American Passage (49 page)

Now Ellen Knauff ’s fate rested in the hands of Attorney General McGrath. He was well acquainted with the case and had previously showed no inclination to admit Knauff. But in November 1951, McGrath ordered that Ellen Knauff be admitted to the United States. It is unclear why he changed his mind.

McGrath released his decision at 6:00
P
.
M
. on November 2. Fifteen minutes later, the phone at Ellis Island rang with the good news. Ellen quickly gathered her belongings in time to make the 7:30 ferry to Manhattan. The media was waiting for her at the Manhattan pier, snapping photos of a jubilant and beaming Knauff standing on the ferry. First, she wanted to call her husband with the news. Then, she told reporters, “I want to have a lobster dinner.” Kurt and Ellen had spent more time apart than they had together and now had to decide whether they would make their home in New York or if Ellen would join Kurt while he remained in Germany working for the military.
In total, Ellen Knauff spent nearly twenty-seven months imprisoned on Ellis Island while fighting for her right to become an American. During that time, she penned a book about her case, which was published a few months after her release. Although it contained no new information, it helped to solidify the public impression that she had been a victim of a security-obsessed nation.

However, there were serious charges against Knauff. Though she vigorously denied the accusations and no further evidence was produced to corroborate her accusers, it is still unclear why three Czech refugees would deliberately lie about her. Ellen theorized that the refugees testified against her in an effort to receive U.S. citizenship. She also believed that rumors of her alleged espionage were being spread in Germany by one of her husband’s old flames, who in a fit of jealousy reportedly said that she would do her best to ruin Ellen’s arrival in the United States.

Though she ultimately won her battle against the U.S. government, the victory came at the cost of her marriage, which did not survive the 1950s. With Ellen detained at Ellis Island and Kurt working in Germany, the first three and a half years of their marriage could hardly be termed a honeymoon. After her divorce, Ellen remarried. With her new husband, William Hartley, she cowrote a number of children’s books. Ellen Raphael Boxhorn Knauff Hartley lived a quiet life in America until she passed away in Florida in 1980.

Ellen Knauff ’s plight had gained nationwide publicity. But her case also brought attention to the fact that individuals could be detained and deported without benefit of an official hearing and without any knowledge of the evidence against them.

The widespread sympathy that Ellen Knauff ’s case elicited did not mean any slackening of the nation’s anti-Communism. Ellis Island would continue to serve as a detention center for suspected Communists and other political radicals. One of them was a middle-aged Trinidadian writer named Cyril Lionel Robert James. He was arrested and taken to Ellis Island in June 1952 for his political affiliations and because the government alleged that he had entered the country illegally in the 1930s. Immigration authorities had spent a number of years trying to sort out his immigration status and his political proclivities. Now he was at Ellis Island awaiting deportation.

Following in the footsteps of Emma Goldman and Ellen Knauff, who both used their detention at Ellis Island to write about their plights, C. L. R. James also devoted his time as a prisoner to writing. His unlikely topic was Herman Melville’s
Moby-Dick
. James’s experience at Ellis Island profoundly influenced his reading of Melville’s classic. He would sit at his desk and write, sometimes for twelve hours a day, all the while suffering from painful ulcers made worse by the stress of his confinement. Within a few weeks of his detention, James was living on milk, boiled egg yolks, soft bread, and butter. He was then taken to the U.S. Marine Hospital on Staten Island (in a cost-saving measure, the hospitals on Ellis Island had recently been closed), where he would recuperate under twenty-four-hour guard.

In the final chapter of his Melville book, James wrote what he called “A Natural but Necessary Conclusion.” It was in part the story of his detention at Ellis Island, but more importantly it was James’s attempt to convince the government that he was not a dangerous subversive and should be allowed to remain in the country. James was not in fact a Communist, but a Trotskyite, and a harsh critic of Stalin and the Soviet Union. “I denounced Russia as the greatest example of barbarism that history has ever known,” James wrote. When he arrived at Ellis Island he was placed in a room with five Communists. Because of his past criticisms of Stalin and the Soviet Union, James feared for his life among these men, “conscious of their murderous past, not only against declared and life-long enemies, but against one another.”

The U.S. government was not interested in parsing the internecine battles among Marxists, sorting out Trotskyites from Stalinists. As far as it was concerned, James was a Marxist critic of capitalism and author of books such as
World Revolution 1917–1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International
and
A History of Negro Revolt
. There was enough revolution there to expel him from 1950s America.

As much as he played up his anti-Soviet and anti-Stalinist views in the hopes of being allowed to stay in the country, James pulled no punches when it came to government officials. “Hence on Ellis Island, in particular, the arbitrariness, the capriciousness, the brutality and savagery where they think they can get away with it,” James wrote, “the complete absence of any principle except to achieve a particular aim by the most convenient means to hand.” For his guards, however, he had nothing but kind words. “They were a body of men in a difficult spot,” James wrote, “yet they remained, not as individuals but as a body of men, not only human but humane.” Although the government continued to refer to individuals like him as detainees, James thought it “a mockery for me to assist them in still more deceiving the American people.” He and the others at Ellis Island were nothing less than prisoners.

James was freed on bail in October 1952 after four months in detention. His Melville book,
Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In
, was released the following year. Despite the fierce anti-Communism that only a Trotskyite could muster, James was eventually deported to England in 1953. There, he made a living as a writer on cricket. He also traveled back and forth to his native Trinidad, where he became involved in local politics. James eventually returned to the United States for extended visits in the 1970s, when Ellis Island was a dim memory and the Cold War a growing embarrassment for Vietnam-fatigued Americans.

C. L. R. James died in relative obscurity in 1989. Posthumously, James’s reputation would grow as one of the leading black social critics of the twentieth century.
Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways
would be republished after his death and garner attention in academia and beyond. Ellis Island inspired millions of true-life sagas of joy and heartbreak among the many who passed through there. Few could imagine that it also inspired a major work of literary criticism.

At least C. L. R. James had a home country to which he could be deported. The same could not be said for fifty-two-year-old cabinetmaker Ignatz Mezei. Arriving in February 1950, after a visit to Europe, Mezei was detained at Ellis Island and refused readmittance to the country he had called his home for over twenty-five years. Like Ellen Knauff, Mezei was also refused a hearing because the charges against him were based on confidential information.

Mezei was not a random immigrant to America. He had made his home in Buffalo for a quarter century before returning to Europe in 1948 to visit his dying mother in Romania. However, he ended up detained in Hungary and never managed to make it to see his mother. While in Hungary, his common-law wife, Julia Horvath, arrived from America and the two of them officially married. They then returned to the United States in 1950. While Horvath was allowed to return to Buffalo, Mezei was detained at Ellis Island and ordered excluded. He was denied a hearing and not allowed to see the specific charges against him. The basic accusation was that he had been a member of a Communist-affiliated group while residing in America.

Mezei was ordered deported, but to where? As a court would later declare, “there is a certain vagueness about [Mezei’s] history.” He had arrived in the United States illegally in 1923, having gone overboard in New York Harbor from a ship on which he served as a seaman. He was born in 1897 on a ship off the Straits of Gibraltar, but raised in Hungary and Romania. In his twenty-five years in the United States, Mezei had never become a naturalized citizen. All of this left his actual citizenship uncertain.

This was a dilemma for U.S. officials deciding where to send Mezei. When the government deported him back to France, that nation turned him away. The same thing happened when Mezei was sent to England. The State Department then asked the Hungarian government to take him, but it refused. Mezei wrote to twelve Latin American countries asking for entry, but not one would accept him. Ignatz Mezei was stuck at Ellis Island, a man without a country.

The next step was for Mezei to file a habeas corpus petition. Eventually, his case reached the Supreme Court. While the judicial process unfolded, Mezei was released on a bond in May 1952, after nearly two years imprisoned at Ellis Island. He returned to Buffalo and tried to earn a living as a cabinetmaker while the courts untangled his case.

In March 1953, the Court came to a decision. In a 5-4 ruling that relied heavily on
Knauff
, it declared that the exclusion without a hearing and subsequent detention of Ignatz Mezei at Ellis Island was constitutional. The Court agreed with the Justice Department that Mezei was not actually imprisoned at Ellis Island, since he was free to leave at any time to any country that would accept him. “In short, respondent sat on Ellis Island because this country shut him out and others were unwilling to take him in,” wrote Justice Tom Clark.

The Court again reiterated the plenary power doctrine that recognized that “the power to expel or exclude aliens” was “a fundamental sovereign attribute exercised by the Government’s political departments largely immune from judicial control.” Even though Mezei had previously lived in the United States and was currently on American soil, the Court recognized the legal fiction that Mezei had not formally and legally “entered” the United States and was therefore not eligible for constitutional protections such as due process. “Neither respondent’s harborage on Ellis Island nor his prior residence here transforms this into something other than an exclusion proceeding,” Clark wrote.

In his dissent, Justice Hugo Black complained that Mezei was being excluded at the “unreviewable discretion of the Attorney General,” noting that such powers were more likely found in totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. As he did in
Knauff
, Justice Jackson also dissented in
Mezei
. “Because the respondent has no right of entry, does it follow that he has no rights at all,” Jackson asked. “Does the power to exclude mean that exclusion may be continued or effectuated by any means which happen to seem appropriate to the authorities?” If so, what would stop the government from ejecting Mezei “bodily into the sea or to set him adrift in a rowboat?”

A defeated Mezei returned to Ellis Island in April 1953. His only hope was that Congress might act on his behalf. He arrived at the ferry slip carrying his clothes, his tools, and a bag of apples. “I feel as if I was walking to death,” he said. Mezei still vigorously denied that he was a Communist. “If I were a Communist I would stay in Hungary,” he said, “plenty of jobs in Hungary for Communists.” The prospect of indefinite detention understandably weighed heavily on Mezei. “You don’t do nothing on Ellis Island,” he complained, “you go crazy.”

Unlike Ellen Knauff, Mezei did not elicit a great deal of sympathy from the public, the press, or Congress. Knauff had seen her family die in the Holocaust, had served in the British military during the war, had worked for the American military after the war, and was married to an American GI. Mezei, on the other hand, had arrived in the United States illegally, had lived in the country for twenty-five years without becoming a citizen, and had married Julia Horvath, an American citizen, while in Hungary under suspicious circumstances, most likely in hopes of easing his entry back into the country. “But when we come to this guy,” wrote one of Justice Jackson’s clerks and future Supreme Court chief justice, William Rehnquist, “I have some trouble crying.”

While there was not a great deal of public sympathy for Mezei, much had changed in the United States by the summer of 1954. The new president, a Republican war hero, Dwight D. Eisenhower, successfully sought an end to the unpopular stalemate in Korea. Though the new president had been cautious in his public comments about Senator Joseph McCarthy, it was clear that Eisenhower wanted to cool the domestic anti-Communist fires of the past few years. His new attorney general, Herbert Brownell, would set a new tone in the Justice Department. Mezei would receive his first hearing in February 1954, nearly four years after he was initially detained.

In an unusual move, Brownell created a three-man board to hear Mezei’s case, which consisted not of immigration officials but of outside lawyers, including law professors from Columbia University and New York University.

The government had a strong case against Mezei. The evidence against Ellen Knauff was scant and she could not be directly tied to any espionage. Mezei, however, had been a member of the Hungarian Workers’ Sick Benefit and Education Society, which later merged with the International Workers Order, which the government considered a Communist organization. Mezei admitted to being a leader in his local lodge, but denied being a Communist.

Unfortunately for Mezei, the government had a number of witnesses who contradicted his story. Two former Communists testified that they had seen Mezei at Communist Party meetings and one told the hearing that he had personally recruited him for the party. Three other witnesses told officials that they had heard Mezei making proCommunist statements. In addition to his political problems, Mezei had also been convicted of petty larceny and fined $10 in his earlier stay in Buffalo. While the crime was rather minor, having to do with his possession of bags of stolen flour, this did mean that Mezei could be excluded under the moral turpitude clause.