American Passage Read online

  Every independent nation has, and must have, an absolute right to determine who shall come into the country, and secondly, who shall become a part of its citizenship, and on what terms. . . . The power of the American people to determine who shall come into the country, and on what terms, is absolute, and by the American people, I mean its citizens at any given moment, whether native born or naturalized, whose votes control the Government. . . . No one has a right to come into the United States, or become part of its citizenship, except by permission of the people of the United States.

  Even though Lodge was an unabashed believer in the superiority of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, his ideas about national sovereignty strike at the heart of how any nation deals with those who knock at its gates.

  The nation’s immigration law was predicated on the idea that a selfgoverning people could decide who may or may not enter the country. But that idea came into conflict with other ideals, such as America’s traditional history of welcoming newcomers. More importantly, it conflicted with the idea that the rights guaranteed in the Constitution were universal rights. How could the Declaration of Independence’s basic creed that all individuals were created equal mesh with the idea that some immigrants were desirable and others undesirable? That conflict between American ideals is central to an understanding of why Ellis Island was created in the first place.

  T RADITIONAL HISTORIES OF THE Ellis Island period, like John Higham’s classic Strangers in the Land, focus on the rise and fall of nativism, which the historian defined as the “intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground of its foreign . . . connections.” Yet Higham would soon come to see the shortcomings of his own analysis. Shortly after the publication of his book, he asked: “Shall I confess that nativism now looks less adequate as a vehicle for studying the struggles of nationalities in America, than my earlier report of it, and other reports, might indicate?” He later admitted: “Repelled as I was not only by the xenophobias of the past but also by the nationalist delusions of the Cold War that were all around me, I had highlighted the most inflammatory aspects of ethnic conflict.”

  The “nativist theme, as defined and developed to date, is imaginatively exhausted,” Higham concluded. By overemphasizing the psychological interpretations of American attitudes toward immigrants, he diminished the rationality of individuals and reduced their reactions to complex social changes down to primitive and primordial emotional reflexes. That does not mean downplaying the often ugly anti-immigrant sentiment that has characterized certain periods of American history. Higham is mostly correct that such feelings were rising in the late nineteenth century as the demographics of immigration shifted from northern Europeans to southern and eastern Europeans. He is also correct that World War I brought a significant opposition to foreigners.

  However, both of these periods also saw a larger shift in American society. The former occurred during the dawning of the era of Progressive reforms, with the beginnings of the federal administrative state designed to enact those reforms. The latter occurred at a time of great disillusionment with reform and government in the wake of the Great War. As the Progressive impulse to regulate society ebbed, Americans instead tried to restore a lost world that had been overtaken by the rise of modern, industrial America.

  By looking past the mere expressions of anti-immigrant sentiment and focusing on the implementation of immigration policy, we find that much of the debate surrounding Ellis Island was not as polarized as we might imagine. Despite the heated rhetoric, this debate took place within the proverbial forty-yard lines of American political life. There was considerable consensus about immigration. Most Americans found themselves in the political middle on the issue. That debate took place most famously at Ellis Island for more than three decades.

  Few Americans argued for a completely open door to all immigrants and few argued for their complete exclusion. Allan McLaughlin, a doctor with the U.S. Public Health Service, put forth the parameters of the debate:

  There are extremists who advocate the impossible—the complete exclusion of all immigrants or the complete exclusion of certain races. There are other extremists who pose as humanitarians and philanthropists and who advocate an act of lunacy—removing all restrictions and admitting all the unfortunate—the lame, the halt, the blind and the morally and physically diseased—without let or hindrance. Neither of these extreme positions is tenable. The debarring of all immigrants, or the unjust discrimination against any particular race, is illogical, bigoted and un-American. On the other hand, the indiscriminate admission of a horde of diseased, defective and destitute immigrants would be a crime against the body politic which could not be justified by false pretense of humanity or a mistaken spirit of philanthropy.

  Americans rarely challenged the government’s right to exclude or deport immigrants, but rather fought over the legitimate criteria for exclusion and how strictly government should enforce those laws at immigration stations like Ellis Island.

  Take the opinions of two men active in the debate during this time. Max Kohler was a lawyer for the American Jewish Committee who doggedly defended the rights of Jewish immigrants and criticized the strict enforcement of the law at Ellis Island. Nevertheless, he admitted that the immigration law at the time was appropriate in barring those deemed undesirable. “We do not want aliens to be admitted of any race or creed,” Kohler said, “suffering from loathsome or contagious diseases, mentally or morally defective, contract laborers or paupers or persona likely to become public charges in fact.” What he opposed was both the stricter enforcement of the law and the passage of any more restrictive measures by Congress to exclude immigrants.

  On the other side was Commissioner-General of Immigration Frank Sargent. The former labor leader favored closer inspection and tighter restriction of immigrants, but conceded that he “would not advocate a ‘closed-door’ policy . . . as we still have need for a high class of aliens who are healthy and will become self-supporting.” For him and other like-minded individuals, the present law was fine, but needed to be more strictly enforced. The debate, then, was not one over the restriction of immigrants, but instead over the regulation of who may be allowed to enter the country.

  “We desire to emphasize at this point that the immigration laws of the United States,” noted the American Jewish Committee in recommendations it made to the U.S. Immigration Commission, “have always been enacted to regulate immigration.” Both sides of the immigration debate agreed on the need for the United States to continue to accept immigrants and for the need to sort through those who arrived and reject those deemed undesirable. They differed, however, in how strictly to regulate immigration. In practice, this allowed almost three decades of continuous immigration, mostly from Europe, at levels that remain historic highs in American history. For all the talk about exclusion and restriction, less than 2 percent of individuals who knocked at its gate were ultimately excluded at Ellis Island.

  The laws that dealt with European immigrants, as well as smaller numbers of Middle Eastern and Caribbean immigrants, were in marked contrast to the law directed toward Chinese immigrants. For the Chinese and other Asians, American immigration policy was one of restriction. This proved the exception to the larger rule of immigration regulation, and Americans at the time were quite conscious of this differential treatment and at pains not to replicate it with other immigrant groups. For Asians, their near-complete exclusion from the country was based on race; for all others seeking entry, officials would try to weed out supposedly undesirable immigrants based not on race, but rather on individual characteristics. Prejudice against southern and eastern Europeans certainly existed, but it was not written into the law until the quotas of the 1920s.

  C ONTRARY TO MUCH THAT is written about American immigration, this book does not see this history strictly through the jaundiced interpretive lens of nativist sentiments or the sentimental notions of Ellis Island as a chronicle of American bounty and frothy idealism. Instead, this book looks at
how actual people created, interpreted, and executed immigration laws at Ellis Island.

  This is a story about the growing pains of a modern nation that was struggling with vast and seemingly disturbing changes. In response, America engaged in a debate about who could become an American. It was heated, loud, and often nasty. Raw emotions and blunt opinions were expressed in language that is often discomforting to modern readers.

  In response to this debate, Congress translated these concerns into laws that were carried out at Ellis Island and other, smaller immigrant inspection stations around the country, where officials were confronted with the very real mass of humans who washed upon America’s shores daily.

  Guarding the borders became the key to defining the character of the nation itself. Ellis Island represents the dawning of a new age: the rise of the United States as a modern nation-state. After the Civil War, it would become an industrial powerhouse, achieve a unified nation from coast to coast, and expand its power on the world stage by extending its sphere of influence into Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. To manage this economic, military, and political behemoth, a new federal government had to be created almost from scratch. Immigration control should be placed in the context of the rise of this modern state.

  The immigration service that ran inspection stations like Ellis Island was one of the country’s first large government programs. The strong federal government that we know today was in its infancy in the late 1800s. As the federal government devoted more time, energy, money, and manpower to inspecting immigrants, it created a larger and larger administrative system. Such a system created its own set of rules.

  Instead of seeing the work of Ellis Island in terms of immigration restriction, it is better to see it as a form of regulation. The relatively unobtrusive federal government of the nineteenth century evolved into a system of greater regulation by the twentieth century, one that did not end capitalism, but sought to control its excesses. Over that same period, the laissez-faire attitude of the federal government gave way to a system that did not end immigration, but regulated it in the public interest.

  The impulse behind immigration control was the same impulse that banned child labor, regulated railroads and monopolies, opened settlement houses, created national parks, battled the corruption of urban political machines, and advocated for temperance. It was these reforms of the Progressive Era that drove the expansion of the federal government to ensure that it would regulate private business in the public interest.

  In this sense, immigration control fits well as a Progressive reform. To many reformers, big business, together with selfish steamship companies and aided by corrupt political bosses, sought to keep the faucet of immigration open full blast as a source of cheap labor to power the new industrial economy and provide voters for urban political machines. Reformers wanted to temper this by regulating immigration, not ending it. They believed that a large industrial and urban society needed to be actively molded and shaped, and that the older laissezfaire philosophy of the nineteenth century was inadequate to deal with the problems of the modern era.

  Much of the political history of twentieth-century America was a battle over the extent of government regulation. Historians generally agree that the spirit of Progressive reform temporarily died out after World War I, and it is no surprise that this period also sees the end of the kind of immigration regulation practiced at Ellis Island for three decades. This regulatory approach to immigration would be replaced by the blunt instrument of immigration quotas by the 1920s. This new mechanism would not try to sift desirable from undesirable immigrants, but instead severely limit immigrants based on where they came from. America did not completely shut down immigration from Europe, as it had done earlier to immigration from China, but the era of mass immigration was effectively ended. Ellis Island had lost its raison d’être.

  When a new spirit of reform came with the New Deal and the federal government again began to intervene actively in the private sector, immigration was left out of the equation. The nation’s conflicting views toward government power would find itself mirrored in its immigration laws.

  Ellis Island would become little more than a prison for enemy aliens during World War II and for noncitizen aliens with radical beliefs during the Cold War. In the flush of postwar prosperity, the government abandoned Ellis Island in 1954 and left it to rot. Not until the 1980s, when the nation began to witness the rise of a new era of mass migration, did the country again pay attention to Ellis Island. By then, the former inspection station had evolved into an emotional symbol to millions of Americans, a new Plymouth Rock. Parts of the old facility were rehabilitated and reopened as a museum of immigration history. Ellis Island had now entered the realm of historical memory.

  THIS BOOK IS A biography, not of a person, but of a place, of one small island in New York Harbor that crystallized the nation’s complex and contradictory ideas about how to welcome people to the New World. It traces the history of Ellis Island from its days of hosting pirate hangings in the nineteenth century to its heyday as America’s main immigration station where some 12 million immigrants were inspected from 1892 to 1924. The story continues through the detention of aliens at Ellis Island during World War II and the Cold War and concludes with its rebirth as an immigration museum and a national icon. Long after Ellis Island has ceased to be an inspection station, the debates that once swirled around it continue to be heard.

  Today, Ellis Island has become a tired cliché for some, a story about the pluck and perseverance of those “poor huddled masses yearning to be free” who found freedom at the end of the inspection line. It is a nostalgic ode to our hardy ancestors who achieved success in spite of their experiences at the infamous Isle of Tears, where bigoted officials made their lives miserable and changed the family’s name from something with six syllables and no vowels to Smith.

  In reality, Ellis Island was the place where the United States worked out its extraordinary national debate over immigration for more than three decades. Inspectors, doctors, and political appointees wrestled every day with the problems of interpreting the nation’s immigration laws while being personally confronted with hundreds of thousands of living, breathing individuals. The dry enterprise of executing the law came into direct conflict with the mass of humanity seeking to make new lives in America.

  Ellis Island embodies the story of Americans grappling with how best to manage the vast and disruptive changes brought by rapid industrialization and large-scale immigration from Europe. It is the story of a nation struggling with the idea of what it meant to be an American at a time when millions of newcomers from vastly different backgrounds were streaming into the country.

  Americans need a history that does not glorify the place in some kind of gauzy, self-congratulatory nostalgia, nor mindlessly condemn what occurred there as the vicious bigotry of ugly nativists. Instead, this book seeks to understand what happened at Ellis Island and why it happened.

  This island, so small in size, has imprinted itself on the minds of so many Americans. It is a gritty and tumultuous history, but one that helps to explain why millions of immigrants had to make their American Passage through Ellis Island and how that passage in turn helped shape this nation.

  Part I

  BEFORE THE DELUGE

  Chapter 1

  Island

  FIFTY THOUSAND NEW YORKERS CL OGGED THE INTERsection of Second Avenue and 13th Street on the afternoon of April 2, 1824. Nearly one-third of the city’s population was there to witness the public hanging of a convicted murderer named John Johnson.

  City officials were not happy with the scene. They were less concerned about the question of whether a civilized city should play host to such a gruesome event than they were about the gridlock created by the public spectacle. The city would later order future executions moved to nearby Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island). But the public could not get enough. At the next execution, they arrived in boats so numerous they shut down river tra
ffic and caused a number of boating accidents. The city council then ordered that all future executions take place in the city prison, out of public view.

  The city did not have jurisdiction over all executions. The crime of piracy on the high seas was a federal offense and common enough to occupy the minds of federal authorities. While the city banned public executions, the federal government continued to offer such grotesque displays to New Yorkers for a few more years on a small island it controlled in the harbor. Nineteenth-century New Yorkers knew the place as Gibbet Island, but under another name it would later become one of the most famous islands in the nation: Ellis Island. However, its early history can best be described as ignominious.

  Pirates bring to mind images of eye-patched swashbucklers, skulland-crossbones flags, and loads of treasure, but real-life piracy was a more mundane, if still violent, pastime. When caught for their crimes, pirates often faced a death sentence. Pirate hangings were not merely about punishment; they were also about deterrence. After death, the damned would be hung in iron chains for an unspecified time, a warning to those who would dare wreak havoc and chaos on the commerce of the seas. The post on which the dead bodies were hung was called a gibbet, hence the island’s chilling name.

  When Washington Irving published his great satire of New York history under the pen name Diedrich Knickerbocker in 1809, he included a number of references to Gibbet Island. Mixing real history with myth, he wrote of a settler named Michael Paw who, according to Irving, “lorded it over the fair regions of ancient Pavonia and the lands away south, even unto the Navesink mountains, and was moreover patroon of Gibbet Island.” While Paw probably did own the area, the three-acre rock and sand island granted him little by way of power or prestige and was not a possession of which to boast.