American Passage (52 page)

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, a Slovenian immigrant named Louis Adamic traveled the country giving a speech entitled “Plymouth Rock and Ellis Island.”

The beginning of their vital American background as groups is not the glorified Mayflower, but the as yet unglorified immigrant steerage; not Plymouth Rock or Jamestown, but Castle Garden or Ellis Island or Angel Island or the International Bridge or the Mexican and Canadian border, not the wilderness of New England, but the social-economic jungle of the city slums and the factory system.

With the United States heading toward involvement in another European war, Adamic hoped the inclusion of Ellis Island into America’s historic pantheon would help unify the diverse nation. “Let’s make America safe for differences,” he exhorted his audiences. “Let us work for unity within diversity.”

After the war, Ellis Island fell off the nation’s collective radar, finding itself uncomfortably in the news with the detentions of enemy aliens during World War II and suspected radicals during the Cold War. However, the revival of white ethnic identity during the late 1960s and 1970s helped bring more attention to Ellis Island.

In deeply nostalgic tones, Leo Rosten wrote an article for
Look
in 1968 entitled: “Not So Long Ago, There Was a Magic Island.” Around the same time, Senator Ted Kennedy, a descendant of pre-Ellis Island Irish immigrants, penned a piece in
Esquire
about Ellis Island and those who passed through it. “They came—creative, industrious, unafraid,” Kennedy wrote. “Today Ellis Island stands as a symbol, in new glory, of the oldest theme in our history. It reminds us all that the nobility to which America has risen was born of humble origins.” In 1975, National Parks Service historian Thomas Pitkin published the first comprehensive history of Ellis Island. “There is nothing really fanciful in calling Ellis Island, as has been done, the Plymouth Rock of its day,” Pitkin wrote in conclusion. “There is no single point in the country where American social history for a generation and more comes to a sharper focus.”

In the late 1970s, a group of Armenian-Americans gathered at Ellis Island “to express gratitude to their adopted land of freedom.” Set Charles Momjian, one of the event’s organizers, captured its meaning for Armenians and other immigrants. “For many, Ellis Island was a sad and disconcerting beginning to life in the United States,” Momjian wrote. “It is therefore a measure of our success as Americans that we return to this place, no longer afraid, intimidated, or bewildered, but confident and grateful for the blessings we have experienced in this country.” The novelist William Saroyan described how his grandmother was almost excluded upon arrival because of poor eyesight. Though Saroyan was born in the United States, he wrote that Ellis Island was in his “very marrow.”

Riding this wave of nostalgia and ethnic pride, Peter Sammartino, a university official and son of Italian immigrants, began the Restore Ellis Island Committee in hopes of eventually opening it to visitors. It succeeded in getting Congress to appropriate $1 million for the effort, as well as $7 million to rebuild the island’s seawall. Thanks to Sammartino’s efforts, the National Park Service opened the main building to the public for a limited number of guided tours in 1976, but the island was still a mess. Journalist Sydney Schanberg called it “about as romantic as a row of hollow buildings in the South Bronx.” Ellis Island was closed again for repairs in 1984.

In that same year, Geraldine Ferraro became not just the first woman from a major American political party to run on a presidential ticket, but also the first Ellis Island descendant. Walter Mondale’s selection of Ferraro as a running mate signaled the importance of ethnic identity to the campaign. So did the choice of Mario Cuomo, another New

York Democrat, to give the keynote address at the party’s convention. “The Battle for Ellis Island” is how political writer Michael Barone
dubbed the campaign. “What’s important in 1984 is not how each
ticket appeals to specific ethnic groups,” Barone wrote, “but which is
more successful in appealing to the Ellis Island tradition generally.” Republicans would point to free-market capitalism as instrumental in the
success of Ellis Island immigrants, while Democrats would argue for
the importance of the New Deal in making second- and third-generation Americans part of the middle class.
In 1988, the Democratic Party nominated another child of Ellis
Island as its presidential candidate. Running against blue-blood Republican George H. W. Bush, Michael Dukakis played up his background
as the son of Greek immigrants. In his acceptance speech, the Massachusetts governor made prominent mention of his late father, “who
arrived at Ellis Island with only $25 in his pocket, but with a deep and
abiding faith in the promise of America.” During the campaign, Dukakis made a red, white, and blue appearance at Ellis Island, where he discussed his parents’ arrival decades earlier. “Their story is your story,”
he said. “It is our story; it is the story of America.”
Ferraro and Dukakis were political losers, but as
Newsweek
’s Meg
Greenfield noted, Ellis Island “has become the East Coast equivalent
of the log cabin, poor farm-boy upbringing and the rest of that Americana unavailable to so many people with exotic surnames.” Now firmly entrenched in the nation’s psyche and historical
memory, Ellis Island was once again ready to take its place on the
public stage. After years of restoration and fundraising by the Statue
of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation, a renovated Ellis Island was finally
reopened on September 9, 1990. An economic recession that year led
to a far more restrained event than the glitzy 1986 unveiling of the refurbished Statue of Liberty.
At the cost of over $150 million, the main building on the island’s
north side was opened to the public as an immigration museum. Visitors
disembarking from the ferry would stroll up the path toward the building just as many of their ancestors had. Arriving in the first floor, they
would then make their way up a set of stairs, a replica of the original,
where inspectors and doctors once closely examined immigrants as they
wound their way upstairs. Visitors would then enter the Great Hall. Though once filled with immigrants marching toward clerks waiting to question them, the renovated Great Hall was starkly empty. Side rooms contained explanations of the immigration inspection process. Tourists could visit a hearing room used by the boards of special inquiry, as well as the detention rooms where immigrants slept in canvas bunk beds stacked three to the ceiling, hanging from wires. The renovation of the main building won rave reviews from
New York Times
architecture critic Paul Goldberger, who called it “skillfully designed, brilliantly executed.”
On many levels, the restoration of Ellis Island has been a success. Many visitors come not just to see the renovated main building and museum, but also for something called the American Immigrant Wall of Honor. Iacocca took this idea from the Wall of Sixteen Million that appeared in Philip Johnson’s 1960s design, but he added his own salesman’s twist. With his philosophy of “Give ’em a piece of it,” Iacocca decided to charge people to put their names or the names of their ancestors on the wall. By 1993, the wall had raised more than $42 million, with the potential for more money from more names on expanding walls in the future.
By accident, Iacocca added to the confusion of Ellis Island. Most visitors believe that the Wall of Honor lists the name of every immigrant who passed through the island. Many are upset when they do not find their ancestor’s name on the wall. The reality is that an immigrant’s name appears on the Wall of Honor only after their descendants donate at least $100. No money, no name.
More confusion followed. Samuel Freedman found that his grandparents are listed twice since both his father and an uncle or aunt had separately given money to list their parents’ names. To confuse matters even more, when visitors see the Wall of Honor, they are liable to find scattered among the over 700,000 names (as of 2008) such “immigrants” as Miles Standish, Paul Revere, and Thomas Thayer, whose name was added thanks to the donation of one of his descendants, former First Lady Barbara Bush.
At the other side of the historical spectrum, Ellis Island immigrants share space on the walls with people like Shin Ki Kang, a Korean immigrant who came to America in 1977 and Parvis Mehran, a recent arrival from Iran. The grab-bag nature of the Wall led a reporter to describe it as the “apotheosis of the American dream, allowing anyone and everyone to purchase a place in American history.”
What name does one put on the wall? One woman complained that
she would have loved to have her grandfather’s name on the Wall of
Honor, but did not know which name to use? Should it be Nehemiah
Nohr, his given name at birth, or “the name assigned by the authorities
at Ellis Island and by which he would be known for the next 50 years
as a naturalized American, Jacob Friedman?” This woman complained
that the Nohrs had vanished into history, “obliterated . . . without
known reason, creating a dilemma that those Ellis Island clerks could
hardly have foreseen.”
The connection between Ellis Island and the issue of names remains
tightly drawn in the public mind. As in the mind of the daughter of
Jacob Friedman, Ellis Island has become synonymous with the changing of immigrant names.
The most famous story of an Ellis Island name change is that of
Sean Ferguson. This Jewish immigrant was reportedly given his Scottish-sounding name by inspectors who, after asking the confused immigrant his name, received a response in Yiddish:
Schoen vergessen
,
meaning “I forgot.” Thus was baptized Sean Ferguson.
The stories multiply. Immigrants from Berlin received the last name
Berliner from officials. Then there is the story of a Jewish orphan who
told inspectors he was a
yosem
, an orphan, and found his new name as
Josem. Another immigrant was supposedly told by officials to “Put
your mark in this space” and found his name had become Yormark.
In the HBO series
The Sopranos
, a mobster named Phil Leotardo complains at a family gathering that the family’s original name was Leonardo—after Leonardo Da Vinci—but was changed to Leotardo at Ellis
Island. When his grandchild asks why, Phil responds: “Because they are
stupid, that’s why. And jealous. They disrespected a proud Italian heritage and named us after a ballet costume.” A popular 1994 children’s
book is entitled
If Your Name Was Changed at Ellis Island
. In an interview later in her life, Sophia Kreitzberg retells the story
that her stepfather told her about his time at Ellis Island. Officials asked
him his name and he replied Kogan. “Kogan Shmogan,” the inspector
allegedly told Sophia’s stepfather, “that’s not an American name,” and
the official renamed him Sam Cohen. “They gave everybody the name
of Cohen or Schwartz or something,” she said. “That’s why you find
so many Jewish people with the same ethnic names. They were given
those names by the people in Ellis Island.”
Then there is the joke about the Chinese laundry owner named
Moishe Pipik. When asked how a Chinese man got such a strange
name, Pipik explained: “At Ellis Island, I stand in line behind man
named Moishe Pipik. When my turn come, man ask my name, I say
‘Sam Ting.’ ” That a Chinese immigrant would easily pass through
Ellis Island, despite the Chinese Exclusion Act, signals the apocryphal
nature of the story.
Nearly all of these name-change stories are false. Names were not
changed at Ellis Island. The proof is found when one considers that
inspectors never wrote down the names of incoming immigrants. The
only list of names came from the manifests of steamships, filled out
by ship officials in Europe. In the era before visas, there was no official
record of entering immigrants except those manifests. When immigrants reached the end of the line in the Great Hall, they stood before
an immigration clerk with the huge manifest opened in front of him.
The clerk then proceeded, usually through interpreters, to ask questions based on those found in the manifests. Their goal was to make
sure the answers matched.
The only time immigration officials at Ellis Island wrote down
names was when immigrants were held for hearings or medical help.
Officials would include aliases and possible permutations of the names
of such immigrants on their paperwork. However, these were not official documents, just internal paperwork, and did not have the power
to change an immigrant’s name officially.
Name changes largely occurred either on the other side of the Atlantic, when steamship officials recorded names in their manifests, or
after Ellis Island, when immigrants filled out naturalization papers or
other official documents. Often immigrants voluntarily chose to Americanize their names to adapt to their new home.
There is at least one instance of a name change at Ellis Island, however. Frank Woodhull, who had been born a woman named Mary
Johnson, but had lived the previous fifteen years of her life passing as
a man, arrived at Ellis Island listed as Frank Woodhull on the ship’s
manifest. After spending one day in detention while authorities figured
out whether to admit him, Woodhull was finally allowed to proceed to
New Orleans, but not before officials crossed out Woodhull’s name on
the ship’s manifest and penciled “Mary Johnson” in its stead. But this
was clearly an exceptional case.
Yet the name change story lives on as urban legend. Many Americans are convinced of its truth because their grandparents told them the story. It is a convenient myth that emphasizes the traumatic nature of Ellis Island and the supposed rough treatment of immigrants, as well as the facility’s role in Americanizing immigrants, often against their will. The story serves as a convenient cover for the uncomfortable fact that many immigrants voluntarily discarded their Old World names in an effort to assimilate into American society. Better to blame insensitive immigration officials than Grandpa for the fact that your
name is Smith and not Hryczyszyn.
The inclusive nature of the Wall, encompassing Massachusetts Puritans and Korean businessmen, as well as those who actually passed
through Ellis Island, brings up larger questions about the memorialization of Ellis Island. Should it be seen as a shrine to celebrate the experiences of those who passed through it? Should it represent immigrants
from every era of American history? Or should it commemorate the
experiences of everyone who came to America in myriad ways, from
eighteenth-century slave ships to early nineteenth-century coffin ships
to modern immigrants who arrive at airports?
Even though the restoration of Ellis Island has drawn public acclaim, many scholars have been critical of its evolution into a national
icon. Their concerns revolve around three issues. First, the memorializing of Ellis Island should not be used to make negative comparisons
with newer immigrant groups. Second, the refurbished Ellis Island
should not lead to ideological celebrations of the free-market or “upby-the-bootstraps” homilies. Last, critics contend that the “nation of
immigrants” saga embodied in the Ellis Island story leaves out groups
that did not voluntarily emigrate to the United States, namely American Indians and the descendants of African slaves.
Historians are supposed to clear out the fog created by the construction of historical memory, but too often their work betrays an
attempt to construct a historical memory that serves an ideological
purpose. For example, historian Mike Wallace complained about the
lack of “fresh thinking” at the island’s museum and helpfully suggested
exhibits on “the effect on immigration flows of actions taken by the International Monetary Fund, major multinationals, and the Central Intelligence Agency.” He believed that the new immigration museum had
nothing that would help people probe contemporary anti-immigrant attitudes. “It would be perfectly possible to leave Ellis,” Wallace writes, “with warm feelings toward the old migrants and preexisting resent
ments of gooks, spicks and towel-heads left intact.”
In addition, Wallace and other leftists were concerned that the restoration of Ellis Island abetted the rise of American conservatism. “At
the heart of the Reagan/Iacocca reading of the history of immigration
was the ‘up-from-poverty’ saga of the model of white ethnics,” wrote
Wallace. This amounted to nothing more than an “antigovernment
screed” that facilitated the contemporary policies of the Reagan administration.
Art professor Erica Rand sees Ellis Island through the edgier
prisms of gender and queer studies. Her 2005 book
Ellis Island Snow
Globe
devotes space not only to predictable denunciations of commercialism, but also to more entertaining discussions of same-sex eroticism, with chapters such as “Breeders on a Golf Ball: Normalizing Sex
at Ellis Island.” Rand is also concerned about the exclusionary nature
of the site, which she sees as privileging the historical narrative of
one group. She worried that the “claim that the Ellis Island museum
honors all immigrants, all migrants, or even all who ‘people America’
also functions to mask the inequity involved in the concentration of
heritage resources at a site that honors and documents primarily white
people.”
It is hard for some to disentangle the memory of Ellis Island from
discussions of race. Many black Americans felt left out of the celebrations of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, even though few Americans seem aware that black nationalist Marcus Garvey, social scientist
Kenneth Clark, and Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay were
among the roughly 143,000 black immigrants—mostly from the Caribbean—who came through Ellis Island between 1899 and 1937. The disconnect was exemplified by black historian John Hope Franklin, who
admitted that the renovation of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island
was “a celebration for immigrants and that has nothing to do with me.