Authors: Vincent J. Cannato
Powderly made a surprise visit to the Barge Office in March 1899. He arrived with a stenographer and was given his own room for a number of days to investigate and interview Barge Office employees. Powderly quickly discovered that McSweeney was the real chief of the immigration station and Fitchie, the nominal head, was “almost unknown to most of the employees at the station although he had been in office two years.” Powderly found some small irregularities, but decided to take no further action. Still, McSweeney took Powderly’s investigation as a personal affront.
Powderly’s views on immigration—and his zealous pursuit of those goals—also added to the growing divide between the two officials. Powderly was busy shaking up immigration enforcement across the country, from New York to California to the Canadian border. To his credit, he was no mere political hack. Powderly was determined to enforce more strictly the laws against contract workers and Chinese immigrants—both traditional bugbears of labor. Powderly proudly noted that in 1899, 741 illegal contract laborers had been excluded, nearly double the number from the previous year.
Yet his strict enforcement of contract-labor laws ran into predictable opposition in the Treasury Department. Powderly’s complaints about cheap immigrant labor did not warm the hearts of his pro-business Republican superiors. In 1899, a large group of Croatian immigrants arrived in Baltimore and were detained on suspicion of being contract laborers. When they appealed their case to Washington, Powderly ordered their deportation. He claimed the men were heading to a Chicago address of a “man whose name is a stench in the nostrils of organized labor.”
Powderly’s decision revealed the weakness of the contract-labor law. By 1899, most employers were careful not to make any contracts for incoming immigrants, who themselves were careful not to tell immigration officials that they were arriving in the country to work on a specific job. Powderly admitted that the evidence in the case “was not such as would warrant a conviction in a criminal court.” Yet, believing deep in his heart that these men were violating the law, he ordered their exclusion anyway.
Such reasoning did not wash with Powderly’s boss, Treasury Secretary Lyman Gage, who overturned his decision and allowed the Croatians to proceed to Chicago. Suspicion without evidence, Gage argued, was not a sufficient reason to bar immigrants. Powderly, seemingly incapable of restraining his anger at the decision, told the German-language
New Yorker Staats-Zeitung
that Gage “has no sympathies for the [nativeborn] laborers.” He later complained about being misquoted, but the quote captures both Powderly’s anger and his perennial inability to bite his tongue.
Such impolitic behavior won Powderly few friends in the Treasury Department. Not only would Powderly battle his subordinates in New York, but he would also find himself fighting with his bosses in Washington. Powderly especially ran afoul of Horace Taylor, the assistant secretary of the Treasury, who took office in early 1899 and often referred to Powderly as “that labor crank.” Their mutual disregard for Powderly would lead McSweeney and Taylor to become close allies in the coming bureaucratic struggle.
The decision on the Croatian laborers fed Powderly’s suspicions— or paranoia—that his colleagues were uninterested in enforcing the contract-labor law. He seemed to have his opinions confirmed in April 1900 when Fitchie and McSweeney enacted a minor reform at the Barge Office. Since Congress passed the contract-labor law in 1885, a separate group of inspectors had existed who only dealt with suspected immigrant contract laborers. In the late 1890s, Fitchie and McSweeney, in the interest of efficiency, decided to merge the contract-labor inspectors with the regular inspectors into one inspector class. Assistant Secretary Taylor approved the plan without consulting Powderly, who bitterly opposed the idea. Though it appeared to be a rational bureaucratic reform, it had the effect of reducing the number of immigrant exclusions in New York based on contract-labor violations by almost 90 percent, according to Powderly.
Powderly was in an awkward position. He was a labor man opposed to cheap immigrant labor, yet he worked for a pro-business Republican administration. Even worse, he had also alienated many people in the labor movement. Recognizing this situation, he worked hard to stay in the good graces of McKinley, without whose support Powderly would have found himself out of a job.
Perhaps that insecurity led Powderly to ask for McSweeney’s help with the 1898 gubernatorial race in Connecticut. John Addison Porter, the personal secretary to McKinley, was running for the Republican nomination. Powderly wanted Fitchie to ask McSweeney to “run over and get some of his Democratic friends to get into the caucuses and help our friends out.” There is no evidence that McSweeney agreed to the request, and Porter failed in his bid to become governor.
Just a few months before Powderly made his request, New York senator Thomas C. Platt, the longtime Republican boss of the state, complained about the “extreme partisan conduct” of McSweeney. “Is there not some way that he can be removed and a good Republican put in his place,” Platt asked Thomas Fitchie. Platt was angered less by McSweeney’s Democratic affiliation and more by the fact that he had run for New York sheriff in 1897 on Seth Low’s reform Citizens’ Union ticket. McSweeney was trying to prove his Republican bona fides by supporting Low, but the Citizens’ Union ticket consisted of reform Republicans opposed to Boss Platt.
Despite Platt’s urgings, McSweeney remained in office. Perhaps Fitchie recognized that the immigration service in New York could not run without McSweeney’s administrative talents. There is another possible explanation. When the bitterness between McSweeney and Powderly broke out into open warfare a few years later, Powderly would accuse McSweeney of delaying the stay of immigrants at Ellis Island “for the purpose of swelling the receipts of Mr. Hess who has the contract for providing food for immigrants at Ellis Island.” Charlie Hess also happened to be a loyal member of Senator Platt’s Republican machine. Powderly claimed that McSweeney told him: “I can rely upon Senator Platt to do the right thing by me.” So it is not beyond the realm of possibility that McSweeney had made his peace with Platt, a man more interested in patronage than partisanship.
The accusation that McSweeney was involved in unethical conduct was part of a larger problem at the Barge Office. While Ellis Island had put the buffer of New York Harbor between immigrants and those who prowled the waterfront looking to take advantage of greenhorns, the Barge Office provided no such luxury. McSweeney himself explained that all of the problems that had once existed at Castle Garden were reappearing at the Barge Office.
More complaints emerged about the Barge Office. Words like “listless,” “inexcusably insolent,” and “inefficient” were thrown about to describe the staff. Victor Safford spoke of one worker, a German immigrant with a bushy beard, whose sole duty seemed to be to march around with great pomp dressed in naval cap and double-breasted coat with brass buttons. The man was obviously a political appointee, and Safford could never figure out what the man did.
By the end of 1899, word reached Washington of serious problems at the Barge Office, prompting Secretary Gage to appoint a committee to investigate, led by John Rodgers, commissioner of immigration at Philadelphia, and Richard K. Campbell, from the Washington office. Rodgers and Campbell conducted two months of hearings in lower Manhattan in early 1900, collecting over two thousand pages of testimony.
Much as Powderly had found earlier, the Campbell-Rodgers report concluded that McSweeney was the real power at the Barge Office. It laid out in detail charges of cruelty, corruption, and the abuse of immigrants “of such a pronounced and inexcusable character.” The report concluded that McSweeney “countenanced extreme cruelty and impropriety in the methods of inspection in the registry division” and recommended the firing of a dozen employees at the Barge Office, including McSweeney.
One form of corruption occurred in the Boarding Division. When ships reached the docks, American citizens were separated out from immigrants and allowed to pass. Albert Wank, an assistant officer in the Boarding Division, reportedly took cash payoffs to let immigrants through, thereby avoiding inspection. A clerk for a French steamship line testified that it was common for immigrants to pay Wank $1 or $2 to get out of the inspection line. Those immigrants not paying the bribe would then often pass by Emil Auspitz, the gateman in charge of the entrance to the registry room. Auspitz was accused of treating immigrants roughly and using foul language.
The most serious charges were leveled against John Lederhilger, the chief of the Registry Division and one of McSweeney’s closest allies. “Mr. Lederhilger is insolent, overbearing, dictatorial and cruel to his subordinate officers,” Campbell and Rodgers concluded, “and is jealous and resentful in his bearing toward those over whom he cannot legitimately exercise control.” More specifically, witnesses accused Lederhilger of being a letch obsessed with the sexual behavior of young female immigrants. One Barge Office worker told the committee: “Every good looking young woman has been put to what they call the 3rd Degree.” Lederhilger often used indecent language with young women because, according to the witness, “he cannot help himself; he is a brutal man.”
An interpreter at the Barge Office testified that Lederhilger was in the habit of asking women about their sexual activity. Sometimes the interpreter, who was forced to translate these questions, had to clean up his language. Another interpreter complained that Lederhilger’s interviews of French girls were obscene. The interpreter refused to interpret for him on a number of occasions when he wanted the following question asked: “Who fucked her on board the ship?”
The report also blamed Lederhilger for the suicide of one Italian woman, who suffered “under the mortification and distress incident to her being held and examined as a procuress [madam].” If Lederhilger thought a woman was possibly a prostitute, it gave him license to molest her physically. Pointing to a woman’s breast, Lederhilger allegedly said: “Open that dress and see if you have anything in that pocket.” Another witness claimed he saw Lederhilger and other officers open the clothing of women and “thrust their hands in their bosoms and in other ways improperly handle their person.”
Treasury Department officials sat on the report for two months. Meanwhile, Powderly drew up formal charges against thirteen individuals, including McSweeney. His superiors quashed the charges, leading Powderly to accuse McSweeney’s friends in Treasury of protecting him. By September, McSweeney felt confident enough to write to Archbishop Michael Corrigan that although unscrupulous persons had attempted to discredit his work, his bosses in the Treasury Department had foiled the plot.
The report was certainly slanted in Powderly’s favor. Both Rodgers and Campbell were Powderly allies and most witnesses were Powderly’s friends at the Barge Office. McSweeney was the main target of the report, and he called the investigation “a persecution, of which I was the proposed victim,” while Fitchie said it was “conceived in iniquity and born in sin.” Yet it is hard to believe that all of the charges and testimony in the massive report were simply fabricated to frame McSweeney.
Edward Steiner, a Grinnell College professor and immigrant from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, traveled a number of times across the Atlantic Ocean in steerage collecting material for his books on immigration. “Roughness, cursing, intimidation and a mild form of blackmail prevailed to such a degree as to be common,” Steiner noted at this time. On one trip, an inspector approached Steiner and hinted that he might have difficulties getting through inspection. A little money, the inspector intimated, might make the problem go away. A Czech girl told Steiner in tears that an inspector promised to pass her through inspection if she agreed to meet him later at a hotel. “Do I look like that,” she asked Steiner through her embarrassment. The inescapable conclusion is that, even accounting for the personal vendetta between Powderly and McSweeney, a lot of petty corruption and abusive behavior was being tolerated at the Barge Office.
Even as the Treasury Department tried to bury the report, excerpts were leaked to the press. Now that the charges were aired publicly, Washington needed to act. In a classic case of creating scapegoats to protect higher-ups, officials fired a handful of minor Barge Office workers, gatemen, and messengers, charging them with taking bribes and treating immigrants roughly. In a tragic footnote, one of those dismissed was a fifty-five-year-old black messenger named Jordan R. Stewart. In addition to bribery, Fitchie also accused Stewart of being repeatedly drunk on the job.
Stewart had been born a slave and served as a lieutenant in the 73rd U.S. Colored Infantry in the Civil War. During Reconstruction, he represented Tensas Parish in the Louisiana state legislature. In addition, he had been a businessman, a deputy sheriff, and a watchman at the New Orleans customs house. By the 1890s, with increasing violence against blacks in the South, Stewart found himself in New York City, where he no doubt used his Republican political connections to land a patronage position in the New York immigration service. Now he was out of a job.
While men like Stewart took the fall, McSweeney and his allies, including John Lederhilger, dodged a bullet and resumed their jobs. Powderly had been foiled and so had his attempt to use the immigration service on behalf of McKinley and the Republican Party. Just after the conclusion of the Campbell-Rodgers investigation, Powderly wrote to an ally that if only he could control the Immigration Bureau without meddling from superiors, he could “pave the way for Republican success in many a doubtful place, and do it without detracting from the usefulness of the Bureau.” He promised McKinley that if only he were allowed a free rein, he could strictly enforce the immigration laws and win more support for the president from labor men, since Powderly’s Immigration Service would be looking after their interests regarding contract labor.