No one felt this disillusionment more than Fred Howe. “I hated the new state that had arisen, hated its brutalities, its ignorance, its unpatriotic patriotism, that made profit from our sacrifices and used its power to suppress criticism of its acts,” he wrote in his autobiography. The man who once argued that government should take control of public utilities now changed his tune. “I became distrustful of the state,” he complained, “And I think I lost interest in it, just as did thousands of other persons . . . who were turned from love into fear of the state and all that it signified.”
To Howe, the brutality of the state was on display at Ellis Island. A few weeks after the Buford left New York Harbor, Howe penned a scathing critique of U.S. immigration laws, the same laws he had been sworn to carry out for five years. The article’s title said it all: “Lynch Law and the Immigrant Alien.” He condemned deportations as cruel and criticized the secret hearings held at Ellis Island to determine the fate of immigrants. He painted a dark picture of European immigrants living in a “state of panic” and “perpetual fear.” He ominously pronounced: “We have made Americanization impossible.” Of course, in retrospect Howe was wrong. The policies at Ellis Island and the Red Scare had few long-term effects on the attitudes of immigrants to their adopted country, but they certainly scarred Fred Howe.
His disillusionment can also be seen in his shift away from the idea of government control over business and utilities toward the idea of a cooperative “producers’ state,” where workers participated in the management and ownership of business. After leaving Ellis Island, Howe tried to put this idea into practice as the executive director of the Conference on Democratic Railroad Control.
When Howe left in September 1919, he was at the depth of despair. He had been condemned on the floor of the House of Representatives. He had survived one congressional investigation, and another one loomed. He despised his superiors and lost faith in his fellow citizens. He had begun work at Ellis Island hoping “to make it a playhouse for immigrants.” When he left, he found it a prison for aliens deemed unworthy by the government, but it had also, as Wendell Phillips once said about slavery, “made a slave of the master no less than the slave.”
Before leaving Ellis Island for the last time in the fall of 1919, Howe gathered up all of the personal papers that he had been saving to use for a book on his experiences there. Instead of taking them with him, he sent for a porter and the two men carried the materials to the island’s engine room where they threw the papers into the flames.
Chapter 16
Quotas
Americanization is not a mathematical process; it is a human process. Pigs may be imported by mathematical calculation. Ought we to be surprised if piggish methods of regulation of immigration produce brutish resentment and hatred of law and government?
—The Outlook, 1921
Whenever anyone wants something to kick against, they usually pick Ellis Island.
—New York Times, 1923
AT EXA CTLY MIDNIGHT ON JULY 1, 1923, THE STEAMSHIP President Wilson rushed across an imaginary line that spanned the Narrows of New York Harbor. Thirty seconds later, the Washington crossed that same line, which stretched from Fort Hamilton on the Brooklyn side to Fort Wadsworth on the Staten Island side. Within six minutes, a total of ten steamships had sailed past the line. One more ship would slip across a few hours later.
Immigration officials stationed at the two forts duly noted the times the ships crossed this line. When the mad midnight dash was over, eleven ships had arrived at Ellis Island, containing over eleven thousand passengers seeking entry to the United States. By morning, immigration officials were busy processing the new arrivals.
To anyone awake at that midnight hour, the throng of massive transatlantic steamers jockeying for position in the middle of the night in New York Harbor must have been a sight to behold. Why were these ships waiting in the harbor for the tolling of the midnight hour? Why did immigration officials patrol an imaginary line along the Narrows in the middle of the night? And why did these ships race across that imaginary line and have their times recorded as if it were an Olympic track meet?
The exact time a steamship crossed that invisible line held the potential to change the lives of thousands of immigrants aboard those vessels and spoke to the dramatic turn in American immigration laws since the end of World War I. The postwar disillusionment meant that the old way of dealing with the regulation and processing of immigrants—sorting the desirable from the undesirable—was over.
Restrictionists had long thought the process at Ellis Island was too lax, while immigration defenders thought it too strict. Yet the little island kept the concerns of both groups in balance, allowing a generally free immigration while barring those few deemed undesirable. War disrupted that balance, and both sides lost faith that government could weed out undesirables while treating its guests with a modicum of respect. Summing up the nation’s disillusionment, the Saturday Evening Post complained in 1921 that “the Department of Labor knows no more about immigration than it knows about the habits of the viviparous blenny or the gambling systems in use at Monte Carlo.”
Though the hysteria of the Red Scare had subsided, economic concerns deepened. The United States had entered a severe postwar recession. With some 2 million Americans out of work—many of them returning soldiers—the prospect of a postwar revival of European immigration was troubling. While four years of war had drastically reduced the number of immigrants, more than 430,000 people arrived between July 1919 and June 1920, and almost double that number would arrive in the following twelve months.
Americans feared that was just the tip of the iceberg. When they looked to Europe, they saw a continent teeming with people living amid the rubble and destruction of war. To those poor souls, America looked more and more attractive. Anthony Caminetti investigated conditions in Europe in late 1920 and reported back that some 25 million Europeans were ready to emigrate. Steamship officials told immigration authorities that some 15 million Europeans were “vociferously demanding immediate passage.” Lothrop Stoddard, author of The
Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, feared as many as 20 million.
“The influx of aliens will be limited only by the capacity of the steamships,” a New York Times editorial warned of this potential deluge of war-displaced Europeans. “Our equipment for handling the alien flood, meanwhile, has pitiably broken down. . . . Ellis Island is a chaos.”
This was all too much for Albert Johnson, the chairman of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. Johnson returned from another visit to Ellis Island in November 1920 and announced that what he found there was so bad that he was sure “the country does not realize the menace of immigration.” He promised that on the first day of the new session of Congress he would offer a bill to restrict immigration.
That is exactly what he did. At first, Johnson pushed for a two-year suspension of immigration, but his colleagues could only be convinced to support a one-year moratorium. Had the legislation passed, it would have marked the first time in American history that the gates of the nation were closed completely. Suspending immigration was a tactic that not even Henry Cabot Lodge or Prescott Hall had ever suggested in their darkest, most pessimistic moods.
The plan went nowhere. In the Senate, William Dillingham, former chairman of the U.S. Immigration Commission, had other ideas. He resurrected a plan that emanated from his 1911 report: institute a quota on new immigrants of 5 percent of the number of foreign-born for each nationality in the United States as counted by the 1910 Census. The plan would also impose a limit of six hundred thousand immigrants per year, well above the wartime figures but half the number that had arrived in the boom years of 1905–1907 and 1913–1914. The House dropped its immigration moratorium plan and signed on to the Senate’s efforts, although Johnson and his allies managed to shrink the quota down to 3 percent and lower the overall ceiling.
The bill came to the desk of Woodrow Wilson for
signature in his final days in office in 1921. His body withered by a stroke and his soul embittered by the failure of the Senate to accept his beloved League of Nations, Wilson did not act on the bill, thereby effecting a pocket veto. No public reason was given.
Congressman Johnson was not finished. A new president, more sympathetic to immigration restriction, was about to enter the White House. Less than two months after Wilson’s pocket veto, President Warren Harding signed a nearly identical bill. More surprising than the drastic change in policy was its relatively uncontroversial nature. The bill passed the Senate with only one negative vote, and it passed in the House with only thirty-three nays. Ethnic groups opposed the measure, but their arguments found little traction in those unsettled postwar years.
As Congress moved rapidly toward restriction in the spring of 1921, Prescott Hall lay ill in his bed in Brookline, Massachusetts. He had devoted the previous twenty-eight years of his life to the ideal of an Anglo-Saxon nation. The sickly Hall used the one weapon at his disposal—his pen—to rail against undesirable immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and in favor of the literacy test. The Immigration Restriction League actually had its own version of immigration quotas introduced into Congress in 1918. The organization admitted that its goal was to “discriminate in favor of immigrants from Northern and Western Europe, thus securing for this country aliens of kindred and homogeneous racial stocks.” That bill went nowhere.
Hall lived long enough to see Congress pass the new quota law, then passed away that May at the age of fifty-two. Joseph Lee, the Boston reformer and IRL member, eulogized Hall in the Boston Herald. “Mr. Hall’s work was unknown, unpaid, unrecognized,” Lee wrote, noting that without Hall, “the gates would have still been unguarded.”
The new law setting quotas by nationality went into effect at the end of June 1921 and limited immigration to a total of 355,000 quota immigrants per year. (Immigrant children and wives of American citizens, naturalized or native-born, could enter outside of the quotas.) The bill was passed as a one-year measure, but Congress would reauthorize the legislation for 1922 and 1923 as well.
The quotas severely restricted immigration from eastern and southern Europe; only 43 percent of immigrant slots were allotted to those regions. On a country-by-country basis, the effect of the quotas was even more startling. Although 296,414 Italians came to America in 1914, the last year in the prewar immigration boom, under the new quotas only 40,294 would be allowed to enter. In addition, no more than 20 percent of a nation’s yearly quota could be filled in any given month. That meant that the yearly quota for most nations would be filled in the first five months of the fiscal year.
If one of those ships on the night of June 30, 1923, had passed the imaginary line before midnight, it would have been marked as having entered in June 1923, the final month of the fiscal year, and all of its passengers would have been counted toward that year’s quota, which by then had most certainly been filled. Such a miscalculation, even by one minute, would mean that most of those immigrants would be barred from entry and sent back to Europe. The steamship race across the Narrows would be repeated at midnight on the first of the month for the next few months.
What had caused this drastic change in immigration policy? America’s unhappy experience in World War I helped turn the nation inward and soured its citizens. By 1920, Europe meant destruction, disease, and pointless ethnic conflict, and Americans sought once again to use the Atlantic Ocean as a barrier to the wretched influence of decayed Europe.
The link between immigration and radicalism further poisoned American attitudes—formerly ambivalent, yet relatively open—toward immigration. The fear of alien radicals caused many in the business community, usually in the forefront of the pro-immigration lobby, to acquiesce to the new restrictive legislation.
A major backbone of pro-immigrant sentiment had been the German-American community, which never fully recovered from the suspicions brought on by the Great War. In 1910, there had been 634 German-language newspapers in the country; by 1920, that number was down to 276.
The National German-American Alliance, one of the largest German-American organizations in the country, had been a staunch supporter of immigration and opponent of restriction. The organization—and especially two of its leaders, Henry Weismann and Alphonse Koelble—had been a fierce critic of William Williams. The Great War destroyed the NGAA. By 1916, Weismann and Koelble were charged with trying to set up an office in Washington to lobby on behalf of the German government. By 1918, Congress voted to revoke the charter of the NGAA. The cumulative effect was that the strongest, loudest, and most fearless pro-immigration voice in the country was now eager to prove its“100 percent Americanism” and would never fully regain that voice.
The growing popularity of eugenics also contributed to the success of the quotas. After the war, Prescott Hall called immigration restriction “a species of segregation on a large scale, by which inferior stocks can be prevented from diluting and supplanting good stocks.” A number of eugenicists linked their work to immigration restriction. Congressman Johnson, a leading proponent of quotas, was deeply influenced by eugenics. Harry Laughlin, director of the Eugenics Record Office, served as a researcher for the House Committee on Immigration. However, as Stephen Jay Gould has noted, “Restriction was in the air, and would have occurred without scientific backing.”
Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, a paean to Nordic supremacy, was originally published in 1916 and received little notice. The early 1920s, however, provided a more welcoming environment for his views. Grant noted how the Great War seemed to shift public attitudes toward immigrants, since “Americans were forced to the realization that their country, instead of being a homogeneous whole, was a jumbled-up mass of undigested racial material.” He also worried that immigration was affecting the national stature of Americans—literally. He complained that the Army had lowered its height requirement to allow the conscription of soldiers from “newly arrived races of small stature.”
The fact that many immigrants and their children fought in the U.S. military was surely a positive sign of assimilation. For Grant, assimilation was a false god. This was one of the few areas where he agreed with proto-multiculturalists like Randolph Bourne. Grant mocked the famous war propaganda poster with Miss Liberty paying homage to an honor roll of names from Du Bois to Smith to Levy to Chriczanevicz. “Americans All!” shouted the poster, an idea that Grant found difficult swallow.
“These immigrants adopt the language of the native American; they wear his clothes; they steal his name; and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom understand his ideals,” Grant bemoaned. The problem was not the lack of assimilation, but rather that the melting pot was being “allowed to boil without control.” He painted a bleak future where assimilation would “produce many amazing racial hybrids and some ethnic horrors that will be beyond the powers of future anthropologists to unravel.” The question for Grant was: Was it too late?
Such views were not just isolated to cranky Manhattan snobs. The Saturday Evening Post, the nation’s most widely read weekly magazine and best known for its Norman Rockwell covers that embodied Middle American values, became one of the leading voices of restriction. A 1921 article warned middle-class Americans that “immigration must be stopped. This is a matter of life and death for America.”
America’s postwar attitude toward immigrants had a substantial effect on the fortunes of immigrants such as the accused prostitute Giulietta Lamarca. The war had meant a reprieve from being returned to Europe, but since their deportation orders had never been rescinded, peacetime meant they were again vulnerable. The turmoil of war and the Red Scare briefly pushed these deportation cases into a bureaucratic black hole, but by 1921, as the American mood toward immigration grew darker, the government once again turned its attention to immigrants like Giulietta.
In the summer of 1921, officials reopened her case. Byron Uhl, the assistant commissioner of Ellis Isla
nd, noted that Giulietta had been living in open adultery in New Jersey for a few years, despite having a husband and child in Italy. This, coupled with the outstanding deportation order for prostitution from 1915, was enough to warrant another stay for Lamarca at Ellis Island.
This time, her boyfriend, Dana E. Robinson, the son of the Ellis Island doctor to whom Frederic Howe had paroled Giulietta in 1916, wrote officials to plead for mercy. He was very much in love with Giulietta (whom he referred to by her Americanized name, Juliette) and wanted to marry her. There had been no further charges against her in the last five years and Robinson found it “hard indeed to believe that the old charges are true as she has been under the careful and kind attention of my mother for the past three years.” Despite her documented past and abandoned family in Italy, Robinson stated that his beloved Juliette was “as good a girl morally as any” and promised that their mutual love would keep them morally pure.
On the word of Robinson and his mother, Paula, Giulietta was once again released. It appeared that Howe had been correct that she could turn around her life and there appears no evidence that Giulietta had fallen back into a life of prostitution. But the happy ending that Frederic Howe, Dana Robinson, and many others had hoped for never materialized. Within three months, Paula Robinson wrote to the Labor Department. “I have to confess,” she wrote in anguish, “that when I asked for clemency in the case of Juliette Lamarca I made the gravest mistake of my life.”
It is hard to tell what went wrong in those few months, but something clearly did. According to Paula Robinson, Juliette threatened that neither the government nor Paula would “have anything further to say about what she does and that if the Government does anything to her, she will show them what she can do.” Juliette vowed that if she were turned over to immigration officials, she would take her story to the newspapers and ruin the Robinson family by publicizing the fact that Dana was going to marry a former prostitute. She also threatened to have the Black Hand kill both mother and son if they turned her over to immigration authorities.
American Passage Page 40