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.
Chapter 9
The Roosevelt Straddle
We can not have too much immigration of the right kind, and we should have none at all of the wrong kind.
—Theodore Roosevelt, 1903
LEANING OVER THE SECOND-ST ORY RAILING IN THE MAIN hall of the reception room at Ellis Island, H. G. Wells surveyed the mazelike rails herding immigrants through the inspection line. “You don’t think they’ll swamp you?” a concerned Wells asked his companion, the new Ellis Island commissioner, Robert Watchorn. Wells had taken the ferry trip to the island as part of research on a book about the future of America. Wells was pessimistic about the future in general, especially regarding technology. Yet as these two Englishmen debated the effects of throngs of southern and eastern Europeans on America, Wells’s question hit upon another uncertainty.
“Now look here,” Watchorn gently rebuked his famous literary guest, “I’m English-born—Derbyshire. I came to America when I was a lad. I had fifteen dollars. And here I am! Well, do you expect me, now I’m here, to shut the door on any other poor chaps who want a start—a start with hope in it, in the New World?”
Wells had cemented his reputation as the premier science fiction writer a decade earlier with a string of successes, including The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds. Now Robert Watchorn was hosting the famous writer at Ellis Island. Both Wells and Watchorn were sons of the British working class who had made good. After the visit, the two men continued on friendly terms. Wells entertained Watchorn on a number of occasions in England, and Watchorn proudly kept an autographed photo of Wells in his office for the rest of his professional life.
This perk of the job, rubbing elbows with the famous and powerful, appealed greatly to Watchorn, whose life story was truly one of rags to riches. It began in the English coal mines and continued through his arrival at Castle Garden in 1880, to his ascension to commissioner of Ellis Island in 1905, and would continue after his time in the immigration service.
Watchorn was the second of seven children born in Alfreton, Derbyshire, to a doting mother and an alcoholic coal-miner father. At age eleven, Watchorn himself went down into the coal pits, where he worked for the next ten years. An intelligent boy, he went to night school, and at the age of twenty-two left for America.
Once there, Watchorn ended up loading coal in the Pennsylvania mines. Soon after, he brought his family over and became involved in the local Knights of Labor chapter, where he befriended Terence V. Powderly, who would remain a lifelong friend and mentor. Watchorn then went on to become the first secretary-treasurer of the newly created United Mine Workers.
Filled with ambition and drive, Watchorn did not remain long with the union. Like another determined member of the working class, Edward McSweeney, Watchorn made the leap from labor activism to politics. The thirty-three-year-old Watchorn became the state’s first chief factory inspector under Robert E. Pattison, Pennsylvania’s first Democratic governor since the Civil War.
Driven to succeed as only one who had escaped the coal pits of both England and Pennsylvania could, Watchorn cleverly amassed important friends, including Powderly and the Pennsylvania senator Matthew Quay, the state’s Republican boss. Politically ambidextrous, Watchorn began his political career working in a Democratic administration but later became a staunch Republican. His ties to Powderly led to a patronage post as an inspector at Ellis Island. During the controversy there with McSweeney, Watchorn became an important ally and friend to Powderly, who later plucked Watchorn from the maelstrom at Ellis Island and promoted him first to Washington and then to Montreal, where he put Watchorn in charge of the immigration service along the Canadian border.
When Roosevelt was searching for a suitable replacement for William Williams in early 1905, he quickly settled on Watchorn, whom he remembered from his first visit to Ellis Island, when Roosevelt was police commissioner and Watchorn a mere inspector. Morally upright, Watchorn could be expected to continue the vigilance against corruption, patronage, and abuse at Ellis Island, but would accomplish it without the abrasive air of the patrician Williams. As an immigrant himself, Watchorn might enforce immigration law without Williams’s restrictionist touch. Also, Watchorn needed the job—unlike the independently wealthy Williams—and might be less difficult to manage.
On the issue of Joe Murray, Roosevelt only asked that Watchorn give him a fair shake. If Watchorn decided that Murray was incompetent, Roosevelt would transfer his friend. “You will be the absolute judge of his competency or incompetency,” Roosevelt wrote. Watchorn, who had not escaped a life in the coal mines by bucking authority, was not about to take the bait. “I shall respect your wishes, Mr. President, in regard to Mr. Murray, whom I know very well,” Watchorn responded. Murray would end up staying at Ellis Island for the rest of the Roosevelt administration.
Watchorn assured the president that they shared a common vision of immigration. Such agreement was important because America was about to witness its biggest wave of immigration ever. For the first time, more than 1 million immigrants entered the country. Roosevelt put this in historical perspective by noting that more people entered the United States in 1905 than had arrived in the 169 years between the first landing at Jamestown and the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Despite stringent laws, Roosevelt believed that a large number of immigrants were still undesirable because they came not of their own initiative, but were instead enticed by agents from steamship companies interested only in increasing their profits.
Roosevelt was adept at finding that perfect fulcrum of American opinion on immig
ration, melding fears of alien newcomers with respect for the country’s open-door tradition. “In dealing with this question it is unwise to depart from the old American tradition and to discriminate for or against any man who desires to come here and become a citizen, save on the ground of that man’s fitness for citizenship,” Roosevelt wrote. An immigrant’s character, not his ethnicity or religion, should determine whether he or she be allowed into the country. To him, a Slav of good character was far more preferable than an Englishman of poor character. Of course, the status of excluded Chinese immigrants complicated the president’s argument.
It was a fine statement of the assimilationist credo, but one that rested on the vigorous enforcement of immigration laws at the nation’s gates, with Roosevelt calling for “an increase in the stringency of the laws to keep out insane, idiotic, epileptic, and pauper immigrants.” He already had had four years to push for this, but achieved little more than banning anarchists and prostitutes. Now he wanted not just anarchists excluded, “but every man of Anarchistic tendencies, all violent and disorderly people, all people of bad character, the incompetent, the lazy, the vicious, the physically unfit, defective, or degenerate.”
If Roosevelt wanted a stricter application of immigration laws, Ellis Island was in the best shape since it opened to accomplish that. And just in time. From 1905 to 1907, some 3.5 million immigrants would come to America, nearly 80 percent passing through New York’s inspection station. Having visited at the beginning of this period, novelist Henry James called Ellis Island “a drama that goes on, without a pause, day by day and year by year, this visible act of ingurgitation on the part of our body politic and social, and constituting really an appeal to amazement beyond that of any sword-swallowing or fire-swallowing of the circus.”
With each passing week in the spring and fall—the peak arrival seasons for immigrants—a new record would be broken. In one week during April 1906, an estimated 45,000 immigrants arrived at Ellis Island. Ships seemed to pile one on top of the other, many forced to dock for two or three days as their passengers remained on board while they awaited inspection. Bigger steamships that could carry as many as 2,300 steerage passengers, like the White Star’s Celtic and Republic, brought these immigrants on a daily basis.
“Immigrant Type Low, But 1,100,735 Get In” read a Times headline about the record number of immigrants in 1906. Of that figure, Ellis Island processed roughly 880,000 immigrants, 10 percent of whom were detained for board of special inquiry hearings, and 7,877 were excluded, less than 1 percent of all those who arrived. Ellis Island witnessed 327 deaths, 18 births, 2 suicides, and 508 marriages that year.
If Americans thought 1906 was bad, the following year would be even worse. In fact, Americans would not see as many immigrants in one year as they saw in 1907 until 1990. Some days, the flood was unmanageable. On March 27, 1907, 16,000 immigrants entered New York Harbor; May 2 brought 21,755. Ellis Island had to process over a million people in 1907 alone, which came to over 2,700 per day, every day.
Robert Watchorn, who oversaw this flood, was a man apart from his predecessor. “A man of brawn, a man who knows how to use his hands in both the sporting and industrial sense of the phrase,” was how the Times described him. He repeated Roosevelt’s mantra that America could not have enough of the right kind of immigrant and too little of the wrong kind. Unlike Williams, however, Watchorn believed that America was largely getting the right kind of immigrants.
This was a bit of an intellectual shift for Watchorn, a man who would prove himself nothing if not flexible in his beliefs. While working under Powderly, Watchorn portrayed himself in favor of strict regulation of immigrants, especially regarding the contract-labor laws. Now, working under Roosevelt, the former United Mine Workers official changed his tune. He found himself harangued for his pro-immigration views while speaking before crowds of workers.
Watchorn told a Jewish audience on New York’s Lower East Side that “the immigrant has done as much for this country as the country has done for him.” While he supported a careful selection of immigrants to keep out those likely to become a public charge, he hated to order deportations. Even though the editors of the American Hebrew had praised William Williams, they noticed a change in tone at Ellis Island. “Since Mr. Robert Watchorn entered upon his duties as Commissioner, there is an entirely different atmosphere about the place,” the paper wrote. “The immigrant is no longer looked upon as one to be kept out, if the law is strained to do so.”
College professor Edward Steiner dedicated his sympathetic book about the new immigrants to Robert Watchorn.
He does not share the feeling that the immigration of to-day is worse than that of the past; in fact he will say quite freely that it is growing better every day. He has his fears and forebodings; but he knows that the miracle of transformation wrought on us, can still be wrought on this mass of clay in the hands of the potter, which may be moulded just as millions of us have been moulded, into the likeness of a new humanity.
Men like Steiner and Watchorn held a deep faith in the transformative power of America on European immigrants.
Watchorn had a chance to explain his views to a group of female college students visiting Ellis Island. Unanimously opposed to immigration, these well-off young women heard the case of a sixty-sixyear-old Italian man heading to his son in Lynchburg, Virginia. They believed him too old and weak to be admitted, especially since the son was not there to pick up the father. In a scene out of Hollywood, the son showed up at the last moment to an emotional reunion with his father. Should the father be sent back to Italy, Watchorn now asked the young women? “No, no, no, certainly not,” was the unanimous response.
Those young women discovered the difference between discussing immigration in the abstract as opposed to dealing with the concrete— and very human—reality at Ellis Island. “There are those who vehemently protest against the landing of aliens on these shores en masse,” Watchorn later wrote, “so long as their protests are made in abstract form, but who, Pilate-like, say, on being brought face to face with the units of the mass, ‘I find no fault with him.’ ”
Watchorn’s tenure marked an evolution in how Roosevelt handled immigration. Practical politics played no small hand in this change. In 1906, William Randolph Hearst used his fortune to run for governor of New York as a Democrat. Roosevelt could not abide Hearst and resented his “enormous popularity among ignorant and unthinking people.” Hearst used the pages of his New York Journal to take on the mantle of defender of immigrants. He further expanded his reach to the city’s largest ethnic group by starting the German-language paper Morgen Journal. The populism of Hearst’s papers filled the patrician Roosevelt with disgust. He had to be stopped.
Roosevelt threw himself heart and soul into helping the Republican Charles Evans Hughes defeat Hearst. Hughes was a bit of a stiff, but enough of a progressive for Roosevelt—anything to keep Hearst from defiling Roosevelt’s old office. The path to stopping Hearst, Roosevelt soon realized, began with New York’s ethnic communities.
When an opening appeared for secretary of Commerce and Labor, Roosevelt jumped at an opportunity to make a point. Roosevelt conferred with Jewish leaders like New York banker Jacob Schiff and named Oscar Straus to the post. Roosevelt now had a Jew and a Catholic in his cabinet. (Charles Bonaparte, the grandnephew of Napoléon, was attorney general.)
At a dinner celebrating Straus’s appointment, Roosevelt explained that he had chosen Straus without regard to race, color, creed, or party. To that, an elderly and increasingly deaf Jacob Schiff nodded and said in his thick German accent: “Dot’s right, Mr. President. You came to me and said, ‘Chake, who is der best jew I can appoint Segretary of Commerce?’” Though probably apocryphal, the spirit of the story contains a germ of truth. Roosevelt had begun a long tradition, followed by most of his successors, of choosing cabinet members to satisfy various racial, ethnic, and religious groups.
Straus, along with Schiff, belonged to an earlier generation of
German Jewish immigrants. Oscar Straus was born in Bavaria in 1850. His father, a Reform Jew and grain merchant, left for the United States in 1852, where he ran a general store in Georgia. Oscar, his brothers, and his mother followed him there two years later. The family’s future was not to be in the South, but rather in New York City. There, the Straus family ran a china and glassware store and later bought out Macy’s. Oscar, however, was not drawn to the world of commerce like his father and brothers. Instead, he opted for a career in law.
As part of his arrangement with Roosevelt, Straus agreed to stump for Hughes in New York, joining Schiff in blunting Hearst’s appeal to the Jewish community. In the end, Hughes squeaked by Hearst with just sixty thousand votes, and Straus took up work at his new job after the election.
The Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, as it was now called, was but one of twelve divisions of the Department of Commerce and Labor, but it was clearly the one that animated Straus the most. “Indeed, no subject in the department occupied my daily attention to the extent that immigration did,” he wrote in his autobiography. Immigration was the most difficult issue because “it is the most human” and “throbs with tearful tragedies,” Straus wrote.
On the morning of December 17, 1906, Straus sat at his desk in his new office and immediately threw himself into the heart-wrenching morass of appeals from immigrants waiting to be deported. He looked at some thirty cases that first day. “I was not surprised to find that most of these cases present difficult questions appealing to the humanity and judgment of the Secretary,” Straus wrote in his diary. Straus believed that the letter of the law must be tempered by humanity.
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