American Passage (44 page)

This time, her boyfriend, Dana E. Robinson, the son of the Ellis Island doctor to whom Frederic Howe had paroled Giulietta in 1916, wrote officials to plead for mercy. He was very much in love with Giulietta (whom he referred to by her Americanized name, Juliette) and wanted to marry her. There had been no further charges against her in the last five years and Robinson found it “hard indeed to believe that the old charges are true as she has been under the careful and kind attention of my mother for the past three years.” Despite her documented past and abandoned family in Italy, Robinson stated that his beloved Juliette was “as good a girl morally as any” and promised that their mutual love would keep them morally pure.

On the word of Robinson and his mother, Paula, Giulietta was once again released. It appeared that Howe had been correct that she could turn around her life and there appears no evidence that Giulietta had fallen back into a life of prostitution. But the happy ending that Frederic Howe, Dana Robinson, and many others had hoped for never materialized. Within three months, Paula Robinson wrote to the Labor Department. “I have to confess,” she wrote in anguish, “that when I asked for clemency in the case of Juliette Lamarca I made the gravest mistake of my life.”

It is hard to tell what went wrong in those few months, but something clearly did. According to Paula Robinson, Juliette threatened that neither the government nor Paula would “have anything further to say about what she does and that if the Government does anything to her, she will show them what she can do.” Juliette vowed that if she were turned over to immigration officials, she would take her story to the newspapers and ruin the Robinson family by publicizing the fact that Dana was going to marry a former prostitute. She also threatened to have the Black Hand kill both mother and son if they turned her over to immigration authorities.

Did Juliette Lamarca finally have enough of the harassment of immigration officials and the threat of deportation that lingered over her head for five years? Was she merely exerting her independence from a meddling future mother-in-law? Or was she a scheming conniver who had latched onto a prosperous American fiancé and, once married, was going to kick her mother-in-law out of her house, as Paula Robinson feared? Juliette was clearly not a naïve woman, having seen the world from the brothels of Algiers and the Brooklyn docks. Perhaps her intentions were less than admirable, or perhaps she had just snapped under the pressure of such prolonged and intrusive scrutiny.

What we do know is that less than two weeks after receiving Mrs. Robinson’s letter, immigration officials rescinded Juliette’s stay of deportation. Four days later, she was taken to Ellis Island for the third time in five years, and on December 3, 1921, she was deported back to Italy.

H
ENRY
H. C
URRAN
,
THE
new commissioner of Ellis Island, took office on July 1, 1923, the morning after the mad dash of steamers at midnight. A feisty and irreverent New York politician who had spent his adult life working in politics as an outnumbered Republican in a Democratic city, Curran had run for mayor in 1921, losing to his Democratic opponent by a margin of more than two to one. No wonder the reserved Calvin Coolidge found Curran “a little peppery.”

His new job at Ellis Island seemed only slightly less quixotic than his mayoral campaign. When first approached for the job, Curran responded: “My God, but . . . that stuff is all over.” He was correct that the best days of Ellis Island were behind it, but after witnessing the mad rush of steamships, Curran knew things were not entirely done.

Curran referred to Ellis Island as a “red-hot stove,” something with which his predecessors would have agreed. The facilities, operations, and morale at Ellis Island were at their lowest since the days of the McSweeney-Powderly feud two decades earlier. Part of the problem rested with the weak administrative talents of Fred Howe, but the larger problem had to do with the wartime use of Ellis Island. Detaining German sailors and IWW radicals and housing wounded doughboys had taxed the island’s infrastructure. With immigration at a near standstill, the workforce at Ellis Island was severely reduced in a cost-saving measure. Even after the war, the government showed little desire to spend more money on its operations.

“It was a poor place to be detained,” Curran thought to himself when he began work. The waters surrounding the island were thick with sewage. Rats and mice made the buildings their home, and bedbugs nested in the sleeping quarters of the detainees. Curran’s greatest reform was convincing Congress to appropriate money to replace the wire bunks, stacked three high with a stretch of canvas serving as a mattress, with real beds for the detainees.

There was little that Curran could do to silence the never-ending criticism of Ellis Island. In 1921,
The Outlook
magazine had called Ellis Island “one of the most efficient factories in the world for the production of hatred of America and American institutions.” Another magazine warned that the “hatred that Ellis Island breeds is spreading like a plague to increase the discontent which menaces our institutions and the Government itself.” Such criticism had been a constant since the facility opened, but by the early 1920s, the cries of one ethnic group in particular had reached a crescendo. While many ethnic and religious groups complained about poor treatment or exclusionary policies, British citizens had another grievance entirely.

Complaints by the British were not new. Back in 1903, a Protestant missionary working at Ellis Island told an investigative commission that the English had a reputation as proverbial “grumblers,” although the missionary noted that most of the complaints centered on British detainees being forced to sleep with blankets that had been used by non-British foreigners. One of Ellis Island’s most famous grumblers was the Reverend Sydney Herbert Bass, whose brief 1911 detainment made headlines.

Even Fred Howe noted that the British gave him the most trouble during the war years. When detained, an Englishman would rush to the telephone to complain to the British Embassy. When deported, “he sizzled in his wrath over the indignities he was subjected to.” English citizens were indignant at being forced to endure inspection by immigration authorities. “All Englishmen seemed to assume that they had a right to go anywhere they liked,” Howe remembered with some exasperation, “and that any interference with this right was an affront to the whole British Empire.”

The British seemed especially perturbed by being forced to interact with other, seemingly inferior, immigrants. British subjects held at Ellis Island considered other immigrants to be foreigners and refused to sleep in the same room as them. Britain’s undersecretary of state for foreign affairs, Roland McNeill, complained that the facilities at Ellis Island were basically for people “of a low standard of conduct” and a hardship for those of “any refinement, especially women.”

A female British journalist named Ishbel Ross traveled through Ellis Island to report on conditions for the
New York Tribune
. She seemed quite animated by the prospect of mixing with the “steerage hordes,” those poor immigrants who not only lacked the proper social graces, but who had also gone without a bath for a long time. “It must unquestionably shock immigrants of any degree of refinement to come into intimate and enforced contact with the strange assortment of humanity that seethes into the country through the gates of Ellis Island,” Ross noted.

There had been a long litany of complaints by British subjects at their treatment at Ellis Island, but now the issue reached the British Parliament. Speakers there likened Ellis Island to “the Black Hole of Calcutta.” As the
Literary Digest
put it: “Ellis Island a Red Rag to John Bull.”

The British continued to argue that they were entitled to special privileges, including the right not to be mixed with uncouth and less cultured immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. But despite the ideas of Nordic and Anglo-Saxon superiority that floated through the air, most American officials had little compunction about subjecting the British to the immigration laws. To the Americans, most of the British aliens coming through Ellis Island were just that: aliens.

What the British wanted was to be segregated from others at Ellis Island. There was already some segregation by class at Ellis Island. While all detainees ate at common tables in the dining hall, sleeping accommodations were structured like steamships. First-class and second-class passengers, noted Ishbel Ross, possessed smaller rooms with fewer people; first-class passengers were even allowed to sleep in individual beds. Both classes received mattresses instead of canvas, with clean sheets and pillows with pillowcases. Detainees who arrived in steerage received more spartan accommodations.

Yet this was not enough for the British. In late 1922, the British ambassador, A. C. Geddes, made a tour of Ellis Island and reported his findings to Parliament. Contrary to some of the criticisms of his fellow Englishmen, Geddes’s report was moderate in tone and sympathetic to the plight of immigration officials. Like many British critics, Geddes blamed other immigrants for much of the problem. “Many of the immigrants are innocent of the most rudimentary understanding of the meaning of the word ‘clean,’ ” he reported. “If they were all accustomed to the same standards of personal cleanliness and consideration for their fellows, Ellis Island would know few real difficulties.” This “pungent odor of unwashed humanity” mixed with more general odors to give Ellis Island a “flat, stale smell” that lingered with Geddes for thirty-six hours after he left.

“I should prefer imprisonment in Sing Sing to incarceration on Ellis Island awaiting deportation,” wrote Geddes, clearly affected by what he had seen. He provided a list of suggested improvements, including fresh paint, better ventilation, and a thorough cleaning of the facility. Geddes thought Ellis Island was too small to handle large numbers of aliens. Rather than just build a new and larger facility, Geddes suggested a number of separate and smaller inspection stations for different classes of aliens.

It soon became clear just what kind of segregation Geddes had in mind. “After considering the matter with some care,” Geddes concluded, “I have come to think that it might be feasible to divide the stream into its Jewish and non-Jewish parts.” The report complained about Ellis Island doctors examining immigrants for veneral diseases. “I saw one nice, clean-looking Irish boy examined immediately after a very unpleasant-looking individual who, I understood, came from some Eastern European district,” Geddes reported. “The doctor’s rubber gloves were with hardly a second’s interval in contact with his private parts after having been soiled, in the surgical sense at least, by contact with those of the unpleasant-looking individual.”

Curran dismissed the report and nothing came of its recommendations. When he arrived at Ellis Island, Curran was sympathetic to immigrants and proved willing to bend the rules on occasion. When a Hungarian girl was ordered deported because the quota had already been met, Curran noticed that she was carrying a violin and asked her to play. When she was done, Curran declared her an artist, a category that was exempt under the quotas, and she was allowed to enter.

Curran admitted that restricting immigration was the last thing on his mind when he took office, but he was soon arguing that America would be better off with fewer immigrants, or none at all—at least for a time. “Take again the intelligence, honesty and cleanliness of the average immigrant of today,” Curran warned. “Those who have served at Ellis Island for thirty years and more will tell you that he is below his predecessor of a generation ago—far below, by all three counts.” That would have been news to Americans in the 1890s who claimed that the immigration of
that
era was significantly inferior to what had arrived thirty years earlier.

Though this made Curran sound like William Williams, Curran’s heart was not in the job of restricting immigrants. When he received another job offer, he dropped his position at Ellis Island “like a hot cake.” “I have never seen such concentrated human sorrow and suffering as I saw at Ellis Island,” Curran later wrote. “Three years were enough.”

Congress had already reauthorized the 3 percent quota twice, but in 1924 it was ready for even stricter measures. Eventually, Congress agreed to a new quota of 2 percent of each foreign-born nationality based on the 1890 Census, with a ceiling for quota immigrants around 287,000. The rationale for using the 1890 Census instead of the 1910 Census was clear. There were far fewer Italians, Greeks, Poles, Jews, and Slavs in the country then. In fact, the new quotas meant that almost 85 percent of the quota allotments would go to northern Europeans. The Italian quota went from roughly 40,000 a year to 3,845; the Russian quota from about 34,000 to just 2,248 and the Greek quota went from just over 3,000 to a negligible 100.

There were even more changes. Beginning in 1925, the inspection of immigrants moved from American ports to American consulates abroad. People who wanted to come to the United States sought permission at the nearest American consulate, whose officers were tasked with inspecting the individual and making sure he or she would make a desirable immigrant. Upon successful inspection and the payment of a fee, consular officials would grant the individual a visa.

It was now the responsibility of American consulate officials to make sure potential immigrants met the monthly quota, which was now reduced to 10 percent per month of the yearly quota. This eliminated the mad midnight dash of steamships across the Narrows.

The shifting of inspection to American consulates abroad was a measure sought for many years by Americans on both sides of the immigration debate. Senator William Chandler argued as far back as 1891 that consular inspections, far from the prying eyes of the press and immigrant-aid societies, would be stricter and conducted without the intervention of friends, relatives, and politicians seeking the immigrant’s entry.

Fiorello La Guardia was also a proponent. Before his stint at Ellis Island he had served as a consular official in the port city of Fiume, where he conducted his own inspection of potential immigrants. Granting immigrants official permission to land
before
their transatlantic journey meant the end, with rare exceptions, of the heart-wrenching scenes of exclusion and deportation at Ellis Island and other ports. Immigrants who had sold all their property in order to come to America now possessed a visa that practically guaranteed their entry into the country. Of course, with the new stricter quotas, far fewer immigrants would actually experience that luxury and peace of mind.