American Passage (30 page)

In his own way, Taft was both bucking up the spirits of a friend and telling him to ease off a bit. Taft saw Williams as faithfully executing the nation’s immigration law, but he did not share his overall view of the world. Taft loved his country no less than Williams, but did not find that the procession of aliens streaming into the country marked the downfall of the Republic. “Don’t let each trouble weigh on you with its intrinsic weight,” advised the weighty president. For Williams there would be no letup. It was not in his makeup. He was, as Taft would later write jokingly, “a severe old bachelor.”

Williams continued with his work despite the criticism. While he was making headlines—and enemies—with his strict policies, he also displayed a more typical bureaucratic mentality. Williams wanted a bigger budget from Congress. “I have repeatedly asked for more money and Congress usually has given me only from one-third to one-half of what I asked,” he complained. This plaint became a staple of his yearly annual reports, with Williams ever concerned about Washington’s “false economy.”

The Immigration Service was supposed to be self-supporting, since it received a head tax of $4 for every immigrant, paid by steamship companies but passed along in their ticket prices. During 1910, the United States welcomed over 1 million immigrants, which meant over $4.1 million for the federal government. However, the head tax receipts simply went into the federal government’s general operating fund. In fact, in 1910 Congress only appropriated a fraction of that money— $2.6 million—for the operations of the immigration service. Washington was making a profit from immigration.

The economic effects of immigration went beyond the head tax. Immigrants brought more than $46 million with them to the United States in 1910 and sent back roughly $154 million to their relatives in Europe. From 1890 to 1922, GNP increased by nearly 400 percent, as millions of immigrants lent their labor to the factories, mines, and construction crews that built industrial America and created the near unprecedented wealth upon which the American Century was built.

When the U.S. Commission on Immigration, chaired by Vermont senator William Dillingham, finally released its report in 1911, it concluded that immigration was largely an economic issue. It found an oversupply of unskilled labor that lowered the standard of living for American wage earners. Newer immigrant groups, the commission concluded, no longer came over for the idealized reasons that supposedly drove previous immigrant groups. Instead, complained economist Henry Parker Willis, who served as an adviser to the commission, many new immigrants came only “to temporarily take advantage of the greater wages paid for industrial labor in this country.”

“Voluminous.” “Encyclopedic.” “Multitudinous.” These were some of the adjectives used to describe the forty-one volumes of the final report of the Dillingham Commission. Clocking in at just under 29,000 pages, it still stands as one of the most impressive reports ever conducted by the U.S. government. How many Greek bakers came to America in 1907? Seventy-three. How many Polish Jewish boys were in the fifth grade of Chicago’s public schools? One hundred and thirtytwo. The Dillingham Commission had the answers for these questions and many, many more.
The commission’s findings were hardly the stuff of hard-core restrictionists, and its data debunked many myths about immigration. It ultimately recommended that immigrants convicted of a crime within five years of entering the country be deported and that immigrant banks and employment agencies be more strictly regulated. It also considered barring unskilled immigrants who arrived without a wife or family, as well as limiting the number of immigrants per year by “race.” However, the commission’s favored method of restriction, after almost 30,000 pages of data, three years of research, and $1 million in expenses was . . . the literacy test.

Theodore Roosevelt had been a staunch supporter of the literacy test in his younger days, but had done little to secure its passage in his seven years as president. In 1912, Roosevelt was again running for president as the leader of the newly formed Progressive Party. Despite Roosevelt’s long record on immigration, there would be no talk of literacy tests, undesirable immigrants, or any kind of immigration regulation during his campaign.

His new party’s platform contained one section on “The Immigrant” that concerned itself only with dealing with the problems immigrants faced once here. It promised to secure greater opportunities for immigrants; denounced the “fatal policy of indifference and neglect” that left immigrants prey to abuse; recommended a policy of distributing immigrants away from overcrowded urban ghettos; and called for promoting assimilation. Considering that it was Roosevelt who first brought William Williams to Ellis Island, it can only be described as pure political chutzpah when the
Progressive Bulletin
, the mouthpiece for Roosevelt’s new party, denounced Taft’s appointment of Williams and his “reign of terror at Ellis Island.”

The candidate who was forced to confront immigration most directly during the campaign was the Democratic candidate. Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey, a former political science professor and president of Princeton University, had published a five-volume history of the United States in 1901. In the final volume, the professor delved into immigration. Fitting with the tenor of the times, he condemned the “alteration of stock” brought about by the “multitudes of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland, men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence,” thereby lowering the American standard of living. Wilson contrasted these “sordid and hapless” individuals with Chinese immigrants who, despite possessing “many an unsavory habit,” were at least more intelligent, harder working, and driven to success.

Thanks to newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, who despised Wilson, these long-forgotten words now became front-page news across the country. Wilson was soon put on the defensive and tried to explain away his words. He wrote letters of apology to Italian, Polish, and Hungarian groups. “America has always been proud to open her gates to everyone who loved liberty and sought opportunity,” Wilson declared in one of these letters, “and she will never seek another course under the guidance of the Democratic Party.” He pointed to his membership in the National Liberal Immigration League and began to speak positively about the contribution of immigrants on the campaign stump. “I should be an ignorant man, indeed,” Wilson said, “if I did not realize that America has been built up by the blood and the sinews and the brains of those born in the Old World who recognized an opportunity for freedom denied them there.”

Despite the controversy, Wilson won by a plurality of votes. Taft came in third, and the lame-duck president had one more issue to deal with after his defeat. The Dillingham Commission provided the momentum for another attempt by Congress to pass a literacy test, which it did in early 1913. It was now up to Taft to decide the bill’s fate. The president, whose earnest and guileless temperament was better suited to the judicial bench than the White House, was conflicted about the literacy test. Two years earlier, Taft told Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell that while he had once been in favor of a literacy test, “I am not quite so clear in my mind now.”

For two decades, those who wanted to restrict immigration looked to the literacy test to achieve their goals. However, 122,735 immigrants would have been excluded if the law had been in effect in 1911. Though a large number, it represented only 14 percent of all immigrants that year. Over 90 percent of those who would have been barred as illiterates in 1911 came from eastern and southern Europe. Even still, the proportion of immigrants from these areas would have only dropped from 68 percent to 63 percent. The literacy test would have done little to stem Jewish immigrants; in 1911, only 6,400 who entered the United States were illiterate.

The numbers support the contention of opponents who argued that it was a poor judge of the worth of incoming aliens. “The literacy test is an admirable test of a man’s ability to read, and it tests nothing else,” said noted rabbi Stephen Wise. Others observed that the law would exclude many a “hard-working industrious man who can add to the country’s wealth by his labor,” yet “admit many a shifty, adroit, and conscienceless scamp who will add merely to our sufficient supply of gamblers, grafters, and thieves.” Nor would it keep out educated anarchists and radicals.

With only a few weeks left to his presidency, Taft finally announced his veto with “great reluctance.” In defense of his decision, he appended a long memo from Secretary Charles Nagel, a longtime opponent of the measure, laying out the weaknesses of the literacy test. “To Hell with Jews, Jesuits, and steamships,” a depressed Prescott Hall wrote to himself in the wake of Taft’s veto.

A few weeks before Taft’s veto of the literacy test, Woodrow Wilson paid a visit to Ellis Island. Accompanied by his wife, two of his daughters, and a number of friends from New Jersey, the presidentelect was ushered around the inspection station by William Williams. Whereas Roosevelt and Taft had thrown themselves into every aspect of the process on their visits to the island, injecting themselves into the decision-making process and even interrogating immigrants, Wilson was remarkably passive during his trip. “If Mr. Wilson was impressed or otherwise moved by what he saw he did not show it,” one newspaper reported. The president-elect asked few questions and his responses to Commissioner Williams were monosyllabic. Upon leaving Ellis Island, Wilson declined to comment about what he had seen. It was his “day off,” he told the reporter and he was there “for information and not for thought.”

Wilson was far more interested in issues like the tariff, antitrust regulation, and reforming the nation’s banking system than he was in immigration, especially after the drubbing he took on the issue during the campaign. It would have made sense for him to ask immediately for the resignation of Commissioner Williams, which would have been the kind of sweeping statement that would have reassured foreign-born Americans concerned about the new president. Wilson chose not to take that politically expedient path and allowed Williams to remain in office.

In his first month in office, Wilson split the Commerce and Labor Department into two separate cabinet posts. The Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization would reside in the newly created Labor Department. Woodrow Wilson chose the former United Mine Workers official and Scottish immigrant, William B. Wilson, as the first secretary of the new department.

Ethnic groups were heartened by the choice of Secretary Wilson, but concerned that after a few months in office, in the words of the
New Yorker Staats-Zeitung
, he had “not moved a finger in order that the brutal government at Ellis Island may come to an end.” Keeping Williams in office would “brand President Wilson as an enemy of immigration of the same type as Williams is in his heart.” Yet nothing had been done to end Williams’s “reign of terror,” which had turned Ellis Island into an “Island of Horrors.” Therefore, the paper called for Wilson to clean out the immigration service “In the Name of Humanity.”

Throughout the 1912 campaign season and into 1913, the foreignlanguage press kept hammering away at Williams, who continued to catalog and counter every charge. One representative article appeared in the Yiddish paper
Warheit
: “A Victim of the Murderous Acts on Ellis Island: A Detained Child Held Up for Stammering Dies in Williams’ Catacombs.”

The
Deutsches Journal
told a tale of “Son Torn from His Mother’s Arms: Was ‘Too Educated’ and ‘Not Muscular’ Enough.” Aron Mosberg had left his home in Galicia to come to America to join his sixtyyear-old mother. The twenty-six-year-old bookkeeper was listed at four feet, eight inches tall. Though he had enough money to travel secondclass instead of steerage, his allegedly “poor physique,” not his financial situation would lead to his deportation. “Not muscular enough” and “marked curvature of spine and deformity of chest” read Mosberg’s medical certificate. The newspaper admitted that Mosberg had no “Jack Johnson shoulders,” but lamented that it now appeared that “in America men are measured by their bone-structure.”

“Sir, You are the murderer of my child, Emilia.” Those were the only words contained in the letter that William Williams received in early May 1913 from a Chicago man named John Czurylo. The man’s wife and two young children had arrived at Ellis Island on March 29. With both eight-year-old Stanislaw and six-year-old Emilia suffering from chronic inflammation of the lymph nodes, all three were forced to remain at Ellis Island. One month later, John, still in Chicago awaiting his family, received a telegram announcing the death of Emilia. Filled with grief, he fired off the letter to Williams.

Williams took the time to reply to Czurylo and explain the circumstances of Emilia’s death. He believed that the father had fallen victim to the misrepresentations of the foreign-language press eager to use such tragedies to attack the government. John wrote back to apologize to Williams for “writing you such nonsensical trash.” Touchingly, he ends his letter by asking Williams to have his wife, still in detention, send him a letter since he had not heard from her in a while. Whatever the merits of the policies enforced at Ellis Island, stories like the Czurylos’ were heartbreaking.

Williams, though, was not a sentimentalist. He displayed little outward angst about the fates of people like Mosberg or the Czurylos. He would probably answer that his first duty was to execute the immigration laws fairly and without bias, which meant that Mosberg had to be deported and the Czurylo family had to remain at Ellis Island until the children had been healed. Williams thought sentiment got in the way of public duty. If exceptions were made, as the foreign-language press continually demanded, then the law would become meaningless.

In an April 1913 letter to Washington, Williams said that the personal attacks from the German press did not bother him much. “I attach no importance to them,” he wrote somewhat unconvincingly. Rather, it showed the effects of “foreign influences at work in our midst.” In a few short years, more Americans would join Williams in his concern about “foreign influences” on American politics, especially that of Germans.