Chapter 6
I have not been understood by many.
—Terence V. Powderly
McSweeney…is governed by his motives, resentment, and inordinate desire for distinction…. [He] is now surrounded by a lot of servile, obsequious flatterers.
—Roman Dobler, Ellis Island Inspector, 1900
JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT ON JUNE 15, 1897, A FIRE BROKE out in the northeast tower of the main building on Ellis Island. The fire’s location made it hard to reach with water hoses. The building, constructed largely of Georgia pine, burned quickly; within a half hour the roof had collapsed. Immigration records dating back to the Castle Garden era, which had been held in half-buried stone and concrete magazines from the island’s former days as an ammunitions depot, were completely burned. The fire quickly spread to other buildings on the island, with flames that lit the night sky. An official investigation into the cause of the fire would later fail to solve the mystery; however, Victor Safford, a doctor at Ellis Island, thought that it was set deliberately, probably by a disgruntled night watchman who should long before have been declared insane.
Whatever its cause, the fire drove out nearly two hundred immigrants who were detained on the island. Most of them were Italians, but the group also included several Hindus in colorful robes and bead hats who had arrived as part of a traveling exhibition. In addition, thirty-one workers, including guards, an apothecary, a cook, two doctors, and three nurses were stationed on the premises.
To some, it was a reminder of the flimsy nature of the original buildings. Harper’s Weekly said the buildings had been “monuments of ugliness” and “wretched barns and architectural rubbish heaps.” The New York World blamed the government for constructing “great piles of rosin-soaked lumber, admirably arranged for burning.” Commissioner Joseph Senner condemned the buildings as firetraps and said that he had been haunted by the fear of fire for years. “Every day as I left the island during the past four years,” Senner told the Times, “I gave a farewell look at the buildings, for I expected to return the next day and find them all in ashes.” His prophecy finally came true.
Thankfully, no one was hurt in the fire, but officials had a bigger problem. An estimated seven thousand immigrants were already on ships in the Atlantic headed for New York, with over six hundred scheduled to arrive the day after the fire. As the ruins on Ellis Island continued to smolder, immigration officials set up a temporary inspection center on the piers at the Battery, on the tip of Manhattan. That first day after the fire, fifty-five immigrants were detained for further inspection.
Officials then moved into the old Barge Office in the southeastern section of the Battery, which had served as a temporary facility after Castle Garden’s closing. The fanciful Venetian Renaissance gray stone building, with its tall, thin turret overlooking the harbor, would again serve as the nation’s primary immigration depot for two and a half more years. The immigration service chartered the steamboat Narragansett, now docked at the island, to serve as a temporary, floating dormitory for as many as eight hundred immigrants who had not yet passed inspection at the Barge Office.
As talk began about rebuilding the facilities on Ellis Island, it became clear that the new facilities would have to be built of stone and steel, not wood. Still, one upstate newspaper in all apparent seriousness suggested that new wooden buildings would not be such a bad idea. An occasional fire on the island, the paper’s editor reassured its readers, would kill off the germs and microbes carried over by immigrants.
The chaos that ensued from the fire and the resulting move into the Barge Office left the New York immigration service in disarray. A newly elected president—William McKinley—began replacing Democratic officeholders in the immigration service with Republicans. A month after the fire, McKinley nominated Thomas Fitchie to replace Senner as commissioner. Fitchie had been a loyal Brooklyn Republican officeholder, but at age sixty-two and with no prior experience with immigration, he could hardly have been counted on to be a vigorous leader in difficult times.
America was digging itself out of the deepest economic depression in its history. As a new century approached, immigration would again pick up. The business of regulating this influx would have to continue for the time being without Ellis Island. To make matters worse, over the next four years the New York immigration service would become mired in a swamp of bureaucratic pettiness and personal vendettas that showed the limits of patronage politics.
THIRTY-YEAR-OLD EDWARD F. MCSWEENEY, the second in command at Ellis Island, was a bulldog of a man, whose bullet-shaped head was topped by thinning black hair. Victor Safford remembered his lifelong friend as a “live wire.”
Growing up in Marlborough, Massachusetts, about thirty miles west of Boston, McSweeney dropped out of school as a child and began working in a shoe factory. Though his early biography had the makings of a Dickensian novel of drudgery and exploitation, McSweeney was more Horatio Alger than Oliver Twist.
By the time he was nineteen, he had helped found the Lasters’ Protective Union; two years later he became the union’s president. Labor work led to political work, as McSweeney became active in the Massachusetts Democratic Party. As a reward for helping round up labor support for Grover Cleveland’s successful presidential campaign, McSweeney was named assistant commissioner at Ellis Island in 1893.
Befitting someone from humble beginnings who clawed his way up through the industrial and political jungles of late-nineteenth-century America, McSweeney had an air of physicality about him. Referring to a Protestant missionary who spent much of his time proselytizing to Catholics at Ellis Island, McSweeney told Archbishop Michael Corrigan of New York that if “any good would come of it, I would be delighted to call him to account with a round turn.” When an immigrant tried to bribe him with $5.00, McSweeney became indignant and smacked the man in the face. Along with such eruptions, he also displayed widely recognized administrative skills and shrewd intelligence. When McKinley became president, McSweeney, a partisan Democrat, not only retained his position but also managed to become the de facto boss at Ellis Island. Above all, McSweeney was a survivor.
McSweeney remained in a Republican administration thanks largely to new civil service regulations. Patronage was the lifeblood of politics and helped staff the small federal bureaucracy, but it also led to corruption and a tolerance for ineptitude. To deal with the problems of an increasingly complex society, a more professional federal workforce was needed. In 1896, President Cleveland placed Immigration Service workers under civil service protection. Current federal workers were not forced to take the civil service exam and were able to keep their jobs. This meant that many patronage workers remained in the service, but this time with the job protection that civil service offered. McSweeney kept his position, although his salary was reduced.
Meanwhile, the McKinley administration searched for someone to run the immigration office in Washington. The president finally settled on Terence V. Powderly, one of the most famous Americans of the late nineteenth century. The former Grand Master Workman of the Knights of Labor—a fanciful title that befitted the utopian nature of the organization—helped build the country’s first major national labor union, and in doing so became a celebrity whose “face and name graced everything from chewing tobacco packages to haberdashers’ trade cards.” His portrait hung inside humble homes, and a town just outside of Birmingham, Alabama, was named in his honor. Powderly had also served as mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania.
On the surface, McSweeney and Powderly possessed many similarities. These two sons of Irish Catholic immigrants grew up in large families—McSweeney was one of eight, Powderly one of twelve. Their careers began in the labor movement, yet they were conservative by temperament and opposed to socialism. Unions were their avenue into partisan politics. Their backgrounds fed their interest in immigration.
Yet their differences outweighed their similarities. Whereas McSweeney was a Democrat, Powderly, sixteen years older than his soon to be nemesis, was a Republican. McSweeney played the political game with aplomb, cultivating influential and powerful people throughout society. Powderly, on the other hand, had a knack for angering both subordinates and superiors wherever he went. McSweeney was slick, while Powderly could be moody and abrasive. McSweeney retained strong ties to labor and the Catholic Church throughout his life; Powderly became estranged from both. Though both men supported the current immigration laws, McSweeney was sympathetic toward immigrants, while Powderly’s views were decidedly more negative.
McSweeney seemed to be born for political life, but Powderly was miscast in the profession. A slender, almost frail man, with a long droopy mustache and pale blue eyes, Powderly had the look, according to one contemporary journalist, that some mistook for “poets, gondola scullers, philosophers, and heroes crossed in love.” He was not, in appearance at least, a typical union man, and his looks suggested other character flaws: indecisiveness, moodiness, thin skin, and a querulous nature.
One historian described him as “a vain, pigheaded, unyielding, difficult man,” who was hard to like even from the “safe distance of an archive one hundred years” later. He had a tendency to quarrel with friends and foes alike. Recalling his days as leader of the Knights of Labor, Powderly noted: “I cannot forget either that I had been the recipient of a much larger share of unstinted censure, condemnation, denunciation, and abuse from those I had worked for as well as from those I had opposed.” By the early 1890s, the Knights had gone into decline, wracked with dissension, and Powderly was looking for other opportunities. He later claimed that when he left the Knights, he was “broken in health and spirits” and doctors had given him only months to live.
Powderly somehow managed to survive, and in 1896 he supported Ohio’s Republican governor, William McKinley, for president. He became McKinley’s main adviser on labor issues. The Immigration Bureau was to be Powderly’s reward.
Over the course of his career, Powderly made many enemies, a dubious skill he would soon put to use in his new job. Some of those enemies pressured the Senate to block Powderly’s confirmation, forcing McKinley to make a recess appointment. Even the Knights of Labor’s official newspaper came out against its former chief. Many of them distrusted Powderly’s Republican friends and criticized Powderly for dropping his opposition to the gold standard to align with McKinley’s views.
Another critic was Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), who called Powderly’s selection “an affront to labor.” Gompers’s AFL succeeded the Knights as the country’s leading labor union, and the two men clashed repeatedly over the years.
Powderly fought back, however, and McKinley stuck with him. Powderly went so far as to elicit the support of Edward McSweeney, his soon to be subordinate, to lobby Gompers to lift his opposition to Powderly’s appointment. Gompers didn’t budge, telling McSweeney that he opposed Powderly because his reputation “had been to break down and disrupt, and that he had used his position for unworthy ends.” Even without the support of Gompers, Powderly eventually received Senate confirmation in March 1898.
Powderly’s brother Joseph had been part of John Weber’s 1891 commission on European immigration. For the brothers, immigration was a personal issue. Terence accused new immigrants of coming to America “to compete in the struggle for food with the American workman.” He had gone to Castle Garden years earlier and saw what he called “agents of corporations” waiting for immigrants to arrive. Powderly recognized one of the men, who then arranged for some newcomers to travel to Pennsylvania, where they displaced native-born workers, many of whom Powderly knew personally.
Powderly did not stop with his economic arguments. He went on to call the new immigrants “semi-barbarous.” His views of immigration were somewhat ironic considering his background. As one of his many critics noted, if the laws Powderly wanted enforced had been applied to his Irish immigrant parents, Powderly might “be carrying turf, in an Irish bog, instead of being able, from the influential position he enjoys among Americans, to warn off later comers.” It was an irony not lost on Powderly, whose father had been arrested as a youth in Ireland for trespassing on a gentleman’s estate with a gun and killing a rabbit. For the offense, the elder Powderly spent three weeks in jail—a fact that would now have excluded him from entry to America.
Powderly was now in charge of enforcing the nation’s immigration laws. One of the biggest problems he had to deal with was the worsening situation in New York. As construction of the new buildings on Ellis Island continued, immigration officials were forced to conduct their business in the much more cramped quarters of the Barge Office. While immigration had been cut in half during the depression, better economic times now lured more immigrants to the country. More immigrants coming through the inadequate facilities at the Barge Office spelled trouble.
That trouble would spark a growing rift between Powderly and Edward McSweeney. It is difficult to pinpoint just when things began to go wrong. Upon taking office, Powderly had learned that there were problems with the immigration station in New York. “Ill treatment of arriving aliens, impositions practiced on steamship companies, and discourtesy to those who called to meet their friends on landing were frequent,” wrote Powderly. Eager to ingratiate himself with his new boss, McSweeney told Powderly that he could see “some rocks ahead” and offered to put his boss “in the way of escaping them.” He cryptically warned Powderly that the Barge Office was “a peculiar Service and some peculiar practices and precedents have come into vogue.”
Powderly made a surprise visit to the Barge Office in March 1899. He arrived with a stenographer and was given his own room for a number of days to investigate and interview Barge Office employees. Powderly quickly discovered that McSweeney was the real chief of the immigration station and Fitchie, the nominal head, was “almost unknown to most of the employees at the station although he had been in office two years.” Powderly found some small irregularities, but decided to take no further action. Still, McSweeney took Powderly’s investigation as a personal affront.
Powderly’s views on immigration—and his zealous pursuit of those goals—also added to the growing divide between the two officials. Powderly was busy shaking up immigration enforcement across the country, from New York to California to the Canadian border. To his credit, he was no mere political hack. Powderly was determined to enforce more strictly the laws against contract workers and Chinese immigrants—both traditional bugbears of labor. Powderly proudly noted that in 1899, 741 illegal contract laborers had been excluded, nearly double the number from the previous year.
Yet his strict enforcement of contract-labor laws ran into predictable opposition in the Treasury Department. Powderly’s complaints about cheap immigrant labor did not warm the hearts of his pro-business Republican superiors. In 1899, a large group of Croatian immigrants arrived in Baltimore and were detained on suspicion of being contract laborers. When they appealed their case to Washington, Powderly ordered their deportation. He claimed the men were heading to a Chicago address of a “man whose name is a stench in the nostrils of organized labor.”
Powderly’s decision revealed the weakness of the contract-labor law. By 1899, most employers were careful not to make any contracts for incoming immigrants, who themselves were careful not to tell immigration officials that they were arriving in the country to work on a specific job. Powderly admitted that the evidence in the case “was not such as would warrant a conviction in a criminal court.” Yet, believing deep in his heart that these men were violating the law, he ordered their exclusion anyway.
Such reasoning did not wash with Powderly’s boss, Treasury Secretary Lyman Gage, who overturned his decision and allowed the Croatians to proceed to Chicago. Suspicion without evidence, Gage argued, was not a sufficient reason to bar immigrants. Powderly, seemingly incapable of restraining his anger at the decision, told the German-language New Yorker Staats-Zeitung that Gage “has no sympathies for the [native-born] laborers.” He later complained about being misquoted, but the quote captures both Powderly’s anger and his perennial inability to bite his tongue.
Such impolitic behavior won Powderly few friends in the Treasury Department. Not only would Powderly battle his subordinates in New York, but he would also find himself fighting with his bosses in Washington. Powderly especially ran afoul of Horace Taylor, the assistant secretary of the Treasury, who took office in early 1899 and often referred to Powderly as “that labor crank.” Their mutual disregard for Powderly would lead McSweeney and Taylor to become close allies in the coming bureaucratic struggle.
The decision on the Croatian laborers fed Powderly’s suspicions—or paranoia—that his colleagues were uninterested in enforcing the contract-labor law. He seemed to have his opinions confirmed in April 1900 when Fitchie and McSweeney enacted a minor reform at the Barge Office. Since Congress passed the contract-labor law in 1885, a separate group of inspectors had existed who only dealt with suspected immigrant contract laborers. In the late 1890s, Fitchie and McSweeney, in the interest of efficiency, decided to merge the contract-labor inspectors with the regular inspectors into one inspector class. Assistant Secretary Taylor approved the plan without consulting Powderly, who bitterly opposed the idea. Though it appeared to be a rational bureaucratic reform, it had the effect of reducing the number of immigrant exclusions in New York based on contract-labor violations by almost 90 percent, according to Powderly.
Powderly was in an awkward position. He was a labor man opposed to cheap immigrant labor, yet he worked for a pro-business Republican administration. Even worse, he had also alienated many people in the labor movement. Recognizing this situation, he worked hard to stay in the good graces of McKinley, without whose support Powderly would have found himself out of a job.
Perhaps that insecurity led Powderly to ask for McSweeney’s help with the 1898 gubernatorial race in Connecticut. John Addison Porter, the personal secretary to McKinley, was running for the Republican nomination. Powderly wanted Fitchie to ask McSweeney to “run over and get some of his Democratic friends to get into the caucuses and help our friends out.” There is no evidence that McSweeney agreed to the request, and Porter failed in his bid to become governor.
Just a few months before Powderly made his request, New York senator Thomas C. Platt, the longtime Republican boss of the state, complained about the “extreme partisan conduct” of McSweeney. “Is there not some way that he can be removed and a good Republican put in his place,” Platt asked Thomas Fitchie. Platt was angered less by McSweeney’s Democratic affiliation and more by the fact that he had run for New York sheriff in 1897 on Seth Low’s reform Citizens’ Union ticket. McSweeney was trying to prove his Republican bona fides by supporting Low, but the Citizens’ Union ticket consisted of reform Republicans opposed to Boss Platt.
Despite Platt’s urgings, McSweeney remained in office. Perhaps Fitchie recognized that the immigration service in New York could not run without McSweeney’s administrative talents. There is another possible explanation. When the bitterness between McSweeney and Powderly broke out into open warfare a few years later, Powderly would accuse McSweeney of delaying the stay of immigrants at Ellis Island “for the purpose of swelling the receipts of Mr. Hess who has the contract for providing food for immigrants at Ellis Island.” Charlie Hess also happened to be a loyal member of Senator Platt’s Republican machine. Powderly claimed that McSweeney told him: “I can rely upon Senator Platt to do the right thing by me.” So it is not beyond the realm of possibility that McSweeney had made his peace with Platt, a man more interested in patronage than partisanship.
The accusation that McSweeney was involved in unethical conduct was part of a larger problem at the Barge Office. While Ellis Island had put the buffer of New York Harbor between immigrants and those who prowled the waterfront looking to take advantage of greenhorns, the Barge Office provided no such luxury. McSweeney himself explained that all of the problems that had once existed at Castle Garden were reappearing at the Barge Office.
More complaints emerged about the Barge Office. Words like “listless,” “inexcusably insolent,” and “inefficient” were thrown about to describe the staff. Victor Safford spoke of one worker, a German immigrant with a bushy beard, whose sole duty seemed to be to march around with great pomp dressed in naval cap and double-breasted coat with brass buttons. The man was obviously a political appointee, and Safford could never figure out what the man did.
By the end of 1899, word reached Washington of serious problems at the Barge Office, prompting Secretary Gage to appoint a committee to investigate, led by John Rodgers, commissioner of immigration at Philadelphia, and Richard K. Campbell, from the Washington office. Rodgers and Campbell conducted two months of hearings in lower Manhattan in early 1900, collecting over two thousand pages of testimony.
Much as Powderly had found earlier, the Campbell-Rodgers report concluded that McSweeney was the real power at the Barge Office. It laid out in detail charges of cruelty, corruption, and the abuse of immigrants “of such a pronounced and inexcusable character.” The report concluded that McSweeney “countenanced extreme cruelty and impropriety in the methods of inspection in the registry division” and recommended the firing of a dozen employees at the Barge Office, including McSweeney.
One form of corruption occurred in the Boarding Division. When ships reached the docks, American citizens were separated out from immigrants and allowed to pass. Albert Wank, an assistant officer in the Boarding Division, reportedly took cash payoffs to let immigrants through, thereby avoiding inspection. A clerk for a French steamship line testified that it was common for immigrants to pay Wank $1 or $2 to get out of the inspection line. Those immigrants not paying the bribe would then often pass by Emil Auspitz, the gateman in charge of the entrance to the registry room. Auspitz was accused of treating immigrants roughly and using foul language.
The most serious charges were leveled against John Lederhilger, the chief of the Registry Division and one of McSweeney’s closest allies. “Mr. Lederhilger is insolent, overbearing, dictatorial and cruel to his subordinate officers,” Campbell and Rodgers concluded, “and is jealous and resentful in his bearing toward those over whom he cannot legitimately exercise control.” More specifically, witnesses accused Lederhilger of being a letch obsessed with the sexual behavior of young female immigrants. One Barge Office worker told the committee: “Every good looking young woman has been put to what they call the 3rd Degree.” Lederhilger often used indecent language with young women because, according to the witness, “he cannot help himself; he is a brutal man.”
An interpreter at the Barge Office testified that Lederhilger was in the habit of asking women about their sexual activity. Sometimes the interpreter, who was forced to translate these questions, had to clean up his language. Another interpreter complained that Lederhilger’s interviews of French girls were obscene. The interpreter refused to interpret for him on a number of occasions when he wanted the following question asked: “Who fucked her on board the ship?”
The report also blamed Lederhilger for the suicide of one Italian woman, who suffered “under the mortification and distress incident to her being held and examined as a procuress [madam].” If Lederhilger thought a woman was possibly a prostitute, it gave him license to molest her physically. Pointing to a woman’s breast, Lederhilger allegedly said: “Open that dress and see if you have anything in that pocket.” Another witness claimed he saw Lederhilger and other officers open the clothing of women and “thrust their hands in their bosoms and in other ways improperly handle their person.”
Treasury Department officials sat on the report for two months. Meanwhile, Powderly drew up formal charges against thirteen individuals, including McSweeney. His superiors quashed the charges, leading Powderly to accuse McSweeney’s friends in Treasury of protecting him. By September, McSweeney felt confident enough to write to Archbishop Michael Corrigan that although unscrupulous persons had attempted to discredit his work, his bosses in the Treasury Department had foiled the plot.
The report was certainly slanted in Powderly’s favor. Both Rodgers and Campbell were Powderly allies and most witnesses were Powderly’s friends at the Barge Office. McSweeney was the main target of the report, and he called the investigation “a persecution, of which I was the proposed victim,” while Fitchie said it was “conceived in iniquity and born in sin.” Yet it is hard to believe that all of the charges and testimony in the massive report were simply fabricated to frame McSweeney.
Edward Steiner, a Grinnell College professor and immigrant from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, traveled a number of times across the Atlantic Ocean in steerage collecting material for his books on immigration. “Roughness, cursing, intimidation and a mild form of blackmail prevailed to such a degree as to be common,” Steiner noted at this time. On one trip, an inspector approached Steiner and hinted that he might have difficulties getting through inspection. A little money, the inspector intimated, might make the problem go away. A Czech girl told Steiner in tears that an inspector promised to pass her through inspection if she agreed to meet him later at a hotel. “Do I look like that,” she asked Steiner through her embarrassment. The inescapable conclusion is that, even accounting for the personal vendetta between Powderly and McSweeney, a lot of petty corruption and abusive behavior was being tolerated at the Barge Office.
Even as the Treasury Department tried to bury the report, excerpts were leaked to the press. Now that the charges were aired publicly, Washington needed to act. In a classic case of creating scapegoats to protect higher-ups, officials fired a handful of minor Barge Office workers, gatemen, and messengers, charging them with taking bribes and treating immigrants roughly. In a tragic footnote, one of those dismissed was a fifty-five-year-old black messenger named Jordan R. Stewart. In addition to bribery, Fitchie also accused Stewart of being repeatedly drunk on the job.
Stewart had been born a slave and served as a lieutenant in the 73rd U.S. Colored Infantry in the Civil War. During Reconstruction, he represented Tensas Parish in the Louisiana state legislature. In addition, he had been a businessman, a deputy sheriff, and a watchman at the New Orleans customs house. By the 1890s, with increasing violence against blacks in the South, Stewart found himself in New York City, where he no doubt used his Republican political connections to land a patronage position in the New York immigration service. Now he was out of a job.
While men like Stewart took the fall, McSweeney and his allies, including John Lederhilger, dodged a bullet and resumed their jobs. Powderly had been foiled and so had his attempt to use the immigration service on behalf of McKinley and the Republican Party. Just after the conclusion of the Campbell-Rodgers investigation, Powderly wrote to an ally that if only he could control the Immigration Bureau without meddling from superiors, he could “pave the way for Republican success in many a doubtful place, and do it without detracting from the usefulness of the Bureau.” He promised McKinley that if only he were allowed a free rein, he could strictly enforce the immigration laws and win more support for the president from labor men, since Powderly’s Immigration Service would be looking after their interests regarding contract labor.
Powderly wanted to help both American workingmen and McKinley, but he believed that personal enemies stymied his mission at every turn. The reason, he felt, was that the Immigration Service was filled with Democrats and the Treasury Department was rife with anti-labor men. With McKinley up for reelection in 1900, Powderly became obsessed with the belief that McSweeney and his allies were working for a Bryan victory.
Some of Powderly’s friends ventured close to paranoia. James “Skin the Goat” Fitzharris and Joseph Mullet arrived in New York in May 1900, having left Queenstown, Ireland. They had been part of a group called the Invincibles, Irish Republicans who carried out the infamous 1882 Phoenix Park murders of Lord Cavendish and Thomas Henry Burke in Dublin. Having served eighteen years in prison, the two men were now free and headed to the United States for a visit. The sixty-year-old Fitzharris, dapperly attired in a blue serge suit and green scarf with a pin bearing the face of Irish hero Robert Emmett, and the younger Mullet, a hunchback, were quickly detained. Their case clearly came within the 1891 law barring the admission of criminals; the only question was whether their crime was of a political nature or not.
A Powderly ally named A. J. You believed that the detention of these two men had McSweeney’s fingerprints all over them. “You can readily see what an alarm will be sounded by the Irish people if these parties are held for investigation by our force and the hellish purpose conceived by the Deputy Commissioner [McSweeney] in having this order issued over the signature of the Commissioner,” You fretted. “How easily the holding up of the Irish immigrants or foreigners can be turned with a free hand against us and especially directed against yourself as the head of the Immigration Services.”
When the Treasury Department finally decided that the crimes of the two men were not politically motivated, “Skin the Goat” and Mullet were sent back to Ireland, but only after they spent an unhappy month in detention. Mullet wrote to Commissioner Fitchie to complain about their treatment, calling their month in detention worse than their eighteen years in a British jail. In the latter, at least, the Irishmen were kept apart from the other convicts and treated like political prisoners, while in New York, Mullet and Fitzharris were forced to “mix with the scum of Europe.”
A Democrat who had kept his job under a Republican administration thanks to new civil service regulations, McSweeney knew that his civil service classification could be overturned at any time, so he went out of his way to ingratiate himself with New York Republicans.
In what was probably as shrewd an assessment as he ever made, Powderly noted that McSweeney was known always to be “a most ardent McSweeney man.” Whatever the case, McSweeney proved himself a consummate survivor and political operator. Powderly could have learned a few lessons from him.
IN MID-DECEMBER 1900, TWO and a half years after the fire that devastated the first immigration station at Ellis Island, new facilities were finally completed and open for business. On December 17, Fitchie, McSweeney, and their entire staff welcomed the first boatload of steerage immigrants to Ellis Island. The Kaiser Wilhelm II brought 654 immigrants, the first of 2,252 who would pass through Ellis Island that first day. There was no pomp and circumstance as there had been in January 1892; the only celebration was a good-luck horseshoe of flowers presented to Thomas Fitchie by his friends. The first immigrant off the boat was a young, laughing, red-headed Italian girl named Carmina di Simona, “so much inclined to rotundity that it was a question whether her greater dimension was length or breadth.” There was no Annie Moore treatment for Carmina, no ten-dollar gold piece or front-page articles. Americans may have been happy about the new facilities, but they seemed less inclined to celebrate the new immigrants.
Officials claimed that the new reception building could accommodate more than seven thousand immigrants in a single day. It was not designed in the neoclassical, white marble, Beaux Arts style then fashionable for public buildings. Instead, it was a steel-frame structure covered with red brick laid in Flemish bond with limestone trimmings. Four 100-foot, copper-covered, bulbous towers crowned each corner, giving the building a vaguely Byzantine feel. Massive arches with moldings of eagles and shields capped many of the windows. There were new offices, dining facilities, hearing rooms for the boards of special inquiry, shower rooms, and a roof deck for entertainment.
The centerpiece of the main building was the second-floor registry room. Measuring 200 feet by 100 feet and with a 56-foot ceiling, this large airy space was divided into narrow aisles by iron railings for immigrants to pass through on their way to the registry clerk holding the ship’s manifest. Unlike the previous shabby wooden quarters, all the new buildings were fireproof. Even secondary buildings like the hospital and the power plant exhibited a stolid dignity.
Ellis Island now consisted of an imposing set of structures that announced to immigrants the grandeur of their adopted country. Inspection would again be cloistered away from the hubbub, distractions, and immigrant sharks at the Barge Office in the Battery. “The crowd of foreigners who besiege the present quarters every day making life hideous with their quarrels or cursing the guards and gatemen in a babel of tongues will be a thing of the past,” rejoiced the Times.
Yet fancy new buildings did nothing to improve the quality of inspection, reduce corruption, stem the abuses of immigrants, or quell the increasingly vicious infighting between the McSweeney and Powderly camps. Washington had created Ellis Island and an immigration service to run it. However, those who worked in this infant bureaucracy were still mired in the political patronage that defined an older period of history. A stronger federal government was needed to deal with the problems of a modern industrial and urbanized society, but a more professional staff to run that government was also needed. Turn-of-the-century Ellis Island embodied that clash between traditional political patronage and the more strenuous demands being placed on government to regulate an increasingly complex society.
Ensconced in Washington, Powderly received regular updates from Ellis Island officials loyal to him. One of them called McSweeney a “Dr. Jekell [sic] and Mr. Hyde character…. He is so bigoted, partisan, spiteful and malevolent. It is terrible.” Powderly himself referred to his nemesis as “McSwine.” His friends intercepted letters from McSweeney to his allies in the Treasury Department, which were dutifully copied and sent to Powderly.
Not to be outdone, McSweeney recruited Powderly’s confidential secretary to spy on Powderly and report on his actions. Powderly discovered this and fired the clerk. Powderly’s allies at Ellis Island accused McSweeney of harassment, while McSweeney played the martyr for his superiors at the Treasury Department. “I am free to admit that it has been pretty hard to come into contact day after day with men who are trying to cut your throat,” he complained to Assistant Secretary Taylor.
When not bogged down with his battles with McSweeney, Powderly continued to think about the effects of the inspection process. Though Powderly was known as a restrictionist, his views were being tempered by political reality. “Italian, Hungarian, Polish and Oriental immigrants passing through Ellis Island should be treated kindly,” he wrote to McKinley. “Such immigrants in time become citizens and their influence among their compatriots will play no insignificant part in the politics of the future.” When future Republican politicians asked these new Americans for their votes, Powderly worried that they would ask: “Is this the party that was in power at Ellis Island when I landed?”
Powderly understood that while Ellis Island symbolized the nation’s vigilance toward immigration regulation for native-born Americans, it was also becoming a symbol for first-generation Americans. Calls for stricter regulation of immigrants would have to be balanced by the concerns of new immigrant communities.
The new buildings at Ellis Island stood as a testament to a nation entering a new century determined for greater power and glory. The main building impressed upon immigrants that America was a substantive and wondrous land; the power of the federal government and the American nation made their stamp on the immigrant immediately. This same government would soon compel some of those who entered Ellis Island or their children back to Europe as soldiers in World War I. The same government would assist many of these immigrants in their old age with Social Security many years later. Just as every immigrant would feel the force of the federal government at this most important point in their lives, it would be only a matter of time before native-born Americans would experience the presence of the state in their own lives. Immigrants at Ellis Island were just a little ahead of the curve.
The government owed the American people a fitting structure to enforce the law, and it owed immigrants a building that would welcome as well as awe. Unfortunately, the new façade could not mask the disarray and corruption that took place inside its walls.
By the summer of 1901, Inspector Roman Dobler, a Powderly informant, talked about “a bellicose spirit” pervading Ellis Island. As proof, he told the story of Helen Taylor, a twenty-six-year-old assistant matron, who had gotten into an altercation with an inspector named Augustus Theiss, a McSweeney ally. When Theiss passed through an immigrant whose entire family, including wife and two daughters, Miss Taylor had marked for special inspection, an indignant Taylor delivered a “stinging slap across the face” of the short and doughy Theiss. “Do you mean to say I am a liar,” she asked him.
From Washington to New York, tempers had reached a boiling point. Scandals, squabbles, and pettiness reigned. Americans like Henry Cabot Lodge feared a peril at the portals and wanted a gate to guard against the wrong kind of immigrants. The dawn of the twentieth century found Americans still raising questions about not only who was entering through those portals, but also who was guarding those gates.
A restless nation—and more importantly a restless new president—would try to remedy this unhappy situation.