American Passage (60 page)

192
While he had expressed
: Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Herbert Knox Smith, January 18, 1909, TR; Watchorn,
Autobiography,
149–152.
192
Prescott Hall had been
: Letter from Prescott Hall to Hon. William Howard Taft, December 8, 1908, File 801, IRL.
192
Despite the criticism
:
NYT
, April 25, May 19, 1909.
193
The personal attacks
:
NYT
, July 17, 1909; Letter from Robert Watchorn to Charles D. Hilles, January 20, 1913, Series 6, Reel 451, WHT. After leaving Ellis Island, Watchorn took a job with Union Oil Company, having befriended its owner Lyman Stewart. Despite Watchorn’s lack of experience in the oil industry or in business in general, he was named treasurer of the company. Many board members opposed him, believing him to be incompetent. The former coal miner, union leader, and government bureaucrat was soon traveling to New York and London to raise capital among the world’s savviest financiers. Watchorn was out of his element, and accusations of ethical impropriety followed him in his new career. He soon managed to upset Stewart and cast doubt on his own honesty and competence when he became involved in a controversy over a million dollars’ worth of stock options given to him by Stewart. Details of the deal remain murky, but it led to Watchorn’s resignation under a cloud of suspicion. Then, having entered the world of oil wildcatting in Oklahoma and Texas, Watchorn became a millionaire and by the 1930s had turned his attention to philanthropy. He endowed a church in his hometown of Alfreton, England, and a music hall at the University of Redlands. In 1932, Watchorn presented his greatest piece of philanthropy—the Lincoln Memorial Shrine—to his adopted hometown of Redlands, California. See Frank J. Taylor and Earl M. Welty,
Black Bonanza: How an Oil Hunt Grew into the Union Oil Company of California
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950) 165–166; Watchorn,
Autobiography,
154–162, 185–211.
193
Just as Roosevelt
: Letter from William Howard Taft to Herbert Parsons, May 17, 1909, Series 8, WHT;
NYT
, May 20, 1909.
193
Even after leaving
: William Williams, “The Sifting of Immigrants,”
Journal of Social Science
, September 1906.
194
Although he questioned
: Williams, “The Sifting of Immigrants,”
NYT
, July 18, 1909.
194
The letter of the law
: “Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration,” 1909, 132;
NYT
, June 5, 1909.
195
It also possessed
: William C. Van Vleck,
The Administrative Control of Aliens; A Study in Administrative Law and Procedure
(New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1932), 54.
195
Realizing this
: “Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration,” 1909, 133; President Theodore Roosevelt, “First Annual Message to Congress,” December 3, 1901.
196
Now Williams was
: He called the $25 test “nothing more than a timely warning to immigrants that they cannot land without funds adequate for their support until such times as they are likely to obtain profitable employment.” Letter from William Williams to A.J. Sabath, July 15, 1909, File 52531-12, INS.
196
Williams’s edict had
: “Annual Report of the Commissioner of Ellis Island to Commissioner-General of Immigration,” August 16, 1909;
NYT
, June 30, 1909.
196
Conditions worsened
:
NYT
, July 14, 1909.
197
On July 4, Rudniew
: Isaac Metzker, ed.,
A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 98–100;
AH
, July 16 1909, 278.
197
Williams was unmoved
:
NYT,
July 10, 1909.

197
Many Americans were
: Letter from Russell Bellamy to William Williams, July 12, 1909; Letter from Prescott Hall to William Williams, July 14, 1909, WWNYPL.

197
Eighty-two-year-old Orville Victor
: Letter from Orville Victor to William Williams, July 17, 1909; Letter from William Patterson to William Williams, July 8, 1909, WW-NYPL.

198
Not all of Williams’s
: Letter from an anonymous pupil at PS 62 in Manhattan to William Williams, undated, WW-NYPL.
198
The child who wrote
: On the history of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, see, Mark Wischnitzer,
Visas to Freedom: The History of HIAS
(Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Company, 1956).
198
The HIAS took on
: “Brief for the Petitioner in the Matter of Hersch Skuratowski,” 1909, File 52530-12, INS; Esther Panitz, “In Defense of the Jewish Immigrant, 1891–1924,” in Abraham Karp, ed.,
The Jewish Experience in America
, vol. 5 (Waltham, MA: American Jewish Historical Society, 1969).
199
The lawyers were not
:
NYT
, July 16, 1909; Max J. Kohler,
Immigration and Aliens in the United States: Studies of American Immigration Laws and the Legal Status of Aliens in the United States
(New York: Bloch, 1936), 54–55.
199
There was something
: “Brief for the Petitioner in the Matter of Hersch Skuratowski,” 1909, 46–61, File 52530-12, INS.
200
The controversy over
: For an overview of the issue of racial classifications, see Marian L. Smith, “INS Administration of Racial Provisions in U.S. Immigration and Nationality Law Since 1898,”
Prologue
, Summer 2002.
200
Powderly and his colleagues
: See File 52729/9, INS; Joel Perlmann, “ ‘Race or People’: Federal Race Classifications for Europeans in America, 1898–1913,” Jerome Levy Economics Institute Working Paper No. 320, January 2001; “Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration,” vol. 15, 1901, 132–133; “Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration,” 1898, 33–34; “Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration,” 1899, 5. Patrick Weil claims that “immigration officials continued to use the statistics provided by the list to deny admission to immigrants of certain ethnic backgrounds, even when their exclusion was not specifically provided for by law.” Weil provides no support for his hypothesis. Patrick Weil, “Races at the Gate: A Century of Racial Distinctions in American Immigration Policy, 1865–1965,”
Georgetown Immigration Law Journal
15 (2001).
201
For Jews, this new classification
: Panitz, “In Defense of the Jewish Immigrant, 1891–1924,” 55–57; Nathan Goldberg, Jacob Lestchinsky, and Max Weinreich,
The Classification of Jewish Immigrants and its Implications
(New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1945); Perlmann, “ ‘Race or People’: Federal Race Classifications for Europeans in America, 1898–1913.” The Hebrew classification was eliminated in 1943.
201
Decades later
: Kohler,
Immigration and Aliens in the United States,
400–401.
201
Now it was William Williams’s
: Memo from William Williams to Commissioner-General of Immigration, September 8, 1909, File 52531-12A, INS.
201
Williams was not happy
:
NYT
, July 16, 1909.
201
Williams assumed
: Letter from Frank Larned to Williams Williams, July 23, 1909, File 52531-12A, INS; Letter from William Williams to Frank Larned, July 20, 1909, File 52531-12, INS.
202
After the resolution
:
NYT
, July 27, 1909; Letter from Charles Nagel to William Williams, July 16, 1909, CN.
202
“There is no more need”
:
NYT
, July 27, 1909; Letter from Charles Nagel to William Williams, July 31, 1909, CN.
203
The following year
:
Canfora v. Williams
, 1911, reprinted in Edith Abbott, ed.,
Immigration: Select Documents and Case Records
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1924), 256–258; File 53139-7, INS.
203
These cases show
:
U.S. v. Ju Toy
, 198 U.S. 253 (1905).
204
However, the Department of Commerce
: File 53438-11, INS. 205
These supposedly weak
: Amy Fairchild argues that the immigration inspection process was part of the shaping of a modern, industrial workforce. See Amy L. Fairchild,
Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). For a discussion of the exclusion of immigrants with physical deficiencies, see Douglas C. Baynton, “Defectives in the Land: Disability and American Immigration Policy, 1882–1924,”
Journal of American Ethnic History
, Spring 2005.
205
In 1902, commissioner-general
: Letter from Frank Sargent to William Williams, October 6, 1902, WW-NYPL.
205
Medical officials
: For more on the designation of “poor physique,” see Fairchild,
Science at the Borders,
165–169.
205
Sargent defined
: Letter to all Commissioners of Immigration and inspectors from Frank Sargent, Commissioner General, Bureau of Immigration, April 17, 1905, File 916, Folder 1, IRL.
205
William Williams agreed
: Letter from William Williams to Prescott Hall, April 10, 1904, File 916, Folder 1, IRL; Williams, “The Sifting of Immigrants.” 205
He had been
: Allan McLaughlin, “Immigration and the Public Health”
PSM
, January 1904.
206
Doctors with the
: Fairchild,
Science at the Borders,
166–167; Elizabeth Yew, “Medical Inspection of Immigrants at Ellis Island, 1891–1924,”
Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine
56, no. 5 (June 1980).
206
This did not mean
: “Book of Instructions for the Medical Inspection of Aliens, Bureau of Public Health and Marine-Hospital Service,” January 18, 1910. 206
In the first
: Letter from Robert Watchorn to Prescott Hall, May 12, 1908, File 958, IRL.
207
When Williams took
: William Williams, “Notice Concerning Detention and Deportation of Immigrant,” March 18, 1910, Folder 10, Box 13, MK. On the connection between deafness and the “likely to become a public charge” clause, see Douglas C. Baynton, “ ‘The Undesirability of Admitting Deaf Mutes’: U.S. Immigration Policy and Deaf Immigrants, 1882–1924,”
Sign Language Studies
6, no. 4 (Summer 2006).
207
In his first
: “Annual Report of William Williams, Ellis Island Commissioner,” September 19, 1910, Folder 5, File 1061, IRL. Also found in “Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration,” 1910, 134–135.
207
The amount of work
: “Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration,” 1911, 147.
207
Williams worried
: Letter from William Williams to Commissioner-General of Immigration, June 24, 1910, WW-Yale.
208
To the thousands
: On the case of Wolf Konig, see File 53452-973, INS. 208
Michele Sica was
: On the case of Michele Sica, see File 53305-74, INS. 209
Although much younger
Although much younger
234, INS.
210
Williams himself
: On the case of Jacob Duck, see File 52880-127, INS. 210
Though Williams may have
: On the Kaganowitz family, see File 53390-146, INS.
211
Meier Salamy Yacoub
: File 53257-34, INS.
211
Jewish groups were
: “Extracts from Minutes of Second Annual Meeting of National Jewish Immigration Council Held February 18, 1912,” File 53173, INS:
NYT
, November 14, 1909.
212
Whether Uhl was
: Edward Alsworth Ross,
The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People
(New York: Century, 1914), 289–290.
212
Meter was detained
: File 53370-699, INS.
212
While HIAS continued
: Max J. Kohler, “Immigration and the Jews of America,”
AH
, January 27, February 3, 1911;
NYT
, January 19, 1911. For a response to Kohler’s charges, see Memorandum for the Secretary from CommissionerGeneral of Immigration Daniel Keefe, February 16, 1911, File 53173-12, INS.
213
Not all Jewish leaders
: Panitz, “In Defense of the Jewish Immigrant, 1891– 1924.”
213
Simon Wolf
:
NYT
, July 18, 1909; Letter from Lipsitch to Kohler, March 7, 1911, Folder 11, Box 11, MK.
213
HIAS President
: Letter from Leon Sanders to Max J. Kohler, July 29, 1910, Folder 11, Box 11, MK.
213
Secretary Nagel
: Kohler, 198–199. See also, Otto Heller, ed.,
Charles Nagel: Speeches and Writings, 1900–1928
, vol. 1 (New York: Putnam’s, 1931), 151, 157.
214
Jewish groups attempted
:
AH
, January 28, 1910.
214
After that, Williams’s
: “Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration,” 1911, 152.
215
In response, members
: Letter from Moe Lenkowsky and Anton Kaufman, Chairman and Secretary of the Citizens Committee of Orchard, Rivington and East Houston Streets, to William Howard Taft, April 9, 1912, WW-NYPL; Letter from William Williams to Theodore Roosevelt, January 31, 1912, Series 1, Reel 126, TR; Letter from William Williams to Daniel Keefe, September 13, 1912, Series 6, Number 1579, WHT.

217
Taft listened to a number
:
NYT
, October 19, 1910; Letter from William Williams to Charles Nagel, October 19, 1910, Folder 64, Box 4, Series I, WW-Yale.
217
But President Taft’s
:
NYTrib
, December 16, 1910; Letters from Charles Nagel to Charles D. Norton, December 10, 13, 1910, WHT; Letter from Charles Nagel to William Howard Taft, January 7, 1911, WHT.
217
These were hard
: “Remarks of President Taft to the Board of Directors of the American Association of Foreign Newspapers at the Executive Office, Washington, DC,” January 4, 1911, No. 77, Reel 364, Series 6, WHT;
New York Evening Sun
, January 4, 1911.
218
“Away with Czarism”
:
Morgen Journal
, April 17, 1911;
New York Evening Journal
, May 24, 1911;
Morgen Journal
, June 23, 1911.
219
The
Morgen Journal
listed
:
Morgen Journal
, April 17, 1911;
Szabadsag
, October 11, 1910.
219
O. J. Miller
: Memorandum from William Williams to Daniel Keefe, October 14, 1910, Folder 63, Box 4, CN; File 53139-7, INS. Nagel sent a detective to investigate Miller and his organization. The investigation discovered that the German Liberal Immigration Bureau was only a paper organization and Miller a reporter for the
New Yorker Staats-Zeitung
. Nevertheless, Miller’s agitation caught the attention of government officials, congressmen, and German-American organizations.
219
Groups such as
: File 53139-7, INS.
219
At first, Williams was
: Letter from William Williams to Charles Nagel, April 5, : Letter from William Williams to Charles Nagel, April 5, 7, INS.
220
Nor could Charles
: Letter from Charles Nagel to Charles Norton, October 21, 1910, Folder 65, Box 4, WW-Yale.
220
Harper’s Weekly
asked
: HW, July 7, 1911.
222
It is hard
: Broughton Brandenburg, “The Tragedy of the Rejected Immigrant,”
Outlook
, October 13, 1906; Philip Taylor,
The Distant Magnet: European Emigration to the USA
(New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 123; “Report of the Dillingham Immigration Commission,” undated, File 1060, Folder 9, IRL; “Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration,” 1907, 83.
Harper’s Weekly
estimated that some eight thousand potential immigrants were refused passage by steamship companies at Bremen in 1905.
HW
, April 14, 1906. 222
For some immigrants
: Letter from J. M. Jenks to Oscar Straus, March 12, 1907, Box 6, OS.
222
An American congressional
: “Report of the Sub-Committee of the Immigration Commission,” 1907; Senator A. C. Latimer and Rep. John L. Burnett, File 1060, Folder 8, IRL; Taylor, 123.
222
William Williams was
: Letter from Charles Nagel to William Williams, April 6, 1911, File 53139-7, INS.
223
Nagel won no friends
: “Hearings on House Resolution No. 166,” House Committee on Rules, United States House of Representatives, May 29, 1911, 107; Max J. Kohler,
Immigration and Aliens in the United States: Studies of American Immigration Laws and the Legal Status of Aliens in the United States
(New York: Bloch, 1936), 46.
223
This was not
: Otto Heller, ed.,
Charles Nagel: Speeches and Writings, 1900–1928
, vol. 1 (New York: Putnam’s, 1931), xviii, 146; Letter from Charles Nagel to William Howard Taft, April 16, 1912, Number 3D, Series 6, WHT. 223
The agitation among
: “Hearings on House Resolution No. 166,” House Committee on Rules, United States House of Representatives, May 29, 1911, 3–6. 224
Before the hearings
: Letter from William Williams to Prescott Hall, May 12, 1911, File 916, Folder 2, IRL.
224
Still, while the earlier
: Letter from William Williams to Charles Nagel, June 5, 1911, Folder 81, Box 5, WW-Yale.
225
He had arrived
: On Bass, see “An English Pastor’s Experience on Ellis Island: The Abuse of the USA Immigration Laws,” undated, Reel 409; Letter from William Williams to Commissioner-General of Immigration, January 30, 1911; Letter from Charles Nagel to Charles D. Norton, Secretary to the President, February 25, 1911, Series 6, Reel 409, WHT; “Hearings on House Resolution No. 166,” House Committee on Rules, United States House of Representatives, May 29, 1911, 130–135;
New York Evening Journal
, June 21, 1911; Letter from William Williams to Commissioner General of Immigration, March 9, 1911, Box 13, Folder 10, MK.
227
With the failure
:
NYT,
October 8, 1911; Charles Thomas Johnson,
Culture at Twilight: The National German-American Alliance, 1901–1918
(New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 76;
Morgen Journal
, January 4, 17, February 7, 1912. 227
Williams had his defenders
:
HW
, June 10, 1911.
228
Arthur von Briesen
: Letter from Arthur von Briesen to William Howard Taft, June 29, 1911, Folder 82, Box 5, Series I, WW-Yale.
228
Williams’s most steadfast
: Letter from William Howard Taft to William Williams, November 25, 1911, Number 90, Reel 509, Series 8, WHT.
228
In his own way
: Letter from William Howard Taft to William Williams, May 2, 1913, Folder 9, Box 1, WW-Yale.
228
Williams continued with
: Thomas Pitkin,
Keepers of the Gate: A History of Ellis Island
(New York: New York University Press, 1975), 109.
229
The economic effects
:
NYT
, September 28, 1912, September 21, 1913; Philip Cowen,
Memories of an American Jew
(New York: International Press, 1932), 184.
229
When the U.S. Commission
: On the Dillingham Commission, see Robert F. Zeidel,
Immigrants, Progressives and Exclusion Politics: The Dillingham Commissioner, 1900–1927
(DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004); Desmond King,
Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 50–81; Daniel J. Tichenor,
Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 128–132; Oscar Handlin,
Race and Nationality in American Life
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), 93–138; Jeremiah Jenks and W. Jett Lauck,
The Immigration Problem: A Study of American Immigration Conditions and Needs
(New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1913); and
Survey
, January 7, 1911. Tichenor found that the Dillingham Commission’s “expert findings offered a portrait of southern and eastern European newcomers that legitimized the xenophobic narrative and policy agenda of Progressive Era restrictionists.” In response, Zeidel notes that the Dillingham Commission was deeply rooted in the reform movements of the early twentieth century, a fact many historians have ignored “because they have not wanted to equate any form of xenophobia with progress.” Its conclusions and recommendations can be found in U.S. Immigration Commission, “Abstracts of Reports of the Immigration Commission with Conclusions and Recommendations and Views of the Minority, Volume One,” 61st Congress, 3
^rd
Session, Document 747, 1911.
230
His new party’s platform
: Rivka Shpak Lissak, “Liberal Progressives and Immigration Restriction, 1896–1917,” Annual Lecture, American Jewish Archives, 1991; Tichenor,
Dividing Lines,
135–136; Hans Vought,
The Bully Pulpit and the Melting Pot: American Presidents and the Immigrant, 1897–1933
(Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2004), 86–87.
230
The candidate who
: Woodrow Wilson,
A History of the American People, Volume 5
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1901), 212–214.
231
Thanks to newspaper
: Arthur S. Link,
Wilson: The Road to the White House
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), 381–387, 499–500; James Chace,
1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft, and Debs—and the Election That Changed the Country
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 135–137; Wilson quoted in the
Jewish Immigration Bulletin
, November 1916, 8.
231
Despite the controversy
: Letter from William Howard Taft to A. Lawrence Lowell, November 6, 1910, File 860, IRL.
231
For two decades
:
Survey
, February 8, 1913.
232
The numbers support
:
LD
, May 25, 1912;
Outlook
, February 22, 1913.
232
With only a few
: Morris M. Sherman, “Immigration Restriction, 1890–1921, and the Immigration Restriction League,” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard College, 1957), 33.
232
A few weeks before
:
NYT
, January 26, 1913.
233
Ethnic groups were
:
New Yorker Staats-Zeitung
, May 7, 14, 1913, translation found in File 53139-7C, INS.
233
Throughout the 1912 campaign
:
Warheit
, July 14, 1912, in “Instances of Continued Abuse of the Ellis Island Authorities by Certain Newspapers Printed in Foreign Languages in the City of New York,” undated, Folder 32, Box 3, WWNYPL.
233
The
Deutsches Journal
:
Deutsches Journal
, April 28 1913; “Comments on Annexed Report of Case of Aron Mosberg,” April 18, 1913, File 53139-7C, INS. 233
“Sir, You are the murderer”
: Letter from John Czurylo to William Williams, May 3, 1913; Letter from William Williams to the Commissioner-General of Immigration, May 9, 1913, WW-NYPL.
234
In an April 1913 letter
: Letter from William Williams to the CommissionerGeneral of Immigration, April 21, 1913, File 53139-7C, INS.
234
The uncertainty
: Letter from Prescott Hall to William Williams, November 22, 1912, Box 3, WW-NYPL.
235
Others remembered Williams
: Letter to William Williams, June 18, 1913, Box 3, WW-NYPL.
235
Others took issue
:
Morgen Journal
, June 20, 1913.
235
After the war
:
NYT
, February 9, 1947; Frederic R. Coudert, “In Memoriam: William Williams,”
American Journal of International Law
41, no. 3 (July 1947). 236
Two months before
: Case of Lipe Pocziwa, No. 667, Series 6, Reel 404, WHT. 237
William Williams
: “Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration,” 1911, 147; “Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration,” 1912, 23.