Part II
Chapter 3
That there is such a problem [immigration] no one doubts. It is in the air. It is in the conversation and the speculation of all parts of the country.
—New York World, 1892
A great system has been perfected on Ellis Island for sifting the grain from the chaff…not as a dam to keep out good and bad alike, but as a sieve fine enough in the mesh to keep out the diseased, the pauper, and the criminal while admitting the immigrant with two strong arms, a sound body and a stout heart.
—Dr. A. J. McLaughlin, 1903
AS SHE EXITED THE BARGE JOHN E. MOORE, YOUNG ANNIE Moore tripped across the gangplank landing her ashore. One could forgive her nervous clumsiness. It was the first morning of 1892 and the fifteen-year-old from County Cork, Ireland, was being rushed from the gaily decorated barge to the new immigration station on Ellis Island.
Even though Washington officials had nixed the idea of a large celebration for the grand opening, the sound of bells and shrieking whistles could still be heard over the noise coming from the crowd of newsmen and government officials. Having spent twelve days at sea, Moore would have been startled by the reception and was likely a little anxious as officials ushered her into the building. Amid the confusion and commotion, she made sure not to lose sight of her two younger brothers: eleven-year-old Anthony and seven-year-old Phillip.
Annie Moore had no idea she would be entering history books as the first immigrant to arrive at Ellis Island. After a brief inspection, she was signed into the entry books by an official from the Treasury Department and given a ten-dollar gold piece by Colonel John Weber, the commissioner of Ellis Island. “Is this for me to keep, sir,” a blushing Annie asked Weber, embarrassed by all of the attention. She then thanked him, saying that it was the largest amount of money she had ever seen and she would keep it forever as a cherished memento of the occasion.
She was soon reunited with her father, Matt, who had sent for his children. Their destination was Monroe Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a neighborhood teeming with immigrants like the Moores and where, just a few blocks from the family’s apartment, a nineteen-year-old budding politician named Al Smith was beginning to make his way in the world.
How Annie became the first official immigrant at Ellis Island is unclear. One story claims that officials had rushed her ahead of a male Austrian immigrant. Another claimed that a fellow passenger named Mike Tierney, in a “spark of Celtic gallantry,” pulled the Austrian away from the gangplank by his collar, shouting “Ladies first,” and let young Annie pass.
Annie Moore’s story is an oft-told tale and ultimately it is impossible to know whether her selection as the first arrival at Ellis Island was pure luck or a conscious decision by officials. It would not be surprising if officials had picked Moore out early for special treatment. After all, one of the main purposes of Ellis Island was to reassure increasingly anxious Americans that public officials were on guard to sift out undesirable immigrants. It is hard to argue that Annie Moore and her rosy cheeks, with younger brothers in tow, wasn’t a reassuring image—although fifty years earlier, the arrival of County Cork’s surplus population would not have been looked upon with much approval.
But a look at the rest of her shipmates tells a more complicated story. Annie and her two brothers and four other Irish immigrants all embarked on the steamship Nevada at the port of Queenstown. When the seven Irish travelers got on the Nevada in late December 1891, the ship already had 117 passengers who had boarded in Liverpool. With 124 passengers, the Nevada made its way toward New York Harbor. Twenty of the passengers, including ten American citizens, traveled in cabin accommodations, while the rest settled for steerage.
Roughly one-third of the Nevada’s passengers hailed from northern Europe: twelve English, seven Irish, two German, two French, and fourteen Swedish. The vast majority of the passengers accompanying Annie Moore were Russian Jews, fleeing the increasingly oppressive measures of the czar. Seventy-seven men, women, and children—over 60 percent of the passengers—had made their way from Russia to England and were now taking their final journey to America. If Annie Moore’s prominence on that day was a bow to the old immigrants from a half-century earlier, the reality of most of the Nevada’s passengers was decidedly new immigrant.
Most of the travelers were in their twenties and thirties. The oldest was a fifty-year-old tailor from Russia, while the youngest was four-month-old Sara Abramowitz. Most would end up staying in New York, but some headed for Pennsylvania, Maryland, Minnesota, and even Wyoming. Most listed their professions as farmers and laborers, while others were skilled laborers like tinsmiths, bookmakers, machinists, and tailors.
When the Nevada entered New York Harbor, it did not head directly for the immigration station. The waters around the island were too shallow and its pier could not accommodate even the smallest transatlantic ship, meaning that ships would have to dock in Manhattan and unload their passengers. From there, immigrants would board smaller ferries, like the John E. Moore, which would take them to Ellis Island, where they would undergo the formal inspection process.
Not all of the passengers who sailed into New York Harbor alongside Annie Moore would end up at Ellis Island. The ship’s twenty cabin passengers could head directly to their destinations on the mainland, whether U.S. citizens or not. An inkling of the rationale for such differential treatment can be found on the ship’s manifest. Whereas steerage passengers listed their occupations with proper plebian titles like laborer or farmer, the twenty cabin passengers on the Nevada were marked down simply as “Gentleman” or “Lady,” signifying their more rarified social status.
As Annie Moore was entering the facility at Ellis Island, two more ships—the City of Paris and the Victoria—were waiting in the harbor. By noon, some 700 steerage passengers from all three ships were at Ellis Island. It is doubtful that immigration officials would have chosen any of the passengers from the Victoria as their celebrated first immigrant. Having just arrived from the ports of Palermo and Naples, 311 of the Victoria’s 313 steerage passengers hailed from southern Italy.
Colonel Weber noted that while officials processed 700 immigrants the first day, the new facilities could handle thousands more in a day. Most people assumed that such a capacity would never be reached. For now, even the New York World was pleased with the new facilities, noting that during the first day’s business, “everything worked like a charm…under the new conditions the comfort and safety of the immigrants will be all that can be desired.”
The immigrants who followed Annie Moore entered the immigrant depot—which was located closer to the ferry slip than its later brick replacement—and then headed up a double staircase to the second floor. Vigilant medical inspectors would watch them as they climbed the stairs, on the lookout for cripples and other invalids.
Once on the second floor, immigrants were herded into ten lines, each of which ended at the desk of a clerk whose job was to cross-examine the immigrants, verifying information from the ship’s manifest and making sure the immigrant did not fall into one of the categories for exclusion. On the second floor were places to buy railroad tickets, information bureaus, telegraph counters, money exchanges, and a lunch counter.
A reporter from Harper’s Weekly visiting Ellis Island in 1893 found it “suggestive of a prison in many of its aspects,” with uniformed guards keeping order. When inspectors questioned immigrants, the reporter found some to be “nervously defiant” while others looked frightened. Still others were “angry, and some stolid with indifference or stupidity.” The long-awaited opening of the federal inspection station did not end the debate over immigration. This five-acre scratch of land sticking out of New York Harbor would now become the focal point for everyone concerned with immigration.
Politicians, journalists, union leaders, and private citizens would now make their way to Ellis Island with their own agendas. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union soon complained about the alleged existence of saloons at Ellis Island. Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, wanted more inspectors to enforce the contract-labor law and visited Ellis Island to make his case to Colonel Weber. Immigration restrictionists went to Ellis Island to make sure the laws were properly enforced. Immigration defenders visited to make sure that newcomers were fairly treated.
“The existing immigration law was framed to sift incomers—to draw a dividing line between desirable and undesirable immigrants,” the superintendent of immigration said in his first annual report, adding that “it is not the serious intention of the Government to prohibit immigration, but from time to time to prohibit the people whom experience has demonstrated fail in some important direction in entering beneficially into American citizenship.”
From the moment Annie Moore stumbled from the gangplank onto Ellis Island, this kind of sifting of desirable and undesirable immigrants proved to be a matter of trial and error. The opening of Ellis Island raised more questions than it answered. How would a nation manage the inspection, regulation, and sometimes exclusion of immigrants on a daily basis? Were immigration laws too strict or too lenient? Should the government create more classes of excludable immigrants or should immigrant inspectors interpret the law in a more generous manner?
In 1875, the Supreme Court placed the control of immigration with the federal government. Now it would decide just how far that power could go. In 1889, three years before the opening of Ellis Island, the Court heard the case of a Chinese immigrant named Chae Chan Ping, who was denied reentry into the country. It dismissed Ping’s challenge to his exclusion, arguing that Congress had the power to make the rules that governed immigrant admissions and the courts should be deferential to that expression of democratic will. “The power of exclusion of foreigners being an incident of sovereignty belonging to the government of the United States as a part of those sovereign powers delegated by the Constitution,” wrote Justice Stephen Field, “the right to its exercise at any time…cannot be granted away or restrained on behalf of anyone.”
Three years later, just a little over two weeks after Annie Moore’s arrival at Ellis Island, the Supreme Court went further. Nishimura Ekiu was a twenty-five-year-old woman from Japan who landed in San Francisco in 1891. With $22 in her pocket, she claimed to be headed to meet her husband, who was already in the country. Immigration officials believed that she had not been honest in her answers and refused her permission to land. Under the 1891 Immigration Act, the Japanese immigrant was declared “likely to become a public charge.” Ekiu argued that the immigration officials in San Francisco had deprived her of due process in a court of law, but the Supreme Court ruled against her, arguing that Congress had entrusted upon officials the “sole and exclusive” right to exclude or admit aliens and immigrants had no recourse to the courts.
Although these two decisions related to events on the West Coast, they would deeply influence what went on at Ellis Island for the next sixty years. If an immigrant felt that officials had unfairly excluded her, the only recourse was up the administrative chain of command in the executive branch, not to the courts. This was called the plenary power doctrine that would dominate American immigration law for more than a century. Congress and the executive branch would have exclusive authority over immigration, and immigrants would be limited in their ability to challenge that authority in federal courts.
The implication was that immigrants who had not yet been approved to land had fewer constitutional rights. Admission to the United States was a privilege, not a right. A sovereign nation had a right to define its borders and decide who may or may not enter the country. “It is an accepted maxim of international law that every sovereign nation has the power,” the Court argued in the Ekiu decision, “to forbid the entrance of foreigners within its dominions, or to admit them only in such cases and upon such conditions as it may see fit to prescribe.” Congress could decide what kinds of immigrants could enter America, and the executive branch—represented by immigration stations like Ellis Island—had the right to execute those laws. Courts would have little say in the matter.
COLONEL JOHN B. WEBER never imagined that his life’s path would lead him to Ellis Island. A former Republican congressman from the Buffalo area, Weber had been appointed commissioner of immigration by President Benjamin Harrison, taking over duties the day after the official closing of Castle Garden in April 1890. As Weber admitted, it was a classic patronage appointment: “I took the business of immigration commissioner with as little knowledge of it as a man who never had seen an immigrant.”
Weber’s parents were immigrants from Alsace, loyal subjects of France at the time. Hearty peasants who were able to read and write, they separately arrived in upstate New York in the 1830s and married there. John Baptiste Weber’s name symbolized the controversial history of the Alsace. Though his last name was solidly German, his middle name attested to the French influence of the region.
Forged in the fire of the Civil War, Weber’s life resembled that of many Northerners at the time. At fourteen, he volunteered as the color bearer for the local militia. When war broke out a few years later, the eighteen-year-old volunteered for service. He survived the war without a scratch, despite having seen his share of combat, and made his way quickly through the ranks, going from private to colonel before his twenty-first birthday. In 1864, he helped organize and lead the 89th United States Colored Infantry. At twenty-one, Weber left the army, returned home to New York, and prepared to take an active role in civic affairs.
He started a family and became a large landowner and a grocer. Like many of the Union soldiers who survived the killing fields of the Civil War, Weber’s postwar life was defined by membership in the local post of the Grand Army of the Republic and the Republican Party. Weber ran for Erie County sheriff in 1870, but narrowly lost to a Democrat named Grover Cleveland. Weber would later win the post in his second attempt, then go on to serve two terms in the House of Representatives.
In return for helping a fellow Civil War officer named Benjamin Harrison win the Republican presidential nomination in 1888, Weber was given the job of commissioner of immigration at the Port of New York, overseeing the construction of the new facilities at Ellis Island as well as the processing of immigrants at the Barge Office until Ellis Island was open. He was also given an additional task. In 1891, Treasury Secretary Charles Foster asked him to chair a five-man commission to travel to Europe and report on immigration. This was the first time the federal government sought to investigate the reasons why Europeans were emigrating to America.
The government wanted answers to very specific questions. Why were Europeans coming to the United States? Was immigration being “promoted or stimulated by steamship or other carrying companies or their agents for the resulting passenger business”? To what extent were “criminals, insane persons, idiots, and other defectives, paupers or persons likely to become a public charge, and persons afflicted with loathsome or dangerous contagious disease” encouraged to emigrate?
There was an additional reason for the trip. Before Weber set sail for Europe, President Harrison summoned him to a seaside cottage in Cape May, New Jersey, where the president was vacationing. Harrison wanted Weber to investigate the condition of Russian Jews. Upon arriving in London, where he would meet the other four members of the commission, Weber would choose one of the four to accompany him to Russia. Weber had to leave for Europe only three days after he received his instructions. The other commissioners, whom Weber had never met, were already waiting in London.
Once in London, Weber chose Dr. Walter Kempster as his traveling companion, leaving the other three members of the commission free to conduct their own investigations. Kempster was born in London and arrived in upstate New York as a young boy. Like Weber, he was a former Civil War officer, having served at Gettysburg. After the war, Kempster became one of the nation’s leading alienists, making the study of the human brain his specialty. He worked at a number of mental hospitals in New York before moving to Wisconsin. In 1881, Kempster served as one of the witnesses for the prosecution in the trial of Charles Guiteau, the assassin of President James A. Garfield.
Beginning in late July 1891, Weber and Kempster city-hopped from Liverpool to Paris, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Minsk, Wilna, Bialystok, Grodno, Warsaw, Cracow, Budapest, and Vienna. They ended their trip in early October in Bremen, Germany. Along the way, Weber and Kempster met with consular officials, visited local neighborhoods, and spoke with officials from steamship companies. With all of his official duties, Weber had little time for sightseeing, complaining that all he managed was one hour at the Tower of London.
Weber and Kempster released their report in January 1892 and concluded that individuals left Europe largely because of “superior conditions of living in the United States…and the general belief that the United States present [sic] better opportunities for rising to a higher level than are furnished at home.” Europeans mostly received these ideas not from the agents of steamship companies looking to drum up business, but from “the relatives or friends who have preceded and are established in the United States, and who, through letters and newspapers sent from this country, furnish such information.”
Many argued that new immigrants were assisted or involuntary immigrants brought here on contract by American businesses or enticed by agents of steamship companies. By their estimates, Weber and Kempster concluded that some 60 percent of immigrants did come to America with prepaid tickets. However, these were tickets largely bought by friends and relatives in America and sent to the potential immigrant in Europe. Weber and Kempster were describing chain migration, the process by which recent immigrants, through letters, newspaper clippings, and money, entice family and friends to join them in the New World.
Weber noted that the country needed these immigrants because Americans traditionally shun hard manual work. “When the foreigner came in, the native engineered the jobs, the former did the shoveling,” he argued. “The foreigner plows and sows, the native reaps; the one builds railroads, the other runs them and waters the stock; one digs canals, the other manages the boats; one burrows in the mines, the other sells the product.” Relying on the connection between immigration and free labor for the health of the economy, Weber asked: “Stop the stream, and where will the new material come from which with a little training and experience develops into useful domestic help?”
Weber concluded that “the evils of immigration are purely imaginary in some features, greatly exaggerated in others, and susceptible of nearly complete remedy by the amendment of existing laws.” He saw only the need for “rigid inspection at our ports,” to enforce the 1891 law. Of course, just what constituted rigid inspection would become a matter for debate for every immigration official at Ellis Island throughout its history.
Following his instructions from Harrison, Weber paid special attention to the plight of Jews. The situation in Russia was beginning to have repercussions for the United States. Mary Antin had already emigrated and wrote a memoir of her family’s journey from Russia to America. During those bleak times, she wrote, “America was in everybody’s mouth. Businessmen talked of it over their accounts…people who had relatives in the famous land went around reading their letters for the enlightenment of less fortunate folk…children played at emigrating…all talked of it, but scarcely anyone knew one true fact about this magic land.” The number of immigrants coming from Russia, the vast majority being Jewish, was increasing dramatically. From 1890 to 1891, the number increased from 41,000 to 73,000.
The emigration of Russian Jews was rooted in the turmoil of late-nineteenth-century Russia. Many of the problems can be traced to 1881, when Czar Alexander II, who had inaugurated an era of relative liberalism in Russia, was assassinated by a group of revolutionaries. Jews bore the brunt of the anger of the Russian people and of the new czar, Alexander III, who pursued anti-Jewish policies with a vengeance. Life in the Pale of Settlement, where much of the Jewish population was forced to live, became harder. Jews who had left the Pale in decades past to earn their livings in cities were now being forced out. Petty harassments increased along with the restrictive edicts.
His time among Russia’s oppressed Jews had a deep impact on Weber. He and Kempster witnessed the expulsion of Jews from Moscow to the Pale. They met an elderly man with paralysis and partial blindness who was suffering in his own bed because he was refused entry into a Moscow hospital. Many who had lived in Moscow for decades now found their businesses failing. “Among those ordered out while I was there were cashiers, clerks, correspondence chiefs, and bookkeepers of banks; heads of business departments; manufacturers,” Weber remembered.
The two Americans traveled extensively through towns such as Minsk, Wilna, Bialystok, and Grodno. The stories from Russian Jews were “sad and pitiful in the extreme…. Everywhere there was gloom and dejection.” Weber encountered pronounced and deep-seated misery. “The emaciated forms, the wan faces, the deep sunken cheeks,” he later remembered about the experience, “the pitiful expression of those great staring eyes reminding one of a hunted animal, are ever present and will never leave me.” Weber was haunted by nightmares of the tragic Jewish figures he encountered and sometimes wondered if he was not suffering from hallucinations.
Weber and Kempster’s report was full of sympathetic observations of Jewish life. They argued that Jewish immigration was forced largely by the religious and ethnic persecution found in Russia. They described in detail life in Jewish ghettos and the history of laws that made life difficult for those of the Jewish faith. After a visit in London with Baron de Hirsch, who used part of his vast fortune to assist Jews fleeing Russia, Weber and Kempster admitted that the case of Russian Jewish immigrants was decidedly different from that of other immigrants.
By the 1890s, Russian Jewish paupers had increased by nearly 30 percent and some estimates counted as many as 40 percent of the Jewish population as luftmenschen, people without jobs, skills, or prospects, floating through the Pale and surviving as best as they could. Here seemed proof of what immigration restrictionists claimed: that assisted immigrants came to America with tickets paid for them by third-party philanthropic groups. They needed to be helped because so many had become paupers.
While Weber and Kempster admitted that some cases of paupers emigrating to America did exist, “that the movement assumes any sort of proportions [as believed by restrictionists] is not warranted by our investigations nor is it believed.” The case of Russian Jews could not be seen simply through the prism of paupers dumped onto U.S. shores. Instead, Weber and Kempster asked that Americans look beyond the temporary condition of immigrants.
A person who by reason of unexpected misfortunes or persecutions is deprived of his accumulations, who has been subjected to pillage and plunder while fleeing from the burdens which have become unbearable, if capable of supporting himself and family, if he has one, with a reasonable certainty after obtaining a foothold, and that foothold is guaranteed by friends or relatives upon landing or strong probable surrounding circumstances, is not, according to our definition, a pauper.
Weber and Kempster’s report was a sharp rebuke to immigration restrictionists.
However, instead of a unified report on European conditions, the committee released four separate ones. Weber’s three other colleagues had conducted their own tours of Europe. The report of Judson Cross most closely resembled the conclusions of Weber and Kempster. Writing about Italian immigration, Cross also described the process of chain migration. Italian immigrants “are constantly bestirring others to go. Each Italian in the United States can easily secure a place for a friend and the process is ever being repeated.” Contrary to some of the reports about these new immigrants, Cross found southern Italians “sober, industrious, and economical and fond of their children.” These Italians left their homelands because of a lack of land, not because they were encouraged to leave by the government.
Joseph Powderly, the brother of famed union leader Terrence V. Powderly, was labor’s representative on the committee, and his report mirrored the concerns of many native-born workingmen. He was concerned that workers from eastern Europe were coming to western Pennsylvania and competing with native-born workers in the mines and factories, driving down wages and the quality of life. Unless immigration was restricted, Powderly argued, the native-born American would be driven from the coal mines or else he “will have to come down from his extravagant standard, and be contented with one room for himself, wife, and children in which to live, eat, and sleep.”
The commission’s final member, Herman J. Schulteis, took issue with the nuanced notion of pauperism found in Weber and Kempster’s report. Schulteis complained that recent immigrants were coming to America with the help of immigrant aid societies and other associations that encouraged paupers and criminals to emigrate. He also reported on the widespread involvement of Italian banks and labor agents in the distribution of prepaid tickets for Italian immigrants. As for whether steamship companies could be trusted to screen out immigrants who might be disqualified under the 1891 Immigration Act, Schulteis answered with an emphatic no, claiming to have witnessed the “sham inspection” of immigrants at the port of Naples.
While Weber was sympathetic to the plight of Russian Jews, Schulteis wrote of the “alleged” persecutions in Russia, which only existed in the minds of “Russophobists and of persons who have never looked into the economic situation in Russia.” Schulteis approved of Russia’s anti-Jewish edicts, writing that they were “in the interest of the general welfare of the Russian people.” After all, Schulteis noted, while Jews were only 5 percent of the population, they owned half of the wealth of Russia. “This is a matter of general notoriety in Russia and has an important bearing on the social status of the Hebrew,” he concluded.
It is no surprise that someone who would recycle the anti-Semitism of Russian officials would conclude that throughout Europe, “there are many persons engaged in the business of transferring from the moribund systems of European misgovernment vast members of their ‘dangerous’ pauperized, diseased, decrepit, and criminal population, not only a safety valve to their own overstrained machinery, but to serve as an element of weakness in this Republic, the greatness of which they view with growing alarm.”
Despite his insensitivity, Schulteis never called for a ban on immigration or the selection of immigrants only from desirable races. Instead, his recommendations included having American inspectors at European ports inspect and approve potential immigrants; a bigger head tax on immigrants; the end of prepaid tickets; and the granting of emergency quarantine powers to the president.
These dueling reports lay out a spectrum of attitudes toward immigration. To Weber and Kempster, newcomers fled poverty and prejudice in search of opportunities in the New World, where they were certain to be molded into independent and productive citizens. By contrast, Powderly voiced the concerns of workingmen eager to protect their wages from the competition of cheap foreign labor brought to America by greedy businesses. Lastly, Schulteis articulated the darker vision of immigration, seeing newcomers as Europe’s refuse dumped on America’s shores—a losing equation that would only weaken the Republic, while strengthening Europe.
Rather than a final answer on the root causes and nature of immigration, the Treasury secretary got more of the same contentious debate of Americans grappling with the changes that were wrenching the nation into the modern world and showed no signs of abating. Ellis Island, created as the “proper sieve” to weed out undesirable immigrants, would soon become a lightning rod in this debate.