Authors: Vincent J. Cannato
At the hearing, Texas congressman James Slayden asked Howe: “What percentage of the people who are detained at Ellis Island are downright immoral people?” Howe responded that the figure was around 20 to 50, out of the 400 to 600 detained at any one time.
Not only was Howe determined to ease the pain of detention; he was also willing to reconsider deportation orders. He sent a team of female social workers to investigate some of the cases. Howe believed that “the great majority of women were casual offenders who would not have been arrested under ordinary circumstances. In many instances their misfortunes were the result of ignorance, almost always of poverty.” In his autobiography, he mentions the case of an immigrant named Sarah, who lived in St. Louis and whose drunken husband abandoned her and her infant. In despair, Sarah sold herself to a man on the street, was arrested, and sent to Ellis Island to be deported.
Alice Gouree was not a prostitute, but she still encountered problems at Ellis Island. Having lived in New York since 1906, the thirtyone-year-old Frenchwoman returned to New York from France the same day that Congress declared war on Germany. Gouree was preceded upon her arrival by an anonymous letter to Ellis Island warning officials that she had had an affair with a married man.
Thanks to the letter, Gouree was detained at Ellis Island and questioned about her sexual past. She admitted to having had sexual relations with the man and that he had paid for her apartment, although she claimed not to know he was married. She also admitted to an affair with another man years earlier who had also paid her rent, as well as a third relationship with another married man. After her hearing, the board ordered Alice excluded as an immoral woman. With deportations suspended until the end of the war, Howe was not interested in keeping Alice detained indefinitely and advised that she be admitted. His superiors in Washington ruled against Howe, calling Gouree a “self-confessed courtesan with very warped ideas of moral uprightness,” and ordered her detained until she could be deported. However, the number two person in the Labor Department, Louis Post, agreed with Howe and ordered Alice paroled to her sister.
But Gouree was not free from the long arm of immigration officials. Investigators monitored her situation, reporting that she had worked as a maid in a hotel after her release from Ellis Island, but that she was fired after a few months for improper behavior with a married waiter named Muhlenberg, who had left his wife and three children to live with Gouree. Seven months later, Gouree was back at Ellis Island to answer for her sexual promiscuity. She admitted to the affair with Muhlenberg, but said she believed he was going to leave his wife to marry her.
In tune with the anti-German hysteria sweeping the country and faced with deportation back to France because of the affair, Gouree told officials that she broke up with Muhlenberg not because he was married and wouldn’t leave his wife, but because he was German. She also informed officials that she believed that Muhlenberg, a German citizen, had not properly registered with the government as an enemy alien. The newly patriotic Gouree begged officials to allow her to stay, admitting her mistake and saying that she had found another job as a maid for a Park Avenue matron.
When it looked as if patriotic, anti-German appeals were not going to win her the right to stay in America, Gouree lashed out. “I have done nothing wrong and was brought back to Ellis Island for no good reason,” she said. “Why should I be kept here?” One can only imagine Gouree’s humiliation at having to discuss her sex life in front of male authorities. It was all too much. Although she was released on bond again in February 1918, she told officials that when the war was over, she would return to France at her own expense. “This sort of treatment will make a bad woman out of any good woman,” Gouree wrote. In 1919, when officials sought Alice’s deportation, they were informed that she had already kept her promise and left America.
Then there was Giulietta Lamarca. Sent to Ellis Island for prostitution in the summer of 1915, Lamarca remained there for months, unable to be deported back to her native Italy. Her case was one of those that attracted Howe’s attention. “This woman has conducted herself with propriety,” Ellis Island matrons informed Howe. “She has kept away from the men. She has a son in Italy and she wants to make a little money in order to bring him over here.” Howe believed that an abusive husband had forced Giulietta into prostitution and decided to give her a chance.
“I have, I admit, thought of the poor, ignorant, immoral women detained at the Island as human beings entitled to every help to a fair start in the world,” Howe wrote in response to his critics. Working with charitable groups, he sought to find homes that would help rehabilitate these women. Giulietta was released on bond to work as a servant in the home of an Ellis Island doctor who lived in New Jersey.
Giulietta seemed to be a good worker. A year after she left Ellis Island, she was working for another government official living in New Jersey, a man named S. L. Norton. Lamarca only worked for Norton for four days before leaving. Inspector Frank Stone was sent to look into Norton’s complaints against his former employee.
Norton was angry that Lamarca had left his employ early. Giulietta claimed she was hired to be a cook for Norton, but instead had to clean up after Norton’s wife, who was suffering from an ailment that forced her to wear a diaper. Norton took after Lamarca with a vengeance. He told Stone that Giulietta had had indecent contact with his two dogs. His proof: when the dogs left Giulietta’s company, they were panting and excited, which to Norton showed “that she had committed some crime against nature with them.”
Norton also complained that the former prostitute was corrupting the morals of the decent young women of Cranford, New Jersey. Because of her past, Lamarca’s relationship with men was open to investigation. Stone found that although Giulietta had had some conversations with an Italian chauffeur and an Italian garbageman, she had “conducted herself properly while in Cranford.” He concluded that Norton’s charges were “inspired by malice and vindictiveness” and anger at Howe’s policy of releasing prostitutes from detention at Ellis Island.
Ellis Island officials allowed Giulietta to remain free. She continued to live and work in New Jersey. Howe argued that he had found that out of the hundreds of women paroled, “not more than a dozen” had reverted to their former lives of prostitution. Howe possessed a positive view of human nature, that men and women were victims of their environment and that rehabilitation was an exercise in humanity, not futility.
With cases like Giulietta’s seemingly to have turned out so well, Congressman Bennet’s hearings went nowhere. The specific complaints were dropped, the former prostitutes were out on parole, the food concession remained in private hands, and Howe remained in office. At least one of Bennet’s criticisms, though, was on the mark.
Bennet charged that Howe spent less than half of the working week at Ellis Island, making him “the most absentee commissioner” in the station’s history. As if to prove the point, Howe could not be reached for comment on Bennet’s charge because he was vacationing for a week in Nantucket.
Howe described his daily schedule for the congressional committee. He would arrive at Ellis Island sometime between 8:30 and 10:00
A
.
M
., depending on which ferry he caught. Usually, he got to his office around 9:30
A
.
M
. His days on Ellis Island would end around 4:15
P
.
M
., but he admitted that “many days I leave before that when I clean up all the work and there is nothing more to do.”
Howe’s inattention was due less to laziness than to overextension. Howe still spent a great deal of time dabbling in personal intellectual and political pursuits, few of which directly related to immigration. He was more likely to make news for his views on unemployment, the nationalization of railroads, or public ownership of utilities than on immigration policy. Most of his letters to Woodrow Wilson dealt with recommendations on everything from who should serve on the new Federal Trade Commission to what kind of peace Wilson should seek when the war in Europe ended.
Howe spoke out about the conflict in Europe, giving a speech in lower Manhattan in 1915 in which he warned against rushing into war, since he believed that “wars are made by classes and privileged interests.” This was a far cry from what his boss, President Wilson, was saying.
Even the
Times
, a defender of Howe against attacks from Bennet, called Howe “a glib spokesman of glittering and ignorant theories, a thinker of vealy thoughts, an individual whose public utterances are often of the half-baked kind.” It encouraged Howe to continue his humanitarian work at Ellis Island, but “stay off the lecture platform.”
There was a deeper issue at work. Not only did Howe know little about immigration, but he was also growing increasingly disillusioned with government. Whereas William Williams wielded the powers of his office comfortably—perhaps too comfortably—Howe seemed uneasy with his role at Ellis Island. More a thinker than a doer, he had difficulty administering the station and admitted that his superiors in Washington often ignored his suggestions and left many of his letters unanswered.
Howe had also grown disillusioned with government workers, finding them nothing more than petty clerks. “The government was their government,” he wrote. The great success of the Progressive Era was the creation of the administrative state that would regulate private business in the public interest. In theory, civil service reform helped staff that bureaucracy with professionals instead of hack politicians. Yet Howe found that this bureaucracy “moved largely by fear, hating initiative,” caring only about “its petty unimaginative salary-hunting instincts.” He felt that his position at Ellis Island was not just irrelevant, but unnecessary. Howe had no desire to preside over what the
Times
called the “petty Czarship” of Ellis Island commissioner and saw little need to weed out the desirable from the undesirable.
Howe’s career indicated a steady change in American liberalism, an evolution from the progressivism of earlier years to a more modern form of liberalism. The Great War only brought more disillusionment with the state, as liberals increasingly emphasized individual rights and humanitarianism.
Even Howe’s choice of a home made a statement. When they arrived in New York in 1910, Howe and his wife, Marie Jenney Howe, chose to live in Greenwich Village. There the couple mixed with a growing band of bohemians and political radicals. Marie became active in the Women’s Suffrage Party and helped found the Heterodoxy Club, a debating society for women that served as an incubator for early feminism. Despite his continual “unlearning” of the conservative values of his childhood, Fred Howe could never fully come to grips with his wife’s feminism, which put a strain on their marriage. When Marie read her husband’s autobiography, she reportedly asked him, her voice dripping with sarcasm: “Why, Fred, were you never married?”
The 1910s were an exciting time in Greenwich Village. One man who helped give the area its bohemian feel was a hunchbacked dwarf named Randolph Bourne, who walked the streets dressed in a black cape. Bourne, who had suffered from spinal tuberculosis as a child and whose difficult delivery as an infant left his face misshapen and disfigured, became a prominent voice among liberal intellectuals.
Much of the immigration debate had been fought over the idea of the melting pot, a phrase made popular by Israel Zangwill in his 1908 play of the same name. Whether immigrants could be absorbed into American society was the question that divided Prescott Hall from Oscar Straus, a dividing line that the politically agile Theodore Roosevelt danced along for his entire political career.
Randolph Bourne believed that the melting pot had failed, but he turned the idea around on the Prescott Halls of America. No group, Bourne argued, clung more tenaciously to the virtues of the old country than Anglo-Saxons who worshipped everything British and whose allegiance to England was getting the United States dangerously close to participating in the faraway war in Europe.
Bourne also complained that assimilation was a one-way street, accomplished only on the terms set by Anglo-Saxon Americans. Bourne feared that assimilation would take the distinctiveness of the nation’s ethnic communities and wash them “into a tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity.” Assimilation, Bourne argued, was bad for immigrants and turned them into people “without a spiritual country, cultural outlaws, without taste.”
For Bourne, America’s strength was that it was a “world-federation in miniature.” He was the prophet of multiculturalism, a hunchbacked John the Baptist laying out arguments that would not gain currency for more than sixty years. Perhaps only a misfit like Bourne could have foreseen this trend in American society. In 1916, these ideas found few adherents beyond the streets of Greenwich Village. Bourne’s colleagues at
The New Republic
argued that if America continued to be fractured ethnically, “we cannot expect to attain the homogeneity of feeling and action essential to our position of power with international rights and obligations.” The editors of this newest liberal magazine argued in favor of stricter regulation of immigration to end the “wholesale transplantation upon our soil of alien communities.”
The war raised questions about ethnic loyalty. Were German-Americans going to support the kaiser? Were Irish-Americans so hateful toward the British that they would side with Germany? Such concerns led to a new enemy on American soil, one so tiny and seemingly insignificant, yet fraught with peril for the entire nation. It was not a person or an organization, but a lowly punctuation mark, a short horizontal line used to connect two words: the hyphen. Irish-Americans, GermanAmericans, Polish-Americans. “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism,” Theodore Roosevelt warned in 1915.
War in Europe and fears of ethnic disloyalty at home recharged the case for immigration restriction. Since the 1890s, the literacy test had been the gold standard for restrictionists. Congress again took up the cause in the waning months of 1916. Both chambers overwhelmingly passed the bill. A week after Wilson gave a speech to Congress calling for “peace without victory” in the war in Europe and only days before Germany resumed its submarine warfare in the Atlantic, the president vetoed the literacy test. It was Wilson’s second veto of the bill since becoming president and the fourth veto of a literacy bill since the 1890s.