American Passage (8 page)

He started a family and became a large landowner and a grocer. Like many of the Union soldiers who survived the killing fields of the Civil War, Weber’s postwar life was defined by membership in the local post of the Grand Army of the Republic and the Republican Party. Weber ran for Erie County sheriff in 1870, but narrowly lost to a Democrat named Grover Cleveland. Weber would later win the post in his second attempt, then go on to serve two terms in the House of Representatives.

In return for helping a fellow Civil War officer named Benjamin Harrison win the Republican presidential nomination in 1888, Weber was given the job of commissioner of immigration at the Port of New York, overseeing the construction of the new facilities at Ellis Island as well as the processing of immigrants at the Barge Office until Ellis Island was open. He was also given an additional task. In 1891, Treasury Secretary Charles Foster asked him to chair a five-man commission to travel to Europe and report on immigration. This was the first time the federal government sought to investigate the reasons why Europeans were emigrating to America.

The government wanted answers to very specific questions. Why were Europeans coming to the United States? Was immigration being “promoted or stimulated by steamship or other carrying companies or their agents for the resulting passenger business”? To what extent were “criminals, insane persons, idiots, and other defectives, paupers or persons likely to become a public charge, and persons afflicted with loathsome or dangerous contagious disease” encouraged to emigrate?

There was an additional reason for the trip. Before Weber set sail for Europe, President Harrison summoned him to a seaside cottage in Cape May, New Jersey, where the president was vacationing. Harrison wanted Weber to investigate the condition of Russian Jews. Upon arriving in London, where he would meet the other four members of the commission, Weber would choose one of the four to accompany him to Russia. Weber had to leave for Europe only three days after he received his instructions. The other commissioners, whom Weber had never met, were already waiting in London.

Once in London, Weber chose Dr. Walter Kempster as his traveling companion, leaving the other three members of the commission free to conduct their own investigations. Kempster was born in London and arrived in upstate New York as a young boy. Like Weber, he was a former Civil War officer, having served at Gettysburg. After the war, Kempster became one of the nation’s leading alienists, making the study of the human brain his specialty. He worked at a number of mental hospitals in New York before moving to Wisconsin. In 1881, Kempster served as one of the witnesses for the prosecution in the trial of Charles Guiteau, the assassin of President James A. Garfield.

Beginning in late July 1891, Weber and Kempster city-hopped from Liverpool to Paris, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Minsk, Wilna, Bialystok, Grodno, Warsaw, Cracow, Budapest, and Vienna. They ended their trip in early October in Bremen, Germany. Along the way, Weber and Kempster met with consular officials, visited local neighborhoods, and spoke with officials from steamship companies. With all of his official duties, Weber had little time for sightseeing, complaining that all he managed was one hour at the Tower of London.

Weber and Kempster released their report in January 1892 and concluded that individuals left Europe largely because of “superior conditions of living in the United States . . . and the general belief that the United States present [
sic
] better opportunities for rising to a higher level than are furnished at home.” Europeans mostly received these ideas not from the agents of steamship companies looking to drum up business, but from “the relatives or friends who have preceded and are established in the United States, and who, through letters and newspapers sent from this country, furnish such information.”

Many argued that new immigrants were assisted or involuntary immigrants brought here on contract by American businesses or enticed by agents of steamship companies. By their estimates, Weber and Kempster concluded that some 60 percent of immigrants did come to America with prepaid tickets. However, these were tickets largely bought by friends and relatives in America and sent to the potential immigrant in Europe. Weber and Kempster were describing chain migration, the process by which recent immigrants, through letters, newspaper clippings, and money, entice family and friends to join them in the New World.

Weber noted that the country needed these immigrants because Americans traditionally shun hard manual work. “When the foreigner came in, the native engineered the jobs, the former did the shoveling,” he argued. “The foreigner plows and sows, the native reaps; the one builds railroads, the other runs them and waters the stock; one digs canals, the other manages the boats; one burrows in the mines, the other sells the product.” Relying on the connection between immigration and free labor for the health of the economy, Weber asked: “Stop the stream, and where will the new material come from which with a little training and experience develops into useful domestic help?”

Weber concluded that “the evils of immigration are purely imaginary in some features, greatly exaggerated in others, and susceptible of nearly complete remedy by the amendment of existing laws.” He saw only the need for “rigid inspection at our ports,” to enforce the 1891 law. Of course, just what constituted rigid inspection would become a matter for debate for every immigration official at Ellis Island throughout its history.

Following his instructions from Harrison, Weber paid special attention to the plight of Jews. The situation in Russia was beginning to have repercussions for the United States. Mary Antin had already emigrated and wrote a memoir of her family’s journey from Russia to America. During those bleak times, she wrote, “America was in everybody’s mouth. Businessmen talked of it over their accounts . . . people who had relatives in the famous land went around reading their letters for the enlightenment of less fortunate folk . . . children played at emigrating . . . all talked of it, but scarcely anyone knew one true fact about this magic land.” The number of immigrants coming from Russia, the vast majority being Jewish, was increasing dramatically. From 1890 to 1891, the number increased from 41,000 to 73,000.

The emigration of Russian Jews was rooted in the turmoil of latenineteenth-century Russia. Many of the problems can be traced to 1881, when Czar Alexander II, who had inaugurated an era of relative liberalism in Russia, was assassinated by a group of revolutionaries. Jews bore the brunt of the anger of the Russian people and of the new czar, Alexander III, who pursued anti-Jewish policies with a vengeance. Life in the Pale of Settlement, where much of the Jewish population was forced to live, became harder. Jews who had left the Pale in decades past to earn their livings in cities were now being forced out. Petty harassments increased along with the restrictive edicts.

His time among Russia’s oppressed Jews had a deep impact on Weber. He and Kempster witnessed the expulsion of Jews from Moscow to the Pale. They met an elderly man with paralysis and partial blindness who was suffering in his own bed because he was refused entry into a Moscow hospital. Many who had lived in Moscow for decades now found their businesses failing. “Among those ordered out while I was there were cashiers, clerks, correspondence chiefs, and bookkeepers of banks; heads of business departments; manufacturers,” Weber remembered.

The two Americans traveled extensively through towns such as Minsk, Wilna, Bialystok, and Grodno. The stories from Russian Jews were “sad and pitiful in the extreme. . . . Everywhere there was gloom and dejection.” Weber encountered pronounced and deep-seated misery. “The emaciated forms, the wan faces, the deep sunken cheeks,” he later remembered about the experience, “the pitiful expression of those great staring eyes reminding one of a hunted animal, are ever present and will never leave me.” Weber was haunted by nightmares of the tragic Jewish figures he encountered and sometimes wondered if he was not suffering from hallucinations.

Weber and Kempster’s report was full of sympathetic observations of Jewish life. They argued that Jewish immigration was forced largely by the religious and ethnic persecution found in Russia. They described in detail life in Jewish ghettos and the history of laws that made life difficult for those of the Jewish faith. After a visit in London with Baron de Hirsch, who used part of his vast fortune to assist Jews fleeing Russia, Weber and Kempster admitted that the case of Russian Jewish immigrants was decidedly different from that of other immigrants.

By the 1890s, Russian Jewish paupers had increased by nearly 30 percent and some estimates counted as many as 40 percent of the Jewish population as luftmenschen, people without jobs, skills, or prospects, floating through the Pale and surviving as best as they could. Here seemed proof of what immigration restrictionists claimed: that assisted immigrants came to America with tickets paid for them by third-party philanthropic groups. They needed to be helped because so many had become paupers.

While Weber and Kempster admitted that some cases of paupers emigrating to America did exist, “that the movement assumes any sort of proportions [as believed by restrictionists] is not warranted by our investigations nor is it believed.” The case of Russian Jews could not be seen simply through the prism of paupers dumped onto U.S. shores. Instead, Weber and Kempster asked that Americans look beyond the temporary condition of immigrants.

A person who by reason of unexpected misfortunes or persecutions is deprived of his accumulations, who has been subjected to pillage and plunder while fleeing from the burdens which have become unbearable, if capable of supporting himself and family, if he has one, with a reasonable certainty after obtaining a foothold, and that foothold is guaranteed by friends or relatives upon landing or strong probable surrounding circumstances, is not, according to our definition, a pauper.

Weber and Kempster’s report was a sharp rebuke to immigration restrictionists.
However, instead of a unified report on European conditions, the committee released four separate ones. Weber’s three other colleagues had conducted their own tours of Europe. The report of Judson Cross most closely resembled the conclusions of Weber and Kempster. Writing about Italian immigration, Cross also described the process of chain migration. Italian immigrants “are constantly bestirring others to go. Each Italian in the United States can easily secure a place for a friend and the process is ever being repeated.” Contrary to some of the reports about these new immigrants, Cross found southern Italians “sober, industrious, and economical and fond of their children.” These Italians left their homelands because of a lack of land, not because they were encouraged to leave by the government.
Joseph Powderly, the brother of famed union leader Terrence V. Powderly, was labor’s representative on the committee, and his report mirrored the concerns of many native-born workingmen. He was concerned that workers from eastern Europe were coming to western Pennsylvania and competing with native-born workers in the mines and factories, driving down wages and the quality of life. Unless immigration was restricted, Powderly argued, the native-born American would be driven from the coal mines or else he “will have to come down from his extravagant standard, and be contented with one room for himself, wife, and children in which to live, eat, and sleep.”
The commission’s final member, Herman J. Schulteis, took issue with the nuanced notion of pauperism found in Weber and Kempster’s report. Schulteis complained that recent immigrants were coming to America with the help of immigrant aid societies and other associations that encouraged paupers and criminals to emigrate. He also reported on the widespread involvement of Italian banks and labor agents in the distribution of prepaid tickets for Italian immigrants. As for whether steamship companies could be trusted to screen out immigrants who might be disqualified under the 1891 Immigration Act, Schulteis answered with an emphatic no, claiming to have witnessed the “sham inspection” of immigrants at the port of Naples.
While Weber was sympathetic to the plight of Russian Jews, Schulteis wrote of the “alleged” persecutions in Russia, which only existed in the minds of “Russophobists and of persons who have never looked into the economic situation in Russia.” Schulteis approved of Russia’s anti-Jewish edicts, writing that they were “in the interest of the general welfare of the Russian people.” After all, Schulteis noted, while Jews were only 5 percent of the population, they owned half of the wealth of Russia. “This is a matter of general notoriety in Russia and has an important bearing on the social status of the Hebrew,” he concluded.
It is no surprise that someone who would recycle the anti-Semitism of Russian officials would conclude that throughout Europe, “there are many persons engaged in the business of transferring from the moribund systems of European misgovernment vast members of their ‘dangerous’ pauperized, diseased, decrepit, and criminal population, not
only a safety valve to their own overstrained machinery, but to serve as
an element of weakness in this Republic, the greatness of which they
view with growing alarm.”
Despite his insensitivity, Schulteis never called for a ban on immigration or the selection of immigrants only from desirable races. Instead, his recommendations included having American inspectors at
European ports inspect and approve potential immigrants; a bigger
head tax on immigrants; the end of prepaid tickets; and the granting of
emergency quarantine powers to the president.
These dueling reports lay out a spectrum of attitudes toward immigration. To Weber and Kempster, newcomers fled poverty and prejudice in search of opportunities in the New World, where they were
certain to be molded into independent and productive citizens. By contrast, Powderly voiced the concerns of workingmen eager to protect
their wages from the competition of cheap foreign labor brought to
America by greedy businesses. Lastly, Schulteis articulated the darker
vision of immigration, seeing newcomers as Europe’s refuse dumped
on America’s shores—a losing equation that would only weaken the
Republic, while strengthening Europe.
Rather than a final answer on the root causes and nature of immigration, the Treasury secretary got more of the same contentious
debate of Americans grappling with the changes that were wrenching
the nation into the modern world and showed no signs of abating. Ellis
Island, created as the “proper sieve” to weed out undesirable immigrants, would soon become a lightning rod in this debate.