American Passage (21 page)

In any case, Williams weathered the storm and continued his zealous enforcement of immigration laws. Roosevelt, up for reelection in 1904, could legitimately appeal to Americans in favor of immigration restriction by pointing to Williams, but also appeal to immigrant ethnic groups by pointing out his deep concern for conditions at Ellis Island.

Williams, however, continued to speak out against what he saw as the large numbers of undesirable immigrants streaming through Ellis Island. His writings showed the strain of dark pessimism exhibited by New England restrictionists. “It is full time, however, for us to appreciate the fact that the settlers who made the country great belonged to a totally different class of people from those described and came here with loftier views of their prospective future,” Williams wrote, “and that a desire to emigrate can no longer be regarded as evidence of initiative, thrift, or courage.”

As proof, Williams offered a story about a family of eight from eastern Europe. The family had little money and was heading to a tenement district in New York City. When asked how he intended to provide for his family, the father responded by saying that his family did not care for a big house and would be satisfied with one room to sleep in: “That is all we want; that is the way we did it in Russia.” To some, this might be a sign of an appropriately humble immigrant who was not demanding great riches from his adoptive country. Perhaps the father thought such a modest answer would impress officials. If that was the case, he thought wrong. To Williams, the family’s aspirations were too narrow, and he sent the entire clan back to Europe.

Though Roosevelt said more about immigration than any previous president, he remained remarkably quiet about the issue during the 1904 campaign. “There seems to be a good deal of uneasiness as to saying anything about immigration this year,” he wrote to Lodge. “It is not believed it would help us to getting legislation. There is no question but that there will be a sharp lookout kept to see if they cannot catch us tripping on it.” Roosevelt may have wanted tougher immigration laws, but he felt it was best not to make any such references in the party’s platform.

Roosevelt’s campaign manager heard rumors that a Democratic operative had gone to Ellis Island to investigate conditions and warned Williams that Democrats saw the potential to make Ellis Island a campaign issue. A month later, Williams complained to Roosevelt about Congressman Richard Bartholdt. Though a Republican, the Germanborn former newspaper editor represented a heavily immigrant district in St. Louis. “He is very hostile to the Ellis Island administration, although he has been here, seen things as they are and had ample opportunity to satisfy himself that the
Staats-Zeitung
articles are false and malicious,” Williams wrote. He warned that Democrats had recently produced a campaign document that attacked Ellis Island based on the
Staats-Zeitung
articles and using Bartholdt’s comments.

All of this meant little to Roosevelt’s reelection bid. He handily won reelection over a lackluster Democratic candidate, winning every state north of the Mason-Dixon line. While he lost heavily immigrant and Democratic Boston and New York City, Roosevelt ran well nationally among Germans, Poles, Italians, and Jews.

Roosevelt could be all things to all people. Restrictionists were heartened by the selection of Williams to run Ellis Island and the president’s words calling for continued regulation and sifting of good immigrants from bad immigrants. However, immigrants and ethnic communities could also find comfort in Roosevelt’s words and deeds.

In the end, it was not the accusations of insensitivity toward immigrants that ultimately drove William Williams out of Ellis Island. It was Joe Murray. The patrician Williams simply could not stand the unsophisticated machine politician. He described Murray as lazy and dull-witted and complained that he was “unable to write any kind of a letter. He can neither write nor speak correctly.” Murray arrived late to work, could not complete basic tasks given to him, and, according to Williams, failed “to show any intelligent interest in anything that was going on to give me the slightest assistance in rooting out deviltry.”

It galled Williams that the easygoing Murray had been on a firstname basis with John Lederhilger, even while Williams was drumming him out of government service. An exasperated Williams could do little to spur Murray to work harder, so he finally decided to leave him alone to do as he pleased, which turned out to be spending an inordinate amount of time shooting the breeze around the Ellis Island barber shop.

As a Harvard man, Roosevelt saw the problem clearly. “The trouble with Williams,” the president wrote his friend Gifford Pinchot, “has been that owing to his past associations and education he has found it difficult to get on with men of inferior education and social status.” In other words, Williams was an officious snob. Yet Roosevelt could not admit that his experiment in old-time patronage, while pleasing to Murray, not only stained Roosevelt’s reform image, but also made the job of reforming Ellis Island more difficult.

Apparently, Williams’s problems with his subordinates went beyond just Murray. On two different occasions, the Ellis Island workforce was on the verge of going out on strike. In cleaning out incompetent and abusive workers, Williams made enemies with his uncompromising personality. “They say he has his peculiarities and I presume he has,” Robert Watchorn said of Williams, but if “he hadn’t he would not be of much account.”

Roosevelt appeared more than willing to overlook those peculiarities, remarking that he didn’t “know anyone who could have done quite the work that he did.” Roosevelt lauded Williams as fearless, energetic, and pubic-spirited—all the qualities that Roosevelt so admired. At the same time, he admitted that his dear friend Murray was not exactly the most engaged employee on the federal payroll.

In December 1904, Williams’s patience finally ran out and he went to the White House to tell Roosevelt he could no longer work with Murray. Williams accused him of being “ignorant, inefficient, and wholly worthless” and said that he had played absolutely no part in helping to reform Ellis Island. Because Roosevelt held Williams in such high regard, he was willing to jettison Murray and keep Williams, although he hoped to place Murray in another government job.

But Williams did not just want Murray out as his assistant. He wanted his friend Allan Robinson, a fellow New York lawyer, named as his replacement. This Roosevelt could not abide. Frank Sargent informed the president that Robinson “possessed in even accentuated degrees the failings of Williams in dealing with other men.” If Williams and Robinson were both in charge, Sargent feared a full-scale mutiny among Ellis Island’s employees. Failing to get the assistant he wanted, Williams resigned in January 1905 and returned to his Wall Street law practice.

The Immigration Restriction League’s Robert DeC. Ward was saddened at the news of Williams’s departure. “It has been a source of constant satisfaction to me to feel that the gates at Ellis Island were so well guarded,” Ward wrote Williams. Madison Grant, another patrician restrictionist, also sent his regrets.

Some immigration defenders praised Williams on his departure. The Society for the Protection of Italian Immigrants passed a resolution lauding Williams. While the editors of the
Staats-Zeitung
were no doubt rejoicing at the news, the
American Hebrew
was not. “He has transformed the internal affairs at Ellis Island to such an extent that visitors today will find very few of the evils complained of before he came,” the paper concluded. “His retirement will be a distinct loss to the immigrant department.”

In many ways, Williams personified George Washington Plunkitt’s reformer. He had made a great show of reforming Ellis Island and ferreting out corruption, but he had his difficulties managing both immigrants and employees. Williams also took Roosevelt’s division of immigrants of good character and bad character to extremes. Roosevelt could temper his concern about new immigrants with a positive view of American national character, the miracles of assimilation, and the benefits of good immigration. For Williams, there was little but pessimism.

The book on Williams’s government service was not yet closed. There would be a second act that would both refute and confirm Plunkitt’s suspicions about reformers.

LEANING OVER THE SECOND-ST ORY RAILING IN THE MAIN hall of the reception room at Ellis Island, H. G. Wells surveyed the mazelike rails herding immigrants through the inspection line. “You don’t think they’ll swamp you?” a concerned Wells asked his companion, the new Ellis Island commissioner, Robert Watchorn. Wells had taken the ferry trip to the island as part of research on a book about the future of America. Wells was pessimistic about the future in general, especially regarding technology. Yet as these two Englishmen debated the effects of throngs of southern and eastern Europeans on America, Wells’s question hit upon another uncertainty.

“Now look here,” Watchorn gently rebuked his famous literary guest, “I’m English-born—Derbyshire. I came to America when I was a lad. I had fifteen dollars. And here I am! Well, do you expect me, now I’m here, to shut the door on any other poor chaps who want a start—a start with hope in it, in the New World?”

Wells had cemented his reputation as the premier science fiction writer a decade earlier with a string of successes, including
The Time Machine
,
The Invisible Man
, and
The War of the Worlds
. Now Robert Watchorn was hosting the famous writer at Ellis Island. Both Wells and Watchorn were sons of the British working class who had made good. After the visit, the two men continued on friendly terms. Wells entertained Watchorn on a number of occasions in England, and Watchorn proudly kept an autographed photo of Wells in his office for the rest of his professional life.

This perk of the job, rubbing elbows with the famous and powerful, appealed greatly to Watchorn, whose life story was truly one of rags to riches. It began in the English coal mines and continued through his arrival at Castle Garden in 1880, to his ascension to commissioner of Ellis Island in 1905, and would continue after his time in the immigration service.

Watchorn was the second of seven children born in Alfreton, Derbyshire, to a doting mother and an alcoholic coal-miner father. At age eleven, Watchorn himself went down into the coal pits, where he worked for the next ten years. An intelligent boy, he went to night school, and at the age of twenty-two left for America.

Once there, Watchorn ended up loading coal in the Pennsylvania mines. Soon after, he brought his family over and became involved in the local Knights of Labor chapter, where he befriended Terence V. Powderly, who would remain a lifelong friend and mentor. Watchorn then went on to become the first secretary-treasurer of the newly created United Mine Workers.

Filled with ambition and drive, Watchorn did not remain long with the union. Like another determined member of the working class, Edward McSweeney, Watchorn made the leap from labor activism to politics. The thirty-three-year-old Watchorn became the state’s first chief factory inspector under Robert E. Pattison, Pennsylvania’s first Democratic governor since the Civil War.

Driven to succeed as only one who had escaped the coal pits of both England and Pennsylvania could, Watchorn cleverly amassed important friends, including Powderly and the Pennsylvania senator Matthew Quay, the state’s Republican boss. Politically ambidextrous, Watchorn began his political career working in a Democratic administration but later became a staunch Republican. His ties to Powderly led to a patronage post as an inspector at Ellis Island. During the controversy there with McSweeney, Watchorn became an important ally and friend to Powderly, who later plucked Watchorn from the maelstrom at Ellis Island and promoted him first to Washington and then to Montreal, where he put Watchorn in charge of the immigration service along the Canadian border.

When Roosevelt was searching for a suitable replacement for William Williams in early 1905, he quickly settled on Watchorn, whom he remembered from his first visit to Ellis Island, when Roosevelt was police commissioner and Watchorn a mere inspector. Morally upright, Watchorn could be expected to continue the vigilance against corruption, patronage, and abuse at Ellis Island, but would accomplish it without the abrasive air of the patrician Williams. As an immigrant himself, Watchorn might enforce immigration law without Williams’s restrictionist touch. Also, Watchorn needed the job—unlike the independently wealthy Williams—and might be less difficult to manage.

On the issue of Joe Murray, Roosevelt only asked that Watchorn give him a fair shake. If Watchorn decided that Murray was incompetent, Roosevelt would transfer his friend. “You will be the absolute judge of his competency or incompetency,” Roosevelt wrote. Watchorn, who had not escaped a life in the coal mines by bucking authority, was not about to take the bait. “I shall respect your wishes, Mr. President, in regard to Mr. Murray, whom I know very well,” Watchorn responded. Murray would end up staying at Ellis Island for the rest of the Roosevelt administration.

Watchorn assured the president that they shared a common vision of immigration. Such agreement was important because America was about to witness its biggest wave of immigration ever. For the first time, more than 1 million immigrants entered the country. Roosevelt put this in historical perspective by noting that more people entered the United States in 1905 than had arrived in the 169 years between the first landing at Jamestown and the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Despite stringent laws, Roosevelt believed that a large number of immigrants were still undesirable because they came not of their own initiative, but were instead enticed by agents from steamship companies interested only in increasing their profits.

Roosevelt was adept at finding that perfect fulcrum of American opinion on immigration, melding fears of alien newcomers with respect for the country’s open-door tradition. “In dealing with this question it is unwise to depart from the old American tradition and to discriminate for or against any man who desires to come here and become a citizen, save on the ground of that man’s fitness for citizenship,” Roosevelt wrote. An immigrant’s character, not his ethnicity or religion, should determine whether he or she be allowed into the country. To him, a Slav of good character was far more preferable than an Englishman of poor character. Of course, the status of excluded Chinese immigrants complicated the president’s argument.

It was a fine statement of the assimilationist credo, but one that rested on the vigorous enforcement of immigration laws at the nation’s gates, with Roosevelt calling for “an increase in the stringency of the laws to keep out insane, idiotic, epileptic, and pauper immigrants.” He already had had four years to push for this, but achieved little more than banning anarchists and prostitutes. Now he wanted not just anarchists excluded, “but every man of Anarchistic tendencies, all violent and disorderly people, all people of bad character, the incompetent, the lazy, the vicious, the physically unfit, defective, or degenerate.”

If Roosevelt wanted a stricter application of immigration laws, Ellis Island was in the best shape since it opened to accomplish that. And just in time. From 1905 to 1907, some 3.5 million immigrants would come to America, nearly 80 percent passing through New York’s inspection station. Having visited at the beginning of this period, novelist Henry James called Ellis Island “a drama that goes on, without a pause, day by day and year by year, this visible act of ingurgitation on the part of our body politic and social, and constituting really an appeal to amazement beyond that of any sword-swallowing or fire-swallowing of the circus.”

With each passing week in the spring and fall—the peak arrival seasons for immigrants—a new record would be broken. In one week during April 1906, an estimated 45,000 immigrants arrived at Ellis Island. Ships seemed to pile one on top of the other, many forced to dock for two or three days as their passengers remained on board while they awaited inspection. Bigger steamships that could carry as many as 2,300 steerage passengers, like the White Star’s
Celtic
and
Republic
, brought these immigrants on a daily basis.

“Immigrant Type Low, But 1,100,735 Get In” read a
Times
headline about the record number of immigrants in 1906. Of that figure, Ellis Island processed roughly 880,000 immigrants, 10 percent of whom were detained for board of special inquiry hearings, and 7,877 were excluded, less than 1 percent of all those who arrived. Ellis Island witnessed 327 deaths, 18 births, 2 suicides, and 508 marriages that year.

If Americans thought 1906 was bad, the following year would be even worse. In fact, Americans would not see as many immigrants in one year as they saw in 1907 until 1990. Some days, the flood was unmanageable. On March 27, 1907, 16,000 immigrants entered New York Harbor; May 2 brought 21,755. Ellis Island had to process over a million people in 1907 alone, which came to over 2,700 per day, every day.

Robert Watchorn, who oversaw this flood, was a man apart from his predecessor. “A man of brawn, a man who knows how to use his hands in both the sporting and industrial sense of the phrase,” was how the
Times
described him. He repeated Roosevelt’s mantra that America could not have enough of the right kind of immigrant and too little of the wrong kind. Unlike Williams, however, Watchorn believed that America
was
largely getting the right kind of immigrants.

This was a bit of an intellectual shift for Watchorn, a man who would prove himself nothing if not flexible in his beliefs. While working under Powderly, Watchorn portrayed himself in favor of strict regulation of immigrants, especially regarding the contract-labor laws. Now, working under Roosevelt, the former United Mine Workers official changed his tune. He found himself harangued for his pro-immigration views while speaking before crowds of workers.

Watchorn told a Jewish audience on New York’s Lower East Side that “the immigrant has done as much for this country as the country has done for him.” While he supported a careful selection of immigrants to keep out those likely to become a public charge, he hated to order deportations. Even though the editors of the
American Hebrew
had praised William Williams, they noticed a change in tone at Ellis Island. “Since Mr. Robert Watchorn entered upon his duties as Commissioner, there is an entirely different atmosphere about the place,” the paper wrote. “The immigrant is no longer looked upon as one to be kept out, if the law is strained to do so.”

He does not share the feeling that the immigration of to-day is worse than that of the past; in fact he will say quite freely that it is growing better every day. He has his fears and forebodings; but he knows that the miracle of transformation wrought on us, can still be wrought on this mass of clay in the hands of the potter, which may be moulded just as millions of us have been moulded, into the likeness of a new humanity.

Men like Steiner and Watchorn held a deep faith in the transformative power of America on European immigrants.
Watchorn had a chance to explain his views to a group of female college students visiting Ellis Island. Unanimously opposed to immigration, these well-off young women heard the case of a sixty-sixyear-old Italian man heading to his son in Lynchburg, Virginia. They believed him too old and weak to be admitted, especially since the son was not there to pick up the father. In a scene out of Hollywood, the son showed up at the last moment to an emotional reunion with his father. Should the father be sent back to Italy, Watchorn now asked the young women? “No, no, no, certainly not,” was the unanimous response.
Those young women discovered the difference between discussing immigration in the abstract as opposed to dealing with the concrete— and very human—reality at Ellis Island. “There are those who vehemently protest against the landing of aliens on these shores en masse,” Watchorn later wrote, “so long as their protests are made in abstract form, but who, Pilate-like, say, on being brought face to face with the units of the mass, ‘I find no fault with him.’ ”
Watchorn’s tenure marked an evolution in how Roosevelt handled immigration. Practical politics played no small hand in this change. In 1906, William Randolph Hearst used his fortune to run for governor of New York as a Democrat. Roosevelt could not abide Hearst and resented his “enormous popularity among ignorant and unthinking people.” Hearst used the pages of his
New York Journal
to take on the mantle of defender of immigrants. He further expanded his reach to the city’s largest ethnic group by starting the German-language paper
Morgen Journal
. The populism of Hearst’s papers filled the patrician Roosevelt with disgust. He had to be stopped.
Roosevelt threw himself heart and soul into helping the Republican Charles Evans Hughes defeat Hearst. Hughes was a bit of a stiff, but enough of a progressive for Roosevelt—anything to keep Hearst from defiling Roosevelt’s old office. The path to stopping Hearst, Roosevelt soon realized, began with New York’s ethnic communities.
When an opening appeared for secretary of Commerce and Labor, Roosevelt jumped at an opportunity to make a point. Roosevelt conferred with Jewish leaders like New York banker Jacob Schiff and named Oscar Straus to the post. Roosevelt now had a Jew and a Catholic in his cabinet. (Charles Bonaparte, the grandnephew of Napoléon, was attorney general.)
At a dinner celebrating Straus’s appointment, Roosevelt explained that he had chosen Straus without regard to race, color, creed, or party. To that, an elderly and increasingly deaf Jacob Schiff nodded and said in his thick German accent: “Dot’s right, Mr. President. You came to me and said, ‘Chake, who is der best jew I can appoint Segretary of Commerce?’” Though probably apocryphal, the spirit of the story contains a germ of truth. Roosevelt had begun a long tradition, followed by most of his successors, of choosing cabinet members to satisfy various racial, ethnic, and religious groups.
Straus, along with Schiff, belonged to an earlier generation of German Jewish immigrants. Oscar Straus was born in Bavaria in 1850. His father, a Reform Jew and grain merchant, left for the United States in 1852, where he ran a general store in Georgia. Oscar, his brothers, and his mother followed him there two years later. The family’s future was not to be in the South, but rather in New York City. There, the Straus family ran a china and glassware store and later bought out Macy’s. Oscar, however, was not drawn to the world of commerce like his father and brothers. Instead, he opted for a career in law.
As part of his arrangement with Roosevelt, Straus agreed to stump for Hughes in New York, joining Schiff in blunting Hearst’s appeal to the Jewish community. In the end, Hughes squeaked by Hearst with just sixty thousand votes, and Straus took up work at his new job after the election.
The Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, as it was now called, was but one of twelve divisions of the Department of Commerce and Labor, but it was clearly the one that animated Straus the most. “Indeed, no subject in the department occupied my daily attention to the extent that immigration did,” he wrote in his autobiography. Immigration was the most difficult issue because “it is the most human” and “throbs with tearful tragedies,” Straus wrote.
On the morning of December 17, 1906, Straus sat at his desk in his new office and immediately threw himself into the heart-wrenching morass of appeals from immigrants waiting to be deported. He looked at some thirty cases that first day. “I was not surprised to find that most of these cases present difficult questions appealing to the humanity and judgment of the Secretary,” Straus wrote in his diary. Straus believed that the letter of the law must be tempered by humanity.
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 formed 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.”