American Passage (5 page)

The
Times
editorialized against the plans for Castle Garden, writing that “one of the delights of the City for nearly thirty years” would “be a delight no more. Hereafter it is to be a nuisance . . . an offence to the eye, and an ugly obstacle to a view of the magnificent moving panorama of our glorious Bay.” One of those prosperous New Yorkers unhappy with Castle Garden was railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who lived across the street from the Battery and would lend his name to the August indignation meeting. Even with such opponents, Castle Garden opened as planned.

On Castle Garden’s first day, as immigrants streamed through its doors, a group of runners gathered outside, shouting at and intimidating Castle Garden workers. One member of the board was forced to pull a gun on the rowdies. That first night, after midnight, a handful of runners—a “foul brood of villains who have so long fattened upon the plunder of emigrants,” one newspaper called them—tried to crash through the doors of Castle Garden to wreak havoc, but were turned away.

Having failed to stop the opening of Castle Garden, Rynders and his supporters took to the streets in mid-August three days after the station opened. Rynders claimed to be merely seeking “open, fair competition among the emigrant forwarders” and opposed any attempt by the state to grant a monopoly over the business of handling immigrants. In other words, the state of New York and the Board of Commissioners were squeezing Rynders and his men out of business.

After the final speaker addressed the gathering, the crowd left the Battery to the strains of “Yankee Doodle” and took their torchlight procession back through the streets of the city’s First Ward. The
Times
was not fooled by the patriotic rhetoric or the claims that Castle Garden would endanger the city’s health. The organizers of the indignation meeting, the paper informed its readers, “were the emigrant runners, baggage smashers, boarding-house keepers, and other professional gentry, who have long filled their own pockets by robbing emigrants upon their first arrival.” The
Daily Tribune
was even more blunt, seeing the meeting as a way “to devise means to throw the immigrants again into the hands of the thieves . . . who have grown rich by robbing strangers.”

Throughout the fall, runners would try to cause trouble at Castle Garden or steer immigrants away from the depot, but they were fighting an uphill battle. By December 1855, Castle Garden had been operating for four months and one reporter who visited the depot was pleased with what he saw. The entrance was heavily guarded and those without letters of introduction were turned away. “There is no public undertaking in the city more wise and benevolent.” The reporter continued, “It redeems our city to know that anything so judicious and benevolent could be executed by it.”

The harassment of Castle Garden officials continued for another year, but the runners and their allies were never able to shut the station down. Between January and April 1856, Castle Garden processed over 16,000 immigrants arriving on 106 ships. In its annual report of that year, the Board of Commissioners made oblique reference to the troubles, stating that “where violence threatened with a strong hand to lay waste and destroy, the police . . . effectually checked the thoughtless and lawless in their course and preserved a valuable property from destruction or damage.”

Some reports claimed that immigrant runners, faced with failure in New York, had left for California to seek their fortune or else had joined private military expeditions to Mexico and Nicaragua. Rynders managed to cling to political power and was named U.S. Marshall for New York in 1857 as a reward for his work in helping to elect James Buchanan president.

At Castle Garden, immigrants received reliable information about travel, jobs, and housing. The newcomers could exchange foreign money for American currency and buy railroad tickets without fear of fraud. An employment bureau helped immigrants find work around the country. The sick and disabled were provided with medical care. Immigrants’ baggage was carefully handled and boardinghouses were screened, licensed, and supervised by the board. Decent food at decent prices was available.

With the runners seemingly vanquished, the Board of Commissioners won lavish praise. Friedrich Kapp, a member of the board, described the institution he helped manage as “one of the most benevolent establishments in the civilized world . . . it forestalls untold misery, need and suffering.” One English emigrant called it “a great national refuge for the emigrant from all lands. . . . It stands alone in its noble and utilitarian character.” In William Dean Howells’s 1890 novel
A Hazard of New Fortunes
, the book’s main character, Basil March, describes how well officials at Castle Garden treated newcomers. “No one appeared troubled or anxious; the officials had a conscientious civility,” March mused. A journalist called Castle Garden “one of the most beneficent institutions in the world.”

Despite the accolades, Kapp had trouble understanding the country’s laissez-faire attitude toward immigration. “People look with indifference at this colossal immigration of the European masses,” Kapp wrote in 1870, “whose presence alone will exercise a powerful influence on the destinies of the Western World; National and State legislators care little or nothing for the direction which is given to this foreign element.”

That would soon change. By the 1880s, it seemed as if all of America had become interested in—even obsessed with—immigration. The industrial revolution was transforming the way Americans worked and lived. The United States was now a continental nation from the Atlantic to the Pacific, unified by transcontinental railroads. The nation saw its population nearly double between 1870 and 1900, while the gross national product increased sixfold. The United States was transforming itself overnight from a predominantly rural, agrarian society into an urban, industrial nation.

Between 1860 and 1910, the number of Americans living in cities rose from 6 million, or 20 percent of the population, to 44 million, or 40 percent of the population. In 1885, a Protestant minister named Josiah Strong wrote a best-selling book,
Our Country
, where he complained that cities were “a serious menace to our civilization” and possessed “a peculiar attraction for the immigrant.” Census data showed that these cities had become foreign territories. Immigrants and their children would soon account for nearly 80 percent of the population of cities like New York and Chicago.

A few years after Strong published his jeremiad, historian Frederick Jackson Turner looked at the 1890 Census and declared that the American frontier was officially closed. Open land, at least in theory, was disappearing. To Turner, open land had made earlier immigration possible, as the frontier became the crucible in which “immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race.”

If the frontier was now closed, where would new immigrants go? Critics feared that the city would be the new frontier, but without the same ability to assimilate newcomers. Overcrowded cities populated by those who spoke in foreign tongues marked the end of the Republic, as the United States was in danger of becoming just like Europe: corrupt, overindulgent, class-ridden, contemptuous of republican government, and doomed to revolution. Political corruption, alcoholism, and socialism would reign.

A writer in the
Atlantic Monthly
worried in 1882 that “our era . . . of happy immunity from those social diseases which are the danger and the humiliation of Europe is passing away.” The new immigrants evoked not just fears of overcrowded and corrupt Old Europe, but also ancient Rome, which had been threatened by an urban rabble and an increasingly non-Roman citizenry: “In spite of the magnificent dimensions of our continent, we are beginning to feel crowded,” said a writer in 1887. “Our cities are filling up with a turbulent foreign proletariat, clamoring for
panem et circenses
, as in the days of ancient Rome, and threatening the existence of the republic if their demands remain unheeded.”

Daily newspapers, middle-class magazines, and highbrow intellectual journals devoted increasing space to immigration. The
North American Review
, the voice of conservative, Northern, native-born Protestants, published two lengthy articles in the early 1880s that detailed how many immigrants were coming and where they were coming from. The articles displayed a marked ambivalence. Immigrants brought great material benefits to the United States, but it was “inevitable, however, that much moral and physical evil will be brought hither by the multitudes who come.”

Newspapers throughout the country chimed in. The
Ohio State Journal
asked, “What statesman will be wise enough to sift the hundreds of thousands of emigrants crowding over from Europe and say which . . . should be admitted and which, in the exercise of the sacred right of self-protection, should be excluded?” Such a statesman would be needed since, according to the
Philadelphia Telegraph
, “ a large percentage of the foreigners to whom we have given welcome are unworthy of it,” because they were “often idle, vicious socialists and anarchists, social pests and incendiaries.”

There were fears that America was becoming a dumping ground for Europe’s unwanted peasants. The
Chicago Times
warned that the “presence among us of a large body of socialists, anarchists, nihilists, lunatics, pordioseros [beggars], and other social dregs from the old world is a danger that threatens the destruction of our national edifice by the erosion of its moral foundations.” The
New York Times
wondered how long would “the people of this country submit cheerfully to this burden shifted to their shoulders from the Old World?”

A more benign view of immigration still continued to be heard. The
Boston Pilot
reminded its largely Irish Catholic readers that calls for restriction were an “unsavory reminder of the dark days” of the nativist Know-Nothings. The
Milwaukee Journal
, with its large German readership, saw immigration as “natural in its movements as the flow of the tides. It is a movement to restore the human equilibrium of the globe.” The paper’s laissez-faire prescriptions rejected government interference, calling it “un-American” and arguing that natural forces would slow or increase immigration based on market forces and social conditions.

Immigration was “giving us the best blood in the world,” according to the
Milwaukee Journal
, alluding to the benefits of an expanded gene pool. “American humanity in the end promises to be an advance on all other humanity that has yet appeared on the planet.” Americans were a “composite people,” according to the
St. Louis Republican
. “Our Americanism is continually changing. It is not today what it was a generation ago, and it will not be a generation hence what it is to-day.”

Others used genetic theory for darker purposes. Senator Justin Morrill argued that the effects of new immigrants were “more dangerous to the individuality and deep-seated stamina of the American people. . . . I refer to those whose inherent deficiencies and iniquities are thoroughbred, and who are as incapable of evolution, whether in this generation or the next.” Morrill, a well-respected Vermont Republican, argued that Americans “must not be coerced to support the weak, vile, and hungry outcasts from hospitals, prisons, and poor-houses, landed here not only to stay themselves but to transmit hereditary taints to the third and fourth generation.”

It took Episcopal bishop and poet A. Cleveland Coxe to bring this theory to its logical conclusion. Coxe called the new immigrants “invaders” who “come with weapons of fatal import to our civilization and to our race.” America was under attack from “hordes of barbarians,” for which, Coxe warned, historically minded Americans, there was ample precedent. Past invasions made Spain “a mongrel race, and have fastened upon her a chronic state of decay and imbecility.” Of course, the great historical example was the Roman Empire, with “Goths and Vandals pouring into the sunny south.” Coxe argued that new immigrants were hereditarily indisposed to democracy and could endanger the nation’s experiment in self-government.

Despite Coxe’s florid rhetoric, most people were trying to find a way to reconcile a vision of America as a refuge for immigrants with a desire to accept only desirable newcomers. The
Troy Times
welcomed “the intelligent, industrious, and honest foreigners who come here to establish homes,” but wanted “the highest and strongest barriers . . . raised” for the “worthless human rubbish.” “What we need,” argued the
Minneapolis Tribune
, “is the inspection and sifting of intending immigrants.” Such a system, the
New York Commercial Advertiser
believed, would allow the nation to “defend itself against undesirable additions to its population without crowding out immigrants who are qualified to become good citizens.”

By the late 1880s, changes in the way America handled immigration were inevitable. Castle Garden had become an anachronism, a quaint relic of a disappearing world. It was a state-run institution trying to deal with a nationwide problem. It was an institution run by machine politicians and private citizens looking to protect the interests of immigrants, not disinterested professionals looking out for the greater good of society. It was a nineteenth-century solution to a (soon to be) twentieth-century problem.

Castle Garden officials would find themselves under nearly continuous assault. Where Isaiah Rynders and his immigrant runners failed years before, the Supreme Court, the Congress, the Treasury Department, the governor of New York, and crusading journalists succeeded.

The Supreme Court struck the first blow in 1875 with
Henderson
v.
Mayor of New York
, which declared that state laws requiring the immigrant head taxes were unconstitutional because they usurped Congress’s constitutional powers to regulate immigration. The Constitution is fairly oblique in its references to immigration, and Congress had shown little desire to exercise that right previously. A decade after the victory of the Union Army at Appomattox, the Supreme Court was unsympathetic to the idea of states’ rights. “The laws which govern the right to land passengers in the United States from other countries ought to be the same in New York, Boston, New Orleans, and San Francisco,” the Court declared.