American Passage (29 page)

An American congressional committee toured these border stations and found that things were even worse for Russian Jews who were deported. Since Germany did not want them in their country, the law demanded they be returned to their villages in Russia. Agents from steamship companies met these unwanted individuals at the RussianGerman border because, according to the congressional report, “if emigrants so rejected were turned over to the Russian frontier guards they would be severely treated and subjected to great hardships.” For these Russian Jews, the tragedy of rejection at Ellis Island was just the beginning of their hardships, which is why organizations like the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society fought so hard against many of the deportation orders.

W
ILLIAM
W
ILLIAMS WAS NOT
the only one to feel the sting of criticism from ethnic groups. Secretary Nagel felt the barbs more keenly because he was the son of German immigrants and a member of St. Louis’s large German-American community. His continued support for Williams made him a villain among his own landsmen. He told Williams that he was “sick and tired of being accused of prejudice against people when my position is such that suspicion, if any, might well come from the other side.”

Nagel won no friends among restrictionists since his natural inclination, like that of his predecessor Oscar Straus, was to side with immigrants in appeals cases. “I am frank to say that my sympathy is all for the human side,” Nagel admitted. “I have sometimes felt that I forgot my own country and the law of my country in my desire to help out and to relieve the hardships of individual cases.” He was sensitive to the power he possessed in controlling the fate of tens of thousands of individuals. “I can send back anybody,” he remarked. “It is an awful power, but I try to use it to the best of my ability.”

This was not the kind of introspection that occupied the mind of William Williams. Yet Nagel still maintained good relations with Williams and continued to defend his work. As a sympathetic contemporary noted, Nagel was “never liberal enough to suit the one group, although he became almost a law-breaker in the eyes of others.”

The agitation among German-Americans led New York congressman William Sulzer to offer a resolution in the House of Representatives to investigate the affairs at Ellis Island. Before allowing a vote on the resolution to come to the House floor, the Rules Committee began hearings on the matter in late May 1911. Sulzer began the hearing by noting the “deplorable condition” of the immigration service and calling attention to the “atrocities, cruelties, and inhumanities practiced at Ellis Island.”

The committee then heard from a procession of German-Americans who had been vocal critics of Williams. Gustave Schweppendick, a journalist for the
Morgen Journal
, admitted that while Ellis Island officials were not specifically targeting German immigrants, he and his colleagues felt the need to stick up for other immigrant groups. Ernest Stahl of the National German-American Alliance described his opinion of an immigrant’s Ellis Island experience. “He goes through hell,” he told the committee, “that is the only expression that I know of.” He called the inspection process “barbarous.” Alphonse Koelble, of the United German Societies, complained both about the odor that pervaded Ellis Island and the increasing percentage of exclusions under Williams.

The ubiquitous Marcus Braun also testified, calling Williams “one of the ablest and most honorable men in the service,” even though he disagreed with the commissioner about immigration. “The great trouble with Mr. Williams is that he is too strict,” Braun said, “not only with the enforcement of the law, but also too strict with his subordinates.” Perceptively, Braun noted that Robert Watchorn had “played to the galleries and Mr. Williams does not.”

Before the hearings had taken place, Williams tried to play down the criticism from the German press, calling them “so silly and extravagant as to make it seem beneath one’s dignity to notice them.” He told Prescott Hall that while the charges might poison the minds of “ignorant persons” concerning the operations at Ellis Island, “on the whole I have paid little or no attention to this matter.”

Williams was much more thin-skinned than he let on. He obsessively kept detailed records of the attacks against him by the German press, having each article translated into English. He answered nearly every allegation of abuse against an immigrant at Ellis Island, usually in letters or memos to his superiors in Washington.

Still, while the earlier criticism had been merely irritating, the charges made against him before a congressional committee caused Williams to fume. He had not been present at the May hearing, but had received a transcript of the hearing from Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. “I may feel differently tomorrow but just now I am outraged at the falsehoods told about my administration,” he wrote to Charles Nagel. “These criticisms pass the bounds of decency and in some manner the persons making them ought to be told what decent people think about them.” He would not appear before the committee until it reconvened in July, but promised not to let the accusations go unanswered.

“The law is a difficult one to administer,” Williams claimed in his written opening statement to the committee, “particularly in regard to the determination of who is ‘likely to become a public charge.’ ” While recounting some of the accusations against him, Williams said it was all part of the uncertainty and vagueness of immigration law that bedeviled those sworn to execute it. However, he resented “as wholly untruthful the use of such words as those quoted to characterize the work at Ellis Island.” He produced details of specific cases of deported immigrants that had appeared in the German press and contradicted the claims of administrative misconduct, all while defending the necessity to tighten the inspection process in the name of enforcing the law.

Williams again repeated his standard line regarding his personal views of immigration. “I will say that I have as little sympathy with those who would curtail all immigration as I have with those who would admit all intending immigrants—good, bad, or indifferent,” he said. Daniel Keefe and Charles Nagel both appeared and defended Williams. Unlike Williams, Nagel was torn by the human tragedies that daily crossed his desk. “It is well enough to make a rule under lamplight,” Nagel told the committee, “but it is very hard to enforce that rule when you see a pair of eyes looking at you.”

In Williams’s previous two years at Ellis Island, most of the criticism came from German- and Jewish-American groups. One of the bitterest witnesses against him at the hearing, however, was one of those few Anglo-Saxons who sometimes passed through Ellis Island. The Reverend Sydney Herbert Bass, a minister from England, told the committee about what he was forced to endure while temporarily detained at Ellis Island. “I, too, have photographs,” he testified, “but mine are engraved on my mind and heart and burned into my soul as by a red-hot iron.”

He had arrived in January 1911, headed for a new congregation in Pennsylvania. Bass traveled in steerage—“for purposes and reasons of my own”—on the White Star’s
Adriatic
. The steerage passengers were marched single file into the main building of Ellis Island. As they headed up the stairs towards the Great Hall, Bass remembered that an inspector yelled at them: “Anyone who comes steerage is cattle, you will soon have a nice little pen.”

Bass was then marked in chalk with “2 hieroglyphics” on his overcoat that designated him for further inspection. After a quick examination, a doctor found that Bass suffered from “atrophy and partial paralysis of right leg; deformity of right foot; shortening of right leg and lameness due to old poliomyelitis,” defects that would affect his ability to earn a living. To this diagnosis, Bass responded, “If that were so it was fortunate that my brains were the other end and I earned my living with them as I did not preach and lecture with my feet.”

He would remain at Ellis Island for almost thirty hours, an experience that enraged and deeply scarred the British preacher. He was placed in a holding room with some six hundred immigrants from various nationalities. Although freezing outside, the overcrowded room was steaming hot. Bass took off his overcoat, placed it on the floor, and sat on it. Only when he arose later did he notice that the coat was now stained with “a portion of Italian phlegm, as large as a silver dollar piece.”

“The noise alone was a diabolical experience to sensitive people,” Bass later remembered, “and I shall never doubt again the literal truth of Scriptures especially with reference to the Tower of Babel.” No matter what he did, Bass could not escape the rabble with whom he now found himself detained. “I was standing hemmed in on all four sides by Italian immigrants very taller than I,” he told the committee. “They were eating garlic and you can imagine how offensive it was. . . . It made it difficult for me to breathe. The smell was worse than I ever smelled before.”

Forced to put up with such conditions, Bass complained to officials, “as any self-respecting Englishman, or American, or those self-respecting Germans . . . would do under similar conditions.” That injury to pride and racial superiority, more than the loss of a day at Ellis Island, seemed to drive Bass’s anger. What particularly galled him was the treatment of those “delicately nurtured English ladies of much culture and refinement” placed with the rest of the rabble in detention. The whole place was so shocking that it reminded him of Dante’s Inferno and the Black Hole of Calcutta.

Bass would get a chance to explain himself before a board of special inquiry the following day. Meanwhile, he was forced to spend the night at Ellis Island. Bass successfully appealed to an official to have all of the detained Englishmen—and one “perfect French gentleman”— put together in the same room, while four English women, a French woman, and a Swedish woman were kept together in another room.

The men slept on canvas hammocks, suspended from the ceiling, numbering three from top to bottom and nine rows for a total of twenty-seven “beds.” The canvas mats were damp, and the men were left without blankets for hours. To add insult to injury, these English and French gentlemen were not alone in their dormitory room. “The insects were fearful, and I think I can safely say the English at any rate were all a mass of bug bites,” Bass said about the bedbugs.

He was released the following day. Hearst’s muscularly populist
New York Evening Journal
, always happy to give Ellis Island officials a black eye, ran Bass’s story with the headline: “Pastor Calls Ellis Island Hell on Earth.” The publicity brought Bass’s plight to the attention of Washington, as he complained to the British consulate.

Williams explained his decision to Charles Nagel, calling Bass “an undersized, badly crippled man.” He noted that Bass was showed special consideration at Ellis Island, considering the fact that he was a steerage passenger. Williams concluded that he thought “that this badly crippled alien was fortunate in securing admission,” a view seconded by Nagel, who told Taft’s personal secretary that Bass “was lucky to get in, or rather that we were unlucky to get him in.” Now, seven months after his ordeal, Bass was telling his story to a congressional committee and demanding a full investigation of Ellis Island.

At the end of the second hearing, Sulzer testified that Ellis Island could be improved for the benefit of immigrants and that its problems were not the fault of Secretary Nagel or Commissioner Williams. The fault was with the government for not appropriating more money to expand the facilities and hire more inspectors. Despite the hearings, the House Rules Committee never acted on Sulzer’s resolution and there was no full-scale congressional investigation of Williams and Ellis Island.

With the failure of Congress to do more than give lip service to their complaints, German groups did not give up the fight. At its annual convention in 1911, just a few months after the end of the congressional hearing, the National German-American Alliance lashed out against William Williams. Henry Weisman, president of the Brooklyn branch of the organization, called Williams’s interpretation of the law “arbitrary” and claimed that he excluded many desirable immigrants. The NGAA called for the removal of Williams. Weisman, a lifelong Republican, declared that if Taft did not remove Williams from office, he would never again vote for another Republican for president. A few months later, the
Morgen Journal
demanded: “Williams Must Go.” When that did not happen, the newspaper followed up with another editorial asking: “How Much Longer, Mr. Taft?”

Williams had his defenders. In the midst of the congressional hearing,
Harper’s Weekly
called Williams “a resolute, upright person, a terror to all scamps who try to plunder the immigrants, and a considerable terror to the steamship companies, who know him as a man not to be trifled with.” The editorial concluded that the “suggestion that he is brutal does not match with anything in his record or with his known character.”

Arthur von Briesen, president of the Legal Aid Society and chair of the committee that had looked into conditions at Ellis Island during Williams’s first term, wrote President Taft about his organization’s recent investigation. A member of the Legal Aid Society was sent to Ellis Island in 1911 to see if there had been any changes there since von Briesen’s 1903 report. He told Taft that the investigators “were filled with admiration at the manner in which the business was being conducted and the manner in which the immigrants were treated.” The facilities at Ellis Island were still too small and the detention quarters too cramped, causing great discomfort for detainees. However, von Briesen’s investigators absolved Williams of blame.

Williams’s most steadfast ally and friend turned out to be President Taft. “I want you to know that every day, as I think over the Government, I rejoice that I have a commissioner like you in the place you fill,” Taft wrote to Williams in November 1911. He then set out to dispense some advice to his fellow Yalie. “Now, brace up!” he wrote. “Life is not so infernally serious that we can not take an interval at time for enjoyment.” Taft thought his friend “too darn conscientious” and in working so hard to save the Republic from the evil influences of undesirable immigrants, “you are neglecting your own health, thus defeating the very objects you have in view by curtailing your usefulness in a short time through a break-down.”