Part III
Chapter 7
It does seem to me that mental and physical inferiority are the highest recommendations for promotion at this station.
—Roman Dobler, Ellis Island Inspector, 1900
Ellis Island has been a place for the harboring of vultures who preyed upon the immigrants and people began to look upon it as the hell hole of America.
—Frank Sargent, Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1903
LEON CZOLGOSZ.
It was not a name that rolled off the tongues of native-born Americans. With great authority, the Journal of the American Medical Association informed its learned readers that the man who fired two shots into President William McKinley on September 6, 1901, “bears a name that can not be mistaken for that of an American.”
To make matters worse, the press reported that Czolgosz was an anarchist. To many Americans already unsettled by large numbers of immigrants from strange lands, the shooting reinforced the connection between foreignness, criminality, and radicalism.
Yet there was one problem: Leon Czolgosz was an American citizen, native-born in Michigan to Polish Catholic parents who had fled Prussia. Despite this inconvenient fact, McKinley’s assassination again stoked America’s fear of immigrants. Yet Congress took its time in reacting to the tragedy, waiting almost two years before it added anarchism to the list of offenses for which immigrants could be excluded. While it was at it, Congress also added prostitutes, epileptics, and professional beggars.
Theodore Roosevelt had little use for anarchists, calling them treasonous criminals who “prefer confusion and chaos to the most beneficent form of social order” and arguing that their philosophy was “no more an expression of ‘social discontent’ than picking pockets or wife beating.” Yet for Roosevelt, out of the tragic murder of William McKinley came the fulfillment of his own ambition as he was now catapulted into the White House. Within three short years, Roosevelt had gone from war hero to governor to vice president to president.
The bullets that ended McKinley’s life also put a close to nineteenth-century America. Roosevelt seemed different from his predecessors in almost every way. He approached the presidency with the vim and vigor he had approached everything else in his life. He possessed a restless and curious mind. His speeches pulsed with energy, with little of the florid and flabby rhetoric of his predecessors. Instead, he spoke the language of action, urging Americans toward the strenuous life. He wrote in 1894: “We Americans have many grave problems to solve, many threatening evils to fight, and many deeds to do, if, as we hope and believe, we have the wisdom, the strength, the courage, and the virtue to do them.” And by 1901 Roosevelt saw that there was still much to do.
In the previous decade or so, the pieces had been put in place for a strong national government at home and abroad. Roosevelt wanted to use that national government for solving problems and fighting evils. “I did not care a rap for the mere form and show of power,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I cared immensely for the use that could be made of the substance.”
Roosevelt is often associated with trust busting and conservation, but he was just as interested in immigration. If Washington was the father of the country and Lincoln the savior of the union, then Theodore Roosevelt was the philosopher of the modern nation. He believed that immigration was central to the question of American identity.
Roosevelt was no newcomer to the issue. Back in 1887, he delivered a blistering, red-meat political speech in front of the cream of New York’s elite gathered for a feast at Delmonico’s, in which he lashed into Governor Grover Cleveland for allowing the admission of “moral paupers and lunatics” at Castle Garden. In 1897, while serving as New York police commissioner, Roosevelt expressed his horror that a local newspaper had said he was opposed to immigration restriction. Roosevelt had the paper quickly correct the error. When President Cleveland later vetoed the literacy bill, Roosevelt “took a kind of grim satisfaction in Cleveland’s winding up his career by this action, so that his last stroke was given to injure the country as much as he possibly could.”
Roosevelt worried about the negative effects of unrestricted immigration. The young patrician criticized businessmen who demanded cheap immigrant labor, saying they were “committing a peculiarly contemptible species of treason.” While they might benefit from immigration in the short term, Roosevelt argued, their “children and grandchildren may have to pay dearly for their ancestors’ selfish greed, when the descendants of the brutalized men whom we imported have grown to be a power in the land, and have cast off the old-world shackles without learning the new-world capacity for self-restraint and self-government.” To protect the wages of workingmen and the future of American self-government, Roosevelt wanted laws that would let in “really good immigrants” and sift out the “very unhealthy elements.”
The relationship between immigration and national character was never far from Roosevelt’s mind. Postulating the definition of “True Americanism,” he gave a rousing, if somewhat vague, definition of American identity and defended American exceptionalism. While Roosevelt’s America accepted European immigrants, it also needed to Americanize them. Roosevelt wrote: “We welcome the German or the Irishman who becomes an American. We have no use for the German or Irishman who remains such…we want only Americans, and, provided they are such, we do not care whether they are of native or of Irish or of German ancestry.” Roosevelt noted that the “mighty tide of immigration to our shores has brought in its train much of good and much of evil,” and therefore the nation needed to regulate immigration more strictly.
Roosevelt was a rare individual; a trust-fund patrician broadly read in history and literature, yet one whose curiosity led him to learn firsthand about social conditions. Roosevelt got an education from his friend Jacob Riis, who led him through the teeming slums of lower Manhattan that Riis was about to immortalize in his book How the Other Half Lives. Wanting to see more, Roosevelt, then police commissioner, hopped a ferry to Ellis Island in 1896 to witness the sifting of immigrants firsthand. With characteristic zeal, he eagerly nosed his way around the old facilities, paying careful attention to both the inspectors and the inspected.
A young inspector named Robert Watchorn remembered Roosevelt’s visit. Roosevelt also remembered Watchorn and a decade later would name him commissioner of Ellis Island. Watchorn recalled seeing Roosevelt at a board of special inquiry hearing for a “stalwart, brawny young Swedish stowaway,” as the future president paid rapt attention to the proceedings, noting that Roosevelt “probably regretted that he was powerless to decide the matter at once.” The stowaway, despite his illegal entry into the country and his lack of money, family, or destination, represented the right kind of immigrant to Roosevelt. “I like the looks of that young fellow,” Roosevelt told Watchorn, applauding the decision of the board to allow the stowaway to remain. “We need lots of good, vigorous, healthy blood to mingle with the national stream.”
William McKinley, on the other hand, seemed uninterested in immigration. During his first presidential campaign, he supported a literacy test for immigrants and spoke of the need to prevent the importation of cheap labor. When the campaign ended, McKinley said little more about immigration and paid no attention to what was happening at Ellis Island and the Barge Office, allowing the troubles there to become festering sores. During his four-plus years in office, McKinley thought that silence was the best policy on immigration.
Roosevelt could not have been more different—or so it seemed. While McKinley was solidly middle American in background and outlook, Roosevelt was part of the nation’s urban gentry, a Harvard-educated New Yorker, a politician and scholar with multivolume histories already under his belt. McKinley was the last of the Civil War veteran presidents, while the forty-two-year-old Roosevelt was the nation’s youngest president.
Roosevelt exists in historical memory as a man of bluster, a straight-talking reformer, yet the reality is more complex. The Rough Rider with overseas expansion on his mind was also noted for his quiet diplomacy. He would see his antitrust record dwarfed by that of his much-maligned successor, William Howard Taft. On issues from his handling of the 1902 miners strike to his shepherding of the meat inspection bill to his relations with the Republican old guard, Roosevelt was more of a deft accommodationist than a take-no-prisoners reformer. Nowhere does that become more apparent than in his handling of immigration. In some ways Roosevelt was not that different from McKinley.
LESS THAN A MONTH after taking office, Roosevelt busied himself with affairs of state. As expected, the new president had his fingers in many pots. There was much to think about—appointments, bills, politics.
One area in particular focused Roosevelt’s mind: the Immigration Service. Through friends in New York, he was already aware of the situation at Ellis Island. Three weeks after taking office, he confided to his close friend Nicholas Murray Butler that he was “more anxious to get this office straight than almost any other.”
As a new boss entered the scene, people quickly calibrated how they would fare under the new order. For Mark Hanna, the brains behind the McKinley presidency and leader of the Republican establishment, the elevation of Roosevelt to the presidency was not good news. “That damned cowboy is president of the United States,” he is reported to have said in a not entirely positive tone. Other Republicans were not sure what to make of the notoriously unpredictable Roosevelt.
Similar thoughts ran through the minds of those who worked on immigration. For Powderly, the death of McKinley was a huge blow. McKinley had been his biggest—and, increasingly, his only—supporter, the object of Powderly’s near–hero worship. With Roosevelt, Powderly had no such relationship. While Roosevelt once applauded an anti-immigrant article Powderly had written, that was almost fifteen years earlier. Powderly feared that Roosevelt still remembered that he had supported Henry George in 1886, when both George and Roosevelt unsuccessfully sought the mayoralty of New York City.
Even with a new boss to impress, Powderly showed no sign of trimming his sails. Just as Roosevelt was settling into the White House, Powderly was trying to force the deportation of sixteen immigrants from Transylvania headed to Hubbard, Ohio. Charged with violating the contract-labor laws, the men had spent two weeks in detention at Ellis Island, but Powderly’s superiors at Treasury found no reason to detain them any further and released them over his strenuous objections. Powderly, no doubt, had all his fears confirmed once again that his bosses had little interest in protecting the American worker from cheap immigrant labor. Treasury Department officials had their belief confirmed that Powderly was insufferably stubborn and not a team player.
Edward McSweeney had more reasons to be optimistic about the new chief executive. Despite McSweeney’s background as a partisan Democrat, he had run for city office in 1897 on a reform ticket with Seth Low, which helped him ingratiate himself with a number of prominent New Yorkers who just happened to be good friends with Roosevelt. His new friends included soon to be president of Columbia University Nicholas Murray Butler and reformer Jacob Riis. When Senator Thomas Platt, New York State’s Republican boss, tried to get McKinley to replace McSweeney, his new friends sent a letter to Washington praising McSweeney. One of the signers was Theodore Roosevelt. Though he had never met McSweeney, Roosevelt signed the letter on the recommendation of Butler.
For Prescott Hall, Roosevelt’s elevation to the presidency must have seemed like a godsend. Although a New Yorker, the new president had strong ties to the Boston Brahmins. A Harvard graduate, Roosevelt was a close friend of Henry Cabot Lodge. The president’s first wife, Alice, hailed from Boston’s blue-blood Lee family.
Roosevelt’s views on immigration, at first glance, appeared in sync with those of Hall and his fellow restrictionists. The new president was already on record condemning unrestricted immigration and castigating big business for its role in promoting it. During the cholera scare of 1892, Roosevelt told Lodge that he hoped the crisis would lead to a “permanent quarantine against most immigrants.” By background, friendships, and temperament, Roosevelt imbibed a decided skepticism about new immigrants.
Yet immigrant defenders had reason to be optimistic as well. As New York police commissioner, Roosevelt had once assigned a group of Jewish policemen to protect an anti-Semitic German preacher in town to give a speech. His calls for immigration regulation were always coupled with strong denunciations of know-nothingism and pleas to treat immigrants with decency. Roosevelt himself was a mixture of Dutch, English, French, Welsh, German, and Scottish blood and possessed an optimism about America that somehow eluded many of his friends. “I am a firm believer that the future will somehow bring things right in the end of our land,” Roosevelt wrote the notoriously dour Brahmin historian Francis Parkman.
Whatever may have been his true beliefs, Roosevelt first had to clean up the mess in the immigration service. A month after taking office, he met with Powderly. Though Powderly was willing to resign his post, the president said he had no intention of removing him from office. Just after the meeting, Roosevelt wrote Butler that “our people have been united in telling me that Powderly was a good man.” Even more good news for Powderly was that Roosevelt told him that every “good man whom I have met who knows anything about that office has agreed in believing McSweeney to be corrupt.”
Powderly left the meeting confident that he would be retained and that perhaps he would triumph over his enemies both at Ellis Island and in the Treasury Department. Even when rumors leaked out in the coming months that Powderly might lose his job, the old labor man held on to the president’s personal reassurance like a life preserver. “From all I knew of Mr. Roosevelt that simple declaration was equivalent to another man’s oath,” Powderly later reminisced.
Whatever his feelings for Powderly, Roosevelt felt no sympathy for Thomas Fitchie, the nominal head of Ellis Island. Nicholas Murray Butler called Fitchie “an old man with weak will” and Roosevelt considered him “absolutely incompetent.” Though Roosevelt did not know Fitchie personally, he certainly knew his type. He had been battling the New York Republican machine, of which Fitchie was a proud member, his entire political career. Although not personally corrupt, Fitchie was a time server who squandered the power he was given.
As the months wore on, nothing was done. As late as April 1902, more than seven months after Roosevelt took office, Fitchie, McSweeney, and Powderly all remained in office. Why had Roosevelt procrastinated? First, contrary to his blustering image, Roosevelt was a deliberate politician. Second, Roosevelt had trouble finding someone to run Ellis Island. “As for Fitchie’s successor, all I want to do is to get the best possible man in the country,” Roosevelt wrote Butler, setting the bar a bit high.
There was still a third reason. Despite his personal reassurances to Powderly and his initial negative impression of McSweeney, Roosevelt still remained torn as to who was at fault in the running battles in the Immigration Service. Depending on whom he last spoke with, his opinion about the two men could change from week to week.
Even with the charges of abuse and corruption swirling around Ellis Island, McSweeney was highly regarded for his administrative skills—even by his enemies. No less a person than Terence Powderly noted that no one else “so thoroughly understands the immigration service at the Port of New York as Mr. McSweeney.” McSweeney devoted himself to learning Italian so as to better handle the waves of Italian immigrants. He had become a leading national authority on immigration issues, writing articles and giving talks to academic audiences. McSweeney was the “ablest man in the whole immigration service,” Butler confidently told Roosevelt.
“Nicholas Miraculous” Butler was one of McSweeney’s biggest defenders. He was extremely close to Roosevelt (although they would later have a nasty falling out) and encouraged Roosevelt to investigate Powderly and keep McSweeney on. “I do not believe the rumors in circulation about his [McSweeney’s] integrity, and I feel pretty confident that an investigation instituted by you would confirm this belief,” Butler wrote Roosevelt. On top of that, he sent Roosevelt the 1898 letter from Powderly requesting to have McSweeney help out with the governor’s race in Connecticut. “This is about as low a grade of political morality as we ordinarily come across,” Butler wrote to Roosevelt. The president seemed disgusted with the letter, which succeeded in tarnishing Powderly’s reputation in his eyes.
Jacob Riis called Powderly “a wart that should be removed” and praised McSweeney as “clean and straight.” Even Henry Cabot Lodge supported McSweeney. The alliance between the Boston Brahmin Republican and the Irish Catholic Democrat was an odd pairing, but Massachusetts Republicans worried that a dismissal of McSweeney might hurt Republicans among the state’s Irish voters. “McSweeney has most industriously worked up every kind of influence, political, charitable, and religious, especially Catholic,” Roosevelt complained to Lodge.
What Roosevelt really wanted at Ellis Island, he wrote to a friend, was someone he could trust and “not some man about whom after hearing all the evidence I could be doubtful as to whether I ought to feel distrust.” The word Roosevelt kept getting was that the inspection center was badly run. “Either McSweeney is absolutely incompetent or else he is more responsible than any other one man for these evils.” Despite all of the positive words about McSweeney that he received from his friends, Roosevelt increasingly leaned toward the latter explanation.
Finally, in the spring of 1902, Roosevelt made the only decision that made any sense: he would get rid of the whole lot. He summoned Fitchie and McSweeney to Washington to inform them they would be replaced. Fitchie begged Roosevelt to rethink his actions and send a committee to visit Ellis Island so they could see that the charges were unfounded. Fitchie found the president adamant in his decision. A clean sweep was what he wanted.
Despite his earlier pledge to Powderly, Roosevelt had also concluded that the old labor leader would have to leave his post in Washington. “I believe the jig is up and that I have to go,” a resentful Powderly wrote to his loyal ally Robert Watchorn. Powderly was convinced that his letter asking for McSweeney’s help in the Connecticut political campaign was the main reason for his dismissal.
Powderly demanded to see the president. As humiliated as he was at getting fired, it particularly galled Powderly that he was being “coupled, before the public, with a man [McSweeney] who had, to my knowledge, brought the service beneath the rule of dishonest men.” Roosevelt told Powderly that he was removing everyone who had brought the problems of the Immigration Service into the public eye. Frank Sargent, another Republican labor man and the former head of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, would replace Powderly.
The sheer number of enemies that Powderly had acquired over the years did him in. One was Archbishop Michael Corrigan, who had personally protested Powderly’s behavior to the president. The Catholic Church had been concerned that the Knights of Labor was a secret organization, with its own rituals and vows, which might conflict with Catholic doctrine. Though Powderly was a Catholic, these concerns caused a number of run-ins with his local bishop in Pennsylvania and led to his estrangement from the Church.
McSweeney took advantage of his fellow Irish Catholic’s difficulties. A regular churchgoer who had been president of the Marlborough Catholic Lyceum’s debating society in his youth, McSweeney quickly allied himself with the Treasury Department’s solicitor, Maurice O’Connell, who made it a point to visit with McSweeney during his trips to New York. Both men were members of the Knights of Columbus, and O’Connell proved useful to McSweeney, helping to squash the Campbell-Rodgers report and foiling Powderly’s attempts to keep out contract laborers.
McSweeney found an even more important ally in Archbishop Corrigan. Dating back to the days of Castle Garden, the Catholic Church had taken an interest in the treatment of immigrants in New York. McSweeney kept the archbishop updated on Catholic immigrants entering Ellis Island. One problem was the presence of Protestant missionaries looking to make converts out of unsuspecting immigrants. For example, the American Tract Society handed out pamphlets at Ellis Island to Italian Catholics in their native language and Yiddish-language pamphlets entitled “Jesus of Nazareth the True Messiah” for Jewish immigrants. Protestant missions to Italian immigrants popped up all over Greenwich Village and Little Italy. Having McSweeney keep an eye on these Protestant missionaries was an invaluable service to the Archbishop.
All of these behind-the-scenes machinations were now over, and Roosevelt needed to find someone to take on the duties at Ellis Island. After a long search, he finally found a man who fit his exacting criteria. William Williams was a thirty-nine-year-old Wall Street lawyer, a loyal Republican with a reform bent, a former quartermaster officer in the army during the Spanish-American War, and a Yale man who belonged to the right clubs, including the University Club where the bachelor lawyer lived.
The son of a New London, Connecticut, merchant, Williams came from a family that was deeply intertwined with the history of early America. On his mother’s side, he was the great-great-great-grandson of the famed preacher Jonathan Edwards. On his father’s side, he was descended from Robert Williams, a Puritan settler who helped found Deerfield, Massachusetts. He was also a direct descendant of William Williams, a signer of the Declaration of Independence from Connecticut. The history of the nation’s British settlers weighed heavily on William Williams’s shoulders as he came reluctantly to Ellis Island.
Williams and Roosevelt had not previously met, but Williams came highly recommended. A Roosevelt friend praised him in words designed to tug at the president’s conception of manhood and public service: “No more ruggedly honest man lives and few who have a keener desire to make their lives useful…. He would accept it as a most solemn trust although at a great personal sacrifice.” This was just the kind of man who warmed Roosevelt’s heart: wealthy, yet willing to sacrifice for the common good, with a résumé that spoke of both good breeding and public service.
After Fitchie, McSweeney, and Powderly had been told of their dismissals, Williams received a telegram from Roosevelt inviting him to lunch at the White House. It took Williams by surprise. Not only did he not know the president, but he was also not actively seeking any political office. A private man of independent means, he enjoyed his law work and had little ambition beyond that. But Roosevelt could be persuasive.
At lunch, he sat Williams down directly to his right and proceeded to talk his ear off for half an hour. It was vintage Roosevelt, but he had not entirely persuaded Williams. The president wanted him to take the offer immediately; Williams wanted to go back to New York and think about it. When Williams asked the president why he should take the job, Roosevelt responded by calling it “the most interesting office in my gift.” Immigrants were being mistreated and something needed to be done about it. Upon his return to New York, Williams read up on immigration law and finally accepted the president’s offer. He would be at his new desk on Ellis Island by the end of April.
Roosevelt had already chosen McSweeney’s successor. Joseph Murray had been dubbed “the man who discovered Roosevelt.” That had about as much truth as the statement that Columbus discovered America. The only thing that the older machine politician did was provide a little push to an ambition that already burned deep in Roosevelt’s soul. In 1881, Murray, who came to America from Ireland as an infant and served as a drummer boy in the Union Army during the Civil War, had nominated the twenty-three-year-old Roosevelt for a seat in the New York Assembly.
Roosevelt always had a soft spot for the earthy Murray, despite their different backgrounds. Now it was time for the president to return the favor. It is not that Murray had not been adequately compensated for his political work. One historian noted that Murray’s “good luck in picking a winner permitted him to reach offices beyond the limits of his capacity,” which included a series of patronage jobs such as running the food counter at Castle Garden during the 1880s.
Roosevelt felt in the older man’s debt, praising him in his autobiography “as fearless and as staunchly loyal as any one whom I have ever met, a man to be trusted in any position demanding courage, integrity, and good faith.” Roosevelt noted that his friendship with the Irish Catholic politico helped broaden his understanding of other ethnic and religious groups. The only issue on which the two men disagreed was civil service reform: Roosevelt a supporter and Murray most certainly not. Now, his loyalty to Murray was going to force Roosevelt to go against the civil service rules that he so staunchly championed.
Roosevelt not only forced out McSweeney, despite civil service protections; he installed Murray into the spot, circumventing civil service rules. Roosevelt worried that Murray’s previous service in the patronage-ridden Castle Garden might cause a problem. Before appointing Murray, Roosevelt asked him if he had ever been investigated. Satisfied with the answer, the president went ahead with the nomination.
William Williams soon learned that Roosevelt, despite his public persona, played the patronage game almost as well as the Tammany Hall politicians both men despised. Shortly after Williams took office, Roosevelt sent a man named Marcus Braun to meet with him about jobs at Ellis Island. Braun was the leader of a small Hungarian Republican political club in New York. A native-born Hungarian, he was a classic American archetype: the ethnic political entrepreneur. Braun leveraged his ethnicity for patronage jobs for himself and a few friends, in turn giving politicians real or imagined access to ethnic communities and their precious votes. Even a marginal figure like Braun could translate such access into power and prestige.
Williams informed Roosevelt he could appoint one of Braun’s men as a laborer at $2 a day, but that under civil service rules he could not appoint another Braun colleague to a $1,800-a-year job. Williams could get the man a lower-paying job if the other candidates failed their civil service test. Not forgetting about his own needs, Braun wanted a job as supervising inspector at Ellis Island, a job for which Williams believed Braun was not eligible. Despite this, Braun managed to get named a special immigrant inspector at Ellis Island, a move that Roosevelt would later come to regret.
The cases of Murray and Braun show that Roosevelt was never too much of a reformer to play the patronage game. Bending the law was not outside of his comfort zone. Years later, lawyer James Sheffield wrote to Williams:
The extraordinary part of a man like Roosevelt is that he finally comes to the conclusion that anything HE does is right, because HE does it. HE could beat the Civil Service rules on behalf of an utterly incompetent man and because his motives were to serve a friend, no one must criticize him for it…. It is strange how the country still believes in the Roosevelt brand of righteousness as against the evidence of his constant use of the very men and methods he denounces in others.
Such behavior was not lost on Terence Powderly, who noted that although McSweeney had been fired effective May 1, he was given an additional thirty days’ paid leave of absence, during which time Murray began work. Since the two men could not be paid for the same job, Powderly was ordered to name Murray as an immigrant inspector for thirty days at a salary of $10 a day. The lame-duck Powderly, still on the job for a few more weeks, expressed his pique with Roosevelt by refusing the order. Powderly’s superiors at Treasury went ahead with the temporary appointment anyway.
Murray replaced McSweeney, but was not forced to take the civil service exam as required by law. The Civil Service Commission, no doubt influenced by the president, argued that the chaos at Ellis Island allowed for greater discretion of appointments. As soon as Murray took office, he was immediately put under normal civil service protections. An angry Powderly, in a letter to Robert Watchorn, clearly saw the irony of the situation: “Mark the consistency of dismissing me for writing a letter such as I wrote and then, in order to make room for a friend, he violates the civil service law himself by knocking it galley west and makes a place for a favorite.” On this issue, Murray’s view of civil service reform won the day, but Roosevelt’s ethical flexibility would soon clash with the reform sensibilities of his new Ellis Island commissioner.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT HOPED WILLIAM Williams would reinvigorate Ellis Island, end the abusive treatment of immigrants, clean out the patronage dump, and strictly enforce the law. There would be no worries about meddling from Washington; Commissioner-General of Immigration Frank Sargent, who had replaced Powderly, was on the same page with his views of immigration, and the union man would prove exceedingly deferential to his underling, the wealthy Wall Street lawyer. William Williams wasted no time in getting to work, and not a minute too soon.
In 1902, more immigrants arrived than in any other year since 1881. More than 25,000 immigrants arrived in Williams’s first week on the job. The island’s sleeping quarters, which could accommodate as many 1,300 people, were bursting at the seams.
Williams let nothing escape his critical eye. In his first Annual Report, written just two months after he took the reins at Ellis Island, Williams talked about the lax enforcement and corrupt practices he found there. The inspection process was marked by a large degree of arbitrariness. Williams accused officials of placing “holds” on immigrants based not on an actual inspection, but rather on information on the ship’s manifest. “The fact that most of those marked were able-bodied people with large amounts of money are points not without interest,” Williams wrote, slyly implying a shakedown racket.
Angry at the sloppiness, corruption, and lack of professionalism among the Ellis Island staff, Williams continued to weed out workers who had given the place a bad name. By late September, he fired the accused serial groper John Lederhilger. By year’s end, all officials named in the Campbell-Rodgers report had been pushed out.
Others also felt Williams’s wrath. Emile Schamcham, a Syrian interpreter, was dismissed from his job for trying to get a date with an immigrant girl. While this woman was waiting at Ellis Island for a friend to meet her, Schamcham slipped her a note with the address of his boardinghouse. Another Williams target was a clerk named James Fraser, who had been away from his post for four straight days on an alcoholic bender—and apparently not for the first time. He told Williams he had contracted a disease during the Civil War that forced him to use alcohol as a stimulant. Under the new regime, such excuses would not be tolerated. Fraser was fired. Malingerers were no longer wanted and could no longer take cover under civil service rules or the protection of political patrons. When Senator Platt asked the new boss of Ellis Island to promote Samuel Samsom from gateman to inspector, Williams brusquely wrote back that Samsom “is not fitted either by temperament or training for a position much above that held by him now.”
Nor would the abusive treatment of immigrants be tolerated. Six weeks into his administration, Williams posted the following notice throughout the main building at Ellis Island:
Immigrants must be treated with kindness and consideration. Any Government official violating the terms of this notice will be recommended for dismissal from the Service. Any other person so doing will be forthwith required to leave Ellis Island. It is earnestly requested that any violation hereof, or any instance of any kind of improper treatment of immigrants at Ellis Island, or before they leave the Barge Office, be promptly brought to the attention of the Commissioner.
Williams was dead serious about enforcing his edict. He wrote to one employee: “I was very much displeased at the rough and unkind manner in which I heard you address two immigrants in the Discharging Bureau this afternoon. Do not let this occur again.” Williams suspended a gateman named John Bell for two weeks without pay for using “vulgar and abusive language” with an immigrant.
No area of immigration escaped Williams’s attention. He kept a close eye on steamship companies, fearing that they were not doing a proper job of inspecting immigrants in European ports. On his fifth day on the job, he fired off a letter to the French Line complaining that while its manifests listed all immigrants as being in sound physical condition, Ellis Island doctors found a number afflicted with various ailments, such as hernias, blindness, and clubfeet. One immigrant had only one leg, another had one leg shorter than the other, and a third was a hunchback. Williams fined steamship companies for failing to inspect immigrants properly. Between May 1902 and May 1903, Williams collected $6,560 in fines from steamship companies.
Next, Williams aimed his fire at those missionaries at Ellis Island whom he believed were runners in disguise, suckering unwitting immigrants to their rooming houses and taking advantage of them. He barred a German Lutheran minister, a man who ran the Home for Scandinavian Emigrants, and members of the Austro-Hungarian Society for swindling immigrants and keeping an unsanitary and unsafe boardinghouse.
To protect immigrants from falling prey to swindlers, Williams took on the concessions at Ellis Island—the money exchange, baggage transfer contract, and food services. Herbert Parsons, a Republican leader in the city, warned Williams about the food concession. Though the contract was in the name of Schwab & Co., the business was really run by Charles Hess, a local Republican leader connected to the Platt machine. According to Parsons, Hess was “one of the most unmitigated scoundrels in this city.” McSweeney had shielded Hess under the previous administration, but that would change. “I witnessed with my own eyes the fact that immigrants were often fed without knives, forks, or spoons and I saw them extract boiled beef from their bowls of soup with their fingers,” Williams reported.
New bids were put out and new contracts were awarded for the food, baggage, and money exchange privileges. Though the opening of Ellis Island and the federalization of immigration regulation were supposed to have eliminated the kinds of corruption that had existed at Castle Garden, the present state of these privileges showed that little had changed. The owner of the baggage contract had held it since Castle Garden, while the money exchange was in the hands of the nephew of the man who held it at Castle Garden. “This office has been run in the past largely in the interests of the restaurant privilege holder, and partly in the interest of some steamship companies, who have been violating our statutes with impunity,” Williams wrote triumphantly to Roosevelt after the new contract had been awarded. “This office is now being run in the Government’s interest.”
Williams even tackled the landscaping of Ellis Island. While the Times noted that before Williams “there was not a flower or a bush of any kind on the island,” by the summer of 1903 the island was taking the appearance of a “well-regulated and unusually prettily decorated park.” And from the front door of the main building to the dock where the barges dropped off immigrants, a new steel canopy with a glass roof was erected to shelter immigrants as they began their inspection ritual.
Then there was the case of Edward McSweeney. Although McSweeney had been dismissed by Roosevelt, controversy still surrounded him. Williams and McSweeney overlapped for three days at the end of April, enough time for the streetwise McSweeney to sell his library of books and periodicals to Williams for the exorbitant price of $100. When Williams took office, not only was the entire service at Ellis Island a mess—from the quality of the inspectors to the quality of the food to the cleanliness of the buildings—but the records and files were also in disarray.
McSweeney had asked Williams if he could store five large boxes at Ellis Island until he could bring them up to Boston, where he was moving. The boxes, he told Williams, contained personal papers and materials. When someone told Williams that McSweeney had placed official documents in the boxes, he referred the matter to his superiors, who then dispatched a Secret Service investigator to New York.
The agent opened the boxes and found inside thousands of documents—4,292 to be exact—relating to official work at Ellis Island. There were letters, special reports, and minutes of boards of special inquiry. When McSweeney wrote to Williams in August asking him to forward the boxes to Boston, he was informed they were being held by order of the secretary of the Treasury. Williams did pack up two small boxes of personal items from the larger boxes and shipped them to Boston.
In addition to the five large boxes, Williams was told that McSweeney had ordered a large cedar chest made at government expense. A Secret Service agent managed to track down the box to a storage facility in Manhattan, but could not open it. Government officials asked McSweeney, through his lawyers, to open the box. After some days of stalling, government officials were allowed to open the chest and found only bed linens. Clearly the chest had been cleaned out. While the original contents of the cedar chest will forever remain a mystery, William Williams made certain to keep a record of what was found in the boxes held at Ellis Island.
According to Williams, McSweeney was in a state of mental anguish when he discovered that the boxes had been opened. One reason was the strange accusation that emerged from those boxes concerning the case of two teenage girls. The Eloy sisters had been caught showing a “filthy and obscene photograph” to other immigrants awaiting inspection. The girls were then brought before McSweeney, who allowed the girls to land. McSweeney later told investigators that the photo in question had mysteriously disappeared. However, all of the material relating to the case, including the photo, was carefully filed away by McSweeney in a small manila folder marked “Eloy girls.”
None of this seemed to slow down the indefatigable McSweeney. While Terence Powderly was at home in Washington sulking, McSweeney was back home in Massachusetts running the campaign of William A. Gaston, the Democratic candidate for governor. Gaston had been Roosevelt’s classmate at Harvard and gave the president his personal assurance that McSweeney could explain the documents if given a chance.
Roosevelt then ordered Henry Burnett, the U.S. attorney in New York, to interview McSweeney. In an interview that lasted almost two days, McSweeney said that he never intended to take away the documents but instead wanted to put them aside to help William Williams, whom he had hoped would call upon him for advice. Williams called the testimony “confused and contradictory.” He had no doubt as to McSweeney’s dishonesty, writing Roosevelt that if he were wrong about McSweeney, then “I am so lacking in intelligence that I am not fit to hold this office one day longer.”
It was not until the summer of 1903 that the president and Burnett agreed to file charges against McSweeney for purloining government documents. McSweeney’s lawyers claimed that the charges were trivial, that he never meant to take official documents, and that the boxes never left Ellis Island. If they were so valuable to McSweeney, his lawyers argued, why didn’t he take them with him immediately?
Because of an electoral fluke, William Gaston was running again for governor of Massachusetts in 1903 and McSweeney was again running the campaign. Gaston staunchly defended McSweeney, claiming that the charge was “technical” and the papers had “no earthly importance.”
The case took on political overtones as Roosevelt took an interest in Gaston’s campaign and the prosecution of McSweeney, calling the latter a “dog” and an “indicted scoundrel.” The president suggested to the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor that he should use Gaston’s employment of McSweeney against him in the campaign.
The case remained in limbo until a former clerk at Ellis Island named John Steele testified on behalf of McSweeney. He said that his old boss had ordered him to pack up his personal papers. In doing so, he emptied all the drawers in McSweeney’s desk, mixing personal papers with official papers and then nailing the boxes shut. He claimed that McSweeney was not present when he did this. Thomas Fitchie also testified on behalf of his former assistant, claiming that in the move from the Barge Office back to Ellis Island, there was a mixup in the department’s filing system.
Though McSweeney tried to remove government documents that would have made him look bad, Steele’s testimony, combined with the fact that the papers never left the island, weakened the government’s case. As William Williams noted, the question of McSweeney’s guilt hinged on whether there was real motive surrounding the keeping of the documents. The Boston Herald, a staunch defender of McSweeney, argued that it was “utter frivolity…to accuse a man of having the criminal intent to steal papers which he voluntarily leaves in his accuser’s possession.” Nor could McSweeney be prosecuted for the mysterious cedar box that contained only bed linens. In June 1904, more than two years after McSweeney left office, all charges against him were finally dropped.
McSweeney was more a typical late-nineteenth-century political operative than a true villain. He cut corners, bent rules, ingratiated himself to powerful people, fought against real and perceived enemies, and too often put his personal survival ahead of public service.
Yet he was a deeply complex man. To his credit, he refused to let the indictment tarnish his career. Back in Boston, McSweeney reestablished himself as a prominent citizen. Besides running Gaston’s two unsuccessful gubernatorial campaigns, McSweeney also became the editor of the Boston Traveler, where he led a campaign against tuberculosis. He fought for a workmen’s compensation bill and was a member of the Massachusetts Industrial Accident Board. He was later put in charge of the Port of Boston. He continued writing and speaking on immigration, defending both the federal regulations enforced at Ellis Island, as well as the positive benefits of immigration.
As McSweeney was re-creating himself in Massachusetts, William Williams was taking firm control at Ellis Island, cleaning out McSweeney’s allies and putting order to what had once been a dumping ground of political patronage. According to one Roosevelt biographer, at the new Ellis Island “a political snug harbor was swept, garnished, and set in running order on a strict merit basis.”
Every move that Williams made seemed to vindicate Powderly. This was cold comfort for the ousted official who was now sitting in his home in the Petworth section of Washington tending to his vegetable and rose gardens, looking out across the street to the verdant grounds of the Old Soldiers’ Home.
Shortly after his dismissal, Powderly found himself a speaker at the annual convention of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, the union that his successor, Frank Sargent, had previously led. Also in attendance that day was Theodore Roosevelt, who was being named a life member of the firemen’s union. For Powderly, the event must have been difficult. “It is a great honor to a Labor Union to enroll the name of the nation’s President on its roster,” Powderly declared in his speech, “but I fear he has not the making of a good fireman, at least I don’t like the way he ‘fired’ me.”
These were difficult times for Powderly. Writing to his friend Robert Watchorn, Powderly said he was “feeling very blue and lonesome, and am also suffering from an attack of cholera morbus or something akin thereto.” A few days later, he told another friend that he had “never felt so humiliated in all my life as on being turned out of a position that I did everything in my power to make respectable and dignified.”
Powderly’s depression deepened as tragedy continued to shadow his life. On top of being fired, he was still dealing with the grief of his wife’s death in October 1901. In May 1903, his brother Joseph died suddenly. Robert Watchorn had visited Powderly to cheer him up, but he feared that when he left, his friend would “relapse into his morbid and apprehensive mood.” Powderly, whose image once adorned the homes of the nation’s working families, now felt abandoned and forgotten.
But Roosevelt had not forgotten Powderly. In the spring of 1903, less than a year after firing him, the president summoned him to the White House. Roosevelt admitted that he had been wrong to dismiss Powderly, and he wanted to reinstate him elsewhere in government. As plans to prosecute McSweeney were in motion, Roosevelt tried to get Powderly a job in the Justice Department. The president explained to Attorney General Philander Chase Knox that the more he looked into the immigration affair, “the more satisfied I am that Powderly was fundamentally right in his attitude.” Roosevelt alluded to Powderly’s 1898 letter as a mistake for which he had “amply atoned” with his time out of office. Roosevelt told a friend, “my conscience does not approve the action taken in Mr. Powderly’s case, and the more I look into this matter, the more I am convinced that he was wronged, and I was misled.”
Nothing came of the Justice Department job and Powderly sank further into gloom. While McSweeney moved on with his life in Boston, Powderly could not shake the embarrassment of his dismissal. He came to deeply resent Roosevelt. Powderly would vote for him in the 1904 election, despite the fact that he found “no reason to admire him” and felt good reason to dislike him. Powderly still hoped that after the election, the stain on his record would be wiped out and he would be returned to government service.
He would have to wait two more years for that moment to arrive.
LEON CZOLGOSZ’S SIMPLE ACT of murder had elevated one man to the presidency, but it also indirectly led another man to a basement prison at Ellis Island.
On October 23, 1903, seven months after anarchists were legally banned from the country, a contingent of Ellis Island inspectors, Secret Service agents, and New York City policemen raided the Murray Hill Lyceum in Manhattan. They brought with them an arrest warrant for John Turner for espousing anarchist beliefs. A British citizen who had arrived in the United States days earlier, Turner had been invited by anarchist Emma Goldman to give a series of lectures. Now he was being taken to a small cutter waiting to ferry him to Ellis Island. Once there, he would be imprisoned in one of three nine-by-six steel-bar cells in the basement of the main building.
Goldman called Turner’s new home a “fetid dungeon,” not knowing that sixteen years later she too would become a prisoner of Ellis Island. A “philosophical anarchist,” as the papers called him, Turner had the entire basement jail to himself, with the exception of two guards. While in public Goldman railed against Turner’s situation, in private she noted that Turner had gained twenty pounds while at Ellis Island and was “wonderfully evenly balanced and easy going as only an Englishman can be.” Despite this, Turner’s plight proved useful fodder for anarchists like Goldman in their battle against what they saw as a reactionary government and established authority.
Writing from his Ellis Island jail, Turner noted how he was being held and threatened with expulsion because “the law imposes certain standards of opinion, of beliefs and disbeliefs.” Steamship companies at European ports were now asking every prospective passenger to America whether he or she was an anarchist. If they answered yes, they were refused passage. Turner had kind words for William Williams, calling him “keen, businesslike, yet always courteous,” but was baffled by what he called the “strange procedure” of the board of special inquiry that heard his case.
Clarence Darrow soon took up Turner’s case, joined by the poet Edgar Lee Masters. While the case made its way to the Supreme Court, Turner was released on bond in March 1904 after four and a half months in jail at Ellis Island. He continued on his lecture tour, speaking out in favor of the merits of a general strike, by which workers would grind the capitalist system to a halt and bring freedom to the oppressed.
In May 1904, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Turner’s deportation. Perhaps sensing that his legal case was doomed, Turner beat the authorities to the punch and left the country of his own volition two weeks before the decision.
Though Turner was technically never deported, his was the first case of an alien to be ordered deported from the United States because of his political beliefs. In upholding Turner’s arrest and eventual deportation, the Supreme Court once again validated the unique status of the administrative rules in place at Ellis Island. Darrow had turned to the First Amendment to defend his client, but the Court unanimously declared they were unable to understand how immigration law violated the First Amendment.
Turner certainly had his right to speak abridged, but that was merely a function of his exclusion under immigration law. “To appeal to the Constitution is to concede that this is a land governed by that supreme law, and as under it the power to exclude has been determined to exist, those who are excluded cannot assert the rights in general obtaining in a land to which they do not belong as citizens or otherwise,” wrote the Court. In other words, since John Turner did not belong in the United States, the constitutional protections of personal freedoms did not apply to him. It was as if he had never entered America in the first place. As Emma Goldman would discover years later, the precedent of the Turner case would continue to reverberate at Ellis Island.
There was another quirk to the Turner case: he was not an immigrant. Turner had merely come to the United States to lecture and then planned to return to his job in England. Ellis Island was no longer just regulating immigrants, but rather any alien headed to U.S. shores even for the shortest visit. Even a casual tourist could find himself stewing in detention at Ellis Island while authorities decided whether he fell into one of the categories for exclusion.
When Turner’s case made it to the Supreme Court, the named defendant was William Williams. The two men are forever linked in legal history. The commissioner of Ellis Island was not just content to clean up the patronage mess at the immigration station. His real goal was a stricter enforcement of immigration laws that would keep undesirables like John Turner from entering the country. That goal would prove far more controversial than making sure inspectors spoke politely to immigrants.