American Passage Page 21

  Some cases were easily disposed of, but others were more difficult. The power Straus possessed was enormous and would determine the futures of many individuals. It was a grave responsibility. “I felt that there was a domestic tragedy involved in every one of these cases, and as the law placed the ultimate decision upon the Secretary,” he wrote, “I decided this responsibility was one that should not be delegated; so day by day I took up these decisions myself.” So engaged was Straus that he brought a number of the toughest cases home with him that first night to examine in more depth.

  “I would be less than human if I failed to interpret the laws as humanely as possible,” Straus wrote his brother Isidor. “I propose to remain on the side of the angels come what will, and I shall defy hostile criticisms—to do less would be cowardly.” Straus was especially sensitive to the plight of Russian Jewish immigrants, thinking it the height of cruelty to send Jews back to the nightmare of czarist Russia.

  Straus made his first official visit to Ellis Island in February 1907, witnessing some 2,600 immigrants passing through that day. He appeared there again two months later, examining every detail of inspection from the time immigrants got off the ferries to the time they passed inspection.

  Straus also heard a number of appeals cases, including that of a Scots-Irish family of seven ordered deported because one son was certified as feebleminded. The family was faced with a decision: Should they split up, with the mother or another sibling returning to Europe with the son and the others remaining in America? The family decided that they would all stick together—either the entire family would stay or the entire family would go back home. Straus thought the family, with the exception of the twenty-year-old feebleminded son, was “an exceptionally fine lot” and decided to allow the entire family to remain in America, including the son. Upon hearing the good news, the family burst into tears of gratitude.

  Straus made yet another visit to Ellis Island in June 1908, joined by the commissioner-general of immigration, Frank Sargent, and other immigration and medical officials from East Coast inspection stations. Straus convened the conference to deal with medical cases that had caused him concern. They first took up the case of a fifty-nine-year-old Russian immigrant named Chena Rog, who was headed to her five children and thirty-six grandchildren in Reading, Pennsylvania. Rog had been diagnosed with trachoma, an infectious disease of the eye. Should she be ordered deported or held in a hospital for treatment?

  When Straus asked Ellis Island’s chief medical officer, George Stoner, about his opinion on the case, an agitated Stoner answered: “Just what I have stated in my certificate.” Stoner and his staff had recommended deportation since trachoma was a contagious disease. They felt they were now being second-guessed by Straus. Can’t she be treated for the disease, Straus asked? Stoner was not optimistic, arguing that it would take an “indefinite period which must be counted by years rather than by months.” Straus kept pushing to see whether there was any way to avoid deporting Rog, who had no relatives back in Russia and whose children had become successful members of their community, as was attested by the presence of their congressman at the conference. Stoner became impatient by Straus’s line of questioning and argued that there was nothing in the law that said that the officials had to treat Rog or any other immigrant suffering from a loathsome or contagious disease.

  Clearly, Straus wanted the woman admitted, but Watchorn and Sargent argued that any ruling allowing diseased immigrants to land would be seen by steamship companies as an invitation to relax their own standards in Europe. They also sensed that their boss had already made up his mind, so they put their concerns aside and agreed to have the woman treated at the Ellis Island hospital. Chena Rog was permitted to land for medical treatment, practically guaranteeing that she would not be deported.

  Stoner was not happy with the decision and had to have the last word. “I doubt very much whether she will be in any different condition at the end of six months’ treatment than she is today,” the doctor said. In fact, he believed that her condition could worsen and any other diagnosis was sheer folly. Straus ignored Stoner’s speech and went on to the next case.

  Schimen Coblenz was a forty-two-year-old butcher from Lithuania diagnosed with psoriasis, a skin condition. The disease was not particularly attractive, but in no way contagious. However, the law stated that immigrants could be deported for a “loathsome or dangerous contagious disease.” Watchorn ordered him deported because psoriasis was loathsome and would be problematic in his profession as a butcher. If Coblenz were a factory worker, Watchorn argued, the disease would not cause his exclusion.

  The case hinged on whether the law required a disease to be both loathsome and contagious or whether an alien could be deported just for suffering from a loathsome disease. It was clear that the law read “or,” instead of “and,” meaning that a loathsome disease alone could certify an immigrant for exclusion. However, since loathsome was a subjective term, and not a medical one, it was at Straus’s discretion to decide the fate of immigrants diagnosed with such diseases. He was willing to read the law loosely and Coblenz was admitted. Unfortunately, Straus could only appear at Ellis Island on rare occasions. Most of his influence would have to be exerted from Washington. While working late at night on immigration appeals in the library of his enormous Italianate villa on the capital’s stately 16th Street on Meridian Hill, Straus came up with an idea. While his sympathies led him to find every means to allow an immigrant to stay in the country, Straus was also bound by the law. Though faithfully executing the law, he felt pangs of guilt for his role in excluding and deporting immigrants. He knew the devastation such decisions caused. Many immigrants had sold all of their possessions to come to America. Those excluded would return home broken in spirit, as well as financially ruined.

  With this in mind, Straus sent a personal check for several hundred dollars to Watchorn, instructing him to dole out the money to unfortunate immigrants excluded at Ellis Island. Watchorn was to use his judgment in disbursing the funds. The only stipulations were that he was to disburse the funds without regard to “creed, country or race,” and that the source of the money should remain anonymous. The move speaks volumes of Straus’s humanity, as well as the heavy weight on his conscience caused by his work.

  By 1907, it was clear that a perceptible shift in immigration policy had occurred. While the law remained the same, the tone of those in charge of enforcing the law had changed dramatically. Only someone like Theodore Roosevelt could have pulled off such a transformation. The shift was also reflected in the president’s own rhetoric. In most of his earlier Annual Messages to Congress, Roosevelt reiterated his support for the strict regulation of immigrants. In his December 1906 message, he abruptly changed course.

  “Not only must we treat all nations fairly,” Roosevelt wrote, “but we must treat with justice and good will all immigrants who come here under the law. Whether they are Catholic or Protestant, Jew or Gentile; whether they come from England or Germany, Russia, Japan, or Italy, matters nothing.” It was a far cry from his first message, five years earlier, when he called for weeding out immigrants of “low moral tendency” and “unsavory reputation.”

  While many worried that immigrants dragged down the standards of civilization and morality, Roosevelt now saw a different threat. “It is the sure mark of a low civilization, a low morality, to abuse or discriminate against or in any way humiliate such stranger who has come here lawfully and who is conducting himself properly,” he argued. There would be no more talk of immigrants of the wrong sort or preservation of America’s national stock. “I grow extremely indignant at the attitude of coarse hostility to the immigrant taken by so many natives,” Roosevelt wrote editor Lyman Abbott.

  Throughout the first decade of the new century, a more organized, pro-immigrant voice began to be heard. Political organizing on immigration had previously been the sole preserve of the Immigration Restriction League. In 1906, the National Liberal Immigration League was forme
d as a counterweight, opposing any further restrictions on immigration, as well as “all unjust and un-American methods of administering these [current immigration] laws.” Yet even the most liberal immigration defenders did not support a completely open-door policy. The group wanted “to preserve for our country the benefits of immigration while keeping out undesirable immigrants.”

  The new organization’s board included luminaries such as Princeton’s president, Woodrow Wilson; Andrew Carnegie; and the president of Harvard, Charles Eliot. In addition, it was strongly allied with German-American organizations and received funds from Germanowned steamship companies, lending credence to the charge that the pro-immigrant movement consisted largely of businessmen concerned with profits.

  The pro-immigrant group also drew support from Jewish Americans, who wanted to make it easier for their coreligionists to escape religious persecution. Back in the 1890s, the German Jewish community had looked askance at the new immigrants from eastern Europe and many had even favored a strict interpretation of immigration laws. This stemmed partly from the snobbishness of cultivated and assimilated German Jews toward their poorer and more orthodox coreligionists, but also from the fact that needy Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe might become a burden on Jewish charities. It took repeated crackdowns in czarist Russia for America’s German Jews to throw themselves wholeheartedly into the battle against further restriction. The public debate over immigration revolved around how strict the regulation of immigrants should be, not on whether there should be any regulations at all. It was hard to find someone arguing either for completely restricted immigration or for a completely open door. Oscar Straus came close when he told the National Conference on Immigration that “the right to move from one part of the earth to another is a fundamental part of personal liberty.” However, he prefaced the remark by saying, “We all agree there should be some restriction of unnatural immigration.”

  Closer to the general consensus on immigration policy was a 1907 New York Times editorial.

  It is well understood and admitted by all men of enlightened and unprejudiced opinions that selection, not exclusion, should be the guiding principle in any amendments of our immigration laws undertaken by Congress. . . . An immigrant capable of adding to the productive energy of the country is desirable. On the other hand, immigrants who are clearly beyond all dispute undesirable, who would be a burden or a source of danger to health, morals, and the public peace, are already under the ban of our statutes.

  As an official devoted to upholding the law against undesirables as well as staying true to his belief in the positive contributions of immigrants, Robert Watchorn had to maintain a careful balance. As his friend Edward Steiner explained, Watchorn “must be both just and kind, show no preferences and no prejudices, guard the interests of his country and yet be humane to the stranger.” It was a tall task for any individual and perhaps unrealistic to expect anyone to satisfy. Not only did Watchorn need to strike the right balance in enforcing American immigration law, but he also had to manage a difficult workforce. One who tried Watchorn’s patience was Marcus Braun, the president of New York’s Hungarian Republican Club who received his patronage position thanks to his friendship with Roosevelt. In fact, Braun increased his stature when Roosevelt agreed to attend a dinner in his honor put on by Braun in January 1905, which over four hundred people attended.

  With pull like that, Braun was no ordinary inspector. Soon after his appointment, he was sent to Europe to investigate conditions there. He charged that officials of the Hungarian government were scouring the countryside, encouraging people to come to America and making money from steamship tickets, since the government owned the steamship company. Braun implicated high government officials, including Prime Minister Stephen Tisza.

  The charges angered Hungarian authorities, who put Braun under constant surveillance. On a subsequent trip to Budapest in 1905, Braun caught a policeman opening his mail and slapped the man, leading to his arrest. After paying a fine, Braun was released and returned to the United States, where he made the episode public, turning the case into an international diplomatic incident and forcing his patron, President Roosevelt, to privately condemn him for acting with “extreme folly.”

  Upon returning home, Braun was given a month’s leave from Ellis Island, after which time he would have to return to work. However, Braun had little desire for the mundane work of immigration inspection and instead asked for a year’s leave, which was denied. Upon returning to work, Braun refused to wear his blue inspector’s uniform. Instead, he resigned. “He didn’t like the uniform because it was a sign of a condition against which he revolted,” said a frustrated Watchorn.

  Braun’s situation did not elicit much sympathy. The New York Times headlined its editorial on the incident “In Mockery of Marcus.” Yet his political patron, Theodore Roosevelt saved Braun. The president reinstated him to government service and transferred him to the Immigration Bureau along the Canadian border. In early 1906, Braun resigned yet again, only to be reinstated later that year. Only Roosevelt could say whether the support of the Hungarian Republican Club was worth the trouble of dealing with Marcus Braun.

  Theodore Roosevelt showed more judgment when he named Philip Cowen, the editor of the American Hebrew and a second-generation Polish-Jewish-American, as a special inspector at Ellis Island in 1905. In doing so, he bypassed civil service regulations as he had with Joe Murray. For more than twenty years, Cowen would be a presence at the immigration station. When he retired in 1927, the occasion attracted attention from as far away as Germany, where Adolf Hitler called Cowen’s presence at Ellis Island proof that American immigration policy was under the control of “Pan-Jewry.”

  Another appointment largely went unnoticed at the time. Unlike Cowen, this new interpreter at Ellis Island got his job in 1907 through a civil service exam, earning the top score among three test takers on the Croatian language test. In addition to Croatian, this twenty-four-yearold son of Italian immigrants also spoke Italian and Yiddish. Fiorello La Guardia earned $1,200 a year at Ellis Island while attending law school at night.

  La Guardia was clearly a man on the make. At Ellis Island, he was one of the many men and women who served as an important link between English-speaking inspectors and confused, non-English-speaking immigrants. When a young child named Louis Pittman was forced to stay at the Ellis Island hospital for seventeen months until his trachoma healed, he received periodic visits from a short, round-faced La Guardia bearing gifts of chocolate for Pittman and other sick children.

  La Guardia found his coworkers “kindly and considerate,” a big change from the earlier patronage era. His superiors found La Guardia a good worker who showed a keen interest in his job, even if he did manage to lose his official badge once, forcing Washington to send a replacement. In recommending La Guardia for a pay raise, Robert Watchorn described him as “energetic, intelligent, and familiar with a number of foreign languages.” Yet he also noted that La Guardia was “inclined to be peppery.” Perhaps the weight of troubles he witnessed at Ellis Island wore on La Guardia, since Watchorn noted that the young interpreter was “inclined to be argumentative” with members of the boards of special inquiry, no doubt in defense of immigrants.

  An acquaintance of young Fiorello described his personality as “a magnificent unrest coupled with a desire to be a leader on his own terms.” La Guardia was a child of the new America and had little sympathy with the daily rigors through which his country put newcomers. “I never managed during the years I worked there to become callous to the mental anguish, the disappointment and the despair I witnessed almost daily,” he wrote years later. As a low-level bureaucrat, he chafed at his own lack of power and at an immigration system of which he was a part, but for which he had little respect. His uncompromising personality and budding social conscience, as well as his relatively low salary, made his position untenable.

  After three years at Ellis Island and now armed with a law degree, La Guardia struck o
ut on his own, hanging a proverbial shingle in a small downtown Manhattan law office. His early practice was largely made up of representing immigrants ordered deported, referred to him by his former colleagues. Though many lawyers who plied this trade took advantage of their greenhorn clients, La Guardia did not—not at $10 a case. Years later, many of his clients would pull the lever in the voting booth to make La Guardia mayor of New York City.

  T HE IMMIGRATION PROBLEM WAS a conflict between abstract laws and the individual tragedies those laws sometimes created. Thanks to technological improvements in photography, this human element could now be brought directly to average Americans as they sat at home reading the newspaper or one of the growing number of magazines aimed at middle-class audiences.

  For Americans who did not have close contact with immigrants, their vision of these newcomers often came from cartoons drawn by unsympathetic hands. Cartoons featured negative characteristics drawn in an exaggerated manner to reinforce stereotypes: the sneering Italian with a dagger, the Jew with a hooked nose, the anarchist immigrant hiding a bomb. The immigrant’s foreignness was often highlighted, as was his general undesirability.

  Jacob Riis, an immigrant and close friend of Theodore Roosevelt, had already showed the power of photos when his portrayals of life in New York’s tenement district were published in the 1890 book How the Other Half Lives. To arouse public sentiment for tenement reform or public parks, Riis portrayed the worst aspects of immigrant life—filth, overcrowding, and child exploitation.

  In the early years of the twentieth century, middle-class readers began to encounter the faces of the masses that would be transformed into new American citizens. Sometimes these new immigrants would be staring straight into the camera, while others were photographed in profile. Few had smiles on their faces and many had hardened or faraway looks in their eyes. The immigrants were usually anonymous. Photo captions read simply “Russian bookbinder,” “Hungarian farm laborer” or “Pollack girls.” An exception was the Mittelstadt family from Germany—father Jacob, wife, daughter, and seven sons, all lined up from tallest to shortest. “Seven soldiers lost to the Kaiser,” proudly read the New York Times caption.