American Passage

by Vincent J. Cannato

  The sale was made possible by the fact that the facilities at Ellis Island had been deemed surplus property by the U.S. government since it had closed its doors in November 1954. The United States had witnessed only about two hundred thousnd immigrants that year, with fewer than half of them passing through New York. Ellis Island had served its purpose; its heyday was well in the past. While a Times editorial hoped that the memory of Ellis Island’s peak years and its role in American history would not fade away, the GSA had more pressing matters. No other government agency wanted the vacant island, and Uncle Sam could not hold onto it indefinitely, especially when it was paying $140,000 a year for security and upkeep.

  So the GSA opened up bidding for Ellis Island to private individuals and corporations. The idea of selling the historic site did not sit well with everyone. “If you can auction off Ellis Island,” a Jersey City congressman wrote President Eisenhower, “perhaps you will be auctioning off the Statue of Liberty next.” A Greek American wrote Eisenhower of his arrival at Ellis Island as a child in 1914. “I first sensed the grandeur of this great country,” this first-generation immigrant wrote, “when I landed on the Island.”

  In response, the Eisenhower administration temporarily suspended the sale less than a week after the Journal advertisement appeared. Some suggested turning Ellis Island into a national monument that would pay tribute to the contribution of immigrants. That ran into opposition from a group already preparing to open up the American Museum of Immigration at the base of the Statue of Liberty. One of the leaders of that project argued that Ellis Island was the wrong place for a national shrine. “No immigrant was ever attracted to America by Ellis Island,” wrote William Baldwin. “Liberty Island is a happy place of continuing inspiration, not a depository of bad memories.”

  Some of the proposals for Ellis Island included a clinic for alcoholics and drug addicts, a park, a “world trade center,” a modern and innovative “college of the future,” private apartments, homes for the elderly, and a shelter for juvenile delinquents. Other proposals were less realistic. Bronx congressman Paul Fino suggested a national lottery center would be in keeping with the history of the island, since immigrants “gambled for a new life in this land of ours.”

  When bidding opened in 1958, the highest offer was just over $200,000 for a property the government considered worth more than $6 million. The high bidder was a New York builder named Sol Atlas, who wanted to turn Ellis Island into Pleasure Island, a high-end resort with a convention center, marina, and recreational and cultural facilities. Though Atlas would later increase his bid, it was still not enough and the island remained surplus government property. Ellis Island had become, in the words of Business Week, “Uncle Sam’s Red Brick Elephant in New York Harbor.”

  Ellis Island’s future would depend on how Americans viewed what had happened—or what they thought had happened—there. If Americans associated negative memories with Ellis Island, then there was no reason why it should not become an oil storage depot or some other commercial venture. But clearly some Americans were beginning to feel the tug of positive memories. As Harvard’s Oscar Handlin put it at the time, the buildings of Ellis Island should “be preserved not simply for their symbolic quality as monuments of an important part of our past but also for the service they can still render.”

  “This is not just another piece of real estate,” Edward Corsi told a congressional committee in 1962. Corsi had come through Ellis Island fifty-six years earlier and later became commissioner there in the 1930s. Now he was arguing, along with historians Handlin and Allan Nevins, that the island’s future “should symbolize what it stands for in the history of our nation and in the hearts of countless Americans—the welding of many nationalities, races and religions into a united nation, bound together by freedom and equality of opportunity.”

  To Corsi and a growing number of first- and second-generation Americans, Ellis Island was no longer just an inspection center created to soothe the concerns of native-born Americans by weeding out undesirable immigrants. Instead those immigrants and their descendants were beginning to shape the historical memory of Ellis Island. In the midst of the Cold War, the island was slowly becoming a symbol of national unity and freedom. During the much bleaker years of the Great Depression, however, Corsi had taken a much different tack. His 1935 history of Ellis Island included a chapter entitled “Who Shall Apologize?” dealing with the “crimes” committed against immigrants there. The passage of twenty-five years had apparently tempered Corsi’s views.

  During that time, eastern and southern European immigrants and their offspring were now entering the American mainstream, slowly shedding the stigma of being considered undesirable immigrants. The fears of nativists like Francis A. Walker, Prescott Hall, and Madison Grant were in fact realized as the descendants of eastern and southern Europeans took their place in American society. In turn, American culture and society became less Anglo-Saxon.

  In the midtwentieth century, Americans enjoyed movies like It’s a Wonderful Life and On the Waterfront, directed by Frank Capra and Elia Kazan. They went to Broadway plays like Gypsy and Funny Girl, with music by Jule Styne. They laughed at the jokes of Bob Hope, watched Edward G. Robinson star in movies like Key Largo and Double Indemnity, and revered the football legend of Notre Dame’s Knute Rockne. All arrived as immigrants at Ellis Island. Most poignantly, Americans sang “God Bless America,” written by Irving Berlin, who had arrived at Ellis Island in 1893 as Israel Beilin, the Yiddish-speaking son of a Jewish cantor.

  While the nativism of the earlier period was dying, the quotas that severely restricted eastern and southern Europeans still remained in place. Not for much longer. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, a landmark piece of legislation that struck a fatal blow against Jim Crow segregation, prohibited discrimination on the grounds of race, color, religion, or national origin. While such legal prohibitions did not extend to immigration, it became politically and morally unacceptable to retain a form of discrimination based on national origins in immigration policy. The days of the quotas were numbered.

  In his 1965 State of the Union address, Lyndon Johnson laid out an ambitious legislative plan known as the Great Society. As part of it, he called for an immigration law “based on the work a man can do and not where he was born or how he spells his name.” Later that year, Johnson traveled to Liberty Island to sign the bill formally ending forty-four years of immigration quotas biased against eastern and southern Europeans, which he called a “cruel and enduring wrong.” The House and Senate overwhelmingly passed the bill.

  Although the bill has been widely hailed as a liberal piece of legislation that ended racial and ethnic discrimination in U.S. immigration law, it still kept much of the restrictive apparatus intact. Overall quotas still remained, and restrictions were placed on immigrants from the Western Hemisphere for the first time. In a move that would have a deep impact on the future of U.S. immigration, the bill made family reunification the cornerstone of immigration policy, setting that outside of the overall quota limit.

  While legislation to end quotas based on national origin made its way through Congress, Johnson went ahead and settled the question of who should own Ellis Island, if not what the island’s future would look like. In May 1965, Johnson signed a proclamation making Ellis Island a part of the National Park Service by adding it to the Statue of Liberty National Monument. The private sale of the island was now off the table.

  With full control over the island, the Johnson administration commissioned architect Philip Johnson to create plans for the development of the island. Frank Lloyd Wright had been drafted a few years earlier to come up with a design for the private development of the island as a self-contained city of the future. His plan went nowhere. Now it was Johnson’s turn and he did not disappoint. Rather than renovating and restoring the main buildings of the island, Johnson called for stabilizing them and keeping them as historical ruins. Vines and trees would be allowed to grow untended about the buildings, addi
ng to the feeling of abandoned ruins. “The effect would be a romantic and nostalgic grouping through which the visitor would pass,” Johnson said.

  The centerpiece of Johnson’s plan was a 130-foot-high truncated cone that would be called the Wall of Sixteen Million. Ramps would wind along the cone, allowing visitors to read the names of every immigrant who had passed through Ellis Island. Some in the press dubbed Johnson’s design the “Cult of Instant Ugliness.”

  There were other problems. A New York Times editorial argued that Johnson had gotten it all wrong. Ellis Island was built as a “gateway,” not a wall “built to exclude.” Adding some Cold War imagery, the paper saw Johnson’s Wall of Sixteen Million as more akin to the Berlin Wall. This interpretation stripped the restrictive function from Ellis Island’s past; the gate that barred undesirable immigrants had now evolved into a gateway, a welcoming station rather than an obstacle designed to sift out immigrants. The forgetting of the restrictive nature of Ellis Island was not new. In a 1954 article on the “passing of Ellis Island,” the American Mercury falsely noted that prior to 1921 “there were no restrictions on immigration.”

  The debate over Ellis Island in the late 1950s and early 1960s took place during an historic lull in U.S. immigration history. The decade following 1955 saw an average of just 288,000 immigrants entering per year. In 1960, just 5.4 percent of all Americans were foreign-born, a historic low, compared to the nearly 15 percent of foreign-born Americans in 1910.

  As immigration slowed to a trickle, the children and grandchildren of those who arrived at Ellis Island were assimilating into American life. In this world, Ellis Island was part of the cultural baggage left behind in the rush toward assimilation, together with tenement apartments, European accents, and unpronounceable names. Despite occasional pleas by people like Oscar Handlin and Edward Corsi, there was little public groundswell for saving Ellis Island.

  The island was a mess. One newspaper referred to it as “a seedy ghost town.” Though the buildings were structurally sound, vandalism and neglect took their toll. Thieves stole the copper fixtures in the buildings; Mother Nature did the rest. Chunks of plaster and tile had fallen from the ceilings; paint was peeling from the walls; wood was rotting; the roofs leaked. Artifacts of the island’s previous life—mattresses, tables, medical equipment—were strewn about. Jungle-like vegetation weaved its way around the island unchecked and unmolested. Combined with the decaying buildings it helped create an eerie and spooky atmosphere on the island.

  By the late 1960s, officials in Washington, and the public at large, were distracted by more pressing problems at home and abroad, and Philip Johnson’s grand design for restoration was left unfunded. Ellis Island simply sat there, neglected, in New York Harbor amid both the affluence and growing chaos of postwar America.

  DURING THE YEARS AFTER the closing of Ellis Island, race, not immigration, came to dominate the national agenda. At the same time that the Wall Street Journal ad appeared regarding the possible sale of Ellis Island, blacks in Montgomery, Alabama, were boycotting that city’s public transportation system to protest the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. A young minister named Martin Luther King Jr. became the public face of the bus boycott and the protest against Jim Crow segregation. The modern civil rights movement had begun.

  Race and immigration in America have an intertwined and complex relationship. The nation’s racial history is a tortured field littered with the tragedy of slavery, discrimination, violence, false promises, and missed opportunities. In contrast, the history of immigration is largely painted in optimistic hues, where plucky immigrants overcome poverty and discrimination to live the American Dream, if not immediately, then over a few generations. Too often, the history of African-Americans is contrasted with that of immigrants, and none too favorably.

  For some white European immigrants, their first sight of a black person was on Ellis Island. Austrian immigrant Estelle Miller remembers coming to Ellis Island as a thirteen-year-old and upon seeing a black man there for the first time, she grew so scared that she dropped her family’s antique china bowl. But in truth her presence in America was more problematic to the black man. A Norwegian immigrant named Paul Knaplund remembers seeing a “Negro charwoman” during his time at Ellis Island. “Her face expressed utter disdain,” he remembered as she watched the streams of immigrants passing before her.

  American blacks have had at best an ambivalent attitude towards immigration. Periods of mass immigration have coincided with low points in African-American history. The Progressive Era of the early 1900s, which pushed liberal reform to the forefront of the nation’s agenda, was driven largely by fears of mass European immigration and the changes that industrialism had wrought. Though reformist in nature, very little of Progressivism dealt with the rights of blacks. If anything, Jim Crow segregation hardened during this period. The great concern of middle-class, northern, urban reformers was not civil rights for southern blacks but the problems they saw in front of them, which had to do with the massive European immigration.

  Meanwhile, black leaders such as Booker T. Washington and A. Philip Randolph were immigration restrictionists, seeing the constant demand for cheap immigrant labor as detrimental to the status and wallets of native-born blacks.

  It is no surprise, then, that the civil rights movement of the postwar era took place at the point of lowest sustained immigration in American history. Unencumbered with the problems of immigrants, the nation’s attention could focus upon the demands of African-Americans for full political and social rights.

  The civil rights movement had some unexpected effects upon Ellis Island immigrants in those postwar years. Despite the rising political power of white ethnic groups, their solid position in the New Deal Democratic coalition, and the rise to power of the first Irish Catholic president, immigration quotas stubbornly remained in place. It was only in light of the Civil Rights Act that Congress and President Johnson could muster enough support to end discrimination against immigrants based on national origins.

  The civil rights movement was about more than just changing laws; it was about the expression of racial pride and the inclusion of groups previously left on the margins of the nation’s historical narrative. Both themes would become tied up with the post-1960s history of Ellis Island. As immigrants took their place in the American mainstream, other groups looked to Ellis Island as they made their pleas for acceptance.

  In the early morning hours of March 16, 1970, a small group of American Indians attempted to set off for Ellis Island undetected before daybreak. Their goal was to turn the island into a center for Indian culture, but a gas leak foiled their plans. After that, the Coast Guard stepped up patrols and proclaimed a zone of security around the island.

  Perhaps the most bizarre incident occurred later that same year. It was an event that demonstrated what happened when you mixed the machinations of the Nixon administration with Black Power and Black Capitalism.

  In 1966, a neurosurgeon named Thomas Matthew formed a group called NEGRO, the National Economic Growth and Reconstruction Organization. Arguing that welfare dependency had harmed blacks, Dr. Matthew called for a program of self-help. To that end, NEGRO would build hospitals, start black-owned businesses, and rebuild the inner city. Matthew planned to fund the organization by selling bonds at a block party and using the money raised to leverage government funds.

  But the bond issue didn’t quite work, and in a few years Matthew found himself convicted of failing to file his income tax returns since the early 1960s and accruing as much as $150,000 in back taxes and penalties. In late 1969, he began a six-month jail sentence and also agreed to make restitution to the IRS.

  While Matthew’s rhetoric was out of step with the Great Society and mainstream civil rights movement, his views caught the attention of Richard Nixon and his aides. Once in office, Nixon was stung by criticism that he was insensitive to civil rights. His administration would never win over traditional
civil rights groups, so it took another tack by proclaiming its support for black capitalism to help minorities enter the nation’s economic mainstream. The Nixon administration made money available to assist blacks with business opportunities. It was the perfect way to mix opposition to welfare with concern for blacks. And Dr. Thomas Matthew seemed made to order for Nixon.

  Perhaps that was the reason that Nixon commuted Matthew’s sentence for tax evasion, the administration’s first executive clemency. Matthew could be useful to the new administration, a black voice supporting Republican policies. In fact, the move began paying political dividends almost immediately when Matthew came out to support Nixon’s embattled Supreme Court nominee, G. Harold Carswell. Matthew’s views did not win him friends among other civil rights leaders, but it did give him political access to the Nixon administration, which was eager to have its Commerce Department and Small Business Administration assist black entrepreneurs.

  It would prove to be an uneasy relationship, as a 1971 discussion made clear. In a White House meeting discussing the possible pardon of Jimmy Hoffa, Nixon and his aides brought up the case of Matthew in ways that laid bare their mixed feelings about the NEGRO leader and blacks in general. “He stole everybody blind,” Nixon said of Matthew, referring to his earlier trouble and somewhat confusing Matthew’s actual crime, “after all he was trying to do well by his people so we let him out. . . . They all steal—I mean not all. . . . People do when they are over their heads. He probably didn’t know that he was stealing.” At that point, one of the aides joked that Matthew “just liberated that money,” to which Nixon responded in a more sympathetic vein that Matthew “was a very nice man, very nice. Had wonderful ideas.”