American Passage (56 page)

42
Shortly after the decision
: Hutchinson,
Legislative History
, 65–66.
42
It was not until
: “An Act to Regulate Immigration,” 1882, excerpted in Abbott, ed.,
Immigration,
181–182.
43
That same year
: Vought,
Bully Pulpit,
10; Tichenor,
Dividing Lines,
89–90; Hutchinson,
Legislative History,
80–83.
44
The Board of Commissioners
: Document No. 815, Box 4, INS.
44
Of the estimated
:
NYT
, January 25, 1883; “Immigration Investigation Report, Testimony and Statistics,” House Report 3472, 51st Congress, 2
^nd
Session, Serial 2886.
44
To many, this cried out
:
NYT
, February 11, 1883.
45
In 1880, a twenty-two-year-old
: Robert Watchorn,
The Autobiography of Robert Watchorn
(Oklahoma City, OK: Robert Watchorn Charities, 1959); “Robert Watchorn,”
Outlook
, March 4, 1905.
45
Another sign
: Roll 19, G-7-G20, ANY.
45
Public concern about
: James B. Bell and Richard I. Abrams,
Liberty: The Story of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island
(New York: Doubleday, 1984), 43–45.
46
In 1887, Pulitzer trained
:
NYW
, July 27, August 4, 10, 1887; Erickson, ed.,
Emigration from Europe, 1815–1914
, 276;
NYT
, August 31, 1887.
46
In 1888
: The Ford Report, reprinted in
Congressional Record
, 50th Congress, 2nd Session, 997–999.
48
Congress never acted
: Vought,
Bully Pulpit,
12.
49
As conditions at
: “Immigration and Crime,”
Forum
, December 1889.
49
The decision was inevitable
: John B. Weber,
Autobiography of John B. Weber
(Buffalo, NY: J.W. Clement Company, 1924), 88.
50
In response, a joint House and Senate
:
Congressional Record
, 51st Congress, 1st Session, Volume 21, 3085–3089.
50
“Give us a rest”
: Francis A. Walker, “Immigration,”
Yale Review
, August 1892; Francis A. Walker, “Immigration and Degradation,”
Forum
, August 1891.
51
Walker also saw
: See Maurice Fishberg, “Ethnic Factors in Immigration—A Critical View,” Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction, May 1906. Australia and New Zealand, largely Anglo-Saxon and with little immigration, saw their birth rates decline during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well.
51
Walker’s views
: Henry Cabot Lodge, “The Restriction of Immigration,”
NAR
, January 1891.
51
Lodge used the occasion
: Henry Cabot Lodge, “Lynch Law and Unrestricted Immigration,”
NAR
, May 1891.
52
Walker and Lodge
:
NYT
, April 30, 1891;
Boston Traveler
, October 24, 1891; “Report of the Select Committee on Immigration and Naturalization,” 51st Congress, 2nd Session, Report No. 3472, January 15, 1891; “Regulation of Immigration and to Amend the Naturalization Laws,” House Report, 51st Congress, 2nd Session, Report No. 3808.
52
The 1891 Immigration Act
: Michael LeMay and Elliot Robert Barkan,
U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 66–70; Higham,
Strangers in the Land,
99–100.
53
Immigration was now
: Hiroshi Motomura, “Immigration Law After a Century of Plenary Power: Phantom Constitutional Norms and Statutory Interpretation,”
Yale Law Journal
, December 1990; Lucy E. Salyer,
Laws as Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 26–28. Salyer claims that the inclusion of this clause that made the executive branch the final arbiter of immigration appeals stemmed from unhappiness over Chinese immigrants using the courts to challenge the Chinese Exclusion Act. While this could very well be true, it remains speculation.
53
The new immigration system
: On the rise of the federal government and the administrative state, see Stephen Skowronek,
Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Keith Fitzgerald,
The Face of the Nation: Immigration, the State and the National Identity
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); Morton Keller,
Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977); Morton Keller,
Regulating a New Society: Public Policy and Social Change in America, 1900–1933
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); and Gabriel J. Chin, “Regulating Race: Asian Exclusion and the Administrative States,”
Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review
37 (2002).
54
Despite the corruption
: Svejda, “Castle Garden,” iii.

57
As she exited
: The discussion of Annie Moore comes from the
NYT
, January 2, 1892;
New York Herald
, January 2, 1892;
NYW
, January 2, 1892; Thomas M. Pitkin,
Keepers of the Gate: A History of Ellis Island
(New York: New York University Press, 1975), 19; and the records of ship manifests found at www. ellisislandrecords.org.

58
She was soon
: A controversy arose over what happened to Annie Moore. Legend held that she headed out west to Texas, married, and died tragically when she was struck by a streetcar. More recent research found that Annie Moore actually never left New York. Instead, she remained in lower Manhattan, married a German-American named Schayer three years after her arrival, had eleven children of whom only five survived, and died of heart failure at age forty-seven in 1924. “She had the typical hardscrabble immigrant life,” said Megan Smolenyak, the genealogist who discovered the story of the real Annie Moore. “She sacrificed herself for future generations.” The living descendants of Annie Moore have Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, and Scandinavian surnames, a testament to the American melting pot.
NYT
, September 14, 16, 2006.

60
Once on the second floor
:
HW
, October 24, 1891.
60
A reporter from
:
HW
, August 26, 1893.
60
Politicians, journalists
:
NYT
, November 7, 1895; Samuel Gompers,
Seventy Years of Life and Labour,
vol. 2 (New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1967), 154.
61
“The existing immigration law”
: “Annual Report of the Superintendent of Immigration to the Secretary of the Treasury for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1892,” 11.
61
In 1875, the Supreme Court
:
Chae Chan Ping v. United States
, 130 U.S. 581 (1889). See also, Hiroshi Motomura, “Immigration Law After a Century of Plenary Power: Phantom Constitutional Norms and Statutory Interpretation,”
Yale Law Journal
, December 1990.
61
Three years later
:
Nishimura Ekiu v. U.S
., 142 U.S. 651 (1892); Hiroshi Motomura,
Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 33–34; Daniel J. Tichenor,
Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 110; “Developments in the Law: Immigration Policy and the Rights of Aliens,”
Harvard Law Review
, April 1983.
63
The government wanted
: The following discussion is taken from “A Report of the Commissioners of Immigration Upon the Causes Which Incite Immigration to the United States,” 52
^nd
Congress, 1st Session, Executive Document 235, January 1892. See also, John B. Weber, “Our National Dumping-Ground: A Study of Immigration,”
NAR
, April 1892.
64
There was an additional
: John B. Weber,
Autobiography of John B. Weber
(Buffalo, NY: J.W. Clement Company, 1924), 105.
65
Weber noted that
: A
Harper’s Weekly
editorial made the same point, asking, “Who else is there here to do the work which these immigrants are doing for us? We have on former occasions called attention to the important fact that the native American is becoming more and more disinclined to do hard work with his hands. . . . How many native Americans are willing to do the dirt work in railway or canal building or to dig coal or even to serve as farm hands?”
HW
, September 1, 1894.
65
Following his instructions
:
NYT
, February 15, 1892; Mary Antin,
From Plotzk to Boston
(Boston: W. B. Clarke: 1899), 12.
66
The emigration of
: Irving Howe,
World of Our Fathers
(New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 5–7.
66
The two Americans
: Weber,
Autobiography,
112–128.
67
By the 1890s
: Howe,
World of Our Fathers
21; Weber,
Autobiography,
106.

70
Weber was not resentful
:
NYT
, January 31, February 2, 1891.
71
The
Massilia
had departed
: The discussion of the
Massilia
case comes from “Immigration Investigation, Ellis Island, 1892,” 52
^nd
Congress, 1st Session, House Reports, Vol. 12, No. 2090, Series 3053; “Annual Report of the Board of Health of the Health Department of the City of New York for the Year Ending December 31, 1892,” City Hall Library, New York City; and Howard Markel,
Quarantine! East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
73
Often confused with
:
NYT
, February 14, 1892.
74
Within two days
:
NYT
, February 12, 1892.
74
Edson and his staff
:
NYT
, February 13, 1892.
76
The actions of Edson
: “Annual Report of the Board of Health of the Health Department of the City of New York for the Year Ending December 31, 1892,” 142, City Hall Library, New York City. Howard Markel overemphasizes the role of nativism in explaining the behavior of Edson and other city officials. He complains that the quarantine stigmatized immigrants and that “there was a huge price to pay in the form of violated civil liberties, cultural insensitivities, inadequate financial or physical resources devoted to their medical care.” In a more nuanced interpretation, Sherwin Nuland argues that city health officials “did what they believed to be the prudent thing, consistent with measures then current among their colleagues all over the world.” The city’s response, Nuland continued, mixed anti-immigrant sentiment with “an earnest desire to protect the people for whom they felt primarily responsible: the citizens of their city.” Sherwin B. Nuland, “Hate in the Time of Cholera,”
New Republic
, May 26, 1997. Markel also misreads an 1895 article by Edson entitled “The Microbe as a Social Leveler.” In it, Edson argued that because of contagious diseases, poor and rich, native-born and immigrant, were all tied together. Treating contagious diseases, therefore, called for a more holistic approach. “To the man of wealth, therefore, there is a direct and very great interest in the well-being of the man of poverty,” Edson wrote, describing a kind of public health socialism. Edson did describe Russian Jews as “poor, ignorant, down-trodden” and implied that they could be susceptible to bringing contagious diseases to the United States. However Edson was not scapegoating Russian Jews or calling for their exclusion. If anything, he was saying that native-born Americans had a distinct interest in the well-being of Russian Jews, whether in Russia or in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. See, Cyrus Edson, “The Microbe as a Social Leveller,”
NAR
, October 1895.
76
The sometimes callous treatment
:
NYT
, February 24, 1892.
77
New Hampshire senator
: Leon Burr Richardson,
William E. Chandler: Republican
(New York: Dodd, Mead, 1940), 7–11.
77
As easy as it may be
: Richardson,
William E. Chandler,
439; Carol L. Thompson, “William E. Chandler: A Radical Republican,”
Current History
23 (November 1952);
NYT
, March 7, 1892. Historian Morton Keller writes that Chandler “gave voice to a widespread attitude when he warned that trusts . . . tended to destroy competition, crush individualism, and put the control of society into the hands of opulent oligarchs.” Morton Keller,
Regulating a New Economy: Public Policy and Economic Change in America, 1900–1933
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 25.
77
Back in the spring
:
NYT
, March 6, 1892.
78
Chandler’s investigation
:
NYT
, June 30, July 29, 1892.
78
The hearings highlighted
: Transcripts of the Chandler hearings and subsequent report are found in “Immigration Investigation, Ellis Island, 1892,” 52
^nd
Congress, 1st Session, House Reports, Vol. 12, No. 2090, Series 3053. For more of Chandler’s criticism of Weber, see
Congressional Record
, 52
^nd
Congress, 1st Session, Vol. 23, Part 2, February 15, 1892, 1132.
79
Weber came across
: John B. Weber,
Autobiography of John B. Weber
(Buffalo, NY: J.W. Clement Company, 1924), 95–96, 99–100.
82
Then there was
: Markel,
Quarantine!
49.
82
Typhus, the
New York Times
:
NYT,
February 13, 1892. See also Amy L. Fairchild,
Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2003), 42–43.
83
The linkage of
: “Select Committee of the House of Representatives to Inquire into the Alleged Violation of the Laws Prohibiting the Importation of Contract Laborers, Paupers, Convicts, and Other Classes,” 1888; Julia H. Twells, “The Burden of Indiscriminate Immigration,”
American Journal of Politics,
December
1894.
83
Cyrus Edson
: Cyrus Edson, “Typhus Fever,”
NAR
, April 1892. 84
Chandler tried to
: William E. Chandler, “Methods of Restricting Immigration,”
Forum
, March 1892; Letter from William Chandler to Unknown, 1890, Book 82, WC.
84
Both extremes
: John Hawks Noble, “The Present State of the Immigration Question,”
Political Science Quarterly
, June 1892;
HW
, September 1, 1894. 85
Not surprisingly
:
AH
, March 4, 1892.
85
Traveling from Turkey
: Howard Markel calls Benjamin Harrison an antiSemitic restrictionist, claiming that his 1892 reelection platform “contained strong calls for the immigration restriction of Russian Hebrews.” The platform calls for no such thing. In fact, the Republican Party platform protested “against the persecution of the Jews in Russia.” It did call for “the enactment of more stringent laws and regulations for the restriction of criminal, pauper and contract immigration,” a belief in keeping with the general view of regulating against “undesirable” immigrants. Markel also claims that Harrison “was long a proponent of ‘restricting the immigration of Russian Hebrews’ and stated so emphatically in his final two annual addresses.” That charge is also false. In his 1891 Annual Message to Congress, Harrison discusses the protests made by his government to the Russian czar “because of the harsh measures now being enforced against the Hebrews in Russia.” Harrison also sent John Weber on a fact-finding trip to the Pale of Settlement to investigate the rise of anti-Semitism. Harrison was clearly concerned not only about the plight of the Russian Jews, but also about the effect that Jewish emigration might have on America. He wrote: “The immigration of these people to the United States—many other countries being closed to them—is largely increasing and is likely to assume proportions which may make it difficult to find homes and employment for them here and to seriously affect the labor market.” Harrison’s actual words hardly betray an anti-Semite. “The Hebrew is never a beggar; he has always kept the law—life by toil—often under severe and oppressive civil restrictions. It is also true that no race, sect, or class has more fully cared for its own than the Hebrew race. But the sudden transfer of such a multitude under conditions that tend to strip them of their small accumulations and to depress their energies and courage is neither good for them nor for us.” In the wake of the cholera and typhus outbreaks, Harrison’s 1892 Annual Message to Congress did argue that the “admission to our country and to the high privileges of its citizenship should be more restricted and more careful. We have, I think, a right and owe a duty to our own people, and especially to our working people, not only to keep out the vicious, the ignorant, the civil disturber, the pauper, and the contract laborer, but to check the too great flow of immigration now coming by further limitations.”
85
What was within
:
NYT
, September 2, 1892.
86
Still, the brunt of
: Markel,
Quarantine!
120–121, 130.
86
The quarantine policy
: Richardson,
William E. Chandler,
417; Thomas M. Pitkin,
Keepers of the Gate: A History of Ellis Island
(New York: New York University Press, 1975), 20; John Higham,
Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 100;
NYT
, November 7, 1892.
87
Weber called Chandler’s bill
: W. E. Chandler, “Shall Immigration Be Suspended?”
NAR
, January 1893; Richardson,
William E. Chandler,
38; Weber,
Autobiography,
133; Arthur Cassot, “Should We Restrict Immigration?”
American Journal of Politics
, September 1893.
87
Instead, Congress passed
: Markel,
Quarantine!
173–182; Edwin Maxey, “Federal Quarantine Laws,”
Political Science Quarterly
23, no. 4 (December 1908).
87
The nation did get
: William C. Van Vleck,
The Administrative Control of Aliens: A Study in Administrative Law and Procedure
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1971 [1932]), 8–9; Richard H. Sylvester, “The Immigration Question in Congress,”
American Journal of Politics
, June 1893; Pitkin,
Keepers of the Gate,
20–21. An article in the
Political Science Quarterly
agreed, noting that although some had proposed extending “the policy adopted with reference to the Chinese, making race the test of fitness,” such a policy would be politically unpopular, cause diplomatic problems, and be “repugnant to the general theory that America is a haven for the oppressed of all mankind.” What was needed was a “less clumsy and offensive law.” Noble, “The Present State of the Immigration Question.”
88
The new manifests
: Joseph H. Senner, “How We Restrict Immigration,”
NAR
, April 1894; Pitkin,
Keepers of the Gate,
20–22.
89
These boards of special
: Van Vleck,
Administrative Control of Aliens,
46–53, 214; Pitkin,
Keepers of the Gate,
24.
89
Health concerns
: Fitzhugh Mullan,
Plagues and Politics: The Story of the United States Public Health Service
(New York: Basic Books, 1989), 40–48. 91
The epidemic scares
:
NYT
, January 6, July 21, 1894; Joseph Senner, “The Immigration Question,”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
, July 1897.
92
The top three
: Daniel J. Tichenor,
Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 79;
HW
, January 8, 1898.
92
These changes were
:
NYT
, March 6, August 29, 1892; Noble, “The Present State of the Immigration Question”; Henry Cabot Lodge, “Lynch Law and Unrestricted Immigration,”
NAR
, May 1891; John Chetwood Jr., “Immigration, Hard Times, and the Veto,”
Arena
, December 1897.
92
Such feelings extended
: James R. O’Beirne, “The Problem of Immigration: Its Dangers to the Future of the United States,”
Independent
, November 2, 1893. 92
While the
Massilia
incident
: Noble, “The Present State of the Immigration Question.” On the 1891 lynching of Italians, see Richard Gambino,
Vendetta
(New York: Doubleday, 1977); Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreale,
La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience
(New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 204–213; Lodge, “Lynch Law and Unrestricted Immigration.”
93
If the crimes seemed
:
NYT
, May 18, 1893.
93
As deportations increased
:
NYT
, May 21, 1894.
93
The anger of Italians
:
NYT
, April 5, 1896; Pitkin,
Keepers of the Gate,
24–26. For more on Italian immigrants during this time, see J. H. Senner, “Immigration to Italy,”
NAR
, June 1896 and Prescott F. Hall, “Italian Immigration,”
NAR
, August 1896.
93
The fear of Italian
:
BG
, April 26, 1896.