Authors: Vincent J. Cannato
Closer to the general consensus on immigration policy was a 1907
New York Times
editorial.
It is well understood and admitted by all men of enlightened and unprejudiced opinions that selection, not exclusion, should be the guiding principle in any amendments of our immigration laws undertaken by Congress. . . . An immigrant capable of adding to the productive energy of the country is desirable. On the other hand, immigrants who are clearly beyond all dispute undesirable, who would be a burden or a source of danger to health, morals, and the public peace, are already under the ban of our statutes.
As an official devoted to upholding the law against undesirables as well as staying true to his belief in the positive contributions of immigrants, Robert Watchorn had to maintain a careful balance. As his friend Edward Steiner explained, Watchorn “must be both just and kind, show no preferences and no prejudices, guard the interests of his country and yet be humane to the stranger.” It was a tall task for any individual and perhaps unrealistic to expect anyone to satisfy. Not only did Watchorn need to strike the right balance in enforcing American immigration law, but he also had to manage a difficult workforce. One who tried Watchorn’s patience was Marcus Braun, the president of New York’s Hungarian Republican Club who received his patronage position thanks to his friendship with Roosevelt. In fact, Braun increased his stature when Roosevelt agreed to attend a dinner in his honor put on by Braun in January 1905, which over four hundred people attended.
With pull like that, Braun was no ordinary inspector. Soon after his appointment, he was sent to Europe to investigate conditions there. He charged that officials of the Hungarian government were scouring the countryside, encouraging people to come to America and making money from steamship tickets, since the government owned the steamship company. Braun implicated high government officials, including Prime Minister Stephen Tisza.
The charges angered Hungarian authorities, who put Braun under constant surveillance. On a subsequent trip to Budapest in 1905, Braun caught a policeman opening his mail and slapped the man, leading to his arrest. After paying a fine, Braun was released and returned to the United States, where he made the episode public, turning the case into an international diplomatic incident and forcing his patron, President Roosevelt, to privately condemn him for acting with “extreme folly.”
Upon returning home, Braun was given a month’s leave from Ellis Island, after which time he would have to return to work. However, Braun had little desire for the mundane work of immigration inspection and instead asked for a year’s leave, which was denied. Upon returning to work, Braun refused to wear his blue inspector’s uniform. Instead, he resigned. “He didn’t like the uniform because it was a sign of a condition against which he revolted,” said a frustrated Watchorn.
Braun’s situation did not elicit much sympathy. The
New York Times
headlined its editorial on the incident “In Mockery of Marcus.” Yet his political patron, Theodore Roosevelt saved Braun. The president reinstated him to government service and transferred him to the Immigration Bureau along the Canadian border. In early 1906, Braun resigned yet again, only to be reinstated later that year. Only Roosevelt could say whether the support of the Hungarian Republican Club was worth the trouble of dealing with Marcus Braun.
Theodore Roosevelt showed more judgment when he named Philip Cowen, the editor of the
American Hebrew
and a second-generation Polish-Jewish-American, as a special inspector at Ellis Island in 1905. In doing so, he bypassed civil service regulations as he had with Joe Murray. For more than twenty years, Cowen would be a presence at the immigration station. When he retired in 1927, the occasion attracted attention from as far away as Germany, where Adolf Hitler called Cowen’s presence at Ellis Island proof that American immigration policy was under the control of “Pan-Jewry.”
Another appointment largely went unnoticed at the time. Unlike Cowen, this new interpreter at Ellis Island got his job in 1907 through a civil service exam, earning the top score among three test takers on the Croatian language test. In addition to Croatian, this twenty-four-yearold son of Italian immigrants also spoke Italian and Yiddish. Fiorello La Guardia earned $1,200 a year at Ellis Island while attending law school at night.
La Guardia was clearly a man on the make. At Ellis Island, he was one of the many men and women who served as an important link between English-speaking inspectors and confused, non-English-speaking immigrants. When a young child named Louis Pittman was forced to stay at the Ellis Island hospital for seventeen months until his trachoma healed, he received periodic visits from a short, round-faced La Guardia bearing gifts of chocolate for Pittman and other sick children.
La Guardia found his coworkers “kindly and considerate,” a big change from the earlier patronage era. His superiors found La Guardia a good worker who showed a keen interest in his job, even if he did manage to lose his official badge once, forcing Washington to send a replacement. In recommending La Guardia for a pay raise, Robert Watchorn described him as “energetic, intelligent, and familiar with a number of foreign languages.” Yet he also noted that La Guardia was “inclined to be peppery.” Perhaps the weight of troubles he witnessed at Ellis Island wore on La Guardia, since Watchorn noted that the young interpreter was “inclined to be argumentative” with members of the boards of special inquiry, no doubt in defense of immigrants.
An acquaintance of young Fiorello described his personality as “a magnificent unrest coupled with a desire to be a leader on his own terms.” La Guardia was a child of the new America and had little sympathy with the daily rigors through which his country put newcomers. “I never managed during the years I worked there to become callous to the mental anguish, the disappointment and the despair I witnessed almost daily,” he wrote years later. As a low-level bureaucrat, he chafed at his own lack of power and at an immigration system of which he was a part, but for which he had little respect. His uncompromising personality and budding social conscience, as well as his relatively low salary, made his position untenable.
After three years at Ellis Island and now armed with a law degree, La Guardia struck out on his own, hanging a proverbial shingle in a small downtown Manhattan law office. His early practice was largely made up of representing immigrants ordered deported, referred to him by his former colleagues. Though many lawyers who plied this trade took advantage of their greenhorn clients, La Guardia did not—not at $10 a case. Years later, many of his clients would pull the lever in the voting booth to make La Guardia mayor of New York City.
T
HE IMMIGRATION PROBLEM WAS
a conflict between abstract laws and the individual tragedies those laws sometimes created. Thanks to technological improvements in photography, this human element could now be brought directly to average Americans as they sat at home reading the newspaper or one of the growing number of magazines aimed at middle-class audiences.
For Americans who did not have close contact with immigrants, their vision of these newcomers often came from cartoons drawn by unsympathetic hands. Cartoons featured negative characteristics drawn in an exaggerated manner to reinforce stereotypes: the sneering Italian with a dagger, the Jew with a hooked nose, the anarchist immigrant hiding a bomb. The immigrant’s foreignness was often highlighted, as was his general undesirability.
Jacob Riis, an immigrant and close friend of Theodore Roosevelt, had already showed the power of photos when his portrayals of life in New York’s tenement district were published in the 1890 book
How the Other Half Lives
. To arouse public sentiment for tenement reform or public parks, Riis portrayed the worst aspects of immigrant life—filth, overcrowding, and child exploitation.
In the early years of the twentieth century, middle-class readers began to encounter the faces of the masses that would be transformed into new American citizens. Sometimes these new immigrants would be staring straight into the camera, while others were photographed in profile. Few had smiles on their faces and many had hardened or faraway looks in their eyes. The immigrants were usually anonymous. Photo captions read simply “Russian bookbinder,” “Hungarian farm laborer” or “Pollack girls.” An exception was the Mittelstadt family from Germany—father Jacob, wife, daughter, and seven sons, all lined up from tallest to shortest. “Seven soldiers lost to the Kaiser,” proudly read the
New York Times
caption.
These men and women may have worn elaborate and strange native costumes and some of their faces may have betrayed a hard life that aged them beyond their years, but these photos hardly portrayed the grave threat to American society that critics feared. Instead, these subjects were proud and dignified, healthy and strong. These photos spoke of the singularity and individuality of the immigrant.
Lewis Hine was one of those photographers drawn to Ellis Island. Originally from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, he came to New York with a zeal for social reform. Though he would later gain fame with his photographic exposés of child labor and his iconic images of the construction of the Empire State Building, Hine’s first large-scale photographic project was Ellis Island in 1905.
Now, suppose we are elbowing our way thru the mob at Ellis Island trying to stop the surge of bewildered beings oozing through the corridors, up the stairs and all over the place, eager to get it all over and be on their way. Here is a small group that seems to have possibilities so we stop ’em and explain in pantomime that it would be lovely if they would only stick around just a moment. The rest of the human tide swirls around, often not too considerate of either the camera or us. We get the focus, on ground glass of course, then hoping they will stay put, get the flash lamp ready.
Then, with his five-by-seven camera on a shaky tripod, Hine would take his photo. The explosion of the flash pan blew smoke and sparks in the air, startling all those in the area.
The intrusiveness of the early photographic process, combined with the chaotic environment of Ellis Island, makes the subtlety and intimacy of Hine’s finished products even more remarkable. The photos provide visual examples of the daily experiences of immigrants: an Italian family looking for their baggage; a Slavic woman asleep on a bench, her kerchiefed head resting on her bags; children enjoying a cup of milk poured by an attendant. A “Young Russian Jewess” stares away from the camera with her big brown eyes, searching for something or perhaps thinking of what she left behind.
Hine’s photos were posed, yet this did little to take away from their immediacy. One photo was entitled “Italian Madonna.” An Italian woman sits on a bench, her head covered in a black shawl and her young daughter in her lap. The mother looks down at the child, while the child looks at the mother with adoring, yet somewhat fearful eyes. Hine interrupts this classical- and religious-themed photo by placing mother and daughter in front of a chain-link fence behind which a crowd of young and old immigrants is milling about slightly out of focus. In juxtaposing the idealized mother-and-child image with the reality of immigrants penned behind a fence, Hine captures the reality of Ellis Island.
More photographs made their way into newspapers and periodicals from the camera of Augustus Sherman, an amateur photographer and inspector at Ellis Island. Sherman’s subjects were largely anonymous, with captions mentioning little beyond ethnicity and occupation, such as “Romanian shepherds” and “Finnish girl.” Even more than Hine, Sherman was attracted to the picturesque—Albanians, Dutch, Greeks, Cossacks, all in their native dress. He also documented the exotic, almost freak-show quality of some immigrants: heavily tattooed German stowaways, a Russian giant, Burmese midgets, and microcephalic East Asians heading to the circus.
The photographs of Hine and Sherman may have helped humanize immigrants, but they did not convince all Americans. By Roosevelt’s second term, the IRL realized that its earlier faith in the president was misplaced. Roosevelt showed little desire to push for a literacy test. His appointments of Watchorn and Straus meant that the guardians of the gate were more likely to swing the door wide than hold it tightly closed. Like Oscar Straus, Prescott Hall realized that those entrusted to execute immigration law possessed a great deal of influence as to how those laws were carried out.
Labor leader Samuel Gompers also joined in the call for restriction. A Jewish immigrant from England, Gompers admitted to mixed feelings, yet the complaint about low-wage immigrant labor was a natural argument. He blamed big business and “idealists and sentimentalists” for opposing restriction, but the National Liberal Immigration League was more than willing to turn that argument around. “The selfishness of their [union] efforts is perfectly plain,” Harvard president Charles Eliot wrote. “As a rule they have only been a few years in this country themselves and are now trying, for their own supposed advantage, to keep other people out.”
The test for both sides would come in 1907 when Congress again took up the literacy test. Henry Cabot Lodge managed to get a bill through the Senate, but it got bogged down in the House. Though there was enough support in the House, the powerful Speaker, Republican Joe Cannon, managed an end run around the literacy test.
Cannon was a laissez-faire, pro-business Republican who opposed nearly every attempt by government to regulate private business. He was also adamantly anti-union, so it was natural for Cannon to support a steady stream of low-wage workers for which his business constituents clamored. He was also a member of the National Liberal Immigration League, which, in addition to German-American, Irish-American, and American Jewish groups, came out against the bill. Ultimately it was Cannon’s manipulation of the legislative process that won the day. In place of the literacy test, Cannon substituted the creation of a federal commission to investigate immigration.