American Passage

by Vincent J. Cannato

  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 replac
e 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 Roose
velt 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.

  T HEODORE 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.