353 Hoover was right: Not to be outdone, Hoover later placed his own FBI agents among the detainees at Ellis Island. According to a German who was temporarily detained at Ellis Island: “You see, there were FBI men scattered among us as observers. You don’t know them, and once a roommate I’d had for a month or more left, and one of the guards told me that fellow had been an FBI man on duty.” “The Detention of Krauss,” New Yorker, March 6, 1943.
353 One Justice Department official: File 56125-86, INS.
354 Although Bishop was taken: NYT, January 15, 1940. On the Christian Front, see Theodore Irwin, “Inside the Christian Front,” Forum, March 1940, and Ronald H. Bayor, Neighbors in Conflict: The Irish, Germans, Jews, and Italians of New York City, 1929–1941 (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 97–104.
355 One of them was: On the Pinza case, see NYT, March 13, 1942; Ezio Pinza, An Autobiography (New York: Rinehart, 1958), 202–228; Sarah Goodyear, “When Being Italian Was a Crime,” Village Voice, April 11, 2000; “Statement of Doris L. Pinza,” Subcommittee on the Constitution, Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. House of Representatives, October 26, 1999.
356 The other half: Rose Marie Neupert, “The Neupert Family Story,” http://www. gaic.info/real_neupert.html.
356 Most of the detainees: NYT, September 23, 1942. For more on these camps, see Mangione, An Ethnic At Large, 319–352.
357 By March 1946: Stephen Fox, Fear Itself: Inside the FBI Roundup of German Americans During World War II (New York: iUniverse, Inc., 2005), 327–328.
357 One of those not holding up: On the story of the Hackenbergs, see Fox, Fear Itself, 325–332.
357 Hundreds of these enemy aliens: NYT, January 3, 1947; Letter from Rosina and Max Rapp to Senator William Langer, July 23, 1947, Folder 12, Box 214, WL.
358 The Fuhr family: On the Fuhr family, see Fox, Fear Itself, 109–126.
358 While in custody: Fox, Fear Itself, 114, 122.
359 Langer introduced a bill: Senate Bill 1749, July 26, 1947, 80th Congress, 1st Session; Fox, Fear Itself, 124–126; Eberhard E. Fuhr, “My Internment by the U.S. Government,” http://www.gaic.info/real_fuhr.html.
359 One of those not on Langer’s list: Sworn Statement of William Langer, August 1947, Folder 9, Box 214, WL; Senate Bill 1083, April 10, 1947, 80th Congress, 1st Session; NYT, September 11, 1947.
359 At the end of June 1948: Ahrens v. Clark, 335 U.S. 188 (1948); NYT, July 7, 8, 1948; Fox, Fear Itself, 140.
359 In the following weeks: Fox, Fear Itself, 329–333; NYT, November 17, 1945. For lists of German detainees and the disposition of their cases, see Folder 1, Box 257, WL.
360 Although exact numbers: On the number of enemy alien detainees, see Krammer, Undue Process, 171. Two websites document the experience of German internment during World War II: the German American Internee Coalition, http://www.gaic.info/index.html, and http://www.foitimes.com/. 360 The bill also granted: On the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, see Michael J. Ybarra, Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist Hunt (Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2004) 509–534. 361 President Truman came out: “Text of President’s Message Vetoing the Communist-Control Bill,” NYT, September 23, 1950.
361 Embarrassed at having: W. L. White, “The Isle of Detention,” American Mercury, May 1951.
361 Gulda arrived at: NYT, October 9, 1950; Time, October 23, 1950; Newsweek, Oct. 23, 1950; A. H. Raskin, “New Role for Ellis Island,” NYTM, November 12, 1950.
362 The law also affected: Letter from Arthur A. Sweberg to President Harry Truman, March 22, 1951; Letter from Mrs. Josephine Mazzeo to President Harry Truman, March 28, 1951, Folder 2750-C Misc, Box 1717, HST. 362 George Voskovec: New Yorker, May 12, 1951; NYT, December 4, 1950. 362 As Truman predicted: NYT, March 22, 1951.
363 Upon his release: NYT, April 3, 1951; New Yorker, May 12, 1951. 363 Voskovec would later: NYT, November 13, 1955.
363 When Ellen arrived: Ellen Raphael Knauff, The Ellen Knauff Story (New York: W.W. Norton, 1952), 8.
364 The government’s case: The case against Ellen Knauff is summarized in Memorandum for the President from J. Howard McGrath, Attorney General, received July 14, 1950, Justice Department Folder, Box 22, HST.
364 It would be more: Knauff, The Ellen Knauff Story, 29.
365 The Court relied on: Knauff v. Shaughnessy, 338 U.S. 537 (1950); David Cole, Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism (New York: New Press, 2003), 136–137; Charles D. Weisselberg, “The Exclusion and Detention of Aliens: Lessons from the Lives of Ellen Knauff and Ignatz Mezei,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 143, no. 4 (April 1995). 366 Having lost: NYT, May 18, 1950.
366 In the meantime: Time, April 17, 1950.
366 In the spring of 1950: Knauff, The Ellen Knauff Story, 138.
366 The press attention: Memo for Charles Rose from Edward A. Harris, June 15, 1950; Memo for Steve Spingarn from Harry S. Truman, June 17, 1950, Justice Department Folder, Box 22, HST.
367 The Justice Department stalled: Memorandum for Peyton Ford, Deputy Attorney General from Steve Spingarn, August 2, 1950; Memorandum for Peyton Ford, Deputy Attorney General from Steve Spingarn, September 25, 1950, Justice Department Folder, Box 22, HST.
367 However, the Justice Department: NYT, February 28, 1950; Knauff, The Ellen Knauff Story, 81.
368 It took the board members: NYT, March 27, 1951.
368 By the end of August: U.S. Department of Justice, Board of Immigration Appeals, File A-6937471, reprinted in Knauff, The Ellen Knauff Story. 368 McGrath released: NYT, November 3, 1951.
369 However, there were: NYT, July 3, 1953; Knauff, The Ellen Knauff Story, 54. 369 Though she ultimately: Anthony Lewis, “Security and Liberty: Preserving the Values of Freedom,” in Richard C. Leone and Greg Anrig Jr., The War on Our Freedoms: Civil Liberties in an Age of Terrorism (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), 72.
369 The widespread sympathy: For the story of C. L. R. James and his detention at Ellis Island, see C. L. R. James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, reprint (London: Allison & Busby, 1985), 132–173; Emily Eakin, “Embracing the Wisdom of a Castaway,” NYT, August 4, 2001; Farrukh Dhondy, C. L. R. James: A Life (New York: Pantheon, 2001), 107–111.
371 Mezei was not: On the Mezei case, see Cole, Enemy Aliens, 138–139; Weisselberg, “The Exclusion and Detention of Aliens”; Richard A. Serrano, “Detained, Without Details,” Los Angeles Times, December 21, 2005.
372 The next step: Shaughnessy v. Mezei, 345 U.S. 206 (1953).
373 A defeated Mezei: NYT, April 23, 1953.
374 The government had a strong: Weisselberg, “The Exclusion and Detention of Aliens,” 975–978. Many years later, Mezei’s stepdaugher remembered how Ignatz would enlist his stepchildren to hand out Communist leaflets on election day. Richard A. Serrano, “Detained, Without Details,” Los Angeles Times, December 21, 2005.
374 Whereas Knauff was: Weisselberg, “The Exclusion and Detention of Aliens,” 979.
374 The special three-man board: Weisselberg, “The Exclusion and Detention of Aliens,” 983–984.
375 By 1954, Ellis Island: NYT, December 6, 1954.
375 On Veterans Day: NYT, November 12, 13, 1954.
376 “They rewarded with”: NYT, November 14, 1954.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: DECLINE
379 A businessman reading: WSJ, September 18, 1956.
379 The sale was made: NYT, November 14, 1954.
380 So the GSA opened: Barbara Blumberg, “Celebrating the Immigrant: An Ad- ministrative History of the Statue of Liberty National Monument, 1952–1982,” National Park Service, 1985, Chapter 5.
380 In response: Blumberg, “Celebrating the Immigrant.”
380 Some of the proposals: NYT, February 3, 1958.
380 When bidding opened: Business Week, September 29, 1956.
380 Ellis Island’s future: NYTM, May 25, 1958.
381 “This is not jus
t”: NYT, December 20, 1960; December 8, 1962.
381 To Corsi: Edward Corsi, In the Shadow of Liberty: The Chronicle of Ellis Island (New York: Macmillan, 1935), 281–295.
383 With full control: Blumberg, “Celebrating the Immigrant,” chapter 6; Time, March 4, 1966; NYT, February 25, 1966.
383 The centerpiece of: New York World-Telegram and Sun, March 7, 1966.
383 There were other: NYT, February 26, 1966; Harry T. Brundidge, “The Passing of Ellis Island,” American Mercury, December 1954.
384 The island was a mess: NYT, July 16, 1964, March 5, 1968.
384 For some white: Peter Morton Coan, Ellis Island Interviews: In Their Own Words (New York: Checkmark Books, 1997), 220; Paul Knaplund, Moorings Old and New: Entries in an Immigrant’s Log (Madison, WI: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1963), 148. See also David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 118–119.
385 Meanwhile, black leaders: On African-American attitudes toward immigration, see Daryl Scott, “ ‘Immigrant Indigestion’: A. Philip Randolph: Radical and Restrictionist,” Center for Immigration Studies, Backgrounder, June 1999, http://www.cis.org/articles/1999/back699.html, and “ ‘Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are’: Black Americans on Immigration,” Center for Immigration Studies, Paper 10, June 1996, http://www.cis.org/articles/1996/paper10.html. 386 In the early morning hours: NYT, March 17, 1970.
387 It would prove: Nixon Tapes, Conversation No. 610-1, Nov. 1, 1971, RMN. The conversation is not transcribed and the audio quality of the recording is poor. This is the author’s rough transcription of the account. The aides at the meeting included John Mitchell, George Schultz, and H. R. Haldeman.
387 Two days after: On the NEGRO takeover of Ellis Island, see NYT, January
8, July 25, 26, August 2, 19, 20, 21, 1970; Newsweek, September 28, 1970; and Blumberg, “Celebrating the Immigrant,” chapter 6.
388 This did not deter: NEGRO brochure, WHCF, SMOF, Leonard Garment, Box
138, RMN.
388 Matthew continually referred: In fact, a few years earlier, Irving Kristol wrote a long piece arguing the same idea. See Irving Kristol, “The Negro Today is Like the Immigrant Yesterday,” NYTM, September 11, 1966.
388 Not surprisingly: Blumberg, “Celebrating the Immigrant,” 6.
389 Since the mid-1960s: NYT, April 24, 1973.
389 As the Ellis Island colony: NYT, November 29, December 11, 1973. In November 1973, Matthew was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. In March 1975, an appeals court struck down the conviction, arguing that errors by the judge merited a dismissal.
389 Around the same time: Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970).
390 Ethnic pride: Michael Novak, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (New York: Macmillan, 1971). On the phenomenon of white ethnicity, see Vincent J. Cannato, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and his Struggle to Save New York (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 389–441; and Mathew Frye Jacobson, Roots, Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post Civil-Rights America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
CHAPTER NINETEEN: THE NEW PLYMOUTH ROCK
391 On this patriotic: NYT, July 3, 1986.
392 Although resoration of the: F. Ross Holland, Idealists, Scoundrels, and the Lady: An Insider’s View of the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Project (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 80, 205.
393 The Statue of Liberty: NYT, November 4, 1985.
393 In November 1985: Roberta Gratz and Eric Fettmann, “The Selling of Miss Liberty,” Nation, November 9, 1985. For other articles by Gratz and Fettmann on the topic, see “Mr. Iacocca Meets the Press,” Nation, March 8, 1986; “Post-Iacocca” Nation, April 19, 1986; and “Whitewashing the Statue of Liberty,” Nation, June 7, 1986. F. Ross Holland dismisses the complaints of Gratz and Fettmann as “scurrilous” and “liberally sprinkled with untruths, half-truths, misinformation, and distorted facts.” Idealists, Scoundrels, and the Lady, 180–181.
394 For some, it was all: Jacob Weisberg, “Gross National Production,” New Republic, June 23, 1986.
394 If the public: Lee Iacocca with William Novak, Iacocca: An Autobiography (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), 339–441.
394 His father, Nicola: Iacocca with Novak, Iacocca, 5; Peter Wyden, The Unknown Iacocca (New York: William Morrow, 1987), 260.
395 “Hard work”: Iacocca with Novak, Iacocca, 339.
395 To others, that vision: Holland, Idealists, Scoundrels, and the Lady, 158–159; Roberta Gratz and Eric Fettmann, “The Battle for Ellis Island,” Nation, November 30, 1985.
395 A historian made: Lynn Johnson, “Ellis Island: Historic Preservation from the Supply Side,” Radical History Review, September 1984.
396 How should the: NYT, January 14, 21, 1984.
396 The former inspection: For more on the evolution of the historical memory of Plymouth Rock, see John Seelye, Memory’s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
396 This process began: Jacob A. Riis, “In the Gateway of Nations,” Century Magazine, March 1903; “The New Plymouth Rock,” Youth’s Companion, December 14, 1905.
396 In 1914, a writer: Mary Antin, They Who Knock at Our Gates: A Complete Gospel of Immigration (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1914), 98. 396 That an immigrant: Werner Sollors, “National Identity and Ethnic Diversity: ‘Of Plymouth Rock and Jamestown and Ellis Island’ or Ethnic Literature and Some Redefinitions of ‘America,’ ” in Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Meally, eds., History and Memory in African-American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 103–105; Agnes Repplier, “The Modest Immigrant,” Atlantic Monthly, September 1915.
397 Other native-born Americans: Thomas Darlington, “The Medic-Economic Aspect of the Immigration Problem,” North American Review, December 21, 1906. 397 In the late 1930s: Sollors, “National Identity and Ethnic Diversity,” 108–109; Dan Shiffman, Rooting Multiculturalism: The Work of Louis Adamic; Louis Adamic, From Many Lands (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939), 296–299. 397 In deeply nostalgic: Leo Rosten, “Not So Long Ago, There Was a Magic Island,” Look, December 24, 1968; Edward M. Kennedy, “Ellis Island,” Esquire, April 1967; Thomas M. Pitkin, Keepers of the Gate: A History of Ellis Island (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 177.
398 In the late 1970s: “Ellis Island Remembered,” September 23, 1978, NYPL. 398 Riding this wave: F. Ross Holland, Idealists, Scoundrels, and the Lady: An Insider’s View of the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Project (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 5–6; NYT, July 25, 1981.
399 “The Battle for”: Michael Barone, “The Battle for Ellis Island,” Washington Post, August 14, 1984, and Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 320–322.
399 In 1988: NYT, September 4, 1988; Michael Dukakis, “A New Era of Greatness for America”: Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, July 21, 1988; and Jacobson, Roots Too, 327–331.
399 Ferraro and Dukakis: Meg Greenfield, “The Immigrant Mystique,” Newsweek, August 8, 1988.
400 At the other side: NYT, January 14, 1993, August 11, 2000.
401 What name does: NYT, September 21, 1990.
401 The most famous: The Sean Ferguson story also appears in Alan M. Kraut, The Huddled Masses: The Immigrant in American Society, 1880–1921 (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1982), 56–57. While Kraut calls the story possibly apocryphal, he uses it to illustrate the changing of names by officials at Ellis Island. One possible explanation of the story has the original Sean Ferguson as a Yiddish-speaking actor named Berel Bienstock. When Bienstock came to the United States to seek a career in the movies, his agent suggested that he Americanize his name.
When he finally got to California and met with a movie producer who asked him his name, the nervous Bienstock replied in Yiddish “Schoen fergessen” and the producer wrote down his name as Sean Ferguson. But that story might also be apocryphal. See Stephen J. Sass, “In the Name of Sean Ferguson,” JewishJournal.com, June 21, 2002, http://www.jewishjournal.com/ home/preview.php?id=8761.
401 The stories multiply: Ellen Levine, illustrated by Wayne Parmenter, If Your Name Was Changed at Ellis Island (New York: Scholastic, 1993); Ellen Levine claims that her grandfather’s original name was Louis Nachinovsky, but immigration inspectors at Ellis Island “changed many Jewish names to Levine or Cohen.” And so her grandfather had become Louis Levine. Another book on Ellis Island, under the header “There’s a Man Goin’ Round Changing Names,” discusses how “tens of thousands” of names were changed at Ellis Island. More discussion of name changes can be found in David M. Brownstone, Irene M. Frank, and Douglass Brownstone, Island of Hope, Island of Tears (New York: MetroBooks, 2002), 177–179.
401 In an interview: Interview with Sophia Kreitzberg, “Voices from Ellis Island.”
402 Then there is the joke: Joseph Epstein, “Death Benefits,” Weekly Standard, May 21, 2007. Although Epstein tells the Moishe Pipik story as a joke, he still believes that the “impatience of officials at Ellis Island altered lots of Eastern European surnames.”
402 Nearly all of these: On the name change myth, see Alan Berliner’s documentary, The Sweetest Sound, reviewed in WSJ, June 25, 2001.
403 The inclusive nature: This issue came up in the development of the plans for the museum in the 1980s. See Holland, Idealists, Scoundrels, and the Lady, 184–185.
403 Historians are supposed to: NYT, September 7, 1990; Mike Wallace, Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 70–71. Wallace is wrong to claim that “for all Reagan’s celebration of the Statue as the ‘mother of exiles’ he was then doing his best to slam the open door shut.” Anti-immigration measures were never part of Reagan’s politics or rhetoric. The major piece of immigration legislation during the Reagan years, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, did not call for immigration restriction, but instead created an amnesty program for illegal immigrants already in the country, as well as measures designed to punish employers who employed illegal immigrants. The number of immigrants remained remarkably steady during the Reagan years, going from 530,639 in 1980 to 643,025 in 1988, before jumping to over 1 million in each of the next three years. Peter Schuck has written that the 1980s produced immigration policies that were “remarkably liberal and expansive by historical standards.” Wallace, 58; Peter H. Schuck, Citizens, Strangers, and In-Between: Essays on Immigration and Citizenship (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 92.
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