION
By 1912, thirty-three-year-old: On the Tyni family, see File 53525-37, INS.
Unlike the Tyni family: For the story of Anna Segla, see File 52880-77, INS.
Other immigrants: Letter from Louis K. Pittman, December 3, 1985, Public Health Service Historians Office, Rockville, MD.
Others, luckier than Pittman: For the story of Frank Woodhull/Mary Johnson, see NYT, October 5, 6, 1908; NYTrib, October 5, 1908; New York Herald, October 5, 1908; and Erica Rand, The Ellis Island Snow Globe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), Chapter 2.
For these individuals: Bruce M. Stave, John F. Sutherland, with Aldo Salerno, From the Old Country: An Oral History of European Migration to America (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994), 44–45.
No one story: James Karavolas, who arrived as a six-year-old in 1915, told of his memories of Ellis Island years later. “Ellis Island didn’t impress me at all. The memory is faint,” Karavolas admitted. Peter Morton Coan, Ellis Island Interviews: In Their Own Words (New York: Checkmark Books, 1997), 279.
The process at: Edward A. Steiner, On the Trail of the Immigrant (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1906), 72; Stephen Graham, With Poor Immigrants to America (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 44.
The central sifting: Allan McLaughlin, “How Immigrants Are Inspected,” PSM, February 1905; J. G. Wilson, “Some Remarks Concerning Diagnosis by Inspection,” NYM, July 8, 1911; Alfred C. Reed, “The Medical Side of Immigration,” PSM, April 1912; E. H. Mullan, “Mental Examination of Immigrants: Administration and Line Inspection at Ellis Island,” Public Health Reports, U.S. Public Health Service, May 18, 1917; and Elizabeth Yew, “Medical Inspection of Immigrants at Ellis Island, 1891–1924,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 56, no. 5 (June 1980).
All of these ideas: Speech by Henry Cabot Lodge before the Boston City Club, March 20, 1908, reprinted, 60th Congress, 1st Session, Senate Document 423.
Traditional histories: John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 4. For a critique of Higham’s “psychopathological approach,” see Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), 6–8.
The “nativist theme”: See John Higham, “Another Look at Nativism,” Catholic Historical Review, July 1958 and John Higham, “Instead of a Sequel, or How I Lost My Subject,” Reviews in American History 28, no. 2 (2000).
Few Americans argued: Allan McLaughlin, “Immigration and Public Health,” PSM, January 1904.
Take the opinions: Max Kohler, “Immigration and the Jews of America,” AH, January 27, 1911.
On the other side: Frank Sargent, “The Need of Closer Inspection and Greater Restriction of Immigrants,” Century Magazine, January 1904.
“We desire to”: American Jewish Committee report quoted in Max J. Kohler, Immigration and Aliens in the United States: Studies of American Immigration Laws and the Legal Status of Aliens in the United States (New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1936), 1.
The laws that dealt: See Erika Lee, “The Chinese Exclusion Example: Race, Immigration, and American Gatekeeping, 1882–1924,” Journal of American Ethnic History, Spring 2002; Lucy E. Salyer, Laws Harsh As Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). On the role of Angel Island in historical interpretations of immigration, see Roger Daniels, “No Lamps Were Lit for Them: Angel Island and the Historiography of Asian American Immigration,” Journal of American Ethnic History 17, no. 1 (Fall 1997).
CHAPTER ONE: ISLAND
Fifty thousand: Daniel Allen Hearn, Legal Executions in New York State, 1639–1963 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1997), 40, 299–300.
Pirates bring to: Rudolph Reimer, “History of Ellis Island,” mimeo, 1934, 6–7, NYPL.
When Washington Irving: Washington Irving, History, Tales and Sketches (New York: Library of America, 1983), 628–629.
“Guests from Gibbet Island”: Washington Irving, “Guests from Gibbet Island,” in Charles Neider, ed., Complete Tales of Washington Irving (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998). Irving also returns to the theme in his short story “Dolph Heyliger.”
Pirate hangings: “Life and Confession of Thomas Jones,” 1824, NYHS.
A similar tale: “Trial and Confession of William Hill,” 1826, NYHS; Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (New York: Signet Classics, 1997), 26.21 On the night: Genius of Universal Emancipation, January 2, 1827; Ralph Clayton, “Baltimore’s Own Version of ‘Amistad’: Slave Revolt,” Baltimore Chronicle, January 7, 1998, http://baltimorechronicle.com/slave_ship2.html.
Confusion reigned: Reimer, “History of Ellis Island,” 24; Commercial Advertiser, April 23, 1831; Workingman’s Advocate, April 30, 1831.
Gibbs was a white man: “Mutiny and Murder: Confession of Charles Gibbs,” (Providence, RI: Israel Smith, 1831), NYHS.
Their dead bodies: New York Evening Post, April 23, 1831; Atkinson’s Saturday Evening Post, April 30, 1831.
The island’s last: Hearn, 46; “The Life of Cornelius Wilhelms: One of the Braganza Pirates,” 1839, NYHS.
New York City: For an excellent discussion of New York’s waterfront, see Phillip Lopate, Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan (New York: Crown, 2004).
There are some forty: See Sharon Seitz and Stuart Miller, The Other Islands of New York City: A History and Guide, 2nd ed. (Woodstock, VT: Countryman Press, 2001).
Many of the city’s: Lopate, Waterfront, 374.
In upper New York Harbor: Diana diZerega Wall and Anne-Marie Cantwell, Touring Gotham’s Archaeological Past: 8 Self Guided Walking Tours Through New York City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 20–21.
Seals, whales, and porpoises: Diana diZerega Wall and Anne-Marie Cantwell, Unearthing Gotham: The Archaeology of New York City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 87; John Waldman, Heartbeats in the Muck: The History, Sea Life, and Environment of New York Harbor(New York: Lyons Press, 1999); and Mark Kurlansky, The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell (New York: Ballantine Books, 2006).
Little Oyster Island: Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 63.
One of the first orders: Berthold Fernow, ed., Records of New Amsterdam, vol. 1 (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1976), 51, 58–59; Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America(New York: Doubleday, 2004), 259; Elva Kathleen Lyon, “Joost Goderis, New Amsterdam Burgher, Weighmaster, and Dutch Master Painter’s Son,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 123, no. 4 (October 1992).
Little Oyster Island would also: Reimer, “History of Ellis Island,” 7.
Ellis died in 1794: I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, vol. 5 (New York: Arno Press, 1967), 1198–1199; Thomas M. Pitkin, Keepers of the Gate: A History of Ellis Island (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 3.
Over the next few years: Pitkin, Keepers of the Gate, 4–5.
In 1807, Lieutenant Colonel: Reimer, “History of Ellis Island,” 16.
Nature blessed New York’s: Robert Greenhalgh Albion, The Rise of New York Port, 1815–1860 (New York: Scribner’s, 1939), 16–29.
Having such a natural port: Edward Robb Ellis, The Epic of New York City: A Narrative History (New York: Kondasha International, 1997), 223–229.
New York City was: Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 435–436; Albion, 389; John Gunther, Inside U.S.A. (New York: Book of the Month Club, 1997), 555.
For the next few decades: Reimer, “History of Ellis Island,” 17–18.
CHAPTER TWO: CASTLE GARDEN
These men, women: NYT, August 7, 1855.
The old fort: On Castle Garden’s history, see Commercial Advertiser, June 22, 1839; James G. Wilson, ed., The Memorial History of the City of New York, vol. 4 (New York: New York History Company, 1893), 441; Phillip Lopate, Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan (New York: Crown Publishers, 2004), 24; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 815–816; Sharon Seitz and Stuart Miller, The Other Islands of New York City: A History and Guide, 2nd ed. (Woodstock, VT: Countryman Press, 2001), 72–74.
The new immigration station: NYT, August 6, 7, 1855.
The indignation meeting: NYT, August 7, 10, 1855.
This was an exercise: Theodore Roosevelt, New York: A Sketch of the City’s Social, Political, and Commercial Progress from the First Dutch Settlement to Recent Times (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), 238, 246.
Born in upstate: On Rynders, see Tyler Andbinder, Five Points: The 19th Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: Free Press, 2001), 141–144, 166–167 and T. J. English, Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (New York: Regan Books, 2005), 13–15, 26–27.
There were certainly: Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 736.
Rynders was: George J. Svejda, “Castle Garden as an Immigrant Depot, 1855–1890,” National Park Service, December 2, 1968, 41.
As soon as: Friedrich Kapp, Immigration and the Commissioners of Emigration of the State of New York (New York: Nation Press, 1870), 62; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 737.
A committee of: “Report of the Select Committee to Investigate Frauds upon Emigrant Passengers,” 1848, excerpted in Edith Abbott, ed., Immigration: Select Documents and Case Records (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1924), 130–134.
The federal government: Hans P. Vought, The Bully Pulpit and the Melting Pot: American Presidents and the Immigrant, 1897–1933 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2004), 5.
The job of regulating E. P. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 1798–1965 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 388–404; Daniel J. Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 58–59; Gerald L. Neuman, Strangers to the Constitution: Immigrants, Borders, and Fundamental Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 19–43. For examples of these state laws, see Abbott, ed., Immigration, 102–110.
The Board of Commissioners laid out: Kapp, Immigration and the Commissioners, 109–110. For a history of the Battery, including Castle Garden’s many incarnations, see Rodman Gilder, The Battery (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1936).
Wealthy New Yorkers: NYT, June 15, 1855; Svejda, “Castle Garden,” 40.
On Castle Garden’s first day: Svejda, “Castle Garden,” 45–46; NYT, August 4, 1855.
Having failed: NYT, August 7, 1855. In a letter to the editor the day after the indignation meeting, Rynders clarified his views on the matter. NYT, August 8, 1855.
After the final: NYT, August 8, 1855; New York Daily Tribune, August 7, 1855.
Throughout the fall: NYT, August 14, 18; December 15, 1855.
The harassment of: Kapp, Immigration and the Commissioners, 108; Svejda, “Castle Garden,” 50–57.
Some reports claimed: Kapp, Immigration and the Commissioners, 81.
With the runners: William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (New York: Meridian, 1994), 263; NYT, December 23, 1866; Friedrich Kapp, quoted in Charlotte Erickson, ed., Emigration from Europe, 1815–1914 (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1976), 274; New York: A Collection from Harper’s Magazine (New York: Gallery Books, 1991), 363.
Between 1860 and: John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 39.
A writer in: Higham, Strangers in the Land, 35; “Dangers of Unrestricted Immigration,” Forum, July 1887.
Daily newspapers: Edward Self, “Why They Come,” NAR, April 1882; Edward Self, “Evils Incident to Immigration,” NAR, January 1884.
Newspapers throughout: Public Opinion, April 30, May 14, June 30, 1887.
Others used: “Immigration and Crime,” Forum, December 1889.
It took Episcopal bishop: “Government by Aliens,” Forum, August 1889.
Despite Coxe’s florid: Public Opinion, April 30, July 30, 1887, December 28, 1889.
Shortly after the decision: Hutchinson, Legislative History, 65–66.
It was not until: “An Act to Regulate Immigration,” 1882, excerpted in Abbott, ed., Immigration, 181–182.
That same year: Vought, Bully Pulpit, 10; Tichenor, Dividing Lines, 89–90; Hutchinson, Legislative History, 80–83.
The Board of Commissioners: Document No. 815, Box 4, INS.
Of the estimated: NYT, January 25, 1883; “Immigration Investigation Report, Testimony and Statistics,” House Report 3472, 51st Congress, 2nd Session, Serial 2886.
To many, this cried out: NYT, February 11, 1883.
In 1880, a twenty-two-year-old: Robert Watchorn, The Autobiography of Robert Watchorn (Oklahoma City, OK: Robert Watchorn Charities, 1959); “Robert Watchorn,” Outlook, March 4, 1905.
Another sign: Roll 19, G-7-G20, ANY.
Public concern about: James B. Bell and Richard I. Abrams, Liberty: The Story of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island (New York: Doubleday, 1984), 43–45.
In 1887, Pulitzer trained: NYW, July 27, August 4, 10, 1887; Erickson, ed., Emigration from Europe, 1815–1914, 276; NYT, August 31, 1887.
In 1888: The Ford Report, reprinted in Congressional Record, 50th Congress, 2nd Session, 997–999.
Congress never acted: Vought, Bully Pulpit, 12.
As conditions at: “Immigration and Crime,” Forum, December 1889.
The decision was inevitable: John B. Weber, Autobiography of John B. Weber (Buffalo, NY: J.W. Clement Company, 1924), 88.
In response, a joint House and Senate: Congressional Record, 51st Congress, 1st Session, Volume 21, 3085–3089.
“Give us a rest”: Francis A. Walker, “Immigration,” Yale Review, August 1892; Francis A. Walker, “Immigration and Degradation,” Forum, August 1891.
Walker also saw: See Maurice Fishberg, “Ethnic Factors in Immigration—A Critical View,” Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction, May 1906. Australia and New Zealand, largely Anglo-Saxon and with little immigration, saw their birth rates decline during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well.
Walker’s views: Henry Cabot Lodge, “The Restriction of Immigration,” NAR, January 1891.
Lodge used the occasion: Henry Cabot Lodge, “Lynch Law and Unrestricted Immigration,” NAR, May 1891.
Walker and Lodge: NYT, April 30, 1891; Boston Traveler, October 24, 1891; “Report of the Select Committee on Immigration and Naturalization,” 51st Congress, 2nd Session, Report No. 3472, January 15, 1891; “Regulation of Immigration and to Amend the Naturalization Laws,” House Report, 51st Congress, 2nd Session, Report No. 3808.
The 1891 Immigration Act: Michael LeMay and Elliot Robert Barkan, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 66–70; Higham, Strangers in the Land, 99–100.
Immigration was now: Hiroshi Motomura, “Immigration Law After a Century of Plenary Power: Phantom Constitutional Norms and Statutory Interpretation,” Yale Law Journal, December 1990; Lucy E. Salyer, Laws as Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 26–28. Salyer claims that the inclusion of this clause that made the executive branch the final arbiter of immigration appeals stemmed from unhappiness over Chinese immigrants using the courts to challenge the Chinese Exclusion Act. While this could very well be true, it remains speculation.
The new immigration system: On the rise of the federal government and the administrative state, see Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Keith Fitzgerald, The Face of the Nation: Immigration, the State and the National Identity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977); Morton Keller, Regulating a New Society: Public Policy and Social Change in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); and Gabriel J. Chin, “Regulating Race: Asian Exclusion and the Administrative States,” Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review 37 (2002).
Despite the corruption: Svejda, “Castle Garden,” iii.
CHAPTER THREE: A PROPER SIEVE
As she exited: The discussion of Annie Moore comes from the NYT, January 2, 1892; New York Herald, January 2, 1892; NYW, January 2, 1892; Thomas M. Pitkin, Keepers of the Gate: A History of Ellis Island (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 19; and the records of ship manifests found at www. ellisislandrecords.org.
She was soon: A controversy arose over what happened to Annie Moore. Legend held that she headed out west to Texas, married, and died tragically when she was struck by a streetcar. More recent research found that Annie Moore actually never left New York. Instead, she remained in lower Manhattan, married a German-American named Schayer three years after her arrival, had eleven children of whom only five survived, and died of heart failure at age forty-seven in 1924. “She had the typical hardscrabble immigrant life,” said Megan Smolenyak, the genealogist who discovered the story of the real Annie Moore. “She sacrificed herself for future generations.” The living descendants of Annie Moore have Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, and Scandinavian surnames, a testament to the American melting pot. NYT, September 14, 16, 2006.
Once on the second floor: HW, October 24, 1891.
A reporter from: HW, August 26, 1893.
Politicians, journalists: NYT, November 7, 1895; Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labour, vol. 2 (New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1967), 154.
“The existing immigration law”: “Annual Report of the Superintendent of Immigration to the Secretary of the Treasury for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1892,” 11.
In 1875, the Supreme Court: Chae Chan Ping v. United States, 130 U.S. 581 (1889). See also, Hiroshi Motomura, “Immigration Law After a Century of Plenary Power: Phantom Constitutional Norms and Statutory Interpretation,” Yale Law Journal, December 1990.
Three years later: Nishimura Ekiu v. U.S., 142 U.S. 651 (1892); Hiroshi Motomura, Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 33–34; Daniel J. Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 110; “Developments in the Law: Immigration Policy and the Rights of Aliens,” Harvard Law Review, April 1983.
The government wanted: The following discussion is taken from “A Report of the Commissioners of Immigration Upon the Causes Which Incite Immigration to the United States,” 52nd Congress, 1st Session, Executive Document 235, January 1892. See also, John B. Weber, “Our National Dumping-Ground: A Study of Immigration,” NAR, April 1892.
There was an additional: John B. Weber, Autobiography of John B. Weber (Buffalo, NY: J.W. Clement Company, 1924), 105.
Weber noted that: A Harper’s Weekly editorial made the same point, asking, “Who else is there here to do the work which these immigrants are doing for us? We have on former occasions called attention to the important fact that the native American is becoming more and more disinclined to do hard work with his hands…. How many native Americans are willing to do the dirt work in railway or canal building or to dig coal or even to serve as farm hands?” HW, September 1, 1894.
Following his instructions: NYT, February 15, 1892; Mary Antin, From Plotzk to Boston (Boston: W. B. Clarke: 1899), 12.
The emigration of: Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 5–7.
The two Americans: Weber, Autobiography, 112–128.
By the 1890s: Howe, World of Our Fathers 21; Weber, Autobiography, 106.
CHAPTER FOUR: PERIL AT THE PORTALS
Weber was not resentful: NYT, January 31, February 2, 1891.
The Massilia had departed: The discussion of the Massilia case comes from “Immigration Investigation, Ellis Island, 1892,” 52nd Congress, 1st Session, House Reports, Vol. 12, No. 2090, Series 3053; “Annual Report of the Board of Health of the Health Department of the City of New York for the Year Ending December 31, 1892,” City Hall Library, New York City; and Howard Markel, Quarantine! East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
Often confused with: NYT, February 14, 1892.
Within two days: NYT, February 12, 1892.
Edson and his staff: NYT, February 13, 1892.
The actions of Edson: “Annual Report of the Board of Health of the Health Department of the City of New York for the Year Ending December 31, 1892,” 142, City Hall Library, New York City. Howard Markel overemphasizes the role of nativism in explaining the behavior of Edson and other city officials. He complains that the quarantine stigmatized immigrants and that “there was a huge price to pay in the form of violated civil liberties, cultural insensitivities, inadequate financial or physical resources devoted to their medical care.” In a more nuanced interpretation, Sherwin Nuland argues that city health officials “did what they believed to be the prudent thing, consistent with measures then current among their colleagues all over the world.” The city’s response, Nuland continued, mixed anti-immigrant sentiment with “an earnest desire to protect the people for whom they felt primarily responsible: the citizens of their city.” Sherwin B. Nuland, “Hate in the Time of Cholera,” New Republic, May 26, 1997. Markel also misreads an 1895 article by Edson entitled “The Microbe as a Social Leveler.” In it, Edson argued that because of contagious diseases, poor and rich, native-born and immigrant, were all tied together. Treating contagious diseases, therefore, called for a more holistic approach. “To the man of wealth, therefore, there is a direct and very great interest in the well-being of the man of poverty,” Edson wrote, describing a kind of public health socialism. Edson did describe Russian Jews as “poor, ignorant, down-trodden” and implied that they could be susceptible to bringing contagious diseases to the United States. However Edson was not scapegoating Russian Jews or calling for their exclusion. If anything, he was saying that native-born Americans had a distinct interest in the well-being of Russian Jews, whether in Russia or in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. See, Cyrus Edson, “The Microbe as a Social Leveller,” NAR, October 1895.
The sometimes callous treatment: NYT, February 24, 1892.
New Hampshire senator: Leon Burr Richardson, William E. Chandler: Republican (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1940), 7–11.
As easy as it may be: Richardson, William E. Chandler, 439; Carol L. Thompson, “William E. Chandler: A Radical Republican,” Current History 23 (November 1952); NYT, March 7, 1892. Historian Morton Keller writes that Chandler “gave voice to a widespread attitude when he warned that trusts…tended to destroy competition, crush individualism, and put the control of society into the hands of opulent oligarchs.” Morton Keller, Regulating a New Economy: Public Policy and Economic Change in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 25.
Back in the spring: NYT, March 6, 1892.
Chandler’s investigation: NYT, June 30, July 29, 1892.
The hearings highlighted: Transcripts of the Chandler hearings and subsequent report are found in “Immigration Investigation, Ellis Island, 1892,” 52nd Congress, 1st Session, House Reports, Vol. 12, No. 2090, Series 3053. For more of Chandler’s criticism of Weber, see Congressional Record, 52nd Congress, 1st Session, Vol. 23, Part 2, February 15, 1892, 1132.
Weber came across: John B. Weber, Autobiography of John B. Weber (Buffalo, NY: J.W. Clement Company, 1924), 95–96, 99–100. 82 Then there was: Markel, Quarantine! 49.
Typhus, the New York Times: NYT, February 13, 1892. See also Amy L. Fairchild, Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 42–43.
The linkage of: “Select Committee of the House of Representatives to Inquire into the Alleged Violation of the Laws Prohibiting the Importation of Contract Laborers, Paupers, Convicts, and Other Classes,” 1888; Julia H. Twells, “The Burden of Indiscriminate Immigration,” American Journal of Politics, December 1894.
Cyrus Edson: Cyrus Edson, “Typhus Fever,” NAR, April 1892.
Chandler tried to: William E. Chandler, “Methods of Restricting Immigration,” Forum, March 1892; Letter from William Chandler to Unknown, 1890, Book 82, WC.
Both extremes: John Hawks Noble, “The Present State of the Immigration Question,” Political Science Quarterly, June 1892; HW, September 1, 1894.
Not surprisingly: AH, March 4, 1892.
Traveling from Turkey: Howard Markel calls Benjamin Harrison an anti-Semitic restrictionist, claiming that his 1892 reelection platform “contained strong calls for the immigration restriction of Russian Hebrews.” The platform calls for no such thing. In fact, the Republican Party platform protested “against the persecution of the Jews in Russia.” It did call for “the enactment of more stringent laws and regulations for the restriction of criminal, pauper and contract immigration,” a belief in keeping with the general view of regulating against “undesirable” immigrants. Markel also claims that Harrison “was long a proponent of ‘restricting the immigration of Russian Hebrews’ and stated so emphatically in his final two annual addresses.” That charge is also false. In his 1891 Annual Message to Congress, Harrison discusses the protests made by his government to the Russian czar “because of the harsh measures now being enforced against the Hebrews in Russia.” Harrison also sent John Weber on a fact-finding trip to the Pale of Settlement to investigate the rise of anti-Semitism. Harrison was clearly concerned not only about the plight of the Russian Jews, but also about the effect that Jewish emigration might have on America. He wrote: “The immigration of these people to the United States—many other countries being closed to them—is largely increasing and is likely to assume proportions which may make it difficult to find homes and employment for them here and to seriously affect the labor market.” Harrison’s actual words hardly betray an anti-Semite. “The Hebrew is never a beggar; he has always kept the law—life by toil—often under severe and oppressive civil restrictions. It is also true that no race, sect, or class has more fully cared for its own than the Hebrew race. But the sudden transfer of such a multitude under conditions that tend to strip them of their small accumulations and to depress their energies and courage is neither good for them nor for us.” In the wake of the cholera and typhus outbreaks, Harrison’s 1892 Annual Message to Congress did argue that the “admission to our country and to the high privileges of its citizenship should be more restricted and more careful. We have, I think, a right and owe a duty to our own people, and especially to our working people, not only to keep out the vicious, the ignorant, the civil disturber, the pauper, and the contract laborer, but to check the too great flow of immigration now coming by further limitations.”
What was within: NYT, September 2, 1892.
Still, the brunt of: Markel, Quarantine! 120–121, 130.
The quarantine policy: Richardson, William E. Chandler, 417; Thomas M. Pitkin, Keepers of the Gate: A History of Ellis Island (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 20; John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 100; NYT, November 7, 1892.
Weber called Chandler’s bill: W. E. Chandler, “Shall Immigration Be Suspended?” NAR, January 1893; Richardson, William E. Chandler, 38; Weber, Autobiography, 133; Arthur Cassot, “Should We Restrict Immigration?” American Journal of Politics, September 1893.
Instead, Congress passed: Markel, Quarantine! 173–182; Edwin Maxey, “Federal Quarantine Laws,” Political Science Quarterly 23, no. 4 (December 1908).
The nation did get: William C. Van Vleck, The Administrative Control of Aliens: A Study in Administrative Law and Procedure (New York: Da Capo Press, 1971 [1932]), 8–9; Richard H. Sylvester, “The Immigration Question in Congress,” American Journal of Politics, June 1893; Pitkin, Keepers of the Gate, 20–21. An article in the Political Science Quarterly agreed, noting that although some had proposed extending “the policy adopted with reference to the Chinese, making race the test of fitness,” such a policy would be politically unpopular, cause diplomatic problems, and be “repugnant to the general theory that America is a haven for the oppressed of all mankind.” What was needed was a “less clumsy and offensive law.” Noble, “The Present State of the Immigration Question.”
The new manifests: Joseph H. Senner, “How We Restrict Immigration,” NAR, April 1894; Pitkin, Keepers of the Gate, 20–22.
These boards of special: Van Vleck, Administrative Control of Aliens, 46–53, 214; Pitkin, Keepers of the Gate, 24.
Health concerns: Fitzhugh Mullan, Plagues and Politics: The Story of the United States Public Health Service (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 40–48.
The epidemic scares: NYT, January 6, July 21, 1894; Joseph Senner, “The Immigration Question,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, July 1897.
The top three: Daniel J. Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 79; HW, January 8, 1898.
These changes were: NYT, March 6, August 29, 1892; Noble, “The Present State of the Immigration Question”; Henry Cabot Lodge, “Lynch Law and Unrestricted Immigration,” NAR, May 1891; John Chetwood Jr., “Immigration, Hard Times, and the Veto,” Arena, December 1897.
Such feelings extended: James R. O’Beirne, “The Problem of Immigration: Its Dangers to the Future of the United States,” Independent, November 2, 1893.
While the Massilia incident: Noble, “The Present State of the Immigration Question.” On the 1891 lynching of Italians, see Richard Gambino, Vendetta (New York: Doubleday, 1977); Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreale, La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 204–213; Lodge, “Lynch Law and Unrestricted Immigration.”
If the crimes seemed: NYT, May 18, 1893.93 As deportations increased: NYT, May 21, 1894.
The anger of Italians: NYT, April 5, 1896; Pitkin, Keepers of the Gate, 24–26. For more on Italian immigrants during this time, see J. H. Senner, “Immigration to Italy,” NAR, June 1896 and Prescott F. Hall, “Italian Immigration,” NAR, August 1896.
The fear of Italian: BG, April 26, 1896.
CHAPTER FIVE: BRAHMINS
Boston had long stood: Barbara Miller Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants: A Changing New England Tradition (New York: Wiley, 1956), 48, 101; Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: Birth Control in America, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 135.
It is no surprise: Francis A. Walker, “Restriction of Immigration,” Atlantic, June 1896.
Perhaps the best expression: Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants, 88; Thomas Bailey Aldrich, “The Unguarded Gates,” Atlantic, March 1895. Today the poem is still popular among supporters of immigration restriction. See, http://www.vdare.com/fulford/unguarded.htm.
Not all of the voices: BH, July 5, 1896.
As the Fitzgeralds: Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants, 23, 57; Francis Walker, “Immigration,” Yale Review, August 1892. Charles Francis Adams Jr., brother of Henry, thought the immigration questions was “too big and too intricate…to meddle with.” Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants, 32.
At just twenty-five years old: Warren later became a noted constitutional lawyer. The Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University is named after Warren, funded by an endowment from his late wife. It is disappointing, yet unsurprising, that Warren’s bio on the Harvard University website makes no mention of his role in the founding of the Immigration Restriction League: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~cwc/historycwbio.html.
Prescott Hall: Prescott F. Hall, “The Future of American Ideals,” NAR, January 1912. For more on the “Anglo-Saxon Complex,” and theories of Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic culture, see Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants, 59–81 and Henry Cabot Lodge, “The Restriction of Immigration,” Our Day, May 1896.
Hall, who would be: Immigration and Other Interests of Prescott Farnsworth Hall, compiled by Mrs. Prescott F. Hall (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1922), 119–123.
The deep depressions: T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 47–58.
In response, the boisterous: Theodore Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life,” speech delivered to Chicago’s Hamilton Club, April 10, 1899; Theodore Roosevelt, “Twisted Eugenics,” Outlook, January 3, 1914. During his presidency, Roosevelt began speaking of “race suicide,” a term coined by Progressive academic Edward A. Ross. The president and father of six famously gave a talk before the National Congress of Mothers arguing against birth control and in favor of larger families. See Theodore Roosevelt, “On American Motherhood,” speech delivered to the National Congress of Mothers, March 13, 1905.
In fact, Hall embodied: Prescott F. Hall, “Representation Without Taxation,” unpublished manuscript, in Immigration and Other Interests of Prescott Farnsworth Hall.
So it was no surprise: Morris M. Sherman, “Immigration Restriction, 1890–1921, and the Immigration Restriction League,” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard College, 1957).
The IRL’s strength: John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 102–103; Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants, 103–104, 123; “Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration,” vol. 15, 1901, 46.
The IRL worked closely: Daniel J. Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 77, 85.
The descendants: Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants, 73, 107, 114, 120; Julia H. Twells, “The Burden of Indiscriminate Immigration,” American Journal of Politics, December 1894.
Among its proposals: “Constitution of the Immigration Restriction League,” August 22, 1894, IRL.
For a young man: NYT, December 12, 1894.
Like so many: BH, April 5, 1895.
In mid-December 1895: “Immigration Restriction League, Annual Report of the Executive Committee for 1895,” January 13, 1896, and “IRL Annual Report of the Executive Committee for 1896,” January 11, 1897, File 1138, IRL; Brookline Chronicle, January 18, 1895; Boston Journal, January 25, 1896.
So in April 1896: NYT, April 21, 1896.
In its April 1896 investigation: “Immigration: Its Effects upon the United States, Reasons for Further Restriction.” Publication of the Immigration Restriction League, No. 16, February 13, 1897, IRL. It is certainly true that many Italians were illiterate, due in large part to the poor schools of their native country, but in Italy illiteracy rates went down considerably during the era of peak immigration, from almost 69 percent in 1872 to an estimated 23 percent in 1922. Antonio Stella, Some Aspects of Italian Immigration to the United States (New York, Arno Press, 1975), 53.
The IRL members: “Immigration Restriction League, Annual Report of the Executive Committee for 1895,” January 13, 1896, File 1138, IRL; Prescott F. Hall, “Immigration and the Educational Test,” NAR, October 1897.
Such a test would: Henry Cabot Lodge, “The Restriction of Immigration,” Our Day, May 1896.
Not all restrictionists: Francis A. Walker, “Immigration,” Yale Review, August 1892.
Writing to the secretary: Letter from Herman Stump to John Carlisle, February 20, 1897, Grover Cleveland Papers, LOC.
For years, immigration restrictionists: President Grover Cleveland’s Veto Message of the Educational Test Bill, March 2, 1897, reprinted by the National Liberal Immigration League, File 1125, Folder 4, IRL. Many years later, Theodore Roosevelt told Madison Grant that General Leonard Wood had told him that Cleveland had regretted his veto of the literacy test, confirming what many restrictionists had come to believe. There is no definite proof that Cleveland ever expressed regret about his veto. Letter from Madison Grant to Theodore Roosevelt, November 15, 1915, TR.
CHAPTER SIX: FEUD
Just after midnight: Victor Safford, Immigration Problems: Personal Experiences of an Official (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1925), 199–200.
To some, it was: Thomas M. Pitkin, Keepers of the Gate: A History of Ellis Island (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 26; NYT, June 17, 1897; NYW, June 16, 1897; HW, February 26, 1898.
Officials then moved: NYT, June 19, 1897.
Victor Safford remembered: Safford, Immigration Problems, 76.
Befitting someone from: Letter from Edward McSweeney to Archbishop Michael Corrigan, January 12, 1900, ANY; Letter from A. J. You to Terence V. Powderly, June 11, 1900, Box 137, TVP.
McSweeney remained: Pitkin, Keepers of the Gate, 29.
Meanwhile, the McKinley: Robert E. Weir, Knights Unhorsed: Internal Conflict in a Gilded Age Social Movement (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), 16; Craig Phelan, Grand Master Workman: Terence Powderly and the Knights of Labor(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 1–2.
McSweeney seemed: Phelan, Grand Master Workman, 47.
One historian described: Weir, Knights Unhorsed, 15; Vincent J. Falzone, Terence V. Powderly: Middle-Class Reformer (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1978), 174; Terence V. Powderly, The Path I Trod: The Autobiography of Terence V. Powderly (New York: AMS Press, 1968; original edition: Columbia University Press, 1940), 287; Letter from Terence V. Powderly to William Scaife, February 6, 1910, Box 153, TVP.
Another critic was: Falzone, Terence V. Powderly, 175.112 Powderly fought back: Letter from Edward F. McSweeney to Samuel Gompers, November 22, 1901, SG.
Powderly’s brother: Letter from T. V. Powderly to Roy W. White, March 1, 1898, Box 128, TVP; T. V. Powderly, “A Menacing Irruption,” NAR, August 1888.
Powderly did not stop: Edward McGlynn, “The New Know-Nothingness and the Old,” NAR, August 1887; Powderly, The Path I Trod, 5.
That trouble would: Powderly, The Path I Trod, 299; Letter from Edward F. McSweeney to T. V. Powderly, June 6, 1898, Box 133, TVP.
Powderly made: Memorandum from T. V. Powderly, February 15, 1902, Box 156, TVP; NYT, March 10, 1899.
Such impolitic behavior: Falzone, Terence V. Powderly, 175–182, 188.
The decision on the: Memorandum from T. V. Powderly, February 15, 1902, Box 156, TVP; Pitkin, Keepers of the Gate, 28.
Perhaps that insecurity: Letter from T. V. Powderly to Thomas Fitchie, August 3, 1898, TR.
Just a few months: Letter from Sen. T. C. Platt to Thomas Fitchie, February 17, 1898, TR.
Despite Platt’s urgings: Letter from T. V. Powderly to William McKinley, 1901, Series 2, TVP.
More complaints emerged: Alvan F. Sanborn, “The New York Immigration Service,” Independent, August 10, 1899; Safford, Immigration Problems, 86.
Much as Powderly: All references to the report come from Report by Campbell and Rodgers, June 2, 1900 to Secretary of the Treasury, Boxes 157–158, TVP.
The most serious charges: For charges against Lederhilger, see Report by Campbell and Rodgers, June 2, 1900 to Secretary of the Treasury, TVP. See also Letter from Thomas Fitchie to John Lederhilger, September 10, 1900, File 52727-4, INS.
Treasury Department officials: Letter from Edward F. McSweeney to Archbishop Michael A. Corrigan, September 10, 1900, Roll 19, G-17-G20, ANY.
The report was certainly: NYT, June 6, 1900.
Edward Steiner: Edward A. Steiner, On the Trail of the Immigrant (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1906), 79–80.
Stewart had been: Letter from Thomas Fitchie to J. Ross Stewart, September 10, 1900, File 51841/119, INS; NYT, October 5, 1900; Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders during Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 204. The Timesreferred to Stewart as “J. Ross Stewart” and claimed he had been a Georgia state legislator. However, it is fairly certain that the man fired at the Barge Office was Jordan R. Stewart and he was from Louisiana. Stewart was also a friend of P. B. S. Pinchback, the first black governor in the nation’s history, who had served one month as Louisiana’s governor. Pinchback was also living in New York City in the 1890s. George McKenzie, the Republican Colored Leader of the 25th Assembly District in New York, had known Stewart for forty years and wrote to the Treasury Department to protest the charges against his friend, calling him a “brave soldier during the war of the rebellion.” McKenzie did not believe the charges against Stewart because they came from “a band of conspirators, trying to reflect discredit on the administration of Commissioner Thomas Fitchie.” Letter from George McKenzie to H. A. Taylor, September 19, 1900, File 51841/119, INS.
While men like Stewart: Letter from Terence V. Powderly to A. J. You, May 16, 1900, Letterbox 73; Letter from Terence V. Powderly to President William McKinley, undated, Box 156, TVP.
Powderly wanted: Letter from Terence V. Powderly to T. F. Lee, June 19, 1900, Letterboook 73, Box 152, TVP.
Some of Powderly’s friends: See File 51841-97, INS. Fitzharris possesses one of history’s all-time great nicknames, which apparently derived from the time he killed a goat he kept in his backyard and skinned it to make some money. James Joyce, no doubt taken by the unusual nickname, immortalized Fitzharris in his novel Ulysses.
A Powderly ally: Letter from A. J. You to Terence V. Powderly, May 24, 1900, Box 137, TVP.
In what was probably: Letter from Terence V. Powderly to Hon. William McKinley, undated, Series 2, TVP.
In mid-December 1900: NYW, December 18, 1900; Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper, January 5, 1901.
The centerpiece of the: Pitkin, Keepers of the Gate, 33; Architectural Record, December 1902.
Ellis Island now consisted: NYT, December 3, 1900.
Ensconced in Washington: Letter to T. V. Powderly, September 20, 1900, TVP. For examples of intercepted McSweeney letters, see Box 125, Series 2, TVP.
When not bogged down: Letter from Terence V. Powderly to Hon. William McKinley, undated, Series 2, TVP.
By the summer of 1901: Letter from Roman Dobler to T. V. Powderly, August 16, 1901, TVP.
CHAPTER SEVEN: CLEANING HOUSE
It was not a name: Eric Rauchway, Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 60.
Theodore Roosevelt had: President Theodore Roosevelt, “First Annual Message to Congress,” December 3, 1901.
The bullets that: Theodore Roosevelt, “True Americanism,” Forum, April 1894.
In the previous decade: Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography (New York: Scribner’s, 1913), 357; Robert Watchorn, The Autobiography of Robert Watchorn (Oklahoma City, OK: Robert Watchorn Charities, 1959), 145.
Roosevelt was no newcomer: Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979), 376; Letters from Theodore Roosevelt to Henry Cabot Lodge, January 27, 1897, March 19, 1897, in Henry Cabot Lodge and Charles F. Redmond, eds., Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, 1884–1918, vol. 1 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1971).
Roosevelt worried about: Theodore Roosevelt, “The Immigration Problem,” Harvard Monthly, December 1888.
The relationship between: Roosevelt, “True Americanism.”
A young inspector: Watchorn, Autobiography, 145–147.
William McKinley: Hans Vought, The Bully Pulpit and the Melting Pot: American Presidents and the Immigrant, 1897–1933 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2004), 22–23; Daniel J. Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 73–75.
Even with a new: Letter from T. V. Powderly to Thomas Fitchie, October 4, 1901, Letter from Acting Secretary O. L. Spaulding to Thomas Fitchie, October 9, 1901, Box 123, TVP.
Edward McSweeney had more reasons: Letter from Edward McSweeney to Theodore Roosevelt, March 26, 1902, Series 1, TR.
Roosevelt’s views: Tichenor, Dividing Lines, 122; Barbara Miller Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants: A Changing New England Tradition (New York: Wiley, 1956), 196; Vought, Bully Pulpit, 33.
Yet immigrant defenders: Roosevelt, An Autobiography, 186–187; Tichenor, Dividing Lines, 33. On Roosevelt’s family background, see Morris, Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 36–37.
Whatever may have been: Elting E. Morison, ed., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), 170–171.
Powderly left the meeting: Letter from T. V. Powderly to John Parsons, October 25, 1904, Box 139, TVP.
Even with the charges: Letter from Terence V. Powderly to President William McKinley, undated, TVP; “Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration,” vol. 15, 1901, 72, 170; Letter from Nicholas Butler to Theodore Roosevelt, October 12, 1901, NMB.
“Nicholas Miraculous” Butler: Letter from Nicholas Murray Butler to Theodore Roosevelt, October 7, 1901, NMB.
Jacob Riis: Letter from Jacob Riis to TR, March 17, 1902, Series 1, TR.
What Roosevelt really: Morison, ed., Letters, vol. 3, 221, 250.
Finally, in the spring: NYT, March 24, 1902.
Powderly demanded: Letter from Terence V. Powderly to Robert Watchorn, March 22, 1902, Letterbook 79, Box 153, TVP.
The sheer number of: Powderly, 381–382.
The son of a New London: Robert Williams’s grandson John was kidnapped by Indians in the infamous Deerfield Indian raid of 1704 and held for two years. John Williams’s book about his experiences inspired James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans. Other direct descendants of Robert Williams include Louisa May Alcott, the Wright Brothers, Ephraim Williams, founder of Williams College, General George B. McClellan, and Eli Whitney.
At lunch, he sat Williams: Letter from Edward Van Ingen to Theodore Roosevelt, March 27, 1902, Series 1, Reel 25, TR.
Roosevelt always had: John Morton Blum, The Republican Roosevelt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), 12–13.
Roosevelt felt: Roosevelt, 57–63.
Williams informed Roosevelt: Letter from William Williams to Theodore Roosevelt, August 8, 1902, Series 1, TR.
The cases of Murray and Braun: Letter from James Sheffield to William Williams, April 29, 1915, Williams Papers, WW-NYPL.
Murray replaced McSweeney: Letter from Terence V. Powderly to Robert Watchorn, March 22, 1902, Letterbook 79, Box 153, TVP.
Williams let nothing: “Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration,” 1902, 56.
Others also felt: Letter from William Williams to Senator Thomas Platt, May 26, 1902, WW-NYPL.
Nor would the abusive: Letter from William Williams to N. J. Sparkling, May 26, 1903; Letter from Williams to John Bell, gateman at Ellis Island, November 3, 1903, WW-NYPL.
To protect immigrants: Letter from Herbert Parsons to William Williams, April 3, 1902, WW-NYPL; “Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration,” 1902, 56.
New bids were put out: Letter from William Williams to Theodore Roosevelt, June 24, 1902, WW-NYPL.
Williams even tackled: NYT, July 12, 1903.
In addition to: Letter from William Williams to Theodore Roosevelt, September 17, 1902, Series 1, TR.
Roosevelt then ordered: Letter from William Williams to Theodore Roosevelt, February 4, 1903, Series 1, TR.
Because of an electoral: BG, June 27, 1903.
The case took on: Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Elihu Root, October 3, 1903; Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Curtis Guild, Junior, October 20, 1903, Morison, ed., Letters, vol. 610–611, 633–634.
The case remained: NYT, December 10, 1903.
Though McSweeney tried: Letter from William Williams to Theodore Roosevelt, February 4, 1903, Series 1, TR; BG, June 15, 1904; BH, July 11, September 18, 1903.
As McSweeney was: Francis E. Leupp, The Man Roosevelt (New York: Appleton, 1904), 136.
Shortly after his dismissal: Watchorn, Autobiography, 92.
These were difficult: Letter from Terence V. Powderly to Robert Watchorn, July 4, 1902, Letterbook 79, Box 153; Terence V. Powderly to T. L. Lee, July 7, 1902, Letterbook 80, Box 153, TVP.
Powderly’s depression: Letter from Robert Watchorn to George R. Cullen, May 18, 1903, TVP.
But Roosevelt had not: Letter from Robert Watchorn to Terence V. Powderly, September 5, 1903, Box 128, TVP; Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Philander Chase Knox, August 1, 1903, Morison, ed., Letters, vol. 3, 538–539.
Nothing came of: Letter from Terence V. Powderly to John N. Parsons, October 25, 1904, TVP.
On October 23: NYT, October 24, 1903; March 14, 1904.
Goldman called: Candace Falk, ed., Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, vol. 2: Making Speech Free, 1902–1909 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 121–123.
Writing from his: John Turner, “The Protest of an Anarchist,” Independent, December 24, 1903.
Turner certainly had: U.S. Ex Rel. Turner v. Williams, U.S. 279 (1904). For more on the Turner case, see Daniel Kanstroom, Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 136–138 and David Cole, Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism (New York: New Press, 2003), 108–109.
CHAPTER EIGHT: FIGHTING BACK
Williams’s appointment: Letter from William Williams to Prescott F. Hall, December 27, 1902, File 999, IRL.
Immigrants were on notice: Letter from William Williams to Bolognesi, Hartfield & Co., June 10, 1902, WW-NYPL.
Williams believed that: “United States Immigration Laws with Annotations for Guidance of Immigrant Inspectors at the Ellis Island Station,” November 1902, TVP; Letter from William Williams to Theodore Roosevelt, November 25, 1902, WW-NYPL.
Compare Williams’s 1902 edict: Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration, 1901 (New York: Arno Press, 1970, reprint), 81.151 In his first Annual Message: President Theodore Roosevelt, “First Annual Message to Congress,” December 3, 1901.
Roosevelt warned Williams: Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to William Williams, January 21, 1903, Series 2, TR; Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to William Williams, January 23, 1903, in Elting E. Morison, ed., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), 411–412.
Williams at first responded: Letter from William Williams to Theodore Roosevelt, January 24, 1903, Series 1, TR.
Williams then shot back: Letter from William Williams to Theodore Roosevelt, January 29, 1903, WW-NYPL.
Williams continued: Letter from William Williams to Theodore Roosevelt, February 8, 1903, Series 1, TR.
A man like William Williams: NYT, May 24, 1903.
Williams ended his: Edited version of Williams’s Annual Report for 1903 with Roosevelt’s edits is found in the WW-NYPL.
Over 857,000 immigrants: Kate Holladay Claghorn, “Immigration in Its Relation to Pauperism,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, July 1904.
In a 1906 book sympathetic: Edward A. Steiner, On the Trail of the Immigrant (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1906), 75.
Not everyone agreed: Wallace Irwin, “Ellis Island’s Problems,” New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser, June 14, 1904.
It was a sentiment: “Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration,” 1903, 70.
It was a cold: “Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration,” 1904, 106.
To his supporters: Letter from Prescott Hall to William Williams, December 24, 1902, WW-NYPL.
Even the American Hebrew: Quoted in Williams Memo, “Comments on Certain Articles Which Appeared in the ‘Staats Zeitung’ Between December 1902 and October 1903,” undated, WW-NYPL; AH, January 30, 1903.
Despite the support: “Hell on Earth,” New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, September 4, 1903. A translated copy appears in the William Williams Papers at the New York Public Library. Williams, who was fluent in German, either translated the articles himself or had them translated.
Williams may have: Letter from Frank Sargent to William Williams, April 14, 1903, WW-NYPL; Letter from Robert Watchorn to Terence V. Powderly, September 5, 1903, Box 128, TVP.
Roosevelt’s trip began: The following account of Roosevelt’s visit is taken from NYT, September 17, 1903, and BG, September 17, 1903.
After a quick lunch: For a slightly different version of the story, see Henry Pratt Fairchild, Immigration: A World Movement and Its American Significance (New York: Macmillan, 1913), 188.
Little escaped: Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Victor Howard Metcalf, February 22, 1906, in Morison, ed., Letters, vol. 5, 162–163; Morgen Journal, July 10, 1912. For more on trachoma, see Howard Markel, “‘The Eyes Have It’: Trachoma, the Perception of Disease, the United States Public Health Service, and the American Jewish Immigration Experience, 1897–1924,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74 (2000).
Among those invited: Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Ralph Trautman, November 28, 1903, in Morison, ed., Letters, vol. 3, 659–660. In addition to von Briesen, the commission included former district attorney Eugene Philbin; Thomas Hynes, New York commissioner of corrections; Ralph Trautman, Treasurer, New York Palisades Interstate Park Commission; and Lee Frankel, of the United Hebrew Charities.
The Von Briesen Commission: See File 52727-2, INS.
Roosevelt was happy: Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Ralph Trautman, November 28, 1903, in Morison, ed., Letters, vol. 3, 659–660.
The final report: Letter from Eugene A. Philbin to Theodore Roosevelt, December 1, 1903, Series 1; Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Eugene Philbin, December 2, 1903; Letter from Arthur von Briesen to Theodore Roosevelt, December 4, 1903, TR.
Though Roosevelt said: Hans Vought, The Bully Pulpit and the Melting Pot: American Presidents and the Immigrant, 1897–1933 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2004), 42–43; Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Henry Cabot Lodge, May 23, 1904 in Henry Cabot Lodge and Charles F. Redmond, eds., Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, 1884–1918, vol. 2 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1971).
Roosevelt’s campaign manager: Letter from George B. Cortelyou to William Williams, September 24, 1904, WW-NYPL; Letter from William Williams to Theodore Roosevelt, October 15, 1904, Series 1, TR.
Apparently, Williams’s problems: Letter from Robert Watchorn to Terence V. Powderly, December 21, 1904, TVP.
In December 1904: Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Gifford Pinchot, January 19, 1905, Series 2, TR; Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Northrop Stranahan, December 24, 1904, in Morison, ed., Letters, vol. 3, 1077–1078.
Some immigration defenders: AH, January 20, 1905.
CHAPTER NINE: THE ROOSEVELT STRADDLE
Leaning over the second-story: H. G. Wells, The Future in America (New York: Arno Press, 1974, orig. pub. 1906), 140.
Wells had cemented: Robert Watchorn, The Autobiography of Robert Watchorn (Oklahoma City, OK: Robert Watchorn Charities, 1959), 127–128.
Once there, Watchorn ended up: In her 1925 autobiography, famed union organizer Mother Jones wrote: “I remember John Siney, a miner. Holloran, a miner. James, a miner. Robert Watchorn, the first and most able secretary that the miners of this country ever had. These men gave their lives that others might live. They died in want.” Though she was correct about Watchorn’s position, he was still very much alive at the time of the publication of Mother Jones’s 1925 memoir. In fact, by the time the autobiography was published, not only was Watchorn alive, he had become a millionaire oilman. Mary Field Parton, ed., The Autobiography of Mother Jones (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1925), 240.
On the issue of Joe Murray: Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Gifford Pinchot, January 19, 1905, Series 2; Letter from Robert Watchorn to Theodore Roosevelt, January 21, 1905, Series 1, TR; Letter from Robert Watchorn to Oscar Straus, May 4, 1907, Box 6, OS.
Roosevelt was adept: President Theodore Roosevelt, “Fifth Annual Message to Congress,” December 5, 1905.
It was a fine statement: President Theodore Roosevelt, “Fifth Annual Message to Congress,” December 5, 1905.
If Roosevelt wanted: Henry James, The American Scene, republished in Henry James, Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America (New York: Library of America, 1993) 425–426.
With each passing week: NYT, April 17, 1906.
If Americans thought: Philip Cowen, Memories of an American Jew (New York: International Press, 1932), 185–186; NYT, January 7, 1907.
Robert Watchorn, who oversaw: NYT, March 11, 1906.
Watchorn told a Jewish audience: NYT, November 19, 1906; Sheldon Morris Neuringer, American Jewry and United States Immigration Policy, 1881–1953 (New York: Arno Press, 1980), 60.
College professor Edward Steiner: Edward A. Steiner, On the Trail of the Immigrant (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1906), 91–92.
Watchorn had a chance: Robert Watchorn, “The Gateway of the Nation,” Outlook, December 28, 1907.
At a dinner celebrating: John Morton Blum, The Republican Roosevelt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), 37. See also, Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Lyman Abbott, May 29, 1908, in Elting E. Morison, ed., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 6 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), 1042.
Straus, along with Schiff: On Straus’s background, see Naomi W. Cohen, A Dual Heritage: The Public Career of Oscar S. Straus (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969).
As part of his: David Nasaw, The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst (Boston: Mariner Books, 2000), 207–209.
The Bureau of: Oscar Straus, Under Four Administrations: From Cleveland to Taft (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922), 216; Letter from Oscar Straus to Robert Watchorn, December 30, 1907, OS.
On the morning of: Oscar Straus Diary, 3, Box 22, OS.
Some cases were: Straus, Under Four Administrations, 216–217.
“I would be less than human”: Cohen, A Dual Heritage, 154–155.
Straus made his: Oscar Straus Diary, 67–68, Box 22, OS; NYT, May 22, 1907. Robert Watchorn discusses the same story in his autobiography, but some of the details are different. Watchorn, Autobiography, 132–135.
Straus made yet: “Report of Conference held at the Ellis Island Immigration Station,” June 15, 1908, File 51831-101, INS.
The case hinged: The Department of Commerce and Labor debated this issue in 1909 and 1914. See File 52745-4, INS.
With this in mind: Letter from Oscar Straus to Robert Watchorn, June 21, 1907, Letterbook 8, Box 20, OS.
“Not only must we treat”: President Theodore Roosevelt, “Sixth Annual Message to Congress,” December 3, 1906.
While many worried: Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Lyman Abbott, May 29, 1908, in Morison, ed., Letters, vol. 6, 1042.
Throughout the first decade: “National Liberal Immigration League,” File 1125, Folder 1, IRL.
The pro-immigrant group: Rivka Shpak Lissak, “The National Liberal Immigration League and Immigration Restriction, 1906–1917,” American Jewish Archives, Fall/Winter 1994; Neuringer, American Jewry, 53–54.
The public debate: Charities, December 16, 1905. While Secretary of Commerce and Labor, Straus told a reporter: “The restriction for the purpose of excluding the diseased, the criminal and other undesirable classes that have been incorporated in our laws, are salutary and wise.” NYT, November 17, 1907.
Closer to the: NYT, January 7, 1907.
As an official: Steiner, On the Trail, 93.
Not only did Watchorn: NYT, May 12, 14, August 12, 15, 1905, February 9, March 17, November 9, 1906; Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to James S. Clarkson, October 3, 1905, in Morison, ed., Letters, vol. 5, 43–44; Marcus Braun, Immigration Abuses: Glimpses of Hungary and Hungarians (New York: Pearson Advertising Co., 1906); Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880–1930 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 92–93.
Theodore Roosevelt showed: Cowen, Memories, 187–188. According to Cowen’s translation of the article, Hitler argued that Jews were behind America’s restrictive immigration quotas in force at the time, believing they wanted to keep out Gentile immigrants while “the Jews are always coming in new swarms.” Nothing could be further from the truth, since the American Jewish community was a loud opponent of immigration quotas and Jewish immigrants were severely affected by them.
La Guardia was clearly: Letter from Louis K. Pittman, December 3, 1985, Public Health Service Archives, Rockville, MD.
La Guardia found: Fiorello H. La Guardia, The Making of an Insurgent: An Autobiography, 1882–1919 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1948), 62–75; “Efficiency Report for Fiorello H. La Guardia,” June 12, 1909, Folder 8, Box 26C7, FLG.
An acquaintance of: Thomas Kessner, Fiorello H. La Guardia and the Making of Modern New York (New York: Penguin, 1989), 24–26; Arthur Mann, La Guardia: A Fighter Against His Times, 1882–1933 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1959), 44–49.
In the early years: For examples of photographs of immigrants, see The World’s Work, February 1901; Outlook, December 28, 1907; NYT, March 11, 1906.
Lewis Hine was one: On Lewis Hine, see Karl Steinorth, ed., Lewis Hine: Passionate Journey (Zurich: Edition Stemmle, 1996); America & Lewis Hine: Photographs, 1904–1940 (New York: Aperture, 1977); and Maren Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890–1950 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 47–87. Hine’s Ellis Island photos can be viewed online at the George Eastman House website: http://www.eastman. org/fm/lwhprints/htmlsrc/ellis-island_idx00001.html.
More photographs made: See Peter Mesenhöller, Augustus F. Sherman: Ellis Island Portraits, 1905–1920 (New York: Aperture, 2005). Some of Sherman’s more exotic subjects were most likely foreign-born circus performers brought over to perform in the United States by Barnum and Bailey. See Letter from William Williams to Daniel Keefe, March 24, 1910, File 52880-171, INS.
Labor leader Samuel Gompers: Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labour, vol. 2 (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1967), 154, 160; Letter from Charles Eliot to Edward Lauterbach, February 1, 1907, File 1125, Folder 1, IRL.
The test for both sides: On the 1907 Immigration Act, see John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 128–130; Hans Vought, The Bully Pulpit and the Melting Pot: American Presidents and the Immigrant, 1897–1933 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2004), 54–57; Daniel J. Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 124–128; and William C. Van Vleck, The Administrative Control of Aliens: A Study in Administrative Law and Procedure (New York: Da Capo Press, 1971), 10–12.
Writing to Speaker Cannon: Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Joseph Cannon, January 12, 1907, in Morison, ed., Letters, vol. 5, 550.
The defeat of: Cohen, A Dual Heritage, 155; Letter from Robert Watchorn to Oscar Straus, February 29, 1908, OS.
Hall took his case: Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Prescott Farnsworth Hall, June 24, 1908, in Morison, ed., Letters, vol. 6, 1096–1097.
Lodge had been: Letter from Henry Cabot Lodge to Theodore Roosevelt, July 26, 1908, in Henry Cabot Lodge and Charles F. Redmond, eds., Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, 1884–1918, vol. 2 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1971).184 Lodge, however, was not: These figures on appeals come from the Annual Reports of the Commissioner of Immigration. I could not find figures predating 1906. Straus’s tenure covered 1908, and parts of 1907 and 1909. An examination of the data from 1906 to 1915 shows that the deportation figures on appeal fell within the range of 44 to 69 percent. The data under Straus’s administration fell on the low end of the range, but are hardly aberrant compared to the policies of his predecessor and successor.
That even Henry Cabot Lodge: Letter from Prescott Hall to Theodore Roosevelt, February 24, 1909, File 801, IRL.
Roosevelt had sought: For Reynolds’s report, see File 51467-1, INS.
In July 1905: Letter from Robert Watchorn to Robert DeC. Ward, July 22, 1905, File 916, Folder 1, IRL.
Keeping up a correspondence: Letter from Robert Watchorn to Prescott Hall, June 5, 1906, File 958; Letter from Prescott Hall to Robert Watchorn, June 7, 1906, File 958, IRL.
That was before: Letter from William Loeb, Jr. to Rev. Dr. Judson Swift, Field Secretary, American Tract Society, February 1, 1908, Box 9, OS: Grose quoted in Mesenhöller, Augustus F. Sherman, 12.
Jewish leaders: Letter from Robert Watchorn to Oscar Straus, February 3, 1908, Box 9; Letter from Oscar Straus to Robert Watchorn, February 1, 1908, Letterbox 3, Box 20, OS.
Roosevelt had little: Letter from William Loeb, Jr. to Rev. Dr. Judson Swift, Field Secretary, American Tract Society, February 1, 1908, Box 9, OS.
At the same time: Thomas Pitkin and Francesco Cordasco, The Black Hand: A Chapter in Ethnic Crime (Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams, 1977), 85.
Watchorn noted that: Letter from Oscar Straus to Robert Watchorn, March 2, 1908; Letter from Oscar Straus to Robert Watchorn, March 19, 1908, OS; Thomas Pitkin, Keepers of the Gate: A History of Ellis Island (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 97–100. Other discussions of Black Hand violence can be found in “How the United States Fosters the Black Hand,” The Outlook, October 30, 1909, and “Imported Crime: The Story of the Camorra in America,” McClure’s Magazine, May 1912.
Immigration restrictionists: Victor Safford, Immigration Problems: Personal Experiences of an Official (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1925), 88–90.
Samuel Gompers, another friend: Gompers, Seventy Years, vol. 2, 164.
By the summer of 1908: BG, August 9, 1908, September 5, 1908; Gompers, Seventy Years, vol. 2, 164; Oscar Straus Diary, 214, OS.
It is no surprise: John Lombardi, Labor’s Voice in the Cabinet: A History of the Department of Labor from its Origin to 1921 (New York: AMS Press, 1968), 144–145.
Gompers, who never had: Gompers, Seventy Years, vol. 2, 168; Lombardi, Labor’s Voice, 147–148.
The in-house journal: Journal of The Knights of Labor, January 1909, quoted in “What of the Future?” Publication of the Immigration Regulation League, No. 5, File 1144, IRL. Powderly even wrote a letter to President-elect Taft urging him to keep Straus as secretary of Commerce and Labor. Showing how out of touch he had become with the labor movement, Powderly claimed that American workers would second his support for Straus. “Talk to labor men anywhere, as I have done, and you will find that what I state is correct and moderate.” Letter from Terence V. Powderly to William Howard Taft, January 7, 1909, Series 3, WHT.
Americans tried to: Allan McLaughlin, “Immigration and Public Health,” PSM, January 1904; Frank Sargent, “The Need of Closer Inspection and Greater Restriction of Immigrants,” Century Magazine, January 1904.189 “The advocates of absolutely unrestricted”: Outlook, February 22, 1913; “Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration,” vol. 15, 1901; NYT, April 14, 1911.
Dr. Victor Safford struck: Safford, Immigration Problems, 88.
CHAPTER TEN: LIKELY TO BECOME A PUBLIC CHARGE
One day, the former president: Robert Watchorn, The Autobiography of Robert Watchorn (Oklahoma City, OK: Robert Watchorn Charities, 1959), 140–141.
While he had expressed: Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Herbert Knox Smith, January 18, 1909, TR; Watchorn, Autobiography, 149–152.
Prescott Hall had been: Letter from Prescott Hall to Hon. William Howard Taft, December 8, 1908, File 801, IRL.
Despite the criticism: NYT, April 25, May 19, 1909.
The personal attacks: NYT, July 17, 1909; Letter from Robert Watchorn to Charles D. Hilles, January 20, 1913, Series 6, Reel 451, WHT. After leaving Ellis Island, Watchorn took a job with Union Oil Company, having befriended its owner Lyman Stewart. Despite Watchorn’s lack of experience in the oil industry or in business in general, he was named treasurer of the company. Many board members opposed him, believing him to be incompetent.
The former coal miner, union leader, and government bureaucrat was soon traveling to New York and London to raise capital among the world’s savviest financiers. Watchorn was out of his element, and accusations of ethical impropriety followed him in his new career. He soon managed to upset Stewart and cast doubt on his own honesty and competence when he became involved in a controversy over a million dollars’ worth of stock options given to him by Stewart. Details of the deal remain murky, but it led to Watchorn’s resignation under a cloud of suspicion. Then, having entered the world of oil wildcatting in Oklahoma and Texas, Watchorn became a millionaire and by the 1930s had turned his attention to philanthropy. He endowed a church in his hometown of Alfreton, England, and a music hall at the University of Redlands. In 1932, Watchorn presented his greatest piece of philanthropy—the Lincoln Memorial Shrine—to his adopted hometown of Redlands, California. See Frank J. Taylor and Earl M. Welty, Black Bonanza: How an Oil Hunt Grew into the Union Oil Company of California (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950) 165–166; Watchorn, Autobiography, 154–162, 185–211.
Just as Roosevelt: Letter from William Howard Taft to Herbert Parsons, May 17, 1909, Series 8, WHT; NYT, May 20, 1909.
Even after leaving: William Williams, “The Sifting of Immigrants,” Journal of Social Science, September 1906.
Although he questioned: Williams, “The Sifting of Immigrants,” NYT, July 18, 1909.
The letter of the law: “Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration,” 1909, 132; NYT, June 5, 1909.
It also possessed: William C. Van Vleck, The Administrative Control of Aliens; A Study in Administrative Law and Procedure (New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1932), 54.
Realizing this: “Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration,” 1909, 133; President Theodore Roosevelt, “First Annual Message to Congress,” December 3, 1901.
Now Williams was: He called the $25 test “nothing more than a timely warning to immigrants that they cannot land without funds adequate for their support until such times as they are likely to obtain profitable employment.” Letter from William Williams to A.J. Sabath, July 15, 1909, File 52531-12, INS.
Williams’s edict had: “Annual Report of the Commissioner of Ellis Island to Commissioner-General of Immigration,” August 16, 1909; NYT, June 30, 1909.
Conditions worsened: NYT, July 14, 1909.
On July 4, Rudniew: Isaac Metzker, ed., A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 98–100; AH, July 16 1909, 278.
Williams was unmoved: NYT, July 10, 1909.
Many Americans were: Letter from Russell Bellamy to William Williams, July 12, 1909; Letter from Prescott Hall to William Williams, July 14, 1909, WW NYPL.
Eighty-two-year-old Orville Victor: Letter from Orville Victor to William Williams, July 17, 1909; Letter from William Patterson to William Williams, July 8, 1909, WW-NYPL.
Not all of Williams’s: Letter from an anonymous pupil at PS 62 in Manhattan to William Williams, undated, WW-NYPL.
The child who wrote: On the history of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, see, Mark Wischnitzer, Visas to Freedom: The History of HIAS (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Company, 1956).
The HIAS took on: “Brief for the Petitioner in the Matter of Hersch Skuratowski,” 1909, File 52530-12, INS; Esther Panitz, “In Defense of the Jewish Immigrant, 1891–1924,” in Abraham Karp, ed., The Jewish Experience in America, vol. 5 (Waltham, MA: American Jewish Historical Society, 1969).
The lawyers were not: NYT, July 16, 1909; Max J. Kohler, Immigration and Aliens in the United States: Studies of American Immigration Laws and the Legal Status of Aliens in the United States (New York: Bloch, 1936), 54–55.
There was something: “Brief for the Petitioner in the Matter of Hersch Skuratowski,” 1909, 46–61, File 52530-12, INS.
The controversy over: For an overview of the issue of racial classifications, see Marian L. Smith, “INS Administration of Racial Provisions in U.S. Immigration and Nationality Law Since 1898,” Prologue, Summer 2002.
Powderly and his colleagues: See File 52729/9, INS; Joel Perlmann, “‘Race or People’: Federal Race Classifications for Europeans in America, 1898–1913,” Jerome Levy Economics Institute Working Paper No. 320, January 2001; “Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration,” vol. 15, 1901, 132–133; “Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration,” 1898, 33–34; “Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration,” 1899, 5. Patrick Weil claims that “immigration officials continued to use the statistics provided by the list to deny admission to immigrants of certain ethnic backgrounds, even when their exclusion was not specifically provided for by law.” Weil provides no support for his hypothesis. Patrick Weil, “Races at the Gate: A Century of Racial Distinctions in American Immigration Policy, 1865–1965,” Georgetown Immigration Law Journal 15 (2001).
For Jews, this new classification: Panitz, “In Defense of the Jewish Immigrant, 1891–1924,” 55–57; Nathan Goldberg, Jacob Lestchinsky, and Max Weinreich, The Classification of Jewish Immigrants and its Implications (New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1945); Perlmann, “‘Race or People’: Federal Race Classifications for Europeans in America, 1898–1913.” The Hebrew classification was eliminated in 1943.
Decades later: Kohler, Immigration and Aliens in the United States, 400–401.
Now it was William Williams’s: Memo from William Williams to Commissioner-General of Immigration, September 8, 1909, File 52531-12A, INS.
Williams was not happy: NYT, July 16, 1909.
Williams assumed: Letter from Frank Larned to Williams Williams, July 23, 1909, File 52531-12A, INS; Letter from William Williams to Frank Larned, July 20, 1909, File 52531-12, INS.
After the resolution: NYT, July 27, 1909; Letter from Charles Nagel to William Williams, July 16, 1909, CN.
“There is no more need”: NYT, July 27, 1909; Letter from Charles Nagel to William Williams, July 31, 1909, CN.
The following year: Canfora v. Williams, 1911, reprinted in Edith Abbott, ed., Immigration: Select Documents and Case Records (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1924), 256–258; File 53139-7, INS.
These cases show: U.S. v. Ju Toy, 198 U.S. 253 (1905).
However, the Department of Commerce: File 53438-11, INS.
These supposedly weak: Amy Fairchild argues that the immigration inspection process was part of the shaping of a modern, industrial workforce. See Amy L. Fairchild, Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). For a discussion of the exclusion of immigrants with physical deficiencies, see Douglas C. Baynton, “Defectives in the Land: Disability and American Immigration Policy, 1882–1924,” Journal of American Ethnic History, Spring 2005.
In 1902, commissioner-general: Letter from Frank Sargent to William Williams, October 6, 1902, WW-NYPL.
Medical officials: For more on the designation of “poor physique,” see Fairchild, Science at the Borders, 165–169.
Sargent defined: Letter to all Commissioners of Immigration and inspectors from Frank Sargent, Commissioner General, Bureau of Immigration, April 17, 1905, File 916, Folder 1, IRL.
William Williams agreed: Letter from William Williams to Prescott Hall, April 10, 1904, File 916, Folder 1, IRL; Williams, “The Sifting of Immigrants.”
He had been: Allan McLaughlin, “Immigration and the Public Health” PSM, January 1904.
Doctors with the: Fairchild, Science at the Borders, 166–167; Elizabeth Yew, “Medical Inspection of Immigrants at Ellis Island, 1891–1924,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 56, no. 5 (June 1980).
This did not mean: “Book of Instructions for the Medical Inspection of Aliens, Bureau of Public Health and Marine-Hospital Service,” January 18, 1910.
In the first: Letter from Robert Watchorn to Prescott Hall, May 12, 1908, File 958, IRL.
When Williams took: William Williams, “Notice Concerning Detention and Deportation of Immigrant,” March 18, 1910, Folder 10, Box 13, MK. On the connection between deafness and the “likely to become a public charge” clause, see Douglas C. Baynton, “‘The Undesirability of Admitting Deaf Mutes’: U.S. Immigration Policy and Deaf Immigrants, 1882–1924,” Sign Language Studies 6, no. 4 (Summer 2006).
In his first: “Annual Report of William Williams, Ellis Island Commissioner,” September 19, 1910, Folder 5, File 1061, IRL. Also found in “Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration,” 1910, 134–135.
The amount of work: “Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration,” 1911, 147.
Williams worried: Letter from William Williams to Commissioner-General of Immigration, June 24, 1910, WW-Yale.
To the thousands: On the case of Wolf Konig, see File 53452-973, INS.
Michele Sica was: On the case of Michele Sica, see File 53305-74, INS.
Although much younger: On the case of Bartolomeo Stallone, see File 53370-234, INS.
Williams himself: On the case of Jacob Duck, see File 52880-127, INS.
Though Williams may have: On the Kaganowitz family, see File 53390-146, INS.
Meier Salamy Yacoub: File 53257-34, INS.
Jewish groups were: “Extracts from Minutes of Second Annual Meeting of National Jewish Immigration Council Held February 18, 1912,” File 53173, INS: NYT, November 14, 1909.
Whether Uhl was: Edward Alsworth Ross, The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People (New York: Century, 1914), 289–290.
Meter was detained: File 53370-699, INS.
While HIAS continued: Max J. Kohler, “Immigration and the Jews of America,” AH, January 27, February 3, 1911; NYT, January 19, 1911. For a response to Kohler’s charges, see Memorandum for the Secretary from Commissioner-General of Immigration Daniel Keefe, February 16, 1911, File 53173-12, INS.
Not all Jewish leaders: Panitz, “In Defense of the Jewish Immigrant, 1891–1924.”
Simon Wolf: NYT, July 18, 1909; Letter from Lipsitch to Kohler, March 7, 1911, Folder 11, Box 11, MK.
HIAS President: Letter from Leon Sanders to Max J. Kohler, July 29, 1910, Folder 11, Box 11, MK.
Secretary Nagel: Kohler, 198–199. See also, Otto Heller, ed., Charles Nagel: Speeches and Writings, 1900–1928, vol. 1 (New York: Putnam’s, 1931), 151, 157.
Jewish groups attempted: AH, January 28, 1910.
After that, Williams’s: “Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration,” 1911, 152.
In response, members: Letter from Moe Lenkowsky and Anton Kaufman, Chairman and Secretary of the Citizens Committee of Orchard, Rivington and East Houston Streets, to William Howard Taft, April 9, 1912, WW-NYPL; Letter from William Williams to Theodore Roosevelt, January 31, 1912, Series 1, Reel 126, TR; Letter from William Williams to Daniel Keefe, September 13, 1912, Series 6, Number 1579, WHT.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: “CZAR WILLIAMS”
Taft listened to a number: NYT, October 19, 1910; Letter from William Williams to Charles Nagel, October 19, 1910, Folder 64, Box 4, Series I, WW-Yale.
But President Taft’s: NYTrib, December 16, 1910; Letters from Charles Nagel to Charles D. Norton, December 10, 13, 1910, WHT; Letter from Charles Nagel to William Howard Taft, January 7, 1911, WHT.
These were hard: “Remarks of President Taft to the Board of Directors of the American Association of Foreign Newspapers at the Executive Office, Washington, DC,” January 4, 1911, No. 77, Reel 364, Series 6, WHT; New York Evening Sun, January 4, 1911.
“Away with Czarism”: Morgen Journal, April 17, 1911; New York Evening Journal, May 24, 1911; Morgen Journal, June 23, 1911.
The Morgen Journal listed: Morgen Journal, April 17, 1911; Szabadsag, October 11, 1910.
O. J. Miller: Memorandum from William Williams to Daniel Keefe, October 14, 1910, Folder 63, Box 4, CN; File 53139-7, INS. Nagel sent a detective to investigate Miller and his organization. The investigation discovered that the German Liberal Immigration Bureau was only a paper organization and Miller a reporter for the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung. Nevertheless, Miller’s agitation caught the attention of government officials, congressmen, and German-American organizations.
Groups such as: File 53139-7, INS.
At first, Williams was: Letter from William Williams to Charles Nagel, April 5, 1911; Letter from William Williams to Charles Nagel, April 7, 1911, File 53139-7, INS.
Nor could Charles: Letter from Charles Nagel to Charles Norton, October 21, 1910, Folder 65, Box 4, WW-Yale.
Harper’s Weekly asked: HW, July 7, 1911.
It is hard: Broughton Brandenburg, “The Tragedy of the Rejected Immigrant,” Outlook, October 13, 1906; Philip Taylor, The Distant Magnet: European Emigration to the USA (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 123; “Report of the Dillingham Immigration Commission,” undated, File 1060, Folder 9, IRL; “Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration,” 1907, 83. Harper’s Weekly estimated that some eight thousand potential immigrants were refused passage by steamship companies at Bremen in 1905. HW, April 14, 1906.
For some immigrants: Letter from J. M. Jenks to Oscar Straus, March 12, 1907, Box 6, OS.
An American congressional: “Report of the Sub-Committee of the Immigration Commission,” 1907; Senator A. C. Latimer and Rep. John L. Burnett, File 1060, Folder 8, IRL; Taylor, 123.
William Williams was: Letter from Charles Nagel to William Williams, April 6, 1911, File 53139-7, INS.
Nagel won no friends: “Hearings on House Resolution No. 166,” House Committee on Rules, United States House of Representatives, May 29, 1911, 107; Max J. Kohler, Immigration and Aliens in the United States: Studies of American Immigration Laws and the Legal Status of Aliens in the United States (New York: Bloch, 1936), 46.
This was not: Otto Heller, ed., Charles Nagel: Speeches and Writings, 1900–1928, vol. 1 (New York: Putnam’s, 1931), xviii, 146; Letter from Charles Nagel to William Howard Taft, April 16, 1912, Number 3D, Series 6, WHT.
The agitation among: “Hearings on House Resolution No. 166,” House Committee on Rules, United States House of Representatives, May 29, 1911, 3–6.
Before the hearings: Letter from William Williams to Prescott Hall, May 12, 1911, File 916, Folder 2, IRL.
Still, while the earlier: Letter from William Williams to Charles Nagel, June 5, 1911, Folder 81, Box 5, WW-Yale.
He had arrived: On Bass, see “An English Pastor’s Experience on Ellis Island: The Abuse of the USA Immigration Laws,” undated, Reel 409; Letter from William Williams to Commissioner-General of Immigration, January 30, 1911; Letter from Charles Nagel to Charles D. Norton, Secretary to the President, February 25, 1911, Series 6, Reel 409, WHT; “Hearings on House Resolution No. 166,” House Committee on Rules, United States House of Representatives, May 29, 1911, 130–135; New York Evening Journal, June 21, 1911; Letter from William Williams to Commissioner General of Immigration, March 9, 1911, Box 13, Folder 10, MK.
With the failure: NYT, October 8, 1911; Charles Thomas Johnson, Culture at Twilight: The National German-American Alliance, 1901–1918 (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 76; Morgen Journal, January 4, 17, February 7, 1912.
Williams had his defenders: HW, June 10, 1911.
Arthur von Briesen: Letter from Arthur von Briesen to William Howard Taft, June 29, 1911, Folder 82, Box 5, Series I, WW-Yale.
Williams’s most steadfast: Letter from William Howard Taft to William Williams, November 25, 1911, Number 90, Reel 509, Series 8, WHT.
In his own way: Letter from William Howard Taft to William Williams, May 2, 1913, Folder 9, Box 1, WW-Yale.
Williams continued with: Thomas Pitkin, Keepers of the Gate: A History of Ellis Island (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 109.
The economic effects: NYT, September 28, 1912, September 21, 1913; Philip Cowen, Memories of an American Jew (New York: International Press, 1932), 184.
When the U.S. Commission: On the Dillingham Commission, see Robert F. Zeidel, Immigrants, Progressives and Exclusion Politics: The Dillingham Commissioner, 1900–1927 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004); Desmond King, Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 50–81; Daniel J. Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 128–132; Oscar Handlin, Race and Nationality in American Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), 93–138; Jeremiah Jenks and W. Jett Lauck, The Immigration Problem: A Study of American Immigration Conditions and Needs (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1913); and Survey, January 7, 1911. Tichenor found that the Dillingham Commission’s “expert findings offered a portrait of southern and eastern European newcomers that legitimized the xenophobic narrative and policy agenda of Progressive Era restrictionists.” In response, Zeidel notes that the Dillingham Commission was deeply rooted in the reform movements of the early twentieth century, a fact many historians have ignored “because they have not wanted to equate any form of xenophobia with progress.” Its conclusions and recommendations can be found in U.S. Immigration Commission, “Abstracts of Reports of the Immigration Commission with Conclusions and Recommendations and Views of the Minority, Volume One,” 61st Congress, 3rdSession, Document 747, 1911.
His new party’s platform: Rivka Shpak Lissak, “Liberal Progressives and Immigration Restriction, 1896–1917,” Annual Lecture, American Jewish Archives, 1991; Tichenor, Dividing Lines, 135–136; Hans Vought, The Bully Pulpit and the Melting Pot: American Presidents and the Immigrant, 1897–1933 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2004), 86–87.
The candidate who: Woodrow Wilson, A History of the American People, Volume 5 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1901), 212–214.
Thanks to newspaper: Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The Road to the White House (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), 381–387, 499–500; James Chace, 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft, and Debs—and the Election That Changed the Country (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 135–137; Wilson quoted in the Jewish Immigration Bulletin, November 1916, 8.
Despite the controversy: Letter from William Howard Taft to A. Lawrence Lowell, November 6, 1910, File 860, IRL.
For two decades: Survey, February 8, 1913.
The numbers support: LD, May 25, 1912; Outlook, February 22, 1913.
With only a few: Morris M. Sherman, “Immigration Restriction, 1890–1921, and the Immigration Restriction League,” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard College, 1957), 33.
A few weeks before: NYT, January 26, 1913.
Ethnic groups were: New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, May 7, 14, 1913, translation found in File 53139-7C, INS.
Throughout the 1912 campaign: Warheit, July 14, 1912, in “Instances of Continued Abuse of the Ellis Island Authorities by Certain Newspapers Printed in Foreign Languages in the City of New York,” undated, Folder 32, Box 3, WW NYPL.
The Deutsches Journal: Deutsches Journal, April 28 1913; “Comments on Annexed Report of Case of Aron Mosberg,” April 18, 1913, File 53139-7C, INS.
“Sir, You are the murderer”: Letter from John Czurylo to William Williams, May 3, 1913; Letter from William Williams to the Commissioner-General of Immigration, May 9, 1913, WW-NYPL.
In an April 1913 letter: Letter from William Williams to the Commissioner-General of Immigration, April 21, 1913, File 53139-7C, INS.
The uncertainty: Letter from Prescott Hall to William Williams, November 22, 1912, Box 3, WW-NYPL.
Others remembered Williams: Letter to William Williams, June 18, 1913, Box 3, WW-NYPL.
Others took issue: Morgen Journal, June 20, 1913.
After the war: NYT, February 9, 1947; Frederic R. Coudert, “In Memoriam: William Williams,” American Journal of International Law 41, no. 3 (July 1947).
Two months before: Case of Lipe Pocziwa, No. 667, Series 6, Reel 404, WHT.
William Williams: “Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration,” 1911, 147; “Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration,” 1912, 23.
CHAPTER TWELVE: INTELLIGENCE
During the depths: On the Zitello family, see File 54050-240, INS.
When Dr. Thomas Salmon: On the life and career of Thomas W. Salmon, see Earl D. Bond, Thomas W. Salmon: Psychiatrist (New York: W.W. Norton, 1950) and Manon Parry, “Thomas W. Salmon: Advocate of Mental Hygiene,” American Journal of Public Health 96, no. 10 (October 2006).
Salmon saw the chance: For a description of the work of a psychologist on line examination at Ellis Island, see Thaddeus S. Dayton, “Importing Our Insane,” HW, October 19, 1912.
Salmon was on the: Ian Robert Dowbiggin, Keeping America Sane: Psychiatry and Eugenics in the United States and Canada, 1880–1940 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 203.
The results of Salmon’s work: Salmon would later become the first medical director of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene. During World War I, he served as a consultant for the U.S. Army and worked with returning soldiers suffering from shell shock and other psychological disorders. In 1923, he was elected president of the American Psychiatric Association. Despite having no formal background in psychiatry, Salmon had reached the pinnacle of his profession.
At the time: On the Binet tests, see Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 176–188.
There was also: Leila Zenderland, Measuring Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 102–103.
If there was some: C. B. Davenport, Eugenics: The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding (New York: Henry Holt, 1910). For more on Davenport, see Daniel J. Kelves, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 41–56.
In 1911, Davenport recommended: Letter from C. B. Davenport, Secretary of the America Breeders Association, Eugenics Section, to Prescott Hall, May 20, 1911, File 342, IRL; Report of the Immigration Committee of the Eugenics Section, American Breeders Association, December 30, 1911, File 1064, Folder 1, IRL. Interestingly, one member of the committee was Columbia anthropologist Franz Boas, who achieved fame for his criticism of eugenics.
Now many IRL members: Robert DeC. Ward, “National Eugenics in Relation to Immigration,” NAR, July 1910; Robert DeC. Ward, “The Crisis in Our Immigration Policy,” File 1063, Folder 9; Robert DeC. Ward, “Our Immigration Laws from the Viewpoint of National Eugenics,” National Geographic, January 1912. “The need is imperative for applying eugenic principles in much of our legislation. But the greatest, the most logical, the most effective step that we can take is to begin with a proper eugenic selection of the incoming alien millions. If we, in our generation take these steps, we shall earn the gratitude of millions of those who will come after us for we shall have begun the real conservation of the American race.”
For Prescott Hall: “Eugenics and Immigration,” Prescott Hall, undated, File 1061, Folder 1, IRL; Immigration and Other Interests of Prescott Farnsworth Hall, Compiled by Mrs. Prescott F. Hall (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1922), 53.
One answer for Hall: Prescott Hall, “Birth Control and World Eugencis,” unpublished manuscript, in Immigration and Other Interests of Prescott Farnsworth Hall.
As to whether humans: Immigration and Other Interests of Prescott Farnsworth Hall, 33, 83. Interestingly, anthropologist Franz Boas had recently completed his study, published by the Dillingham Commission, which showed a divergence in head size between foreign-born Hebrews and Sicilians and American-born Hebrews and Sicilian Americans. The American environment, Boas concluded, was having some effect on the “race characteristics” that many believed immutable. The irony is that Boas used the discredited theory of craniometry to prove his anti-eugenic, anti-racist theory. See “Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants,” Reports of the Immigration Commission, Volume 38, 61st Congress, 2nd Session.
At the intersection: “Is it any wonder that serious students contemplate the racial future of the Anglo-Saxon American with some concern? They have seen the passing of the American Indian and the buffalo; and now they query as to how long the Anglo-Saxon may be able to survive.” William Z. Ripley, “Races in the United States,” Atlantic, December 1908. See also Robert DeC. Ward, “National Eugenics in Relation to Immigration,” NAR, July 1910.
Progressive sociologist: Ross quoted in M. Victor Safford, “The Business Side of Immigration,” speech delivered at Old South Club, October 20, 1913, File 1064, Folder 8, IRL.
Ross proudly noted: Edward Alsworth Ross, The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People (New York: Century, 1914), 285–286.
A leading academic: Ross, The Old World in the New, 289–293.
Ross predicted that: Ross, The Old World in the New, 228, 254–256.
These descriptions placed: NYT, June 20, 1914.
Amidst such pressing: “Immigration and Insanity,” address of William Williams, U.S. Commissioner of Immigration, before the Mental Hygiene Conference at New York City, November 17, 1912, File 53139-13, INS; “The Crisis in Our Immigration Policy,” Robert DeC. Ward, File 1063, Folder 9, IRL.
Williams complained: See File 53139-13A, INS.
Neither Congress: H. H. Goddard, “The Binet Tests in Relation to Immigration,” Journal of Psycho-Asthenics 18 (1913); Henry H. Goddard, “The Feeble Minded Immigrant,” The Training School, November/December 1912; and Steven A. Gelb, “Henry H. Goddard and the Immigrants, 1910–1917: The Studies and Their Social Context,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 22 (October 1986). For more general background on Goddard and intelligence testing, see Zenderland, Measuring Minds; Franz Samelson, “Putting Psychology on the Map: Ideology and Intelligence Testing,” in Allan R. Buss, ed., Psychology in Social Context (New York: Irvington Publishers, 1979); and Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 188–204.
Believing this was proof: Goddard’s own mathematical abilities were less than stellar. He translated his assistants’ success rate of nine out of eleven into a rate of “seven-eighths.” Goddard, “The Feeble Minded Immigrant.”
Goddard magnanimously said: Goddard, “The Feeble Minded Immigrant”; Goddard, “The Binet Test in Relation to Immigration.”
Goddard’s test did not go: Goddard, “The Binet Test in Relation to Immigration.”
Goddard’s staff chose: Henry H. Goddard, “Mental Tests and the Immigrant,” Journal of Delinquency, September 1917. For some unknown reason, perhaps owing to his sloppiness as a researcher, Goddard claims to have tested “about 165 immigrants.” Other scholars have used that figure as well, but a count of the figures from Goddard’s own article comes up with 191: 54 Jews, 70 Italians, 45 Russians, and 22 Hungarians. Even the numbers on Goddard’s chart (252) don’t add up to 191, and there is an error of arithmetic in one of the columns.
The results, wrote Goddard: Gelb, “Henry H. Goddard and the Immigrants, 1910–1917: The Studies and their Social Context”; Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 194–198.
As for whether: Zenderland, Measuring Minds, 274.
Even a nonscientist: The debate over Goddard’s legacy is contentious. On one side, Leon Kamin and Stephen Jay Gould have been harshly critical of Goddard’s work, methods, and intentions. On the other side, Franz Samelson, Leila Zenderland, and Steven Gelb have been more measured in their interpretations, placing the psychologist within the context of his times. Gelb’s description is the most helpful: “Goddard’s writings about Ellis Island immigrants, when placed in their proper context, do not provide evidence of the virulent type of racism with which his name has become associated. Goddard is more accurately described as a ‘decent’ man, pursuing questions and conclusions—in the name of disinterested ‘science’—that were, in fact, driven by the engines of an institutionalized, pernicious social ideology.” Gelb, “Henry H. Goddard and the Immigrants, 1910–1917: The Studies and Their Social Context.” For a harsher view of Goddard, see Leon Kamin, “The Science and Politics of IQ,” Social Research 41 (1974).
The Survey, the nation’s leading: Survey, September 15, 1917.
Goddard had been: C. P. Knight, “The Detection of the Mentally Defective Among Immigrants,” JAMA, January 11, 1913.
For immigrants suffering: E. H. Mullan, “Mental Examination of Immigrants: Administration and Line Inspection at Ellis Island,” Public Health Reports, U.S. Public Health Service, May 18, 1917, 737, 746.
Ellis Island doctors: Knight, “The Detection of the Mentally Defective Among Immigrants”; E. H. Mullan, “Mental Examination of Immigrants: Administration and Line Inspection at Ellis Island,” 738.
Howard Knox: For background on Knox, see John T. E. Richardson, “Howard Andrew Knox and the Origins of Performance Testing on Ellis Island, 1912–1916,” History of Psychology 6, no. 2 (May 2003); John T. E. Richardson, “A Physician with the Coast Artillery Corps: The Military Career of Dr. Howard Andrew Knox, Pioneer of Psychological Testing,” Coast Defense Journal 15, no. 4, November 2001.
Knox shared many: Howard A. Knox, “The Moron and the Study of Alien Defectives,” JAMA, January 11, 1913.
Knox was also sensitive: Howard A. Knox, “Psychogenetic Disorders: Cases Seen in Detained Immigrants,” Medical Record, July 12, 1913; Howard A. Knox, “The Difference Between Moronism and Ignorance,” NYM, September 20, 1913; E.K. Sprague, “Mental Examination of Immigrants,” Survey, January 17, 1914. “Does the Binet-Simon measuring scale of intelligence or its American modification…represent the average normal intelligence of practically the entire human race,” asked Ellis Island doctor Bernard Glueck. “Assuredly not. We are convinced of this both from experience with the immigrant and actual experimental investigation of the subject and were it considered necessary to adduce facts to prove the fallacy of such a contention, these could easily be gotten from the hundreds of case histories on file at Ellis Island.” Bernard Glueck, “The Mentally Defective Immigrant,” NYM, October 18, 1913.
Knox noted one case: Howard A. Knox, “Psychological Pitfalls,” NYM, March 14, 1914; Howard A. Knox, “Diagnostic Study of the Face,” NYM, June 14, 1913.
Another Ellis Island doctor: Glueck, “The Mentally Defective Immigrant.”
Ignoring Goddard’s work: Knox, “The Moron and the Study of Alien Defectives.”
The testing room: Howard A. Knox, “Measuring Human Intelligence,” Scientific American, January 19, 1915; Howard A. Knox, “Tests for Mental Defects,” Journal of Heredity 5 (1914).
Once the conditions: Glueck, “The Mentally Defective Immigrant.”
This battery of questions: NYT, November 1, 7, 1912.
The questions that: Howard A. Knox, “A Comparative Study of the Imaginative Powers in Mental Defectives,” Medical Record, April 25, 1914.
Immigrants were also: E. H. Mullan, “The Mentality of the Arriving Immigrant,” Public Health Bulletin 90 (October 1917): 118–124.
Ellis Island doctors were increasingly bothered: Bernard Glueck, “The Mentally Defective Immigrant”; Zenderland, Measuring Minds, 276–277.
Howard Knox created: For examples of the various tests, see Howard A. Knox, “Mentally Defective Aliens: A Medical Problem,” Lancet-Clinic, May 1, 1915; Howard A. Knox, “A Scale Based on the Work at Ellis Island for Estimating Mental Defect,” JAMA, March 7, 1914; Mullan, “The Mentality of the Arriving Immigrant.” Mullan’s report contains detailed results from the whole array of tests used at Ellis Island on a sample of literate and illiterate immigrants in 1914.
These tests were about: Mullan, “The Mentality of the Arriving Immigrant,” 42–43; T. E. John, “Knox’s Cube Imitation Test: A Historical Overview and an Experimental Analysis,” Brain and Cognition 59 (2005).
In 1913, the number of: NYT, September 16, 1913; Berth Boody, A Psychological Study of Immigrant Children at Ellis Island, reprint (New York: Arno Press, 1970), 65; Knox, “Mentally Defective Aliens: A Medical Problem,” 495.
Like others: Howard Knox, “Mental Defectives,” NYM, January 31, 1914.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: MORAL TURPITUDE
Dressed in a large green: Time, March 1, 1926; Edward Corsi, In the Shadow of Liberty (New York: Macmillan, 1935), 201–210.
Vera’s problems began: Vera married for a third time in 1930 to seventy-five-year-old millionaire Sir Rowland Hodge. In 1934, she asked for a divorce. The Earl of Craven died in 1932 in France at the age of thirty-five.
Immigration officials declared: Quoted in Black’s Law Dictionary, 7th ed. (St. Paul, MN: West Group, 1999), 1026.
The term entered American: Jane Perry Clark, Deportation of Aliens from the United States to Europe (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 164, 171; Brian C. Harms, “Redefining ‘Crimes of Moral Turpitude’: A Proposal to Congress,” Georgetown Immigration Law Journal 15 (2001).
Vera could now attend to: NYT, March 16, 1926.
Angry at the reception: The Vera Cathcart story was prominent enough to warrant a mention in Frederick Lewis Allen’s popular history of the 1920s, where it was listed as a notable event of early 1926, along with Byrd’s flight over the North Pole and the disappearance of evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (New York: Perennial Classics, 1931; reissued 1990), 181.
Women of all nationalities: Deirdre M. Moloney, “Women, Sexual Morality, and Economic Dependency in Early U.S. Deportation Policy,” Journal of Women’s History 18, no. 2 (Summer 2006). Moloney claims that the “enforcement of immigration policies concerning women’s sexuality differed according to their race and ethnicity.” She offers only anecdotal, but not statistical, evidence for the claim.
Giulia Del Favero: Document No. 16129, Box 23, Entry 7, INS.
Sometimes, though, those vultures: Campbell and Rodgers Report, June 2, 1900, to Secretary of the Treasury, Boxes 157–158, TVP.
Immigration officials continued: File 52388-59, INS.
A young Serbian woman: File 52388-77, INS.
Young women who transgressed: File 53155-125, INS.
Immigration officials also: Some scholars have seen the imposition of morality tests as specifically targeted against women. One historian, discussing the exclusion of a pregnant, unmarried woman named Dolan, argued that, “it was highly unlikely that the man who impregnated her would have been similarly excluded. Dolan’s story painfully illustrates how the incorporation of patriarchal heterosexual imperatives into immigration policy resulted in the exclusion of women who violated its order.” Of course, for practical reasons, had the father of the child entered alone, there would have been no way for inspectors to tell that he had fathered an illegitimate child. Had the father of the child entered with his pregnant girlfriend, however, both man and woman would have been excluded or forced to marry before entering the country. Eithne Luibheid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 3–5.
“I had approved exclusion”: Oscar Straus Diary, Box 22, OS.
In another case: File 52279-14, INS.
Sometimes women could use: File 53257-34, INS.
Oftentimes, the moral turpitude: William M. Sullivan, “The Harassed Exile: General Cipriano Castro, 1908–1924,” Americas 33, no. 2 (October 1976); J. Fred Rippy and Clyde E. Hewitt, “Cipriano Castro: ‘Man Without a Country,’” American Historical Review 55, no. 1 (October 1949).
In December 1912: NYT, December 31, 1912.
He arrived on: New York Herald Tribune, August 18, 1942.
At his hearing: File 53166-8, INS.
Castro had a number: WP, January 3, 1913.
One month after: Memorandum in the case of Cipriano Castro, January 30, 1913, Folder 39, Box 59, CN.
Meanwhile, New York Democrats: NYT, February 16, 1913.
Castro returned to America: On Castro’s 1916 visit, see File 53166-8C, INS.
This time, however, officials: NYT, December 8, 1924.
The solicitor of the Department: File 53371-25, INS.
The case of Marya Kocik: File 53148-19, INS.
Officials became: File 53986-67, INS.
Eva Ranc provided officials: File 54050-228, INS.
Eva Ranc’s case shows: Quoted in Francesco Cordasco and Thomas Monroe Pitkin, The White Slave Trade and the Immigrants: A Chapter in American Social History (Detroit: Blaine Ethridge Books, 1981), 26.
There was a term for this: Outlook, November 6, 1909.
The imagery implied: Jane Addams, “A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil,” McClure’s Magazine, November 1911.
Reports began to filter: Edwin Sims, “The White Slave Trade,” Woman’s World, September 1908.
Ellis Island inspector Marcus Braun: File 52484-1-F, 1-G, INS.
French authorities complained: Letter from Marcus Braun to Commissioner General of Immigration, September 16, 1909, File 52484/1-F, INS.
McSweeney focused on: Letter from Edward F. McSweeney to Terence V. Powderly, July 27, 1898, Box 125, Series 2, TVP.
In 1908, the case: Mark Thomas Connelly, The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 114–115; U.S. v. Bitty, 208 U.S. 393 (1908).
Former New York police commissioner: Gen. Theodore A. Bingham, The Girl That Disappears: The Real Fact About the White Slave Traffic (Boston: Richard G. Badger, Gorham Press, 1911), 15.
He found that talent: George Kibbe Turner, “The Daughters of the Poor,” McClure’s Magazine, November 1909. For more on the Independent Benevolent Association, see Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 261–262.
The fight against: Mara L. Keire, “The Vice Trust: A Reinterpretation of the White Slavery Scare in the United States, 1907–1917,” Journal of Social History 35, no. 1 (2001).
Some, like Theodore Bingham: Quoted in Cordasco and Pitkin, 22. For more on Bingham, see James Lardner and Thomas Reppetto, NYPD: A City and its Police (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 141–142.
Despite the increased: File 51777-303, INS.
The 1911 Dillingham Commission: “Importing Women for Immoral Purposes: A Partial Report from the Immigration Commission on the Importation and Harboring of Women for Immoral Purposes,” 61st Congress, 2nd Session, Document No. 196, 1909, 68.
On the other hand: “Importing Women for Immoral Purposes,” 58–59.
Single French women: Edward J. Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery, 1870–1939 (New York: Schocken Books, 1983), 166.
The charge of: On the relationship between Jews and prostitution, see Lloyd Gartner, “Anglo-Jewry and the Jewish International Traffic in Prostitution, 1885–1914,” AJS Review 7 (1982); Egal Feldman, “Prostitution, the Alien Woman and the Progressive Imagination, 1910–1915,” American Quarterly, Summer 1967; and Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice.
The link between: Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, 156–157, 160.
Were most prostitutes: “Importing Women for Immoral Purposes,” 60; Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 1982), 139–140; Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 292.
Were large numbers: Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood, 118; Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, 156–157.
The Dillingham Commission: “Importing Women for Immoral Purposes,” 51, 54–55.
William Williams also believed: Letter from William Williams to Commissioner-General of Immigration, December 18, 1912, File 52809-7E, INS.
Williams was probably: Rosen, the Lost Sisterhood, 118, 133–134, 137. On the debate over whether white slavery was myth or reality, see Connelly, The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era, Chapter 6, and Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood, Chapter 7. Connelly argues that white slavery was largely a myth that scapegoated immigrants for the problems in American cities. Rosen argues that “a careful review of the evidence documents a real traffic in women, a historical fact and experience that must be integrated into the record.” Rosen writes that various contemporary investigations showed that “the sale of some women into sexual slavery is an inescapable fact of the American past.” Another historian agrees with Rosen. “Even a superficial sampling of contemporary evidence leaves no doubt that a white-slave traffic existed in the United States.” But while the prostitution business was a reality, “no nationally organized white slave syndicate existed.” Roy Lubove, “The Progressives and the Prostitute,” Historian, May 1962.
The public may have: File 53155-144, INS.
On June 9, 1914: File 53986-43, INS.
The Supreme Court failed: “Redefining ‘Crimes of Moral Turpitude’: A Proposal to Congress.”
The reach of: INS: I-94W Nonimmigrant Visa Waiver Arrival/Departure Form.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: WAR
At a few minutes: On the Black Tom explosion, see Jules Witcover, Sabotage at Black Tom: Imperial Germany’s Secret War in America, 1914–1917 (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1989); Tracie Lynn Provost, “The Great Game: Imperial German Sabotage and Espionage against the United States, 1914–1917,” PhD dissertation, University of Toledo, 2003; NYT, July 31, August 1, 1916; NYW, July 31, August 1, 1916. Witcover called the Black Tom explosion “the centerpiece of one of the greatest and most cunning deceptions ever perpetrated on the United States by a foreign power.”
On Manhattan’s Lower East Side: “Why Dveire Kept Her Head,” Jewish Immigration Bulletin, November 1916.
The few barges: Survey, August 5, 1916. An explosion on the Jersey piers in 1911 also caused damage at Ellis Island. The cause of that explosion was either the careless handling of explosives being loaded onto ships at the Jersey pier or an explosion in a ship’s boiler, which set off ten thousand pounds of black powder. See Files 53173-26 and 53173-26B, NA and NYT, February 2, 1911.
The road to: Quoted in Witcover, Sabotage, 310–311.
Any male over: “President’s Proclamation of a State of War, and Regulation Governing Alien Enemies,” NYT, April 7, 1917. For more on the implications of the detention of German alien enemies in World War I, see Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
The German officers: Frederic C. Howe, The Confessions of a Reformer (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), 272.
One exception was: NYT, June 20, 1917.
Another detainee: File 54188-473E, INS.
Not everyone felt: File 54188-468M, INS.
Most were not: “Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration,” 1918, 14.
Other cases were: File 54188-468H, INS.
The militarization of: “U.S. Immigration Service Bulletin,” April 1, 1918, Folder 6, File 1133, IRL; Thomas Pitkin, Keepers of the Gate: A History of Ellis Island (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 120; NYT, September 23, 1918.
The man in charge: On Howe’s pre–Ellis Island career, see Kevin Mattson, Creating a Democratic Public: The Struggle for Urban Participatory Democracy During the Progressive Era (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998) and Howe, Confessions of a Reformer,240–251.
Howe sought to humanize: Howe, Confessions of a Reformer, 256–257; Survey, October 17, 1914; Outlook, October 21, 1914; Pitkin, Keepers of the Gate, 113–114.
“Aliens traveling in the cabin”: Memo from William Williams to Inspectors, Jan. 22, 1912, and Letter from William Williams to Commissioner-General of Immigration, Jan. 22, 1912, File 53438-15, INS.
News of this inspection: File 53438-15, INS; NYS, January 22, 1912.
With Ellis Island overflowing: File 53139-13B, INS; Frederic C. Howe, “Turned Back in Time of War,” Survey, May 6, 1916.
At Bennet’s urging: “Ellis Island Immigration Station, Hearings Before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, House of Representatives, 64th Congress, First Session, July 28, 1916.”
One case that aroused: “Ellis Island Immigration Station, Hearings,” 54.
At the hearing: “Ellis Island Immigration Station, Hearings,” 53.
Not only was Howe: Howe, Confessions of a Reformer, 270–271.
Alice Gouree: File 54188-482, INS.
Then there was: “Ellis Island Immigration Station, Hearings,” 42–43; Howe, Confessions of a Reformer, 270. In the book, Howe does not refer to Lamarca by name, but the reference is clear. The unnamed woman was “an Italian girl, had been married in Algeria and brought to this country. Her husband had taken her clothes away from her and had kept her in confinement. She had been forced by him to receive men. She was arrested and brought to the island. The husband had not been arrested.”
Giulietta seemed: On the case of Giulietta Lamarca, see File 53986-43, INS.
Bennet charged: NYT, July 19, September 6, 1916.
Howe described: “Ellis Island Immigration Station, Hearings,” 55–56.
Howe’s inattention: Letter from Frederic C. Howe to Woodrow Wilson, December 8, 1914, Series 2, and Letter from Frederic C. Howe to Woodrow Wilson, December 31, 1917, Series 4, WW. For Howe’s outside interests, see NYT, April 28, 1915.
Howe spoke out: NYT, June 11, 1915.
Even the Times: NYT, June 21, 1916.
Even Howe’s choice: Sandra Adickes, To Be Young Was Very Heaven: Women in New York Before the First World War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 59–61, 151.
Randolph Bourne believed: Randolph S. Bourne, “Trans-national America,” Atlantic, July 1916. See also, David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
For Bourne: “Americanization,” New Republic, January 29, 1916.
The president had: Arthur S. Link, Wilson: Campaigns for Progressivism and Peace, 1916–1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 327–328.
The literacy test: Letter from Byron Uhl to Fiorello La Guardia, June 16, 1917, Folder 8, Box 26C7, FLG; NYT, March 28, 1917.
Instead of rejoicing: Barbara Miller Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants: A Changing New England Tradition (New York: Wiley, 1956), 202.
The targeting of Germans: NYT, April 7, 1917, August 2, 1918; Witcover, Sabotage, 66–67.
Then there was: NYT, December 10, 1915, September 23, 24, 1917, September 2, 3, 1918; “Brewing and Liquor Interests and German Propaganda,” Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Sixty-Fifth Congress, Second Session.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: REVOLUTION
As the train approached: NYT, February 10, 1919; Letter from A. D. H. Jackson to Anthony Caminetti, February 13, 1919, File 54235-36C, INS. There are differing accounts of the number of radicals sent from Seattle to New York. One account lists forty-five radicals, while another counts thirty-six with two more joining the group along the train route. The Jackson letter and a letter from immigration officials in Seattle corroborate that the number of radicals leaving Seattle was forty-seven. Letter from John H. Sargent, acting commissioner of immigration in Seattle to Commissioner General of Immigration Anthony Caminetti, February 7, 1919 in “I.W.W. Deportation Cases,” Hearings before a House Subcommittee of the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, 66th Congress, Second Session, April 27–30, 1920. For the other numbers, see Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), 194–195, and William Preston Jr., Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), 198–201.
The train arrived: Letter from A. D. H. Jackson to Anthony Caminetti, February 13, 1919, File 54235-36C, INS; NYT, February 10, 1919.
When the Red Special: New York Call, February 18, 1919.
Attorneys Caroline Lowe: Charles Recht, unpublished autobiography, Chapter 10, Folder 18, Box 1, Collection 176, CR; Preston, Aliens and Dissenters, 200.
In contrast to: New York Call, February 20, 1919.
The detainees were: NYTrib, February 21, 1919.
McDonald and the other: Frederic C. Howe, The Confessions of a Reformer (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), 274–275.
Howe was swimming: Preston, Aliens and Dissenters, 182–183; “The Deportations,” Survey, February 22, 1919.
This expansion of the law: Memo from Thomas Fisher, Immigration Inspector, to Henry W. White, Commissioner of Immigration, Seattle, Washington, August 24, 1918; Letter from Henry W. White to Anthony Caminetti, August 28, 1918, File 54235-36B, INS.
Though he was out: Memo from John M. Abercrombie to All Commissioners of Immigration and Inspectors in Charge, March 14, 1919, File No. 54235-36B, INS.
For those Red Special: Preston, Aliens and Dissenters, 204–205.
Martin de Wal: Survey, May 17, June 14, 1919.
In the middle of this: NYT, June 3, 4, 5, 1919.
Howe was not: Memo from A. Warner Parker to Anthony Caminetti, April 17, 1919, File 54235-85B, INS.
The attacks on: Congressional Record, 66th Congress, 1st session, 1522–1524; Arthur Mann, La Guardia: A Fighter Against His Times, 1882–1933 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1959), 101.
During this second hearing: “Conditions at Ellis Island,” Hearing before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, 66th Congress, 1st Session, November 24, 26, 28, 1919, 21, 76.
Back inside: “Conditions at Ellis Island,” 29–30.
The press had a field day: LD, December 13, 1919; NYW, November 25, 1919.
With Secretary Wilson: Kenneth D. Ackerman, Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2007), 50–59, 112. William N. Vayle [sic], “Before the Buford Sailed,” NYT, January 11, 1920.
If the earlier roundups: Letter from Francis G. Caffey to Frederic C. Howe, July 12, 1917, Folder R57, EG.
Beginning in 1907: Oscar Straus Diary, March 6, 1908, 165–166, Box 22, OS.
For two years: Candace Falk (ed.), Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, vol. 2, Making Speech Free, 1902–1909 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 66–68, 254–257.
As Julius Goldman: File 54235-30, INS.
When released from jail: “Deportation Hearing of Emma Goldman,” Ellis Island, NY, October 27, and November 12, 1919, Folder 63R, EG.
Detained at Ellis Island: File 54709-449, INS; Constantine Panunzio, The Deportation Cases of 1919–1920 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), 60–62.
Apart from the: “Deportation: Its Meaning and Menace, Last Message to the People of America by Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman,” Ellis Island, New York, U.S.A., December 1919, LOC.
In his waning: John Lombardi, Labor’s Voice in the Cabinet: A History of the Department of Labor from its Origin to 1921 (New York: AMS Press, 1968), 132; Louis F. Post, “Living a Long Life Over Again,” 309, 322, unpublished manuscript, LOC.
Post complained: Louis F. Post, “Administrative Decisions in Connection with Immigration,” American Political Science Review 10 (May 1916).
Still in office: Louis F. Post, The Deportations Delirium of Nineteen-Twenty (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1923), 1–27.
Post found that: Emma Goldman, Living My Life, vol. 2 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931), chapter 51.
Collecting their things: Alice Wexler, Emma Goldman in Exile: From the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 13–15. For more on Goldman’s deportation, see Candace Serena Falk, Love, Anarchy and Emma Goldman(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 181–182, and Alice Wexler, Emma Goldman: An Intimate Life, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 271–276; Ackerman, Young J. Edgar, 160.
Colorado congressman: Vayle, “Before the Buford Sailed.” A slightly different version of this account appears in Congressional Record, January 5, 1920.
It must have been: Ackerman, Young J. Edgar, 160.
Upon arrival at: Post, The Deportations Delirium, 27.
The press was quick: Letter from F. W. Berkshire, Supervising Inspector to Anthony Caminetti, Commissioner General of Immigration, February 11, 1920, File 54235-36G, INS; LD, January 3, 1920; Post, The Deportations Delirium, 7.
“One could not imagine”: NYT, December 22, 1919.
A few years before: Bugajewitz v. Adams, 228 U.S. 585 (1913).
Post made enemies: Ackerman, Young J. Edgar, 274–276.
At the height: Panunzio, The Deportation Cases of 1919–1920, 16; Jane Perry Clark, Deportation of Aliens from the United States to Europe (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 225.
When the war ended: Fred Howe believed that big business was behind the war and repeatedly tried to convince Wilson of his theory that “it was not the Kaiser, nor the Czar, but the imperialistic adventurers who had driven their countries into conflict. Secret diplomacy, the conflict of bankers, the activity of munition-makers, exploiters, and concessionaires in the Mediterranean, in Morocco, in south and central Africa, had brought on the cataclysm; glacial-like aggregations of capital and credit were responsible for the war.” Howe, Confessions of a Reformer, 287.
No one felt: Howe, Confessions of a Reformer, 279–282.
To Howe, the brutality: Frederic C. Howe, “Lynch Law and the Immigrant Alien,” Nation, February 14, 1920.
Before leaving Ellis Island: Howe, Confessions of a Reformer, 327–328.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: QUOTAS
Immigration officials stationed: NYT, July 2, 1923; Henry H. Curran, Pillar to Post (New York: Scribner’s, 1941), 287–288.
Restrictionists had long: “Plain Remarks on Immigration for Plain Americans,” SP, February 12, 1921.
Americans feared that: LD, December 18, 1920; Lothrop Stoddard, “The Permanent Menace from Europe,” in Madison Grant and Charles Steward Davison, eds., The Alien in Our Midst or Selling Our Birthright for a Mess of Pottage (New York: Galton, 1930), 226.
“The influx of aliens”: NYT, November 27, 1920.
This was all too: NYT, November 17, 1920.
As Congress moved: “The League’s Numerical Limitation Bill,” Publications of the Immigration Restriction League, No. 69, IRL.
Hall lived long: Immigration and Other Interests of Prescott Farnsworth Hall, compiled by Mrs. Prescott F. Hall, (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1922).
If one of those ships: NYT, August 1, September 2, 1923.
A major backbone: Desmond King, Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 112.
The National German-American: Charles Thomas Johnson, Culture at Twilight: The National German-American Alliance, 1901–1918 (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 102, 104–107, 118; NYT, March 8, 1916.
The growing popularity: Prescott F. Hall, “Immigration and World Eugenics,” Publications of the Immigration Restriction League, No. 71, IRL. Mark Snyderman and R. J. Herrnstein argue that intelligence testing had little effect on the passage of immigration quotas, while Leon Kamin argues the opposite. Mark Snyderman and R. J. Herrnstein, “Intelligence Tests and the Immigration Act of 1924,” American Psychologist, September 1983; Leon Kamin, The Science and Politics of I.Q. (Potomac, MD: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1974). Those taking a more nuanced view include Steven A. Gelb, Garland E. Allen, Andrew Futterman, and Barry A. Mehler, “Rewriting Mental Testing History: The View from the American Psychologist,” Sage Race Relations Abstracts, May 1986; and Franz Samelson, “Putting Psychology on the Map: Ideology and Intelligence Testing,” in Allan R. Buss, ed., Psychology in Social Context (New York: Irvington, 1979), 135–136. Stephen Jay Gould seems to want to have it both ways, arguing that immigration restriction was inevitable in the 1920s even without eugenics, but that “the timing, and especially the peculiar character, of the 1924 Restriction Act [sic] clearly reflected the lobbying of scientists and eugenicists.” Stephen Jay Gould, Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (New York: W.W. Norton, 1983), 301, and Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 261–262.
Madison Grant’s: Madison Grant, “The Racial Transformation of America,” NAR, March 1924; Madison Grant, “America for the Americans,” Forum, September 1925.
“These immigrants adopt”: SP, May 7, 1921.
Such views were: SP, February 28, 1920; February 12, May 7, November 26, 1921.
America’s postwar: File 53986-43, INS.
His new job: Curran, Pillar to Post, 285–286.
“It was a poor place”: Curran, Pillar to Post, 291–296.
There was little that: Outlook, November 2, 1921; Delineator, March 1921.
Complaints by the British: Von Briesen Commission Report, 1903, File 52727/2, INS; Curran, Pillar to Post, 309.
Even Fred Howe: Frederic C. Howe, Confessions of a Reformer (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), 257–258.
The British seemed: NYT, July 29, 1923.
A female British journalist: LD, August 4, 1923.
There had been: NYT, July 2, 1923; LD, September 22, 1923; Rex Hunter, “Eight Days on Ellis Island,” Nation, October 28, 1925.
What the British: NYT, December 19, 1922.
Yet this was not: “Despatch [sic] from H.M. Ambassador at Washington reporting on Conditions at Ellis Island Immigration Station,” 1923, NYPL.
Curran dismissed: Henry H. Curran, “Fewer and Better,” SP, Nov. 15, 1924; Curran, 298–299.
Curran admitted: Henry H. Curran, “Fewer and Better, or None,” SP, April 26, 1924.
Though this made: Curran, Pillar to Post, 296–297.
The shifting of inspection: William E. Chandler, “Consular Certificates for Intending Immigrants,” Independent, October 1, 1891.
Fiorello La Guardia: Letter from Fiorello La Guardia to Anthony Caminetti, September 9, 1916, Folder 8, Box 26C7, FLG.
Though La Guardia: Thomas Kessner, Fiorello H. La Guardia and the Making of Modern New York (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 120–124.
These new quotas: Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 56–57.
Stricter quotas led to: Letter from James J. Davis, Secretary of Labor to President Warren G. Harding, April 16, 1923, Folder 5, File 75, WGH; “President Calvin Coolidge’s Remarks at Governor’s Conference at the White House,” October 20, 1923, Series 1, File 52, CC.
Deportations also increased: Jane Perry Clark, Deportation of Aliens from the United States to Europe (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 29.
To rectify the situation: For a discussion of the national origins plan, see King, Making Americans, 204–228 and NYT, June 30, 1929; Harry H. Laughlin, “The Control of Trends in the Racial Composition of the American People,” in Grant and Davison, eds., The Alien in Our Midst or Selling Our Birthright for a Mess of Pottage.
The commission calculated: NYT, August 7, 1925.
Edward F. McSweeney: For more on the “history wars” of the 1920s and McSweeney’s role, see Jonathan Zimmerman, “Each ‘Race’ Could Have Its Heroes Sung: Ethnicity and the History Wars in the 1920s,” Journal of American History 87, no, 1 (June 2000), and Christopher J. Kauffman, “Edward McSweeney, the Knights of Columbus, and the Irish-American Response to Anglo-Saxonism, 1900–1925,” American Catholic Studies 114, no. 4 (Winter 2003). See also, NYT, September 8, 1921, June 9, 1923, and BG, July 10, 1921.
More substantively: W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America (Boston: Stratford, 1924) and David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 95–96.
To a pro-immigration: NYT, August 7, 1925. See also Edward F. McSweeney, “The Immigration Act of 1924: Fallaciousness of the ‘National Origins’ Theory,” Journal of the American-Irish Historical Society 223 (1926).
In the late afternoon: Framingham News, November 17, 19, 1928.
Powderly had once: T. V. Powderly, “Immigration’s Menace to the National Health,” NAR, July 1902; Letter from Terence V. Powderly to Frederick Wallis, September 9, 1920, Box 139, TVP.
Freed from the burdens: Vincent J. Falzone, Terence V. Powderly: Middle-Class Reformer (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1978), 191–193.
Powderly was not: Henry H. Goddard, “Feeblemindedness: A Question of Definition,” American Association for the Study of the Feeble Minded: Proceedings and Addresses 33 (1928); Leila Zenderland, Measuring Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 325–327; Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 202–204.
By the time: Edward Alsworth Ross, Seventy Years of It: An Autobiography (New York: Appleton-Century, 1936), 275–277.
Nine-year-old Edoardo Corsi: Edward Corsi, In the Shadow of Liberty (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 3–7, 22. As proof that the memory of immigrants, like all memory, is usually fuzzy around the edges, Corsi’s account of his family’s arrival is slightly off. The Corsi family arrived in November 1906, not October 1907 as Corsi notes, meaning that Edward was nine years old, not ten. Also, young Edward is listed as “Nerino Corsi” on the steamship list.
Those days were: LD, February 24, 1934; “Report of the Ellis Island Committee,” March 1934.
The 1930s would: LD, February 24, 1934.
The combination of: Corsi, In the Shadow of Liberty, 95.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: PRISON
“Herzlich Willkommen!”: Arnold Krammer, Undue Process: The Untold Story of America’s German Alien Internees (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 1997), 10–11, 25–26, 30. For more on the issue, see John Christgau, “Enemies”: World War II Alien Internment (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1985).
On December 8, 1941: Memo from Major Lemuel B. Schofield to J. Edgar Hoover, December 8, 1941, File 56125-29, INS.
Some of the internees: Jerre Mangione, An Ethnic At Large: A Memoir of America in the Thirties and Forties (New York: Putnam’s, 1978), 321.
A large number of enemy: File 56125-29, INS; “Harbor Camp for Enemy Aliens,” NYTM, January 25, 1942. See also “The Detention of Krauss,” New Yorker, March 6, 1943.
The Office of Strategic Services: The OSS report and other related documents can be found in File 56125-86, INS.
Hoover was right: Not to be outdone, Hoover later placed his own FBI agents among the detainees at Ellis Island. According to a German who was temporarily detained at Ellis Island: “You see, there were FBI men scattered among us as observers. You don’t know them, and once a roommate I’d had for a month or more left, and one of the guards told me that fellow had been an FBI man on duty.” “The Detention of Krauss,” New Yorker, March 6, 1943.
One Justice Department official: File 56125-86, INS.
Although Bishop was taken: NYT, January 15, 1940. On the Christian Front, see Theodore Irwin, “Inside the Christian Front,” Forum, March 1940, and Ronald H. Bayor, Neighbors in Conflict: The Irish, Germans, Jews, and Italians of New York City, 1929–1941 (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 97–104.
One of them was: On the Pinza case, see NYT, March 13, 1942; Ezio Pinza, An Autobiography (New York: Rinehart, 1958), 202–228; Sarah Goodyear, “When Being Italian Was a Crime,” Village Voice, April 11, 2000; “Statement of Doris L. Pinza,” Subcommittee on the Constitution, Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. House of Representatives, October 26, 1999.
The other half: Rose Marie Neupert, “The Neupert Family Story,” http://www. gaic.info/real_neupert.html.
Most of the detainees: NYT, September 23, 1942. For more on these camps, see Mangione, An Ethnic At Large, 319–352.
By March 1946: Stephen Fox, Fear Itself: Inside the FBI Roundup of German Americans During World War II (New York: iUniverse, Inc., 2005), 327–328.
One of those not holding up: On the story of the Hackenbergs, see Fox, Fear Itself, 325–332.
Hundreds of these enemy aliens: NYT, January 3, 1947; Letter from Rosina and Max Rapp to Senator William Langer, July 23, 1947, Folder 12, Box 214, WL.
The Fuhr family: On the Fuhr family, see Fox, Fear Itself, 109–126.
While in custody: Fox, Fear Itself, 114, 122.
Langer introduced a bill: Senate Bill 1749, July 26, 1947, 80th Congress, 1st Session; Fox, Fear Itself, 124–126; Eberhard E. Fuhr, “My Internment by the U.S. Government,” http://www.gaic.info/real_fuhr.html.
One of those not on Langer’s list: Sworn Statement of William Langer, August 1947, Folder 9, Box 214, WL; Senate Bill 1083, April 10, 1947, 80th Congress, 1st Session; NYT, September 11, 1947.
At the end of June 1948: Ahrens v. Clark, 335 U.S. 188 (1948); NYT, July 7, 8, 1948; Fox, Fear Itself, 140.
In the following weeks: Fox, Fear Itself, 329–333; NYT, November 17, 1945. For lists of German detainees and the disposition of their cases, see Folder 1, Box 257, WL.
Although exact numbers: On the number of enemy alien detainees, see Krammer, Undue Process, 171. Two websites document the experience of German internment during World War II: the German American Internee Coalition, http://www.gaic.info/index.html, and http://www.foitimes.com/.
The bill also granted: On the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, see Michael J. Ybarra, Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist Hunt (Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2004) 509–534.
President Truman came out: “Text of President’s Message Vetoing the Communist-Control Bill,” NYT, September 23, 1950.
Embarrassed at having: W. L. White, “The Isle of Detention,” American Mercury, May 1951.
Gulda arrived at: NYT, October 9, 1950; Time, October 23, 1950; Newsweek, Oct. 23, 1950; A. H. Raskin, “New Role for Ellis Island,” NYTM, November 12, 1950.
The law also affected: Letter from Arthur A. Sweberg to President Harry Truman, March 22, 1951; Letter from Mrs. Josephine Mazzeo to President Harry Truman, March 28, 1951, Folder 2750-C Misc, Box 1717, HST.
George Voskovec: New Yorker, May 12, 1951; NYT, December 4, 1950.
As Truman predicted: NYT, March 22, 1951.
Upon his release: NYT, April 3, 1951; New Yorker, May 12, 1951.
Voskovec would later: NYT, November 13, 1955.
When Ellen arrived: Ellen Raphael Knauff, The Ellen Knauff Story (New York: W.W. Norton, 1952), 8.
The government’s case: The case against Ellen Knauff is summarized in Memorandum for the President from J. Howard McGrath, Attorney General, received July 14, 1950, Justice Department Folder, Box 22, HST.
It would be more: Knauff, The Ellen Knauff Story, 29.
The Court relied on: Knauff v. Shaughnessy, 338 U.S. 537 (1950); David Cole, Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism (New York: New Press, 2003), 136–137; Charles D. Weisselberg, “The Exclusion and Detention of Aliens: Lessons from the Lives of Ellen Knauff and Ignatz Mezei,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 143, no. 4 (April 1995).
Having lost: NYT, May 18, 1950.
In the meantime: Time, April 17, 1950.
In the spring of 1950: Knauff, The Ellen Knauff Story, 138.
The press attention: Memo for Charles Rose from Edward A. Harris, June 15, 1950; Memo for Steve Spingarn from Harry S. Truman, June 17, 1950, Justice Department Folder, Box 22, HST.
The Justice Department stalled: Memorandum for Peyton Ford, Deputy Attorney General from Steve Spingarn, August 2, 1950; Memorandum for Peyton Ford, Deputy Attorney General from Steve Spingarn, September 25, 1950, Justice Department Folder, Box 22, HST.
However, the Justice Department: NYT, February 28, 1950; Knauff, The Ellen Knauff Story, 81.
It took the board members: NYT, March 27, 1951.
By the end of August: U.S. Department of Justice, Board of Immigration Appeals, File A-6937471, reprinted in Knauff, The Ellen Knauff Story.
McGrath released: NYT, November 3, 1951.
However, there were: NYT, July 3, 1953; Knauff, The Ellen Knauff Story, 54.
Though she ultimately: Anthony Lewis, “Security and Liberty: Preserving the Values of Freedom,” in Richard C. Leone and Greg Anrig Jr., The War on Our Freedoms: Civil Liberties in an Age of Terrorism (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), 72.
The widespread sympathy: For the story of C. L. R. James and his detention at Ellis Island, see C. L. R. James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, reprint (London: Allison & Busby, 1985), 132–173; Emily Eakin, “Embracing the Wisdom of a Castaway,” NYT, August 4, 2001; Farrukh Dhondy, C. L. R. James: A Life (New York: Pantheon, 2001), 107–111.
Mezei was not: On the Mezei case, see Cole, Enemy Aliens, 138–139; Weisselberg, “The Exclusion and Detention of Aliens”; Richard A. Serrano, “Detained, Without Details,” Los Angeles Times, December 21, 2005.
The next step: Shaughnessy v. Mezei, 345 U.S. 206 (1953).
A defeated Mezei: NYT, April 23, 1953.
The government had a strong: Weisselberg, “The Exclusion and Detention of Aliens,” 975–978. Many years later, Mezei’s stepdaugher remembered how Ignatz would enlist his stepchildren to hand out Communist leaflets on election day. Richard A. Serrano, “Detained, Without Details,” Los Angeles Times, December 21, 2005.
Whereas Knauff was: Weisselberg, “The Exclusion and Detention of Aliens,” 979.
The special three-man board: Weisselberg, “The Exclusion and Detention of Aliens,” 983–984.
By 1954, Ellis Island: NYT, December 6, 1954.
On Veterans Day: NYT, November 12, 13, 1954.
“They rewarded with”: NYT, November 14, 1954.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: DECLINE
A businessman reading: WSJ, September 18, 1956.
The sale was made: NYT, November 14, 1954.
So the GSA opened: Barbara Blumberg, “Celebrating the Immigrant: An Administrative History of the Statue of Liberty National Monument, 1952–1982,” National Park Service, 1985, Chapter 5.
In response: Blumberg, “Celebrating the Immigrant.”
Some of the proposals: NYT, February 3, 1958.
When bidding opened: Business Week, September 29, 1956.
Ellis Island’s future: NYTM, May 25, 1958.
“This is not just”: NYT, December 20, 1960; December 8, 1962.
To Corsi: Edward Corsi, In the Shadow of Liberty: The Chronicle of Ellis Island (New York: Macmillan, 1935), 281–295.
With full control: Blumberg, “Celebrating the Immigrant,” chapter 6; Time, March 4, 1966; NYT, February 25, 1966.
The centerpiece of: New York World-Telegram and Sun, March 7, 1966.
There were other: NYT, February 26, 1966; Harry T. Brundidge, “The Passing of Ellis Island,” American Mercury, December 1954.
The island was a mess: NYT, July 16, 1964, March 5, 1968.
For some white: Peter Morton Coan, Ellis Island Interviews: In Their Own Words (New York: Checkmark Books, 1997), 220; Paul Knaplund, Moorings Old and New: Entries in an Immigrant’s Log (Madison, WI: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1963), 148. See also David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 118–119.
Meanwhile, black leaders: On African-American attitudes toward immigration, see Daryl Scott, “‘Immigrant Indigestion’: A. Philip Randolph: Radical and Restrictionist,” Center for Immigration Studies, Backgrounder, June 1999, http://www.cis.org/articles/1999/back699.html, and “‘Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are’: Black Americans on Immigration,” Center for Immigration Studies, Paper 10, June 1996, http://www.cis.org/articles/1996/paper10.html.
In the early morning hours: NYT, March 17, 1970.
It would prove: Nixon Tapes, Conversation No. 610-1, Nov. 1, 1971, RMN. The conversation is not transcribed and the audio quality of the recording is poor. This is the author’s rough transcription of the account. The aides at the meeting included John Mitchell, George Schultz, and H. R. Haldeman.
Two days after: On the NEGRO takeover of Ellis Island, see NYT, January 8, July 25, 26, August 2, 19, 20, 21, 1970; Newsweek, September 28, 1970; and Blumberg, “Celebrating the Immigrant,” chapter 6.
This did not deter: NEGRO brochure, WHCF, SMOF, Leonard Garment, Box 138, RMN.
Matthew continually referred: In fact, a few years earlier, Irving Kristol wrote a long piece arguing the same idea. See Irving Kristol, “The Negro Today is Like the Immigrant Yesterday,” NYTM, September 11, 1966.
Not surprisingly: Blumberg, “Celebrating the Immigrant,” 6.
Since the mid-1960s: NYT, April 24, 1973.
As the Ellis Island colony: NYT, November 29, December 11, 1973. In November 1973, Matthew was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. In March 1975, an appeals court struck down the conviction, arguing that errors by the judge merited a dismissal.
Around the same time: Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970).
Ethnic pride: Michael Novak, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (New York: Macmillan, 1971). On the phenomenon of white ethnicity, see Vincent J. Cannato, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and his Struggle to Save New York (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 389–441; and Mathew Frye Jacobson, Roots, Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post Civil-Rights America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
CHAPTER NINETEEN: THE NEW PLYMOUTH ROCK
On this patriotic: NYT, July 3, 1986.
Although resoration of the: F. Ross Holland, Idealists, Scoundrels, and the Lady: An Insider’s View of the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Project (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 80, 205.
The Statue of Liberty: NYT, November 4, 1985.
In November 1985: Roberta Gratz and Eric Fettmann, “The Selling of Miss Liberty,” Nation, November 9, 1985. For other articles by Gratz and Fettmann on the topic, see “Mr. Iacocca Meets the Press,” Nation, March 8, 1986; “Post-Iacocca” Nation, April 19, 1986; and “Whitewashing the Statue of Liberty,” Nation, June 7, 1986. F. Ross Holland dismisses the complaints of Gratz and Fettmann as “scurrilous” and “liberally sprinkled with untruths, half-truths, misinformation, and distorted facts.” Idealists, Scoundrels, and the Lady, 180–181.
For some, it was all: Jacob Weisberg, “Gross National Production,” New Republic, June 23, 1986.
If the public: Lee Iacocca with William Novak, Iacocca: An Autobiography (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), 339–441.
His father, Nicola: Iacocca with Novak, Iacocca, 5; Peter Wyden, The Unknown Iacocca (New York: William Morrow, 1987), 260.
“Hard work”: Iacocca with Novak, Iacocca, 339.
To others, that vision: Holland, Idealists, Scoundrels, and the Lady, 158–159; Roberta Gratz and Eric Fettmann, “The Battle for Ellis Island,” Nation, November 30, 1985.
A historian made: Lynn Johnson, “Ellis Island: Historic Preservation from the Supply Side,” Radical History Review, September 1984.
How should the: NYT, January 14, 21, 1984.
The former inspection: For more on the evolution of the historical memory of Plymouth Rock, see John Seelye, Memory’s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
This process began: Jacob A. Riis, “In the Gateway of Nations,” Century Magazine, March 1903; “The New Plymouth Rock,” Youth’s Companion, December 14, 1905.
In 1914, a writer: Mary Antin, They Who Knock at Our Gates: A Complete Gospel of Immigration (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1914), 98.
That an immigrant: Werner Sollors, “National Identity and Ethnic Diversity: ‘Of Plymouth Rock and Jamestown and Ellis Island’ or Ethnic Literature and Some Redefinitions of ‘America,’” in Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Meally, eds., History and Memory in African-American Culture(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 103–105; Agnes Repplier, “The Modest Immigrant,” Atlantic Monthly, September 1915.
Other native-born Americans: Thomas Darlington, “The Medic-Economic Aspect of the Immigration Problem,” North American Review, December 21, 1906.
In the late 1930s: Sollors, “National Identity and Ethnic Diversity,” 108–109; Dan Shiffman, Rooting Multiculturalism: The Work of Louis Adamic; Louis Adamic, From Many Lands (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939), 296–299.
In deeply nostalgic: Leo Rosten, “Not So Long Ago, There Was a Magic Island,” Look, December 24, 1968; Edward M. Kennedy, “Ellis Island,” Esquire, April 1967; Thomas M. Pitkin, Keepers of the Gate: A History of Ellis Island (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 177.
In the late 1970s: “Ellis Island Remembered,” September 23, 1978, NYPL.
Riding this wave: F. Ross Holland, Idealists, Scoundrels, and the Lady: An Insider’s View of the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Project (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 5–6; NYT, July 25, 1981.
“The Battle for”: Michael Barone, “The Battle for Ellis Island,” Washington Post, August 14, 1984, and Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 320–322.
In 1988: NYT, September 4, 1988; Michael Dukakis, “A New Era of Greatness for America”: Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, July 21, 1988; and Jacobson, Roots Too, 327–331.
Ferraro and Dukakis: Meg Greenfield, “The Immigrant Mystique,” Newsweek, August 8, 1988.
At the other side: NYT, January 14, 1993, August 11, 2000.
What name does: NYT, September 21, 1990.
The most famous: The Sean Ferguson story also appears in Alan M. Kraut, The Huddled Masses: The Immigrant in American Society, 1880–1921 (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1982), 56–57. While Kraut calls the story possibly apocryphal, he uses it to illustrate the changing of names by officials at Ellis Island. One possible explanation of the story has the original Sean Ferguson as a Yiddish-speaking actor named Berel Bienstock. When Bienstock came to the United States to seek a career in the movies, his agent suggested that he Americanize his name. When he finally got to California and met with a movie producer who asked him his name, the nervous Bienstock replied in Yiddish “Schoen fergessen” and the producer wrote down his name as Sean Ferguson. But that story might also be apocryphal. See Stephen J. Sass, “In the Name of Sean Ferguson,” JewishJournal.com, June 21, 2002, http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=8761.
The stories multiply: Ellen Levine, illustrated by Wayne Parmenter, If Your Name Was Changed at Ellis Island (New York: Scholastic, 1993); Ellen Levine claims that her grandfather’s original name was Louis Nachinovsky, but immigration inspectors at Ellis Island “changed many Jewish names to Levine or Cohen.” And so her grandfather had become Louis Levine. Another book on Ellis Island, under the header “There’s a Man Goin’ Round Changing Names,” discusses how “tens of thousands” of names were changed at Ellis Island. More discussion of name changes can be found in David M. Brownstone, Irene M. Frank, and Douglass Brownstone, Island of Hope, Island of Tears (New York: MetroBooks, 2002), 177–179.
In an interview: Interview with Sophia Kreitzberg, “Voices from Ellis Island.”
Then there is the joke: Joseph Epstein, “Death Benefits,” Weekly Standard, May 21, 2007. Although Epstein tells the Moishe Pipik story as a joke, he still believes that the “impatience of officials at Ellis Island altered lots of Eastern European surnames.”
Nearly all of these: On the name change myth, see Alan Berliner’s documentary, The Sweetest Sound, reviewed in WSJ, June 25, 2001.
The inclusive nature: This issue came up in the development of the plans for the museum in the 1980s. See Holland, Idealists, Scoundrels, and the Lady, 184–185.
Historians are supposed to: NYT, September 7, 1990; Mike Wallace, Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 70–71. Wallace is wrong to claim that “for all Reagan’s celebration of the Statue as the ‘mother of exiles’ he was then doing his best to slam the open door shut.” Anti-immigration measures were never part of Reagan’s politics or rhetoric. The major piece of immigration legislation during the Reagan years, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, did not call for immigration restriction, but instead created an amnesty program for illegal immigrants already in the country, as well as measures designed to punish employers who employed illegal immigrants. The number of immigrants remained remarkably steady during the Reagan years, going from 530,639 in 1980 to 643,025 in 1988, before jumping to over 1 million in each of the next three years. Peter Schuck has written that the 1980s produced immigration policies that were “remarkably liberal and expansive by historical standards.” Wallace, 58; Peter H. Schuck, Citizens, Strangers, and In-Between: Essays on Immigration and Citizenship (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 92.
In addition: Wallace, Mickey Mouse History, 57. For other academic critics of Ellis Island, see Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 177–187, and John Bodnar, “Symbols and Servants: Immigrant America and the Limits of Public History,” Journal of American History 73, no. 1 (June 1986). For a more positive academic appraisal of Ellis Island, see Judith Smith, “Celebrating Immigration History at Ellis Island,” American Quarterly, March 1992.
Art professor: Erica Rand, The Ellis Island Snow Globe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 177.
It is hard for: Ira De A. Reid, The Negro Movement: His Background, Characteristics, and Social Adjustment, 1899–1937 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 42; NYT, May 30, 1986.
David Roediger’s: David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005).
For historian: Jacboson, Roots Too, 204–205.
Another group was: Samuel Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 37–39, 46; Seelye, Memory’s Nation, 628–629.
In the years since: NYT, September 7, 1990.
Ellis Island’s iconic status: For a print version of the TD Ameritrade advertisement, see NYT, April 26, 2006, A11.
In the 1990s: New Jersey v. New York 523 U.S. 767 (1998); NYT, April 3, 1997, January 13, 1998, May 26, 1998, August 13, 2001; WP, May 27, 1998.
To help with fundraising: On the Arrow advertising and fundraising campaign, see http://www.weareellisisland.org. A collection of recent photographs of the abandoned southern section of the island can be found in Stephen Wilkes, Ellis Island: Ghosts of Freedom (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006).
In a different context: NYT, August 31, 2001.408 Whether Ellis Island: NYT, April 3, 1997; Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, “Remarks at Naturalization Ceremony on Ellis Island with President Bush,” July 10, 2001, http://www.nyc.gov/html/rwg/html/2001b/ellis_island.html.
EPILOGUE
“We should not let”: Time, December 15, 1980.
Wolf may have believed: NYTM, March 22, 1998.
In this most recent: Matt Towery, “Immigration: The Ellis Island Solution,” Townhall.com, May 31, 2007.
Unhappy with: Samuel Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 189, 225.
As Barbara Jordan: “Testimony of Barbara Jordan, Chair, U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, Before a Joint U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims and U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration,” June 28, 1995. See also, Mark Krikorian, “Immigration and Civil Rights in the Wake of September 11th,” Testimony prepared for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, October 12, 2001, http://www.cis.org/articles/2001/msktestimony1001.html.
Much of the discussion: Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2, 11.
The plenary power: On recent trends in immigration rights and citizenship, see Peter H. Schuck, Citizens, Strangers, and In-Between: Essays on Immigration and Citizenship (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 19–87; Linda S. Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 37–76; and Hiroshi Motomura, “Immigration Law After a Century of Plenary Power: Phantom Constitutional Norms and Statutory Interpretation,” Yale Law School, December 1990. Michael Walzer makes a strong case for the retention of some boundaries for national membership in Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 31–63.
In a 2001 Supreme Court: Zadvydas v. Davis, 533 U.S. 678 (2001). See Trevor Morrison, “The Supreme Court and Immigration Law: A New Commitment to Avoiding Hard Constitutional Questions?” July 31, 2001, http://writ.news. findlaw.com/commentary/20010731_morrison.html.
Before the rise: Schuck, Citizens, Strangers, 80; Krikorian, “Immigration and Civil Rights in the Wake of September 11th.”