American Passage (24 page)

The in-house journal of the Knights of Labor remarked that its former leader had once been known as a restrictionist until he started working for Oscar Straus. Powderly, the journal mused, “must feel greatly embarrassed, when to keep a job, he manufactures new speeches and opinions at variance with those of only yesterday.” It may have been a change of heart brought about by age, but the reality was that Powderly now reported to Oscar Straus. Desperate to keep his government paycheck and avoid another embarrassing dismissal, he quietly modified his views.

A
_{MERICANS TRIED TO BALANCE}
concerns about newcomers with the country’s traditional role in welcoming immigrants. Allan McLaughlin, a doctor with the U.S. Marine-Hospital Service, was one of those who framed the immigration debate within the boundaries of the political center. The complete exclusion of immigrants, he argued, was “illogical, bigoted, and un-American,” while a completely open door was “an act of lunacy” and a “crime against the body politic.”

Instead, McLaughlin called for the strict enforcement of the present law. That was also Frank Sargent’s position. He made clear he had no desire to see a closed-door policy and believed that America had need of “a high class of aliens who are healthy and will become selfsupporting.” The real question was how to divide desirable immigrants from the undesirable.

“The advocates of absolutely unrestricted immigration are too few to be taken into account,” noted
The Outlook
. Prescott Hall could only count about a handful of people who believed in a completely opendoor policy, the most prominent being William Lloyd Garrison Jr., the son of the famed abolitionist. When pro-immigration lawyer Max Kohler debated restrictionist academic Jeremiah Jenks in 1911, he applauded the fact that twenty-four thousand immigrants had been rejected in the previous year, thereby proving the effectiveness of the law. He also wanted no restrictions on “healthy, willing, industrious immigrants, whom this country needs as much as they need this country.”

With remarkable flexibility, Theodore Roosevelt found himself operating within that debate. When immigration supporters complained about the restrictionist leanings of William Williams, Roosevelt named an ethnically diverse panel to investigate him. Later, when restrictionists complained about the lax enforcement of laws under Robert Watchorn, the president named an IRL member to investigate. Only Roosevelt could have pulled it off.

For all of his early bluster about immigration, Roosevelt was surprisingly mute about the issue in his final years in the White House. The young patrician who had once supported the literacy test and corrected a New York newspaper for calling him an opponent of restriction, was replaced by an older, more politically savvy man. Roosevelt began his presidency bemoaning the deficiencies of immigration law and calling for more categories of exclusion. In his last Annual Message to Congress, Roosevelt never once mentioned immigration.

Dr. Victor Safford struck at the heart of Roosevelt’s conflicted mind. A close friend of Edward McSweeney, the doctor believed that Roosevelt had discovered “that while it was good politics to have stringent immigration laws to point to, it was poor practical politics to enforce them impartially.”

This was how Roosevelt straddled the immigration question. In his openness to ethnic and religious groups, he satisfied immigrants and their defenders. In his rhetorical concerns about the quality of new immigrants, he satisfied restrictionists, but at the end of the day all of his talk about restriction was little more than bluster. On immigration, the straight-talking reformer blurs into an amorphous, but highly successful politician.

In many important respects, indeed, the foreign immigrant is the very anti-type of the pauper. . . . Their very presence here shows the desire for bettering one’s condition and the energy to set about it that is so characteristically a lack in the true pauper.

It is therefore high time that aliens of poor physique should be debarred from our shores. When we raise horse or cattle or dogs or sheep, we select good, strong healthy stock. If we have any concern for the physical development of our race, we should certainly be no less careful in the selection of our human stock.

BY FEBRUA RY 1910, THEODORE ROOSEVELT HAD RETURNED from his post-presidential big-game hunting trip to Africa. A private citizen now ensconced in the Manhattan offices of his new employer,
The Outlook
magazine, the fifty-one-year-old Roosevelt was not a man accustomed to retirement. His discomfort was made even worse by his increasing annoyance with his handpicked successor, William Howard Taft.

One day, the former president received some friends, including Robert Watchorn, at his new office. Pulling him aside by the arm and leading him to a quiet corner away from the others, Roosevelt asked: “Tell me, Mr. Watchorn, why did you leave your post at Ellis Island?”

“Because you left the White House,” Watchorn responded. “Or in other words because you are a friend of mine,” the former president said with a mischievous grin, receiving the confirmation he had sought. Watchorn’s answer reinforced Roosevelt’s belief that Taft had been forcing out Roosevelt loyalists. Yet Roosevelt was also suffering from a bit of selective memory. As president, he had brushed aside complaints about Watchorn’s supposed lax enforcement of immigration laws, but not the charges of corruption that had surfaced by 1908.

While he had expressed a desire to renew Watchorn’s appointment, Roosevelt also asked Herbert Knox Smith, solicitor of the Department of Commerce and Labor, to look into the accusations. The charges were relatively minor, dealing with accusations that Watchorn had forced the owner of the food contract at Ellis Island to cater private parties for him without charge. Watchorn denied the accusation, claiming he reimbursed the company except where “extravagant and extortionate charges” were made. Roosevelt seemed uneasy about the arrangement, but did not ask that formal charges be brought and renominated Watchorn. The request died in the Senate before Taft’s inauguration.

Prescott Hall had been filling Roosevelt’s ear with negative stories about Oscar Straus and Watchorn. Now he turned his attention to the incoming president, telling Taft that Roosevelt had been deceived in appointing Straus to his cabinet, calling him a man who “has done all in his power to interpret and apply the existing laws in such a way as to practically nullify some sections entirely and to weaken and demoralize the whole service.” As for Watchorn, Hall doubted his sincerity in enforcing immigration laws.

Despite the criticism, many people entreated Taft to renominate Watchorn. That was not to be. Noting that those around Taft were “not only not friendly to me but were distinctly unfriendly,” Watchorn knew his days were numbered. Taft had already eased out Straus as secretary of Commerce and Labor by naming him ambassador to Turkey and replacing him with Charles Nagel, a German-American lawyer from St. Louis. With Roosevelt and Straus gone, Watchorn lost his strongest defenders. When it became clear that Taft would not renominate him, he resigned. The official White House statement noted that Taft had found Watchorn’s administration “unsatisfactory.”

The personal attacks took their toll on Watchorn. When a reporter asked him after his resignation to comment on affairs at Ellis Island, Watchorn bluntly declined: “When I left the island I cut all connections. There has always been trouble down at that place and always will be. I’m out of it.” As late as 1913, Watchorn was still seething over his dismissal, complaining to Taft’s chief aide that he had been “very shabbily treated in the manner of my elimination from the service.”

If Watchorn was upset with Taft, the president complained that conditions at Ellis Island were “not what they ought to be” and sought out a man who could put them “on a proper basis.” Much as Roosevelt had been disgusted with the Powderly-McSweeney imbroglio when he took office, Taft seemed unhappy with the controversy that surrounded Watchorn.

Just as Roosevelt had done seven years earlier, Taft turned to William Williams to put things in order at Ellis Island. Williams, four years younger than the new president and a fellow graduate of Yale, was reluctant to reenter public service, but eventually agreed to return. One of Williams’s first orders of business upon coming back to his old job at the end of May 1909 was to declare that Assistant Commissioner Joe Murray, his former nemesis, would be leaving. Replacing him would be Byron Uhl, who had been working at Ellis Island since its opening in 1892.

Now that Williams was returning to Ellis Island, he was eager to get to work on what he felt was the most pressing concern: tightening the sieve that would strain out larger numbers of undesirable immigrants.

Even after leaving Ellis Island in early 1905, Williams continued to be an outspoken advocate for greater restriction. Writing in the
Journal of Social Science
, he charged that the immigration law was good as far is it went, but failed to sift out “a certain minority of immigrants who are generally undesirable because unintelligent, of low vitality, almost, though not quite, poverty-stricken.” He argued that roughly 25 percent of immigrants currently admitted were “not wanted.” He called them “the
undesirable minority
of immigrants.” Williams carefully pointed out that he was not against all immigration. “I will say that I have as little sympathy with those who would curtail all immigration as I have with those who would admit all intending immigrants, good, bad, or indifferent,” he wrote.

Part of his concern with this “undesirable minority” was with what he called its “racial effects.” Immigrants flocking to the United States in the early twentieth century were different from earlier settlers and immigrants. “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 wrote. Those older immigrant groups largely hailed from northern Europe and consisted “mainly of the rugged types that were kindred to the native stock.” These groups were “as good as the new immigrants are bad,” he told the
New York Times
after returning to Ellis Island.

Although he questioned whether newer immigrants could ever be assimilated into American society, Williams found it “impracticable to legislate directly or discriminate against any race or locality of Europe as we have done in the case of the Chinese.” Even he understood that any exclusion of Europeans based on nationality or ethnicity, as had occurred with the Chinese, would violate America’s basic understanding of immigration. However, Williams’s emphasis on this difference between new and old immigrants foreshadowed drastic changes to come.

The letter of the law, which Williams deeply respected, forced him to accept even those immigrants he believed would bring down the nation’s standard of living and weaken American democracy. Working within these legal and ideological confines, Williams set out to do what he could to protect the Republic. Seven days after taking over, he distributed the following note to his staff:

It is necessary that the standard of inspection at Ellis Island be raised. Notice hereof is given publicly in order that intending immigrants may be advised before embarkation that our immigration laws will be strictly enforced, and that those who are unable to measure up to its requirements may not waste their time or money in coming here, only to encounter the hardships of deportation.

Williams had now put everyone—from inspectors to politicians to immigrants—on notice. America was receiving too many “low-grade immigrants” and “riffraff,” he insisted. The country’s present laws, in his opinion, kept out “only what may be termed ‘scum,’ or the very worst elements that seek to come here.” William Williams was determined to do something about it.

H
_ERSCH
S
_{KURATOWSKI ARRIVED AT}
Ellis Island in late June 1909 with $2.75 in his pocket. The twenty-nine-year-old Russian Jewish butcher appeared to be a desirable immigrant in every way. He was in good health, literate, intelligent, and neither a criminal, a polygamist, or an anarchist. Yet Skuratowski was ordered excluded by officials at Ellis Island because he was deemed “likely to become a public charge.”

This little phrase became a stumbling block for many individuals coming to America. Between 1900 and 1907, 63 percent of all immigrants barred from the country were kept out because officials deemed them likely to become public charges.

The public charge clause had been a feature of American immigration law since 1882, although the law originally barred those “
unable
to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” In 1891, that was changed to “
likely
to become a public charge.” With this new phrasing, the government could bar paupers, who were already dependent on public funds for support, as well as those whom immigration officials suspected
might
end up as public charges
in the future
.

The clause embodied a basic American belief: immigrants should be able to take care of themselves. Although this was an era before the federal welfare state, persons were considered a public charge if they were being taken care of by either private charities or local government institutions such as poorhouses or asylums.

It also possessed another characteristic of American immigration law: it was vaguely defined. As one legal scholar would write in the 1930s: “Likely to become a public charge is used as a kind of miscellaneous file into which are placed cases where the officers think the alien ought not to enter, but the facts do not come within any specific requirements of the statutes.” It was the responsibility of officials at Ellis Island to decide which immigrants were likely to become public charges.

Realizing this, and wanting to tighten inspection standards as he stated in his first notice to Ellis Island employees, Williams issued a second one at the end of June.
Certain steamship companies are bringing to this port many immigrants whose funds are manifestly inadequate for their proper support until such time as they are likely to obtain profitable employment. . . . In the absence of a statutory provision, no hard and fast rule can be laid down as to the amount of money an immigrant must bring with him, but in most cases it will be unsafe for immigrants to arrive with less than twenty-five dollars ($25) besides railroad ticket to destination, while in many instances they should have more. They must in addition, of course, satisfy the authorities that they will not become charges either on public or private charity.

The money test had occasionally reared its head in the past. In his first Annual Message to Congress, Theodore Roosevelt called for immigrants to show “proper proof of personal capacity to earn an American living and enough money to insure a decent start under American conditions.” Williams had informally tried such a money test during his first administration, but Watchorn disavowed it when he took over.

Now Williams was reinstating the test. Recognizing that he was entering murky legal territory, he said that the $25 requirement was not a fixed rule, but instead “a humane notice to intending immigrants” that they should have a certain amount of money on them when they landed. As for Hersch Skuratowski, he had arrived on June 22, six days
before
Williams issued his new rule. Further stretching the law, officials kept Skuratowski in detention until his board of special inquiry hearing, which was conveniently held on the same day that Williams made his $25 edict.

Twenty-five dollars was a significant amount of money in 1909. In 2007 dollars, it would equal roughly $570. Add to that steerage tickets that cost between $30 and $40, and the cost of coming to America would now become an onerous financial burden.

Williams’s edict had an immediate effect. On its first day of enforcement, 215 of the 301 passengers on Holland-Amerika’s
Ryndam
liner were detained for possessing less than $25. Most would not be sent back, but the burden of proof would now fall on immigrants to convince authorities they would not become public charges.

Conditions worsened as more immigrants piled up because of the new rule. “Trouble Feared from the Excluded,” read a
New York Times
headline, “The 800 Immigrants Held on Ellis Island Not Taking Deportation Easily.” One of the detainees was a twenty-three-year-old Russian medical student named Alexander Rudniew, who was ordered deported as likely to become a public charge because he arrived with less than $25. At one point, a frustrated Rudniew lashed out in Yiddish at Ellis Island officials, who feared that the doctor might stir the detainees to take over the station. A night watchman pulled a gun on Rudniew, which seemed to settle down the crowd. Rudniew would eventually be admitted into the country.

On July 4, Rudniew was one of a hundred detained Russian Jews, ranging in age from eight to fifty-eight, to sign a letter to the
Forward
, New York’s Yiddish-language newspaper, complaining of crowded conditions at Ellis Island. The editors printed the letter on page one. “Everyone goes around dejected and cries and wails,” the letter read. Many of the detainees had deserted from the Russian army and feared deportation. They called Williams’s $25 rule an “outrage” and “nonsense” and hoped to alert fellow Jews as to “how we suffer here.” The
American Hebrew
sent a correspondent to Ellis Island and found that none were sick, although most were pale and flustered from their ordeal.