Chapter 8
The fact is that a reformer can’t last in politics. He can make a show for a while, but he always comes down like a rocket…. He hasn’t been brought up in the difficult business of politics and he makes a mess of it every time.
—George Washington Plunkitt, 1905
GEORGE WASHINGTON PLUNKITT LIVED JUST THREE LONG city blocks west and three short city blocks south of William Williams’s bachelor accommodations at the upper-crust University Club. But those six blocks were a gulf as wide as any ocean. Plunkitt, who served as a New York state senator while Williams was at Ellis Island, was the epitome of the Tammany Hall ward boss. Working-class Irish Catholics like Plunkitt entered politics as a profession looking for profit, not as a service to the public interest.
Reformers like Williams had little respect for the Tammany bosses and the feeling was mutual. To Plunkitt, men like Williams were amateur dabblers with no real understanding of the messiness of democracy and a disdain for the average citizen. They put ideals and morals ahead of practicality. True to Plunkitt’s maxim, Williams would make a good show for a while, but would soon come down like a rocket.
Theodore Roosevelt was a reformer too—at least he styled himself that way. He was equal parts zealotry and flexibility, a combination that served him well in public life. It was a style that even Plunkitt probably could appreciate.
William Williams, on the other hand, was all zealotry and no flexibility. Starchy as the high, white collars favored by men of that era, Williams was convinced of his utter correctness in all matters and had little use for those who might differ with him. That Williams had done yeoman’s work in cleaning up Ellis Island made his attitude even more unfortunate.
Having first moved swiftly to clean up the immigration service in New York, Williams proceeded to tackle what he felt was an even more vital part of his job: a rigid enforcement of the immigration laws.
A year in office at Ellis Island confirmed Williams’s low opinion of America’s new immigrants. What he had seen in his first year on the job was “a particularly undesirable stream of immigration.” In response, Williams stepped up the exclusion of immigrants, keeping an especially close eye on those he considered paupers or likely to become public charges.
Williams’s appointment elated members of the Immigration Restriction League (IRL). For the first time since Ellis Island opened, a true restrictionist and New England patrician was now guarding the gate. Williams kept in contact with members of the IRL, telling Prescott Hall he wanted even stricter exclusionary laws. In the meantime, he would work within the law to prevent undesirable immigrants from entering the country.
Immigrants were on notice. Take the case of twelve-year-old Raffaele Borcelli, suffering from an advanced case of the scalp disease favus. When lawyers tried to intervene on behalf of the young boy, Williams bluntly informed them that America did not want “diseased people in this country and I intend that they shall not come.”
Williams believed that the current laws were not going far enough. He told President Roosevelt that what was needed to “meet the real evils of the situation” was new legislation. In its absence, Williams was going to do his part to protect American civilization. In November 1902, he provided guidance for Ellis Island inspectors in interpreting the law: “Any inspector who passes an alien who may not be ‘clearly beyond a doubt’ entitled to land, violates his oath of office,” Williams informed his subordinates. “The purpose of the statute is to exclude undesirable aliens, not to invite aliens to come here. It casts upon them the burden of proving that they are entitled to admission.” He was going to take the broad and vague classifications for immigration exclusion and tighten them.
Compare Williams’s 1902 edict with McSweeney’s interpretation of the same immigration law from three years earlier. “I have seen cases where an immigrant would fall within the letter of the law [of exclusion] and still in the opinion of the inspectors be a desirable immigrant,” McSweeney told the Industrial Commission on Immigration. Williams believed he was appointed to end just that kind of laxity. He had every reason to believe that the president who appointed him also believed in tightening the law.
In his first Annual Message to Congress, Roosevelt allotted two long paragraphs to the immigration problem, calling the present system unsatisfactory. He went on to call for adding anarchists to the list of excludable categories, as well as some type of education or literacy test. Just as important, Roosevelt felt that all immigrants who were “below a certain standard of economic fitness to enter our industrial fields as competitors with American labor” should be excluded. Immigrants had to prove they could earn a living in America and had to have enough money to make a new life here.
So it must have surprised Williams when he received two letters from Roosevelt informing him that reports had been filtering into the White House from the president’s German-American and Jewish friends in New York objecting to the treatment of immigrants at Ellis Island. They criticized what they called the “star chamber” quality of the boards of special inquiry, complaining that immigrants were deported before their relatives were notified of their landing, that immigrants were no longer allowed to have counsel during their exclusion hearings, and that Williams no longer allowed the issuance of bonds for those believed likely to become a public charge.
Roosevelt warned Williams that he needed to avoid the appearance of arbitrary harshness. While the president heartily approved of the exclusion of immigrants who “would tend to the physical or moral deterioration of our people,” such actions needed to be tempered with compassion. Sending an immigrant back home, Roosevelt understood, was “to inflict a punishment upon him only less severe than death itself.” Roosevelt asked Williams if he could include members of German, Jewish, and Italian immigrant societies in board of inquiry hearings.
It was a mild scolding, but a scolding nonetheless. The letter opened a window into Roosevelt’s conflicted view of immigration. Good immigrants were welcome; bad immigrants need not apply. Yet above all, such sifting of immigrants had to be done with the utmost sensitivity and without regard for race, religion, or ethnicity.
Williams at first responded with uncharacteristic deference. “I have carefully noted all that you say,” Williams wrote. “It will be my earnest endeavor at all times to execute the immigration laws rigidly, but fairly and without unnecessary friction and I think I can satisfy any reasonable person that I have never exhibited any anti-foreign feeling.” He informed the president that, as per his orders, he had invited some representatives from immigrant societies to lunch at Ellis Island.
Williams then shot back with another letter to Roosevelt in a more characteristic style. “Any reliable person asserting that the immigrant is judged by ‘star chamber’ methods must be densely ignorant of the facts,” wrote an indignant Williams. While admitting the need to enforce the immigration laws without “friction,” he added snippily, “Of course, I do not call it lack of discretion in proper cases to show up thieves, dismiss missionaries for revenue, or expose fraudulent practices of steamship agents.”
Williams continued a few days later even more unapologetically. While reassuring the president that he was consulting with philanthropic groups, immigrant aid societies, and social welfare agencies, he informed Roosevelt of just what he found in these talks. “Every intelligent person with whom I converse (whether engaged in charitable work or business) is of the opinion that altogether too many low-grade aliens are entering this country,” Williams wrote. He was not against immigration in general, nor did he oppose hearty immigrants ready to work, even if they were not highly intelligent. What he opposed was the minority of undesirable immigrants.
By background and temperament more of a New Englander than a New Yorker, the Connecticut-born Williams shared many of the fears of the Immigration Restriction League. In contrast, Roosevelt’s background was tempered by his connections and friendships with New York City’s ethnic groups. For Roosevelt, it was a constant fight between his patrician side, which looked on some newcomers with dismay, and his pluralist side, which believed that it was character, not education or race or religion, that counted the most when judging individuals.
A man like William Williams appealed to Roosevelt’s patrician side. For Williams, as for Roosevelt, the regulation of immigration was not just about preserving Anglo-Saxon culture; it was also about limiting the selfish interests of big business in the interest of the public good. With the immigration question, Williams argued, America was “confronted with problems of far greater importance than the immediate material development of the country.” Just as progressives argued that unrestricted laissez-faire damaged the social fabric, Williams argued that Americans could not “sacrifice our National ideals and character for mere pecuniary gain.”
For many progressives, being critical of the excesses of capitalism meant not only criticizing the selfish greed of businessmen and the unfair competition of the trusts; it also meant regulating the tide of immigrants fueling industrial America. Being progressive meant being in favor of a strong national government to rein in private interest; it also meant, for Roosevelt, Williams, and many others, that “National ideals and character” existed.
Williams ended his 1903 Annual Report by arguing that a “too rapid filling up of any country with foreign elements is sure to be at the expense of national character when such elements belong to the poorer classes in their own respective homes.” Although the words were published under Williams’s name and no doubt reflected his views, they were actually penned by Theodore Roosevelt, who added those words in his personal edits of the original text.
Perhaps for that reason, Williams was not deterred by Roosevelt’s mild rebuke. Williams could proudly note that “the worst riff-raff of Europe” was kept out of America, yet more work was needed. Many of those who technically did not fall under the excludable categories of immigration law, in Williams’s opinion, were still undesirable.
Over 857,000 immigrants arrived during Williams’s first year, of whom about 60 percent were Italians, Jews, and Slavs. These new immigrants were overwhelmingly male (including 89 percent of all Croatians and 81 percent of all Italians), overwhelmingly unskilled (including 96 percent of all Ruthenians and 89 percent of all Lithuanians), and mostly between the ages of fourteen and forty-five. Anywhere from one-third to one-half of these groups were illiterate, and, on average, they came with about $9 per person. They were mostly young, unskilled, illiterate males with little money but the necessary muscle and brawn to run the country’s mills, factories, and powerhouses and build the subways and skyscrapers. Hardly paupers, yet definitely not professionals, these new immigrants were raw labor pure and simple.
In a 1906 book sympathetic to the plight of immigrants, Edward Steiner, an immigrant himself, described the lumpen masses from which new Americans would be created: “It is true that many criminals come, especially from Italy. Many weak, impoverished and poorly developed creatures come from among Polish and Russian Jews, but they are only the tares in the wheat. The stock as a whole is physically sound; it is crude, common peasant stock, not the dregs of society, but its basis.”
Not everyone agreed. The poet Wallace Irwin took to the pages of a New York newspaper to express his thoughts at the rising tide of immigrants washing ashore in a poem entitled “Ellis Island’s Problems”:
Down the greasy gang-plank
See the motley pack
Nothing in the pocketbook
Tatters on the back
Pauper, cripple, criminal
Halt and blind and slow
Has Uncle Sammy room enough
To give ’em all a show?
Crime, disease, and wretchedness
Of a hundred lands
All the world’s incompetence
Dumped upon our hands.
It was a sentiment with which William Williams would have agreed. In his 1903 Annual Report, Williams boldly estimated that at least two hundred thousand of the immigrants arriving that year “will be of no benefit to the country.” Had they all stayed home, he argued, nobody “would have missed them,” except of course the steamship companies that made money on their passage. Most of these immigrants came from “some of the most undesirable sources of population” of Italy, Austria, and Russia.
It was a cold but not uncharacteristic sentiment, but Williams was unapologetic. He called it “sheer folly” to allow in so many immigrants when the nation was trying to fix the social and economic problems brought about by rapid industrialization and urbanization. Besides, he declared, “aliens have no inherent right whatever to come here,” asserting the right of sovereignty at the heart of American immigration law. Congress, acting upon the wishes of the people, had the right to determine who could and who could not enter America. Williams was an officer of the state, faithfully administering the wishes of the people, transmitted through Congress into law and executed by the Immigration Service. In such an arrangement, sentimentality was banished from the stage.
Though immigrants did not have a legal right to come to the United States, once they entered the country, became citizens, and put down roots, they too joined the immigration debate. It is no surprise that immigrant groups, especially Jewish and German leaders, would voice their concerns. These were men of high character, as Roosevelt would say, leaders in their community striving toward social betterment. They were the right kind of immigrants. Of Leopold Deutschberger, though, Roosevelt would probably not go so far.
A reporter for the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, the city’s German-language newspaper and one of the most influential of its kind in the country, Deutschberger covered the Ellis Island beat. Throughout Williams’s tenure at Ellis Island, the German-American journalist published numerous inflammatory articles about alleged abuses of immigrants, with titles such as “Men Weep,” “Disgrace to Country,” “Unrestricted Despotism,” “Barbarous Treatment of Immigrants,” and “No Pity.”
To his supporters, such criticism was proof of Williams’s success. Keeping a close eye on affairs from Boston, Prescott Hall congratulated Williams “on the great tribute which the Staats-Zeitung is paying your administration…. I have never known the Staats-Zeitung to abuse anything as much as it has your administration, which of itself is the highest praise.” To Hall, if the paper was criticizing Williams, then he must be doing something right.
Germans were the largest ethnic group in New York City and a political power in the Midwest. The number of German immigrants, however, had fallen off substantially in recent years. In the first two years of Williams’s administration, only about 93,000 German immigrants arrived through Ellis Island, less than 6 percent of all immigrants. Of those only 696 were excluded, or about 0.7 percent.
Although Williams’s animus was largely directed against southern and eastern European immigrants, it was the German press and the German-American community that were most angered by his administration. When Williams banned a German missionary from Ellis Island, a woman from Washington, D.C., wrote him to complain. If he did not reconsider his actions, she warned, millions of German-Americans would condemn him. “Do look over the matter again or you have struck trouble,” she warned. With self-confidence bordering on arrogance, Williams responded: “I hasten to assure you that I am utterly indifferent to any unfavorable resolutions that may be passed upon me, or to any that may come to me, as a result of doing the right thing.”
Even the American Hebrew, a prominent voice in the Jewish community, defended Williams, writing that the agitation “is not based on firm ground, and seems to be inspired by some motive other than the unselfish one of securing justice for the immigrant.” The newspaper credited Williams with creating an atmosphere at Ellis Island where immigrants were well-treated and no longer “hauled about like foreign baggage.” The editors encouraged Jews not to complain and “for the sake of their own self-respect refuse to ask for special treatment.”
Despite the support from some quarters, Williams’s problems with the German community continued. In early September 1903, Deutschberger published another article about Ellis Island, entitled “Hell on Earth.” Among its accusations was that “people on the Island were literally eaten up by vermin.”
Williams may have appeared indifferent to the criticism, but when combined with his frenetic work schedule, it was all beginning to take a toll. During 1903, Williams was at his desk for all but five days of the year—including Sundays and holidays. “I have for a long time felt that you were overworked and that it was only a matter of time when you could no longer stand up under the strain,” Commissioner-General Frank Sargent wrote Williams a year into his tenure. Just after the publication of the Staats-Zeitung’s “Hell on Earth” article, Robert Watchorn was hearing rumors that Williams had already “run his mile” at Ellis Island.
For Roosevelt, it was time for a presidential visit to Ellis Island, the first one by a sitting president. The visit was scheduled for Wednesday, September 15. Roosevelt would leave his home at Sagamore Hill, on Long Island’s Oyster Bay and arrive with his party on the presidential yacht Sylph in time for lunch. In addition to his wife and son Kermit, Roosevelt was joined by special guests, including friends Jacob Riis and Owen Wister, as well as local politicians, journalists, and academics. The Ellis Island dining facility added oysters and champagne fritters to its usual bland fare of stewed prunes for the occasion.
Roosevelt’s trip began badly. The Sylph left Oyster Bay a little before 10:00 AM.. Strong winds and heavy rains beat hard against the Sylph as it made its way from the North Shore of Long Island, southwest into the East River toward Manhattan. The winds reached near hurricane force as the Sylph made its way around Fort Schuyler off the coast of the Bronx. As waves continued to break over the presidential vessel, Mrs. Roosevelt and Kermit were sent below deck. Upon reaching Hell’s Gate, the notorious cross-current patch of water where the tidal straight known as the East River meets the Long Island Sound just off the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the presidential party saw a tugboat that had been capsized by the winds and waves. The Sylph’s pilot suggested that the trip be canceled, and the group landed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard until the storm blew over.
The weather eventually improved and Roosevelt’s group got back on the ship and continued its journey. It was not until sometime after 2:00 PM.. that the presidential party approached Ellis Island, where they were met by a small tugboat that transferred the passengers of the Sylph to the slip at Ellis Island. The president stood at the front of the tugboat, in his raincoat and slouch hat, waving to a small crowd of officials, including William Williams, waiting in the rain to welcome the tardy presidential party. After more than four hours, Roosevelt and his party had finally made it to Ellis Island.
After a quick lunch, Roosevelt began his whirlwind tour of the facilities. Over two thousand immigrants were on the island when Roosevelt arrived, and the president dove right into the process. Not content simply to watch, he joined inspectors in questioning immigrants, including a fifteen-year-old Slavic orphan named Ildra Andras. After a few questions, the president gave Andras a hearty slap on the back and the boy was off to Minnesota to be with his uncle. When Roosevelt saw Adele Walte, a young German women carrying her sleeping baby in a wicker basket, he passed Jacob Riis a five-dollar bill to hand to the woman. “It’s for the baby,” Riis told a startled Adele, “It’s from the President of the United States.”
Little escaped the president’s curious mind. Roosevelt was dismayed by the eye exam performed on immigrants, complaining that doctors had dirty hands and did not clean their instruments between patients. The eye exam, designed to uncover cases of trachoma, was the most infamous test at Ellis Island. Given at this time only to those who exhibited symptoms of the disease, by 1905 every immigrant passing through Ellis Island would be subjected to it. Usually using a buttonhook, a doctor would flip back, or evert, the immigrant’s eyelid to look for signs of trachoma. For some, it was a painful and traumatic experience. “The eye of the unsuspecting arrival is so brutally pulled open by the doctor,” noted a German-language newspaper, “that the poor unfortunate is unable to see anything for the next two or three hours because of the pain.” With some exaggeration, the paper called it “a brutality without equal.” From 1904 to 1914, almost 25,000 immigrants would be debarred for trachoma, nearly two-thirds of all those excluded for loathsome or contagious diseases.
After this, Roosevelt and his party were off to a hearing room to witness the boards of special inquiry. One case dealt with a Hungarian man heading to his son-in-law in Pennsylvania with a railroad ticket and $12 in his pocket. Was he likely to become a public charge? Two members of the board voted to defer the decision for further investigation, while one member voted to allow the man to land. “Why should there be any doubt about this man,” the president chimed in. Williams, an upholder of the strict interpretation of the law, tried to explain to Roosevelt that immigrants had to be beyond a doubt entitled to land. Since the old Hungarian had only $12, Williams declared him certain to become a public charge. To that, the German-born Arthur von Briesen, a member of Roosevelt’s party and president of the Legal Aid Society, interjected: “Under the law, Jake Riis should have been sent back when he came over.” That sealed the deal in favor of the Hungarian.
Von Briesen’s presence at Ellis Island that day was important to more than just that Hungarian immigrant. Roosevelt used the trip to announce that he was appointing a commission to investigate the operations at Ellis Island. This was news to William Williams, who had not been previously informed of the decision.
Among those invited to the island that day were the five men Roosevelt had already chosen to sit on the commission, including von Briesen, who would head the commission. From the dramatic, rainsoaked arrival to the surprise announcement, it was vintage Roosevelt. Everyone assumed that Roosevelt created the commission in response to the charges from the Staats-Zeitung. What better way to counter the complaints that Roosevelt’s immigration service was anti-immigrant than to appoint a committee composed of, in the words of a newspaper critical of the president, “two Germans, two Irishmen, and a Jew—not a single native American.”
Roosevelt could not have picked a better commission from his perspective. As von Briesen wrote the president after the completion of the report, the commission was unanimous in agreeing that “desirable immigrants are men and women of good repute and good character and that undesirable immigrants are persons of bad repute and bad character.” This was the Roosevelt party line on immigration, which he had earlier reiterated in a letter to another member of the commission: “My own feeling is that we cannot have too many of the right kind of immigrants and that, on the other hand, we should steadily and consistently endeavor to exclude the man who is physically, mentally or morally unfit to be a good citizen or to beget good citizens.”
It was not only pure Roosevelt, but his immigration axiom neatly encapsulated the broad American consensus toward immigration. A few Americans may have supported unrestricted immigration, and a larger number may have supported a complete shutting of the nation’s gates. Yet even the Immigration Restriction League did not go so far as to lobby for such extreme measures. Public opinion polling was still decades away, so it is difficult to gauge accurately what exactly the American public believed, but the consensus, as witnessed through immigration policy and elite opinion, seemed to support some kind of regulation and selection of immigrants, while upholding the nation’s traditional views on the benefits of good immigrants.
The devil, of course, was in the details. How does one define good and bad immigrants? Each person who worked at Ellis Island, from commissioner to inspector to doctor, had his own interpretation of that dividing line, as did officials in Washington.
The Von Briesen Commission was the fifth investigation of Ellis Island in eleven years—and certainly not the last. It was the first to deal exclusively with the concerns of pro-immigrant groups. Williams’s presence at Ellis Island satisfied that part of Roosevelt’s patrician psyche worried about the wrong kind of immigrants, but the pluralist side of Roosevelt needed to be soothed as well. Appointing an ethnic commission to investigate his handpicked Ellis Island commissioner dutifully following Roosevelt’s own beliefs about immigration was a masterly, yet cynical political stroke.
For native-born Americans fearful of the rapid changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the man at the gate at Ellis Island was a comforting idea that made mass immigration a more palatable concept. As immigration continued and first-and second-generation immigrants entered the American mainstream, they too wanted Ellis Island to reflect their values. As Roosevelt was well aware—and William Williams would soon discover—the growing political power of immigrant groups meant that operations at Ellis Island had to take into account the sensitivities of immigrants as well. The tension of serving as a symbol for both immigrants and restrictionists would define—and haunt—Ellis Island its entire history.
The Von Briesen Commission served as a sounding board for complaints from numerous ethnic and religious groups. The first to testify was Leopold Deutschberger and his editor at the Staats-Zeitung, repeating their charges of maladministration against Williams. The German newspapermen were followed by a long procession of ethnic representatives, members of the German Lutheran Society, the Irish Emigrant Society, the Austrian Hungarian Home, Our Lady of the Rosary, United Hebrew Charities, the Leo House for German Catholic girls. All of these witnesses testified on behalf of Williams. Sure, they had their quibbles. Most complained about overcrowded conditions, small waiting rooms, not enough bathrooms or benches. And then there were the steamship company representatives, who had their own complaints.
Two months after Roosevelt’s trip to Ellis Island, the commission completed its report and sent it to the president. It was largely an exoneration of Williams, although it included some criticism of the sanitary conditions on the island, the money exchange, and the overcrowding. As to the criticisms brought by the German-language press, the report declared them unfounded.
Roosevelt was happy with the report, except for one detail. Though it dismissed every charge against Williams, the president regretted that it “did not in one telling sentence embody what it in effect said, and back up Williams not merely by inference but by positive aggressive statement.” Despite all the criticism and despite Williams’s personality quirks, Roosevelt still held him in very high regard.
The final report contained one sentence declaring that Williams was “entitled to the highest commendation for the indefatigable zeal and intelligent supervision” at Ellis Island. That was not enough for Roosevelt. After all, the point of the commission was the vindication of Williams. The president wanted the report to speak specifically of his integrity. Roosevelt was going to use the commission, entirely made up of ethnic members, to both soothe ethnic concerns and absolve the restrictionist Williams. Perhaps uncomfortable with his role in this Rooseveltian play, commission member Eugene Philbin answered the president’s charges with some odd logic of his own. He believed it was “absolutely necessary that the report should avoid, as far as possible, anything like actual praise, but that it should be so worded as to have the inference irresistibly created that the administration of the island was a most commendable one.”
In any case, Williams weathered the storm and continued his zealous enforcement of immigration laws. Roosevelt, up for reelection in 1904, could legitimately appeal to Americans in favor of immigration restriction by pointing to Williams, but also appeal to immigrant ethnic groups by pointing out his deep concern for conditions at Ellis Island.
Williams, however, continued to speak out against what he saw as the large numbers of undesirable immigrants streaming through Ellis Island. His writings showed the strain of dark pessimism exhibited by New England restrictionists. “It is full time, however, for us to appreciate the fact that the settlers who made the country great belonged to a totally different class of people from those described and came here with loftier views of their prospective future,” Williams wrote, “and that a desire to emigrate can no longer be regarded as evidence of initiative, thrift, or courage.”
As proof, Williams offered a story about a family of eight from eastern Europe. The family had little money and was heading to a tenement district in New York City. When asked how he intended to provide for his family, the father responded by saying that his family did not care for a big house and would be satisfied with one room to sleep in: “That is all we want; that is the way we did it in Russia.” To some, this might be a sign of an appropriately humble immigrant who was not demanding great riches from his adoptive country. Perhaps the father thought such a modest answer would impress officials. If that was the case, he thought wrong. To Williams, the family’s aspirations were too narrow, and he sent the entire clan back to Europe.
Though Roosevelt said more about immigration than any previous president, he remained remarkably quiet about the issue during the 1904 campaign. “There seems to be a good deal of uneasiness as to saying anything about immigration this year,” he wrote to Lodge. “It is not believed it would help us to getting legislation. There is no question but that there will be a sharp lookout kept to see if they cannot catch us tripping on it.” Roosevelt may have wanted tougher immigration laws, but he felt it was best not to make any such references in the party’s platform.
Roosevelt’s campaign manager heard rumors that a Democratic operative had gone to Ellis Island to investigate conditions and warned Williams that Democrats saw the potential to make Ellis Island a campaign issue. A month later, Williams complained to Roosevelt about Congressman Richard Bartholdt. Though a Republican, the German-born former newspaper editor represented a heavily immigrant district in St. Louis. “He is very hostile to the Ellis Island administration, although he has been here, seen things as they are and had ample opportunity to satisfy himself that the Staats-Zeitung articles are false and malicious,” Williams wrote. He warned that Democrats had recently produced a campaign document that attacked Ellis Island based on the Staats-Zeitungarticles and using Bartholdt’s comments.
All of this meant little to Roosevelt’s reelection bid. He handily won reelection over a lackluster Democratic candidate, winning every state north of the Mason-Dixon line. While he lost heavily immigrant and Democratic Boston and New York City, Roosevelt ran well nationally among Germans, Poles, Italians, and Jews.
Roosevelt could be all things to all people. Restrictionists were heartened by the selection of Williams to run Ellis Island and the president’s words calling for continued regulation and sifting of good immigrants from bad immigrants. However, immigrants and ethnic communities could also find comfort in Roosevelt’s words and deeds.
In the end, it was not the accusations of insensitivity toward immigrants that ultimately drove William Williams out of Ellis Island. It was Joe Murray. The patrician Williams simply could not stand the unsophisticated machine politician. He described Murray as lazy and dull-witted and complained that he was “unable to write any kind of a letter. He can neither write nor speak correctly.” Murray arrived late to work, could not complete basic tasks given to him, and, according to Williams, failed “to show any intelligent interest in anything that was going on to give me the slightest assistance in rooting out deviltry.”
It galled Williams that the easygoing Murray had been on a first-name basis with John Lederhilger, even while Williams was drumming him out of government service. An exasperated Williams could do little to spur Murray to work harder, so he finally decided to leave him alone to do as he pleased, which turned out to be spending an inordinate amount of time shooting the breeze around the Ellis Island barber shop.
As a Harvard man, Roosevelt saw the problem clearly. “The trouble with Williams,” the president wrote his friend Gifford Pinchot, “has been that owing to his past associations and education he has found it difficult to get on with men of inferior education and social status.” In other words, Williams was an officious snob. Yet Roosevelt could not admit that his experiment in old-time patronage, while pleasing to Murray, not only stained Roosevelt’s reform image, but also made the job of reforming Ellis Island more difficult.
Apparently, Williams’s problems with his subordinates went beyond just Murray. On two different occasions, the Ellis Island workforce was on the verge of going out on strike. In cleaning out incompetent and abusive workers, Williams made enemies with his uncompromising personality. “They say he has his peculiarities and I presume he has,” Robert Watchorn said of Williams, but if “he hadn’t he would not be of much account.”
Roosevelt appeared more than willing to overlook those peculiarities, remarking that he didn’t “know anyone who could have done quite the work that he did.” Roosevelt lauded Williams as fearless, energetic, and pubic-spirited—all the qualities that Roosevelt so admired. At the same time, he admitted that his dear friend Murray was not exactly the most engaged employee on the federal payroll.
In December 1904, Williams’s patience finally ran out and he went to the White House to tell Roosevelt he could no longer work with Murray. Williams accused him of being “ignorant, inefficient, and wholly worthless” and said that he had played absolutely no part in helping to reform Ellis Island. Because Roosevelt held Williams in such high regard, he was willing to jettison Murray and keep Williams, although he hoped to place Murray in another government job.
But Williams did not just want Murray out as his assistant. He wanted his friend Allan Robinson, a fellow New York lawyer, named as his replacement. This Roosevelt could not abide. Frank Sargent informed the president that Robinson “possessed in even accentuated degrees the failings of Williams in dealing with other men.” If Williams and Robinson were both in charge, Sargent feared a full-scale mutiny among Ellis Island’s employees. Failing to get the assistant he wanted, Williams resigned in January 1905 and returned to his Wall Street law practice.
The Immigration Restriction League’s Robert DeC. Ward was saddened at the news of Williams’s departure. “It has been a source of constant satisfaction to me to feel that the gates at Ellis Island were so well guarded,” Ward wrote Williams. Madison Grant, another patrician restrictionist, also sent his regrets.
Some immigration defenders praised Williams on his departure. The Society for the Protection of Italian Immigrants passed a resolution lauding Williams. While the editors of the Staats-Zeitung were no doubt rejoicing at the news, the American Hebrew was not. “He has transformed the internal affairs at Ellis Island to such an extent that visitors today will find very few of the evils complained of before he came,” the paper concluded. “His retirement will be a distinct loss to the immigrant department.”
In many ways, Williams personified George Washington Plunkitt’s reformer. He had made a great show of reforming Ellis Island and ferreting out corruption, but he had his difficulties managing both immigrants and employees. Williams also took Roosevelt’s division of immigrants of good character and bad character to extremes. Roosevelt could temper his concern about new immigrants with a positive view of American national character, the miracles of assimilation, and the benefits of good immigration. For Williams, there was little but pessimism.
The book on Williams’s government service was not yet closed. There would be a second act that would both refute and confirm Plunkitt’s suspicions about reformers.