American Passage
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to modern immigrants who arrive at airports?
Even though the restoration of Ellis Island has drawn public acclaim, many scholars have been critical of its evolution into a national
icon. Their concerns revolve around three issues. First, the memorializing of Ellis Island should not be used to make negative comparisons
with newer immigrant groups. Second, the refurbished Ellis Island
should not lead to ideological celebrations of the free-market or “upby-the-bootstraps” homilies. Last, critics contend that the “nation of
immigrants” saga embodied in the Ellis Island story leaves out groups
that did not voluntarily emigrate to the United States, namely American Indians and the descendants of African slaves.
Historians are supposed to clear out the fog created by the construction of historical memory, but too often their work betrays an
attempt to construct a historical memory that serves an ideological
purpose. For example, historian Mike Wallace complained about the
lack of “fresh thinking” at the island’s museum and helpfully suggested
exhibits on “the effect on immigration flows of actions taken by the International Monetary Fund, major multinationals, and the Central Intelligence Agency.” He believed that the new immigration museum had
nothing that would help people probe contemporary anti-immigrant attitudes. “It would be perfectly possible to leave Ellis,” Wallace writes, “with warm feelings toward the old migrants and preexisting resent
ments of gooks, spicks and towel-heads left intact.”
In addition, Wallace and other leftists were concerned that the restoration of Ellis Island abetted the rise of American conservatism. “At
the heart of the Reagan/Iacocca reading of the history of immigration
was the ‘up-from-poverty’ saga of the model of white ethnics,” wrote
Wallace. This amounted to nothing more than an “antigovernment
screed” that facilitated the contemporary policies of the Reagan administration.
Art professor Erica Rand sees Ellis Island through the edgier
prisms of gender and queer studies. Her 2005 book Ellis Island Snow
Globe devotes space not only to predictable denunciations of commercialism, but also to more entertaining discussions of same-sex eroticism, with chapters such as “Breeders on a Golf Ball: Normalizing Sex
at Ellis Island.” Rand is also concerned about the exclusionary nature
of the site, which she sees as privileging the historical narrative of
one group. She worried that the “claim that the Ellis Island museum
honors all immigrants, all migrants, or even all who ‘people America’
also functions to mask the inequity involved in the concentration of
heritage resources at a site that honors and documents primarily white
people.”
It is hard for some to disentangle the memory of Ellis Island from
discussions of race. Many black Americans felt left out of the celebrations of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, even though few Americans seem aware that black nationalist Marcus Garvey, social scientist
Kenneth Clark, and Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay were
among the roughly 143,000 black immigrants—mostly from the Caribbean—who came through Ellis Island between 1899 and 1937. The disconnect was exemplified by black historian John Hope Franklin, who
admitted that the renovation of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island
was “a celebration for immigrants and that has nothing to do with me.
I’m interested in it as an event, but I don’t feel involved in it.” David Roediger’s Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs
exemplifies this unease. What makes the journey from Ellis Island to
suburbia so “strange” is not immediately apparent, but it has something to do with the idea that immigrants had to consciously “become white” in order to move into the mainstream of society, and in doing so they bought into ideas of white supremacy, turned their backs on African-Americans, and failed to place themselves in the vanguard of the proletariat for a revolution against capitalism. Apart from the title, Ellis Island barely makes an appearance in the book, but serves as a
convenient symbol for Roediger’s ideological tract.
For historian Matthew Frye Jacobson, the memorialization of Ellis
Island is tied to the troublesome idea of America as a “nation of immigrants.” This idea is problematic because it excludes from our national mythology those black Americans and American Indians not
descended from immigrants. Just as bad for Jacobson, “the immigrant
myth and immigrants’ real-life descendants contributed to the swing
vote that rendered the Republicans the majority party in the electoral
realignment beginning in 1968,” an outcome that he abhors. Jacobson
implies that the arrival of European immigrants was a bad deal for civil
rights. Channeling Malcolm X, he writes: “We didn’t land on Ellis
Island, my brothers and sisters—Ellis Island landed on us.” Another group was also feeling left out of the whole “nation of
immigrants” celebration. To describe the United States in that way,
says political scientist Samuel Huntington, “is to stretch a partial truth
into a misleading falsehood.” Huntington is speaking for white AngloSaxon Protestants, whose ancestors, he argues, were settlers, not immigrants. On a similar note, the author of a history of Plymouth Rock
argues that, as they visit the Ellis Island museum, “the descendants of
Pilgrims do not have to be told that this is a society to which they need
not apply.”
These criticisms suggest another question about the rehabilitation
of Ellis Island. As the federal government originally created the inspection station to exclude undesirable immigrants, is the National Park
Service now practicing another kind of exclusion in its celebration of
the immigrants who came through there?
In the years since, the National Park Service and the Statue of
Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation have made great efforts to be historically inclusive. “It doesn’t matter whether your family arrived on the
Mayflower or recently got off the airplane from Honduras,” explained
Gary G. Roth, the National Park Service’s project manager for the immigration museum. “Ellis Island is a symbol of four hundred years of
immigration. The story of it all is told here, including that of Native Americans and of forced immigrations, the slaves who were brought
here against their will.”
In 2006, the foundation began fundraising for a project entitled
“The Peopling of America Center.” The new museum will show “the
entire panorama of the American experience,” and look beyond the
traditional tale of immigration, which excludes those brought over in
slave ships and native peoples residing on the continent prior to European colonization. As if to emphasize the inclusive nature of the project, as opposed to the allegedly narrow and exclusionary nature of the
current museum, which focuses almost exclusively on Ellis Island immigrants, the center’s motto is: “It’s About All of Us!”
E LLIS ISLAND’S ICONIC STATUS is ever-present. When the online brokerage firm TD Ameritrade launched a new advertising campaign, it chose as its theme the celebration of America’s independent spirit. To embody that spirit, it picked Ellis Island immigrants. “When immigrants came to Ellis Island they carried a dream,” intoned the company’s spokesman, Sam Waterston: “Work hard and opportunity will follow.” The company’s newspaper ad featured Waterston standing next to a large photo of an immigrant fami
ly standing on Ellis Island and looking at the Statue of Liberty, as well as a copy of the famous painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In big letters, the ad stated, “Independence is the spirit that drives America’s most successful investors.”
In an episode from the fifth season of The Apprentice, those vying for the opportunity to work for Donald Trump were given the task of creating a new souvenir booklet for visitors to Ellis Island. “Yes, even Donald Trump seems to appreciate the historic importance and magical allure of this great national monument to freedom and opportunity,” proclaimed the newsletter of the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation.
The island takes a prominent role in movies like Godfather II, Hitch, Hester Street, and Brother from Another Planet. The 2006 Italian film Nuovomondo, titled Golden Door in its American release, deals with Sicilian immigrants who pass through Ellis Island. The film is evocative of the dislocation and confusion of the inspection process; however, it is also historically inaccurate. It shows all immigrants undergoing rigorous physical and mental testing. In reality, the relatively small staff at Ellis Island meant a hasty inspection for most who passed through. Only if immigrants were suspected of having some deficiency did they undergo the full battery of mental and physical testing. William Williams only wished that he could have inspected every immigrant as closely as we see in Golden Door.
In the 1990s, New York and New Jersey fought a protracted legal battle for jurisdiction over Ellis Island. In 1998, this battle eventually made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in a 6-3 decision that all but three acres of the site belonged to New Jersey. The Court’s majority relied on an 1834 agreement between the two states that granted the then three-acre island to New York while allowing New Jersey to retain the rights to the surrounding waters and submerged land. Some of that land was eventually added to Ellis Island as it expanded.
Despite the rhetoric from both sides, the fight had little to do with lofty issues and more to do with who would control the development of the rest of the island and the taxes it would generate. Beginning in the 1980s, there had been talk of redeveloping the south side of the island, which used to house medical facilities. The new plan included demolishing some of the abandoned buildings and replacing them with a hotel and conference center, with the money from the commercial sites paying for the restoration of the rest of the buildings. New Jersey wanted to build a footbridge from its side of the Hudson to the island. Lee Iacocca had other ideas, including a nebulous plan for an “ethnic Williamsburg,” an exhibition center devoted to ethnic arts and crafts and food.
In the end, none of the plans was approved and the southern half of the island remained fallow as preservationists staunchly opposed the idea of commercial development. Unfortunately, they had little money with which to restore the decaying southern section of the island. At this point, the National Park Service stepped in and entered into an agreement with a newly formed nonprofit organization called Save Ellis Island, which was now authorized to raise money for the rehabilitation of the island’s southern section.
“Establish the Ellis Island Institute and Conference Center in the thirty unrestored buildings on Ellis Island,” its mission statement declares. “The Ellis Island Institute and Conference Center will capture the power of place to become a world class facility for civic engagement and life long learning on the topics of immigration, diversity, human health and wellbeing, the themes of Ellis Island.”
To help with fundraising and raise awareness of the project, the clothing maker Arrow launched a nationwide public relations effort. It created a high-production-value advertising campaign with television spots and posters featuring actors Elliot Gould and Christian Slater, pro-football Hall of Famer Joe Montana, American Idol finalist Kathryn McPhee, and cast members from The Sopranos. Everyone was fashionably dressed—no doubt in Arrow clothing—as they walked through the abandoned buildings of the island’s south side to the haunting notes from a string orchestra. To support the effort, the public can buy “Save Ellis Island” T-shirts and leave their family’s immigrant stories on a website.
For those wondering what a clothing maker has to do with immigration, Arrow created the slogan: “Ellis Island. Where the World Came Together and American Style Began.” Posters reinforced the link between Ellis Island, the American Dream, and the themes of family, opportunity, and freedom. Although Christian Slater’s ancestors were decidedly old immigrants from Ireland and England and it is not clear whether they came through Ellis Island, his poster reads: “Ellis Island represents our foundation—a place of possibility and new beginning.” To Kathryn McPhee, Ellis Island is about “the collective heritage of the American Dream.” For Joe Montana, it is about his Italian immigrant ancestors who worked in the mines of Pennsylvania to create opportunity for their family. “Triumph against the odds,” his poster reads. “That’s authentic American style.”
In a different context, the National Park Service’s superintendent of Ellis Island supported the restoration for just the opposite reasons. “It is haunting,” Cynthia Garrett said of the island’s abandoned south side, whose hospital buildings witnessed many tragedies of disease and death. “It tells us that our history isn’t all positive stories and success.”
Whether Ellis Island is a story of uplift and success or harrowing tragedies, it has evolved into something akin to a national shrine. In an editorial on the Supreme Court case, the New York Times referred to “Ellis Island’s sacred history.” In 2001, New York City’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani, summed up this trend when he said at a naturalization ceremony on the island: “Ellis Island is a wonderful place, it’s a sacred place, and it’s hallowed ground in American history.”
Such talk would no doubt have amused William Williams, Frederic Howe, and so many others who had worked at Ellis Island during its heyday. It would have baffled those immigrants who had to navigate the obstacle course at Ellis Island and probably saw little of the sacred in their experiences.
It was not preordained that Ellis Island should end up as a national shrine. San Francisco’s Angel Island holds none of the same allure for descendants of Chinese immigrants, who received a much harsher reception than European immigrants. The Hotel de la Inmigración in Buenos Aires, known as Argentina’s Ellis Island, pales in comparison to its northern namesake. Though it has also been turned into an immigration museum where modern Argentines can trace their ancestors who arrived a century earlier, it receives few visitors and is nestled off the city’s beaten path.
Having said that, each generation makes its own history and there is nothing wrong with the descendants of Ellis Island reclaiming a historic site that was created, in part, to exclude their ancestors. Too many critics, eager to score political points, ignore the ways that the memorialization of Ellis Island stands as a sharp rebuke to nativists, both past and present.
That said, the historical memory of Ellis Island, like all memory, has been created over time, and that memory will continue to evolve in the future. What exactly this historic site symbolizes can be a matter of debate even with the same family.
After visiting the restored Ellis Island in 2004, a woman sought out her grandmother’s name on the Wall of Honor. This successful New York professional called her grandmother, who had passed through the facility many decades earlier, to share the moment. “What are you doing there,” her grandmother testily responded from the other end of the phone line. The grandmother clearly did not share the same positive thoughts that her granddaughter associated with Ellis Island.
By the dawn of the twenty-first century, Ellis Island’s former life as an immigrant inspection station had given way to its latest incarnation as a national shrine and icon, a modern-day Plymouth Rock. As this transformation occurred, America was in the midst of another wave of mass immigration. What kinds of lessons—if any—could Americans learn from how immigrants were treated a century earlier?
Epilogue
“WE SHOULD NO T LET ANY ONE IN . WHEN
WE CAME, the rules were you could not be a burden to the state,” eighty-threeyear-old Sophie Wolf told a reporter on a visit to Ellis Island in 1980. “There were no schools where you could learn the language.” Wolf had arrived in the United States from Germany in 1923, and for her the new immigrants of the 1980s and beyond were inferior to those of her day. Wolf and many others whose ancestors came through Ellis Island believed that late-twentieth-century immigrants were treated with greater leniency and received more help from the government than the generation that arrived at Ellis Island.
At first glance, Wolf seems to validate the recent criticism of Ellis Island for its ethnic triumphalism. Yet when she continued with her thoughts about Mexican, Vietnamese, and Cuban immigrants, her views seemed to shift. “But you’ve got to give people a chance,” she said. “You can’t send them back.” Wolf ’s conflicted response tells us a great deal about American ambivalence toward immigration.
Wolf may have believed that things were tougher for immigrants in the past than they are today, but not everyone agrees. “At the turn of the century [1900],” the National Park Service’s Richard Wells told a reporter in 1998, “America treated its immigrants far better than it does today.” Americans continue to fight over the memory of Ellis Island in the wake of another era of mass immigration.
In one of history’s many ironies, Ellis Island reopened to the public in 1990 just as the United States was witnessing its largest influx of immigrants ever, surpassing the previous record from 1907. The following year would see even greater numbers. During the 1990s, an average of just under 1 million immigrants entered each year, a trend that would continue into the new century.
However much Americans may feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of this new immigration, the total U.S. population was nearly four times larger in 1990 than it was when Ellis Island opened a century earlier. Therefore, immigration in the 1990s was not as large on a percentage basis as that of the Ellis Island years.
Much like the late nineteenth century, the demographics of immigrants in the late twentieth century were also evolving. The great migration of Europeans has largely run its course. In the 1990s, only 14 percent of immigrants came from Europe, while 22 percent came from just one country: Mexico. Another 22 percent came from the Caribbean and Central and South America, while 29 percent arrived from Asia. By 2004, the percentage of Americans who were foreign-born had risen to nearly 12 percent, from its low of 5 percent in 1960, although still below the almost 15 percent during the heyday of Ellis Island.