Goldman and Berkman were asked to arrive at Ellis Island on December 5 to await their imminent deportation to Russia. There they joined eighty-eight other suspected radical aliens. For more than two weeks, Goldman and Berkman would remain in detention, to be joined by more radicals rounded up by the government. After thirty-three years here, Ellis Island was to be Emma Goldman’s last home in America.
Detained at Ellis Island alongside Goldman and Berkman was Joseph Poluleck, who had already been there for almost a month. While Goldman was famous or infamous, Poluleck was an anonymous figure. A packer at the American-European Distributing Company on the Lower East Side, he had arrived in America from Russia six years earlier. He was arrested in early November while attending math classes at the People’s House night school run by the Union of Russian Workers, one of the radical organizations targeted by government officials.
At his hearing, Poluleck adamantly denied being an anarchist and claimed to like the United States and support the country. “There is not a word of truth in the charges,” he told immigration officials, “I am not an anarchist and I am not affiliated with any organization of that kind.” He had only been taking classes at the People’s House since September and the only organization he belonged to was the Methodist Episcopal Church.
The case against Poluleck was weak. Even Byron Uhl admitted there was no evidence to substantiate the main charges against him. The government’s case rested on the fact that each student at the school received a book from the Union of Russian Workers, which implied membership in the organization. Though Labor Department officials had declared earlier that mere membership in a radical organization was not grounds for deportation, by late 1919, the Justice Department reversed the policy and Poluleck was ordered deported.
Meanwhile, Goldman called the conditions at Ellis Island “frightful” and argued that little had changed in the treatment of immigrants since she had arrived at Castle Garden more than thirty years earlier. While in detention, Goldman suffered an attack of neuralgia, a painful condition affecting her jaw and teeth. The Ellis Island doctor could not help with the pain and, as she later put it, for “forty-eight hours, my teeth became a federal issue.” Eventually, officials allowed her to visit a dentist in New York, accompanied by a male guard and female matron. Goldman called her ailment “very timely,” since the visit allowed her friends a chance to visit her. At Ellis Island, detainees were allowed only occasional visits conducted behind screens and with the oversight of guards.
Apart from the minidrama with Goldman’s dental pain, there was little else for detainees at Ellis Island to do but wait for their day of deportation, which was kept secret from them. To pass the time, Goldman did something she was especially good at. She wrote. Most of her efforts were directed toward a pamphlet she was writing with Berkman entitled “Deportation: Its Meaning and Menace,” further subtitled, accurately but melodramatically as the “Last Message to the People of America by Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman.”
Afraid that officials would confiscate their material, they wrote in their cells at night while their roommates kept watch for guards. On their morning walks, the two would discuss the material and trade suggestions for the next night’s writing. The pamphlet included an introduction by fellow radical and political cartoonist Robert Minor, who called the impending deportation, the first effort of “the War Millionaires to crush the soul of America and insure the safety of the dollars they have looted over the graves of Europe.” A mixture of melodrama, grandiosity, and conspiratorial history pervaded the pamphlet. Goldman and Berkman saw their tribulations as nothing less than another form of czarism. “Now reaction is in full swing,” they wrote. “Liberty is dead, and white terror on top dominates the country. Free speech is a thing of the past.”
While Goldman was angry at her detention, she was especially saddened to find out that Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis Post had signed her order of deportation. The seventy-year-old Post had been a noted liberal journalist and possessed none of the traditional starchy appearance of most public men of the time. With his thick, unkempt head of hair, bushy, gray Van Dyke beard, and thin wire-rimmed glasses, at a quick glance Post looked a little like an American-born Trotsky. More philosopher than bureaucrat, he called himself a rational spiritualist and had been an early supporter of Henry George’s single-tax theory, a plan popular with utopian thinkers disheartened by the vast accumulations of wealth in the industrial age.
Years earlier, Post had come to Goldman’s defense when she was accused of involvement in President McKinley’s assassination. Not only did he defend her in the pages of his magazine, but Goldman had also once been a guest in his house.
In his waning professional years, Post went to work in the Wilson administration. Like Howe, he was uncomfortable having to enforce laws that went against his beliefs. Coming to the Labor Department in 1914, Post had hoped to work on issues dealing with the condition of workers, but instead found that some 70 percent of the department’s appropriations and more than 80 percent of its staff went toward enforcing the immigration laws. One of the nation’s few advocates of an open-door policy for immigrants, Post had little interest in this work, which put him in a depressive mood for the rest of his tenure. “I found myself moving about in a cloud of gloom from the beginning to the end of my service in the Department of Labor,” Post later wrote.
Post complained about the administrative nature of immigration law. While serving as assistant secretary, he published an article arguing that the exclusion or deportation of aliens “should not be determined finally by administrative decision.” It was unusual for a serving political appointee to write in an academic journal criticizing policies he was bound to uphold, but Post had few good options.
Still in office in late 1919 and taking on more responsibility with the continuing absence of his boss, Labor Secretary Wilson, Post was faced with the cases of the radical detainees. The decision to deport Goldman rested in his hands. He spent a great deal of time contemplating her case and came to the conclusion that the only issue that mattered under the law was whether or not Goldman was an anarchist, not whether she had ever participated in revolutionary or violent actions. On that question, Post could only answer yes; the result had to be deportation. Post signed the order.
Post found that he had to enforce the law even if it clashed with his own beliefs. To do otherwise would be a violation of his oath of office and, as he wrote, “essentially repugnant to the developing democratic principles of our Republic.” Such thinking did not impress Emma Goldman, who thought Post had another option open to him: resignation. Since he chose to remain in office and carry out the deportations, Goldman “felt that Post had covered himself in ignominy.”
Post, however, could do something for Goldman. The deportation called for her to be brought back to Russia, where the civil war was raging. To send Goldman back to areas controlled by White Russians would have been a death sentence, so Post ordered her deported to Soviet-controlled Russia.
In the early morning hours of December 21, Emma Goldman was in her cell, which she shared with two other female detainees. She was doing what she had been doing for most of her detention: writing. At the sound of guards approaching their cell, Goldman hid her notes under her pillow and pretended to be asleep. The guards were there for another reason. The hour of deportation—that inevitable, yet carefully guarded secret—had finally arrived.
Collecting their things, the three women were marched into the Great Hall, where they joined 246 men, including Alexander Berkman, shivering in the cold. In a short time, the group would march single-file through the main building and outside to a waiting ferry that would take them on the first leg of their journey. Walking through the bitter air of an early December morning with snow covering the ground, the band of ragged, sleepy, and dispirited radicals made their way to the ferry under the watchful eyes of armed soldiers and a group of federal officials, including J. Edgar Hoover and Congressman Albert Johnson, chairm
an of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. “Scores of cruel eyes staring us in the face,” was Goldman’s recollection of the event. As Goldman was boarding the ferry, someone yelled sarcastically: “Merry Christmas, Emma,” to which the anarchist thumbed her nose.
Colorado congressman William Vaile was also on hand. He described the deportees as having “rather stupid faces” and being “degraded and brutalized men.” Vaile believed that the deportations were perfectly justified. “Deportation is merely the act of ridding ourselves of foreigners who are not eligible for residence here under our laws,” he wrote. Though the government could not expel citizens for holding anarchist views, he believed that “a nation has the right to refuse its privileges and protection to any class of aliens whom it may consider undesirable residents.”
Vaile shared his cigarettes with a few of the deportees as they waited to board the ferry, but stopped after listening to their conversations, filled with a “bitter sneer.” Disgusted with these radicals, Vaile was overwhelmed by feelings of loathing and decided that “the rest of my tobacco should go to Americans.”
From the Ellis Island pier, the 249 deportees were first taken to Fort Wadsworth in Staten Island. Goldman and the other two female deportees were segregated from the men during the two-hour ferry ride. As the ferry passed the Statue of Liberty, it crossed paths with another ferry crowded with incoming immigrants headed for Ellis Island, who let out a cheer upon seeing the other boat, not realizing the destination of its passengers. Goldman, with her typewriter case beside her and holding a few sprigs of holly, engaged Hoover in conversation. America’s time was coming to an end, she told him matter-of-factly. Just as a new day was dawning in Russia, Goldman believed, so too would revolution come to the United States.
It must have been an odd sight, with the middle-aged anarchist and the young federal agent engaged in political conversation. The thin veneer of civility between Goldman and the authorities was a sign of the anarchist’s defeat. Goldman was still bitter at Hoover for not informing her lawyer about the deportation, and she let the young government official know it. “Haven’t I given you a square deal, Miss Goldman?” a defensive Hoover responded. “Oh, I suppose you’ve given me as square a deal as you could,” she replied. She could not refuse one final dig at her adversary: “We shouldn’t expect from any person something beyond his capacity.”
Upon arrival at Fort Wadsworth, the passengers were transferred to the Buford, a thirty-year-old army transport ship that had been in use during the Spanish-American War. Only 51 of the Buford’s passengers were deemed anarchists, including Berkman and Goldman. Some 184 of the deportees were members of the Federation of the Union of Russian Workers, a group designated as advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government. This included Joseph Poluleck, the Methodist whose major offense was that he took math classes at the wrong place. Finally, 9 of the passengers were excluded as likely to become a public charge, while 5 others had violated other parts of the immigration law.
The press was quick to give the Buford a new name, one that would stick throughout history: the Soviet Ark. The Pittsburgh Post called Goldman and the other passengers “the unholiest cargo that ever left our shores.” Because of the supposedly dangerous nature of the Buford’s human cargo, the army provided a contingent of sixty-four soldiers and officers to provide protection and prevent a mutiny, joined by nine officials from the Immigration Service.
Goldman and the others elicited little sympathy from Americans. Contrary to what Goldman and Berkman wrote, their deportation did not signify the beginnings of czarism or the end of freedom in America. Rather it was one of the many big and small events that, when taken as a whole, helped break apart the national consensus on immigration and herald a new era when Ellis Island—and the immigrants who once streamed through its doors—were less relevant to America.
“One could not imagine a more quiet movement of so many people,” Commissioner-General Caminetti reported the next day.
F ROM THE BLACK TOM explosion to the deportation of Emma Goldman, Ellis Island found itself witness to the traumas of the Great War and its aftermath. The war was now over, but the debate over the power of exclusion, detention, and deportation remained.
A few years before Goldman was expelled, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes succinctly summarized the government’s view on deportation. It is not a punishment, Holmes wrote, but instead “simply a refusal by the government to harbor persons whom it does not want.”
The sailing of the Soviet Ark, which forever banished the country’s number one anarchist, emboldened the Justice Department to make further arrests. While the Buford was still on the high seas, hundreds more suspected alien radicals were rounded up as part of the Palmer Raids and brought to Ellis Island for deportation, many of whom belonged to the Communist Party. At the Labor Department, Louis Post tried to rein in the Justice Department’s excesses. With Secretary Wilson still ill, much of the burden fell on Post’s shoulders. He did not save Emma Goldman, but now, at the end of his career and with little to lose, Post ordered the release of over two thousand suspected radicals across the country, although he did uphold the deportations of a few hundred individuals.
Post made enemies with his actions, not the least of whom was J. Edgar Hoover. The young Justice Department official had dug up an affidavit that Post had signed in 1904 in support of anarchist John Turner. In Hoover’s files was a poem entitled “The Bully Bolshevik,” which was “disrespectfully dedicated to ‘Comrade’ Louie Post.” It is not clear whether Hoover wrote the ditty, but it certainly summed up his views:
The ‘Reds’ at Ellis Island
Are happy as can be
For Comrade Post at Washington Is setting them all free.
The anger toward Post extended to Congress. Six months earlier it had been Fred Howe who was being grilled for his sympathy toward radicals. Now it was Post’s turn. In May 1920, the House Rules Committee began impeachment hearings against him. By then, the Red Scare had petered out almost as quickly as it had begun. When Palmer’s dire warnings of a May Day revolution failed to come true, the public lost interest in the crusade. Congress quietly dropped its proceedings against Post.
At the height of the Red Scare, between November 1919 and May 1920, warrants were issued for 6,350 aliens suspected of radical activity, leading to around 3,000 arrests. Of that number, only 762 were ordered deported and only 271 were actually deported, including the 249 who left on the Buford. In the year after May 1920, an additional 510 alien radicals were deported.
The roundup and deportation of alien radicals were merely a continuation of longstanding immigration policy. For years, immigrants safely landed in the United States were at risk of deportation if they were subsequently found to qualify under one of the categories of exclusion. Between 1910 and 1918, almost twenty-five thousand immigrants already residing in the United States found themselves rounded up by authorities and deported back to their homelands for various reasons. After World War I, the government focused its attention more closely on radical aliens, but the mechanism it used was largely the same as had been used to deport immigrants before the war.
While the deportation process that characterized the Red Scare had long been part of the immigration law and would be used for decades more to come, the emotions that fueled this particular spasm of antiradical sentiment quickly died out. In hindsight, this period was a disjointed blip, a hiccup of tension and conflict. To the American mind of 1919 and 1920, however, the world seemed ablaze with danger.
A global flu outbreak had erupted before the armistice and continued into 1919. The worldwide death toll has been estimated at anywhere from 20 million to as high as 100 million. Many in the United States referred to it as the Spanish flu, reinforcing the alien nature of the disease and the danger of foreign entanglements. Some one-quarter of all Americans came down with the flu, and 675,000 died in less than one year, including Randolph Bourne, who passed away in December 1918. To many Americans, war
and pestilence seemed their grim reward for becoming a world power.
During 1919, Americans were on edge. Some 4 million workers across the country went out on nearly 2,600 strikes. Steelworkers, miners, even Boston policemen walked out on their jobs during that tumultuous year. The American Communist Party was formed that year. And it was not just the United States that was in turmoil: following the lead of the Russian Bolsheviks, Communist uprisings occurred in Bavaria and Hungary.
The Great War turned the world upside down and dashed the optimism of a generation. Modern civilizations tore each other up on the battlefield as new technologies like airplanes, machine guns, and poison gas made the traditional destruction of war that much worse. The number of military dead was staggering: around 2 million Germans and Russians each, and around 1 million English, Austrians, and French each, not to mention the wounded, maimed, or shell-shocked. In a little over one year of war, America lost more than 115,000 men, with more than 200,000 wounded.
When the war ended, people on both sides of the Atlantic began to ask why and received few answers. The victorious Allies carved up the map and took their war booty, while Woodrow Wilson’s romantic vision of a League of Nations that would end war forever would have to function without the participation of the United States, when the Senate failed to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. When Americans asked what the war had been for, some answered that it had been fought only to fatten the pocketbooks of big business.
The scars of war remained on the American psyche and disabused many of their positive feelings for government. For liberals, the disillusionment was even more pronounced. They were the ones who had built up the federal government, who hoped to use it to counteract the power of corporations and provide protections for workers and consumers. The government, run by educated, middle-class professionals, was supposed to rescue America from an orgy of commercialism and ignorance, but instead it bumbled into a bloody European war for no apparent reason, stirred up ethnic hatred at home, and used its new police powers to quash dissent.
American Passage Page 39