Did Juliette Lamarca finally have enough of the harassment of immigration officials and the threat of deportation that lingered over her head for five years? Was she merely exerting her independence from a meddling future mother-in-law? Or was she a scheming conniver who had latched onto a prosperous American fiancé and, once married, was going to kick her mother-in-law out of her house, as Paula Robinson feared? Juliette was clearly not a naïve woman, having seen the world from the brothels of Algiers and the Brooklyn docks. Perhaps her intentions were less than admirable, or perhaps she had just snapped under the pressure of such prolonged and intrusive scrutiny.
What we do know is that less than two weeks after receiving Mrs. Robinson’s letter, immigration officials rescinded Juliette’s stay of deportation. Four days later, she was taken to Ellis Island for the third time in five years, and on December 3, 1921, she was deported back to Italy.
H ENRY H. CURRAN, THE new commissioner of Ellis Island, took office on July 1, 1923, the morning after the mad dash of steamers at midnight. A feisty and irreverent New York politician who had spent his adult life working in politics as an outnumbered Republican in a Democratic city, Curran had run for mayor in 1921, losing to his Democratic opponent by a margin of more than two to one. No wonder the reserved Calvin Coolidge found Curran “a little peppery.”
His new job at Ellis Island seemed only slightly less quixotic than his mayoral campaign. When first approached for the job, Curran responded: “My God, but . . . that stuff is all over.” He was correct that the best days of Ellis Island were behind it, but after witnessing the mad rush of steamships, Curran knew things were not entirely done.
Curran referred to Ellis Island as a “red-hot stove,” something with which his predecessors would have agreed. The facilities, operations, and morale at Ellis Island were at their lowest since the days of the McSweeney-Powderly feud two decades earlier. Part of the problem rested with the weak administrative talents of Fred Howe, but the larger problem had to do with the wartime use of Ellis Island. Detaining German sailors and IWW radicals and housing wounded doughboys had taxed the island’s infrastructure. With immigration at a near standstill, the workforce at Ellis Island was severely reduced in a cost-saving measure. Even after the war, the government showed little desire to spend more money on its operations.
“It was a poor place to be detained,” Curran thought to himself when he began work. The waters surrounding the island were thick with sewage. Rats and mice made the buildings their home, and bedbugs nested in the sleeping quarters of the detainees. Curran’s greatest reform was convincing Congress to appropriate money to replace the wire bunks, stacked three high with a stretch of canvas serving as a mattress, with real beds for the detainees.
There was little that Curran could do to silence the never-ending criticism of Ellis Island. In 1921, The Outlook magazine had called Ellis Island “one of the most efficient factories in the world for the production of hatred of America and American institutions.” Another magazine warned that the “hatred that Ellis Island breeds is spreading like a plague to increase the discontent which menaces our institutions and the Government itself.” Such criticism had been a constant since the facility opened, but by the early 1920s, the cries of one ethnic group in particular had reached a crescendo. While many ethnic and religious groups complained about poor treatment or exclusionary policies, British citizens had another grievance entirely.
Complaints by the British were not new. Back in 1903, a Protestant missionary working at Ellis Island told an investigative commission that the English had a reputation as proverbial “grumblers,” although the missionary noted that most of the complaints centered on British detainees being forced to sleep with blankets that had been used by non-British foreigners. One of Ellis Island’s most famous grumblers was the Reverend Sydney Herbert Bass, whose brief 1911 detainment made headlines.
Even Fred Howe noted that the British gave him the most trouble during the war years. When detained, an Englishman would rush to the telephone to complain to the British Embassy. When deported, “he sizzled in his wrath over the indignities he was subjected to.” English citizens were indignant at being forced to endure inspection by immigration authorities. “All Englishmen seemed to assume that they had a right to go anywhere they liked,” Howe remembered with some exasperation, “and that any interference with this right was an affront to the whole British Empire.”
The British seemed especially perturbed by being forced to interact with other, seemingly inferior, immigrants. British subjects held at Ellis Island considered other immigrants to be foreigners and refused to sleep in the same room as them. Britain’s undersecretary of state for foreign affairs, Roland McNeill, complained that the facilities at Ellis Island were basically for people “of a low standard of conduct” and a hardship for those of “any refinement, especially women.”
A female British journalist named Ishbel Ross traveled through Ellis Island to report on conditions for the New York Tribune. She seemed quite animated by the prospect of mixing with the “steerage hordes,” those poor immigrants who not only lacked the proper social graces, but who had also gone without a bath for a long time. “It must unquestionably shock immigrants of any degree of refinement to come into intimate and enforced contact with the strange assortment of humanity that seethes into the country through the gates of Ellis Island,” Ross noted.
There had been a long litany of complaints by British subjects at their treatment at Ellis Island, but now the issue reached the British Parliament. Speakers there likened Ellis Island to “the Black Hole of Calcutta.” As the Literary Digest put it: “Ellis Island a Red Rag to John Bull.”
The British continued to argue that they were entitled to special privileges, including the right not to be mixed with uncouth and less cultured immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. But despite the ideas of Nordic and Anglo-Saxon superiority that floated through the air, most American officials had little compunction about subjecting the British to the immigration laws. To the Americans, most of the British aliens coming through Ellis Island were just that: aliens.
What the British wanted was to be segregated from others at Ellis Island. There was already some segregation by class at Ellis Island. While all detainees ate at common tables in the dining hall, sleeping accommodations were structured like steamships. First-class and second-class passengers, noted Ishbel Ross, possessed smaller rooms with fewer people; first-class passengers were even allowed to sleep in individual beds. Both classes received mattresses instead of canvas, with clean sheets and pillows with pillowcases. Detainees who arrived in steerage received more spartan accommodations.
Yet this was not enough for the British. In late 1922, the British ambassador, A. C. Geddes, made a tour of Ellis Island and reported his findings to Parliament. Contrary to some of the criticisms of his fellow Englishmen, Geddes’s report was moderate in tone and sympathetic to the plight of immigration officials. Like many British critics, Geddes blamed other immigrants for much of the problem. “Many of the immigrants are innocent of the most rudimentary understanding of the meaning of the word ‘clean,’ ” he reported. “If they were all accustomed to the same standards of personal cleanliness and consideration for their fellows, Ellis Island would know few real difficulties.” This “pungent odor of unwashed humanity” mixed with more general odors to give Ellis Island a “flat, stale smell” that lingered with Geddes for thirty-six hours after he left.
“I should prefer imprisonment in Sing Sing to incarceration on Ellis Island awaiting deportation,” wrote Geddes, clearly affected by what he had seen. He provided a list of suggested improvements, including fresh paint, better ventilation, and a thorough cleaning of the facility. Geddes thought Ellis Island was too small to handle large numbers of aliens. Rather than just build a new and larger facility, Geddes suggested a number of separate and smaller inspection stations for different classes of aliens.
It soon became clear just what kind of segregation
Geddes had in mind. “After considering the matter with some care,” Geddes concluded, “I have come to think that it might be feasible to divide the stream into its Jewish and non-Jewish parts.” The report complained about Ellis Island doctors examining immigrants for veneral diseases. “I saw one nice, clean-looking Irish boy examined immediately after a very unpleasant-looking individual who, I understood, came from some Eastern European district,” Geddes reported. “The doctor’s rubber gloves were with hardly a second’s interval in contact with his private parts after having been soiled, in the surgical sense at least, by contact with those of the unpleasant-looking individual.”
Curran dismissed the report and nothing came of its recommendations. When he arrived at Ellis Island, Curran was sympathetic to immigrants and proved willing to bend the rules on occasion. When a Hungarian girl was ordered deported because the quota had already been met, Curran noticed that she was carrying a violin and asked her to play. When she was done, Curran declared her an artist, a category that was exempt under the quotas, and she was allowed to enter.
Curran admitted that restricting immigration was the last thing on his mind when he took office, but he was soon arguing that America would be better off with fewer immigrants, or none at all—at least for a time. “Take again the intelligence, honesty and cleanliness of the average immigrant of today,” Curran warned. “Those who have served at Ellis Island for thirty years and more will tell you that he is below his predecessor of a generation ago—far below, by all three counts.” That would have been news to Americans in the 1890s who claimed that the immigration of that era was significantly inferior to what had arrived thirty years earlier.
Though this made Curran sound like William Williams, Curran’s heart was not in the job of restricting immigrants. When he received another job offer, he dropped his position at Ellis Island “like a hot cake.” “I have never seen such concentrated human sorrow and suffering as I saw at Ellis Island,” Curran later wrote. “Three years were enough.”
Congress had already reauthorized the 3 percent quota twice, but in 1924 it was ready for even stricter measures. Eventually, Congress agreed to a new quota of 2 percent of each foreign-born nationality based on the 1890 Census, with a ceiling for quota immigrants around 287,000. The rationale for using the 1890 Census instead of the 1910 Census was clear. There were far fewer Italians, Greeks, Poles, Jews, and Slavs in the country then. In fact, the new quotas meant that almost 85 percent of the quota allotments would go to northern Europeans. The Italian quota went from roughly 40,000 a year to 3,845; the Russian quota from about 34,000 to just 2,248 and the Greek quota went from just over 3,000 to a negligible 100.
There were even more changes. Beginning in 1925, the inspection of immigrants moved from American ports to American consulates abroad. People who wanted to come to the United States sought permission at the nearest American consulate, whose officers were tasked with inspecting the individual and making sure he or she would make a desirable immigrant. Upon successful inspection and the payment of a fee, consular officials would grant the individual a visa.
It was now the responsibility of American consulate officials to make sure potential immigrants met the monthly quota, which was now reduced to 10 percent per month of the yearly quota. This eliminated the mad midnight dash of steamships across the Narrows.
The shifting of inspection to American consulates abroad was a measure sought for many years by Americans on both sides of the immigration debate. Senator William Chandler argued as far back as 1891 that consular inspections, far from the prying eyes of the press and immigrant-aid societies, would be stricter and conducted without the intervention of friends, relatives, and politicians seeking the immigrant’s entry.
Fiorello La Guardia was also a proponent. Before his stint at Ellis Island he had served as a consular official in the port city of Fiume, where he conducted his own inspection of potential immigrants. Granting immigrants official permission to land before their transatlantic journey meant the end, with rare exceptions, of the heart-wrenching scenes of exclusion and deportation at Ellis Island and other ports. Immigrants who had sold all their property in order to come to America now possessed a visa that practically guaranteed their entry into the country. Of course, with the new stricter quotas, far fewer immigrants would actually experience that luxury and peace of mind.
Though La Guardia may have thought the new overseas inspection process was an improvement, he was no fan of the new quotas. The former Ellis Island interpreter was now representing a Manhattan district in the U.S. House of Representatives. With little actual power in Congress, La Guardia took on the role of gadfly, denouncing restrictive legislation and defending the contributions of immigrants. A child of immigrants, he condemned the quotas as being in the “spirit of the Ku Klux Klan.”
These new quotas covered immigrants from Europe, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. But nearly as many immigrants arrived from the Western Hemisphere, which was exempt from the quota system. Throughout the 1920s, 60 percent came from Canada and 30 percent came from Mexico.
Since the 1890s, more than 70 percent of immigrants entered through the Port of New York; throughout the 1920s, that number was about 50 percent. While the twenty-seven acres of Ellis Island served as the legal border for most immigrants, the new gate of entry became the nearly two-thousand-mile border with Mexico and the even longer border to the north with Canada. The future of American immigration, little grasped at the time, would not be with Europeans, but with those coming from south of the border.
Stricter quotas led to greater efforts to evade the new law. Illegal immigration began to attract the attention of the nation’s leaders. In 1923, Labor Secretary James J. Davis warned President Harding that as many as one hundred thousand immigrants were crossing into the United States surreptitiously. Other reports, no doubt exaggerated, put the figure at a thousand a day. After taking office later that same year, President Calvin Coolidge warned the nation’s governors of this “seepage over the borders,” which he called a “considerable menace” to the success of the new immigration legislation.
Deportations also increased during the 1920s. From 1910 to 1918, an average of 2,750 immigrants were deported each year. By 1921, over 4,500 immigrants were deported annually, and by 1930, that figure had skyrocketed to 16,631, as the nation’s mood increasingly soured toward immigrants. As more people were being stopped at the front door by quotas, still more were being kicked out the back door with stepped-up enforcement of the law.
By far the most important change brought by the new law would not go into effect for a few more years. Not happy with the near-complete exclusion of most southern and eastern Europeans, restrictionists saw a gross disparity in these quotas: they were based upon the foreign-born population. If the goal was to maintain America as an Anglo-Saxon nation, why not figure the quotas on the ethnic background of the entire population, both native- and foreign-born. In fact, the 2 percent quota based on the 1890 Census had actually reduced the quota on immigrants from the United Kingdom by more than half. The big winners of the 1924 quota law were midnineteenth-century immigrant groups such as the Irish and Germans.
To rectify the situation, Congress authorized a study to determine the precise ethnic makeup of all American citizens living in the country in 1920. The result was a so-called national origins plan. In keeping with the rigid racial boundaries of the era, the study included only white Americans and omitted blacks, Asians, and American Indians.
The commission calculated that by 1920, the United States was no longer a majority Anglo-Saxon nation, as more than 56 percent of the population was descended from non-British ancestors. An optimist like Henry Curran could defend the national origins plan for ensuring “that all future immigration will consist of the same racial proportions as are found in the stock of the hundred millions of us already here.” For Madison Grant, however, the future was bleak: Americans of colonial descent were soon to “become as extinct as the Athenian of the
age of Pericles and the Viking of the days of Rollo.”
The new national origins plan lowered the overall immigration ceiling to 150,000 per year and granted immigrants from the United Kingdom almost half of the yearly quota. The big losers were the Germans, Irish, and Scandinavians, who saw their previous quotas cut by more than half. Ironically, although quotas were originally designed to bar southern and eastern Europeans, quotas for Italians, Greeks, and Russians all went up from the previous ones based on the 1890 Census, but their numbers were still pitifully low. Now, only 307 Greeks and 5,802 Italians would be allowed in each year.
On the surface, the quotas possessed a scientific precision that lent the endeavor the air of authenticity. Unlike the 1921 or 1924 quotas, the national origins plan would not be instituted without a fight. German-Americans, ten years removed from the harrowing effects of the war, began to speak up, as did Irish-Americans. One of those voices was a familiar one.
Edward F. McSweeney had resurrected his professional career and reputation after the imbroglio that led to his departure from Ellis Island in 1902 and the criminal charges for attempting to steal government documents. Now a respected citizen of Massachusetts, McSweeney served as chairman of the Knights of Columbus Historical Commission. The former union man and government official used his new post to call for a home-grown national history of the United States, untainted by what he felt was a creeping British bias in some histories. Anglo-Americans, argued McSweeney, were the real hyphenated Americans who overemphasized the contributions of the English to the exclusion of other groups. “What America needs most,” he argued, “is the Americanization of most self-appointed Americanizers.”
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