American Passage

by Vincent J. Cannato

  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.

  I N 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. Turnof-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.

  Part III

  REFORM AND REGULATION

  Chapter 7

  Cleaning House

  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 CZOL GOSZ.

  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 nineteenthcentury 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 selfgovernment.” 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 straighttalking 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 muchmaligned 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.

  L ESS THAN A MONTH after taking office, Roosevelt busied himself with affairs of state. As expected, the new president had his fi
ngers 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 antiimmigrant 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.