American Passage (25 page)

Williams was unmoved by the protests and thoroughly unapologetic. “I have enforced the laws,” he told a reporter. “Why shouldn’t I? That’s what I am here for.”

Many Americans were glad that Williams was there. Russell Bellamy, a member of the Immigration Restriction League, told him his “appointment is most agreeable because we know you will enforce the laws your predecessor and his Chief so shamefully ignored.” Chiming in from Boston, the gloomy Prescott Hall was cheered by Williams’s appointment: “Nothing has made me as happy for a long time as feeling that you are there and seeing, as far as I do from the papers, how you are cleaning things up.”

Eighty-two-year-old Orville Victor, a leading editor in the world of dime-novel publishing, was less genteel. Calling himself an American “of early colonial ancestry,” Victor congratulated Williams on his appointment and wrote: “What a stench in the nostrils of true Americans are the dirty Jew lawyers who rush to the ‘defense’ of their kin whom you would exclude. . . . More power to you, and success to your efforts to keep out the dirty scum of European fields, bogs and warrens.” William Patterson, who described himself simply as an “obscure American,” wrote Williams that “God only knows what havoc is going to be brought upon the United States by the influx of Europe’s scum. . . . You cannot render the country a greater service than by restricting the inflow of worn-out, decadent, and impoverished Europeans.”

Not all of Williams’s correspondents were as sympathetic. An anonymous student from PS 62 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side complained to Williams in ungrammatical, yet heartfelt, prose:

You don’t realize what you are doing. You kill people without a knife. Does money make you a person? A person who has a mind and hands and has not $25 cash is not a person? Has he to be killed? Here is the free America. People how much do they suffer until they come here. [
sic
] If you would have conscious [
sic
] in you would not do such things. You think that they are not people but animals. . . . I do not see what do foreigners do harm [
sic
].

PS 62 had opened its doors a few years earlier to deal with the massive influx of mostly Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side, a neighborhood bursting with overcrowded tenements. Though Williams’s edict may have looked like a patriotic gesture in the Upper East Side, it had a very different effect on those living on the Lower East Side.

The child who wrote that letter was not a lonely voice, as groups such as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) worked to assist Jewish immigrants. Irving Lipsitch, the organization’s New York representative, worked closely with Ellis Island officials, while Simon Wolf lobbied Washington.

For Jews who fled anti-Semitic oppression in Europe, protest in America had to be carefully calibrated so as not to stir up ancient hatreds here. However, there was a change in the way American Jewish groups approached immigration. In the 1890s, they had been largely deferential to authorities during the typhus fever and cholera crises. During Williams’s first term at Ellis Island, Jewish groups were cautiously supportive, but not without concerns. By 1909, however, some took a more oppositional approach. To Max Kohler, a lawyer working for the American Jewish Committee, the courts seemed a more appropriate place to challenge immigration law.

The HIAS took on the cases of Hersch Skuratowski and fourteen other Russian Jews detained for possessing less than $25. The organization was unable to prevent the deportation of eleven of them, but did convince Kohler and another lawyer named Abram Elkus to file habeas corpus petitions with U.S. District Court Judge Learned Hand for Skuratowski and the other three—Nechemie Beitz, Meyer Gelvot, and Gershon Farber—who arrived together on the steamship
Raglan Castle
from Rotterdam.

They argued that the $25 rule had created an extra-legal means of exclusion. “The retroactive character of these regulations makes them all the more unjust and oppressive,” according to the brief. They countered the idea that these men were likely to become public charges. Skuratowki was a butcher by trade, literate, and had a cousin and other family in the country. He left behind his wife and two children in Russia, where he owned his home, as well as a cow and some farming equipment. This was hardly the profile of a pauper. Similar cases were made for the other three men, two tailors and a baker.

The lawyers were not just arguing the merits of these four immigrants; they also set out to attack much of the administrative and legal apparatus for making decisions at Ellis Island. They claimed that the men did not receive due process and were not allowed the benefit of counsel during their hearings. The brief also charged that members of the board of special inquiry were not “free agents,” because they were also subordinates of Williams and felt pressured to carry out his orders. “The officers here are afraid to decide cases on their merits,” Kohler said. It was as if assistant district attorneys were sitting in judgment of cases brought to court by their boss, the district attorney.

There was something else that bothered Kohler and Elkus. Toward the end of their petition, the lawyers included a lengthy section decrying the “unconstitutional classification and discrimination . . . as to his Russian nationality and his Hebrew religion.” Official government documents had referred to Skuratowski as a “Russian Hebrew.” Kohler and Elkus contended that Ellis Island officials “illegally and without authority took into consideration the fact which they spread upon their minutes that applicant is a Russian Hebrew.” They did not accuse Williams and his staff of overt anti-Semitism, but argued that “things foreign to our own conception produce at least a subconscious feeling, and that we may entertain prejudices of which we have no distinct consciousness.” Religious classification by government authorities was unconstitutional and un-American, the lawyers claimed, a situation only made worse by the fact that Judaism was the only religion to be so defined by immigration officials.

The controversy over the classification of immigrants had begun with an 1898 report by then commissioner general of immigration Terence Powderly, Ellis Island assistant commissioner Edward McSweeney, and Victor Safford, a doctor at Ellis Island. Officials had been unhappy that immigrants were being classified solely by country of origin, which meant large multi-ethnic political divisions such as Russia or the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Lost within those groupings were myriad ethnic identities. People coming from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for instance, could have been German, Jewish, Polish, Magyar (Hungarian), Bohemian (Czech), or Croatian.

In its place, the commission recommended that all immigrants be classified by their nationality and their race. That is why officials marked Hersch Skuratowski as a Russian Hebrew. As Powderly explained, “an Englishman does not lose his race characteristics by coming from South Africa, a German his by coming from France, or a Hebrew his, though he come from any country on the globe.”

Powderly made clear that officials were using race in the “popular rather than in its strict ethnological sense.” Basically, they meant to use the word as modern Americans would use the term “ethnicity,” while they used the term “color” for what is now called race. However, that qualification did little to settle the controversy.

Powderly and his colleagues also made clear that their endeavor had nothing to do with targeting undesirable immigrants based on their race. Instead, they hoped that better classifications of ethnic backgrounds would assist officials in understanding the nature of immigration, especially as it related to labor issues. “It is not intended as a history of an immigrant’s antecedents but as a clew [
sic
] to what will be his immediate future after he has landed,” the report concluded.

As Safford noted, Russian Jews had been coming to the United States in larger numbers in the 1890s. “They have for the most part entered well defined fields of labor here and have given rise to special labor problems,” he wrote to Powderly in 1898. “The Immigration Bureau fails to give a clew [
sic
] to the size of this movement. They are lumped up with Poles, people of a distinct race and of different capacities and who have gone into entirely different fields of industry.” Officials sought better information about who was coming to America, what kinds of work they did, and where they were heading.

For Jews, this new classification was a double-edged sword. Over his many years with HIAS, Simon Wolf protested the Hebrew classification to government officials, arguing that Jews were not a distinct race. However, when he sought to compile the opinions of leading Jewish authorities on the matter, he found that his views were not universally shared. Many Jews, especially Zionists, did consider themselves a “race or people” and had no objection to the government’s classification scheme.

Decades later, even Max Kohler had a change of heart. Such a system, he explained, enabled “the Government to furnish Yiddish-speaking interpreters quickly in the majority of Jewish cases pending before the immigration officials,” he wrote, and “it enabled the Jewish immigrant aid societies quickly to identify their prospective protégés.”

Now it was William Williams’s turn to offer a point-by-point rebuttal of the lawyers’ brief. He defended not only his $25 rule but also the entire structure of administrative law at Ellis Island. He admitted to “certain shortcomings” on the part of the boards of special inquiry, but argued that better training of those who sat on the boards was the answer, not legal challenges. Not only were the lawyers wrong about the law, Williams believed, but their real goal was not the improvement of immigration regulation, but rather “to facilitate
the admission of one particular class
of immigrants,” no doubt referring to Jewish immigrants.

Williams was not happy about having to defend himself in court. He resented that the court case was brought by “four ignorant aliens who do not know a word of English” and was indignant at the “objectionable manner” in which Kohler and Elkus put forward their critique of his administration. Williams claimed that even before he received the petition, he had already delayed the deportation of these four men in order to rehear their cases. Now that the case was going to court, he told a representative of HIAS that if he was “expecting to compel the granting of a rehearing through the threat of habeas corpus proceedings, I assure you that you will not succeed.”

Williams assumed that the petitions would be quickly dismissed. After he had won in court, he would grant a rehearing to the four men and most likely allow them to land. “Any other course,” Williams wrote, “might place the immigration authorities in the attitude of wishing to be vindictive.” However, government officials were receiving some disturbing news. Simon Wolf told the assistant commissionergeneral of immigration, Frank Larned, that he hoped that the immigration service “would act in such a way as not to embarrass itself.” He gave confidential information that led Larned to believe that if the government did not relent on these cases, “the Government’s exclusive control of these matters might be put in hazard to a certain extent.” Perhaps Judge Hand was not going to dismiss this case.

A court decision could have upended the entire inspection and exclusion apparatus at Ellis Island and opened up every decision to a judicial appeal. Not wanting to risk this, Williams immediately ordered a new hearing for the four immigrants before Judge Hand could make a ruling. Witnesses appeared vowing employment for the four men, money was deposited in their name by Jewish organizations, and Williams declared himself satisfied that, especially in light of the publicity surrounding the case, the four would not become public charges. All were allowed to land and their petitions withdrawn. “We have now shown them that the immigration authorities can do full justice without the necessity of the intervention of the courts,” Williams wrote somewhat disingenuously. “What has now happened is exactly what would have occurred sooner had they not rushed to the court.”

After the resolution of the case, Secretary Charles Nagel came to Ellis Island with Elkus and Simon Wolf. In public, Nagel was supportive of his commissioner, but the visit signaled that he took the charges against Williams seriously. In private he made his displeasure known, albeit in a cautious and respectful manner. Nagel told Williams that his $25 rule—which Nagel had just a few weeks earlier approved—had already served its purpose to warn immigrants and steamship companies that the supposedly lax policies of the Watchorn years were over. He believed the rule was now “of no value, but on the contrary is calculated to give you and the Bureau and the Department trouble.”

“There is no more need for making suggestions as to the amount of money than there is for saying how short a leg must be to constitute lameness,” Nagel wrote after his visit. He was also concerned that the $25 rule was operable at Ellis Island but not at other inspection stations and would create confusion if each station created its own rules. In conclusion, he reminded Williams that “we can well afford even to err on the side of fairness and toleration.” The $25 rule appeared to be history. Though a personal victory for Hersch Skuratowski and his friends, it was no victory for Kohler and others who sought to liberalize the process at Ellis Island.

The following year, the U.S. District Court heard another habeas corpus petition challenging the detention and deportation of Vincenzo Canfora. The sixty-year-old Italian bookbinder had lived in America with his wife and six children since 1895, but he got sick and had his leg amputated below the knee. He then returned to Italy for a brief visit with his mother. Before his arrival at Ellis Island, a letter arrived from one Joseph Ruggio alerting officials to Canfora’s arrival and alleging that he had been a public charge when recovering from his amputation at Bellevue Hospital, where doctors performed the surgery for free. Upon his arrival, Canfora was ordered excluded as suffering from a physical defect that would likely make him a public charge, despite his skill as a bookbinder, his $200 in savings, and the presence in America of his family, including self-supporting children.