Authors: Vincent J. Cannato
Though La Guardia may have thought the new overseas inspection process was an improvement, he was no fan of the new quotas. The former Ellis Island interpreter was now representing a Manhattan district in the U.S. House of Representatives. With little actual power in Congress, La Guardia took on the role of gadfly, denouncing restrictive legislation and defending the contributions of immigrants. A child of immigrants, he condemned the quotas as being in the “spirit of the Ku Klux Klan.”
These new quotas covered immigrants from Europe, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. But nearly as many immigrants arrived from the Western Hemisphere, which was exempt from the quota system. Throughout the 1920s, 60 percent came from Canada and 30 percent came from Mexico.
Since the 1890s, more than 70 percent of immigrants entered through the Port of New York; throughout the 1920s, that number was about 50 percent. While the twenty-seven acres of Ellis Island served as the legal border for most immigrants, the new gate of entry became the nearly two-thousand-mile border with Mexico and the even longer border to the north with Canada. The future of American immigration, little grasped at the time, would not be with Europeans, but with those coming from south of the border.
Stricter quotas led to greater efforts to evade the new law. Illegal immigration began to attract the attention of the nation’s leaders. In 1923, Labor Secretary James J. Davis warned President Harding that as many as one hundred thousand immigrants were crossing into the United States surreptitiously. Other reports, no doubt exaggerated, put the figure at a thousand a day. After taking office later that same year, President Calvin Coolidge warned the nation’s governors of this “seepage over the borders,” which he called a “considerable menace” to the success of the new immigration legislation.
Deportations also increased during the 1920s. From 1910 to 1918, an average of 2,750 immigrants were deported each year. By 1921, over 4,500 immigrants were deported annually, and by 1930, that figure had skyrocketed to 16,631, as the nation’s mood increasingly soured toward immigrants. As more people were being stopped at the front door by quotas, still more were being kicked out the back door with stepped-up enforcement of the law.
By far the most important change brought by the new law would not go into effect for a few more years. Not happy with the near-complete exclusion of most southern and eastern Europeans, restrictionists saw a gross disparity in these quotas: they were based upon the
foreign-born
population. If the goal was to maintain America as an Anglo-Saxon nation, why not figure the quotas on the ethnic background of the entire population, both native- and foreign-born. In fact, the 2 percent quota based on the 1890 Census had actually reduced the quota on immigrants from the United Kingdom by more than half. The big winners of the 1924 quota law were midnineteenth-century immigrant groups such as the Irish and Germans.
To rectify the situation, Congress authorized a study to determine the precise ethnic makeup of all American citizens living in the country in 1920. The result was a so-called national origins plan. In keeping with the rigid racial boundaries of the era, the study included only white Americans and omitted blacks, Asians, and American Indians.
The commission calculated that by 1920, the United States was no longer a majority Anglo-Saxon nation, as more than 56 percent of the population was descended from non-British ancestors. An optimist like Henry Curran could defend the national origins plan for ensuring “that all future immigration will consist of the same racial proportions as are found in the stock of the hundred millions of us already here.” For Madison Grant, however, the future was bleak: Americans of colonial descent were soon to “become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles and the Viking of the days of Rollo.”
The new national origins plan lowered the overall immigration ceiling to 150,000 per year and granted immigrants from the United Kingdom almost half of the yearly quota. The big losers were the Germans, Irish, and Scandinavians, who saw their previous quotas cut by more than half. Ironically, although quotas were originally designed to bar southern and eastern Europeans, quotas for Italians, Greeks, and Russians all went up from the previous ones based on the 1890 Census, but their numbers were still pitifully low. Now, only 307 Greeks and 5,802 Italians would be allowed in each year.
On the surface, the quotas possessed a scientific precision that lent the endeavor the air of authenticity. Unlike the 1921 or 1924 quotas, the national origins plan would not be instituted without a fight. German-Americans, ten years removed from the harrowing effects of the war, began to speak up, as did Irish-Americans. One of those voices was a familiar one.
Edward F. McSweeney had resurrected his professional career and reputation after the imbroglio that led to his departure from Ellis Island in 1902 and the criminal charges for attempting to steal government documents. Now a respected citizen of Massachusetts, McSweeney served as chairman of the Knights of Columbus Historical Commission. The former union man and government official used his new post to call for a home-grown national history of the United States, untainted by what he felt was a creeping British bias in some histories. Anglo-Americans, argued McSweeney, were the real hyphenated Americans who overemphasized the contributions of the English to the exclusion of other groups. “What America needs most,” he argued, “is the Americanization of most self-appointed Americanizers.”
More substantively, McSweeney’s group commissioned a number of books to counter overly pro-British histories, creating something called the Racial Contribution Series, whose monographs detailed the contributions of various racial, ethnic, and religious communities. One product of the series was W. E. B. Du Bois’s
The Gift of Black Folk
, for which McSweeney wrote the introduction.
Foreshadowing a trend that would blossom decades later, ethnic groups were beginning to lay claim to their own Americanness, evolving into staunch patriots and defenders of a distinctly American history as they became more assimilated, while more established ethnic groups would often succumb to more critical attitudes toward American history and nationalism. McSweeney’s work with the Knights of Columbus was a way to fight Anglo-Saxonism and immigration restrictionists with patriotic fervor.
To a pro-immigration Anglophobe like McSweeney, the whole national origins plan smelled fishy. In his mind, it was an un-American fraud perpetrated by Anglo-Americans. The data on national origins, in McSweeney’s words, were an “impudent imposition . . . fabricated for a sinister purpose and are in truth discrimination.”
Despite McSweeney’s efforts, the National Origins Act went into effect in 1929. However, McSweeney never lived to see the implementation of a plan he believed violated America’s traditional attitude of judging immigrants as individuals, not by their ethnic, religious, or national background.
In the late afternoon of November 16, 1928, McSweeney was driving home in Framingham, Massachusetts, when his car stalled at a railroad crossing in the face of an oncoming train. McSweeney’s car was demolished by the train, which dragged it some sixty feet. Suffering serious head trauma and many broken bones, McSweeney was rushed to a hospital where he lingered for two days before succumbing to his injuries. He was sixty-three years old.
McSweeney had managed to outlive his former nemesis, Terence Powderly, by four years. He had rebuilt his life to such a degree that senators, congressmen, judges, and other dignitaries turned out for his funeral. In contrast, Powderly died in relative obscurity. He had gone from being the most famous labor leader of the late nineteenth century to an obscure government bureaucrat, a low-level functionary working within the Immigration Service that he once ran.
Powderly had once been a staunch restrictionist who opposed immigrant contract laborers and warned that immigrants posed a menace to the nation’s health. By 1920, Powderly changed his tune. In his new position, he was concerned that government was neglecting the needs of immigrants. “We have admitted them as we have received baled hay, bars of pig iron and casks of olive oil,” he wrote to his boss, “not a single throb of human sympathy has been extended to them and not a thing has been done to assure them of a welcome.” By the time of his change of heart, it was too late. Powderly was little more than a powerless bureaucrat who needed his job for the paycheck that staved off poverty in his old age.
Freed from the burdens of petty political and labor squabbles, Powderly lived out his final years with little of the mental and emotional stress that plagued him in the past. He remarried, wrote his autobiography, and continued his work as an amateur photographer. He died in 1924 at the age of seventy-five.
The immigration work of McSweeney and Powderly belonged to another era. They both passed away during a time when the nation’s immigration laws changed dramatically and Ellis Island, the site of their bitter feud a quarter century earlier, had gradually begun to fade in importance.
Powderly was not the only person to have second thoughts. Psychologist Henry Goddard, who coined the term “moron,” had done much to buttress beliefs in the mental inferiority of immigrants. By the late 1920s, he had changed course and now believed that most individuals scoring below the mental age of twelve were not morons. Despite his lifetime of work on the subject, Goddard wrote in 1928 that psychologists were “still limited to a definition of feeble-mindedness that is unscientific and unsatisfactory.”
Taking issue with supporters of eugenics, Goddard came to believe that feeblemindedness was curable and that environment played just as strong a role in intelligence as genes. In the late 1920s, he even concluded that there was not much evidence to show that feebleminded parents begat feebleminded children. Goddard had never personally been drawn to the racism that infected others associated with eugenics, but by the 1920s he would go so far as to write that the “distribution of intelligence in the different races is probably the same.” By this time, immigration quotas were solidly in effect and Goddard’s national influence had waned.
Unlike Goddard, University of Wisconsin sociologist Edward A. Ross had been much more heavily invested in the genetic inferiority of immigrants. He had earlier coined the term “race suicide” and complained that many new immigrants resembled prehistoric creatures and were “the descendants of those who always stayed behind.” A proud Anglo-Saxon and defender of Nordic superiority, Ross was also a progressive who believed immigrants from southern and eastern Europe retarded the advancement of American civilization by bringing illiteracy, vice, and political corruption.
By the time he wrote his autobiography, Ross had moderated his views. He still professed a belief in eugenics and birth control and was proud that his writings had helped build support for the quota laws of the 1920s. Yet something happened to the man who had once penned articles such as “The Causes of Race Superiority” and “The Value Rank of the American People.” Since then, Ross had traveled the world and softened his views toward non-Nordic cultures. A chastened Ross now declared: “Far behind me in a ditch lies the Nordic Myth. . . . Difference of race means far less to me now than it once did.” He regretted that it took him more than two-thirds of his life to come to realize the “fallacy of rating peoples according to the grade of their culture.”
In 1904, he had referred to eastern Europeans as “beaten members of beaten breeds.” More than thirty years later, he recanted. “I rue this sneer,” Ross admitted. The change of heart did nothing to change U.S. immigration quotas, but the newfound attitudes of Powderly, Goddard, and Ross foreshadowed the slow and steady abandonment of racialist thinking that would develop in the twentieth century.
N
INE
-
YEAR
-
OLD
E
DOARDO
C
ORSI AND
his brother Giuseppe Garibaldi Corsi stood on the deck of the steamship
Florida
as it sailed into New York Harbor in November 1906. They were two of the over 1 million immigrants who would pass through Ellis Island in that record year. Amid the excitement of the end of their journey, they thought they spied mountains rising out of the haze in the distance and wondered why their peaks were not topped by snow. Their stepfather corrected them. Those were not mountains, but the highest buildings in the world, he said pointing to the Manhattan skyline.
The Corsi family—two young sons, two sisters, mother, and stepfather—had arrived from the Abruzzi region of southern Italy. Adding to the sense of confusion brought on by those mysterious urban mountains, the Corsis felt an apprehension about what lay ahead of them at Ellis Island. Their acceptance into America was not assured, although Edoardo’s stepfather had spent the rest of the family’s money to buy his wife a second-class cabin ticket to ease her entry. “I felt a resentment toward this Ellis Island ahead of us,” Corsi later reminisced.
The child who thought the Manhattan skyline was a mountain range would make his adult life within those urban mountains. Edward Corsi became active in the settlement house movement in New York and a progressive Republican in the mold of his congressman, Fiorello La Guardia. His political connections eventually led him to be named commissioner of Ellis Island in 1931 by Herbert Hoover.
Corsi was not the first foreign-born commissioner, but he was the first to have entered through Ellis Island. He presided over a muchdiminished station. It had once attracted the attention and ire of many Americans. Presidents had visited the island for an up-close view of its operations. Restrictionists thought the system was too lenient; immigration defenders thought it too strict.
Those days were over. As America became mired in the Great Depression, Ellis Island slipped into the far recesses of the collective American mind. “Only occasionally now does this most famous of national gateways appear in the news,” the
Literary Digest
noted in 1934. When Ellis Island was mentioned, it was often in highly negative tones. A 1934 report commissioned by Labor Secretary Frances Perkins began its findings by noting the popular myth that Ellis Island had been a place of misery, “a dungeon from which the immigrant is lucky to escape.”