American Passage

by Vincent J. Cannato

  Attorneys Caroline Lowe and Charles Recht led the fight to free the detainees. However, they were unfamiliar with immigration law. “A sovereign state has the right to deport every alien, under any laws or rules it pleases,” an astounded Recht later remembered in his autobiography. “An alien deportee cannot invoke the Bill of Rights or the Constitution, for these do not apply to him.”

  In contrast to the depiction in newspapers, Lowe saw her clients as admirable citizens of high character, “clean cut, upright, intelligent, educated.” All were literate and could speak English. Americans had been so worried about the pernicious effect of illiterate immigrants that it had enacted a literacy test, yet these radicals would have had no problem passing such a test. The stereotype of the anarchist and radical was usually the Jewish Socialist or the Italian with a bomb, but most of the immigrants on the Red Special were English or Scandinavian.

  The detainees were a random lot of IWW organizers, political radicals, and eccentrics. Among them was thirty-four-year-old E. E. McDonald, who had been born in Denmark and had come to the United States when he was eight. A local newspaper called the picturesque McDonald the poet laureate of the Ellis Island detainees. He even composed a poem there called “Song of the Alien Deportees.”

  In the shadow of the statue

  That Bartholdi’s hand designed We are waiting for the mandate That will make us leave behind All the friends and kin and loved ones We have here on this fair shore We are waiting to be exiled

  From this land forevermore.

  McDonald and the other passengers of the Red Special were still at Ellis Island when Fred Howe returned from Europe. When Howe complained about the status of the detainees, his superiors told him to mind his own business and follow orders. Howe was also dismayed that his colleagues at Ellis Island were “happy in the punishing power which all jailers enjoy, and resented any interference on behalf of its victims.”

  Howe was swimming against the tide when it came to the country’s attitude toward radicals. Congress had added anarchists to its list of excluded groups back in 1903, and the 1917 Immigration Act expanded the definition of excluded or deportable immigrants to include not just anarchists, but also “persons who believe in or advocate the overthrow by force or violence of the Government of the United States.” The following year, Congress gave officials more latitude to define alien radicals. Undesirable immigrants were now defined as those “opposed to all organized government,” who advocated or taught “the unlawful destruction of property,” and who belonged to an organization that advocated any of the above measures.

  This expansion of the law allowed Anthony Caminetti, commissioner-general of immigration, to launch a personal crusade against foreign-born, nonnaturalized radicals living in the United States. One of his first targets in 1918 was the Home Colony, a radical commune on the west side of Puget Sound some forty miles from Seattle. An investigation by government officials showed that the Home Colony was a kind of utopia-turned-sour whose middle-aged members seemed more interested in free love than revolution. It was small potatoes when compared to the IWW.

  Though he was out of step with American anti-radical laws, Fred Howe did have one trump card at his disposal. He simply postponed all deportations, allowing the IWW lawyers to present their case to Washington. With additional time to hear the cases, the acting secretary of labor, John Abercrombie, overruled Caminetti and issued a memorandum to all immigration officials stating that the department had never declared the IWW to be an anarchistic organization and therefore its members could not be deported. In all future cases, he declared, a Wobbly’s actions, and not simply his membership, would be the basis for deportation.

  Using this new standard, the department took up the case of James Lund, an immigrant from Sweden and a member of the Seattle IWW. The Labor Department found, contrary to earlier findings, that there was little evidence that he advocated the overthrow of the U.S. government. Therefore, it ordered Lund released on his own recognizance, or in effect paroled. The cases of eleven others were deemed to be similar to Lund’s and they too were paroled on March 17. In the next six weeks, eleven more alien radicals were set free. One suspected radical escaped from custody, while four others were discharged outright and one was found to be an American citizen.

  For those Red Special radicals still in custody at Ellis Island, attorneys Lowe and Recht pursued a round of habeas corpus writs to free the detainees. Judge Augustus Hand ruled in the case of Sam Nelson that he could only find that the detainee believed in an “irreconcilable conflict between employer and employee.” This was not enough, in the eyes of Hand, to justify Nelson’s detention or deportation. Using Nelson’s precedent, more Red Special detainees were paroled. Later in June, Judge Hand ruled on seven more cases, allowing the deportation of six men while freeing one: Ellis Island’s poet laureate, E. E. McDonald.

  Martin de Wal was one of the unlucky ones whom Judge Hand ruled against. After three months of the tedium of detention, de Wal sent a letter to the editor of The Survey asking readers to send books and other reading material to them. By June, de Wal again wrote to thank readers for the apparently large number of books and pamphlets they had sent, although de Wal noted that they could not tell how many books had actually been sent, since officials at Ellis Island withheld material so as “not to spoil our morals further by allowing us radical or truthful books.” Hopefully, de Wal had enough reading material, for he was to remain at Ellis Island until the end of September.

  As de Wal and his colleagues whiled away their time in detention, more than thirty bombs were being mailed to prominent Americans like J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. Postal officials intercepted most of them, but one package they missed arrived at the home of former Georgia senator Thomas Hardwick where it exploded and blew off the hands of Hardwick’s maid. In June, another bomb exploded in front of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s Washington home, damaging the house and killing the man who planted the bomb. To Americans, these seemed like dangerous times.

  Meanwhile, despite the hoopla surrounding the big roundup of radicals from the Red Special, only nine of the detainees had actually been deported. Most of those taken from Seattle to Ellis Island were eventually released on parole. The big Red roundup had actually been a bust.

  In the middle of this was Fred Howe, a public servant with impeccably bad timing. Not only were suspected radicals being released from his custody, but just a few days before the bomb exploded in front of Palmer’s home, Howe had presided over a Justice to Russia rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden. His presence attracted the attention of Senator William King of Utah, who demanded that Howe be fired. “I don’t think a man who has sanctioned Bolshevism, as he did by presiding at that meeting, is fit to remain in office,” King said. “If there is any hint of Bolshevism at Ellis Island, through which the immigrants of the world pour into the United States, it must be wiped out.” Howe was unapologetic and denied that the meeting was “pro-Bolshevist” or “pro-Soviet.” Yet a Times article claimed that participants cheered for Trotsky and Lenin, while booing the mention of Woodrow Wilson’s name.

  Howe was not a Communist, but a Labor Department report showed that he had been solicitous of the comfort of the Red Special detainees. When the radicals complained that they had to get up at six thirty in the morning, but could not eat breakfast until eight thirty, Howe ordered that their mandatory wake-up be postponed closer to breakfast. Howe also allowed detainees to receive such IWW periodicals as The Rebel Worker and The Red Dawn.

  The attacks on Howe also came from an unexpected source: Fiorello La Guardia. The former Ellis Island translator, who had recently returned to his House seat after serving in the army during the Great War, lashed out at Howe on the floor of Congress. La Guardia was a liberal and sympathetic to the plight of immigrants at Ellis Island, but was disgusted enough to condemn Howe as a radical and complain that he had allowed anarchist literature to be available to detainees. While Senator King proposed
impeaching Howe, La Guardia merely wanted to cut his pay by 50 percent.

  In the midst of the criticism, Howe resigned in September 1919. He was mostly guilty of a political tin ear, a victim of political naïveté and poor judgment. The irony is that despite his sympathy for the radicals, one of the intercepted explosive packages sent by anarchists in the spring of 1919 was addressed to Howe, perhaps because he was technically in charge of the detention of IWW radicals.

  This did not prevent Congress from initiating three days of hearings in November 1919 at Ellis Island to look into charges that Howe’s administration was lax, especially regarding suspected radical detainees. Howe had already weathered one congressional hearing dealing with his alleged lenient treatment of alien prostitutes.

  During this second hearing, Congressman John Box of Texas called the inspection of immigrants at Ellis Island a farce, a characterization that Howe’s deputy, Byron Uhl, did not dispute, saying that it had become “largely a matter of checking names.” The committee chairman, Albert Johnson, asked Uhl whether it was Howe’s desire to turn Ellis Island into “a place of individual government, letting everyone do as he pleased.” Uhl had been fairly taciturn in his responses, but answered that that had been his impression. In addition, he admitted that nearly all employees at Ellis Island were of the opinion that Howe’s policies were “utterly improper.” Uhl admitted that under Howe each detainee at Ellis Island could just about do as he or she pleased.

  The committee also released at letter from anarchist Emma Goldman to Howe in 1915, addressed to “My Dear Fred.” Critics argued that the letter implied a friendship between the two, yet another piece of evidence that Howe was soft on radicals.

  Howe was present during the hearings at Ellis Island, but was not on the witness list. At a number of points during proceedings, he tried to answer charges but was silenced by the chairman. Later, Howe made his case to the press outside the hearing, explaining that he had never released anyone from Ellis Island without the explicit order from the Labor Department. In a literal sense, what Howe said was true. The decision to parole or release detained radicals was made by his superiors, but it was Howe’s intercession that stalled the proceedings and allowed the radicals a second chance to make their case to Washington.

  Back inside the hearing, the congressmen seemed particularly bothered that not only were the Red Special detainees, as well as others held at Ellis Island, released on their own recognizance, but the government had no idea where they were. “Whereabouts now unknown,” was the phrase that attached itself to name after name of suspected radicals. In the course of the hearings, it came out that 697 warrants of arrest had been issued for the deportation of suspected radicals between February 1917 and November 1919. Of that number, only 60 had actually been deported.

  The press had a field day with the revelations. The most colorful, if overwrought, description came from the Cleveland News, which described Ellis Island as a “government institution turned into a Socialist hall, a spouting ground for Red revolutionists . . . a place of deceit and sham to which foreign mischief-makers are sent temporarily to make the public think the Government is courageously deporting them.” The New York World complained that Ellis Island was in danger of becoming a “perpetual joke,” where a workforce of guards consisting of “one-legged, one-armed or decrepit old men” was in danger of losing control to anarchists.

  The case of the Red Special detainees was a false start in the government’s battle against suspected alien radicals. The next round of arrests and deportations, which were already underway during the Howe hearings, would be much different.

  The next series of roundups had their genesis on the desk of A. Mitchell Palmer, the attorney general. But there was a problem: the power of deportation lay not with the Department of Justice but with the Department of Labor. William B. Wilson, who headed the newly created department, reminded Palmer of this fact in a letter, temporarily derailing Palmer’s crusade. But Wilson had become increasingly disengaged from his job and was in no position for bureaucratic infighting. His wife had recently suffered a stroke, so he took an extended leave from his job to care for her. Adding to his burdens, Wilson himself fell sick and was rarely seen in his office throughout most of 1919.

  With Secretary Wilson turning over effective control of his department to subordinates, Palmer saw an opportunity. Commissioner-General Caminetti had already shown that he was committed to the idea of rounding up alien radicals. In Secretary Wilson’s absence, Caminetti made an end run around his superiors and worked directly with Palmer and the Justice Department. His liaison was the twenty-four-year-old head of the General Intelligence Division, J. Edgar Hoover, whom a congressman referred to as a “slender bundle of high-charged electric wire.” A direct phone line to Hoover’s Washington office would be installed at Ellis Island.

  If the earlier roundups of suspected radicals consisted of mostly obscure figures from the West Coast, the main targets of the fall 1919 campaign were the country’s most notorious radicals: Emma Goldman and her former lover Alexander Berkman. Goldman was a notorious nonconformist known for her fiery rhetoric and anarchist beliefs. The U.S. attorney Francis G. Caffey referred to her as a “continual disturber of the peace.” Berkman’s claim to fame was his attempted murder of industrialist Henry Clay Frick, for which he served fourteen years in jail.

  Both Berkman and Goldman had been born in Russia. Goldman had arrived at Castle Garden in 1886. Berkman was not a citizen, but Goldman claimed citizenship via a brief 1887 marriage to Jacob Kershner, a naturalized Russian immigrant. Goldman’s citizenship should have left her immune from deportation, but that was not to be.

  Beginning in 1907, immigration officials began to monitor Goldman closely. Commerce and Labor secretary Oscar Straus began going after anarchists, in part to compensate for the criticism he was receiving from restrictionists. “There is no doubt about it that Emma Goldman, who is a woman of the French Revolution type, is dangerous by reason of her incendiary ability,” Straus wrote in his diary. Secret Service agents monitored Goldman’s public speeches.

  For two years, Straus vacillated on the Goldman case. At one point, he ordered Robert Watchorn to take her into custody at Ellis Island for an administrative hearing. Yet that never happened. Straus claimed that Goldman’s speeches were “very skillfully worded so as not to be actionable.” He argued that although she was an anarchist, arresting her would only add to her prestige among radicals.

  As Straus continued to debate action against Goldman, a federal judge revoked her ex-husband’s citizenship as fraudulent. It was a peculiar move. By 1909, Kershner was dead and it was not readily apparent why the government thought it necessary to pull the citizenship from a corpse. The move was not really about Kershner, who had been little more than a poor factory worker. The real target was Emma Goldman. In revoking Kershner’s citizenship, the government also revoked Goldman’s. By this dubious legal move, Goldman was now subject to deportation under the immigration law.

  This did not put Goldman in immediate jeopardy, although she was more than capable of getting into trouble on her own. Before World War I, she was arrested for lecturing on birth control. Her real problems began after the United States entered the war, as officials continued to monitor her speeches for criticisms of the war effort. In 1917, Goldman and Berkman were arrested under the Espionage Act for speaking out against the draft. They were sentenced to two years in prison.

  As Julius Goldman was about to find out, the mere attendance at an Emma Goldman speech could place one in legal jeopardy. No relation to Emma, Julius was a nineteen-year-old deli clerk on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He had been in the country since 1913. One night after seeing a movie, he walked down East Broadway for dinner when he saw a large crowd at Forward Hall, the headquarters of the city’s Yiddish-language, socialist paper. Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were speaking. After their speech, all men in the audience were stopped by police and asked to show their draft registration card
s. Having been caught up in the crowd, Julius Goldman was interrogated by police. Was he an anarchist, one policeman asked? More questions followed: “Do you believe in the overthrow of law and government by force? Do you believe in organized government? Do you believe in free love?” Because he had admitted to being an anarchist and since he was a nonnaturalized immigrant, Julius was sent to Ellis Island.

  Officials quickly realized that Julius was hardly a bomb thrower. His lawyer argued that Julius’s appearance “does not stamp him as one who has been given over to too much study.” He had simply wandered into the meeting and mistakenly said he was an anarchist out of fear. Caminetti called Julius a “somewhat unsophisticated lad” with no knowledge of anarchism and he was released on bond. Julius had come to find that even a random association with Emma Goldman could be dangerous to one’s liberty. A short time later, with government officials and policemen monitoring their every utterance, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were arrested and convicted of obstructing the draft by speaking out against the war. The two were each sentenced to two years in jail.

  When released from jail in September 1919, Goldman, stripped of her citizenship for a decade, knew that deportation was a possibility. She was ordered to appear at Ellis Island for a hearing on October 27 to answer charges that she was actively advocating anarchy and the violent overthrow of the government. At the hearing, Goldman asserted her citizenship, going so far as to state that her name was Emma Goldman Kershner. She submitted a long statement for the record, denouncing the “star chamber hearing,” and then proceeded to refuse to answer most of the questions officials put to her. To question after question, Goldman responded: “I refuse to answer.” A subsequent hearing in November produced much the same result, and officials recommended deportation.