American Passage (43 page)

Collecting their things, the three women were marched into the Great Hall, where they joined 246 men, including Alexander Berkman, shivering in the cold. In a short time, the group would march single-file through the main building and outside to a waiting ferry that would take them on the first leg of their journey. Walking through the bitter air of an early December morning with snow covering the ground, the band of ragged, sleepy, and dispirited radicals made their way to the ferry under the watchful eyes of armed soldiers and a group of federal officials, including J. Edgar Hoover and Congressman Albert Johnson, chairman of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. “Scores of cruel eyes staring us in the face,” was Goldman’s recollection of the event. As Goldman was boarding the ferry, someone yelled sarcastically: “Merry Christmas, Emma,” to which the anarchist thumbed her nose.

Colorado congressman William Vaile was also on hand. He described the deportees as having “rather stupid faces” and being “degraded and brutalized men.” Vaile believed that the deportations were perfectly justified. “Deportation is merely the act of ridding ourselves of foreigners who are not eligible for residence here under our laws,” he wrote. Though the government could not expel citizens for holding anarchist views, he believed that “a nation has the right to refuse its privileges and protection to any class of aliens whom it may consider undesirable residents.”

Vaile shared his cigarettes with a few of the deportees as they waited to board the ferry, but stopped after listening to their conversations, filled with a “bitter sneer.” Disgusted with these radicals, Vaile was overwhelmed by feelings of loathing and decided that “the rest of my tobacco should go to Americans.”

From the Ellis Island pier, the 249 deportees were first taken to Fort Wadsworth in Staten Island. Goldman and the other two female deportees were segregated from the men during the two-hour ferry ride. As the ferry passed the Statue of Liberty, it crossed paths with another ferry crowded with incoming immigrants headed for Ellis Island, who let out a cheer upon seeing the other boat, not realizing the destination of its passengers. Goldman, with her typewriter case beside her and holding a few sprigs of holly, engaged Hoover in conversation. America’s time was coming to an end, she told him matter-of-factly. Just as a new day was dawning in Russia, Goldman believed, so too would revolution come to the United States.

It must have been an odd sight, with the middle-aged anarchist and the young federal agent engaged in political conversation. The thin veneer of civility between Goldman and the authorities was a sign of the anarchist’s defeat. Goldman was still bitter at Hoover for not informing her lawyer about the deportation, and she let the young government official know it. “Haven’t I given you a square deal, Miss Goldman?” a defensive Hoover responded. “Oh, I suppose you’ve given me as square a deal as you could,” she replied. She could not refuse one final dig at her adversary: “We shouldn’t expect from any person something beyond his capacity.”

Upon arrival at Fort Wadsworth, the passengers were transferred to the
Buford
, a thirty-year-old army transport ship that had been in use during the Spanish-American War. Only 51 of the
Buford
’s passengers were deemed anarchists, including Berkman and Goldman. Some 184 of the deportees were members of the Federation of the Union of Russian Workers, a group designated as advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government. This included Joseph Poluleck, the Methodist whose major offense was that he took math classes at the wrong place. Finally, 9 of the passengers were excluded as likely to become a public charge, while 5 others had violated other parts of the immigration law.

The press was quick to give the
Buford
a new name, one that would stick throughout history: the Soviet Ark. The
Pittsburgh Post
called Goldman and the other passengers “the unholiest cargo that ever left our shores.” Because of the supposedly dangerous nature of the
Buford
’s human cargo, the army provided a contingent of sixty-four soldiers and officers to provide protection and prevent a mutiny, joined by nine officials from the Immigration Service.

Goldman and the others elicited little sympathy from Americans. Contrary to what Goldman and Berkman wrote, their deportation did not signify the beginnings of czarism or the end of freedom in America. Rather it was one of the many big and small events that, when taken as a whole, helped break apart the national consensus on immigration and herald a new era when Ellis Island—and the immigrants who once streamed through its doors—were less relevant to America.

F
ROM THE
B
LACK
T
OM
explosion to the deportation of Emma Goldman, Ellis Island found itself witness to the traumas of the Great War and its aftermath. The war was now over, but the debate over the power of exclusion, detention, and deportation remained.

A few years before Goldman was expelled, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes succinctly summarized the government’s view on deportation. It is not a punishment, Holmes wrote, but instead “simply a refusal by the government to harbor persons whom it does not want.”

The sailing of the Soviet Ark, which forever banished the country’s number one anarchist, emboldened the Justice Department to make further arrests. While the
Buford
was still on the high seas, hundreds more suspected alien radicals were rounded up as part of the Palmer Raids and brought to Ellis Island for deportation, many of whom belonged to the Communist Party. At the Labor Department, Louis Post tried to rein in the Justice Department’s excesses. With Secretary Wilson still ill, much of the burden fell on Post’s shoulders. He did not save Emma Goldman, but now, at the end of his career and with little to lose, Post ordered the release of over two thousand suspected radicals across the country, although he did uphold the deportations of a few hundred individuals.

Post made enemies with his actions, not the least of whom was J. Edgar Hoover. The young Justice Department official had dug up an affidavit that Post had signed in 1904 in support of anarchist John Turner. In Hoover’s files was a poem entitled “The Bully Bolshevik,” which was “disrespectfully dedicated to ‘Comrade’ Louie Post.” It is not clear whether Hoover wrote the ditty, but it certainly summed up his views:

The ‘Reds’ at Ellis Island
Are happy as can be
For Comrade Post at Washington Is setting them all free.

The anger toward Post extended to Congress. Six months earlier it had been Fred Howe who was being grilled for his sympathy toward radicals. Now it was Post’s turn. In May 1920, the House Rules Committee began impeachment hearings against him. By then, the Red Scare had petered out almost as quickly as it had begun. When Palmer’s dire warnings of a May Day revolution failed to come true, the public lost interest in the crusade. Congress quietly dropped its proceedings against Post.

At the height of the Red Scare, between November 1919 and May 1920, warrants were issued for 6,350 aliens suspected of radical activity, leading to around 3,000 arrests. Of that number, only 762 were ordered deported and only 271 were actually deported, including the 249 who left on the
Buford
. In the year after May 1920, an additional 510 alien radicals were deported.

The roundup and deportation of alien radicals were merely a continuation of longstanding immigration policy. For years, immigrants safely landed in the United States were at risk of deportation if they were subsequently found to qualify under one of the categories of exclusion. Between 1910 and 1918, almost twenty-five thousand immigrants already residing in the United States found themselves rounded up by authorities and deported back to their homelands for various reasons. After World War I, the government focused its attention more closely on radical aliens, but the mechanism it used was largely the same as had been used to deport immigrants before the war.

While the deportation process that characterized the Red Scare had long been part of the immigration law and would be used for decades more to come, the emotions that fueled this particular spasm of antiradical sentiment quickly died out. In hindsight, this period was a disjointed blip, a hiccup of tension and conflict. To the American mind of 1919 and 1920, however, the world seemed ablaze with danger.

A global flu outbreak had erupted before the armistice and continued into 1919. The worldwide death toll has been estimated at anywhere from 20 million to as high as 100 million. Many in the United States referred to it as the Spanish flu, reinforcing the alien nature of the disease and the danger of foreign entanglements. Some one-quarter of all Americans came down with the flu, and 675,000 died in less than one year, including Randolph Bourne, who passed away in December 1918. To many Americans, war and pestilence seemed their grim reward for becoming a world power.

During 1919, Americans were on edge. Some 4 million workers across the country went out on nearly 2,600 strikes. Steelworkers, miners, even Boston policemen walked out on their jobs during that tumultuous year. The American Communist Party was formed that year. And it was not just the United States that was in turmoil: following the lead of the Russian Bolsheviks, Communist uprisings occurred in Bavaria and Hungary.

The Great War turned the world upside down and dashed the optimism of a generation. Modern civilizations tore each other up on the battlefield as new technologies like airplanes, machine guns, and poison gas made the traditional destruction of war that much worse. The number of military dead was staggering: around 2 million Germans and Russians each, and around 1 million English, Austrians, and French each, not to mention the wounded, maimed, or shell-shocked. In a little over one year of war, America lost more than 115,000 men, with more than 200,000 wounded.

When the war ended, people on both sides of the Atlantic began to ask why and received few answers. The victorious Allies carved up the map and took their war booty, while Woodrow Wilson’s romantic vision of a League of Nations that would end war forever would have to function without the participation of the United States, when the Senate failed to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. When Americans asked what the war had been for, some answered that it had been fought only to fatten the pocketbooks of big business.

The scars of war remained on the American psyche and disabused many of their positive feelings for government. For liberals, the disillusionment was even more pronounced. They were the ones who had built up the federal government, who hoped to use it to counteract the power of corporations and provide protections for workers and consumers. The government, run by educated, middle-class professionals, was supposed to rescue America from an orgy of commercialism and ignorance, but instead it bumbled into a bloody European war for no apparent reason, stirred up ethnic hatred at home, and used its new police powers to quash dissent.

No one felt this disillusionment more than Fred Howe. “I hated the new state that had arisen, hated its brutalities, its ignorance, its unpatriotic patriotism, that made profit from our sacrifices and used its power to suppress criticism of its acts,” he wrote in his autobiography. The man who once argued that government should take control of public utilities now changed his tune. “I became distrustful of the state,” he complained, “And I think I lost interest in it, just as did thousands of other persons . . . who were turned from love into fear of the state and all that it signified.”

To Howe, the brutality of the state was on display at Ellis Island. A few weeks after the
Buford
left New York Harbor, Howe penned a scathing critique of U.S. immigration laws, the same laws he had been sworn to carry out for five years. The article’s title said it all: “Lynch Law and the Immigrant Alien.” He condemned deportations as cruel and criticized the secret hearings held at Ellis Island to determine the fate of immigrants. He painted a dark picture of European immigrants living in a “state of panic” and “perpetual fear.” He ominously pronounced: “We have made Americanization impossible.” Of course, in retrospect Howe was wrong. The policies at Ellis Island and the Red Scare had few long-term effects on the attitudes of immigrants to their adopted country, but they certainly scarred Fred Howe.

His disillusionment can also be seen in his shift away from the idea of government control over business and utilities toward the idea of a cooperative “producers’ state,” where workers participated in the management and ownership of business. After leaving Ellis Island, Howe tried to put this idea into practice as the executive director of the Conference on Democratic Railroad Control.

When Howe left in September 1919, he was at the depth of despair. He had been condemned on the floor of the House of Representatives. He had survived one congressional investigation, and another one loomed. He despised his superiors and lost faith in his fellow citizens. He had begun work at Ellis Island hoping “to make it a playhouse for immigrants.” When he left, he found it a prison for aliens deemed unworthy by the government, but it had also, as Wendell Phillips once said about slavery, “made a slave of the master no less than the slave.”

Before leaving Ellis Island for the last time in the fall of 1919, Howe gathered up all of the personal papers that he had been saving to use for a book on his experiences there. Instead of taking them with him, he sent for a porter and the two men carried the materials to the island’s engine room where they threw the papers into the flames.

Americanization is not a mathematical process; it is a human process. Pigs may be imported by mathematical calculation. Ought we to be surprised if piggish methods of regulation of immigration produce brutish resentment and hatred of law and government?

AT EXA CTLY MIDNIGHT ON JULY 1, 1923, THE STEAMSHIP
President Wilson
rushed across an imaginary line that spanned the Narrows of New York Harbor. Thirty seconds later, the
Washington
crossed that same line, which stretched from Fort Hamilton on the Brooklyn side to Fort Wadsworth on the Staten Island side. Within six minutes, a total of ten steamships had sailed past the line. One more ship would slip across a few hours later.

Immigration officials stationed at the two forts duly noted the times the ships crossed this line. When the mad midnight dash was over, eleven ships had arrived at Ellis Island, containing over eleven thousand passengers seeking entry to the United States. By morning, immigration officials were busy processing the new arrivals.

To anyone awake at that midnight hour, the throng of massive transatlantic steamers jockeying for position in the middle of the night in New York Harbor must have been a sight to behold. Why were these ships waiting in the harbor for the tolling of the midnight hour? Why did immigration officials patrol an imaginary line along the Narrows in the middle of the night? And why did these ships race across that imaginary line and have their times recorded as if it were an Olympic track meet?

The exact time a steamship crossed that invisible line held the potential to change the lives of thousands of immigrants aboard those vessels and spoke to the dramatic turn in American immigration laws since the end of World War I. The postwar disillusionment meant that the old way of dealing with the regulation and processing of immigrants—sorting the desirable from the undesirable—was over.

Restrictionists had long thought the process at Ellis Island was too lax, while immigration defenders thought it too strict. Yet the little island kept the concerns of both groups in balance, allowing a generally free immigration while barring those few deemed undesirable. War disrupted that balance, and both sides lost faith that government could weed out undesirables while treating its guests with a modicum of respect. Summing up the nation’s disillusionment, the
Saturday Evening Post
complained in 1921 that “the Department of Labor knows no more about immigration than it knows about the habits of the viviparous blenny or the gambling systems in use at Monte Carlo.”

Though the hysteria of the Red Scare had subsided, economic concerns deepened. The United States had entered a severe postwar recession. With some 2 million Americans out of work—many of them returning soldiers—the prospect of a postwar revival of European immigration was troubling. While four years of war had drastically reduced the number of immigrants, more than 430,000 people arrived between July 1919 and June 1920, and almost double that number would arrive in the following twelve months.

Americans feared that was just the tip of the iceberg. When they looked to Europe, they saw a continent teeming with people living amid the rubble and destruction of war. To those poor souls, America looked more and more attractive. Anthony Caminetti investigated conditions in Europe in late 1920 and reported back that some 25 million Europeans were ready to emigrate. Steamship officials told immigration authorities that some 15 million Europeans were “vociferously demanding immediate passage.” Lothrop Stoddard, author of
The

“The influx of aliens will be limited only by the capacity of the steamships,” a
New York Times
editorial warned of this potential deluge of war-displaced Europeans. “Our equipment for handling the alien flood, meanwhile, has pitiably broken down. . . . Ellis Island is a chaos.”

This was all too much for Albert Johnson, the chairman of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. Johnson returned from another visit to Ellis Island in November 1920 and announced that what he found there was so bad that he was sure “the country does not realize the menace of immigration.” He promised that on the first day of the new session of Congress he would offer a bill to restrict immigration.

That is exactly what he did. At first, Johnson pushed for a two-year suspension of immigration, but his colleagues could only be convinced to support a one-year moratorium. Had the legislation passed, it would have marked the first time in American history that the gates of the nation were closed completely. Suspending immigration was a tactic that not even Henry Cabot Lodge or Prescott Hall had ever suggested in their darkest, most pessimistic moods.

The plan went nowhere. In the Senate, William Dillingham, former chairman of the U.S. Immigration Commission, had other ideas. He resurrected a plan that emanated from his 1911 report: institute a quota on new immigrants of 5 percent of the number of foreign-born for each nationality in the United States as counted by the 1910 Census. The plan would also impose a limit of six hundred thousand immigrants per year, well above the wartime figures but half the number that had arrived in the boom years of 1905–1907 and 1913–1914. The House dropped its immigration moratorium plan and signed on to the Senate’s efforts, although Johnson and his allies managed to shrink the quota down to 3 percent and lower the overall ceiling.

The bill came to the desk of Woodrow Wilson for signature in his final days in office in 1921. His body withered by a stroke and his soul embittered by the failure of the Senate to accept his beloved League of Nations, Wilson did not act on the bill, thereby effecting a pocket veto. No public reason was given.

Congressman Johnson was not finished. A new president, more sympathetic to immigration restriction, was about to enter the White House. Less than two months after Wilson’s pocket veto, President Warren Harding signed a nearly identical bill. More surprising than the drastic change in policy was its relatively uncontroversial nature. The bill passed the Senate with only one negative vote, and it passed in the House with only thirty-three nays. Ethnic groups opposed the measure, but their arguments found little traction in those unsettled postwar years.

As Congress moved rapidly toward restriction in the spring of 1921, Prescott Hall lay ill in his bed in Brookline, Massachusetts. He had devoted the previous twenty-eight years of his life to the ideal of an Anglo-Saxon nation. The sickly Hall used the one weapon at his disposal—his pen—to rail against undesirable immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and in favor of the literacy test. The Immigration Restriction League actually had its own version of immigration quotas introduced into Congress in 1918. The organization admitted that its goal was to “discriminate in favor of immigrants from Northern and Western Europe, thus securing for this country aliens of kindred and homogeneous racial stocks.” That bill went nowhere.

Hall lived long enough to see Congress pass the new quota law, then passed away that May at the age of fifty-two. Joseph Lee, the Boston reformer and IRL member, eulogized Hall in the
Boston Herald.
“Mr. Hall’s work was unknown, unpaid, unrecognized,” Lee wrote, noting that without Hall, “the gates would have still been unguarded.”

The new law setting quotas by nationality went into effect at the end of June 1921 and limited immigration to a total of 355,000 quota immigrants per year. (Immigrant children and wives of American citizens, naturalized or native-born, could enter outside of the quotas.) The bill was passed as a one-year measure, but Congress would reauthorize the legislation for 1922 and 1923 as well.

The quotas severely restricted immigration from eastern and southern Europe; only 43 percent of immigrant slots were allotted to those regions. On a country-by-country basis, the effect of the quotas was even more startling. Although 296,414 Italians came to America in 1914, the last year in the prewar immigration boom, under the new quotas only 40,294 would be allowed to enter. In addition, no more than 20 percent of a nation’s yearly quota could be filled in any given month. That meant that the yearly quota for most nations would be filled in the first five months of the fiscal year.

If one of those ships on the night of June 30, 1923, had passed the imaginary line before midnight, it would have been marked as having entered in June 1923, the final month of the fiscal year, and all of its passengers would have been counted toward that year’s quota, which by then had most certainly been filled. Such a miscalculation, even by one minute, would mean that most of those immigrants would be barred from entry and sent back to Europe. The steamship race across the Narrows would be repeated at midnight on the first of the month for the next few months.

What had caused this drastic change in immigration policy? America’s unhappy experience in World War I helped turn the nation inward and soured its citizens. By 1920, Europe meant destruction, disease, and pointless ethnic conflict, and Americans sought once again to use the Atlantic Ocean as a barrier to the wretched influence of decayed Europe.

The link between immigration and radicalism further poisoned American attitudes—formerly ambivalent, yet relatively open—toward immigration. The fear of alien radicals caused many in the business community, usually in the forefront of the pro-immigration lobby, to acquiesce to the new restrictive legislation.

A major backbone of pro-immigrant sentiment had been the German-American community, which never fully recovered from the suspicions brought on by the Great War. In 1910, there had been 634 German-language newspapers in the country; by 1920, that number was down to 276.

The National German-American Alliance, one of the largest German-American organizations in the country, had been a staunch supporter of immigration and opponent of restriction. The organization—and especially two of its leaders, Henry Weismann and Alphonse Koelble—had been a fierce critic of William Williams. The Great War destroyed the NGAA. By 1916, Weismann and Koelble were charged with trying to set up an office in Washington to lobby on behalf of the German government. By 1918, Congress voted to revoke the charter of the NGAA. The cumulative effect was that the strongest, loudest, and most fearless pro-immigration voice in the country was now eager to prove its“100 percent Americanism” and would never fully regain that voice.

The growing popularity of eugenics also contributed to the success of the quotas. After the war, Prescott Hall called immigration restriction “a species of segregation on a large scale, by which inferior stocks can be prevented from diluting and supplanting good stocks.” A number of eugenicists linked their work to immigration restriction. Congressman Johnson, a leading proponent of quotas, was deeply influenced by eugenics. Harry Laughlin, director of the Eugenics Record Office, served as a researcher for the House Committee on Immigration. However, as Stephen Jay Gould has noted, “Restriction was in the air, and would have occurred without scientific backing.”

Madison Grant’s
The Passing of the Great Race
, a paean to Nordic supremacy, was originally published in 1916 and received little notice. The early 1920s, however, provided a more welcoming environment for his views. Grant noted how the Great War seemed to shift public attitudes toward immigrants, since “Americans were forced to the realization that their country, instead of being a homogeneous whole, was a jumbled-up mass of undigested racial material.” He also worried that immigration was affecting the national stature of Americans—literally. He complained that the Army had lowered its height requirement to allow the conscription of soldiers from “newly arrived races of small stature.”

The fact that many immigrants and their children fought in the U.S. military was surely a positive sign of assimilation. For Grant, assimilation was a false god. This was one of the few areas where he agreed with proto-multiculturalists like Randolph Bourne. Grant mocked the famous war propaganda poster with Miss Liberty paying homage to an honor roll of names from Du Bois to Smith to Levy to Chriczanevicz. “Americans All!” shouted the poster, an idea that Grant found difficult swallow.

“These immigrants adopt the language of the native American; they wear his clothes; they steal his name; and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom understand his ideals,” Grant bemoaned. The problem was not the lack of assimilation, but rather that the melting pot was being “allowed to boil without control.” He painted a bleak future where assimilation would “produce many amazing racial hybrids and some ethnic horrors that will be beyond the powers of future anthropologists to unravel.” The question for Grant was: Was it too late?

Such views were not just isolated to cranky Manhattan snobs. The
Saturday Evening Post
, the nation’s most widely read weekly magazine and best known for its Norman Rockwell covers that embodied Middle American values, became one of the leading voices of restriction. A 1921 article warned middle-class Americans that “immigration must be stopped. This is a matter of life and death for America.”

America’s postwar attitude toward immigrants had a substantial effect on the fortunes of immigrants such as the accused prostitute Giulietta Lamarca. The war had meant a reprieve from being returned to Europe, but since their deportation orders had never been rescinded, peacetime meant they were again vulnerable. The turmoil of war and the Red Scare briefly pushed these deportation cases into a bureaucratic black hole, but by 1921, as the American mood toward immigration grew darker, the government once again turned its attention to immigrants like Giulietta.

In the summer of 1921, officials reopened her case. Byron Uhl, the assistant commissioner of Ellis Island, noted that Giulietta had been living in open adultery in New Jersey for a few years, despite having a husband and child in Italy. This, coupled with the outstanding deportation order for prostitution from 1915, was enough to warrant another stay for Lamarca at Ellis Island.