American Passage Page 26

  Irving Lipsitch tried to intervene on behalf of Meter. He admitted that the diagnosis at first appeared damning, but went on to note that “if reduced to plain language,” it “simply means that the immigrant is slightly lame.” Lipsitch claimed that Meter was a good tailor and his was an occupation “which does not require him to make much use of his lower extremities, nor does it mean that he has to stand on his feet for any length of time.” Officials did not buy Litsitch’s argument and Meter was deported.

  While HIAS continued to appeal immigrant cases, Max Kohler stepped up his criticism of immigration officials in harsh tones. In a well-publicized speech, he declared that America was “in the midst of a new ‘Know-Nothing Era’ and only a campaign of education can safeguard the best interests of the country and maintain the ‘open door’ to continued national prosperity.”

  He noted that the exclusion rates of Jewish immigrants were increasing, although still less than 2 percent of all arrivals. More than two-thirds of Jewish exclusions were deemed likely to become a public charge. That number was roughly in keeping with overall rates for all groups, but to Kohler it was occurring because “of ever newer misconstructions of the law, furtively forced upon inspectors at Ellis Island, day by day, breaking down their judicial attitude and creating an atmosphere of uncertainty and anarchy and cowed timidity.” Kohler was not going to let Williams off the hook.

  Not all Jewish leaders followed the adversarial lead of Kohler. Responding to Kohler’s speech, an editorial in the Times stated that it would have “been more effective if he had adopted a somewhat less controversial tone.” Others went even further. Nissim Behar, one of the leaders of the National Liberal Immigration League, defended Williams. “Nothing is gained by making absurd charges,” Behar warned. “No man could please everybody and do his full duty.”

  Simon Wolf also defended Williams, saying he placed “no stock” in the accusations against him. He instead urged Jewish leaders to work more closely with immigration officials, rather than antagonize them. Irving Lipsitch, who had to deal on a daily basis with Williams, counseled against appealing every case of Jewish immigrants ordered deported. He worried that such an aggressive move might backfire. “I believe that if that were done,” he wrote, “we would lose the privilege.”

  HIAS President Leon Sanders expressed the same fear, telling Kohler there was “much discontent” among officials in Washington with Jewish immigrant aid societies. “It has been hinted also that Jewish societies are making themselves obnoxious by calling upon the Department frequently and repeatedly for trivial matters,” wrote Sanders.

  Secretary Nagel, who showed himself sympathetic to immigrant appeals, urged immigrant aid societies to work with, not against, government officials. “Your societies are, of course, carrying out your individual views,” he said in a speech before a Jewish group, “but you cannot expect me in my official capacity to accept anything that they say.” He pointed to Simon Wolf as a model for cooperation between government and immigrant advocates. “The way Mr. Wolf approaches us is calculated to get best results because he comes to us fairly, goodnaturedly, and when he is defeated he recognizes our point of view,” he lectured the audience. “This is the spirit in which you ought to come.” He also joked about Wolf ’s continual presence in Nagel’s office. “If we ever miss him,” Nagel said, “we think the world is going to stop.”

  Jewish groups attempted a kind of détente with William Williams when they invited him to address the HIAS annual meeting in January 1910. Jacob Schiff led the applause for Williams, setting “the example of paying due respect to a government official by rising and the audience followed him,” the American Hebrew reported. In turn, Williams extended an olive branch to the crowd. He repeated his basic philosophy of immigration: whereas some Americans believed all immigrants should be let in and others believed few should be allowed to enter, “I agree with neither.” In a surprising turn, the blue-blood Williams told the crowd that he particularly disagreed “with the latter, especially when I see what promising citizens the Jewish immigrants make.”

  The warm feelings did not last long. Following Williams to the podium was a rabbi who addressed the crowd in Yiddish and criticized the debarment of immigrants with poor physiques. “The strong man by his very strength may be a menace to the peace of the country,” the rabbi said, “but the man physically weak may be mentally strong and able to help build up the nation.” Williams “seemed to be under the impression that he was being criticized, which was not exactly the case,” according to the American Hebrew, and grew visibly angry. This cultural and linguistic misunderstanding seemed to have negated any of the initial good will.

  After that, Williams’s relationship with the Jewish community continued to deteriorate. In his 1911 annual report, Williams spoke dismissively of new immigrants, singling out the crowded Italian and Jewish ghettos of lower Manhattan.

  The new immigrants, unlike that of the earlier years, proceed in part from the poorer elements of the countries of southern and eastern Europe and from backward races with customs and institutions widely different from ours and without the capacity of assimilating with our people as did the early immigrants. Many of those coming from these sources have very low standards of living, possess filthy habits, and are of an ignorance which passes belief. Types of the classes referred to representing various alien races and nationalities may be observed in some of the tenement districts of Elizabeth, Orchard, Rivington, and East Houston Streets, New York City. In response, members of the “Citizens Committee of Orchard, Rivington, and East Houston Streets” fired off a letter to President Taft. They called Williams’s remarks “false,” “libelous,” and a “gratuitous insult” and maintained that “no public official should be permitted with impunity to malign a large and populous section of this great city.” Williams denied that he was targeting Jews, but was only stating “economic, industrial, and sociological facts which are open to the observation of anyone.” However, in a 1912 letter to Theodore Roosevelt, Williams complained that many Jews put “the interests of their race before those of their country.”

  HIAS officials continued to lobby the government on behalf of Jewish immigrants. At Ellis Island, immigrants were too often reduced to words on a sheet of paper: transcripts of hearings, summaries of fact by officials, and medical inspection records. Immigrant aid societies were able to add the human element to this often two-dimensional bureaucratic story. Though immigrants were barred from having lawyers represent them at board of special inquiry hearings, men like Irving Lipsitch served as combination defense attorney and lobbyist.

  While it was the job of William Williams and his inspectors to execute the law faithfully, immigrant aid societies became the immigrants’ advocates, tilting the scale in the immigrants’ favor when no one else would.

  WILLIAM WILLIAMS SET OUT to rigorously enforce the law against those he considered undesirable, especially those deemed likely to become public charges. Rather than focusing on markers of personal character to determine desirability, as Theodore Roosevelt had encouraged, Williams increasingly linked undesirability to southern and eastern Europeans. As the enforcement of the law at Ellis Island became tighter and the rhetoric of the commissioner more pointed, opposition to Williams was building. More and more people came to believe that something had to be done to stop “Czar Williams.”

  Chapter 11

  “Czar Williams”

  The more humanely the immigrant is treated at Ellis Island, the more humanely he will deal with us when he becomes the master of our national destiny.

  —Edward Steiner, 1906

  A saint from heaven actuated by all his saintliness would fail to give satisfaction at this place.

  —Robert Watchorn, 1907

  GEORGE THORNT ON HAD THE GOOD FORTUNE T O ARRIVE at Ellis Island in October 1910. The Welsh miner and widower was accompanied by his seven children, ranging in age from two to nineteen. The family had over $100 with them and was headed to George’s sist
er in Pittsburgh. However, George was missing fingers on one of his hands, suffered from a hernia, and was therefore certified as likely to become a public charge. He and his family were ordered excluded.

  It was Thornton’s luck that when William Williams heard the family’s appeal, sitting in the commissioner’s office was all three hundred and twenty pounds of the president of the United States. Theodore Roosevelt had handpicked William Howard Taft to be his successor and continue his policies, so it is no surprise that Taft emulated his predecessor and paid a presidential visit to Ellis Island. If Roosevelt braved torrential rains and near-hurricane-force winds to arrive at Ellis Island, Taft had to make his way by ferry across New York Harbor through dense fog. Once there, Taft threw himself into the visit, spending almost five hours examining the entire process.

  Taft listened to a number of appeals that day and took a special interest in the nicely dressed Thornton family. He proceeded to question the elder Thornton, who was unaware of the identity of his new interrogator inquiring about the singing abilities of the Thornton children. Taft then asked George if he knew who the head of the U.S. government was. “The President,” replied George. Did he know his name? “Mr. William H. Taft,” responded George. The scene must have given the president a good laugh, as he then revealed his identity to the shocked Thornton. “It appears to me that this respectable-looking family . . . will all grow up to be good, self-supporting citizens of the country,” Taft concluded. The family was allowed to land.

  The poignant story of the Thornton family barely saved from deportation by the intervention of the president of the United States was enough of a public-interest story to make the newspapers. However, some people in Wales heard the story and wrote to Williams stating that George Thornton had left the country without paying his debts. When Williams contacted George two months after his arrival, he admitted that he had not been able to secure work and his sister was unable to support the family. So George asked to be deported back to Wales, a wish Williams was no doubt happy to fulfill.

  But President Taft’s personal judgment was on the line, having publicly vouched for the promising character of the family. Therefore, the secretary of Commerce and Labor, Charles Nagel, who had accompanied Taft to Ellis Island on that foggy October day and also strongly urged that the family be allowed to land, intervened to help Thornton find work. The results of Nagel’s efforts were disappointing. “In the Thornton case I have ignominiously surrendered,” Nagel wrote Taft only a few weeks later. “I find that he does not feel able to do work and that the doctors at Ellis Island evidently knew more about the case than we did.”

  These were hard words for Taft to hear. Members of the American Association of Foreign Language Newspapers visited Taft at the White House in January 1911 to voice their concerns about the treatment of immigrants at Ellis Island. In response, the president told the group about his visit there a few months earlier. “I have since followed those cases in which I influenced him [Williams] against his better judgment,” he told the group, “and I am obliged to make the humiliating confession to you that the outcome vindicated him and showed that my judgment was at fault for lack of experience.

  “There are certain parts of this Government that I understand very well, but immigration is new to me,” Taft further admitted, “and it is a subject to which I must give as much study as I can, being dependent, however, on the men whom I have selected to administer the law.” Such humility clearly marked Taft a different political animal than Theodore Roosevelt. It also led Taft to place even more faith in William Williams.

  For the remainder of his term, no matter how heated the criticism got, Taft always stood behind his fellow Yale man. “In selecting Mr. Williams, I have selected a man whom I thought to be a very just and kindly man, and that is what you need there,” Taft told the foreign-born newspapermen. Moreover, Taft offered a mild criticism of the group, noting that when one is “continually pulling a man’s coattail when he is making a speech you can’t expect anything but a poor speech, and so it is with reference to the administration of the Federal law.” As for the Thornton family, Nagel wrote to Taft shortly after this meeting at the White House to inform the president that he had just “reluctantly signed the warrant for his deportation.”

  Never again would Taft meddle in another immigrant case. However, immigrants at Ellis Island did not lack for vocal defenders. During Williams’s second tour of duty, the more he tried to tighten the enforcement of the law, the louder the roar from his critics. In his own mind, William Williams was a fearless upholder of the law who ran Ellis Island as a bulwark against undesirable immigrants. The foreignlanguage press had other ideas. To them, he was a dictator ruling over his fiefdom with an iron fist, enforcing his will upon powerless immigrants and servile employees. He was Czar Williams.

  “A WAY WITH CZARISM AT Ellis Island,” screamed an editorial from the German-language newspaper Morgen Journal. “Bestiality Rampant in the Name of the Law,” cried another. The English-language Evening Journal chimed in with an editorial castigating “Brutality at Ellis Island.” Both papers were owned by William Randolph Hearst and were part of a relentless drumbeat of criticism that Williams would face during his second term at Ellis Island.

  The Morgen Journal listed almost two dozen German-language papers from Baltimore to Cincinnati, from Buffalo to Denver, from Davenport, Iowa to Sandusky, Ohio, that ran editorials condemning the Ellis Island administration. The Chicago Abendpost complained that the members of the boards of special inquiry were “mostly ossified and grouchy bureaucrats of the first order to whom the dead letter of the law is more precious than sound common sense.” The protests against Williams’s rule went beyond the German-American community. A Hungarian paper in Cleveland, the Szabadsag, described “The Terrors of Hell’s Island: The Calvary of an Old Hungarian Couple.”

  O. J. Miller of the German Liberal Immigration Bureau sent out a mass mailing to “Citizens of German Blood” calling attention to the “bias and prejudices of ignorant government hirelings” and the “tyranny” they practiced at Ellis Island. Noting that Jews had “organized a powerful system for the shielding of immigrants of their race from political ruffianism and from the chicane and bias of the immigration officials,” Miller called for German-Americans to do the same. He called for every German organization in the country to demand the resignation of William Williams.

  Groups such as the Alliance of German Societies of the State of Indiana, the Deutsch-Amerikanischer National Bund of East St. Louis, Illinois, and the German-American Alliance of Hartford, Connecticut, all joined the calls for Williams’s resignation. The Brooklyn League of the National German-American Alliance (NGAA) pronounced “the tyrannical and inhuman practices of Commissioner Williams and his staff of inspectors a blot upon civilization.”

  Likening Williams to a “czar” or “pasha” turned the Ellis Island commissioner into a brutal authoritarian who used his power to suppress helpless immigrants. It was imagery designed to raise the hackles of those who had escaped czarist Russia or other monarchical regimes. The use of terms such as “inquisitors,” “star chamber,” and “catacombs” were also meant to hit the raw historical nerves of foreignborn Americans.

  At first, Williams was surprised by all the heat he was taking from German groups. “If this hostility were confined to papers representing south Europeans I could at least understand the philosophy of it all,” he wrote to Charles Nagel. “But we are so fond of Germans, so anxious to have them come here, and we send back and detain such a negligible quantity of those who arrive, that we must look for this hostility elsewhere than in the application of the immigration law to Germans.”

  Nor could Charles Nagel understand it. The overall rate of rejection of immigrants was “smaller than the general public is prepared to hear,” Nagel told President Taft’s secretary. He believed that Germans and Jews, the two ethnic groups complaining the loudest about Williams, “have fared if anything better than any other race.”


  German immigration had slowed. Between 1900 and 1913, nearly 1 million Germans entered the country, but that was only 7.7 percent of all immigrants. In the great divide between old and new immigrants, Germans fell on the right side of the equation. By the early twentieth century, most Americans saw Germans as hearty pioneers who were easy to assimilate, especially when compared to Italians, Greeks, or Russian Jews. Teutonic blood was seen as relatively compatible with that of Anglo-Saxons, as people like Henry Cabot Lodge remembered the origins of their beloved Saxons.

  German immigrants had a slim chance of being excluded and were kept out at a rate lower than the average. Between 1904 and 1912, less than 1 percent of all German immigrants were excluded. GermanAmericans would have noticed that the percentage of exclusions was increasing, although that began before William Williams returned to Ellis Island. Still, this was hardly a crusade against German immigrants. There had to be some other reason for these ferocious attacks on Ellis Island.

  Harper’s Weekly asked: “Who Is Stirring Up the Germans?” William Williams and the magazine both agreed that the answer could only be explained by the influence of German-owned steamship companies. As Williams stepped up deportations, each one cost the steamship companies $100 in fines, plus the cost of shipping the excluded immigrant back home. Williams may have contributed to the heartache of immigrants concerned about passing through the inspection process, but he was also making a dent in the finances of the steamship companies.

  The stricter enforcement of immigration law may not have seriously affected German immigrants, but there was no denying that Williams was now turning away more immigrants at Ellis Island. He believed that Robert Watchorn, with the approval and oversight of Secretary Oscar Straus, had kept the gates at Ellis Island wide open.

  Between 1907 and 1909, less than 1 percent of all immigrants arriving at Ellis Island were rejected. Williams had set out to rectify that situation, and the numbers demonstrate his success. In 1910, Williams’s first full year back at Ellis Island, the rate of exclusions doubled to 1.8 percent of all arrivals. That would decrease over the next three years but never dip below 1 percent, as it had under Watchorn. Immigrants faced tougher scrutiny at Ellis Island than they would at any other major inspection station in the country, with the exception of those along the Mexican and Canadian borders.