American Passage (18 page)

T
HEODORE
R
OOSEVELT HOPED
W
ILLIAM
Williams would reinvigorate Ellis Island, end the abusive treatment of immigrants, clean out the patronage dump, and strictly enforce the law. There would be no worries about meddling from Washington; Commissioner-General of Immigration Frank Sargent, who had replaced Powderly, was on the same page with his views of immigration, and the union man would prove exceedingly deferential to his underling, the wealthy Wall Street lawyer. William Williams wasted no time in getting to work, and not a minute too soon.

In 1902, more immigrants arrived than in any other year since 1881. More than 25,000 immigrants arrived in Williams’s first week on the job. The island’s sleeping quarters, which could accommodate as many 1,300 people, were bursting at the seams.

Williams let nothing escape his critical eye. In his first Annual Report, written just two months after he took the reins at Ellis Island, Williams talked about the lax enforcement and corrupt practices he found there. The inspection process was marked by a large degree of arbitrariness. Williams accused officials of placing “holds” on immigrants based not on an actual inspection, but rather on information on the ship’s manifest. “The fact that most of those marked were ablebodied people with large amounts of money are points not without interest,” Williams wrote, slyly implying a shakedown racket.

Angry at the sloppiness, corruption, and lack of professionalism among the Ellis Island staff, Williams continued to weed out workers who had given the place a bad name. By late September, he fired the accused serial groper John Lederhilger. By year’s end, all officials named in the Campbell-Rodgers report had been pushed out.

Others also felt Williams’s wrath. Emile Schamcham, a Syrian interpreter, was dismissed from his job for trying to get a date with an immigrant girl. While this woman was waiting at Ellis Island for a friend to meet her, Schamcham slipped her a note with the address of his boardinghouse. Another Williams target was a clerk named James Fraser, who had been away from his post for four straight days on an alcoholic bender—and apparently not for the first time. He told Williams he had contracted a disease during the Civil War that forced him to use alcohol as a stimulant. Under the new regime, such excuses would not be tolerated. Fraser was fired. Malingerers were no longer wanted and could no longer take cover under civil service rules or the protection of political patrons. When Senator Platt asked the new boss of Ellis Island to promote Samuel Samsom from gateman to inspector, Williams brusquely wrote back that Samsom “is not fitted either by temperament or training for a position much above that held by him now.”

Nor would the abusive treatment of immigrants be tolerated. Six weeks into his administration, Williams posted the following notice throughout the main building at Ellis Island:

Immigrants must be treated with kindness and consideration. Any Government official violating the terms of this notice will be recommended for dismissal from the Service. Any other person so doing will be forthwith required to leave Ellis Island. It is earnestly requested that any violation hereof, or any instance of any kind of improper treatment of immigrants at Ellis Island, or before they leave the Barge Office, be promptly brought to the attention of the Commissioner.

Williams was dead serious about enforcing his edict. He wrote to one employee: “I was very much displeased at the rough and unkind manner in which I heard you address two immigrants in the Discharging Bureau this afternoon. Do not let this occur again.” Williams suspended a gateman named John Bell for two weeks without pay for using “vulgar and abusive language” with an immigrant.

No area of immigration escaped Williams’s attention. He kept a close eye on steamship companies, fearing that they were not doing a proper job of inspecting immigrants in European ports. On his fifth day on the job, he fired off a letter to the French Line complaining that while its manifests listed all immigrants as being in sound physical condition, Ellis Island doctors found a number afflicted with various ailments, such as hernias, blindness, and clubfeet. One immigrant had only one leg, another had one leg shorter than the other, and a third was a hunchback. Williams fined steamship companies for failing to inspect immigrants properly. Between May 1902 and May 1903, Williams collected $6,560 in fines from steamship companies.

Next, Williams aimed his fire at those missionaries at Ellis Island whom he believed were runners in disguise, suckering unwitting immigrants to their rooming houses and taking advantage of them. He barred a German Lutheran minister, a man who ran the Home for Scandinavian Emigrants, and members of the Austro-Hungarian Society for swindling immigrants and keeping an unsanitary and unsafe boardinghouse.

To protect immigrants from falling prey to swindlers, Williams took on the concessions at Ellis Island—the money exchange, baggage transfer contract, and food services. Herbert Parsons, a Republican leader in the city, warned Williams about the food concession. Though the contract was in the name of Schwab & Co., the business was really run by Charles Hess, a local Republican leader connected to the Platt machine. According to Parsons, Hess was “one of the most unmitigated scoundrels in this city.” McSweeney had shielded Hess under the previous administration, but that would change. “I witnessed with my own eyes the fact that immigrants were often fed without knives, forks, or spoons and I saw them extract boiled beef from their bowls of soup with their fingers,” Williams reported.

New bids were put out and new contracts were awarded for the food, baggage, and money exchange privileges. Though the opening of Ellis Island and the federalization of immigration regulation were supposed to have eliminated the kinds of corruption that had existed at Castle Garden, the present state of these privileges showed that little had changed. The owner of the baggage contract had held it since Castle Garden, while the money exchange was in the hands of the nephew of the man who held it at Castle Garden. “This office has been run in the past largely in the interests of the restaurant privilege holder, and partly in the interest of some steamship companies, who have been violating our statutes with impunity,” Williams wrote triumphantly to Roosevelt after the new contract had been awarded. “This office is now being run in the Government’s interest.”

Williams even tackled the landscaping of Ellis Island. While the
Times
noted that before Williams “there was not a flower or a bush of any kind on the island,” by the summer of 1903 the island was taking the appearance of a “well-regulated and unusually prettily decorated park.” And from the front door of the main building to the dock where the barges dropped off immigrants, a new steel canopy with a glass roof was erected to shelter immigrants as they began their inspection ritual.

Then there was the case of Edward McSweeney. Although McSweeney had been dismissed by Roosevelt, controversy still surrounded him. Williams and McSweeney overlapped for three days at the end of April, enough time for the streetwise McSweeney to sell his library of books and periodicals to Williams for the exorbitant price of $100. When Williams took office, not only was the entire service at Ellis Island a mess—from the quality of the inspectors to the quality of the food to the cleanliness of the buildings—but the records and files were also in disarray.

McSweeney had asked Williams if he could store five large boxes at Ellis Island until he could bring them up to Boston, where he was moving. The boxes, he told Williams, contained personal papers and materials. When someone told Williams that McSweeney had placed official documents in the boxes, he referred the matter to his superiors, who then dispatched a Secret Service investigator to New York.

The agent opened the boxes and found inside thousands of documents—4,292 to be exact—relating to official work at Ellis Island. There were letters, special reports, and minutes of boards of special inquiry. When McSweeney wrote to Williams in August asking him to forward the boxes to Boston, he was informed they were being held by order of the secretary of the Treasury. Williams did pack up two small boxes of personal items from the larger boxes and shipped them to Boston.

In addition to the five large boxes, Williams was told that McSweeney had ordered a large cedar chest made at government expense. A Secret Service agent managed to track down the box to a storage facility in Manhattan, but could not open it. Government officials asked McSweeney, through his lawyers, to open the box. After some days of stalling, government officials were allowed to open the chest and found only bed linens. Clearly the chest had been cleaned out. While the original contents of the cedar chest will forever remain a mystery, William Williams made certain to keep a record of what was found in the boxes held at Ellis Island.

According to Williams, McSweeney was in a state of mental anguish when he discovered that the boxes had been opened. One reason was the strange accusation that emerged from those boxes concerning the case of two teenage girls. The Eloy sisters had been caught showing a “filthy and obscene photograph” to other immigrants awaiting inspection. The girls were then brought before McSweeney, who allowed the girls to land. McSweeney later told investigators that the photo in question had mysteriously disappeared. However, all of the material relating to the case, including the photo, was carefully filed away by McSweeney in a small manila folder marked “Eloy girls.”

None of this seemed to slow down the indefatigable McSweeney. While Terence Powderly was at home in Washington sulking, McSweeney was back home in Massachusetts running the campaign of William A. Gaston, the Democratic candidate for governor. Gaston had been Roosevelt’s classmate at Harvard and gave the president his personal assurance that McSweeney could explain the documents if given a chance.

Roosevelt then ordered Henry Burnett, the U.S. attorney in New York, to interview McSweeney. In an interview that lasted almost two days, McSweeney said that he never intended to take away the documents but instead wanted to put them aside to help William Williams, whom he had hoped would call upon him for advice. Williams called the testimony “confused and contradictory.” He had no doubt as to McSweeney’s dishonesty, writing Roosevelt that if he were wrong about McSweeney, then “I am so lacking in intelligence that I am not fit to hold this office one day longer.”

It was not until the summer of 1903 that the president and Burnett agreed to file charges against McSweeney for purloining government documents. McSweeney’s lawyers claimed that the charges were trivial, that he never meant to take official documents, and that the boxes never left Ellis Island. If they were so valuable to McSweeney, his lawyers argued, why didn’t he take them with him immediately?

Because of an electoral fluke, William Gaston was running again for governor of Massachusetts in 1903 and McSweeney was again running the campaign. Gaston staunchly defended McSweeney, claiming that the charge was “technical” and the papers had “no earthly importance.”

The case took on political overtones as Roosevelt took an interest in Gaston’s campaign and the prosecution of McSweeney, calling the latter a “dog” and an “indicted scoundrel.” The president suggested to the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor that he should use Gaston’s employment of McSweeney against him in the campaign.

The case remained in limbo until a former clerk at Ellis Island named John Steele testified on behalf of McSweeney. He said that his old boss had ordered him to pack up his personal papers. In doing so, he emptied all the drawers in McSweeney’s desk, mixing personal papers with official papers and then nailing the boxes shut. He claimed that McSweeney was not present when he did this. Thomas Fitchie also testified on behalf of his former assistant, claiming that in the move from the Barge Office back to Ellis Island, there was a mixup in the department’s filing system.

Though McSweeney tried to remove government documents that would have made him look bad, Steele’s testimony, combined with the fact that the papers never left the island, weakened the government’s case. As William Williams noted, the question of McSweeney’s guilt hinged on whether there was real motive surrounding the keeping of the documents. The
Boston Herald
, a staunch defender of McSweeney, argued that it was “utter frivolity . . . to accuse a man of having the criminal intent to steal papers which he voluntarily leaves in his accuser’s possession.” Nor could McSweeney be prosecuted for the mysterious cedar box that contained only bed linens. In June 1904, more than two years after McSweeney left office, all charges against him were finally dropped.

McSweeney was more a typical late-nineteenth-century political operative than a true villain. He cut corners, bent rules, ingratiated himself to powerful people, fought against real and perceived enemies, and too often put his personal survival ahead of public service.

Yet he was a deeply complex man. To his credit, he refused to let the indictment tarnish his career. Back in Boston, McSweeney reestablished himself as a prominent citizen. Besides running Gaston’s two unsuccessful gubernatorial campaigns, McSweeney also became the editor of the
Boston Traveler
, where he led a campaign against tuberculosis. He fought for a workmen’s compensation bill and was a member of the Massachusetts Industrial Accident Board. He was later put in charge of the Port of Boston. He continued writing and speaking on immigration, defending both the federal regulations enforced at Ellis Island, as well as the positive benefits of immigration.

As McSweeney was re-creating himself in Massachusetts, William Williams was taking firm control at Ellis Island, cleaning out McSweeney’s allies and putting order to what had once been a dumping ground of political patronage. According to one Roosevelt biographer, at the new Ellis Island “a political snug harbor was swept, garnished, and set in running order on a strict merit basis.”

Every move that Williams made seemed to vindicate Powderly. This was cold comfort for the ousted official who was now sitting in his home in the Petworth section of Washington tending to his vegetable and rose gardens, looking out across the street to the verdant grounds of the Old Soldiers’ Home.