American Passage

by Vincent J. Cannato

  Ellen Knauff ’s plight had gained nationwide publicity. But her case also brought attention to the fact that individuals could be detained and deported without benefit of an official hearing and without any knowledge of the evidence against them.

  The widespread sympathy that Ellen Knauff ’s case elicited did not mean any slackening of the nation’s anti-Communism. Ellis Island would continue to serve as a detention center for suspected Communists and other political radicals. One of them was a middle-aged Trinidadian writer named Cyril Lionel Robert James. He was arrested and taken to Ellis Island in June 1952 for his political affiliations and because the government alleged that he had entered the country illegally in the 1930s. Immigration authorities had spent a number of years trying to sort out his immigration status and his political proclivities. Now he was at Ellis Island awaiting deportation.

  Following in the footsteps of Emma Goldman and Ellen Knauff, who both used their detention at Ellis Island to write about their plights, C. L. R. James also devoted his time as a prisoner to writing. His unlikely topic was Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. James’s experience at Ellis Island profoundly influenced his reading of Melville’s classic. He would sit at his desk and write, sometimes for twelve hours a day, all the while suffering from painful ulcers made worse by the stress of his confinement. Within a few weeks of his detention, James was living on milk, boiled egg yolks, soft bread, and butter. He was then taken to the U.S. Marine Hospital on Staten Island (in a cost-saving measure, the hospitals on Ellis Island had recently been closed), where he would recuperate under twenty-four-hour guard.

  In the final chapter of his Melville book, James wrote what he called “A Natural but Necessary Conclusion.” It was in part the story of his detention at Ellis Island, but more importantly it was James’s attempt to convince the government that he was not a dangerous subversive and should be allowed to remain in the country. James was not in fact a Communist, but a Trotskyite, and a harsh critic of Stalin and the Soviet Union. “I denounced Russia as the greatest example of barbarism that history has ever known,” James wrote. When he arrived at Ellis Island he was placed in a room with five Communists. Because of his past criticisms of Stalin and the Soviet Union, James feared for his life among these men, “conscious of their murderous past, not only against declared and life-long enemies, but against one another.”

  The U.S. government was not interested in parsing the internecine battles among Marxists, sorting out Trotskyites from Stalinists. As far as it was concerned, James was a Marxist critic of capitalism and author of books such as World Revolution 1917–1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International and A History of Negro Revolt. There was enough revolution there to expel him from 1950s America.

  As much as he played up his anti-Soviet and anti-Stalinist views in the hopes of being allowed to stay in the country, James pulled no punches when it came to government officials. “Hence on Ellis Island, in particular, the arbitrariness, the capriciousness, the brutality and savagery where they think they can get away with it,” James wrote, “the complete absence of any principle except to achieve a particular aim by the most convenient means to hand.” For his guards, however, he had nothing but kind words. “They were a body of men in a difficult spot,” James wrote, “yet they remained, not as individuals but as a body of men, not only human but humane.” Although the government continued to refer to individuals like him as detainees, James thought it “a mockery for me to assist them in still more deceiving the American people.” He and the others at Ellis Island were nothing less than prisoners.

  James was freed on bail in October 1952 after four months in detention. His Melville book, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, was released the following year. Despite the fierce anti-Communism that only a Trotskyite could muster, James was eventually deported to England in 1953. There, he made a living as a writer on cricket. He also traveled back and forth to his native Trinidad, where he became involved in local politics. James eventually returned to the United States for extended visits in the 1970s, when Ellis Island was a dim memory and the Cold War a growing embarrassment for Vietnam-fatigued Americans.

  C. L. R. James died in relative obscurity in 1989. Posthumously, James’s reputation would grow as one of the leading black social critics of the twentieth century. Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways would be republished after his death and garner attention in academia and beyond. Ellis Island inspired millions of true-life sagas of joy and heartbreak among the many who passed through there. Few could imagine that it also inspired a major work of literary criticism.

  At least C. L. R. James had a home country to which he could be deported. The same could not be said for fifty-two-year-old cabinetmaker Ignatz Mezei. Arriving in February 1950, after a visit to Europe, Mezei was detained at Ellis Island and refused readmittance to the country he had called his home for over twenty-five years. Like Ellen Knauff, Mezei was also refused a hearing because the charges against him were based on confidential information.

  Mezei was not a random immigrant to America. He had made his home in Buffalo for a quarter century before returning to Europe in 1948 to visit his dying mother in Romania. However, he ended up detained in Hungary and never managed to make it to see his mother. While in Hungary, his common-law wife, Julia Horvath, arrived from America and the two of them officially married. They then returned to the United States in 1950. While Horvath was allowed to return to Buffalo, Mezei was detained at Ellis Island and ordered excluded. He was denied a hearing and not allowed to see the specific charges against him. The basic accusation was that he had been a member of a Communist-affiliated group while residing in America.

  Mezei was ordered deported, but to where? As a court would later declare, “there is a certain vagueness about [Mezei’s] history.” He had arrived in the United States illegally in 1923, having gone overboard in New York Harbor from a ship on which he served as a seaman. He was born in 1897 on a ship off the Straits of Gibraltar, but raised in Hungary and Romania. In his twenty-five years in the United States, Mezei had never become a naturalized citizen. All of this left his actual citizenship uncertain.

  This was a dilemma for U.S. officials deciding where to send Mezei. When the government deported him back to France, that nation turned him away. The same thing happened when Mezei was sent to England. The State Department then asked the Hungarian government to take him, but it refused. Mezei wrote to twelve Latin American countries asking for entry, but not one would accept him. Ignatz Mezei was stuck at Ellis Island, a man without a country.

  The next step was for Mezei to file a habeas corpus petition. Eventually, his case reached the Supreme Court. While the judicial process unfolded, Mezei was released on a bond in May 1952, after nearly two years imprisoned at Ellis Island. He returned to Buffalo and tried to earn a living as a cabinetmaker while the courts untangled his case.

  In March 1953, the Court came to a decision. In a 5-4 ruling that relied heavily on Knauff, it declared that the exclusion without a hearing and subsequent detention of Ignatz Mezei at Ellis Island was constitutional. The Court agreed with the Justice Department that Mezei was not actually imprisoned at Ellis Island, since he was free to leave at any time to any country that would accept him. “In short, respondent sat on Ellis Island because this country shut him out and others were unwilling to take him in,” wrote Justice Tom Clark.

  The Court again reiterated the plenary power doctrine that recognized that “the power to expel or exclude aliens” was “a fundamental sovereign attribute exercised by the Government’s political departments largely immune from judicial control.” Even though Mezei had previously lived in the United States and was currently on American soil, the Court recognized the legal fiction that Mezei had not formally and legally “entered” the United States and was therefore not eligible for constitutional protections such as due process. “Neither respondent’s harborage on Ellis Island nor his prior residence here transforms
this into something other than an exclusion proceeding,” Clark wrote.

  In his dissent, Justice Hugo Black complained that Mezei was being excluded at the “unreviewable discretion of the Attorney General,” noting that such powers were more likely found in totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. As he did in Knauff, Justice Jackson also dissented in Mezei. “Because the respondent has no right of entry, does it follow that he has no rights at all,” Jackson asked. “Does the power to exclude mean that exclusion may be continued or effectuated by any means which happen to seem appropriate to the authorities?” If so, what would stop the government from ejecting Mezei “bodily into the sea or to set him adrift in a rowboat?”

  A defeated Mezei returned to Ellis Island in April 1953. His only hope was that Congress might act on his behalf. He arrived at the ferry slip carrying his clothes, his tools, and a bag of apples. “I feel as if I was walking to death,” he said. Mezei still vigorously denied that he was a Communist. “If I were a Communist I would stay in Hungary,” he said, “plenty of jobs in Hungary for Communists.” The prospect of indefinite detention understandably weighed heavily on Mezei. “You don’t do nothing on Ellis Island,” he complained, “you go crazy.”

  Unlike Ellen Knauff, Mezei did not elicit a great deal of sympathy from the public, the press, or Congress. Knauff had seen her family die in the Holocaust, had served in the British military during the war, had worked for the American military after the war, and was married to an American GI. Mezei, on the other hand, had arrived in the United States illegally, had lived in the country for twenty-five years without becoming a citizen, and had married Julia Horvath, an American citizen, while in Hungary under suspicious circumstances, most likely in hopes of easing his entry back into the country. “But when we come to this guy,” wrote one of Justice Jackson’s clerks and future Supreme Court chief justice, William Rehnquist, “I have some trouble crying.”

  While there was not a great deal of public sympathy for Mezei, much had changed in the United States by the summer of 1954. The new president, a Republican war hero, Dwight D. Eisenhower, successfully sought an end to the unpopular stalemate in Korea. Though the new president had been cautious in his public comments about Senator Joseph McCarthy, it was clear that Eisenhower wanted to cool the domestic anti-Communist fires of the past few years. His new attorney general, Herbert Brownell, would set a new tone in the Justice Department. Mezei would receive his first hearing in February 1954, nearly four years after he was initially detained.

  In an unusual move, Brownell created a three-man board to hear Mezei’s case, which consisted not of immigration officials but of outside lawyers, including law professors from Columbia University and New York University.

  The government had a strong case against Mezei. The evidence against Ellen Knauff was scant and she could not be directly tied to any espionage. Mezei, however, had been a member of the Hungarian Workers’ Sick Benefit and Education Society, which later merged with the International Workers Order, which the government considered a Communist organization. Mezei admitted to being a leader in his local lodge, but denied being a Communist.

  Unfortunately for Mezei, the government had a number of witnesses who contradicted his story. Two former Communists testified that they had seen Mezei at Communist Party meetings and one told the hearing that he had personally recruited him for the party. Three other witnesses told officials that they had heard Mezei making proCommunist statements. In addition to his political problems, Mezei had also been convicted of petty larceny and fined $10 in his earlier stay in Buffalo. While the crime was rather minor, having to do with his possession of bags of stolen flour, this did mean that Mezei could be excluded under the moral turpitude clause.

  Whereas Knauff was articulate and made an excellent case for herself, the same could not be said for Mezei. “His testimony was riddled with inconsistencies, and he seemed to have great difficulty understanding and answering many questions,” according to one sympathetic account. “Several of his statements lacked credibility.” Mezei had also repeatedly lied on government forms about his place of birth.

  Not surprisingly, the board unanimously voted to exclude Mezei as a security risk in April 1954. He appealed the decision to Washington, but a board of immigration appeals upheld the decision to exclude him in August. Just two days later, however, the government reversed itself and announced that it had released Mezei on parole.

  The special three-man board that had affirmed Mezei’s exclusion also recommended in private to Attorney General Brownell that he use his authority to release Mezei, since his role in the Communist Party was minor. That is exactly what he did. Mezei would return to his wife and stepchildren in Buffalo, where he would live an unassuming life until his wife died in 1969. In that year, he sold his house and mysteriously moved back to Communist Hungary, where he lived until his death in 1976.

  Mezei’s release occurred at the same time that the career of Senator Joe McCarthy was quickly unraveling, thanks to the public humiliation caused by his unwise investigation of alleged Communism in the U.S. Army in the spring of 1954. As Mezei was released from Ellis Island, censure proceedings against McCarthy were about to come to the floor of the Senate. Anti-Communism was not dead, but its rough edges were being sanded down. The Eisenhower administration had no need to burnish its anti-Communist bona fides and could therefore tone down the government’s antiradical crusade.

  By 1954, Ellis Island had been tainted by its unfortunate connection to the Cold War detention of aliens, which was increasingly becoming a public relations problem. It was being referred to as a concentration camp, and the United States’ role as the leader of the free world in opposing Communist tyranny made its detention policies untenable. “Unlike the totalitarians and despots,” wrote the New York Times, “we Americans abhor imprisonment by administrative officers’ fiat.”

  In this political environment, the Eisenhower administration began to consider closing Ellis Island for good. Publicly, it sold the move as a cost-saving measure. The federal government could move its immigration offices to Manhattan and would no longer have to keep up the many buildings on the twenty-seven-acre compound. But there is little doubt that the public attention of the Knauff and Mezei cases helped seal Ellis Island’s fate.

  On Veterans Day 1954, Attorney General Brownell spoke before two massive naturalization ceremonies in New York City. He used the occasion to set out a new policy on immigrant detentions. Those whose admissibility to the United States was under question would now no longer be detained while their cases were decided. Only those deemed “likely to abscond” or whose freedom would be “adverse to the national security or the public safety” would be held. The others would be released under conditional paroles or bonds until their cases were cleared. Brownell estimated that authorities had in the past year temporarily detained some 38,000 people, of whom only 1,600 were excluded from entering the United States. Holding so many individuals in detention had become an administrative, civil liberties, and public relations nightmare.

  As part of this new policy, Brownell announced the closing of six detention facilities run by the government, including Ellis Island. Washington would save nearly $1 million a year by shuttering it and moving its offices to Manhattan. No longer needed to inspect and process hundreds of thousands of new immigrants, Ellis Island was now no longer wanted as a detention facility.

  Ellis Island closed its doors to little fanfare just a few days after Brownell’s speech. From now on, those lucky enough to qualify for admission, after filling a quota position and proving they were not subversives, would no longer concern themselves with the little island in New York Harbor. After decades of attention from journalists, politicians, missionaries, and immigrant aid societies, Ellis Island was now drifting off the nation’s radar screen. With only 5 percent of Americans claiming foreign birth, the heyday of Ellis Island—with its inspection process, its medical and mental tests, its boards of special inquiry, its ha
sty wedding ceremonies, its tearful family reunions and even more tearful family separations because of deportation—was over.

  Ellis Island’s last detainee was Arne Peterssen. The Norwegian seaman was not an immigrant in the traditional sense, but someone who had overstayed his shore leave. Under the newly relaxed immigration rules, officials released Peterssen on parole with a promise that he would rejoin his ship and return home.

  “They rewarded with magnificent gifts the country that had received them with such magnificent hospitality,” declared a New York Times editorial looking back with pride at the achievements of immigrants who had passed through Ellis Island. “Perhaps some day a monument to them will go up on Ellis Island,” it continued, admonishing its readers that the “memory of this episode in our national history should never be allowed to fade.”

  In the glow of postwar prosperity, assimilation, and suburbanization, few cared to keep that memory alive. That would have to wait for another day.

  Part V

  MEMORY

  Chapter 18

  Decline

  What the son wishes to forget, the grandson wishes to remember.

  —Marcus Lee Hansen, 1938

  A BUSINESSMAN READING THE SEPTEMBER 18, 1956, EDItion of the Wall Street Journal would have come across an advertisement for an exciting new opportunity. The federal government’s landlord, the General Services Administration (GSA), was soliciting sealed bids for the purchase of “one of the most famous landmarks in the world.”

  The GSA offered to sell the entire twenty-seven-acre Ellis Island facility, including all thirty-five buildings and the old ferryboat Ellis Island, which had previously carried immigrants from the Manhattan piers to the island. Ellis Island, the advertisement proclaimed, would be the perfect location for an oil-storage depot, warehouses, manufacturing, or import-export processing.