“I have, I admit, thought of the poor, ignorant, immoral women detained at the Island as human beings entitled to every help to a fair start in the world,” Howe wrote in response to his critics. Working with charitable groups, he sought to find homes that would help rehabilitate these women. Giulietta was released on bond to work as a servant in the home of an Ellis Island doctor who lived in New Jersey.
Giulietta seemed to be a good worker. A year after she left Ellis Island, she was working for another government official living in New Jersey, a man named S. L. Norton. Lamarca only worked for Norton for four days before leaving. Inspector Frank Stone was sent to look into Norton’s complaints against his former employee.
Norton was angry that Lamarca had left his employ early. Giulietta claimed she was hired to be a cook for Norton, but instead had to clean up after Norton’s wife, who was suffering from an ailment that forced her to wear a diaper. Norton took after Lamarca with a vengeance. He told Stone that Giulietta had had indecent contact with his two dogs. His proof: when the dogs left Giulietta’s company, they were panting and excited, which to Norton showed “that she had committed some crime against nature with them.”
Norton also complained that the former prostitute was corrupting the morals of the decent young women of Cranford, New Jersey. Because of her past, Lamarca’s relationship with men was open to investigation. Stone found that although Giulietta had had some conversations with an Italian chauffeur and an Italian garbageman, she had “conducted herself properly while in Cranford.” He concluded that Norton’s charges were “inspired by malice and vindictiveness” and anger at Howe’s policy of releasing prostitutes from detention at Ellis Island.
Ellis Island officials allowed Giulietta to remain free. She continued to live and work in New Jersey. Howe argued that he had found that out of the hundreds of women paroled, “not more than a dozen” had reverted to their former lives of prostitution. Howe possessed a positive view of human nature, that men and women were victims of their environment and that rehabilitation was an exercise in humanity, not futility.
With cases like Giulietta’s seemingly to have turned out so well, Congressman Bennet’s hearings went nowhere. The specific complaints were dropped, the former prostitutes were out on parole, the food concession remained in private hands, and Howe remained in office. At least one of Bennet’s criticisms, though, was on the mark.
Bennet charged that Howe spent less than half of the working week at Ellis Island, making him “the most absentee commissioner” in the station’s history. As if to prove the point, Howe could not be reached for comment on Bennet’s charge because he was vacationing for a week in Nantucket.
Howe described his daily schedule for the congressional committee. He would arrive at Ellis Island sometime between 8:30 and 10:00 A.M., depending on which ferry he caught. Usually, he got to his office around 9:30 A.M. His days on Ellis Island would end around 4:15 P.M., but he admitted that “many days I leave before that when I clean up all the work and there is nothing more to do.”
Howe’s inattention was due less to laziness than to overextension. Howe still spent a great deal of time dabbling in personal intellectual and political pursuits, few of which directly related to immigration. He was more likely to make news for his views on unemployment, the nationalization of railroads, or public ownership of utilities than on immigration policy. Most of his letters to Woodrow Wilson dealt with recommendations on everything from who should serve on the new Federal Trade Commission to what kind of peace Wilson should seek when the war in Europe ended.
Howe spoke out about the conflict in Europe, giving a speech in lower Manhattan in 1915 in which he warned against rushing into war, since he believed that “wars are made by classes and privileged interests.” This was a far cry from what his boss, President Wilson, was saying.
Even the Times, a defender of Howe against attacks from Bennet, called Howe “a glib spokesman of glittering and ignorant theories, a thinker of vealy thoughts, an individual whose public utterances are often of the half-baked kind.” It encouraged Howe to continue his humanitarian work at Ellis Island, but “stay off the lecture platform.”
There was a deeper issue at work. Not only did Howe know little about immigration, but he was also growing increasingly disillusioned with government. Whereas William Williams wielded the powers of his office comfortably—perhaps too comfortably—Howe seemed uneasy with his role at Ellis Island. More a thinker than a doer, he had difficulty administering the station and admitted that his superiors in Washington often ignored his suggestions and left many of his letters unanswered.
Howe had also grown disillusioned with government workers, finding them nothing more than petty clerks. “The government was their government,” he wrote. The great success of the Progressive Era was the creation of the administrative state that would regulate private business in the public interest. In theory, civil service reform helped staff that bureaucracy with professionals instead of hack politicians. Yet Howe found that this bureaucracy “moved largely by fear, hating initiative,” caring only about “its petty unimaginative salary-hunting instincts.” He felt that his position at Ellis Island was not just irrelevant, but unnecessary. Howe had no desire to preside over what the Times called the “petty Czarship” of Ellis Island commissioner and saw little need to weed out the desirable from the undesirable.
Howe’s career indicated a steady change in American liberalism, an evolution from the progressivism of earlier years to a more modern form of liberalism. The Great War only brought more disillusionment with the state, as liberals increasingly emphasized individual rights and humanitarianism.
Even Howe’s choice of a home made a statement. When they arrived in New York in 1910, Howe and his wife, Marie Jenney Howe, chose to live in Greenwich Village. There the couple mixed with a growing band of bohemians and political radicals. Marie became active in the Women’s Suffrage Party and helped found the Heterodoxy Club, a debating society for women that served as an incubator for early feminism. Despite his continual “unlearning” of the conservative values of his childhood, Fred Howe could never fully come to grips with his wife’s feminism, which put a strain on their marriage. When Marie read her husband’s autobiography, she reportedly asked him, her voice dripping with sarcasm: “Why, Fred, were you never married?”
The 1910s were an exciting time in Greenwich Village. One man who helped give the area its bohemian feel was a hunchbacked dwarf named Randolph Bourne, who walked the streets dressed in a black cape. Bourne, who had suffered from spinal tuberculosis as a child and whose difficult delivery as an infant left his face misshapen and disfigured, became a prominent voice among liberal intellectuals.
Much of the immigration debate had been fought over the idea of the melting pot, a phrase made popular by Israel Zangwill in his 1908 play of the same name. Whether immigrants could be absorbed into American society was the question that divided Prescott Hall from Oscar Straus, a dividing line that the politically agile Theodore Roosevelt danced along for his entire political career.
Randolph Bourne believed that the melting pot had failed, but he turned the idea around on the Prescott Halls of America. No group, Bourne argued, clung more tenaciously to the virtues of the old country than Anglo-Saxons who worshipped everything British and whose allegiance to England was getting the United States dangerously close to participating in the faraway war in Europe.
Bourne also complained that assimilation was a one-way street, accomplished only on the terms set by Anglo-Saxon Americans. Bourne feared that assimilation would take the distinctiveness of the nation’s ethnic communities and wash them “into a tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity.” Assimilation, Bourne argued, was bad for immigrants and turned them into people “without a spiritual country, cultural outlaws, without taste.”
For Bourne, America’s strength was that it was a “world-federation in miniature.” He was the prophet of multiculturalism, a hunchbacked John the Baptist laying out ar
guments that would not gain currency for more than sixty years. Perhaps only a misfit like Bourne could have foreseen this trend in American society. In 1916, these ideas found few adherents beyond the streets of Greenwich Village. Bourne’s colleagues at The New Republic argued that if America continued to be fractured ethnically, “we cannot expect to attain the homogeneity of feeling and action essential to our position of power with international rights and obligations.” The editors of this newest liberal magazine argued in favor of stricter regulation of immigration to end the “wholesale transplantation upon our soil of alien communities.”
The war raised questions about ethnic loyalty. Were German-Americans going to support the kaiser? Were Irish-Americans so hateful toward the British that they would side with Germany? Such concerns led to a new enemy on American soil, one so tiny and seemingly insignificant, yet fraught with peril for the entire nation. It was not a person or an organization, but a lowly punctuation mark, a short horizontal line used to connect two words: the hyphen. Irish-Americans, GermanAmericans, Polish-Americans. “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism,” Theodore Roosevelt warned in 1915.
War in Europe and fears of ethnic disloyalty at home recharged the case for immigration restriction. Since the 1890s, the literacy test had been the gold standard for restrictionists. Congress again took up the cause in the waning months of 1916. Both chambers overwhelmingly passed the bill. A week after Wilson gave a speech to Congress calling for “peace without victory” in the war in Europe and only days before Germany resumed its submarine warfare in the Atlantic, the president vetoed the literacy test. It was Wilson’s second veto of the bill since becoming president and the fourth veto of a literacy bill since the 1890s.
The president had few strong feelings on the issue, but had promised ethnic groups during his 1912 campaign that he would veto any literacy test to make amends for his earlier anti-immigrant writings. Wilson called the test a radical departure from traditional policy. Unlike other justifications for the exclusion of immigrants, Wilson argued, the literacy test was not a “test of character, of quality or of personal fitness,” but instead penalized those who lacked opportunity in Europe. Wilson’s arguments were moot. Within days, both the Senate and the House had easily overridden Wilson’s veto. The literacy test was finally law.
The new law would require all immigrants over the age of sixteen to be able to read a short text in their native language. In a nod to America’s traditional role as an asylum for refugees, those fleeing religious persecution were exempt from the literacy test. To give a sense of how far restrictionist sentiment had evolved, the 1917 Immigration Act contained twenty-six different exclusionary categories for aliens. In contrast, the 1891 law contained only seven.
The literacy test consisted of about forty words from the Bible in the immigrant’s native language. The decision to use the Bible had little to do with evangelizing and more to do with the fact that the Bible was the most translated book in the world. Assistant Commissioner Uhl said that the biblical verses were a “non-controversial matter in every case and are practically all from the Old Testament.”
Instead of rejoicing at victory, Prescott Hall believed that the work of restriction had just begun, hinting that a literacy test would have little effect on immigration. Since, between 1908 and 1917, some 1.6 million illiterate immigrants had entered the country, many had assumed that the new law would bar a large number of aliens. Yet in its first five years, a mere 6,533 people were barred by the literacy test. After a quarter-century of political agitation, this was at best a tepid victory for restrictionists.
The enactment of the literacy test coincided with America’s entry into the Great War, when hostility toward immigrants was channeled toward German-Americans. War propaganda painted the murderous and rapacious Hun as a virulent enemy. Anti-German hysteria spread across the continent as schools stopped teaching German, and Germanlanguage newspapers folded. Anything remotely German was suspect: Americans went so far as to rename sauerkraut as “liberty cabbage.”
The war greatly strengthened the hand of prewar restrictionists. Charles Warren served as assistant attorney general during the war. He had been a founding member of the Immigration Restriction League and though not as prolific a pamphleteer as some of his colleagues, he perhaps had a greater influence in the long term.
At the Justice Department, Warren began work to resuscitate the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to give the government greater control over German alien enemies. Warren was also the architect of the Espionage Act, which passed Congress in 1917 and was designed to go after domestic opponents of the war effort. While Prescott Hall could merely fulminate against the inferiority of the new immigrants, Warren quietly changed the law affecting thousands of people.
The targeting of Germans was also tied to German-owned steamship companies, which had been responsible for much of the immigrant traffic to America in the past quarter century. Otto Wolpert, superintendent of the Hamburg-American docks in Hoboken, and Paul Koenig, the chief detective for Hamburg-American, were accused of assisting German saboteurs and bomb makers. Though only a small percentage of steamship employees were involved in Germany’s covert war effort, it was enough of a link to reinforce negative views of steamship companies and tie wartime sabotage directly to immigration.
Then there was the case of the increasingly hapless Marcus Braun, the former head of the Hungarian Republican Club in New York and sometime friend of Theodore Roosevelt. Braun had pushed his way into a patronage job at Ellis Island in 1903, which led him to his native Hungary to investigate the causes of immigration. After leaving the immigration service, he started his own newspaper, Fair Play.
Braun’s career took a strange turn during the war. In 1915, he was discovered carrying documents from the Austrian consul general in New York to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vienna. Though not illegal, Braun’s activities reinforced notions that foreign-born Americans still held loyalties to their mother countries and were willing to assist them in wartime.
It was later revealed that Count Johann von Bernstorff, Germany’s ambassador to Washington, had secretly purchased Braun’s newspaper. It became apparent that Braun had been a shill for the German government since 1915. Von Bernstorff ’s activities went beyond buying up American newspapers and extended to overseeing the whole operation of German propaganda and sabotage—including the Black Tom explosion.
Braun somehow escaped punishment, but found his reputation and career in ruins. His name came up a number of times during 1918 congressional hearings looking into the relationship between GermanAmerican brewers and German propaganda during the war. The man who had dined with President Roosevelt, inspected immigrants at Ellis Island, and investigated white slavery in Europe had been publicly disgraced. After the war, he moved to Vienna, bought another small newspaper, and passed away unnoticed in 1921.
S ITTING IN HIS OFFICE after Armistice Day in 1918, Fred Howe must have thought that the worst of his troubles had passed. The war was now over. Detained immigrants could be released from their Ellis Island imprisonment. But the end of the Great War would not bring peace either to Ellis Island or America.
Chapter 15
Revolution
The worst dump I have ever stayed in.
—Emma Goldman, referring to Ellis Island, 1919
ON THE MORNING OF FEBRU A RY 6, 1919, SOME 65,000 workers in the city of Seattle began a general strike that would shut down the city for the next five days. Mayor Ole Hanson feared that his city was in the grip of a political and social revolution. Tensions ran high, but revolution never came. The strike ended five days later, after federal troops arrived to restore order.
Even before the strike began, government officials had their eyes on the immigrant radicals of Washington State. On the day that the strike began, some forty-seven suspected radical aliens from Seattle, Spokane, and Portland found themselves on a train headed for Ellis Island instead of manning the barricades. Most were Wob
blies, members of the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), but a few belonged to the Union of Russian Workers. Newspapers eagerly dubbed the train the Red Special.
As the train approached Montana, some one thousand Wobblies were waiting for it in Butte in hopes of freeing their comrades, but the Red Special bypassed the city by way of Helena and avoided any problems. In Chicago, the train picked up seven more suspected radicals headed for deportation. The Times called the group a “motley company of I.W.W. troublemakers, bearded labor fanatics, and red flag supporters.”
The train arrived at Hoboken, New Jersey, and its fifty-four passengers were hustled onto a waiting barge for Ellis Island, where a melee erupted after an argument between a guard and one of the prisoners. This was one exception to a fairly peaceful trip, although the radicals did heap abuse and insults upon their guards throughout. As the guard in charge of the Red Special explained to his boss in Washington, it “went against my grain, as well as every guard aboard the train, to handle them without force, as they were very insulting at times.” One guard said the detainees needed gags, not handcuffs. “This is a musical gang,” he told a reporter. “They sing foreign songs for hours. Some of ’em wake up in the night to do it.”
When the Red Special radicals arrived at Ellis Island, Fred Howe was not there to greet them. He had been away since December accompanying President Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference. In his absence, Byron Uhl was acting commissioner, faithfully carrying out deportation orders from Washington. The fifty-four suspected radicals were held incommunicado. Neither their relatives nor their lawyers could see them. The headline from the socialist paper New York Call read: “Mystery Thick Around Exiles in Ellis Island: Keepers of New Bastille Terribly Fussy About Even Relatives Seeing Inmates.” Officials soon relented and allowed lawyers to review the cases.
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