American Passage (46 page)

The 1930s would represent a low point in U.S. immigration history. The island’s welcoming role continued to shrink, while its more punitive side increased. “An important consequence of restriction has been to make Ellis Island as much an emigrant as an immigrant station,” one newspaper noted. “One may even say that its major activities now are concerned with deportation since of course to slam the front door is to challenge entrance through the back.”

The combination of restrictive quotas and economic distress meant that by 1932, three times as many people left the United States as came to it. In the following year, only 23,068 individuals made the decision to come to immigrate, the smallest number since 1831. Ellis Island had given up its decades-long role as a “proper sieve” to inspect immigrants. By the 1930s, Corsi noted with more than a touch of sadness, “deportation was the big business at Ellis Island.”

With fewer immigrants to process and no longer the nation’s primary gate for inspection, Ellis Island increasingly reverted to a role that it had played sporadically in its history: a prison for unwanted aliens. Much would change in the coming years. World War II and the Cold War would highlight the dangers that existed in the world. As Americans concerned themselves with fighting those threats abroad, they also began looking to threats on the home front. The nation’s immigration laws became increasingly entangled with national security concerns. Once again, Ellis Island would find itself at the center of controversy.

I would never go back to Ellis Island. I spent too much time facing the back of the Statue of Liberty. I always felt that even though she had welcomed immigrants promising the American dream, she turned her back on us just because of our ancestry.

Government counsel ingeniously argued that Ellis Island is his “refuge” whence he [Mezei] is free to take leave in any direction except west. That might mean freedom, if only he were an amphibian.

“HERZLICH WILLKOMMEN! HEIL.” THOSE WORDS ON A large poster greeted visitors to Room 206 at Ellis Island in 1942. This was the headquarters of a small clique of pro-Nazi German nationals who had been detained by the U.S. government as enemy aliens. Even before the United States entered the war, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt was drawing up lists of suspicious aliens to be arrested and detained if and when the country joined the war effort against the Axis powers. J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation spent a great deal of time between 1939 and 1941 collecting information on noncitizens living in the United States who were suspected of sympathizing with Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. In October 1941, the attorney general warned officials at Ellis Island to prepare for an avalanche of wartime detainees.

Hoover had run into bureaucratic difficulties during the Red Scare because the power to detain and deport aliens resided in the Labor Department. Now he would have no such problem. The Immigration Service had been moved to the Justice Department in 1940. Immigration was now officially a law enforcement issue.

On December 8, 1941, as the nation was reeling from the previous day’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Major Lemuel Schofield, head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), wrote to Hoover with a list of individuals “considered for custodial detention” because of their views about Germany and Italy. This information gathering had begun before either of these countries had actually been declared enemies of the United States.

More disturbing still, Schofield’s list included “American citizens sympathetic to Germany” and “American citizens sympathetic to Italy.” In all, over four thousand individuals were under consideration for detention.

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt issued three presidential proclamations declaring nonnaturalized Japanese, Germans, and Italians living in the United States to be enemy aliens. The proclamation against Japanese civilians was issued on December 7; the other two were issued on December 8, 1941, three days before the United States was technically at war with Germany and Italy.

The government wasted little time in rounding up alleged enemy aliens. On December 8, the attorney general ordered Hoover to immediately arrest “alien enemies who are natives, citizens, denizens or subjects of Germany.” They were to be arrested and delivered to the INS for detention. Hoover’s FBI moved at lightning speed. On December 9, 1941, working off the lists it had been compiling for the past two years, FBI agents arrested and detained 497 Germans, 83 Italians, and 1,912 Japanese enemy aliens. The following day saw more than 2,200 additional arrests. Some of these individuals would be quickly released, but a month later the government was holding nearly 2,700 enemy aliens in facilities across the country.

Some of the internees had belonged to organizations like the German-American Bund. Others made comments, whether to neighbors or in letters to the editor, opposing America’s entry into the war. Informants would report to the FBI if they noticed a picture of Hitler in the home of German-Americans or if they overheard comments favorable to the Nazis or opposing the Allies.

This internment of enemy aliens was distinct from the relocation and internment of Japanese and Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, which began in February 1942. Under FDR’s Executive Order 9066, certain zones in the United States could be designated as military areas, off limits to any or all unauthorized personnel. Later that spring, military officials ordered everyone of Japanese ancestry who resided on the West Coast moved to camps in the nation’s interior. This was accomplished by a new agency called the War Relocation Authority. Unlike the military relocation and internment of Japanese-Americans, enemy aliens were rounded up under the auspices of the INS.

A large number of enemy aliens were initially detained at Ellis Island. Four days after Pearl Harbor, 413 German enemy aliens found themselves in detention at Ellis Island. “For the time being,” the
New York Times
wrote of Ellis Island’s new role, “New York has a concentration camp of its own.”

The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the nation’s newly formed wartime intelligence agency, took an interest in the detainees at Ellis Island. In the summer of 1942, it placed an undercover agent there for three weeks. When the unnamed agent filed his report, he told his superiors of a large chink in America’s security. “Ellis Island is undoubtedly a major information spot for the Axis, both for getting it and sending it,” the agent wrote. “There is every reason to suppose that they regard Ellis Island as an important transmission center.”

The OSS report described a tightly organized and disciplined “Nazi clique” among some detainees at Ellis Island. Their informal headquarters was Room 206. They sang the “Horst Wessel Lied” and other Nazi songs and plastered their rooms with drawings and articles mocking the American war effort. “They act as though it were inevitable that Germany win this war,” the report noted. The Nazi sympathizers who congregated around Room 206 “can carry on effective propaganda and intimidate the weak.”

Were these few hundred Germans, Italians, and Japanese held at Ellis Island in the summer of 1942 a major threat to the American war effort? The OSS agent certainly thought so, believing that it “would be strange, indeed, if such well-organized and fanatical Hitlerites only carry on harmless activities. The chances for conspiracy are practically limitless.” He argued that German detainees kept watch on the shipping activity on the docks of New Jersey and reported this information back to Germany. Yet even the OSS agent had to admit that this was largely speculation and that in his three weeks among the detainees, he had found “no actual instance of this happening.”

By the fall of 1942, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was hearing gossip about this OSS report and demanded that an underling get a copy immediately. What angered Hoover was not the far-fetched claims that Nazis were operating an intelligence gathering operation for the Third Reich from Ellis Island. What really concerned him was that the report criticized, in Hoover’s words, “the incompetent and venal custodial practices at Ellis Island.” He wanted all such talk of lax security immediately “scotched.”

Hoover was right. The OSS report was absolutely blistering in its depiction of the guards. “The system of supervision and control is inadequate to cope with experienced conspirators,” the report concluded. The guards were “unpolitical and unobservant.” Most were only interested in their weekly paychecks, sports, food, and drink. “Race prejudice, especially anti-Semitism among the guards, is conspicuous,” the report noted.

The report painted many of the guards as easily corruptible by the petty payoffs and gifts of the detainees. Some of the guards could be found cavorting with detainees, sharing cigars and drinks. Much of the blame for the corruption of officials was placed at the feet of one detainee: William Gerald Bishop. For the remainder of the war, no detainee would give the government more headaches than Bishop.

One Justice Department official called Bishop “one of the most unreliable individuals with whom I ever came into contact,” while another called him one of Ellis Island’s “worst sources of mischiefmaking and corruption of employees.” Bishop was accused of encouraging guards to violate rules, leading to the dismissal of a number of them. He constantly bullied uncooperating guards and officials by threatening them with his “political influence.” At various times, he incited a hunger strike among the detainees, stole food from the dining hall, and was accused of abusing and cursing Jewish guards. It was reported that Bishop had three white poison tablets hidden in a pencil that he said were meant for Jewish guards. “If I can’t make them leave the Island one way, I will make them leave another,” Bishop is reported to have told a fellow detainee.

Not only did Bishop enjoy many privileges on the island, but he also spent a great deal of time in Manhattan on leave. A friendly eye doctor would require Bishop to make weekly appointments for exams. Guards would accompany him to the doctor’s office, but were easily paid off in food, drinks, and cigars, and would allow Bishop to visit friends and do as he pleased until it was time to return to the island.

Although Bishop was taken to Ellis Island on February 27, 1942, his problems had actually begun back in January 1940, when J. Edgar Hoover held a press conference to announce that the FBI had arrested seventeen members of an organization known as the Christian Front for plotting to bomb various buildings in New York. Hoover claimed that the plotters had hoped these bombings would eventually lead to the overthrow of the U.S. government. “Plots were discussed for the wholesale sabotage and blowing up of all these institutions so that a dictatorship could be set up here, similar to the Hitler dictatorship in Germany,” Hoover dramatically claimed. The alleged plotters were going to start their revolution with eighteen cans of explosives, twelve Springfield rifles, and assorted other guns and ammunition. One of their leaders was William Gerald Bishop.

During the spring 1940 trial of the Christian Front plotters, all of his fellow codefendants turned against Bishop, portraying him as a hothead who wanted to commit violence against the government, a man whose rhetoric was so extreme some of them believed he had to be a government informant. It was Bishop who admitted stealing many of the weapons and ammunition from a National Guard armory. In keeping with later government reports, the trial also showed Bishop to be suffering delusions of grandeur. He asserted that prominent politicians, such as Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, were among his supporters. He also claimed to have fought in the 1930s with Spanish rebels in North Africa, where he served as secretary to General Francisco Franco.

In June, the jury came back with its verdict. In a slap to the government, it acquitted nine of the men, while the cases of five others, including Bishop, ended in a hung jury. (Two men found their cases dropped before coming to trial and one committed suicide.) Shortly thereafter, the government quietly dropped its case against the five remaining defendants.

However, Bishop’s troubles had just begun. During the trial, his citizenship had become a subject of debate. At various points, he referred to his birthplace as Salem, Massachusetts; California; Switzerland; and Vienna, Austria. At trial, he finally admitted that he was born abroad and had entered the country in 1926 as an illegal stowaway, leaving him vulnerable to the much looser rules of immigration law. Immediately after Bishop’s legal case ended in a hung jury, officials issued a warrant for his deportation. Because of the war in Europe, the government suspended the order and Bishop remained free.

By February 1942, Bishop faced another threat. He was now considered an enemy alien, since authorities declared his place of birth as Austria, though this was unusual since Austrian citizens were generally not considered enemy aliens. He was now brought to Ellis Island with hundreds of other accused enemy aliens.

Though Bishop was vocal about his support for Nazi Germany, the OSS report was careful to note that many of those imprisoned on the island were not Nazis and several were “on the verge of a nervous breakdown only because of this intolerable Nazi atmosphere.” These unfortunate individuals had been caught up in a bureaucratic dragnet based on false accusations.

One of them was the forty-nine-year-old Italian opera singer Ezio Pinza. The leading basso at the Metropolitan Opera, Pinza was arrested at his home in suburban New York in March 1942 as an enemy alien. The news of his arrest made the front page of the
New York Times
. Pinza would spend nearly three months in detention at Ellis Island and feared that his career was over.

The FBI had talked to a number of informants willing to peddle salacious stories about Pinza, including a fellow opera singer who resented him and former girlfriends jealous that he had recently married another woman. The case against Pinza rested on a number of allegations: he had owned a ring with a Nazi swastika on it; he had a boat from which he broadcast secret radio messages to Europe; he was friends with Mussolini and was even nicknamed after the dictator; he sent out coded messages during his performances at the Metropolitan Opera; he had organized a collection of gold and silver at a benefit for the Italian government in 1935. Only the last charge had any merit. Pinza, along with other Italians working at the Met, contributed to a benefit for Italy, but less out of sympathy for fascism than for patriotic support for their homeland. The benefit occurred after Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, which Pinza, like most Italians, supported at the time.

Thanks to a good lawyer and the dogged persistence of his wife, Pinza was able to prove his innocence. He was even able to enlist the aid of New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia, whose dentist was Pinza’s father-in-law. He was eventually released on parole from Ellis Island in June and had to report weekly to his local doctor, who acted as his sponsor. On Columbus Day 1942, a few months after Pinza’s release, the Roosevelt administration lifted the enemy alien designation from Italians living in the United States, but it was not until 1944 that Pinza received his unconditional release.

Ironically, three years after his release, Pinza was invited to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at a welcome-home celebration for General George Patton at the Los Angeles Coliseum. In 1950, Pinza won a Tony Award for his role in the Broadway musical
South Pacific.
Yet he never completely got over the heartbreak of his wartime detention. His widow, Doris, charged that his imprisonment worsened his heart condition and helped speed his early death in 1957 at the age of sixty-four.