American Passage (23 page)

The Immigration Act of 1907 was a victory for opponents of restriction in the sense that the literacy bill was defeated. In reality, the bill was much more complicated and restrictionists got far more than most people realized. The head tax on immigrants was raised to $4 per person, though some had wanted to raise it as high as $25. More importantly, Congress once again expanded the categories for exclusion. First, in addition to the insane and epileptics, feebleminded immigrants were now excludable. Second, Congress expanded the exclusion for prostitutes to include the “importation into the United States of any alien woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution, or for any other immoral purpose.” Lastly, any immigrant determined by doctors to be “mentally or physically defective,” and whose defect would “affect the ability of such alien to earn a living,” could be excluded. Loosely worded legislation opened up new grounds for debate over policies at Ellis Island. The key question boiled down to the definition of terms like “mental defective,” “immoral purpose,” “feebleminded,” or “ability to earn a living.”

As for the commission to investigate immigration, it combined two features of twentieth-century commissions. First, it would collect data and investigate various conditions throughout the country to give lawmakers better information. Second, it would allow short-term-minded politicians to postpone any further discussion of immigration, giving them cover on an increasingly sensitive issue.

President Roosevelt, who years earlier had criticized Grover Cleveland’s veto of the literacy test and who spoke earlier in his presidency in favor of one, was spared the agonizing decision of whether or not to veto such a bill. “When it came to a showdown,” Alabama congressman John Burnett said of Roosevelt’s behavior during the congressional fight, “the President was not to be seen, and his hand was not to be felt.”

Writing to Speaker Cannon, Roosevelt saw the commission as an opportunity to achieve restriction without jeopardizing his political capital. “I would want a Commission which would enable me . . . to put before the Congress a plan which would amount to a definite solution of this immigration business,” he told Cannon. He hoped this would occur after the 1908 election but before he left office. Roosevelt wanted legislation that would keep “out the unfit, physically, morally, or mentally.” These were words that came easily in private, but which the president was increasingly loath to speak publicly.

It would be four more years before this new commission would make its report to Congress. In the meantime, the focus of immigration left Washington and returned to the increasingly busy island in New York Harbor.

T
HE DEFEAT OF THE
literacy test showed the growing influence of immigration supporters, but also led to virulent attacks against Oscar Straus and Robert Watchorn. Not surprisingly, one of their sharpest critics was Prescott Hall, who complained that Straus was reversing half of the exclusion cases that reached his desk on appeal and that such behavior was demoralizing the department. The first Jewish cabinet secretary also attracted complaints that he was less sympathetic to appeals from non-Jewish immigrants. By early 1908, there was such a steady drumbeat of protest that Watchorn complained to Straus about “the growing impression among many officials—both state, county, and municipal—that your administration is not disposed to execute the expulsion feature of the immigration laws.”

Hall took his case against Straus directly to President Roosevelt, who did not seem terribly disturbed by the charge. Nevertheless, he would pass along Hall’s criticism to Henry Cabot Lodge for further investigation.

Lodge had been a staunch ally of the IRL and the main point man in Congress for the literacy test. After looking into the charges against Straus, however, Lodge came away unimpressed. “Hall is both honest and able but he is extreme and does not understand that it is one thing to make general charges on hearsay and another to sustain them by proof,” he wrote to Roosevelt. Lodge admitted that Straus was “averse to the laws which affect the entry of poor Jews,” a fact he found unfortunate. Nevertheless, he could find no proof that Straus had ordered any easing of the enforcement of the law. In fact, Lodge told Roosevelt that reversals of deportation orders on appeal to Washington had not increased under Straus’s tenure.

Lodge, however, was not quite correct. In the first full year before Straus took office, almost 52 percent of immigrants who appealed their deportations to Washington lost their case. In 1908, Straus’s first full year as secretary, that figure dropped to 44 percent. In 1910, the first year after Straus left office, the number of lost appeal cases jumped to over 60 percent. On the whole, however, this relatively minor dip hardly proves a lax administration of the law.

That even Henry Cabot Lodge was defending Straus must have galled Hall. He later told Roosevelt that Straus “has deceived you time and again in regard to many immigration matters . . . he is one of the most subtly insidiously unscrupulous officials that ever breathed.” Such words would do little to dent Roosevelt’s admiration and respect for Straus.

Hall also aimed his fire at the man he saw as the other villain in this piece. “Watchorn has been a crook ever since he immigrated to this country,” Hall told Roosevelt. “His naturalization papers were fraudulent.” He also accused Watchorn of stealing the addresses of union members in a political campaign in 1890. “I am absolutely sure of Watchorn’s dishonesty and unscrupulousness,” he raged.

Roosevelt had sought to mollify Watchorn’s critics in late 1906 by asking IRL member James B. Reynolds to investigate operations at Ellis Island. When he had completed his report, Reynolds did not come up with an indictment of Watchorn’s administration, but instead issued a strong condemnation of the treatment of mentally ill immigrants in detention. This is not what Prescott Hall was looking for.

Part of Hall’s anger stemmed from the fact that Watchorn had tried to play both sides of the immigration debate. He accurately sensed a slippery nature to Watchorn’s personality. He had already proved himself a man a little too eager to please his superiors, someone who easily switched from Democrat to Republican when it suited his career. Watchorn appeared tough on immigration early in his term, but later trimmed his sails when he began reporting to Oscar Straus.

In July 1905, Watchorn wrote to Robert DeC. Ward, explaining that he had no qualms about separating families when one member was ordered excluded and the rest admitted. “What sort of protection would be afforded the United States,” wrote Watchorn, “if any such minor children, wife or parents are of the kind who are going to furnish as a legacy a progeny of the sort which you and I and all thoughtful persons must of necessity view with no little apprehension?” In words that would have shocked those who saw him as an advocate for immigrants, Watchorn told Ward that he wondered whether “misplaced sympathy is not responsible for more evils than the so-called callousness of which we are occasionally accused.”

Keeping up a correspondence with the Boston restrictionists, Watchorn wrote Hall in 1906 to discuss a paper that William Williams had recently delivered. Watchorn was hurt that Hall remarked that it was a shame that Williams was no longer at Ellis Island, implying that a lax enforcement now existed there. Watchorn was eager to correct that impression, writing that he was in near complete agreement with Hall and Williams, and that it was his “unremitting endeavor to prevent the landing of any and all such persons” defined as mental or physical defectives. Hall responded by calling Watchorn an “exceptionally capable and energetic official.”

That was before Oscar Straus. Now Prescott Hall was not the only one unhappy. Judson Swift of the American Tract Society wrote to Roosevelt to complain that Watchorn, supposedly under orders from Straus, was hampering the efforts of missionaries at Ellis Island. Protestant missionaries looked upon the crush of immigrants streaming through the inspection station not so much as a fearful deluge as an evangelical opportunity. In his 1906 book entitled
Aliens or Americans?
Baptist minister Howard Grose called the new immigrants an opportunity for evangelists and asked: “Will we give the gospel to the heathen in America?” Some were truly ministering to the newcomers, while others were busy targeting Catholics and Jews with Protestant pamphlets written in their native language.

Jewish leaders complained of the situation to Watchorn, who ordered missionaries to stop proselytizing to Jewish immigrants. Rumors began to circulate among Protestant churches in New York that Watchorn had threatened to banish from Ellis Island anyone using the name of Jesus Christ. Although Swift insinuated that Straus’s Judaism was the cause of Watchorn’s actions, Straus himself was unaware, though not unsupportive, of what his subordinate had done.

Roosevelt had little sympathy for the criticism and dispatched his secretary, William Loeb, to deal with Swift. Speaking for the president, Loeb chastised Swift for bringing Straus’s religion into the matter, calling it “unwarranted slander” to which “missionaries of the Gospel should be most averse.” Loeb also noted that Watchorn, a devout Methodist himself, could hardly be antagonistic toward religion since his own brother was a Protestant minister.

At the same time that Swift was complaining about the treatment of Christian missionaries, New York police commissioner Theodore Bingham blasted Watchorn for failing to deport immigrants convicted of crimes, calling on the president to appoint a new commissioner dedicated to keeping the “bars up against the criminal class.”

Watchorn noted that in the preceding year, warrants for deportation had risen almost 50 percent. Still, Bingham would not relent and repeatedly stressed the connection between immigration and criminality. He furnished Watchorn and Straus with a list of Italian immigrants in New York with criminal records, baiting officials to deport them. Straus told Watchorn he was “ready to cooperate in ridding the country of the class that can be deported under the immigration laws.” Warrants soon arrived from Washington for their arrest.

Immigration restrictionists saw further proof of the nefarious influence of Oscar Straus in the case of the commissioner-general of immigration, Frank Sargent. Many people noticed a change in Sargent after he began to report to Oscar Straus. Public Health Service official Victor Safford recounted the tale of a hearing in Boston. When the doctors recommended sending home a Swedish girl with trachoma, Sargent replied: “If you exclude this alien and the case comes to Washington on appeal, backed by the political influence which the relatives evidently can command, I can assure you that your decision will be reversed and the alien admitted to the country.” Safford noted that by early 1908, Sargent had become “discouraged, sick, entirely dependent upon his official salary and wondering what was to become of his family after he was gone.”

Samuel Gompers, another friend of Sargent, noticed that he had become so “disappointed and crestfallen” working under Straus that he sought reelection to his old post as president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. When he lost his bid, Sargent was faced with the realization that he had to remain in his government job. Needing money to support his family, he could not resign on principle and would have to continue upholding interpretations of the law that compromised his beliefs.

By the summer of 1908, the pressures began to get to Sargent. He struggled with severe stomach problems and would eventually suffer a stroke. After two more strokes and a serious fall, Sargent died in early September at the age of fifty-three. “If ever a man died of a broken heart it was he,” wrote Gompers, “because he found himself in a position which he deemed it necessary to retain and yet was unable to carry out his ideals of public service and righteous conduct.” Remarking on Sargent’s death in his diary, Oscar Straus spoke well of his subordinate, calling him, with a touch of mild condescension, “a good and conscientious official and whatever defects he had were not the result of lack of human sympathy, but education.”

Straus’s views on immigration also had an effect on another old labor restrictionist. Terence V. Powderly had been out of steady work for over three years. By 1906, Roosevelt had made amends with him and sent him on a fact-finding mission to Europe to investigate the causes of European immigration. After Powderly submitted his report, Roosevelt named him to a new position. The old union leader needed a steady government paycheck, but the man who once led Washington’s immigration office now had to take a subordinate position in the agency he once ran.

Powderly was now in charge of the new Division of Information. Its goal was to “promote a beneficial distribution of aliens admitted into the United States.” This was a reform supported by both sides of the immigration debate. In fact, the motto of the National Immigration Restriction League was “Distribution and Education Rather than Restriction.” What Powderly’s new organization did was more prosaic. It collected information on wages and employment throughout the country, put the data together, and got the information into the hands of immigrants at stations like Ellis Island.

It was a rather naïve view of how immigrants behaved. When most immigrants arrived in America, they usually stayed with friends and relatives from their homeland in immigrant ghettos. No matter how overcrowded and bleak these neighborhoods might seem to the outsider, they served as a safety blanket that provided the greenhorn with a foot into America’s golden door. The air of the familiar—language, newspapers, food, music—was more enticing than job opportunities elsewhere. The Lower East Side of Manhattan or the West Side of Chicago were more attractive than the steel mills of Alabama or the farms of Texas.

It is no surprise that Powderly’s efforts were relatively unsuccessful. Between 1908 and 1913 only 23,000 immigrants made use of Powderly’s information. Despite this seeming failure, labor leaders pounced on the new agency. Gompers, who never had much respect for Powderly, called the Division of Information “a strike-breaking agency.” The head of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen told Powderly that his division would only be a success if it could “convince the people of Europe to stay at home.” Gompers’s deputy, John Mitchell, told Powderly he wanted him to distribute unemployment statistics to immigrants to discourage them from coming.