Authors: Vincent J. Cannato
W
ILLIAM
W
ILLIAMS SET OUT
to rigorously enforce the law against those he considered undesirable, especially those deemed likely to become public charges. Rather than focusing on markers of personal character to determine desirability, as Theodore Roosevelt had encouraged, Williams increasingly linked undesirability to southern and eastern Europeans. As the enforcement of the law at Ellis Island became tighter and the rhetoric of the commissioner more pointed, opposition to Williams was building. More and more people came to believe that something had to be done to stop “Czar Williams.”
The more humanely the immigrant is treated at Ellis Island, the more humanely he will deal with us when he becomes the master of our national destiny.
GEORGE THORNT ON HAD THE GOOD FORTUNE T O ARRIVE at Ellis Island in October 1910. The Welsh miner and widower was accompanied by his seven children, ranging in age from two to nineteen. The family had over $100 with them and was headed to George’s sister in Pittsburgh. However, George was missing fingers on one of his hands, suffered from a hernia, and was therefore certified as likely to become a public charge. He and his family were ordered excluded.
It was Thornton’s luck that when William Williams heard the family’s appeal, sitting in the commissioner’s office was all three hundred and twenty pounds of the president of the United States. Theodore Roosevelt had handpicked William Howard Taft to be his successor and continue his policies, so it is no surprise that Taft emulated his predecessor and paid a presidential visit to Ellis Island. If Roosevelt braved torrential rains and near-hurricane-force winds to arrive at Ellis Island, Taft had to make his way by ferry across New York Harbor through dense fog. Once there, Taft threw himself into the visit, spending almost five hours examining the entire process.
Taft listened to a number of appeals that day and took a special interest in the nicely dressed Thornton family. He proceeded to question the elder Thornton, who was unaware of the identity of his new interrogator inquiring about the singing abilities of the Thornton children. Taft then asked George if he knew who the head of the U.S. government was. “The President,” replied George. Did he know his name? “Mr. William H. Taft,” responded George. The scene must have given the president a good laugh, as he then revealed his identity to the shocked Thornton. “It appears to me that this respectable-looking family . . . will all grow up to be good, self-supporting citizens of the country,” Taft concluded. The family was allowed to land.
The poignant story of the Thornton family barely saved from deportation by the intervention of the president of the United States was enough of a public-interest story to make the newspapers. However, some people in Wales heard the story and wrote to Williams stating that George Thornton had left the country without paying his debts. When Williams contacted George two months after his arrival, he admitted that he had not been able to secure work and his sister was unable to support the family. So George asked to be deported back to Wales, a wish Williams was no doubt happy to fulfill.
But President Taft’s personal judgment was on the line, having publicly vouched for the promising character of the family. Therefore, the secretary of Commerce and Labor, Charles Nagel, who had accompanied Taft to Ellis Island on that foggy October day and also strongly urged that the family be allowed to land, intervened to help Thornton find work. The results of Nagel’s efforts were disappointing. “In the Thornton case I have ignominiously surrendered,” Nagel wrote Taft only a few weeks later. “I find that he does not feel able to do work and that the doctors at Ellis Island evidently knew more about the case than we did.”
These were hard words for Taft to hear. Members of the American Association of Foreign Language Newspapers visited Taft at the White House in January 1911 to voice their concerns about the treatment of immigrants at Ellis Island. In response, the president told the group about his visit there a few months earlier. “I have since followed those cases in which I influenced him [Williams] against his better judgment,” he told the group, “and I am obliged to make the humiliating confession to you that the outcome vindicated him and showed that my judgment was at fault for lack of experience.
“There are certain parts of this Government that I understand very well, but immigration is new to me,” Taft further admitted, “and it is a subject to which I must give as much study as I can, being dependent, however, on the men whom I have selected to administer the law.” Such humility clearly marked Taft a different political animal than Theodore Roosevelt. It also led Taft to place even more faith in William Williams.
For the remainder of his term, no matter how heated the criticism got, Taft always stood behind his fellow Yale man. “In selecting Mr. Williams, I have selected a man whom I thought to be a very just and kindly man, and that is what you need there,” Taft told the foreign-born newspapermen. Moreover, Taft offered a mild criticism of the group, noting that when one is “continually pulling a man’s coattail when he is making a speech you can’t expect anything but a poor speech, and so it is with reference to the administration of the Federal law.” As for the Thornton family, Nagel wrote to Taft shortly after this meeting at the White House to inform the president that he had just “reluctantly signed the warrant for his deportation.”
Never again would Taft meddle in another immigrant case. However, immigrants at Ellis Island did not lack for vocal defenders. During Williams’s second tour of duty, the more he tried to tighten the enforcement of the law, the louder the roar from his critics. In his own mind, William Williams was a fearless upholder of the law who ran Ellis Island as a bulwark against undesirable immigrants. The foreignlanguage press had other ideas. To them, he was a dictator ruling over his fiefdom with an iron fist, enforcing his will upon powerless immigrants and servile employees. He was Czar Williams.
“A
WAY WITH
C
ZARISM AT
Ellis Island,” screamed an editorial from the German-language newspaper
Morgen Journal
. “Bestiality Rampant in the Name of the Law,” cried another. The English-language
Evening Journal
chimed in with an editorial castigating “Brutality at Ellis Island.” Both papers were owned by William Randolph Hearst and were part of a relentless drumbeat of criticism that Williams would face during his second term at Ellis Island.
The
Morgen Journal
listed almost two dozen German-language papers from Baltimore to Cincinnati, from Buffalo to Denver, from Davenport, Iowa to Sandusky, Ohio, that ran editorials condemning the Ellis Island administration. The
Chicago Abendpost
complained that the members of the boards of special inquiry were “mostly ossified and grouchy bureaucrats of the first order to whom the dead letter of the law is more precious than sound common sense.” The protests against Williams’s rule went beyond the German-American community. A Hungarian paper in Cleveland, the
Szabadsag
, described “The Terrors of Hell’s Island: The Calvary of an Old Hungarian Couple.”
O. J. Miller of the German Liberal Immigration Bureau sent out a mass mailing to “Citizens of German Blood” calling attention to the “bias and prejudices of ignorant government hirelings” and the “tyranny” they practiced at Ellis Island. Noting that Jews had “organized a powerful system for the shielding of immigrants of their race from political ruffianism and from the chicane and bias of the immigration officials,” Miller called for German-Americans to do the same. He called for every German organization in the country to demand the resignation of William Williams.
Groups such as the Alliance of German Societies of the State of Indiana, the Deutsch-Amerikanischer National Bund of East St. Louis, Illinois, and the German-American Alliance of Hartford, Connecticut, all joined the calls for Williams’s resignation. The Brooklyn League of the National German-American Alliance (NGAA) pronounced “the tyrannical and inhuman practices of Commissioner Williams and his staff of inspectors a blot upon civilization.”
Likening Williams to a “czar” or “pasha” turned the Ellis Island commissioner into a brutal authoritarian who used his power to suppress helpless immigrants. It was imagery designed to raise the hackles of those who had escaped czarist Russia or other monarchical regimes. The use of terms such as “inquisitors,” “star chamber,” and “catacombs” were also meant to hit the raw historical nerves of foreignborn Americans.
At first, Williams was surprised by all the heat he was taking from German groups. “If this hostility were confined to papers representing south Europeans I could at least understand the philosophy of it all,” he wrote to Charles Nagel. “But we are so fond of Germans, so anxious to have them come here, and we send back and detain such a negligible quantity of those who arrive, that we must look for this hostility elsewhere than in the application of the immigration law to Germans.”
Nor could Charles Nagel understand it. The overall rate of rejection of immigrants was “smaller than the general public is prepared to hear,” Nagel told President Taft’s secretary. He believed that Germans and Jews, the two ethnic groups complaining the loudest about Williams, “have fared if anything better than any other race.”
German immigration had slowed. Between 1900 and 1913, nearly 1 million Germans entered the country, but that was only 7.7 percent of all immigrants. In the great divide between old and new immigrants, Germans fell on the right side of the equation. By the early twentieth century, most Americans saw Germans as hearty pioneers who were easy to assimilate, especially when compared to Italians, Greeks, or Russian Jews. Teutonic blood was seen as relatively compatible with that of Anglo-Saxons, as people like Henry Cabot Lodge remembered the origins of their beloved Saxons.
German immigrants had a slim chance of being excluded and were kept out at a rate lower than the average. Between 1904 and 1912, less than 1 percent of all German immigrants were excluded. GermanAmericans would have noticed that the percentage of exclusions was increasing, although that began before William Williams returned to Ellis Island. Still, this was hardly a crusade against German immigrants. There had to be some other reason for these ferocious attacks on Ellis Island.
Harper’s Weekly
asked: “Who Is Stirring Up the Germans?” William Williams and the magazine both agreed that the answer could only be explained by the influence of German-owned steamship companies. As Williams stepped up deportations, each one cost the steamship companies $100 in fines, plus the cost of shipping the excluded immigrant back home. Williams may have contributed to the heartache of immigrants concerned about passing through the inspection process, but he was also making a dent in the finances of the steamship companies.
The stricter enforcement of immigration law may not have seriously affected German immigrants, but there was no denying that Williams was now turning away more immigrants at Ellis Island. He believed that Robert Watchorn, with the approval and oversight of Secretary Oscar Straus, had kept the gates at Ellis Island wide open.
Between 1907 and 1909, less than 1 percent of all immigrants arriving at Ellis Island were rejected. Williams had set out to rectify that situation, and the numbers demonstrate his success. In 1910, Williams’s first full year back at Ellis Island, the rate of exclusions doubled to 1.8 percent of all arrivals. That would decrease over the next three years but never dip below 1 percent, as it had under Watchorn. Immigrants faced tougher scrutiny at Ellis Island than they would at any other major inspection station in the country, with the exception of those along the Mexican and Canadian borders.
Nor was it just a question of immigrants having a tougher time getting through inspection at Ellis Island. Those already landed could be deported within three years of their arrival if found to be public charges, prostitutes, criminals, anarchists, feebleminded, or any one of a number of categories that would have labeled them as undesirable under the law. Such deportations were steadily increasing over the years and continued under Williams. During Williams’s second tenure at Ellis Island, over 6,000 immigrants found themselves returned to Ellis Island and deported back to their homelands.
Even with the stricter enforcement of the law and increasing number of deportations and in spite of Williams’s rhetoric about undesirable immigrants, over 98 percent of all who arrived at Ellis Island were eventually admitted. This speaks to the powerful legal, political, social, economic, and ideological consensus that allowed America to accept millions of new immigrants despite the grumbling of those made uneasy by the disruptions that this human wave brought. Every exclusion was a personal tragedy; in 1910 there were over 14,000 such tragedies at Ellis Island. However, when compared to the hundreds of thousands who easily passed through, it is hard to describe Ellis Island as a restrictionist nightmare.
What is not fully known is how many potential immigrants were stopped at European ports from emigrating in the first place. Steamship companies set up their own inspection process there to weed out individuals they felt were not qualified to land according to American immigration law. If someone did not pass that inspection, he or she could not purchase a ticket. It was simple economics for the steamship companies, who did not want to incur fines and the added expense of transporting rejected immigrants back to Europe. In many ways, that inspection was much tougher and more intrusive than the one immigrants experienced at Ellis Island.
It is hard to come by official figures on the number of people rejected by steamship officials at European ports. Journalist Broughton Brandenburg investigated the conditions of immigrants on both sides of the Atlantic and found that at the ports of Hamburg, Bremen, Liverpool, Naples, and Fiume, from which most American immigrants sailed, some 68,000 people were refused steamship tickets during 1906. At Naples, roughly 6 percent of immigrants seeking passage to America were turned away in 1906. The following year, Robert Watchorn estimated that a total of 65,000 immigrants were barred at all European ports.
For some immigrants, their obstacle course to the New World began even earlier. Russians had to first make their way to German ports like Hamburg or Bremen. Since most of these Russians were Jews, German officials were not happy about having them tramp through their lands, although they were more than willing to have German steamship lines take their passage money. Therefore, Russians could not enter Germany unless they had a ticket to America and a sufficient amount of money on their persons. To enforce the law, Germany erected a series of fourteen border stations in the east. According to one estimate, German border guards turned away some 12,000 Russians in 1907.