American Passage (38 page)

Miller and Baratte were soon arrested, while Jeanne was released from Ellis Island into the care of the Jeanne D’Arc Home. The stress of her ordeal caused Jeanne to fall ill for the next two months, after which time she found a job in the home of Mr. J. Dreyfus in Staten Island. After her release, Inspector Tedesco went to see how Jeanne was progressing. Dreyfus informed him that Jeanne had admitted her past to him and he had no doubt that she was trying to “become a respectable woman.” In August 1911, five months after her arrest, the deportation order was canceled. Jeanne Rondez’s ordeal was over, but her experience as a white slave no doubt lived with her for the rest of her life.

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9, 1914, twenty-one-year-old Giulietta Lamarca arrived at Ellis Island. Though most of her fellow passengers had embarked at Palermo, Lamarca began her journey from Algiers, an unlikely starting point for most immigrants. Lamarca listed her profession as a domestic and declared she was heading for her intended husband, Marco Giro, in Brooklyn. As a young woman arriving at Ellis Island alone, she was temporarily detained, but eventually discharged when Giro came to escort her off the island.

Lamarca’s stay in Brooklyn lasted less than a year. In May 1915, an Italian immigrant named Vincenzo Palumbo was arrested for running a gambling house and brothel at 116 Van Brunt Street, the same house where Giulietta Lamarca resided. As it turned out, Palumbo had brought Lamarca to America to work as a prostitute; his brother had originally recruited Lamarca from Italy to work in a brothel in Algiers. Marco Giro was merely an associate of Palumbo, not Lamarca’s fiancé. Palumbo was convicted of procuring prostitutes and sentenced to seven and a half years in an Atlanta jail. Giulietta Lamarca was brought to Ellis Island and detained.

At her hearing, Lamarca began to spin a tale about her life. Despite her Italian ethnicity, she claimed to have been born in Algeria. She maintained that she had a husband in the United States, but that she left him. She vehemently denied she was a prostitute.

Witnesses claimed otherwise. One testified that Lamarca had purchased a watch from him and offered to pay him with sexual favors. The most damning testimony came from Ellis Island inspector Frank Stone, who called Lamarca’s case commercialized vice “in its most vicious forms.” He claimed that she was infected with syphilis and that she charged men 50 cents for sex. Lamarca’s home was along the Brooklyn piers and her clientele was almost exclusively sailors. Stone also hinted at greater evil. Obstetrical instruments were found in the rooms at the brothel and a vaginal speculum was discovered hidden in the springs of a couch. Furthermore, Stone noted, obscene photos “depicting the most revolting sexual and carnal scenes” were found.

With her pimp in jail, the case against Lamarca was clear-cut. Having been in the country for just a year, she came within the statute of limitations for deportation, but much in the world had changed since her arrival. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir apparent to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had been assassinated in Sarajevo just two weeks after Giulietta arrived. Officials could no longer deport immigrants back to war-torn Europe, as steamships were now in danger from German U-boats. Lamarca would have to be detained on Ellis Island until further notice.

The Supreme Court failed to clear up the ambiguity of the phrase when it ruled in the 1950s that the moral turpitude clause was not unconstitutionally vague. Between 1908 and 1980, almost 62,000 aliens were deported for moral turpitude, one-quarter for immoral behavior and the rest on criminal charges.

The reach of the moral turpitude clause extends into the twentyfirst century. When visitors to the United States fill out an entry form at the border, one of the questions they are asked is: “Have you ever been arrested or convicted for an offense or crime involving moral turpitude?” Vera Cathcart would be amused.

We must not forget that these men and women who file through the narrow gates at Ellis Island, hopeful, confused, with bundles of misconceptions as heavy as the great sacks upon their backs . . . these simple, rough-handed people are the ancestors of our descendants, the fathers and mothers of our children.

AT A FEW MINUTES PAST 2 O’CLOCK IN THE EARLY MORNING of July 30, 1916, Peter Raceta, the captain of a barge docked at a Jersey City pier, found himself tossed some twenty feet in the air by the force of a blast he could only describe as something akin to the explosion of a Zeppelin and what others likened to the sound of the firing of a large cannon. Raceta landed in the waters of New York Harbor many yards from his boat, which was now on fire. He was stunned, but unhurt, apart from a severe burn on the back of his head. The other two men on Raceta’s small boat were missing.

Just a few miles away, on Central Avenue in Jersey City, the very same explosion threw two-and-a-half-month-old Arthur Tossen from his bed. Unlike Raceta, little Arthur did not survive. He died from shock.

On Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Jewish immigrants were jolted from their sleep by the explosion and streamed out of their tenements in panic and fear. Amid the chaos, a young mother named Dveire, who had recently escaped the war in Russia, calmly took her family into the cellar of their East Broadway tenement to ride out the confusion. Accustomed to the noise of battle, Dveire stayed calm, but many of her neighbors did not, as the sounds of shells exploding in New York Harbor made them fear that war had followed them to the New World.

Throughout the New York metropolitan area and extending as far south as Philadelphia, people were awakened by what they thought was an earthquake. Residents of northern Maryland called their local police to complain. But this was no earthquake.

The epicenter of the explosion that had disturbed the sleep of so many people was a place called Black Tom Island. Though once a small island in New York Harbor, Black Tom had since been connected with the mainland of New Jersey by landfill, making it a peninsula that jutted out nearly a mile into the harbor. Piers and warehouses were built along its shoreline and railroad tracks connected them to points west.

A fire had started sometime after midnight on board one of the barges docked at the National Dock and Storage Company’s facility at Black Tom. Dozens of these boats were lined up along the piers at Black Tom, while locomotive cars waited at the terminal, their contents to be loaded onto those boats the following Monday. Some were filled with sugar and tobacco, but most were stocked with dynamite, ammunition, shells, and other tools of war headed for Britain, Russia, and France.

Two hours after it began, the fire eventually reached one of the ships filled with munitions, setting off the great explosion that had awakened so many people for miles around. For three hours after the first blast, more explosions followed and the fire spread to other ships. Huge towers of flames lit the early morning sky. Shrapnel dug huge pits in the Statue of Liberty on Bedloe’s Island, some two hundred yards from Black Tom.

Thousands of windows in the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan were blown out; the buildings looked as if “they had been targets for scattering handfuls of rocks from some great giant.” The Brooklyn Bridge swayed. Smoldering embers continued to explode shells as late as twenty-four hours after the first explosion, causing firemen and others surveying the wreckage to duck for cover. Twelve people in Manhattan were taken to local hospitals to be treated for cuts from shattered glass.

Almost the entire Black Tom facility was reduced to rubble. Warehouses became piles of large splinters, stacked almost a hundred feet in the air. Railroad cars from the Lehigh Valley Railroad Company were now burning hulks. Rails that helped speed goods to the dock were now gnarled and twisted pieces of metal pointing in all directions. Six piers had become smoking ruins, along with thirteen warehouses, eighty-five fully loaded railroad cars, and over one hundred barges.

The explosion was felt on Ellis Island, just a few hundred yards northeast of Black Tom. The
New York Times
described it in the wake of the blast as “a war-swept town.” Almost every window on the island was shattered by the concussive effect of the explosions. Shrapnel and other debris were strewn across the island. The terra-cotta ceiling of the main hospital had caved in. The iron-bound door of the main building was jammed inward, as if hit by a direct dynamite blast. An Ellis Island doctor, watching the fire on Black Tom, was thrown fifteen feet against a wall by the power of the blast.

The few barges filled with explosives that did not blow up from the fire had been set loose from their moorings and drifted threateningly toward Ellis Island. Two of them hit the pier there, but softly enough to prevent another explosion. Workers at the island doused the ships with water.

Over three hundred immigrants spending the night at Ellis Island were evacuated to Battery Park, but the mentally ill detainees were kept on the island. They were brought out to the east side of the island, where they were treated to a pyrotechnic extravaganza as rocket shells continually shot over the island like flares, exploding in a large arc of fire. These patients, not aware of what had happened or the danger involved, “clapped their hands and cheered, laughed and cried, thinking it was a show which had been arranged for their particular amusement.”

It took Jersey City authorities little more than twenty-four hours to make their first arrest. The city’s commissioner of public safety, Frank Hague, ordered the arrests of the head of the National Dock and Storage Company and the local agent for the Lehigh Valley Railroad on charges of manslaughter. Hague was upset that the blast had killed one of his own men, Jersey City patrolman James Dougherty, who died when a warehouse collapsed on top of him while he was investigating the original fire.

Authorities were adamant that there was no evidence that foreign plotters were to blame. Officials from the Lehigh Valley Railroad went so far as to chalk up the fire to spontaneous combustion. Never mind that the destruction of so many military explosives would have cheered the German kaiser. Americans were cozily snug in their cocoon, secure in the thought that the vast Atlantic Ocean would buffer them from Europe’s deadly storms. The war in Europe, already two years old, was a distant event for most Americans.

But the nearly $50 million worth of damage caused by the explosion was not a mere accident or spontaneous combustion; rather, it was the deliberate act of human hands. Just before midnight, two German saboteurs, Lothar Witzke and Kurt Jahnke, arrived by rowboat at the lightly guarded Black Tom facility. A third man, Michael Kristoff, joined them by land. The three then lit several small fires and set a number of timed explosives in the boxcars and barges filled with ammunition and shells. Within fifteen minutes, the watchmen at Black Tom began to see fires throughout the complex, which would soon burn out of control. Two hours later, these fires would set off the massive explosions that rocked the New York area.

Witzke, Jahnke, and Kristoff were part of a larger plot by the German government to sabotage the Allied war effort. Though technically neutral, the United States had been aiding its friends in Europe, and now Germany responded by waging a quiet war of sabotage against the United States.

Although the explosion’s immediate effect on Ellis Island was measured mostly in broken windows, its long-term effect would be felt with grave consequences for the way that America viewed immigrants. Americans of English stock would be dismayed by the reaction of German- and Irish-Americans who sympathized with Germany against England. Alien immigrants would morph into alien enemies.

The road to the Japanese internment camps of World War II began at Black Tom Island and continued right through Ellis Island. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was serving as assistant secretary of the navy in 1916, reportedly told an aide after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor: “We don’t want any more Black Toms.”

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, April 6, 1917, when Congress declared a state of war with Imperial Germany. After three years of avoiding ethnic squabbles that were ripping apart Europe, and less than a year after the devastation at Black Tom, the United States was officially at war. Two million American soldiers would soon be heading for France, many of them country boys from small-town America who had never ventured far from home.

However, President Woodrow Wilson went beyond simply declaring Germany the enemy of America. More than half of his war proclamation dealt not with affairs in Europe but with a class of individuals he termed “alien enemies.”

Any male over the age of fourteen born in Germany, residing in the United States, and not a naturalized U.S. citizen, overnight became an alien enemy, part of a potential fifth column ready to strike America on behalf of the kaiser. Such individuals were banned from possessing any weapons or operating a plane. Alien enemies were barred from living within half a mile of any military base, aircraft station, navy yard, or munitions factory. Such aliens could not “write, print or publish any attack or threat against the Government or Congress of the United States.” Above all, no enemy alien could give aid or comfort to Germany, assist its war effort, or disturb the “public peace or safety of the United States.” Anyone suspected of violating these orders was subject to summary arrest and confinement. No trial or hearing was necessary.

This action was not unprecedented, but was based on the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which stated that if the United States was ever at war with a foreign nation, all adult males from that country residing in the United States who had not become naturalized citizens were deemed “alien enemies” and “shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured and removed.” The legislation was part of a series of laws known collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts, pushed through by members of the Federalist Party as the nation prepared for a possible war against France. While the other parts of the Alien and Sedition Acts either expired or were repealed, the Alien Enemies Act still remains law more than two hundred years later.

After Wilson’s proclamation, the government wasted little time in exercising its prerogative. America’s first wartime action took place not in Europe but on American soil, using agents from the Immigration Service. On the night of Wilson’s war proclamation, federal agents began rounding up German alien enemies and taking them to Ellis Island for indefinite detention. Literally overnight, Ellis Island’s role changed from an immigrant inspection station to a military detention facility.

As for targets, officials did not have to look far. Less than a mile up the Jersey coast from Black Tom stood Hoboken: the “Mile Square City,” the self-proclaimed birthplace of baseball and the hometown of Frank Sinatra, who was just a sixteen-month-old toddler when America declared war on Germany. In 1916, the tiny city had a large German population, thanks in part to the fact that the North German Lloyd and Hamburg-American steamship lines docked at Hoboken.

With war declared against Germany, steamships owned by German companies docked at American piers on April 6, including the
President Lincoln
and
President Grant
, were seized by the federal government. All German nationals working on those ships or on the docks were rounded up and taken to Ellis Island.

These men who made their living bringing immigrants to the United States now found themselves in detention. The ships whose steerage sections once carried immigrants would soon be shuttling American troops to the European front. A year later, German torpedoes would sink the
President Lincoln
off the coast of France.

The German officers and crew members were not prisoners of war and did not receive trials. Deemed alien enemies, they were rounded up and detained using the administrative apparatus of immigration law. The almost 1,500 Germans caused little trouble during their stay on Ellis Island, although they complained that they could not get beer. The men filled their days with calisthenics, games, and reading. The commissioner of Ellis Island found the men “obedient to discipline” and resigned to their situation.

One exception was the case of George Begeman, an officer on the North German Lloyd’s steamship
George Washington
. Begeman, along with three other colleagues, was granted a leave to visit a dentist in Hoboken. While the guard was getting a sandwich, Begeman fled the dentist’s office. He was last seen in a Hoboken bar downing huge schooners of beer and “calling down the curse of the ghost of Mohammed’s black dog on all prohibitionists.” All that was left by the time police arrived was a line of empty beer steins on the bar. “Ach Himmel,” the bartender told police of Begeman, “he vas a great drinker.” Begeman would never be captured.

Another detainee at Ellis Island was thirty-seven-year-old William Hausdorffer, the acting captain of the steamship
Bohemia
. Hausdorffer, his wife, and two small children lived in nearby Bayonne. The Hausdorffer children were born in the United States and therefore citizens, but their parents had not yet become naturalized. Hausdorffer had lived in America since 1906, and his wife since 1899, and the family considered themselves American. Hausdorffer’s crew had even derisively nicknamed him “the American” because he sympathized with the United States over the land of his birth. His wife told officials that her husband was even willing to enlist in the U.S. Army. Nevertheless, Hausdorffer was not a naturalized citizen, and his position with a German company was enough to make him an alien enemy.

Not everyone felt the same way as Hausdorffer. William Koerner, who served as a machinist on the
Vaterland
, was also taken to Ellis Island. When questioned as to which country he sympathized with in the war, his answer was Germany. Koerner, like many of the steamship company workers, also served in the German naval reserve. Though not officially in the military, the status of Koerner and his comrades was enough to convince American officials to hold them as alien enemies.