Henry Curran, commissioner of immigration for the Port of New York, had been at his job long enough to know what to expect when a group of visitors came to Ellis Island in July 1925. He knew what they’d ask, and he knew how to answer.
A reform Republican in a city not quite suited either to reform or to Republicans, he had been badly beaten in New York’s mayoral election in 1921, then rewarded for both his party loyalty and his skills as an administrator when he was placed in charge of the portal that welcomed 70 percent of the immigrants coming to the United States. Since its opening in 1892, the Ellis Island facility had grown to twenty-seven acres of inspection centers, detention areas, and hospitals. Built to process 5,000 people a day, at times it had to handle twice that number. Many of them exhausted and frightened, most of them impoverished, crowds of immigrants were funneled through a series of examination and processing stations. Those detained for further assessment were housed in dormitories—a series of enormous rooms divided into wire cages, frequently ridden with bedbugs, intended to accommodate 1,800 individuals but at times occupied by several hundred more. In one year the Public Health Service hospital on Ellis Island treated more than 10,000 immigrants hoping to traverse that final, single mile to a life in the United States. Over the years more than 3,000 died in the hospital, their voyage incomplete.
On the base of the nearby Statue of Liberty, Emma Lazarus’s famous poem invited the world to “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” On July 1, 1925, when Henry Curran gave a tour for this particular set of visitors, many Americans still found a certain nobility, a confirmation of the nation’s promise, in Lazarus’s words and the images they evoked. By now, it was likely that even more citizens perceived evidence of menace, and threat, and inevitable national decline.
Among Curran’s guests, those in the latter group couldn’t help but be surprised by what they encountered on that fair summer Wednesday on the edge of New York’s bustling harbor. “A visitor making a return trip to Ellis Island today after a lapse of several years would have difficulty in recognizing it,” wrote an Associated Press reporter. Twenty ships discharged their passengers on the island on July 1 two years earlier; on this day only two steamed into port. In the main hall built to accommodate raucous thousands, fewer than six hundred newcomers stood in orderly lines. Where the visitors had expected filth, Curran presented scenes of what he called “spotless cleanliness” and an atmosphere of “fresh air untainted by odors.” Where they might have expected a polyglot babel of Italian and Yiddish and Slavic tongues so foreign as not to be recognizable, or even imaginable, a serene quiet prevailed.
These newcomers, in fact, hardly seemed foreign at all. So when one of Curran’s befuddled guests asked, “And who are all these people? Are they immigrants?” Curran offered the reply that he knew would surprise and delight his guests: “Today there is not one immigrant in a thousand who does not dress, walk, and generally look so much like an American that ‘you will believe they are all really Americans.’ ”
In at least one way, they were. Since the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, which had gone into effect exactly one year before Curran gave his tour, the incoming population had changed to conform to a very specific American image. Just four years earlier, 76 percent of all immigrants had come from the nations of southern and eastern Europe—from Italy and Greece, Poland and Russia, and the other nations jammed between the Baltic and Mediterranean Seas. Now the same countries accounted for a scant 11 percent of the newcomers.
Henry Curran was not by nature a bigot; serving later in his career as deputy mayor to the half-Italian, half-Jewish Fiorello La Guardia, he would celebrate “the ethnological crazy quilt” that had made New York “an electric, pulsing miniature of the world.” But in 1925 Curran said that “the immigrants of today are of a better kind” than those who had come ashore on Ellis Island over the previous two decades. “They are better by reason of our new immigration law; the cause and effect are direct.”
What he didn’t say was what a major national figure had written four years earlier: “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend.” He was not alone. The editors of the nation’s most popular magazine had said continued immigration from southern and eastern Europe would compel America to “join the lowly ranks of the mongrel races.” The leader of one of the nation’s most esteemed scientific institutions had argued that “through science we have discovered” that neither education nor environment could alter the “profound and inborn racial differences” that rendered certain peoples inferior. The chairman of the congressional committee that drafted the new law was especially direct: the former argument for immigration restriction had been economic, he said, but now “the fundamental reason for it is biological.”
It was an idea that had been gaining credence for years, supported by some of the nation’s leading scientific institutions, amplified by political activists both reactionary and progressive, and soon embedded in the popular consciousness. Long-standing hatreds, and the moment’s political exigencies, had assured that a version of the Immigration Act of 1924 would pass. But science—“biological laws”—imported from England and then popularized in the United States had made the arguments in support of it respectable and its consequences enduring. The newcomers who would arrive in years to come, said Henry Curran, “will be the kind we are glad to welcome.”