American Passage (20 page)

To his supporters, such criticism was proof of Williams’s success. Keeping a close eye on affairs from Boston, Prescott Hall congratulated Williams “on the great tribute which the
Staats-Zeitung
is paying your administration. . . . I have never known the
Staats-Zeitung
to abuse anything as much as it has your administration, which of itself is the highest praise.” To Hall, if the paper was criticizing Williams, then he must be doing something right.

Germans were the largest ethnic group in New York City and a political power in the Midwest. The number of German immigrants, however, had fallen off substantially in recent years. In the first two years of Williams’s administration, only about 93,000 German immigrants arrived through Ellis Island, less than 6 percent of all immigrants. Of those only 696 were excluded, or about 0.7 percent.

Although Williams’s animus was largely directed against southern and eastern European immigrants, it was the German press and the German-American community that were most angered by his administration. When Williams banned a German missionary from Ellis Island, a woman from Washington, D.C., wrote him to complain. If he did not reconsider his actions, she warned, millions of GermanAmericans would condemn him. “Do look over the matter again or you have struck trouble,” she warned. With self-confidence bordering on arrogance, Williams responded: “I hasten to assure you that I am utterly indifferent to any unfavorable resolutions that may be passed upon me, or to any that may come to me, as a result of doing the right thing.”

Even the
American Hebrew
, a prominent voice in the Jewish community, defended Williams, writing that the agitation “is not based on firm ground, and seems to be inspired by some motive other than the unselfish one of securing justice for the immigrant.” The newspaper credited Williams with creating an atmosphere at Ellis Island where immigrants were well-treated and no longer “hauled about like foreign baggage.” The editors encouraged Jews not to complain and “for the sake of their own self-respect refuse to ask for special treatment.”

Despite the support from some quarters, Williams’s problems with the German community continued. In early September 1903, Deutschberger published another article about Ellis Island, entitled “Hell on Earth.” Among its accusations was that “people on the Island were literally eaten up by vermin.”

Williams may have appeared indifferent to the criticism, but when combined with his frenetic work schedule, it was all beginning to take a toll. During 1903, Williams was at his desk for all but five days of the year—including Sundays and holidays. “I have for a long time felt that you were overworked and that it was only a matter of time when you could no longer stand up under the strain,” Commissioner-General Frank Sargent wrote Williams a year into his tenure. Just after the publication of the
Staats-Zeitung
’s “Hell on Earth” article, Robert Watchorn was hearing rumors that Williams had already “run his mile” at Ellis Island.

For Roosevelt, it was time for a presidential visit to Ellis Island, the first one by a sitting president. The visit was scheduled for Wednesday, September 15. Roosevelt would leave his home at Sagamore Hill, on Long Island’s Oyster Bay and arrive with his party on the presidential yacht
Sylph
in time for lunch. In addition to his wife and son Kermit, Roosevelt was joined by special guests, including friends Jacob Riis and Owen Wister, as well as local politicians, journalists, and academics. The Ellis Island dining facility added oysters and champagne fritters to its usual bland fare of stewed prunes for the occasion.

Roosevelt’s trip began badly. The
Sylph
left Oyster Bay a little before 10:00
A
.
M
. Strong winds and heavy rains beat hard against the
Sylph
as it made its way from the North Shore of Long Island, southwest into the East River toward Manhattan. The winds reached near hurricane force as the
Sylph
made its way around Fort Schuyler off the coast of the Bronx. As waves continued to break over the presidential vessel, Mrs. Roosevelt and Kermit were sent below deck. Upon reaching Hell’s Gate, the notorious cross-current patch of water where the tidal straight known as the East River meets the Long Island Sound just off the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the presidential party saw a tugboat that had been capsized by the winds and waves. The
Sylph
’s pilot suggested that the trip be canceled, and the group landed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard until the storm blew over.

The weather eventually improved and Roosevelt’s group got back on the ship and continued its journey. It was not until sometime after 2:00
P
.
M
. that the presidential party approached Ellis Island, where they were met by a small tugboat that transferred the passengers of the
Sylph
to the slip at Ellis Island. The president stood at the front of the tugboat, in his raincoat and slouch hat, waving to a small crowd of officials, including William Williams, waiting in the rain to welcome the tardy presidential party. After more than four hours, Roosevelt and his party had finally made it to Ellis Island.

After a quick lunch, Roosevelt began his whirlwind tour of the facilities. Over two thousand immigrants were on the island when Roosevelt arrived, and the president dove right into the process. Not content simply to watch, he joined inspectors in questioning immigrants, including a fifteen-year-old Slavic orphan named Ildra Andras. After a few questions, the president gave Andras a hearty slap on the back and the boy was off to Minnesota to be with his uncle. When Roosevelt saw Adele Walte, a young German women carrying her sleeping baby in a wicker basket, he passed Jacob Riis a five-dollar bill to hand to the woman. “It’s for the baby,” Riis told a startled Adele, “It’s from the President of the United States.”
Little escaped the president’s curious mind. Roosevelt was dismayed by the eye exam performed on immigrants, complaining that doctors had dirty hands and did not clean their instruments between patients. The eye exam, designed to uncover cases of trachoma, was the most infamous test at Ellis Island. Given at this time only to those who exhibited symptoms of the disease, by 1905 every immigrant passing through Ellis Island would be subjected to it. Usually using a buttonhook, a doctor would flip back, or evert, the immigrant’s eyelid to look for signs of trachoma. For some, it was a painful and traumatic experience. “The eye of the unsuspecting arrival is so brutally pulled open by the doctor,” noted a German-language newspaper, “that the poor unfortunate is unable to see anything for the next two or three hours because of the pain.” With some exaggeration, the paper called it “a brutality without equal.” From 1904 to 1914, almost 25,000 immigrants would be debarred for trachoma, nearly two-thirds of all those excluded for loathsome or contagious diseases.

After this, Roosevelt and his party were off to a hearing room to witness the boards of special inquiry. One case dealt with a Hungarian man heading to his son-in-law in Pennsylvania with a railroad ticket and $12 in his pocket. Was he likely to become a public charge? Two members of the board voted to defer the decision for further investigation, while one member voted to allow the man to land. “Why should there be any doubt about this man,” the president chimed in. Williams, an upholder of the strict interpretation of the law, tried to explain to Roosevelt that immigrants had to be beyond a doubt entitled to land. Since the old Hungarian had only $12, Williams declared him certain to become a public charge. To that, the German-born Arthur von Briesen, a member of Roosevelt’s party and president of the Legal Aid Society, interjected: “Under the law, Jake Riis should have been sent back when he came over.” That sealed the deal in favor of the Hungarian.

Von Briesen’s presence at Ellis Island that day was important to more than just that Hungarian immigrant. Roosevelt used the trip to announce that he was appointing a commission to investigate the operations at Ellis Island. This was news to William Williams, who had not been previously informed of the decision.

Among those invited to the island that day were the five men Roosevelt had already chosen to sit on the commission, including von Briesen, who would head the commission. From the dramatic, rainsoaked arrival to the surprise announcement, it was vintage Roosevelt. Everyone assumed that Roosevelt created the commission in response to the charges from the
Staats-Zeitung
. What better way to counter the complaints that Roosevelt’s immigration service was anti-immigrant than to appoint a committee composed of, in the words of a newspaper critical of the president, “two Germans, two Irishmen, and a Jew—not a single native American.”

Roosevelt could not have picked a better commission from his perspective. As von Briesen wrote the president after the completion of the report, the commission was unanimous in agreeing that “desirable immigrants are men and women of good repute and good character and that undesirable immigrants are persons of bad repute and bad character.” This was the Roosevelt party line on immigration, which he had earlier reiterated in a letter to another member of the commission: “My own feeling is that we cannot have too many of the right kind of immigrants and that, on the other hand, we should steadily and consistently endeavor to exclude the man who is physically, mentally or morally unfit to be a good citizen or to beget good citizens.”

It was not only pure Roosevelt, but his immigration axiom neatly encapsulated the broad American consensus toward immigration. A few Americans may have supported unrestricted immigration, and a larger number may have supported a complete shutting of the nation’s gates. Yet even the Immigration Restriction League did not go so far as to lobby for such extreme measures. Public opinion polling was still decades away, so it is difficult to gauge accurately what exactly the American public believed, but the consensus, as witnessed through immigration policy and elite opinion, seemed to support some kind of regulation and selection of immigrants, while upholding the nation’s traditional views on the benefits of good immigrants.

The devil, of course, was in the details. How does one define good and bad immigrants? Each person who worked at Ellis Island, from commissioner to inspector to doctor, had his own interpretation of that dividing line, as did officials in Washington.

The Von Briesen Commission was the fifth investigation of Ellis Island in eleven years—and certainly not the last. It was the first to deal exclusively with the concerns of pro-immigrant groups. Williams’s presence at Ellis Island satisfied that part of Roosevelt’s patrician psyche worried about the wrong kind of immigrants, but the pluralist side of Roosevelt needed to be soothed as well. Appointing an ethnic commission to investigate his handpicked Ellis Island commissioner dutifully following Roosevelt’s own beliefs about immigration was a masterly, yet cynical political stroke.

For native-born Americans fearful of the rapid changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the man at the gate at Ellis Island was a comforting idea that made mass immigration a more palatable concept. As immigration continued and first- and second-generation immigrants entered the American mainstream, they too wanted Ellis Island to reflect
their
values. As Roosevelt was well aware—and William Williams would soon discover—the growing political power of immigrant groups meant that operations at Ellis Island had to take into account the sensitivities of immigrants as well. The tension of serving as a symbol for both immigrants and restrictionists would define—and haunt—Ellis Island its entire history.

The Von Briesen Commission served as a sounding board for complaints from numerous ethnic and religious groups. The first to testify was Leopold Deutschberger and his editor at the
Staats-Zeitung
, repeating their charges of maladministration against Williams. The German newspapermen were followed by a long procession of ethnic representatives, members of the German Lutheran Society, the Irish Emigrant Society, the Austrian Hungarian Home, Our Lady of the Rosary, United Hebrew Charities, the Leo House for German Catholic girls. All of these witnesses testified on behalf of Williams. Sure, they had their quibbles. Most complained about overcrowded conditions, small waiting rooms, not enough bathrooms or benches. And then there were the steamship company representatives, who had their own complaints.

Two months after Roosevelt’s trip to Ellis Island, the commission completed its report and sent it to the president. It was largely an exoneration of Williams, although it included some criticism of the sanitary conditions on the island, the money exchange, and the overcrowding. As to the criticisms brought by the German-language press, the report declared them unfounded.

Roosevelt was happy with the report, except for one detail. Though it dismissed every charge against Williams, the president regretted that it “did not in one telling sentence embody what it in effect said, and back up Williams not merely by inference but by positive aggressive statement.” Despite all the criticism and despite Williams’s personality quirks, Roosevelt still held him in very high regard.

The final report contained one sentence declaring that Williams was “entitled to the highest commendation for the indefatigable zeal and intelligent supervision” at Ellis Island. That was not enough for Roosevelt. After all, the point of the commission was the vindication of Williams. The president wanted the report to speak specifically of his integrity. Roosevelt was going to use the commission, entirely made up of ethnic members, to both soothe ethnic concerns and absolve the restrictionist Williams. Perhaps uncomfortable with his role in this Rooseveltian play, commission member Eugene Philbin answered the president’s charges with some odd logic of his own. He believed it was “absolutely necessary that the report should avoid, as far as possible, anything like actual praise, but that it should be so worded as to have the inference irresistibly created that the administration of the island was a most commendable one.”