American Passage (63 page)

311
As the train approached
:
NYT
, February 10, 1919; Letter from A. D. H. Jackson to Anthony Caminetti, February 13, 1919, File 54235-36C, INS. There are differing accounts of the number of radicals sent from Seattle to New York. One account lists forty-five radicals, while another counts thirty-six with two more joining the group along the train route. The Jackson letter and a letter from immigration officials in Seattle corroborate that the number of radicals leaving Seattle was forty-seven. Letter from John H. Sargent, acting commissioner of immigration in Seattle to Commissioner General of Immigration Anthony Caminetti, February 7, 1919 in “I.W.W. Deportation Cases,” Hearings before a House Subcommittee of the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, 66th Congress, Second Session, April 27–30, 1920. For the other numbers, see Robert K. Murray,
Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), 194–195, and William Preston Jr.,
Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933
(New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), 198–201.

312
The train arrived
: Letter from A. D. H. Jackson to Anthony Caminetti, February 13, 1919, File 54235-36C, INS;
NYT
, February 10, 1919.
312
When the Red Special
:
New York Call
, February 18, 1919.
312
Attorneys Caroline Lowe
: Charles Recht, unpublished autobiography, Chapter 10, Folder 18, Box 1, Collection 176, CR; Preston,
Aliens and Dissenters,
200.
312
In contrast to
:
New York Call
, February 20, 1919.
312
The detainees were
:
NYTrib
, February 21, 1919.
313
McDonald and the other
: Frederic C. Howe,
The Confessions of a Reformer
(Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), 274–275.
313
Howe was swimming
: Preston,
Aliens and Dissenters,
182–183; “The Deportations,”
Survey
, February 22, 1919.
313
This expansion of the law
: Memo from Thomas Fisher, Immigration Inspector, to Henry W. White, Commissioner of Immigration, Seattle, Washington, August 24, 1918; Letter from Henry W. White to Anthony Caminetti, August 28, 1918, File 54235-36B, INS.
314
Though he was out
: Memo from John M. Abercrombie to All Commissioners of Immigration and Inspectors in Charge, March 14, 1919, File No. 54235-36B, INS.
314
For those Red Special
: Preston,
Aliens and Dissenters,
204–205. 314
Martin de Wal
:
Survey
, May 17, June 14, 1919.
315
In the middle of this
:
NYT,
June 3, 4, 5, 1919.
315
Howe was not
: Memo from A. Warner Parker to Anthony Caminetti, April 17, 1919, File 54235-85B, INS.
316
The attacks on
: Congressional Record, 66th Congress, 1st session, 1522–1524; Arthur Mann,
La Guardia: A Fighter Against His Times, 1882–1933
(Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1959), 101.
316
During this second hearing
: “Conditions at Ellis Island,” Hearing before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, 66th Congress, 1st Session, November 24, 26, 28, 1919, 21, 76.
317
Back inside
: “Conditions at Ellis Island,” 29–30.
317
The press had a field day
:
LD
, December 13, 1919;
NYW
, November 25, 1919. 318
With Secretary Wilson
: Kenneth D. Ackerman,
Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties
(New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2007), 50–59, 112. William N. Vayle [
sic
], “Before the Buford Sailed,”
NYT
, January 11, 1920.
318
If the earlier roundups
: Letter from Francis G. Caffey to Frederic C. Howe, July 12, 1917, Folder R57, EG.
318
Beginning in 1907
: Oscar Straus Diary, March 6, 1908, 165–166, Box 22, OS. 318
For two years
: Candace Falk (ed.),
Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years
, vol. 2,
Making Speech Free, 1902–1909
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 66–68, 254–257.
319
As Julius Goldman
: File 54235-30, INS.
320
When released from jail
: “Deportation Hearing of Emma Goldman,” Ellis Island, NY, October 27, and November 12, 1919, Folder 63R, EG. 320
Detained at Ellis Island
: File 54709-449, INS; Constantine Panunzio,
The Deportation Cases of 1919–1920
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), 60–62. 321
Apart from the
: “Deportation: Its Meaning and Menace, Last Message to the People of America by Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman,” Ellis Island, New York, U.S.A., December 1919, LOC.
322
In his waning
: John Lombardi,
Labor’s Voice in the Cabinet: A History of the Department of Labor from its Origin to 1921
(New York: AMS Press, 1968), 132; Louis F. Post, “Living a Long Life Over Again,” 309, 322, unpublished manuscript, LOC.
322
Post complained
: Louis F. Post, “Administrative Decisions in Connection with Immigration,”
American Political Science Review
10 (May 1916). 323
Still in office
: Louis F. Post,
The Deportations Delirium of Nineteen-Twenty
(Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1923), 1–27.
323
Post found that
: Emma Goldman,
Living My Life
, vol. 2 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931), chapter 51.
323
Collecting their things
: Alice Wexler,
Emma Goldman in Exile: From the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 13–15. For more on Goldman’s deportation, see Candace Serena Falk,
Love, Anarchy and Emma Goldman
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 181–182, and Alice Wexler,
Emma Goldman: An Intimate Life
, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 271–276; Ackerman,
Young J. Edgar,
160.
324
Colorado congressman
: Vayle, “Before the Buford Sailed.” A slightly different version of this account appears in
Congressional Record
, January 5, 1920.
324
It must have been
: Ackerman,
Young J. Edgar,
160.
325
Upon arrival at
: Post,
The Deportations Delirium,
27.
325
The press was quick
: Letter from F. W. Berkshire, Supervising Inspector to Anthony Caminetti, Commissioner General of Immigration, February 11, 1920, File 54235-36G, INS;
LD
, January 3, 1920; Post,
The Deportations Delirium,
7.
325
“One could not imagine”
:
NYT
, December 22, 1919.
325
A few years before
:
Bugajewitz v. Adams
, 228 U.S. 585 (1913).
326
Post made enemies
: Ackerman,
Young J. Edgar,
274–276.
326
At the height
: Panunzio,
The Deportation Cases of 1919–1920
, 16; Jane Perry Clark,
Deportation of Aliens from the United States to Europe
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 225.
328
When the war ended
: Fred Howe believed that big business was behind the war and repeatedly tried to convince Wilson of his theory that “it was not the Kaiser, nor the Czar, but the imperialistic adventurers who had driven their countries into conflict. Secret diplomacy, the conflict of bankers, the activity of munition-makers, exploiters, and concessionaires in the Mediterranean, in Morocco, in south and central Africa, had brought on the cataclysm; glacial-like aggregations of capital and credit were responsible for the war.” Howe,
Confessions of a Reformer,
287.
328
No one felt
: Howe,
Confessions of a Reformer,
279–282.
328
To Howe, the brutality
: Frederic C. Howe, “Lynch Law and the Immigrant Alien,”
Nation
, February 14, 1920.
329
Before leaving Ellis Island
: Howe,
Confessions of a Reformer,
327–328.

330
Immigration officials stationed
:
NYT
, July 2, 1923; Henry H. Curran,
Pillar to Post
(New York: Scribner’s, 1941), 287–288.
331
Restrictionists had long
: “Plain Remarks on Immigration for Plain Americans,”
SP
, February 12, 1921.
331
Americans feared that
:
LD
, December 18, 1920; Lothrop Stoddard, “The Permanent Menace from Europe,” in Madison Grant and Charles Steward Davison, eds.,
The Alien in Our Midst or Selling Our Birthright for a Mess of Pottage
(New York: Galton, 1930), 226.
332
“The influx of aliens”
:
NYT
, November 27, 1920.
332
This was all too
:
NYT
, November 17, 1920.
333
As Congress moved
: “The League’s Numerical Limitation Bill,” Publications of the Immigration Restriction League, No. 69, IRL.
333
Hall lived long
:
Immigration and Other Interests of Prescott Farnsworth Hall,
compiled by Mrs. Prescott F. Hall, (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1922).
334
If one of those ships
:
NYT
, August 1, September 2, 1923.
334
A major backbone
: Desmond King,
Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 112.
334
The National German-American
: Charles Thomas Johnson,
Culture at Twilight: The National German-American Alliance, 1901–1918
(New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 102, 104–107, 118;
NYT
, March 8, 1916.
335
The growing popularity
: Prescott F. Hall, “Immigration and World Eugenics,” Publications of the Immigration Restriction League, No. 71, IRL. Mark Snyderman and R. J. Herrnstein argue that intelligence testing had little effect on the passage of immigration quotas, while Leon Kamin argues the opposite. Mark Snyderman and R. J. Herrnstein, “Intelligence Tests and the Immigration Act of 1924,”
American Psychologist
, September 1983; Leon Kamin,
The Science and Politics of I.Q.
(Potomac, MD: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1974). Those taking a more nuanced view include Steven A. Gelb, Garland E. Allen, Andrew Futterman, and Barry A. Mehler, “Rewriting Mental Testing History: The View from the American Psychologist,”
Sage Race Relations Abstracts
, May 1986; and Franz Samelson, “Putting Psychology on the Map: Ideology and Intelligence Testing,” in Allan R. Buss, ed.,
Psychology in Social Context
(New York: Irvington, 1979), 135–136. Stephen Jay Gould seems to want to have it both ways, arguing that immigration restriction was inevitable in the 1920s even without eugenics, but that “the timing, and especially the peculiar character, of the 1924 Restriction Act [
sic
] clearly reflected the lobbying of scientists and eugenicists.” Stephen Jay Gould,
Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1983), 301, and Stephen Jay Gould,
The Mismeasure of Man
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 261–262.
335
Madison Grant’s
: Madison Grant, “The Racial Transformation of America,”
NAR
, March 1924; Madison Grant, “America for the Americans,”
Forum
, September 1925.
335
“These immigrants adopt”
:
SP
, May 7, 1921.
336
Such views were
:
SP
, February 28, 1920; February 12, May 7, November 26, 1921.
336
America’s postwar
: File 53986-43, INS.
338
His new job
: Curran,
Pillar to Post,
285–286.
338
“It was a poor place”
: Curran,
Pillar to Post,
291–296.
338
There was little that
:
Outlook
, November 2, 1921;
Delineator
, March 1921. 338
Complaints by the British
: Von Briesen Commission Report, 1903, File 52727/2, INS; Curran,
Pillar to Post,
309.
339
Even Fred Howe
: Frederic C. Howe,
Confessions of a Reformer
(Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967)
,
257–258.
339
The British seemed
:
NYT
, July 29, 1923.
339
A female British journalist
:
LD
, August 4, 1923.
339
There had been
:
NYT
, July 2, 1923;
LD
, September 22, 1923; Rex Hunter, “Eight Days on Ellis Island,”
Nation
, October 28, 1925.
340
What the British
:
NYT
, December 19, 1922.
340
Yet this was not
: “Despatch [
sic
] from H.M. Ambassador at Washington reporting on Conditions at Ellis Island Immigration Station,” 1923, NYPL. 341
Curran dismissed
: Henry H. Curran, “Fewer and Better,”
SP
, Nov. 15, 1924; Curran, 298–299.
341
Curran admitted
: Henry H. Curran, “Fewer and Better, or None,”
SP
, April 26, 1924.
341
Though this made
: Curran,
Pillar to Post,
296–297.
342
The shifting of inspection
: William E. Chandler, “Consular Certificates for Intending Immigrants,”
Independent
, October 1, 1891.
342
Fiorello La Guardia
: Letter from Fiorello La Guardia to Anthony Caminetti, September 9, 1916, Folder 8, Box 26C7, FLG.
342
Though La Guardia
: Thomas Kessner,
Fiorello H. La Guardia and the Making of Modern New York
(New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 120–124.
343
These new quotas
: Roger Daniels,
Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 56–57. 343
Stricter quotas led to
: Letter from James J. Davis, Secretary of Labor to President Warren G. Harding, April 16, 1923, Folder 5, File 75, WGH; “President Calvin Coolidge’s Remarks at Governor’s Conference at the White House,” October 20, 1923, Series 1, File 52, CC.
343
Deportations also increased
: Jane Perry Clark,
Deportation of Aliens from the United States to Europe
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 29.
344
To rectify the situation
: For a discussion of the national origins plan, see King,
Making Americans
, 204–228 and
NYT
, June 30, 1929; Harry H. Laughlin, “The Control of Trends in the Racial Composition of the American People,” in Grant and Davison, eds.,
The Alien in Our Midst or Selling Our Birthright for a Mess of Pottage
.
344
The commission calculated
:
NYT
, August 7, 1925.
344
Edward F. McSweeney
: For more on the “history wars” of the 1920s and McSweeney’s role, see Jonathan Zimmerman, “Each ‘Race’ Could Have Its Heroes Sung: Ethnicity and the History Wars in the 1920s,”
Journal of American History
87, no, 1 (June 2000), and Christopher J. Kauffman, “Edward McSweeney, the Knights of Columbus, and the Irish-American Response to Anglo-Saxonism, 1900–1925,”
American Catholic Studies
114, no. 4 (Winter 2003). See also,
NYT
, September 8, 1921, June 9, 1923, and
BG
, July 10, 1921.
345
More substantively
: W. E. Burghardt Du Bois,
The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America
(Boston: Stratford, 1924) and David Levering Lewis,
W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919– 1963
(New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 95–96.
345
To a pro-immigration
:
NYT
, August 7, 1925. See also Edward F. McSweeney, “The Immigration Act of 1924: Fallaciousness of the ‘National Origins’ Theory,”
Journal of the American-Irish Historical Society
223 (1926).
345
In the late afternoon
:
Framingham News
, November 17, 19, 1928.
346
Powderly had once
: T. V. Powderly, “Immigration’s Menace to the National Health,”
NAR
, July 1902; Letter from Terence V. Powderly to Frederick Wallis, September 9, 1920, Box 139, TVP.
346
Freed from the burdens
: Vincent J. Falzone,
Terence V. Powderly: Middle-Class Reformer
(Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1978), 191–193.
346
Powderly was not
: Henry H. Goddard, “Feeblemindedness: A Question of Definition,”
American Association for the Study of the Feeble Minded: Proceedings and Addresses
33 (1928); Leila Zenderland,
Measuring Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 325–327; Gould,
The Mismeasure of Man,
202–204.
347
By the time
: Edward Alsworth Ross,
Seventy Years of It: An Autobiography
(New York: Appleton-Century, 1936), 275–277.
347
Nine-year-old Edoardo Corsi
: Edward Corsi,
In the Shadow of Liberty
(New York: Arno Press, 1969), 3–7, 22. As proof that the memory of immigrants, like all memory, is usually fuzzy around the edges, Corsi’s account of his family’s arrival is slightly off. The Corsi family arrived in November 1906, not October 1907 as Corsi notes, meaning that Edward was nine years old, not ten. Also, young Edward is listed as “Nerino Corsi” on the steamship list.
348
Those days were
:
LD
, February 24, 1934; “Report of the Ellis Island Committee,” March 1934.
348
The 1930s would
:
LD
, February 24, 1934.
349
The combination of
: Corsi,
In the Shadow of Liberty,
95.