After the original wooden inspection station on Ellis Island burned down in 1897, it was replaced by the iconic brick and limestone building that still stands there today.
15
IMMIGRANTS ABOARD THEIR transatlantic steamships often responded with tears or shouts of joy when they first spotted the Statue of Liberty, but as their steamers chugged past the bronze marvel, a more foreboding sight came into view. “There’s Ellis Island,” Russian immigrant Kyra Goritzina remembered one of the passengers on her ship exclaiming as it approached the city. “‘Ellis Island!’ I echoed, and my heart sank. ‘This dreadful, unavoidable Ellis Island!’” Italian immigrants often referred to Ellis Island as l’Isola dell Lagrime, the “Island of Tears.”1
The island that endless boatfuls of tourists now visit to rediscover their immigrant roots was for their ancestors a terrifying gauntlet of physical and oral examinations. Before the immigration station opened there, the inspection of immigrants at Castle Garden had been relatively perfunctory. Doctors might send sick arrivals to quarantine on Staten Island, but once recovered, they could enter the city and begin new lives. Yet from 1875 to 1917, Congress created an increasingly long list of conditions that might bar a potential immigrant from entering the United States. Medical problems, political beliefs, even one’s occupation or employment status could cause inspectors to turn an immigrant away. The officials at Ellis Island could even reject an immigrant who had been living in New York for years if he had not yet become a citizen and had left the United States temporarily to visit his homeland. The immigrants viewed their arrival at Ellis Island, in the words of a journalist who made the crossing in steerage with them, as “the nearest earthly likeness to the final Day of Judgment, when we have to prove our fitness to enter Heaven.”2
The first restrictive immigration legislation, the Page Act of 1875, is known primarily as the law that banned the landing of Chinese “cooly” laborers—indentured workers not free to keep the fruits of their labor. The act also banned prostitutes and those still serving sentences for “felonious crimes” (an attempt by Congress to prevent foreign nations from emptying out their prisons by paroling their convicted felons in exchange for the promise to emigrate).
In 1882 Congress enacted additional restrictions. The most infamous was the so-called Chinese Exclusion Act, which “suspended” for ten years the admission of Chinese laborers to the United States. Because aspiring Chinese immigrants tried to evade the law by claiming to be students, merchants, or the adult children of already established Chinese American businessmen, this statute resulted in the creation of a significant immigrant inspection regime meant to ferret out such deceit. But because nearly all Chinese immigrants landed on the West Coast, this statute had little impact on the inspectors at Castle Garden.
More important for Castle Garden was another statute enacted in 1882. It barred the landing of convicts (except those guilty of political offenses), lunatics, “idiots,” and “any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” In 1885 Congress expanded the list of banned immigrants to include those who had accepted a job in America before actually arriving in the United States. Labor unions had pushed for this “contract labor” law because they feared that if immigrants were allowed to sign labor contracts before reaching America’s shores, the newcomers would accept wages lower than the prevailing American pay rate. Union leaders insisted that immigrant contract laborers drove down the wages of those already living in the United States.3
During the 1880s, as immigration reached record levels, many Americans became convinced (not wholly inaccurately) that the government’s screeners at Castle Garden were political hacks “unfit for their work.” The requirement for obtaining and keeping their jobs was party loyalty, not competence. A Treasury Department investigation also found that the state board that ran Castle Garden allowed politically connected food and transportation concession holders to fleece the immigrants. Castle Garden was “a delusion to the public and a snare to the immigrant,” testified an employee of an immigrant aid society at a Treasury Department hearing on the matter. Congress then ordered its own inquiries, which concluded that “large numbers of persons not lawfully entitled to land in the United States are annually received at this port.” The “method and system now followed” to identify and return barred immigrants, the congressmen concluded, “was a perfect farce.”4
Another complaint about Castle Garden was that its employees gave free rein to “immigrant runners,” even though the immigration station there had been created expressly to protect the immigrants from these swindlers. A federal official sent to reform Castle Garden’s operations recalled that as soon as immigration officers released a shipload of immigrants from the facility, the runners would sprint “towards the affrighted aliens, calling out their respective boarding houses, pulling and hauling the poor dazed creatures this way and that, frequently quarreling among themselves over some confused, bewildered victim. After herding them in groups they were finally marched off to their temporary quarters where they could be plucked at leisure.”
Boardinghouse runners were not the only waiting predators. Con artists might pretend to come from the same part of Italy or the Pale as the immigrants in order to cheat them out of their precious savings. “Thieves, blackmailers, and agents of bawdy-houses made their harvest on many a hapless immigrant,” in particular women traveling alone, reported a Catholic priest in 1899. The Catholic Church set up a mission directly across the street from Castle Garden in an attempt to protect single women from “these scheming wretches” who might trick female immigrants into a life of crime or prostitution.5
Federal authorities came to the conclusion that conditions at Castle Garden were irreparable. In the spring of 1890 they canceled the contract under which they paid New York State employees to process the immigrants and took over the job themselves. Treasury Department officials temporarily moved the immigration station to the west end of the Battery to a building known as the Barge Office while they searched for a better permanent location. Seeking a site that would be beyond the reach of the runners and that would isolate the newcomers from the rest of the American population until they had been deemed eligible to enter the country, the authorities decided to place the new immigration station on an island in the harbor. They chose Ellis Island.6
Ellis Island sits one mile west-southwest of the southern tip of Manhattan, much closer to New Jersey than to New York. Dutch settlers had referred to it as Little Oyster Island because it sat amidst a huge oyster reef. (The nearby island on which the Statue of Liberty would later sit was known as “Great Oyster Island.”) In the eighteenth century, a New Yorker named Samuel Ellis bought the island, which is how it got its modern name. The Ellis family later sold the property to the State of New York for use as part of the harbor’s defenses. A few years later, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, the state decided that defense against foreign invaders was a federal responsibility and transferred ownership to the federal government. For the next several decades, the island was best known as the place where those convicted of federal capital offenses such as piracy were executed. From mid-century on, the military used it as a munitions depot.7
As construction progressed on the immigration station for Ellis Island, Congress decided to give even more duties to the inspectors who would work there. The Immigration Act of 1891 added paupers, polygamists, and anyone ever convicted of a felony or a “misdemeanor involving moral turpitude” to the list of those banned from entering the United States. (Previously, a felon who had finished serving his or her term of punishment was acceptable.) Perhaps most important, the new law also banned “persons suffering from a loathsome or a dangerous contagious disease.” Before that, a sick person could receive medical treatment and enter the country once cured. Now these would-be immigrants would be returned to their country of origin. The law mandated thorough medical inspections to weed out the sick and infirm, formal hearings for those deemed ineligible to enter the United States, and the provision of housing, food, and other care for immigrants—at the government’s expense—while they waited for those hearings (and any appeals) to take place. Congress designated the secretary of the treasury as the final arbiter of all appeals regarding an immigrant’s eligibility to enter the country. Finally, the new act gave the government one year from arrival to deport any immigrant who entered the country in violation of these laws, so that if new evidence of ineligibility came to light after the newcomer left Ellis Island, or if the immigrant became a “public charge” within a year of arrival, he or she could still be deported.8
When seventeen-year-old Annie Moore stepped ashore on January 1, 1892, as the first of 12 million immigrants who would eventually be processed at Ellis Island, she did not enter the iconic brick and limestone building that we associate with the island today. The Fifty-first Congress, known as the “Billion Dollar Congress” for its spendthrift ways, was uncharacteristically tightfisted when it came to appropriating money for the Ellis Island immigration station. The Treasury Department officials in charge of the project decided that, given their limited budget, they would sacrifice impressive design and superior building materials in favor of square footage. As a result, the Tribune reported, the new immigration station, “though of gigantic proportions,” was “little more than a big business shed.” The station’s main building, constructed with 4 million board feet of Georgia pine and measuring 404 feet long, 154 feet wide, and three stories high, could accommodate twice as many inspectors as Castle Garden. The immigrants would store their baggage, buy food and train tickets, and undergo medical inspections on the first floor and then proceed to the second floor for questioning and registration by immigration inspectors. But the press predicted that with thousands of people passing through the wooden structure each day, it could not possibly last very long.9
How right they were. Shortly after midnight on June 15, 1897, a huge fire destroyed the massive wooden building and virtually everything else on Ellis Island. “The fire ate its way ravenously through every part of the big structure,” reported the Times, but miraculously, no one was killed or even injured in the enormous blaze. This was because the commissioner of the station was so certain it was a firetrap that he directed that a ferry, with full steam up, be stationed at the docks all night, every night, so the immigrants detained there and the employees who supervised them could escape in just such an emergency.10
The most tragic loss resulting from the fire was the destruction of the registry books listing every immigrant who had landed in New York since the opening of Castle Garden in 1855. These huge leather-bound volumes had been sitting safely in Albany for decades, but Ellis Island officials demanded that they be transferred to them so that if arriving foreign-born passengers claimed that they already resided in the United States, the registers could be consulted to verify their stories. The loss of these registers, which were significantly more detailed than the passenger manifests provided by the crews of the ships the immigrants sailed on, is a tragedy for anyone trying to trace the stories of immigrant ancestors who arrived in New York in the latter half of the nineteenth century.11
After the fire, immigrants were initially processed on the piers of Manhattan and then once again at the Barge Office on the Battery until the Ellis Island facilities could be rebuilt. This time, Congress appropriated sufficient funds to build a more impressive and durable structure. The legislators also allocated money to increase the size of the island to seventeen acres so that additional buildings could be constructed. The Treasury Department quickly organized an architectural competition for the new buildings, and the winners were a pair of young architects, William Boring and Edward Lippincott Tilton, who had trained at McKim, Mead & White but had few finished buildings to their credit when they snagged the Ellis Island commission. The main building they designed was almost precisely the same size as the one it replaced and was laid out almost identically, with baggage, food, and transfers being handled on the first floor, inspections and registration on the second floor, and administrative offices and a gallery overlooking the inspection area on the third level, capped with towers at each corner of the structure. The exterior, with its mixture of classical and French and Italian motifs, exemplifies the Beaux-Arts style, named for the art school in Paris where both Boring and Tilton had studied architecture. The building set just the right tone—governmental but not grandiose, serious but not somber. The architects won gold medals for their design at both the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1900 and the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901. The inspection of immigrants in the new station began on December 17, 1900.12
After the original wooden inspection station on Ellis Island burned down in 1897, it was replaced by the iconic brick and limestone building that still stands there today.
For nearly every immigrant, the inspection process was an anxiety-laden experience. For some, like Kyra Goritzina, it was downright terrifying. More often than not, the steamship passengers would not go to Ellis Island immediately upon entering the harbor but would have to remain overnight aboard their ship before the immigration station was ready to process them. This last night, spent so close to America and yet so far, given the uncertain reception that awaited, was incredibly stressful, creating a ship full of insomniacs. According to a journalist who traveled in steerage to report on the experience, “nobody had slept the night before” their arrival at Ellis Island.13
Even before they could set foot on shore, the immigrants had to undergo a health inspection so that no one with a potentially lethal contagious disease could spread it at the immigration station. A physician from the Marine Hospital Service (later renamed the Public Health Service) would climb a ladder from a launch to board the immigrants’ ocean liner and search for any signs of cholera, typhus, or other deadly diseases. Sometimes these medical inspections took place in the middle of the night so that the passengers could land at Ellis Island first thing the next morning. Those found to have these illnesses were sent to the quarantine hospital on Staten Island. In such cases, the whole shipload of passengers would have to wait several days in the harbor so that those who might have been infected but were not yet exhibiting symptoms could be identified and quarantined. For many immigrants, this exam was their third medical inspection—the first having been administered by the railway that carried them across Europe, and the second by the steamship company at the port.
Before the immigrants could leave the ship, the crew would gather them on deck, call out their names from the ship manifest, and, when each one stepped forward, pin a large piece of paper to the person’s clothing with a letter and a number on it. Tags with the same letters and numbers would be pasted onto every piece of luggage the immigrants carried. The letter on the tag allowed officials on Ellis Island to identify the ship on which the immigrants and their baggage had traveled, while the number corresponded to each passenger’s place on that ship’s manifest. Finally, dockworkers or sailors herded the arrivals, carrying all their worldly possessions, onto barges or ferries that would take them to Ellis Island. “In the work of hustling the immigrants aboard the barges,” one journalist observed, “the dock men displayed great unnecessary roughness, sometimes shoving them violently, prodding them with sticks, etc.”14
If the processing of immigrants began to back up, they might have to wait, standing on the barges (or sitting on their luggage) for hours until the lines inside the immigration station subsided. “Waiting, waiting, waiting, without food and without water; or, if there was water, we could not get to it on account of the crush of people,” wrote journalist Broughton Brandenburg, describing his experience with a boatload of Italian immigrants. “Children cried, mothers strove to hush them, the musically inclined sang or played, and then the sun went down while we waited and still waited.” Sometimes the inspectors’ workday would end before all the immigrants could be processed and they would be brought back to their ship to spend another night. But more often than not, the inspectors would work overtime until everyone transported to Ellis Island that day had been processed. In Brandenburg’s account in mid-October 1903, only well after sunset did the barge hands drag out the gangplank and lower the restraining ropes, at which point “the weary hundreds, shouldering their baggage yet once again, poured out of the barge on to the wharf” at Ellis Island.15
On a typical day it could take anywhere from two to five hours from the time the immigrants left their ship to the completion of their processing, but given the anxiety and the interminable waiting, it seemed much longer. “The day I spent on Ellis Island was an eternity,” recalled Louis Adamic of his inspection there in December 1913. “Rumors were current among immigrants of several nationalities that some of us would be refused admittance into the United States and sent back to Europe. For several hours I was in a cold sweat on this account, although, so far as I knew, all my papers were in order.”16
Once landed on Ellis Island, the immigrants left their luggage outside the main building and headed inside for inspection, which began with the medical examination. The exam was performed not by one doctor but in assembly-line fashion by more than a dozen officials stationed at various points along the line that led to the Registry Room on the second floor.* First, the immigrants had to produce a medical certificate indicating that they had received a smallpox vaccination before boarding their ship. Next, they filed past inspectors who looked for signs of physical ailments that might prevent the immigrant from finding work in America. Dr. Alfred Reed, who examined immigrants at Ellis Island for many years, explained that as each immigrant approached each physician, he or she would study “the gait, attitude, presence of flat feet, lameness, stiffness at ankle, knee, or hip, malformations of the body, observes the neck for goitre, muscular development, scars, enlarged glands, texture of skin, and finally as the immigrant comes up face to face, the examiner notes abnormalities of the features, eruptions, scars, paralysis, expression, etc.” Poor posture might indicate a bad back. A limp could be a sign of a permanent deformity of the lower extremities. Holding one’s head at an odd angle might be evidence of a neck ailment.
Even as the immigrant passed this inspector, the examination continued, as the view from the side offered the doctor a glimpse of the ears, scalp, side of neck, and hands, which might be examined for signs of paralysis or deformity. “If anything about the individual seems suspicious,” Reed reported, “he is asked several questions.” This was one of the ways the examiners fulfilled the requirement to screen for “lunatics” and “idiots.” “Often simple questions in addition and multiplication are propounded,” recounted another Ellis Island physician, Dr. Eugene Mullan. “Should the immigrant appear stupid and inattentive to such an extent that mental defect is suspected,” said Mullan, the immigrant would receive a more thorough mental examination from a different physician in another part of the building. Unlike the inspectors in the Registry Room, who were hired for their facility with languages, the doctors were rarely fluent in the immigrants’ native tongues, and would instead memorize the questions they typically asked in the most common immigrant languages. Often they could not understand the answers, but this fact did not concern them. Rather, they used the speed and tone of the answer, as well as the facial expression of the immigrant, as the main criteria by which to discern a potential mental defect.
Because the doctors who looked for signs of such ailments had to keep the line moving as quickly as possible, they did not pull aside those suspected of having these conditions. Instead they would mark the immigrants’ clothing on the right shoulder with chalk so that the individual could be pulled out of the line later on for a more comprehensive examination before reaching the Registry Room. Scrawling a “B” on an immigrant’s shoulder indicated a suspected back problem; “F” stood for face, “Ft” feet, “G” goiter, “K” hernia, “L” lameness, “N” neck, “S” senility, “Sc” scalp, “X” mental illness (a circled “X” meant acute mental problems). Some suspected ailments, such as “hand,” “measles,” “nails,” “skin,” “temperature,” and “vision,” would be written out in full on the immigrant’s clothing.17
Soon the immigrants reached a second doctor. “This examiner is known in service parlance as ‘the eye man,’” Mullan reported. He stood with his back to a window so that he could use the natural light to examine the immigrants’ eyes. First he looked directly into each eye for signs of opaque corneas or other common eye diseases. Then, using either his thumb and forefinger or a buttonhook-like medical instrument, the doctor would pull the immigrant’s lower eyelid away from the face to look for signs of conjunctivitis or trachoma, a bacterial infection of the eye whose telltale symptom was roughening of the inner eyelid. In the days before antibiotics, trachoma was considered one of the “loathsome” diseases that rendered an immigrant ineligible to enter the United States.
Because of the desire to process the immigrants as quickly as possible, Ellis Island eye doctors did not typically bother to wash their hands or clean their instruments between the examination of successive immigrants. Perhaps the physicians believed that steerage passengers were already so dirty that they did not deserve anything better. Even laymen understood that the physicians might be infecting healthy immigrants through their lax practices. “I was struck by the way in which the doctors made the [trachoma] examinations with dirty hands and with no pretense to clean the instruments,” complained President Theodore Roosevelt to his secretary of commerce and labor, Victor Metcalf, after touring Ellis Island in 1906. “It would seem to me that these examinations as conducted would themselves be a fruitful source of carrying infection from diseased to healthy people.”18
Inspectors at Ellis Island pulling back eyelids to check for trachoma and other eye diseases.
Nearly 80 percent of the immigrants denied entry to the United States for medical reasons suffered from trachoma. “When they learned their fate, they were stunned,” recalled Fiorello La Guardia, who worked as an interpreter at Ellis Island before he entered politics. “They had never felt ill. They had never heard the word trachoma. They could see all right.” Worst of all, La Guardia wrote, were the cases in which a family had sold virtually everything it owned to come to America, only to find that one member of the family had the disease. “Sometimes, if it was a young child who suffered from trachoma, one of the parents had to return to the native country with the rejected member of the family,” an especially grim prospect because often “they had no homes to return to.” But because of the potential for trachoma to spread, especially from child to child during play, inspectors considered its discovery a cause for mandatory exclusion. Only in 1919 did Congress pass a law requiring trachoma examinations at ports of embarkation.19
The 15 to 20 percent of immigrants who received a chalk mark in these initial inspections were led to the examination rooms of the Public Health Service. Those whose suspected ailment was physical—the vast majority—were segregated by sex, with the men going to one room and the women to another. Here, again, an assembly line of examinations took place. “The line of male immigrants approached the first medical officer with their trousers open,” recounted the British ambassador, Aukland Geddes, after a tour of this part of the immigration station in 1922. “The doctor examined their external genitals for signs of venereal infection. Next he examined the inguinal canals for hernia. The doctor wore rubber gloves. I saw him ‘do’ nine or ten men. His gloves were not cleansed between cases.” At other stations within the room these immigrants had their heart and lungs examined, their scalp and eyes checked, and so forth. Laboratory specimens were taken for analysis if necessary.20
Women, often with their children in tow, went through a similar procedure in their examination room. They had to strip to the waist, and until 1913 this was done in front of male doctors, which the female immigrants found mortifying. Even once female doctors became the exclusive examiners of female immigrants, most of the women considered the process excruciating. The exam “was so embarrassing for me,” recalled an Austrian immigrant years later. “I wasn’t even twenty-one, very bashful, and there were these big kids [both male and female] running around, but you had to do it.” Some of these children recognized how humiliating the process was for their parents. “My mother had never, ever undressed in front of us,” Enid Jones from Wales remembered of her experience as a ten-year-old in the female examination room. “In those days nobody ever would. She was so embarrassed.”21
Those immigrants whom inspectors had marked with an “X” were sent to the “mental room.” It held two desks where doctors sat and benches to accommodate more than one hundred waiting immigrants. Here the newcomers underwent an interview and were asked to count and do simple addition. Beginning in the mid-1910s, those suspected of mental retardation also had to pass the Knox Cube Test. This was one of many tests developed by Ellis Island physician Howard Knox to measure intelligence without requiring any oral communication with the immigrant, who might speak only an obscure language or dialect. In this test, an examiner moved a black cube in a certain pattern over four differently colored cubes attached to a board on the desk. The immigrant then had to move the black cube across the colored cubes in the same order as the inspector had.
Eighty percent of the immigrants sent to the “mental room” immediately satisfied the doctors that they were not suffering from a mental “defect,” and were either returned to the line snaking toward the Registry Room or asked to undergo a physical exam if the doctors believed that the symptoms that had originally been flagged as mental might instead reflect a physical ailment. The remainder would be held for a day or more to undergo a thorough battery of mental testing. Of the group kept overnight, doctors would eventually declare about 10 percent (1 percent of those originally marked with an “X”) “feebleminded” or “insane” (a group that in this era also included epileptics). All in all, Ellis Island officials turned away about one in every ten thousand immigrants owing to mental “defects” from 1892 through 1909 and one in every 750 from 1910 until the end of World War I.22
The dramatic increase in the number of immigrants classified as mentally ill was due partly to the fact that Congress in the first decade of the twentieth century expanded the list of criteria that inspectors could use to turn away immigrants. In 1903 Congress added epileptics, beggars, anarchists, and importers of prostitutes to the list of undesirables. In addition, the length of time immigration officials were given to deport such newcomers after their initial admission to the country increased to two years, and the “head tax” assessed per immigrant was doubled to $2. In 1907 Congress further expanded the definition of mental “defects” beyond idiocy and lunacy to include “imbeciles” and “feebleminded” persons (“idiot” was the term used for someone with severe mental retardation, an “imbecile” was someone with moderate mental handicaps, and a “feebleminded” person had mild mental impairments), thus increasing the number of immigrants liable to be barred from entry. The new law also banned the immigration of unaccompanied minors. With other prohibitions added by these two laws, there were now twenty separate reasons for an immigrant to be rejected at Ellis Island. Furthermore, the 1907 statute doubled the head tax yet again, to $4. Supporters expressly suggested that this higher landing fee (which immigrants paid when purchasing their steamship ticket) would prevent poor immigrants from entering the United States, thereby reducing immigration overall. The new law also increased to three years the period during which immigration officials could deport immigrants who became public charges or were subsequently found to be unqualified for entry. Some in Congress attempted to go even further by proposing that immigrants be required to show Ellis Island inspectors that they had $25 (the equivalent of about $650 today) in order to enter the country. Families of two or more would have to produce twice that amount. But this provision was stripped from the bill before it became law.23
The impact of these new laws would depend on the guidance immigration inspectors received concerning how to interpret and enforce the statutes. Early in his presidency (1901–1909), Theodore Roosevelt had expressed the fear that Americans were committing “race suicide” by admitting so many southern and eastern European immigrants of “low moral tendency” while native-born Americans were having fewer and fewer children. In his first State of the Union message, in 1901, Roosevelt called for both an “educational test” for immigrants as well as “economic tests” to exclude those “who are below a certain standard of economic fitness.” Of course, newcomers from southern and eastern Europe would be the ones most likely to fail these tests. But by the fall of 1903, after complaints from the immigrant press, the president had begun to reconsider, and by the middle of his second term in office, Roosevelt had changed his tone entirely. “We must treat with justice and good will all immigrants who come here under the law,” the president wrote in his State of the Union message in December 1906.* “Whether they are Catholic or Protestant, Jew or Gentile; whether they come from England or Germany, Russia, Japan, or Italy, matters nothing.”24
Roosevelt’s evolving attitude toward the “new immigration” from southern and eastern Europe was exemplified by his selection in 1906 of Oscar Straus, a Jewish immigrant from New York, as his secretary of commerce and labor, the department that had taken over the administration of immigration law from the Treasury Department. Straus, the youngest of five children, was born in 1850 in what is now southwest Germany. When he was four and a half years old, he, his mother, and siblings immigrated to the United States to join Straus’s father, who had arrived two years earlier. They settled in a small town in west-central Georgia, where they became merchants. After the Civil War they relocated to New York City, where, according to the Times, Oscar’s father, Lazarus, became one of the most successful importers of “china, pottery, glassware, clocks, and bronzes . . . in the world.” Unlike his older brothers Nathan and Isidor, who entered the family business, Oscar went to college, receiving from Columbia both his undergraduate degree in 1871 and a law diploma two years later. Straus became a successful commercial litigator, specializing in railway cases, until he left his legal practice in 1881 to join the family business. The company later branched out into retailing, acquiring a struggling New York department store called R. H. Macy & Co. and turning it into one of the city’s most successful. The Straus family also bought one of Brooklyn’s leading department stores, Abraham & Weschler, and renamed it Abraham & Straus. Macy’s and Abraham & Straus would become two of the region’s leading retailers for much of the twentieth century.25
Roosevelt must have seen Straus as something of an intellectual soul mate. Both men were active in the progressive wings of their New York City political organizations (Straus as a Democrat and Roosevelt as a Republican). Both were voracious readers of history, amassing two of the largest private libraries in the city specializing in that subject. Both were prolific writers, with Roosevelt publishing on subjects as varied as history and natural science, while Straus focused on American politics, religion, and law. Straus was not a political neophyte when he joined the cabinet, having represented the United States as minister to the Ottoman Empire from 1887 to 1889. In selecting a Democrat for the cabinet, Roosevelt may have sought to portray himself as a man above party. But in placing a Jew in the cabinet for the first time in American history, and putting him in charge of the administration’s immigration policy, no less, Roosevelt clearly hoped to signal that he no longer shared Americans’ increasing unease at the record numbers of southern and eastern Europeans coming to the United States. The appointment was also meant as a rebuke to Russia in the wake of the continuing stream of anti-Jewish pogroms. “I want to show Russia and some other countries,” Roosevelt said when he told Straus of his intention to nominate him, “what we think of the Jews in this country.”26
Straus clearly sympathized with the immigrants threatened with debarment and did everything in his power to blunt the impact of the stricter 1907 immigration law.* When inspectors denied entry to one son of an Irish family of seven because he had been certified as feebleminded, and the mother considered going back to Ireland with him so the rest could enter the United States, Straus overruled his Ellis Island inspectors and allowed the entire family to remain. When the medical staff declared fifty-nine-year-old Russian immigrant Chena Rog unfit (due to trachoma) to join her five adult children and three dozen grandchildren in Reading, Pennsylvania, Straus overturned the decision on appeal. And when the station’s commissioner denied entry to Schimen Coblenz, a forty-two-year-old butcher from Lithuania, because his psoriasis (a “loathsome” disease) might prevent him from finding work in his trade and therefore lead him to become a public charge, Straus again countermanded the debarment order on the grounds that psoriasis was not communicable. Exclusions clearly troubled Straus, so much so that he gave the head of the Ellis Island immigration station several hundred dollars of his own money (the equivalent of several thousand today) to be doled out anonymously to immigrants whose rejection he could not prevent. Under Roosevelt’s administration, the percentage of immigrants turned away at Ellis Island changed very little in the two years after the new 1907 immigration law.27
Things did change, however, when William Howard Taft became president in 1909. Roosevelt had handpicked the Ohioan as his successor because he thought Taft shared his progressive outlook. But Taft turned out to be more conservative than Roosevelt in a number of areas, including immigration policy. Taft’s choice to head the Ellis Island immigration station was William Williams, a forty-six-year-old native of New London, Connecticut, who had an undergraduate degree from Yale and a law degree from Harvard. Williams had spent nearly three years as head of the Ellis Island immigration station under Roosevelt, from 1902 to 1905, but had resigned when the president made it clear he was displeased with Williams’s management of his subordinates. As Roosevelt put it, Williams “found it difficult to get on with men of inferior education and social status.”28
When Williams took charge again at the end of May 1909, he immediately announced that the more welcoming attitude toward immigrants that had previously characterized the administration of Ellis Island would not continue. “We are receiving too many low-grade immigrants,” Williams told the press. He vowed to enforce the existing immigration laws far more strictly than his predecessor and weed out the “unintelligent,” immigrants “of low vitality,” and those whose lack of savings indicated that they did not possess the intellect or work ethic necessary to succeed in the United States. “We owe our present civilization and standing amongst nations chiefly to people of a type widely different from that of those now coming here in such numbers,” Williams argued. He promised to use every means at his disposal to keep as many of these “undesirables” out of the country as possible.29
Secretary of Commerce and Labor Oscar Straus, the first Jewish cabinet officer in U.S. history, was sympathetic to the plight of immigrants deemed inadmissible by Ellis Island’s medical officers and overturned many of their debarment decisions.
Williams accomplished his goal in three ways. First, he instructed his inspectors to flag and debar not merely those immigrants who seemed “likely to become a public charge” immediately but also those who might be unable to support themselves ten or fifteen years in the future. Second, he decided unilaterally to institute the “economic test” that Congress had rejected two years earlier, deeming any adult immigrants who did not arrive with $25 (above and beyond the price of the rail ticket to their final destination) as, by definition, likely to become a public charge and thus subject to debarment. Third, Williams told his inspectors that even if they could not find anything physically wrong with an immigrant, they could still reject the newcomer for “poor physique.” According to this line of reasoning, immigrants who were thin and pale would find it difficult to satisfy American employers and, if they had no specialized occupational training, were likely to become public charges. As a result of these policy changes, the rejection rate at Ellis Island increased by nearly 150 percent, from fewer than one immigrant out of every one hundred before Williams took over to nearly two out of every one hundred in his first full fiscal year in office.30
REJECTION RATE FOR IMMIGRANTS SEEKING ADMISSION TO THE UNITED STATES AT ELLIS ISLAND FOR THE TWELVE-MONTH PERIOD ENDING JUNE 30 OF THE YEAR INDICATED
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Immigrants debarred |
6,752 |
4,643 |
4,361 |
14,771 |
12,917 |
8,294 |
10,720 |
16,588 |
2,674 |
Total seeking admission |
1,011,508 |
590,613 |
584,978 |
800,865 |
799,011 |
613,445 |
903,373 |
894,640 |
181,090 |
Percent rejected |
0.67 |
0.79 |
0.75 |
1.84 |
1.62 |
1.35 |
1.19 |
1.85 |
1.48 |
Source: Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30 (1907): 49; (1909): 15; (1911): 12; (1912): 66; (1913): 38; (1915): 57, 126.
Immigrants reacted with outrage to what they interpreted as Williams’s arbitrary and prejudiced reinterpretation of the immigration laws. A Russian Jewish immigrant being held at the Ellis Island detention center sent a letter to the editor of the Forward, a Yiddish newspaper in New York, calling Williams’s $25 rule “nonsense” and an “outrage.” Another wrote directly to Williams in broken English: “You don’t realize what you are doing. You kill people without a knife. Does money make you a person? A person who has a mind and hands and has not $25 cash is not a person? Has he to be killed? . . . If you would have conscious in you would not do such things.” Eastern European Jews especially resented the poor physique rule, which they perceived—not wholly inaccurately—to be directed at them. The number of Jews barred for this reason “has been constantly increasing,” charged a Jewish attorney, Max Kohler, in 1911, “because of ever newer misconstructions of the law furtively forced upon inspectors at Ellis Island” by Williams. The Forward dubbed Williams “the Haman* of Ellis Island.”31
Predictably, many Americans applauded Williams’s increased scrutiny of incoming immigrants. “What a stench in the nostrils of true Americans are the dirty Jew lawyers who rush to the ‘defense’ of their kin whom you would exclude,” wrote Orville Victor, a New Jerseyan “of early colonial ancestry,” to Williams. “More power to you, and success to your efforts to keep out the dirty scum of European fields, bogs and warrens.” Williams must have found such letters gratifying. “I have enforced the laws,” he solemnly told the Times when explaining the increase in debarments. “Why shouldn’t I? That is what I am here for.”32
Victor’s reference to “dirty Jew lawyers” representing their kinsmen at Ellis Island reflects the fact that immigrants did not face the appeals process alone. Some, especially those who already had family in the United States, hired lawyers to contest the doctors’ diagnoses or inspectors’ interpretations of the law. Fiorello La Guardia, who studied law at night while working as an interpreter on Ellis Island, built his fledgling legal practice representing immigrants denied entry to the United States for $10 per case.33
Most immigrants, however, could not afford a private attorney, and were instead assisted in their appeals by lawyers employed by the immigrant aid societies that proliferated in the years after the Ellis Island immigration station opened. Just as the English, Scots, Irish, and Germans each had their own immigrant aid organizations working to assist antebellum immigrants at Castle Garden, now the Jews, Italians, and other European groups created them too. By the beginning of World War I, immigrants could get assistance from the Belgian Bureau, the Czech Relief Association, the Danish Aid Society, the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society, the Home for Scandinavian Immigrants, the Hungarian Relief Society, the Irish Emigrant Society, the Lutheran Emigrants House, the Lutheran Immigrant Society, the Netherland Benevolent Society, the Norwegian Evangelical Emigrant Mission and Emigrant Home, the Polish National Alliance, the Russian Orthodox Christian Immigrant Society, the Saint Raphael’s Italian Emigrant Society, Saint Raphael’s Society for the Protection of German Catholic Immigrants, Saint Raphael’s Spanish Emigrant Society, the Slavonic Immigrant Society, the Society for Italian Immigrants (not Catholic affiliated), the Spanish Home for Immigrants (also non-Catholic), the Swedish Lutheran Immigrant Home, the Swiss Benevolent Society, and the Syrian Mount Lebanon Relief Society. The Salvation Army, the Red Cross, and the Travelers Aid Society also assisted immigrants at Ellis Island. All these groups helped the newcomers find lost luggage, family members, temporary lodging, and work, made sure they were not cheated by railroad ticket agents, and, in the case of immigrants not immediately admitted to the country, offered free legal counsel as well.34
The Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society (known universally as HIAS) became the largest and most visible immigrant aid organization at Ellis Island. A Yiddish-language guidebook for Jewish immigrants urged the newcomers to take advantage of the services offered by HIAS, whose doors were open twenty-four hours a day at 229–231 East Broadway on the Lower East Side. “Accommodations are provided for men, women and children . . . There are excellent baths, always at the free disposition of guests. A physician and a nurse are in attendance. The kitchen supplies excellent Kosher cooking.” For those who did not know landsmen who could assist them, the HIAS employment bureau would help the immigrants find jobs, either in New York or outside the city. All of their services were provided free of charge.35
Perhaps the most important work HIAS did was to assist immigrants who could not leave Ellis Island because inspectors had declared them ineligible to enter the country. HIAS employees did everything in their power to overturn unfavorable rulings by the station’s inspectors. HIAS workers explained the immigrants’ rights in the appeal process, helped the detainees round up witnesses to testify in their defense, supplied attorneys to argue cases before the appeals panels, and even wrote letters to the secretary of commerce and labor in an effort to get unfavorable appeals decisions overturned. About half of all debarment orders at Ellis Island were overturned on appeal, but three-quarters of those handled by HIAS were reversed. No wonder Victor resented the work of the HIAS lawyers.36
Once the immigrants had satisfied Ellis Island’s medical officials that they were healthy enough to enter the United States, the newcomers ascended a tall flight of stairs to the center of the station’s Registry Room, known as the Great Hall. The Registry Room was an imposing space, 189 feet long and 102 feet wide with a 60-foot-high vaulted ceiling. Here the immigrants would wind their way through iron railings toward immigration inspectors waiting at imposing wooden desks on raised platforms along the northwest wall. In order to make the hall easy to clean even as several thousand immigrants passed through it each day, the entire room—floors, walls, and ceiling—was lined with tile. The reverberating din from the hundreds of chatting immigrants waiting in line was positively deafening.
Immigrants climbing the stairs to the Registry Room at Ellis Island in 1908.
The 90 percent of immigrants who either made it through the medical inspection without getting a chalk mark on their clothing, or were quickly cleared after a brief additional medical inspection, entered the Registry Room with the other passengers from their ship. If the vessel had arrived from Naples, all the immigrants might be placed in a single line and processed by a single Italian-speaking inspector, who would use the ship manifest to tally each immigrant and record additional information required by law. The passengers from vessels bringing immigrants from a variety of nations (like the Nevada, which carried Annie Moore) might be divided into several lines, with the Italians in one, the east European Jews in another, the Scandinavians in a third, and so forth, depending on the linguistic abilities of the inspectors on duty that day. If the Yiddish-speaking inspector got the manifest first, the Italians would not be called for examination until all the east European Jews from their ship had been processed. Then the Italian-speaking inspector would receive the manifest and begin examining the Italians. That process would repeat itself until all the immigrants from each ship had been examined. Typically, no matter how many languages they spoke, the immigrants from one ship would wait on the north side of the Registry Room, while the newcomers from a second ship would be simultaneously accommodated on the south side.37
The Registry Room at Ellis Island, where immigrants who had passed the physical examination waited to be questioned and processed. Each of the pens pictured here was designed to hold thirty immigrants, the same number that fit on a manifest page.
With so many people crammed together on benches waiting to be examined, the Registry Room became very hot in the late spring, when immigration was at its peak. The heat was exacerbated by the fact that the immigrants wore their best clothes in order to impress the inspectors. Women wore elaborate dresses and men (even those in steerage) landed wearing jackets and ties. An Irish immigrant who arrived at Ellis Island in late summer remembered that it was “hot as a pistol and I’m wearing my long johns and a heavy Irish tweed suit . . . I’m dying with the heat. I never experienced such heat . . . I just wanted to get the hell out of there.” Owing both to the heat and to their nervousness about the impending examination, those waiting to be examined perspired profusely. As a result, the Registry Room did not smell much better than the steerage compartments the immigrants had just left.38
When the newcomers’ names were finally called, they stepped forward—palms sweaty, mouth dry—for what they knew might be the most important interrogation of their lives. Like most of the immigrants, Louis Adamic vividly remembered his, which took place on New Year’s Eve 1913:
Immigrants answering questions posed by the inspectors in the Ellis Island Registry Room. In 1911, the iron pens in the Registry Room had been removed and replaced with long rows of wooden benches.
The examiner sat bureaucratically—very much in the manner of officials in the Old Country—behind a great desk, which stood upon a high platform. On the wall above him was a picture of George Washington. Beneath it was an American flag. The official spoke a bewildering mixture of many Slavic languages. He had a stern voice and a sour visage. I had difficulty understanding some of his questions. At a small table, piled with papers, not far from the examiner’s desk, was a clerk who called out our names, which, it seemed, were written on the long sheets of paper before him. When my turn came, toward dusk, I was asked the usual questions. When and where was I born? My nationality? Religion? Was I a legitimate child? What were the names of my parents? Was I an imbecile? Was I a prostitute? . . . Was I an ex-convict? A criminal? Why had I come to the United States? I was questioned as to the state of my finances and I produced the required twenty-five dollars. What did I expect to do in the United States? I replied that I hoped to get a job. What kind of a job? I didn’t know; any kind of job.39
Like most immigrants, Adamic had probably been coached on how to answer that last question. Many newcomers had jobs waiting for them when they arrived, but admitting this was grounds for debarment. So immigrants learned to say simply that they planned to find a job but had neither received nor accepted any offers before their arrival. Doing so seemed so counterintuitive—didn’t it increase the risk of becoming a public charge?—that every day, four or five immigrants answered this question incorrectly (though perhaps truthfully) and were barred from entering the country.40
Beginning in 1917, one additional test was added to the Registry Room examination: a literacy test. Congressmen had been pushing since the 1890s to ban immigrants who could not read. In the words of Senator William Dillingham of Vermont, one of the test’s most vociferous advocates, the point was to reduce the “menace to American institutions from immigrants from southern and eastern Europe.” President Grover Cleveland had vetoed a bill containing such a literacy test in his last days in office in 1897. Taft rejected one in 1913. Wilson did the same in both 1915 and 1917, but in the latter year Congress overrode his veto, and the literacy test became law. The new statute required male immigrants over the age of sixteen to be able to read a passage of up to forty words in any language or dialect of his choosing. Ellis Island inspectors would administer the test to women only if they were not traveling with or joining an already admitted male family member. Men over age fifty-five reuniting with family were also exempted from the literacy test, as were those who could prove they were fleeing religious persecution.41
It is difficult to measure the impact of the literacy test. Before its imposition, upwards of 200,000 immigrants per year admitted that they were illiterate when asked, but once the law took effect, fewer than 2,000 per year were turned away at Ellis Island for failing it. To opponents of the law, this fact showed that immigrants were not nearly as unintelligent as restrictionists claimed, but supporters of the literacy restriction asserted that illiterates no longer tried to immigrate or were turned away by steamship companies before they could board U.S.-bound vessels.42
The immigration inspectors in the Registry Room who guarded what H. G. Wells aptly called “the gate of America” had enormous control over the fate of each immigrant. Decades later, newcomers recalled with gratitude the officer who had waved them past even though they had only $22 instead of the required $25, or who did not ask to see their money at all, or who had suggested that an immigrant rethink his answer when, out of nervousness or ignorance, he gave a reply that might get him turned away.43
One thing the inspectors could not do, despite decades of handed-down family stories to the contrary, was change the immigrants’ surnames. Thousands of Americans believe that their last name differs from those on their ancestors’ immigration manifests because the inspectors at Ellis Island altered their family name. Yet there is absolutely no evidence that such name changing took place in the Registry Room or anyplace else on Ellis Island. Several factors may explain this widespread misconception. Some immigrants, embarrassed to admit to their children or grandchildren that they themselves changed their surname to something “more American” in order to fit in, may have invented tales of mandated Ellis Island name changes to hide the truth. Others, speaking no English when they arrived at the immigration station, might have mistaken the officers’ awful mispronunciations of their transliterated or misspelled name on ship manifests to be their new American name. Still others might have assumed that the identification tag pinned to their clothing, which listed but often misspelled the immigrants’ surnames, was an official immigration document that contained their new American name. In fact, immigrants did not leave Ellis Island with any official paperwork whatsoever. Only Chinese immigrants had to possess proof of their legal entry into the United States. The newly admitted immigrant was free to use any name he or she desired.44
One reason why the inspectors could not change immigrants’ names is that they did not have the time. On average, they could spare only one minute for the inspection of each family. Given how many questions they were required to ask, there was no opportunity to assign new names. In fact, after hours of waiting in line, the interrogation in the Registry Room was over so quickly that immigrants hardly felt like celebrating when the inspectors waved them through. It all seemed so anticlimactic.
Once the immigrants passed beyond the Registry Room desks, they faced a staircase divided by two railings into three sections, leading back down to the building’s first floor. These were known as “the Stairs of Separation.” The right-hand section led to the railroad room, where immigrants continuing on from New York by rail would be met by railroad employees who led them to ferries bound for railroad stations either in New Jersey (where trains headed south and west generally originated) or in New York (for those bound for New England). The stairs on the left were for those immigrants who were free to leave the station and were staying in New York City; ferries dropped them at the Barge Office on the western edge of the Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan. The central section of the staircase led to waiting rooms. Married women and children not transferring to trains were not allowed to leave Ellis Island unless accompanied by an adult male. These immigrants waited in the detention area to be picked up by family members or friends.45
Waiting in the detention room could be just as nerve-wracking as the voyage to America or the Ellis Island inspection process. Wives worried that their husbands might no longer find them attractive after years surrounded by fashionable American women. The Red Cross actually distributed American clothes to newly arrived female immigrants specifically so that husbands would not be disappointed when they claimed their wives. Children feared that they would not recognize parents they had not seen for years. Marie Jastrow, who arrived at Ellis Island as a child with her mother in 1907, remembered that as they waited for her father to arrive, “a million catastrophic possibilities assaulted our imaginations. ‘Where is Papa?’ ‘Was there an accident?’ ‘Has he forgotten that we were coming?’ ‘Is he coming at all?’ These fantasies took their toll. My mother’s eyes filled, and I panicked. ‘Where is my Papa? Where is my Papa?’” When loved ones finally did arrive, the reunions were often more awkward than joyous. Young children cried in fear when embraced by fathers they did not remember. Wives stared at their husbands, wondering why they looked so old and careworn. But for most, the awkwardness eventually dissipated and the exhausted and relieved immigrants boarded the ferry for the mile-long trip across the harbor to New York.46
When the immigrants headed for New York City landed in lower Manhattan, their senses were bombarded with strange new sights, sounds, and smells. “I could hardly believe my eyes, it was so wonderful at first,” recounted an Italian immigrant of his initial impression of New York. “I was bewildered,” Russian immigrant Morris Shapiro told an interviewer of his arrival in 1923, “at the sight of trains running overhead, under my very feet, trolleys clanging, thousands upon thousands of taxis tearing around corners, and millions of people rushing and pushing through the screaming noise day in and day out. To me this city appeared as a tremendous overstuffed roar, where people just burst with a desire to live.” The city blazed with light even at night, an amazing phenomenon to immigrants from the countryside. The noise was deafening. People moved so fast. The air smelled bad. Where was the sky? Where were the stars? As a German immigrant who arrived in 1910 recalled, “It was just overwhelming.”47
But eventually, after a few hours or a few days, the enormity of what they had just been through would sink in, and the immigrants would realize that after years of planning, saving, convincing, organizing, and arranging, and after weeks or months of travel by foot, cart, train, and ship, their long-held dream had finally become a reality: “I was in America!”48