Authors: Vincent J. Cannato
There was one dissenter. Rep. Francis Spinola, a Democratic congressmen from Brooklyn and one of two Italian-American generals in the Union Army during the Civil War, made it clear that he opposed any attempt to restrict “honest immigration.” However, even Spinola agreed with efforts “to shut out paupers, lunatics, idiots, cripples, and thieves, as well as all other evil-doers, who come here to practice their wickedness and fill our poor-houses and prisons.”
Congress never acted upon the “Bill to Regulate Immigration” that the Ford Committee recommended. However, both the House and the Senate established permanent standing committees on immigration for the first time, thereby assuring continued congressional interest.
As conditions at Castle Garden continued to worsen, its critics became more vocal, driving one member of the Board of Commissioners to the point of despair. “So far as Castle Garden is concerned, the country would be better off if it were wiped out of existence,” Edmund Stephenson told the
New York Sun
in 1889. He felt understandably beleaguered, caught between those who wanted tougher restriction of immigration, defenders of immigration who wanted lax enforcement, and the usual predators looking to take advantage of any immigrant who made it outside the walls of Castle Garden.
At the end of 1889, Secretary of the Treasury William Windom ordered another report on Castle Garden. The Treasury report also found the inspection of immigrants at Castle Garden inadequate and the arrangement between state and federal officials in the regulation of immigration unsatisfactory. It recommended that the federal government take complete control over the regulation of immigrants. Windom accepted that advice, and in February 1890, he notified the Board of Commissioners at Castle Garden that he was terminating their contract in sixty days.
The decision was inevitable. A Republican named Colonel John B. Weber, who was soon to oversee the federal control of immigration, visited Castle Garden in its waning days. He found that boardinghouse runners were having their way with the confused and bewildered immigrants, with seemingly little interference from officials. A new direction was in order.
On Friday, April 18, 1890, the steamers
Bohemia
and
State of Indiana
were the last two ships to drop passengers at Castle Garden, landing 465 people that day. In a spiteful mood, members of the Board of Commissioners had refused to allow the Treasury Department to use Castle Garden until new facilities could be found. A makeshift immigrant depot was set up at the Barge Office on the other side of the Battery. Castle Garden was now closed for business.
T
REASURY
S
ECRETARY
W
INDOM WAS
determined to begin anew and erase the memory of Castle Garden by building a new facility for processing immigrants completely under the control of the federal government. Some two weeks after announcing the termination of the Castle Garden contract, Windom made public his desire to place the new immigrant station at Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor.
Bedloe’s Island was also the home of the newly erected Statue of Liberty. Once again, Pulitzer used the pages of the
New York World
to defend Lady Liberty. For weeks, the
Wo r l d
hammered away, warning that the island would “be converted instead into a Babel.” The paper even tracked down Auguste Bartholdi, the statue’s sculptor, who called the decision a “downright desecration.”
In response, a joint House and Senate committee selected another island in New York Harbor for the home of the new federal immigration station. Congress appropriated $75,000 to improve Ellis Island for the purposes of creating a new immigrant depot. The island was a perfect choice in many ways. It was already in the possession of the federal government as an underused munitions depot. Its island location meant that the immigrant runners and other predators could be kept at a distance, but it was only a quick ferry ride to Manhattan or the railroads on the Jersey side of the harbor.
Before the low-lying island could be made usable, a good deal of work was needed. While immigrants were being processed at the Barge Office—mostly by ex–Castle Garden inspectors—work had begun on dredging a deeper channel to Ellis Island. Docks were constructed on the island, as well as a two-story wooden building, which would be the main reception area. It would take nearly two years to complete the project. Meanwhile, the national debate over the meaning of immigration only intensified.
“Give us a rest,” thundered Francis A. Walker. He worried that “no one can be surely enough of an optimist to contemplate without dread the fast rising flood of immigration now setting in upon our shores.” Walker was no average citizen. He was the nation’s most esteemed economist, a late-nineteenth-century combination of Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith.
A well-bred Bostonian descended from generations of Anglo-Saxon stock, Walker possessed an envious résumé that mirrored the great transformations of nineteenth-century America. A Union general in the Civil War by his midtwenties, Walker was in charge of the 1870 and 1880 Censuses and then taught economics at Yale. At the time of his musings on immigration, Walker was president of both MIT and the American Economic Association.
Walker found the new immigrants “ignorant, unskilled, inert, accustomed to the beastliest conditions with little of social aspiration, with none of the expensive tastes for light and air and room, for decent dress and homely comforts.” They were lowering the country’s wages and standard of living.
Walker also saw the birth rates of native-born Americans shrinking, while immigrant families produced more and more children. While most social scientists now see birth rates as a function of class, with birth rates shrinking as incomes rise, Walker had a different explanation: Immigrants brought down the nation’s standard of living, and native-born Americans revolted against this situation by refusing to bring more children into such a degraded world. Walker’s thesis neglected the fact that native-born American birth rates had been declining since the early nineteenth century, with seemingly little correlation to immigration rates.
Walker’s views were echoed by a younger man with an even more distinguished pedigree. Forty-one-year-old Henry Cabot Lodge had already established himself in academia, gaining the first PhD in political science from Harvard. Though he would continue to write, especially about the glory of Anglo-Saxon culture, it was politics, not academia, that beckoned. In the 1890s, first as a congressman and then as a senator, Lodge began sounding the alarm about immigration. He hoped to prove that current immigration showed “a marked tendency to deteriorate in character.”
Lodge used the occasion of the March 1891 lynching of eleven Italian immigrants in New Orleans to argue that changes were needed in the nation’s immigration law. The cause of the attack was not antiimmigrant sentiment, Lodge argued, but rather “the utter carelessness with which we treat immigration to this country.” For Lodge, the lynchings were one more piece of evidence showing that America could no longer “permit this stream to pour in without discrimination or selection or the exclusion of dangerous and undesirable elements.” He called for moderate restriction that did not “exclude a desirable immigrant who seeks in good faith to become a citizen of the United States.”
Whatever benefits immigration might bring, there were other values that took precedence. “More important to a country than wealth and population is the quality of its people,” wrote Lodge. He was articulating the attitude of upper-class Americans dismayed by both the extravagances of the Gilded Age as well as the squalor and poverty brought about by urbanization. Like his close friend Theodore Roosevelt, Lodge was critical of crass materialism. Though this attitude was a luxury confined to those living on inherited wealth, it also reminded Americans that the public interest could not always be calculated by figures in a ledger book.
Walker and Lodge had tapped into a larger national concern. Newspaper headlines in 1891 screamed: “Lunatics and Idiots Shipped from Europe” and “The World’s Dumping Ground.” Alabama Congressman William C. Oates, who had led the Confederate charge up Little Round Top at the Battle of Gettysburg, summed up the growing belief in the undesirability of new immigrants.
A house to house visit to Mulberry Street, in New York [the city’s Little Italy], will satisfy any one that there are thousands of people in this country who should never have been allowed to land here. . . . Many of the Russian Jews who inhabit other streets in New York, and other cities are of no better class than the Italians just referred to. Many of the mining towns and camps of Pennsylvania and other states are overrun with the most beastly, ignorant foreign laborers who herd together almost as animals and are disgraceful to civilization.
The atmosphere was ripe for a major change in immigration policy. In 1891, while workers were busy constructing the physical edifice of Ellis Island’s facilities, Congress was building the legal structures that would govern what would occur there.
The 1891 Immigration Act expanded the types of undesirable immigrants listed in the 1882 law to include “idiots, insane persons, paupers or persons likely to become public charges, persons suffering from a loathsome or a dangerous disease, persons who have been convicted of a felony or other infamous crime or misdemeanor involving moral turpitude, polygamists.”
Excluded immigrants would be shipped back home at the expense of the steamship company that brought them. The burden of inspecting immigrants would lie not just with American officials, but with steamship companies who now had a financial incentive not to bring over immigrants who would not pass muster at American ports. For the first time since the Alien and Sedition Acts one hundred years earlier, the federal government laid out a method for deporting immigrants.
Immigration was now completely under the control of the federal government. Embedded deep within the law, Congress granted vast powers to this new federal agency. “All decisions made by the inspection officers or their assistants touching on the right of any alien to land . . . shall be final unless appeal be taken to the superintendent of immigration, whose action shall be subject to review by the Secretary of the Treasury.” Though the language seemed innocuous, this provision would prove to be the most controversial. Congress had effectively declared that immigrants could not appeal their exclusions in court. Instead, all appeals had to be made through the executive branch, with a final decision made by the secretary of the Treasury.
The new immigration system represented a big step for Washington. The federal government of the nineteenth century had been a rather sleepy enterprise. The locus of power was in the political parties that controlled patronage for the few jobs that did exist, as well as the judiciary system. The federal government was a weak shell whose main responsibilities were to deliver the mail and pay the pensions of retired Civil War veterans and their widows. More than half of the federal government’s workforce was employed by the Postal Service.
The growing complexity of the American economy would change all that. Within three years, Congress passed two landmark laws— the Interstate Commerce Act (1887) and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890)—which set the stage for the regulation of private business by the federal government. In many ways, the 1891 Immigration Act deserves to be mentioned with the other two landmark laws. Like those other two laws, the immigration bill was enacted to address what many considered to be a failure of the free market. Almost immediately, it created an immigration service larger in size and manpower than the Interstate Commerce Commission or the anti-trust division of the Justice Department and bestowed upon it greater powers.
Between 1875 and 1891, Congress had seized control of the immigration issue by passing sweeping laws banning the entry of most Chinese immigrants, defining classifications of undesirable immigrants, prohibiting the recruitment and contracting of immigrant laborers, and creating a system that would enforce these measures, with a centralized office in Washington overseen by congressional committees, and federal immigrant inspection stations at ports throughout the nation. The most important of these stations was at Ellis Island. The era of big government was dawning.
tive. Castle Garden was a state operation, created largely at the behest of immigrant aid societies, designed to protect and aid new arrivals to America. Ellis Island was a federal operation, created in response to the national uproar at perceived changes in the type and nature of immigration at the end of the nineteenth century. Its raison d’être was neither the protection of immigrants nor their complete exclusion, but rather their regulation so that only the fittest, ablest, and safest would be permitted to land.
Castle Garden has long since receded from the national memory. As the years passed, the old immigrant station evolved first into the city’s aquarium, then into neglect, and then into a historical reconstruction of the original fort. From here, modern tourists buy tickets for the ferry ride to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.
Over 8 million immigrants passed through Castle Garden between 1855 and 1890. Many of their descendants know little of its history, thinking their forebears entered at Ellis Island.
Despite the corruption that plagued Castle Garden, one historian has called it “not only a monumental work, but also a great human expression, which can be placed among the shining achievements of American history during the nineteenth century.”
Yet it is Ellis Island, not Castle Garden and its albeit imperfect history of benevolence and service, which takes center stage in the nation’s tale of immigration.
That there is such a problem [immigration] no one doubts. It is in the air. It is in the conversation and the speculation of all parts of the country.
A great system has been perfected on Ellis Island for sifting the grain from the chaff . . . not as a dam to keep out good and bad alike, but as a sieve fine enough in the mesh to keep out the diseased, the pauper, and the criminal while admitting the immigrant with two strong arms, a sound body and a stout heart.
AS SHE EXITED THE B A RGE
JOHN E. MOORE
, YOUNG ANNIE Moore tripped across the gangplank landing her ashore. One could forgive her nervous clumsiness. It was the first morning of 1892 and the fifteen-year-old from County Cork, Ireland, was being rushed from the gaily decorated barge to the new immigration station on Ellis Island.
Even though Washington officials had nixed the idea of a large celebration for the grand opening, the sound of bells and shrieking whistles could still be heard over the noise coming from the crowd of newsmen and government officials. Having spent twelve days at sea, Moore would have been startled by the reception and was likely a little anxious as officials ushered her into the building. Amid the confusion and commotion, she made sure not to lose sight of her two younger brothers: eleven-year-old Anthony and seven-year-old Phillip.
Annie Moore had no idea she would be entering history books as the first immigrant to arrive at Ellis Island. After a brief inspection, she was signed into the entry books by an official from the Treasury Department and given a ten-dollar gold piece by Colonel John Weber, the commissioner of Ellis Island. “Is this for me to keep, sir,” a blushing Annie asked Weber, embarrassed by all of the attention. She then thanked him, saying that it was the largest amount of money she had ever seen and she would keep it forever as a cherished memento of the occasion.
She was soon reunited with her father, Matt, who had sent for his children. Their destination was Monroe Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a neighborhood teeming with immigrants like the Moores and where, just a few blocks from the family’s apartment, a nineteen-year-old budding politician named Al Smith was beginning to make his way in the world.
How Annie became the first official immigrant at Ellis Island is unclear. One story claims that officials had rushed her ahead of a male Austrian immigrant. Another claimed that a fellow passenger named Mike Tierney, in a “spark of Celtic gallantry,” pulled the Austrian away from the gangplank by his collar, shouting “Ladies first,” and let young Annie pass.
Annie Moore’s story is an oft-told tale and ultimately it is impossible to know whether her selection as the first arrival at Ellis Island was pure luck or a conscious decision by officials. It would not be surprising if officials had picked Moore out early for special treatment. After all, one of the main purposes of Ellis Island was to reassure increasingly anxious Americans that public officials were on guard to sift out undesirable immigrants. It is hard to argue that Annie Moore and her rosy cheeks, with younger brothers in tow, wasn’t a reassuring image— although fifty years earlier, the arrival of County Cork’s surplus population would not have been looked upon with much approval.
But a look at the rest of her shipmates tells a more complicated story. Annie and her two brothers and four other Irish immigrants all embarked on the steamship
Nevada
at the port of Queenstown. When the seven Irish travelers got on the
Nevada
in late December 1891, the ship already had 117 passengers who had boarded in Liverpool. With 124 passengers, the
Nevada
made its way toward New York Harbor. Twenty of the passengers, including ten American citizens, traveled in cabin accommodations, while the rest settled for steerage.
Roughly one-third of the
Nevada
’s passengers hailed from northern Europe: twelve English, seven Irish, two German, two French, and fourteen Swedish. The vast majority of the passengers accompanying Annie Moore were Russian Jews, fleeing the increasingly oppressive measures of the czar. Seventy-seven men, women, and children—over 60 percent of the passengers—had made their way from Russia to England and were now taking their final journey to America. If Annie Moore’s prominence on that day was a bow to the old immigrants from a half-century earlier, the reality of most of the
Nevada
’s passengers was decidedly new immigrant.
Most of the travelers were in their twenties and thirties. The oldest was a fifty-year-old tailor from Russia, while the youngest was fourmonth-old Sara Abramowitz. Most would end up staying in New York, but some headed for Pennsylvania, Maryland, Minnesota, and even Wyoming. Most listed their professions as farmers and laborers, while others were skilled laborers like tinsmiths, bookmakers, machinists, and tailors.
When the
Nevada
entered New York Harbor, it did not head directly for the immigration station. The waters around the island were too shallow and its pier could not accommodate even the smallest transatlantic ship, meaning that ships would have to dock in Manhattan and unload their passengers. From there, immigrants would board smaller ferries, like the
John E. Moore
, which would take them to Ellis Island, where they would undergo the formal inspection process.
Not all of the passengers who sailed into New York Harbor alongside Annie Moore would end up at Ellis Island. The ship’s twenty cabin passengers could head directly to their destinations on the mainland, whether U.S. citizens or not. An inkling of the rationale for such differential treatment can be found on the ship’s manifest. Whereas steerage passengers listed their occupations with proper plebian titles like laborer or farmer, the twenty cabin passengers on the
Nevada
were marked down simply as “Gentleman” or “Lady,” signifying their more rarified social status.
As Annie Moore was entering the facility at Ellis Island, two more ships—the
City of Paris
and the
Victoria
—were waiting in the harbor. By noon, some 700 steerage passengers from all three ships were at Ellis Island. It is doubtful that immigration officials would have chosen any of the passengers from the
Victoria
as their celebrated first immigrant. Having just arrived from the ports of Palermo and Naples, 311 of the
Victoria
’s 313 steerage passengers hailed from southern Italy.
Colonel Weber noted that while officials processed 700 immigrants the first day, the new facilities could handle thousands more in a day. Most people assumed that such a capacity would never be reached. For now, even the
New York World
was pleased with the new facilities, noting that during the first day’s business, “everything worked like a charm . . . under the new conditions the comfort and safety of the immigrants will be all that can be desired.”
The immigrants who followed Annie Moore entered the immigrant depot—which was located closer to the ferry slip than its later brick replacement—and then headed up a double staircase to the second floor. Vigilant medical inspectors would watch them as they climbed the stairs, on the lookout for cripples and other invalids.
Once on the second floor, immigrants were herded into ten lines, each of which ended at the desk of a clerk whose job was to crossexamine the immigrants, verifying information from the ship’s manifest and making sure the immigrant did not fall into one of the categories for exclusion. On the second floor were places to buy railroad tickets, information bureaus, telegraph counters, money exchanges, and a lunch counter.
A reporter from
Harper’s Weekly
visiting Ellis Island in 1893 found it “suggestive of a prison in many of its aspects,” with uniformed guards keeping order. When inspectors questioned immigrants, the reporter found some to be “nervously defiant” while others looked frightened. Still others were “angry, and some stolid with indifference or stupidity.” The long-awaited opening of the federal inspection station did not end the debate over immigration. This five-acre scratch of land sticking out of New York Harbor would now become the focal point for everyone concerned with immigration.
Politicians, journalists, union leaders, and private citizens would now make their way to Ellis Island with their own agendas. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union soon complained about the alleged existence of saloons at Ellis Island. Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, wanted more inspectors to enforce the contract-labor law and visited Ellis Island to make his case to Colonel Weber. Immigration restrictionists went to Ellis Island to make sure the laws were properly enforced. Immigration defenders visited to make sure that newcomers were fairly treated.
“The existing immigration law was framed to sift incomers—to draw a dividing line between desirable and undesirable immigrants,” the superintendent of immigration said in his first annual report, adding that “it is not the serious intention of the Government to prohibit immigration, but from time to time to prohibit the people whom experience has demonstrated fail in some important direction in entering beneficially into American citizenship.”
From the moment Annie Moore stumbled from the gangplank onto Ellis Island, this kind of sifting of desirable and undesirable immigrants proved to be a matter of trial and error. The opening of Ellis Island raised more questions than it answered. How would a nation manage the inspection, regulation, and sometimes exclusion of immigrants on a daily basis? Were immigration laws too strict or too lenient? Should the government create more classes of excludable immigrants or should immigrant inspectors interpret the law in a more generous manner?
In 1875, the Supreme Court placed the control of immigration with the federal government. Now it would decide just how far that power could go. In 1889, three years before the opening of Ellis Island, the Court heard the case of a Chinese immigrant named Chae Chan Ping, who was denied reentry into the country. It dismissed Ping’s challenge to his exclusion, arguing that Congress had the power to make the rules that governed immigrant admissions and the courts should be deferential to that expression of democratic will. “The power of exclusion of foreigners being an incident of sovereignty belonging to the government of the United States as a part of those sovereign powers delegated by the Constitution,” wrote Justice Stephen Field, “the right to its exercise at any time . . . cannot be granted away or restrained on behalf of anyone.”
Three years later, just a little over two weeks after Annie Moore’s arrival at Ellis Island, the Supreme Court went further. Nishimura Ekiu was a twenty-five-year-old woman from Japan who landed in San Francisco in 1891. With $22 in her pocket, she claimed to be headed to meet her husband, who was already in the country. Immigration officials believed that she had not been honest in her answers and refused her permission to land. Under the 1891 Immigration Act, the Japanese immigrant was declared “likely to become a public charge.” Ekiu argued that the immigration officials in San Francisco had deprived her of due process in a court of law, but the Supreme Court ruled against her, arguing that Congress had entrusted upon officials the “sole and exclusive” right to exclude or admit aliens and immigrants had no recourse to the courts.
Although these two decisions related to events on the West Coast, they would deeply influence what went on at Ellis Island for the next sixty years. If an immigrant felt that officials had unfairly excluded her, the only recourse was up the administrative chain of command in the executive branch, not to the courts. This was called the plenary power doctrine that would dominate American immigration law for more than a century. Congress and the executive branch would have exclusive authority over immigration, and immigrants would be limited in their ability to challenge that authority in federal courts.
The implication was that immigrants who had not yet been approved to land had fewer constitutional rights. Admission to the United States was a privilege, not a right. A sovereign nation had a right to define its borders and decide who may or may not enter the country. “It is an accepted maxim of international law that every sovereign nation has the power,” the Court argued in the
Ekiu
decision, “to forbid the entrance of foreigners within its dominions, or to admit them only in such cases and upon such conditions as it may see fit to prescribe.” Congress could decide what kinds of immigrants could enter America, and the executive branch—represented by immigration stations like Ellis Island—had the right to execute those laws. Courts would have little say in the matter.
C
OLONEL
J
OHN
B. W
EBER
never imagined that his life’s path would lead him to Ellis Island. A former Republican congressman from the Buffalo area, Weber had been appointed commissioner of immigration by President Benjamin Harrison, taking over duties the day after the official closing of Castle Garden in April 1890. As Weber admitted, it was a classic patronage appointment: “I took the business of immigration commissioner with as little knowledge of it as a man who never had seen an immigrant.”
Weber’s parents were immigrants from Alsace, loyal subjects of France at the time. Hearty peasants who were able to read and write, they separately arrived in upstate New York in the 1830s and married there. John Baptiste Weber’s name symbolized the controversial history of the Alsace. Though his last name was solidly German, his middle name attested to the French influence of the region.
Forged in the fire of the Civil War, Weber’s life resembled that of many Northerners at the time. At fourteen, he volunteered as the color bearer for the local militia. When war broke out a few years later, the eighteen-year-old volunteered for service. He survived the war without a scratch, despite having seen his share of combat, and made his way quickly through the ranks, going from private to colonel before his twenty-first birthday. In 1864, he helped organize and lead the 89th United States Colored Infantry. At twenty-one, Weber left the army, returned home to New York, and prepared to take an active role in civic affairs.