Authors: Vincent J. Cannato
Once there, the young Bostonians were granted remarkable access as
they handed out their pamphlets to immigrants who had already told
officials they could read. According to Warren and Paine, 9 to 10 percent of those claiming to be literate were lying. Over three days, the
two men examined immigrants from six separate ships, most hailing
from the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Russia. All the Germans and
Bohemians they interrogated could read and write. However, 48 percent of Russians, 37 percent of Hungarians, 62 percent of Galicians, and 45 percent of Croatians could not read. Despite their unusual access, the IRL deemed the investigation a failure since during the visit not a single Italian immigrant passed through Ellis Island, and no investigation would be complete without assessing the vast throng of illiterate
and unskilled Italians pouring into the country.
So in April 1896, IRL members visited Ellis Island again immediately after the mini-riot of Italian immigrants. This time, Prescott Hall,
Robert DeC. Ward, and George Loring Briggs came at the invitation of
Commissioner Senner. The three men spent several days on the island.
It must have been a sight to see the young Brahmins, holding their
pamphlets as tightly as their prejudices, set out among the dazed and
dirty crowd of immigrants. We have no record of how the immigrants
felt about the well-dressed young men thrusting pamphlets in front of
them, but we do know what Hall thought about the immigrants. In its April 1896 investigation, the IRL committee examined 3,174
Italian immigrants at Ellis Island and found that 68 percent of them
were illiterate. Yet, much to the dismay of the IRL team, only 197 of
these Italians were excluded from entry. In just a few days, officials at
Ellis Island had let in almost two thousand illiterate Italians. Overall,
they found that only 4.5 percent of the immigrants from northwestern
Europe coming through Ellis Island during their visit were illiterate,
while nearly 48 percent of those from southern and eastern Europe
could not read. To the Boston Brahmins, this alarming trend threatened America’s moral and intellectual fabric.
The IRL members came away from their visit feeling surprisingly
positive toward the enforcement of the current law—perhaps due to
the great deference granted to them by Ellis Island officials. Yet they
called current immigration laws “radically defective” in keeping out undesirables. A miniscule number of immigrants were actually debarred
or deported. In 1892 and 1893, the first years of the new immigration law, the number was around 0.5 percent. With the institution of
boards of special inquiry under the 1893 immigration law, the percentage doubled between 1894 and 1895 to around 1 percent. To rectify
this situation, the IRL continued to press for a literacy test. Such a test would separate desirable from undesirable immigrants,
keep the nation true to its history of welcoming immigrants, and make
exclusion based on individual characteristics, not race, religion, or nationality. Although a literacy test was theoretically race- and ethnicityneutral, restrictionists rightly believed it would have a disparate effect on immigrants. Henry Cabot Lodge used the work of the IRL to push for the literacy test in the Senate and was quite explicit that the test would mostly affect eastern and southern Europeans.
Not all restrictionists were enamored with the literacy test. Although he died in January 1897 before Congress took up the idea, Francis A. Walker, for once applying some of his economist’s skepticism, had earlier noted that the “anarchist, the criminal, the habitual drunkard would be far more likely to pass the ordeal of a reading and writing test than the pocket-book test.”
Eventually, both the House and Senate passed a literacy test in early 1897. The test would consist of roughly twenty-five words from the U.S. Constitution translated in the immigrant’s native language. However, both Joseph Senner and Herman Stump urged President Grover Cleveland to veto the idea. Back in 1893, Stump had been an ally of Senator Chandler in the investigation of Ellis Island and was highly critical of the new immigrants. Now, after four years at the Immigration Bureau, he modified his views.
Writing to the secretary of the Treasury, Stump agreed that the public demanded greater immigration restriction. However, he argued that any such laws “should be tempered with sympathy for our unfortunate fellow beings who are compelled by adversity to abandon their homes to seek an asylum in an unknown country.” Making a familiar argument, Stump said that America needed unskilled labor to “construct railroads, macadamize our highways, build sewers, clear lands,” thereby freeing up native-born Americans from jobs they found distasteful and allowing them “to engage in the higher and more remunerative trades and occupations.”
Such arguments helped sway Cleveland who, in one of his final acts as president, vetoed the literacy bill. Congress was unable to override it. Cleveland’s veto message was a defense of traditional views of immigration. “It is said, however, that the quality of recent immigration is undesirable,” Cleveland stated. “The time is quite within recent memory when the same thing was said of immigrants who, with their descendants, are now numbered among our best citizens.” Cleveland would rather “admit a hundred thousand immigrants who, though unable to read and write, seek among us only a home and opportunity to work, than to admit one of those unruly agitators and enemies of governmental control, who can not only read and write, but delights in arousing by inflammatory speech the illiterate and peacefully inclined
to discontent and tumult.”
For years, immigration restrictionists would speak of the perfidy of
Cleveland’s veto, never forgetting how close they had come to saving
the Republic from tens of thousands of illiterate undesirables. Yet the
IRL continued the fight for a literacy bill, single-mindedly working on
the issue for twenty more years, publishing pamphlets and lobbying
newspaper editors and elected officials.
While these Bostonians attempted to exert power at the elite level
of the debate, another New Englander with very different ideas was
perhaps the most powerful person in charge of immigration policy at
Ellis Island in the late 1890s. For years, Edward McSweeney did his
work quietly until scandal forced his name onto the pages of newspapers, again raising doubts about Ellis Island’s ability to enforce the
nation’s immigration laws.
McSweeney . . . is governed by his motives, resentment, and inordinate desire for distinction. . . . [He] is now surrounded by a lot of servile, obsequious flatterers.
JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT ON JUNE 15, 1897, A FIRE BROKE out in the northeast tower of the main building on Ellis Island. The fire’s location made it hard to reach with water hoses. The building, constructed largely of Georgia pine, burned quickly; within a half hour the roof had collapsed. Immigration records dating back to the Castle Garden era, which had been held in half-buried stone and concrete magazines from the island’s former days as an ammunitions depot, were completely burned. The fire quickly spread to other buildings on the island, with flames that lit the night sky. An official investigation into the cause of the fire would later fail to solve the mystery; however, Victor Safford, a doctor at Ellis Island, thought that it was set deliberately, probably by a disgruntled night watchman who should long before have been declared insane.
Whatever its cause, the fire drove out nearly two hundred immigrants who were detained on the island. Most of them were Italians, but the group also included several Hindus in colorful robes and bead hats who had arrived as part of a traveling exhibition. In addition, thirty-one workers, including guards, an apothecary, a cook, two doctors, and three nurses were stationed on the premises.
To some, it was a reminder of the flimsy nature of the original buildings.
Harper’s Weekly
said the buildings had been “monuments of ugliness” and “wretched barns and architectural rubbish heaps.” The
New York World
blamed the government for constructing “great piles of rosin-soaked lumber, admirably arranged for burning.” Commissioner Joseph Senner condemned the buildings as firetraps and said that he had been haunted by the fear of fire for years. “Every day as I left the island during the past four years,” Senner told the
Times
, “I gave a farewell look at the buildings, for I expected to return the next day and find them all in ashes.” His prophecy finally came true.
Thankfully, no one was hurt in the fire, but officials had a bigger problem. An estimated seven thousand immigrants were already on ships in the Atlantic headed for New York, with over six hundred scheduled to arrive the day after the fire. As the ruins on Ellis Island continued to smolder, immigration officials set up a temporary inspection center on the piers at the Battery, on the tip of Manhattan. That first day after the fire, fifty-five immigrants were detained for further inspection.
Officials then moved into the old Barge Office in the southeastern section of the Battery, which had served as a temporary facility after Castle Garden’s closing. The fanciful Venetian Renaissance gray stone building, with its tall, thin turret overlooking the harbor, would again serve as the nation’s primary immigration depot for two and a half more years. The immigration service chartered the steamboat
Narragansett
, now docked at the island, to serve as a temporary, floating dormitory for as many as eight hundred immigrants who had not yet passed inspection at the Barge Office.
As talk began about rebuilding the facilities on Ellis Island, it became clear that the new facilities would have to be built of stone and steel, not wood. Still, one upstate newspaper in all apparent seriousness suggested that new wooden buildings would not be such a bad idea. An occasional fire on the island, the paper’s editor reassured its readers, would kill off the germs and microbes carried over by immigrants.
The chaos that ensued from the fire and the resulting move into the Barge Office left the New York immigration service in disarray. A newly elected president—William McKinley—began replacing Democratic officeholders in the immigration service with Republicans. A month after the fire, McKinley nominated Thomas Fitchie to replace Senner as commissioner. Fitchie had been a loyal Brooklyn Republican officeholder, but at age sixty-two and with no prior experience with immigration, he could hardly have been counted on to be a vigorous leader in difficult times.
America was digging itself out of the deepest economic depression in its history. As a new century approached, immigration would again pick up. The business of regulating this influx would have to continue for the time being without Ellis Island. To make matters worse, over the next four years the New York immigration service would become mired in a swamp of bureaucratic pettiness and personal vendettas that showed the limits of patronage politics.
T
HIRTY
-
YEAR
-
OLD
E
DWARD
F. M
C
S
WEENEY
, the second in command at Ellis Island, was a bulldog of a man, whose bullet-shaped head was topped by thinning black hair. Victor Safford remembered his lifelong friend as a “live wire.”
Growing up in Marlborough, Massachusetts, about thirty miles west of Boston, McSweeney dropped out of school as a child and began working in a shoe factory. Though his early biography had the makings of a Dickensian novel of drudgery and exploitation, McSweeney was more Horatio Alger than Oliver Twist.
By the time he was nineteen, he had helped found the Lasters’ Protective Union; two years later he became the union’s president. Labor work led to political work, as McSweeney became active in the Massachusetts Democratic Party. As a reward for helping round up labor support for Grover Cleveland’s successful presidential campaign, McSweeney was named assistant commissioner at Ellis Island in 1893.
Befitting someone from humble beginnings who clawed his way up through the industrial and political jungles of late-nineteenth-century America, McSweeney had an air of physicality about him. Referring to a Protestant missionary who spent much of his time proselytizing to Catholics at Ellis Island, McSweeney told Archbishop Michael Corrigan of New York that if “any good would come of it, I would be delighted to call him to account with a round turn.” When an immigrant tried to bribe him with $5.00, McSweeney became indignant and smacked the man in the face. Along with such eruptions, he also displayed widely recognized administrative skills and shrewd intelligence. When McKinley became president, McSweeney, a partisan Democrat, not only retained his position but also managed to become the de facto boss at Ellis Island. Above all, McSweeney was a survivor.
McSweeney remained in a Republican administration thanks largely to new civil service regulations. Patronage was the lifeblood of politics and helped staff the small federal bureaucracy, but it also led to corruption and a tolerance for ineptitude. To deal with the problems of an increasingly complex society, a more professional federal workforce was needed. In 1896, President Cleveland placed Immigration Service workers under civil service protection. Current federal workers were not forced to take the civil service exam and were able to keep their jobs. This meant that many patronage workers remained in the service, but this time with the job protection that civil service offered. McSweeney kept his position, although his salary was reduced.
Meanwhile, the McKinley administration searched for someone to run the immigration office in Washington. The president finally settled on Terence V. Powderly, one of the most famous Americans of the late nineteenth century. The former Grand Master Workman of the Knights of Labor—a fanciful title that befitted the utopian nature of the organization—helped build the country’s first major national labor union, and in doing so became a celebrity whose “face and name graced everything from chewing tobacco packages to haberdashers’ trade cards.” His portrait hung inside humble homes, and a town just outside of Birmingham, Alabama, was named in his honor. Powderly had also served as mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania.
On the surface, McSweeney and Powderly possessed many similarities. These two sons of Irish Catholic immigrants grew up in large families—McSweeney was one of eight, Powderly one of twelve. Their careers began in the labor movement, yet they were conservative by temperament and opposed to socialism. Unions were their avenue into partisan politics. Their backgrounds fed their interest in immigration.
Yet their differences outweighed their similarities. Whereas McSweeney was a Democrat, Powderly, sixteen years older than his soon to be nemesis, was a Republican. McSweeney played the political game with aplomb, cultivating influential and powerful people throughout society. Powderly, on the other hand, had a knack for angering both subordinates and superiors wherever he went. McSweeney was slick, while Powderly could be moody and abrasive. McSweeney retained strong ties to labor and the Catholic Church throughout his life; Powderly became estranged from both. Though both men supported the current immigration laws, McSweeney was sympathetic toward immigrants, while Powderly’s views were decidedly more negative.
McSweeney seemed to be born for political life, but Powderly was miscast in the profession. A slender, almost frail man, with a long droopy mustache and pale blue eyes, Powderly had the look, according to one contemporary journalist, that some mistook for “poets, gondola scullers, philosophers, and heroes crossed in love.” He was not, in appearance at least, a typical union man, and his looks suggested other character flaws: indecisiveness, moodiness, thin skin, and a querulous nature.
One historian described him as “a vain, pigheaded, unyielding, difficult man,” who was hard to like even from the “safe distance of an archive one hundred years” later. He had a tendency to quarrel with friends and foes alike. Recalling his days as leader of the Knights of Labor, Powderly noted: “I cannot forget either that I had been the recipient of a much larger share of unstinted censure, condemnation, denunciation, and abuse from those I had worked for as well as from those I had opposed.” By the early 1890s, the Knights had gone into decline, wracked with dissension, and Powderly was looking for other opportunities. He later claimed that when he left the Knights, he was “broken in health and spirits” and doctors had given him only months to live.
Powderly somehow managed to survive, and in 1896 he supported Ohio’s Republican governor, William McKinley, for president. He became McKinley’s main adviser on labor issues. The Immigration Bureau was to be Powderly’s reward.
Over the course of his career, Powderly made many enemies, a dubious skill he would soon put to use in his new job. Some of those enemies pressured the Senate to block Powderly’s confirmation, forcing McKinley to make a recess appointment. Even the Knights of Labor’s official newspaper came out against its former chief. Many of them distrusted Powderly’s Republican friends and criticized Powderly for dropping his opposition to the gold standard to align with McKinley’s views.
Another critic was Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), who called Powderly’s selection “an affront to labor.” Gompers’s AFL succeeded the Knights as the country’s leading labor union, and the two men clashed repeatedly over the years.
Powderly fought back, however, and McKinley stuck with him. Powderly went so far as to elicit the support of Edward McSweeney, his soon to be subordinate, to lobby Gompers to lift his opposition to Powderly’s appointment. Gompers didn’t budge, telling McSweeney that he opposed Powderly because his reputation “had been to break down and disrupt, and that he had used his position for unworthy ends.” Even without the support of Gompers, Powderly eventually received Senate confirmation in March 1898.
Powderly’s brother Joseph had been part of John Weber’s 1891 commission on European immigration. For the brothers, immigration was a personal issue. Terence accused new immigrants of coming to America “to compete in the struggle for food with the American workman.” He had gone to Castle Garden years earlier and saw what he called “agents of corporations” waiting for immigrants to arrive. Powderly recognized one of the men, who then arranged for some newcomers to travel to Pennsylvania, where they displaced native-born workers, many of whom Powderly knew personally.
Powderly did not stop with his economic arguments. He went on to call the new immigrants “semi-barbarous.” His views of immigration were somewhat ironic considering his background. As one of his many critics noted, if the laws Powderly wanted enforced had been applied to his Irish immigrant parents, Powderly might “be carrying turf, in an Irish bog, instead of being able, from the influential position he enjoys among Americans, to warn off later comers.” It was an irony not lost on Powderly, whose father had been arrested as a youth in Ireland for trespassing on a gentleman’s estate with a gun and killing a rabbit. For the offense, the elder Powderly spent three weeks in jail—a fact that would now have excluded him from entry to America.
Powderly was now in charge of enforcing the nation’s immigration laws. One of the biggest problems he had to deal with was the worsening situation in New York. As construction of the new buildings on Ellis Island continued, immigration officials were forced to conduct their business in the much more cramped quarters of the Barge Office. While immigration had been cut in half during the depression, better economic times now lured more immigrants to the country. More immigrants coming through the inadequate facilities at the Barge Office spelled trouble.
That trouble would spark a growing rift between Powderly and Edward McSweeney. It is difficult to pinpoint just when things began to go wrong. Upon taking office, Powderly had learned that there were problems with the immigration station in New York. “Ill treatment of arriving aliens, impositions practiced on steamship companies, and discourtesy to those who called to meet their friends on landing were frequent,” wrote Powderly. Eager to ingratiate himself with his new boss, McSweeney told Powderly that he could see “some rocks ahead” and offered to put his boss “in the way of escaping them.” He cryptically warned Powderly that the Barge Office was “a peculiar Service and some peculiar practices and precedents have come into vogue.”