Authors: Vincent J. Cannato
The president had few strong feelings on the issue, but had promised ethnic groups during his 1912 campaign that he would veto any literacy test to make amends for his earlier anti-immigrant writings. Wilson called the test a radical departure from traditional policy. Unlike other justifications for the exclusion of immigrants, Wilson argued, the literacy test was not a “test of character, of quality or of personal fitness,” but instead penalized those who lacked opportunity in Europe. Wilson’s arguments were moot. Within days, both the Senate and the House had easily overridden Wilson’s veto. The literacy test was finally law.
The new law would require all immigrants over the age of sixteen to be able to read a short text in their native language. In a nod to America’s traditional role as an asylum for refugees, those fleeing religious persecution were exempt from the literacy test. To give a sense of how far restrictionist sentiment had evolved, the 1917 Immigration Act contained twenty-six different exclusionary categories for aliens. In contrast, the 1891 law contained only seven.
The literacy test consisted of about forty words from the Bible in the immigrant’s native language. The decision to use the Bible had little to do with evangelizing and more to do with the fact that the Bible was the most translated book in the world. Assistant Commissioner Uhl said that the biblical verses were a “non-controversial matter in every case and are practically all from the Old Testament.”
Instead of rejoicing at victory, Prescott Hall believed that the work of restriction had just begun, hinting that a literacy test would have little effect on immigration. Since, between 1908 and 1917, some 1.6 million illiterate immigrants had entered the country, many had assumed that the new law would bar a large number of aliens. Yet in its first five years, a mere 6,533 people were barred by the literacy test. After a quarter-century of political agitation, this was at best a tepid victory for restrictionists.
The enactment of the literacy test coincided with America’s entry into the Great War, when hostility toward immigrants was channeled toward German-Americans. War propaganda painted the murderous and rapacious Hun as a virulent enemy. Anti-German hysteria spread across the continent as schools stopped teaching German, and Germanlanguage newspapers folded. Anything remotely German was suspect: Americans went so far as to rename sauerkraut as “liberty cabbage.”
The war greatly strengthened the hand of prewar restrictionists. Charles Warren served as assistant attorney general during the war. He had been a founding member of the Immigration Restriction League and though not as prolific a pamphleteer as some of his colleagues, he perhaps had a greater influence in the long term.
At the Justice Department, Warren began work to resuscitate the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to give the government greater control over German alien enemies. Warren was also the architect of the Espionage Act, which passed Congress in 1917 and was designed to go after domestic opponents of the war effort. While Prescott Hall could merely fulminate against the inferiority of the new immigrants, Warren quietly changed the law affecting thousands of people.
The targeting of Germans was also tied to German-owned steamship companies, which had been responsible for much of the immigrant traffic to America in the past quarter century. Otto Wolpert, superintendent of the Hamburg-American docks in Hoboken, and Paul Koenig, the chief detective for Hamburg-American, were accused of assisting German saboteurs and bomb makers. Though only a small percentage of steamship employees were involved in Germany’s covert war effort, it was enough of a link to reinforce negative views of steamship companies and tie wartime sabotage directly to immigration.
Then there was the case of the increasingly hapless Marcus Braun, the former head of the Hungarian Republican Club in New York and sometime friend of Theodore Roosevelt. Braun had pushed his way into a patronage job at Ellis Island in 1903, which led him to his native Hungary to investigate the causes of immigration. After leaving the immigration service, he started his own newspaper,
Fair Play
.
Braun’s career took a strange turn during the war. In 1915, he was discovered carrying documents from the Austrian consul general in New York to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vienna. Though not illegal, Braun’s activities reinforced notions that foreign-born Americans still held loyalties to their mother countries and were willing to assist them in wartime.
It was later revealed that Count Johann von Bernstorff, Germany’s ambassador to Washington, had secretly purchased Braun’s newspaper. It became apparent that Braun had been a shill for the German government since 1915. Von Bernstorff ’s activities went beyond buying up American newspapers and extended to overseeing the whole operation of German propaganda and sabotage—including the Black Tom explosion.
Braun somehow escaped punishment, but found his reputation and career in ruins. His name came up a number of times during 1918 congressional hearings looking into the relationship between GermanAmerican brewers and German propaganda during the war. The man who had dined with President Roosevelt, inspected immigrants at Ellis Island, and investigated white slavery in Europe had been publicly disgraced. After the war, he moved to Vienna, bought another small newspaper, and passed away unnoticed in 1921.
S
ITTING IN HIS OFFICE
after Armistice Day in 1918, Fred Howe must have thought that the worst of his troubles had passed. The war was now over. Detained immigrants could be released from their Ellis Island imprisonment. But the end of the Great War would not bring peace either to Ellis Island or America.
ON THE MORNING OF FEBRU A RY 6, 1919, SOME 65,000 workers in the city of Seattle began a general strike that would shut down the city for the next five days. Mayor Ole Hanson feared that his city was in the grip of a political and social revolution. Tensions ran high, but revolution never came. The strike ended five days later, after federal troops arrived to restore order.
Even before the strike began, government officials had their eyes on the immigrant radicals of Washington State. On the day that the strike began, some forty-seven suspected radical aliens from Seattle, Spokane, and Portland found themselves on a train headed for Ellis Island instead of manning the barricades. Most were Wobblies, members of the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), but a few belonged to the Union of Russian Workers. Newspapers eagerly dubbed the train the Red Special.
As the train approached Montana, some one thousand Wobblies were waiting for it in Butte in hopes of freeing their comrades, but the Red Special bypassed the city by way of Helena and avoided any problems. In Chicago, the train picked up seven more suspected radicals headed for deportation. The
Times
called the group a “motley company of I.W.W. troublemakers, bearded labor fanatics, and red flag supporters.”
The train arrived at Hoboken, New Jersey, and its fifty-four passengers were hustled onto a waiting barge for Ellis Island, where a melee erupted after an argument between a guard and one of the prisoners. This was one exception to a fairly peaceful trip, although the radicals did heap abuse and insults upon their guards throughout. As the guard in charge of the Red Special explained to his boss in Washington, it “went against my grain, as well as every guard aboard the train, to handle them without force, as they were very insulting at times.” One guard said the detainees needed gags, not handcuffs. “This is a musical gang,” he told a reporter. “They sing foreign songs for hours. Some of ’em wake up in the night to do it.”
When the Red Special radicals arrived at Ellis Island, Fred Howe was not there to greet them. He had been away since December accompanying President Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference. In his absence, Byron Uhl was acting commissioner, faithfully carrying out deportation orders from Washington. The fifty-four suspected radicals were held incommunicado. Neither their relatives nor their lawyers could see them. The headline from the socialist paper
New York Call
read: “Mystery Thick Around Exiles in Ellis Island: Keepers of New Bastille Terribly Fussy About Even Relatives Seeing Inmates.” Officials soon relented and allowed lawyers to review the cases.
Attorneys Caroline Lowe and Charles Recht led the fight to free the detainees. However, they were unfamiliar with immigration law. “A sovereign state has the right to deport every alien, under any laws or rules it pleases,” an astounded Recht later remembered in his autobiography. “An alien deportee cannot invoke the Bill of Rights or the Constitution, for these do not apply to him.”
In contrast to the depiction in newspapers, Lowe saw her clients as admirable citizens of high character, “clean cut, upright, intelligent, educated.” All were literate and could speak English. Americans had been so worried about the pernicious effect of illiterate immigrants that it had enacted a literacy test, yet these radicals would have had no problem passing such a test. The stereotype of the anarchist and radical was usually the Jewish Socialist or the Italian with a bomb, but most of the immigrants on the Red Special were English or Scandinavian.
The detainees were a random lot of IWW organizers, political radicals, and eccentrics. Among them was thirty-four-year-old E. E. McDonald, who had been born in Denmark and had come to the United States when he was eight. A local newspaper called the picturesque McDonald the poet laureate of the Ellis Island detainees. He even composed a poem there called “Song of the Alien Deportees.”
In the shadow of the statue
That Bartholdi’s hand designed We are waiting for the mandate That will make us leave behind All the friends and kin and loved ones We have here on this fair shore We are waiting to be exiled
From this land forevermore.
McDonald and the other passengers of the Red Special were still at Ellis Island when Fred Howe returned from Europe. When Howe complained about the status of the detainees, his superiors told him to mind his own business and follow orders. Howe was also dismayed that his colleagues at Ellis Island were “happy in the punishing power which all jailers enjoy, and resented any interference on behalf of its victims.”
Howe was swimming against the tide when it came to the country’s attitude toward radicals. Congress had added anarchists to its list of excluded groups back in 1903, and the 1917 Immigration Act expanded the definition of excluded or deportable immigrants to include not just anarchists, but also “persons who believe in or advocate the overthrow by force or violence of the Government of the United States.” The following year, Congress gave officials more latitude to define alien radicals. Undesirable immigrants were now defined as those “opposed to all organized government,” who advocated or taught “the unlawful destruction of property,” and who belonged to an organization that advocated any of the above measures.
This expansion of the law allowed Anthony Caminetti, commissioner-general of immigration, to launch a personal crusade against foreign-born, nonnaturalized radicals living in the United States. One of his first targets in 1918 was the Home Colony, a radical commune on the west side of Puget Sound some forty miles from Seattle. An investigation by government officials showed that the Home Colony was a kind of utopia-turned-sour whose middle-aged members seemed more interested in free love than revolution. It was small potatoes when compared to the IWW.
Though he was out of step with American anti-radical laws, Fred Howe did have one trump card at his disposal. He simply postponed all deportations, allowing the IWW lawyers to present their case to Washington. With additional time to hear the cases, the acting secretary of labor, John Abercrombie, overruled Caminetti and issued a memorandum to all immigration officials stating that the department had never declared the IWW to be an anarchistic organization and therefore its members could not be deported. In all future cases, he declared, a Wobbly’s actions, and not simply his membership, would be the basis for deportation.
Using this new standard, the department took up the case of James Lund, an immigrant from Sweden and a member of the Seattle IWW. The Labor Department found, contrary to earlier findings, that there was little evidence that he advocated the overthrow of the U.S. government. Therefore, it ordered Lund released on his own recognizance, or in effect paroled. The cases of eleven others were deemed to be similar to Lund’s and they too were paroled on March 17. In the next six weeks, eleven more alien radicals were set free. One suspected radical escaped from custody, while four others were discharged outright and one was found to be an American citizen.
For those Red Special radicals still in custody at Ellis Island, attorneys Lowe and Recht pursued a round of habeas corpus writs to free the detainees. Judge Augustus Hand ruled in the case of Sam Nelson that he could only find that the detainee believed in an “irreconcilable conflict between employer and employee.” This was not enough, in the eyes of Hand, to justify Nelson’s detention or deportation. Using Nelson’s precedent, more Red Special detainees were paroled. Later in June, Judge Hand ruled on seven more cases, allowing the deportation of six men while freeing one: Ellis Island’s poet laureate, E. E. McDonald.
Martin de Wal was one of the unlucky ones whom Judge Hand ruled against. After three months of the tedium of detention, de Wal sent a letter to the editor of
The Survey
asking readers to send books and other reading material to them. By June, de Wal again wrote to thank readers for the apparently large number of books and pamphlets they had sent, although de Wal noted that they could not tell how many books had actually been sent, since officials at Ellis Island withheld material so as “not to spoil our morals further by allowing us radical or truthful books.” Hopefully, de Wal had enough reading material, for he was to remain at Ellis Island until the end of September.
As de Wal and his colleagues whiled away their time in detention, more than thirty bombs were being mailed to prominent Americans like J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. Postal officials intercepted most of them, but one package they missed arrived at the home of former Georgia senator Thomas Hardwick where it exploded and blew off the hands of Hardwick’s maid. In June, another bomb exploded in front of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s Washington home, damaging the house and killing the man who planted the bomb. To Americans, these seemed like dangerous times.
Meanwhile, despite the hoopla surrounding the big roundup of radicals from the Red Special, only nine of the detainees had actually been deported. Most of those taken from Seattle to Ellis Island were eventually released on parole. The big Red roundup had actually been a bust.
In the middle of this was Fred Howe, a public servant with impeccably bad timing. Not only were suspected radicals being released from his custody, but just a few days before the bomb exploded in front of Palmer’s home, Howe had presided over a Justice to Russia rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden. His presence attracted the attention of Senator William King of Utah, who demanded that Howe be fired. “I don’t think a man who has sanctioned Bolshevism, as he did by presiding at that meeting, is fit to remain in office,” King said. “If there is any hint of Bolshevism at Ellis Island, through which the immigrants of the world pour into the United States, it must be wiped out.” Howe was unapologetic and denied that the meeting was “pro-Bolshevist” or “pro-Soviet.” Yet a
Times
article claimed that participants cheered for Trotsky and Lenin, while booing the mention of Woodrow Wilson’s name.
Howe was not a Communist, but a Labor Department report showed that he had been solicitous of the comfort of the Red Special detainees. When the radicals complained that they had to get up at six thirty in the morning, but could not eat breakfast until eight thirty, Howe ordered that their mandatory wake-up be postponed closer to breakfast. Howe also allowed detainees to receive such IWW periodicals as
The Rebel Worker
and
The Red Dawn.
The attacks on Howe also came from an unexpected source: Fiorello La Guardia. The former Ellis Island translator, who had recently returned to his House seat after serving in the army during the Great War, lashed out at Howe on the floor of Congress. La Guardia was a liberal and sympathetic to the plight of immigrants at Ellis Island, but was disgusted enough to condemn Howe as a radical and complain that he had allowed anarchist literature to be available to detainees. While Senator King proposed impeaching Howe, La Guardia merely wanted to cut his pay by 50 percent.
In the midst of the criticism, Howe resigned in September 1919. He was mostly guilty of a political tin ear, a victim of political naïveté and poor judgment. The irony is that despite his sympathy for the radicals, one of the intercepted explosive packages sent by anarchists in the spring of 1919 was addressed to Howe, perhaps because he was technically in charge of the detention of IWW radicals.
This did not prevent Congress from initiating three days of hearings in November 1919 at Ellis Island to look into charges that Howe’s administration was lax, especially regarding suspected radical detainees. Howe had already weathered one congressional hearing dealing with his alleged lenient treatment of alien prostitutes.
During this second hearing, Congressman John Box of Texas called the inspection of immigrants at Ellis Island a farce, a characterization that Howe’s deputy, Byron Uhl, did not dispute, saying that it had become “largely a matter of checking names.” The committee chairman, Albert Johnson, asked Uhl whether it was Howe’s desire to turn Ellis Island into “a place of individual government, letting everyone do as he pleased.” Uhl had been fairly taciturn in his responses, but answered that that had been his impression. In addition, he admitted that nearly all employees at Ellis Island were of the opinion that Howe’s policies were “utterly improper.” Uhl admitted that under Howe each detainee at Ellis Island could just about do as he or she pleased.
The committee also released at letter from anarchist Emma Goldman to Howe in 1915, addressed to “My Dear Fred.” Critics argued that the letter implied a friendship between the two, yet another piece of evidence that Howe was soft on radicals.
Howe was present during the hearings at Ellis Island, but was not on the witness list. At a number of points during proceedings, he tried to answer charges but was silenced by the chairman. Later, Howe made his case to the press outside the hearing, explaining that he had never released anyone from Ellis Island without the explicit order from the Labor Department. In a literal sense, what Howe said was true. The decision to parole or release detained radicals was made by his superiors, but it was Howe’s intercession that stalled the proceedings and allowed the radicals a second chance to make their case to Washington.
Back inside the hearing, the congressmen seemed particularly bothered that not only were the Red Special detainees, as well as others held at Ellis Island, released on their own recognizance, but the government had no idea where they were. “Whereabouts now unknown,” was the phrase that attached itself to name after name of suspected radicals. In the course of the hearings, it came out that 697 warrants of arrest had been issued for the deportation of suspected radicals between February 1917 and November 1919. Of that number, only 60 had actually been deported.
The press had a field day with the revelations. The most colorful, if overwrought, description came from the
Cleveland News
, which described Ellis Island as a “government institution turned into a Socialist hall, a spouting ground for Red revolutionists . . . a place of deceit and sham to which foreign mischief-makers are sent temporarily to make the public think the Government is courageously deporting them.” The
New York World
complained that Ellis Island was in danger of becoming a “perpetual joke,” where a workforce of guards consisting of “one-legged, one-armed or decrepit old men” was in danger of losing control to anarchists.