American Passage (39 page)

Over 1,500 German detainees would spend some time at Ellis Island. For some, their detention would be short. Albert Meyer, who worked as a cook on the steamship
Vaterland
, had been caught up in the dragnet of April 6. He was detained at Ellis Island for two weeks before he could prove to authorities that he was a citizen of Switzerland and therefore not an alien enemy.

Most were not so lucky. In early June, government officials began transferring the German detainees to an internment camp at Hot Springs, North Carolina. First went 470 officers, the captains, engineers, and chief warrant officers. The rest, 1,100 or so crew members and sailors, would follow their officers to North Carolina later. One could have easily mistaken the place for a summer camp, with tidy cabins in a rustic setting, but it was a militarized facility where detainees were not allowed to leave unless given permission. In total, some 2,300 Germans taken into custody throughout the country would be interned at Hot Springs during the war. Thirty-six Germans accused of being spies remained at Ellis Island and would later be removed to Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia.

Some wives of the detainees, not considered alien enemies because of their gender, petitioned the government for the freedom of their husbands. William Koerner’s wife, Paula, was five months pregnant when her husband was taken to Ellis Island. Not only did she lose her husband, but she also had to give up her job making handbags. To help with their situation, Paula and the other wives of steamship crew members received a monthly stipend from their husbands’ employers. Thanks to his wife’s pleadings, Koerner received a three-week parole in August 1917 to be with his wife as she gave birth.

Other cases were more tragic. Herman Byersdorff, the chief engineer of the
Kaiser Wilhelm II
, had been caught in the first roundup of Germans on April 6 and taken to Ellis Island. War had already touched the Byersdorff family. His only son had been killed in battle in France while serving in the German army in 1914, driving Herman’s wife to a nervous breakdown. She was then brought to America to join her husband, which seemed to calm her nerves.

Byersdorff ’s detention once again sent his wife down an emotional spiral. A doctor in Hoboken diagnosed her with severe mental depression bordering on melancholia. From his internment camp in North Carolina, Byersdorff asked to be paroled to be with his distraught wife. As the paperwork for his parole made its way through the federal bureaucracy, Mrs. Byersdorff moved to Hot Springs to be closer to her husband.

Finally, in February 1918, the stress and grief proved too much for Mrs. Byersdorff, who committed suicide almost a year after her husband was taken into custody. Herman received a temporary leave to attend her funeral in Brooklyn, but had to return to North Carolina after two weeks. In June 1918, four months after his wife’s suicide, Herman Byersdorff ’s paperwork finally landed on the right desk and he was granted a parole, a small consolation with his wife and only son dead.

It is unclear why Byersdorff ’s parole should have taken so long. As early as February 1918, William Hausdorffer was paroled. That spring, more paroles followed as the fear of German sabotage subsided. William Koerner left Hot Springs in April 1918.

The militarization of Ellis Island continued after the German detainees were gone. With immigration from Europe slowing to a trickle because of the war, the army took over the island’s hospital for wounded troops, while the navy took over the baggage and dormitory building and used them to quarter sailors waiting for their assignments. At times, as many as 2,500 military men were stationed at Ellis Island, most for no longer than two weeks. At the same time, American soldiers wounded at the European front were also sent to recover at Ellis Island’s hospital. Young American doughboys who had survived the trenches of the Western Front, often at the cost of an arm or a leg, could be seen wandering the grounds of Ellis Island as part of their convalescence.

The man in charge of Ellis Island during this turbulent period was Frederic C. Howe. He knew little about immigration before assuming the job and later admitted that the topic did not interest him greatly. Unlike Ellis Island’s first commissioner, John Weber, whose life was forged in the combat of the Civil War, Howe’s formative experience as a young man was graduate school at Johns Hopkins, where he studied under Professor Woodrow Wilson. Although Howe later became a lawyer, his graduate years instilled in him an idealistic temperament and a restless intellectual curiosity. His job prior to coming to Ellis Island in 1914 was head of the People’s Institute, a debating society for liberal intellectuals in New York.

Whereas William Williams was comfortable, if not smug, with his position in society and his relationship with his ancestors and background, Howe spent most of his life, in his words, “unlearning” the values of his childhood. Raised in a comfortable middle-class, churchgoing, Republican family in western Pennsylvania, Howe worked to rid himself of the lessons and values of his small-town childhood as he moved up in the world and became engaged in politics.

Howe was a Progressive, a man driven to public service to reform a society reeling from the effects of industrialism, mass immigration, and urbanization. Both Williams and Howe possessed a moralism that stoked the engines of reform. Both men saw the world divided between good and bad. For Williams, the good consisted of people of his class and background, the descendants of the Puritan forefathers. The bad were the undesirable new immigrants whose presence brought crime, disease, and political machines and threatened the Republic that Williams’s ancestors had built.

Howe’s heroes were those liberals who also had unlearned the values of their youth and committed themselves to changing the world. His villains were selfish and narrow-minded people who pursued economic self-interest at the expense of the public interest. Unlike William Williams, whose progressivism was based on ideas of efficiency, Howe was a humanist who defined his type of reform as “sentimentality, or the dreaming of dreams.” No one would have ever accused William Williams of being a dreamer.

Howe sought to humanize Ellis Island, a not-too-subtle dig at his predecessor, and saw his new job as “an opportunity to ameliorate the lot of several thousand human beings.” He sought to spruce up the Great Hall, mixing in some Americanization with beautification. Potted plants were placed throughout the grand, yet sterile hall. Photos of American presidents and paintings of important events from American history hung from walls and large American flags from the balcony. Howe also placed suggestion boxes around the station where immigrants, visitors, or employees could voice their complaints.

“I was struck by the dreadful idleness of these poor people,” Howe said of the detainees. “Some three hundred of them were detained here, compelled to sit hour after hour on hard benches in a bare room.” Instead, Howe ordered that benches be brought out of storage and placed on the lawn outside so that immigrants previously cooped up in indoor cells could now enjoy the outdoors. A playground was created for detained children, with an adult supervisor in charge of ball games and jump rope. Sewing materials, periodicals, and toys were now available. English classes were offered, as was schooling for children. One day, an Italian group brought over Enrico Caruso to entertain the detainees for a Sunday afternoon concert.

Despite their differences, Howe and Williams agreed on one thing. Both sought to end discrimination between steerage passengers and those traveling in first- and second-class cabins. The former were always sent to Ellis Island for inspection, while the latter were inspected aboard ship and were only in rare circumstances ordered to Ellis Island.

“Aliens traveling in the cabin are no more exempt from the immigration laws (which apply to
all
aliens) than they are from the customs laws,” Williams wrote. “Some of the most objectionable of the prohibited classes are likely to have means sufficient to enable them to buy a first-class ticket.” Criminals, pimps, and prostitutes were sometimes found in first-class cabins, and steamship officials sometimes listed aliens as citizens, which meant, to the cost-conscious Williams, that the government coffers were being deprived of its $4 immigrant head tax.

In January 1912, ninety-two first- and second-class passengers on the
Carmania
were having a pleasant dinner when immigration officials boarded their ship. They were ordered to stop eating, form a line, and answer questions. The inspection lasted forty-five minutes and netted six people who were sent to Ellis Island for further hearings, including four suspected prostitutes and one notorious embezzler.

News of this inspection provoked outrage. A letter signed “One of the Upper Class, Newport, Rhode Island,” complained to the editor of a New York newspaper. “We of the better class consider the action of the immigration authorities a gratuitous insult,” the indignant writer protested. “There is nothing to my mind that strikes a more violent blow at our ‘position’ and ‘caste’ than . . . the intimation that ‘firstclass’ passengers are not one whit better in the social scale than those horrid people who cross the Atlantic in the nauseating and ill-smelling steerage.”

Fred Howe would go a step further and ask for permission to send all second-class passengers through Ellis Island, along with steerage passengers. Steamship companies complained and forced a public hearing on the matter. “There has always been maintained in this country that distinction between the cabin and the steerage,” said a representative of the steamship companies. “Most of the people who travel secondcabin are most self-respecting people.”

Steamship passengers paid a premium for that distinction. The average cost in 1915 for a first-class passage was between $85 and $120; for second-class passage, $50 to $65; and for steerage, $35 to $46. “A man in the first-cabin might consider it almost a joke to be, as he would express it, put with immigrants,” said the man from the steamship company. “A person in the second cabin would regard it as a very serious protest in his own mind.” The fear that such a measure would cut into the profits of steamship companies, as well as ingrained class prejudice against steerage passengers, meant that the reforms of Williams and Howe went nowhere, and nearly all first- and second-class passengers would continue to bypass Ellis Island.

By this time, however, there were more pressing matters. Most of Howe’s reforms came during a unique period in Ellis Island’s history. For most of his five-year tenure, war raged in Europe. During 1914, 878,000 immigrants came through Ellis Island; the following year the war had brought that number down to 178,000. During Howe’s entire administration, only about half a million immigrants passed through Ellis Island.

While the pressure to inspect large numbers of immigrants had subsided, war created other problems. Those denied entry and ordered deported could not be sent back because of the war. Many of Howe’s reforms were meant to ease conditions on Ellis Island for these men and women stranded because of the violence and destruction at home, yet blocked from legally entering the United States.

Whereas a strict segregation of sexes had been the rule at Ellis Island, Howe allowed men and women to mingle throughout the day on the grounds and in the common detention hall—with matrons keeping an eye out for any illicit activity.

With Ellis Island overflowing with detainees, Howe took a more liberal approach to enforcing the law. He released on bond a number of immigrants designated as feebleminded. A special report by the New York State Department of Labor condemned the move from both an economic and a eugenics standpoint. “The precipitation of feebleminded females or [
sic
] marriageable age without restrain into the community, is to be condemned in the strongest possible terms,” the report complained.

With the controversy over detainees swirling around the island, Howe also tried to reform the operations of Ellis Island. He believed that the money exchange, the railroads, and the food concession all exploited immigrants. When the contract for the food concession expired, he pushed for the federal government to take over the responsibility of feeding immigrants. Deeply suspicious of private enterprise, Howe had previously championed the public ownership of railroads and utility companies. Here was a chance, on a much smaller scale, to push his ideas about the inherent justice and efficiency of public ownership of business. Private business, argued Howe, should not make money off immigrants on government property.

Like many reformers, Howe had a tin ear for politics. He was apparently unaware that New York congressman William S. Bennet was the lawyer for Hudgins & Dumas, the food concessionaire. Bennet was no reactionary; he was the lone dissenting voice on the Dillingham Commission to oppose the literacy test and was an opponent of immigration restriction. However, Howe had touched a nerve—or Bennet’s pocketbook—and the congressman used an amendment to a House bill to block Howe’s plan.

At Bennet’s urging, Congress began an investigation of Howe in the summer of 1916. It focused heavily on the issue of the sexual morality of female immigrant detainees. Bennet charged gross immorality under Howe’s watch, calling him “a half-baked radical” who supported free love.

Even more pointed was Bennet’s charge that Howe was lenient toward immigrant women of questionable morality. The white slavery hysteria meant that more suspected prostitutes were taken to Ellis Island and stranded because of the war. Bennet complained that prostitutes were allowed to mingle during the day with other detainees and that detained Chinese sailors were gambling and cavorting with detained prostitutes.

One case that aroused congressional interest was that of a suspected prostitute named Ella Lebewitz. Officials accused her of having sex with a nineteen-year-old Brazilian male, also in detention. Lebewitz denied the charge and argued she would be foolish to ruin her chances of being allowed into the country. A Labor Department official called her “absolutely incorrigible,” “subnormal or abnormal,” and “positively a degenerate.” Though Howe claimed he had been aware of Lebewetz, he doubted any sexual impropriety.