American Passage

by Vincent J. Cannato

  More substantively, McSweeney’s group commissioned a number of books to counter overly pro-British histories, creating something called the Racial Contribution Series, whose monographs detailed the contributions of various racial, ethnic, and religious communities. One product of the series was W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Gift of Black Folk, for which McSweeney wrote the introduction.

  Foreshadowing a trend that would blossom decades later, ethnic groups were beginning to lay claim to their own Americanness, evolving into staunch patriots and defenders of a distinctly American history as they became more assimilated, while more established ethnic groups would often succumb to more critical attitudes toward American history and nationalism. McSweeney’s work with the Knights of Columbus was a way to fight Anglo-Saxonism and immigration restrictionists with patriotic fervor.

  To a pro-immigration Anglophobe like McSweeney, the whole national origins plan smelled fishy. In his mind, it was an un-American fraud perpetrated by Anglo-Americans. The data on national origins, in McSweeney’s words, were an “impudent imposition . . . fabricated for a sinister purpose and are in truth discrimination.”

  Despite McSweeney’s efforts, the National Origins Act went into effect in 1929. However, McSweeney never lived to see the implementation of a plan he believed violated America’s traditional attitude of judging immigrants as individuals, not by their ethnic, religious, or national background.

  In the late afternoon of November 16, 1928, McSweeney was driving home in Framingham, Massachusetts, when his car stalled at a railroad crossing in the face of an oncoming train. McSweeney’s car was demolished by the train, which dragged it some sixty feet. Suffering serious head trauma and many broken bones, McSweeney was rushed to a hospital where he lingered for two days before succumbing to his injuries. He was sixty-three years old.

  McSweeney had managed to outlive his former nemesis, Terence Powderly, by four years. He had rebuilt his life to such a degree that senators, congressmen, judges, and other dignitaries turned out for his funeral. In contrast, Powderly died in relative obscurity. He had gone from being the most famous labor leader of the late nineteenth century to an obscure government bureaucrat, a low-level functionary working within the Immigration Service that he once ran.

  Powderly had once been a staunch restrictionist who opposed immigrant contract laborers and warned that immigrants posed a menace to the nation’s health. By 1920, Powderly changed his tune. In his new position, he was concerned that government was neglecting the needs of immigrants. “We have admitted them as we have received baled hay, bars of pig iron and casks of olive oil,” he wrote to his boss, “not a single throb of human sympathy has been extended to them and not a thing has been done to assure them of a welcome.” By the time of his change of heart, it was too late. Powderly was little more than a powerless bureaucrat who needed his job for the paycheck that staved off poverty in his old age.

  Freed from the burdens of petty political and labor squabbles, Powderly lived out his final years with little of the mental and emotional stress that plagued him in the past. He remarried, wrote his autobiography, and continued his work as an amateur photographer. He died in 1924 at the age of seventy-five.

  The immigration work of McSweeney and Powderly belonged to another era. They both passed away during a time when the nation’s immigration laws changed dramatically and Ellis Island, the site of their bitter feud a quarter century earlier, had gradually begun to fade in importance.

  Powderly was not the only person to have second thoughts. Psychologist Henry Goddard, who coined the term “moron,” had done much to buttress beliefs in the mental inferiority of immigrants. By the late 1920s, he had changed course and now believed that most individuals scoring below the mental age of twelve were not morons. Despite his lifetime of work on the subject, Goddard wrote in 1928 that psychologists were “still limited to a definition of feeble-mindedness that is unscientific and unsatisfactory.”

  Taking issue with supporters of eugenics, Goddard came to believe that feeblemindedness was curable and that environment played just as strong a role in intelligence as genes. In the late 1920s, he even concluded that there was not much evidence to show that feebleminded parents begat feebleminded children. Goddard had never personally been drawn to the racism that infected others associated with eugenics, but by the 1920s he would go so far as to write that the “distribution of intelligence in the different races is probably the same.” By this time, immigration quotas were solidly in effect and Goddard’s national influence had waned.

  Unlike Goddard, University of Wisconsin sociologist Edward A. Ross had been much more heavily invested in the genetic inferiority of immigrants. He had earlier coined the term “race suicide” and complained that many new immigrants resembled prehistoric creatures and were “the descendants of those who always stayed behind.” A proud Anglo-Saxon and defender of Nordic superiority, Ross was also a progressive who believed immigrants from southern and eastern Europe retarded the advancement of American civilization by bringing illiteracy, vice, and political corruption.

  By the time he wrote his autobiography, Ross had moderated his views. He still professed a belief in eugenics and birth control and was proud that his writings had helped build support for the quota laws of the 1920s. Yet something happened to the man who had once penned articles such as “The Causes of Race Superiority” and “The Value Rank of the American People.” Since then, Ross had traveled the world and softened his views toward non-Nordic cultures. A chastened Ross now declared: “Far behind me in a ditch lies the Nordic Myth. . . . Difference of race means far less to me now than it once did.” He regretted that it took him more than two-thirds of his life to come to realize the “fallacy of rating peoples according to the grade of their culture.”

  In 1904, he had referred to eastern Europeans as “beaten members of beaten breeds.” More than thirty years later, he recanted. “I rue this sneer,” Ross admitted. The change of heart did nothing to change U.S. immigration quotas, but the newfound attitudes of Powderly, Goddard, and Ross foreshadowed the slow and steady abandonment of racialist thinking that would develop in the twentieth century.

  NINE-YEAR-OLD EDOARDO CORSI AND his brother Giuseppe Garibaldi Corsi stood on the deck of the steamship Florida as it sailed into New York Harbor in November 1906. They were two of the over 1 million immigrants who would pass through Ellis Island in that record year. Amid the excitement of the end of their journey, they thought they spied mountains rising out of the haze in the distance and wondered why their peaks were not topped by snow. Their stepfather corrected them. Those were not mountains, but the highest buildings in the world, he said pointing to the Manhattan skyline.

  The Corsi family—two young sons, two sisters, mother, and stepfather—had arrived from the Abruzzi region of southern Italy. Adding to the sense of confusion brought on by those mysterious urban mountains, the Corsis felt an apprehension about what lay ahead of them at Ellis Island. Their acceptance into America was not assured, although Edoardo’s stepfather had spent the rest of the family’s money to buy his wife a second-class cabin ticket to ease her entry. “I felt a resentment toward this Ellis Island ahead of us,” Corsi later reminisced.

  The child who thought the Manhattan skyline was a mountain range would make his adult life within those urban mountains. Edward Corsi became active in the settlement house movement in New York and a progressive Republican in the mold of his congressman, Fiorello La Guardia. His political connections eventually led him to be named commissioner of Ellis Island in 1931 by Herbert Hoover.

  Corsi was not the first foreign-born commissioner, but he was the first to have entered through Ellis Island. He presided over a muchdiminished station. It had once attracted the attention and ire of many Americans. Presidents had visited the island for an up-close view of its operations. Restrictionists thought the system was too lenient; immigration defenders thought it too strict.

  Those days were over. As America became mired in the Gr
eat Depression, Ellis Island slipped into the far recesses of the collective American mind. “Only occasionally now does this most famous of national gateways appear in the news,” the Literary Digest noted in 1934. When Ellis Island was mentioned, it was often in highly negative tones. A 1934 report commissioned by Labor Secretary Frances Perkins began its findings by noting the popular myth that Ellis Island had been a place of misery, “a dungeon from which the immigrant is lucky to escape.”

  The 1930s would represent a low point in U.S. immigration history. The island’s welcoming role continued to shrink, while its more punitive side increased. “An important consequence of restriction has been to make Ellis Island as much an emigrant as an immigrant station,” one newspaper noted. “One may even say that its major activities now are concerned with deportation since of course to slam the front door is to challenge entrance through the back.”

  The combination of restrictive quotas and economic distress meant that by 1932, three times as many people left the United States as came to it. In the following year, only 23,068 individuals made the decision to come to immigrate, the smallest number since 1831. Ellis Island had given up its decades-long role as a “proper sieve” to inspect immigrants. By the 1930s, Corsi noted with more than a touch of sadness, “deportation was the big business at Ellis Island.”

  With fewer immigrants to process and no longer the nation’s primary gate for inspection, Ellis Island increasingly reverted to a role that it had played sporadically in its history: a prison for unwanted aliens. Much would change in the coming years. World War II and the Cold War would highlight the dangers that existed in the world. As Americans concerned themselves with fighting those threats abroad, they also began looking to threats on the home front. The nation’s immigration laws became increasingly entangled with national security concerns. Once again, Ellis Island would find itself at the center of controversy.

  Chapter 17

  Prison

  I would never go back to Ellis Island. I spent too much time facing the back of the Statue of Liberty. I always felt that even though she had welcomed immigrants promising the American dream, she turned her back on us just because of our ancestry.

  —Eberhard Fuhr, German enemy alien detainee

  Government counsel ingeniously argued that Ellis Island is his “refuge” whence he [Mezei] is free to take leave in any direction except west. That might mean freedom, if only he were an amphibian.

  —Justice Robert Jackson, Shaughnessy v. Mezei, 1953

  “HERZLICH WILLKOMMEN! HEIL.” THOSE WORDS ON A large poster greeted visitors to Room 206 at Ellis Island in 1942. This was the headquarters of a small clique of pro-Nazi German nationals who had been detained by the U.S. government as enemy aliens. Even before the United States entered the war, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt was drawing up lists of suspicious aliens to be arrested and detained if and when the country joined the war effort against the Axis powers. J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation spent a great deal of time between 1939 and 1941 collecting information on noncitizens living in the United States who were suspected of sympathizing with Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. In October 1941, the attorney general warned officials at Ellis Island to prepare for an avalanche of wartime detainees.

  Hoover had run into bureaucratic difficulties during the Red Scare because the power to detain and deport aliens resided in the Labor Department. Now he would have no such problem. The Immigration Service had been moved to the Justice Department in 1940. Immigration was now officially a law enforcement issue.

  On December 8, 1941, as the nation was reeling from the previous day’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Major Lemuel Schofield, head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), wrote to Hoover with a list of individuals “considered for custodial detention” because of their views about Germany and Italy. This information gathering had begun before either of these countries had actually been declared enemies of the United States.

  More disturbing still, Schofield’s list included “American citizens sympathetic to Germany” and “American citizens sympathetic to Italy.” In all, over four thousand individuals were under consideration for detention.

  Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt issued three presidential proclamations declaring nonnaturalized Japanese, Germans, and Italians living in the United States to be enemy aliens. The proclamation against Japanese civilians was issued on December 7; the other two were issued on December 8, 1941, three days before the United States was technically at war with Germany and Italy.

  The government wasted little time in rounding up alleged enemy aliens. On December 8, the attorney general ordered Hoover to immediately arrest “alien enemies who are natives, citizens, denizens or subjects of Germany.” They were to be arrested and delivered to the INS for detention. Hoover’s FBI moved at lightning speed. On December 9, 1941, working off the lists it had been compiling for the past two years, FBI agents arrested and detained 497 Germans, 83 Italians, and 1,912 Japanese enemy aliens. The following day saw more than 2,200 additional arrests. Some of these individuals would be quickly released, but a month later the government was holding nearly 2,700 enemy aliens in facilities across the country.

  Some of the internees had belonged to organizations like the German-American Bund. Others made comments, whether to neighbors or in letters to the editor, opposing America’s entry into the war. Informants would report to the FBI if they noticed a picture of Hitler in the home of German-Americans or if they overheard comments favorable to the Nazis or opposing the Allies.

  This internment of enemy aliens was distinct from the relocation and internment of Japanese and Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, which began in February 1942. Under FDR’s Executive Order 9066, certain zones in the United States could be designated as military areas, off limits to any or all unauthorized personnel. Later that spring, military officials ordered everyone of Japanese ancestry who resided on the West Coast moved to camps in the nation’s interior. This was accomplished by a new agency called the War Relocation Authority. Unlike the military relocation and internment of Japanese-Americans, enemy aliens were rounded up under the auspices of the INS.

  A large number of enemy aliens were initially detained at Ellis Island. Four days after Pearl Harbor, 413 German enemy aliens found themselves in detention at Ellis Island. “For the time being,” the New York Times wrote of Ellis Island’s new role, “New York has a concentration camp of its own.”

  The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the nation’s newly formed wartime intelligence agency, took an interest in the detainees at Ellis Island. In the summer of 1942, it placed an undercover agent there for three weeks. When the unnamed agent filed his report, he told his superiors of a large chink in America’s security. “Ellis Island is undoubtedly a major information spot for the Axis, both for getting it and sending it,” the agent wrote. “There is every reason to suppose that they regard Ellis Island as an important transmission center.”

  The OSS report described a tightly organized and disciplined “Nazi clique” among some detainees at Ellis Island. Their informal headquarters was Room 206. They sang the “Horst Wessel Lied” and other Nazi songs and plastered their rooms with drawings and articles mocking the American war effort. “They act as though it were inevitable that Germany win this war,” the report noted. The Nazi sympathizers who congregated around Room 206 “can carry on effective propaganda and intimidate the weak.”

  Were these few hundred Germans, Italians, and Japanese held at Ellis Island in the summer of 1942 a major threat to the American war effort? The OSS agent certainly thought so, believing that it “would be strange, indeed, if such well-organized and fanatical Hitlerites only carry on harmless activities. The chances for conspiracy are practically limitless.” He argued that German detainees kept watch on the shipping activity on the docks of New Jersey and reported this information back to Germany. Yet even the OSS agent had to admit that this was largely speculation and that in
his three weeks among the detainees, he had found “no actual instance of this happening.”

  By the fall of 1942, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was hearing gossip about this OSS report and demanded that an underling get a copy immediately. What angered Hoover was not the far-fetched claims that Nazis were operating an intelligence gathering operation for the Third Reich from Ellis Island. What really concerned him was that the report criticized, in Hoover’s words, “the incompetent and venal custodial practices at Ellis Island.” He wanted all such talk of lax security immediately “scotched.”

  Hoover was right. The OSS report was absolutely blistering in its depiction of the guards. “The system of supervision and control is inadequate to cope with experienced conspirators,” the report concluded. The guards were “unpolitical and unobservant.” Most were only interested in their weekly paychecks, sports, food, and drink. “Race prejudice, especially anti-Semitism among the guards, is conspicuous,” the report noted.

  The report painted many of the guards as easily corruptible by the petty payoffs and gifts of the detainees. Some of the guards could be found cavorting with detainees, sharing cigars and drinks. Much of the blame for the corruption of officials was placed at the feet of one detainee: William Gerald Bishop. For the remainder of the war, no detainee would give the government more headaches than Bishop.

  One Justice Department official called Bishop “one of the most unreliable individuals with whom I ever came into contact,” while another called him one of Ellis Island’s “worst sources of mischiefmaking and corruption of employees.” Bishop was accused of encouraging guards to violate rules, leading to the dismissal of a number of them. He constantly bullied uncooperating guards and officials by threatening them with his “political influence.” At various times, he incited a hunger strike among the detainees, stole food from the dining hall, and was accused of abusing and cursing Jewish guards. It was reported that Bishop had three white poison tablets hidden in a pencil that he said were meant for Jewish guards. “If I can’t make them leave the Island one way, I will make them leave another,” Bishop is reported to have told a fellow detainee.