American Passage

by Vincent J. Cannato

  These men and women may have worn elaborate and strange native costumes and some of their faces may have betrayed a hard life that aged them beyond their years, but these photos hardly portrayed the grave threat to American society that critics feared. Instead, these subjects were proud and dignified, healthy and strong. These photos spoke of the singularity and individuality of the immigrant.

  Lewis Hine was one of those photographers drawn to Ellis Island. Originally from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, he came to New York with a zeal for social reform. Though he would later gain fame with his photographic exposés of child labor and his iconic images of the construction of the Empire State Building, Hine’s first large-scale photographic project was Ellis Island in 1905.

  It was no easy task to photograph amid the turmoil and chaos of Ellis Island. As Hine later described his difficulties:

  Now, suppose we are elbowing our way thru the mob at Ellis Island trying to stop the surge of bewildered beings oozing through the corridors, up the stairs and all over the place, eager to get it all over and be on their way. Here is a small group that seems to have possibilities so we stop ’em and explain in pantomime that it would be lovely if they would only stick around just a moment. The rest of the human tide swirls around, often not too considerate of either the camera or us. We get the focus, on ground glass of course, then hoping they will stay put, get the flash lamp ready.

  Then, with his five-by-seven camera on a shaky tripod, Hine would take his photo. The explosion of the flash pan blew smoke and sparks in the air, startling all those in the area.

  The intrusiveness of the early photographic process, combined with the chaotic environment of Ellis Island, makes the subtlety and intimacy of Hine’s finished products even more remarkable. The photos provide visual examples of the daily experiences of immigrants: an Italian family looking for their baggage; a Slavic woman asleep on a bench, her kerchiefed head resting on her bags; children enjoying a cup of milk poured by an attendant. A “Young Russian Jewess” stares away from the camera with her big brown eyes, searching for something or perhaps thinking of what she left behind.

  Hine’s photos were posed, yet this did little to take away from their immediacy. One photo was entitled “Italian Madonna.” An Italian woman sits on a bench, her head covered in a black shawl and her young daughter in her lap. The mother looks down at the child, while the child looks at the mother with adoring, yet somewhat fearful eyes. Hine interrupts this classical- and religious-themed photo by placing mother and daughter in front of a chain-link fence behind which a crowd of young and old immigrants is milling about slightly out of focus. In juxtaposing the idealized mother-and-child image with the reality of immigrants penned behind a fence, Hine captures the reality of Ellis Island.

  More photographs made their way into newspapers and periodicals from the camera of Augustus Sherman, an amateur photographer and inspector at Ellis Island. Sherman’s subjects were largely anonymous, with captions mentioning little beyond ethnicity and occupation, such as “Romanian shepherds” and “Finnish girl.” Even more than Hine, Sherman was attracted to the picturesque—Albanians, Dutch, Greeks, Cossacks, all in their native dress. He also documented the exotic, almost freak-show quality of some immigrants: heavily tattooed German stowaways, a Russian giant, Burmese midgets, and microcephalic East Asians heading to the circus.

  The photographs of Hine and Sherman may have helped humanize immigrants, but they did not convince all Americans. By Roosevelt’s second term, the IRL realized that its earlier faith in the president was misplaced. Roosevelt showed little desire to push for a literacy test. His appointments of Watchorn and Straus meant that the guardians of the gate were more likely to swing the door wide than hold it tightly closed. Like Oscar Straus, Prescott Hall realized that those entrusted to execute immigration law possessed a great deal of influence as to how those laws were carried out.

  Labor leader Samuel Gompers also joined in the call for restriction. A Jewish immigrant from England, Gompers admitted to mixed feelings, yet the complaint about low-wage immigrant labor was a natural argument. He blamed big business and “idealists and sentimentalists” for opposing restriction, but the National Liberal Immigration League was more than willing to turn that argument around. “The selfishness of their [union] efforts is perfectly plain,” Harvard president Charles Eliot wrote. “As a rule they have only been a few years in this country themselves and are now trying, for their own supposed advantage, to keep other people out.”

  The test for both sides would come in 1907 when Congress again took up the literacy test. Henry Cabot Lodge managed to get a bill through the Senate, but it got bogged down in the House. Though there was enough support in the House, the powerful Speaker, Republican Joe Cannon, managed an end run around the literacy test.

  Cannon was a laissez-faire, pro-business Republican who opposed nearly every attempt by government to regulate private business. He was also adamantly anti-union, so it was natural for Cannon to support a steady stream of low-wage workers for which his business constituents clamored. He was also a member of the National Liberal Immigration League, which, in addition to German-American, Irish-American, and American Jewish groups, came out against the bill. Ultimately it was Cannon’s manipulation of the legislative process that won the day. In place of the literacy test, Cannon substituted the creation of a federal commission to investigate immigration.

  The Immigration Act of 1907 was a victory for opponents of restriction in the sense that the literacy bill was defeated. In reality, the bill was much more complicated and restrictionists got far more than most people realized. The head tax on immigrants was raised to $4 per person, though some had wanted to raise it as high as $25. More importantly, Congress once again expanded the categories for exclusion. First, in addition to the insane and epileptics, feebleminded immigrants were now excludable. Second, Congress expanded the exclusion for prostitutes to include the “importation into the United States of any alien woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution, or for any other immoral purpose.” Lastly, any immigrant determined by doctors to be “mentally or physically defective,” and whose defect would “affect the ability of such alien to earn a living,” could be excluded. Loosely worded legislation opened up new grounds for debate over policies at Ellis Island. The key question boiled down to the definition of terms like “mental defective,” “immoral purpose,” “feebleminded,” or “ability to earn a living.”

  As for the commission to investigate immigration, it combined two features of twentieth-century commissions. First, it would collect data and investigate various conditions throughout the country to give lawmakers better information. Second, it would allow short-term-minded politicians to postpone any further discussion of immigration, giving them cover on an increasingly sensitive issue.

  President Roosevelt, who years earlier had criticized Grover Cleveland’s veto of the literacy test and who spoke earlier in his presidency in favor of one, was spared the agonizing decision of whether or not to veto such a bill. “When it came to a showdown,” Alabama congressman John Burnett said of Roosevelt’s behavior during the congressional fight, “the President was not to be seen, and his hand was not to be felt.”

  Writing to Speaker Cannon, Roosevelt saw the commission as an opportunity to achieve restriction without jeopardizing his political capital. “I would want a Commission which would enable me . . . to put before the Congress a plan which would amount to a definite solution of this immigration business,” he told Cannon. He hoped this would occur after the 1908 election but before he left office. Roosevelt wanted legislation that would keep “out the unfit, physically, morally, or mentally.” These were words that came easily in private, but which the president was increasingly loath to speak publicly.

  It would be four more years before this new commission would make its report to Congress. In the meantime, the focus of immigration left Washington and returned to the increasingly busy island in New York Harbor.

  T HE DEFE
AT OF THE literacy test showed the growing influence of immigration supporters, but also led to virulent attacks against Oscar Straus and Robert Watchorn. Not surprisingly, one of their sharpest critics was Prescott Hall, who complained that Straus was reversing half of the exclusion cases that reached his desk on appeal and that such behavior was demoralizing the department. The first Jewish cabinet secretary also attracted complaints that he was less sympathetic to appeals from non-Jewish immigrants. By early 1908, there was such a steady drumbeat of protest that Watchorn complained to Straus about “the growing impression among many officials—both state, county, and municipal—that your administration is not disposed to execute the expulsion feature of the immigration laws.”

  Hall took his case against Straus directly to President Roosevelt, who did not seem terribly disturbed by the charge. Nevertheless, he would pass along Hall’s criticism to Henry Cabot Lodge for further investigation.

  Lodge had been a staunch ally of the IRL and the main point man in Congress for the literacy test. After looking into the charges against Straus, however, Lodge came away unimpressed. “Hall is both honest and able but he is extreme and does not understand that it is one thing to make general charges on hearsay and another to sustain them by proof,” he wrote to Roosevelt. Lodge admitted that Straus was “averse to the laws which affect the entry of poor Jews,” a fact he found unfortunate. Nevertheless, he could find no proof that Straus had ordered any easing of the enforcement of the law. In fact, Lodge told Roosevelt that reversals of deportation orders on appeal to Washington had not increased under Straus’s tenure.

  Lodge, however, was not quite correct. In the first full year before Straus took office, almost 52 percent of immigrants who appealed their deportations to Washington lost their case. In 1908, Straus’s first full year as secretary, that figure dropped to 44 percent. In 1910, the first year after Straus left office, the number of lost appeal cases jumped to over 60 percent. On the whole, however, this relatively minor dip hardly proves a lax administration of the law.

  That even Henry Cabot Lodge was defending Straus must have galled Hall. He later told Roosevelt that Straus “has deceived you time and again in regard to many immigration matters . . . he is one of the most subtly insidiously unscrupulous officials that ever breathed.” Such words would do little to dent Roosevelt’s admiration and respect for Straus.

  Hall also aimed his fire at the man he saw as the other villain in this piece. “Watchorn has been a crook ever since he immigrated to this country,” Hall told Roosevelt. “His naturalization papers were fraudulent.” He also accused Watchorn of stealing the addresses of union members in a political campaign in 1890. “I am absolutely sure of Watchorn’s dishonesty and unscrupulousness,” he raged.

  Roosevelt had sought to mollify Watchorn’s critics in late 1906 by asking IRL member James B. Reynolds to investigate operations at Ellis Island. When he had completed his report, Reynolds did not come up with an indictment of Watchorn’s administration, but instead issued a strong condemnation of the treatment of mentally ill immigrants in detention. This is not what Prescott Hall was looking for.

  Part of Hall’s anger stemmed from the fact that Watchorn had tried to play both sides of the immigration debate. He accurately sensed a slippery nature to Watchorn’s personality. He had already proved himself a man a little too eager to please his superiors, someone who easily switched from Democrat to Republican when it suited his career. Watchorn appeared tough on immigration early in his term, but later trimmed his sails when he began reporting to Oscar Straus.

  In July 1905, Watchorn wrote to Robert DeC. Ward, explaining that he had no qualms about separating families when one member was ordered excluded and the rest admitted. “What sort of protection would be afforded the United States,” wrote Watchorn, “if any such minor children, wife or parents are of the kind who are going to furnish as a legacy a progeny of the sort which you and I and all thoughtful persons must of necessity view with no little apprehension?” In words that would have shocked those who saw him as an advocate for immigrants, Watchorn told Ward that he wondered whether “misplaced sympathy is not responsible for more evils than the so-called callousness of which we are occasionally accused.”

  Keeping up a correspondence with the Boston restrictionists, Watchorn wrote Hall in 1906 to discuss a paper that William Williams had recently delivered. Watchorn was hurt that Hall remarked that it was a shame that Williams was no longer at Ellis Island, implying that a lax enforcement now existed there. Watchorn was eager to correct that impression, writing that he was in near complete agreement with Hall and Williams, and that it was his “unremitting endeavor to prevent the landing of any and all such persons” defined as mental or physical defectives. Hall responded by calling Watchorn an “exceptionally capable and energetic official.”

  That was before Oscar Straus. Now Prescott Hall was not the only one unhappy. Judson Swift of the American Tract Society wrote to Roosevelt to complain that Watchorn, supposedly under orders from Straus, was hampering the efforts of missionaries at Ellis Island. Protestant missionaries looked upon the crush of immigrants streaming through the inspection station not so much as a fearful deluge as an evangelical opportunity. In his 1906 book entitled Aliens or Americans? Baptist minister Howard Grose called the new immigrants an opportunity for evangelists and asked: “Will we give the gospel to the heathen in America?” Some were truly ministering to the newcomers, while others were busy targeting Catholics and Jews with Protestant pamphlets written in their native language.

  Jewish leaders complained of the situation to Watchorn, who ordered missionaries to stop proselytizing to Jewish immigrants. Rumors began to circulate among Protestant churches in New York that Watchorn had threatened to banish from Ellis Island anyone using the name of Jesus Christ. Although Swift insinuated that Straus’s Judaism was the cause of Watchorn’s actions, Straus himself was unaware, though not unsupportive, of what his subordinate had done.

  Roosevelt had little sympathy for the criticism and dispatched his secretary, William Loeb, to deal with Swift. Speaking for the president, Loeb chastised Swift for bringing Straus’s religion into the matter, calling it “unwarranted slander” to which “missionaries of the Gospel should be most averse.” Loeb also noted that Watchorn, a devout Methodist himself, could hardly be antagonistic toward religion since his own brother was a Protestant minister.

  At the same time that Swift was complaining about the treatment of Christian missionaries, New York police commissioner Theodore Bingham blasted Watchorn for failing to deport immigrants convicted of crimes, calling on the president to appoint a new commissioner dedicated to keeping the “bars up against the criminal class.”

  Watchorn noted that in the preceding year, warrants for deportation had risen almost 50 percent. Still, Bingham would not relent and repeatedly stressed the connection between immigration and criminality. He furnished Watchorn and Straus with a list of Italian immigrants in New York with criminal records, baiting officials to deport them. Straus told Watchorn he was “ready to cooperate in ridding the country of the class that can be deported under the immigration laws.” Warrants soon arrived from Washington for their arrest.

  Immigration restrictionists saw further proof of the nefarious influence of Oscar Straus in the case of the commissioner-general of immigration, Frank Sargent. Many people noticed a change in Sargent after he began to report to Oscar Straus. Public Health Service official Victor Safford recounted the tale of a hearing in Boston. When the doctors recommended sending home a Swedish girl with trachoma, Sargent replied: “If you exclude this alien and the case comes to Washington on appeal, backed by the political influence which the relatives evidently can command, I can assure you that your decision will be reversed and the alien admitted to the country.” Safford noted that by early 1908, Sargent had become “discouraged, sick, entirely dependent upon his official salary and wondering what was to become of his family after he was gone.”

  Samuel Gompe
rs, another friend of Sargent, noticed that he had become so “disappointed and crestfallen” working under Straus that he sought reelection to his old post as president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. When he lost his bid, Sargent was faced with the realization that he had to remain in his government job. Needing money to support his family, he could not resign on principle and would have to continue upholding interpretations of the law that compromised his beliefs.

  By the summer of 1908, the pressures began to get to Sargent. He struggled with severe stomach problems and would eventually suffer a stroke. After two more strokes and a serious fall, Sargent died in early September at the age of fifty-three. “If ever a man died of a broken heart it was he,” wrote Gompers, “because he found himself in a position which he deemed it necessary to retain and yet was unable to carry out his ideals of public service and righteous conduct.” Remarking on Sargent’s death in his diary, Oscar Straus spoke well of his subordinate, calling him, with a touch of mild condescension, “a good and conscientious official and whatever defects he had were not the result of lack of human sympathy, but education.”

  Straus’s views on immigration also had an effect on another old labor restrictionist. Terence V. Powderly had been out of steady work for over three years. By 1906, Roosevelt had made amends with him and sent him on a fact-finding mission to Europe to investigate the causes of European immigration. After Powderly submitted his report, Roosevelt named him to a new position. The old union leader needed a steady government paycheck, but the man who once led Washington’s immigration office now had to take a subordinate position in the agency he once ran.