American Passage (65 page)

391
On this patriotic
:
NYT
, July 3, 1986.
392
Although resoration of the
: F. Ross Holland,
Idealists, Scoundrels, and the Lady: An Insider’s View of the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Project
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 80, 205.
393
The Statue of Liberty
:
NYT
, November 4, 1985.
393
In November 1985
: Roberta Gratz and Eric Fettmann, “The Selling of Miss Liberty,”
Nation
, November 9, 1985. For other articles by Gratz and Fettmann on the topic, see “Mr. Iacocca Meets the Press,”
Nation
, March 8, 1986; “Post-Iacocca”
Nation
, April 19, 1986; and “Whitewashing the Statue of Liberty,”
Nation
, June 7, 1986. F. Ross Holland dismisses the complaints of Gratz and Fettmann as “scurrilous” and “liberally sprinkled with untruths, half-truths, misinformation, and distorted facts.”
Idealists, Scoundrels, and the Lady,
180–181.
394
For some, it was all
: Jacob Weisberg, “Gross National Production,”
New Republic
, June 23, 1986.
394
If the public
: Lee Iacocca with William Novak,
Iacocca: An Autobiography
(New York: Bantam Books, 1984), 339–441.
394
His father, Nicola
: Iacocca with Novak,
Iacocca,
5; Peter Wyden,
The Unknown Iacocca
(New York: William Morrow, 1987), 260.
395
“Hard work”
: Iacocca with Novak,
Iacocca,
339.
395
To others, that vision
: Holland,
Idealists, Scoundrels, and the Lady,
158–159; Roberta Gratz and Eric Fettmann, “The Battle for Ellis Island,”
Nation
, November 30, 1985.
395
A historian made
: Lynn Johnson, “Ellis Island: Historic Preservation from the Supply Side,”
Radical History Review
, September 1984.
396
How should the
:
NYT
, January 14, 21, 1984.
396
The former inspection
: For more on the evolution of the historical memory of Plymouth Rock, see John Seelye,
Memory’s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
396
This process began
: Jacob A. Riis, “In the Gateway of Nations,”
Century Magazine
, March 1903; “The New Plymouth Rock,”
Youth’s Companion
, December 14, 1905.
396
In 1914, a writer
: Mary Antin,
They Who Knock at Our Gates: A Complete Gospel of Immigration
(Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1914), 98. 396
That an immigrant
: Werner Sollors, “National Identity and Ethnic Diversity: ‘Of Plymouth Rock and Jamestown and Ellis Island’ or Ethnic Literature and Some Redefinitions of ‘America,’ ” in Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Meally, eds.,
History and Memory in African-American Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 103–105; Agnes Repplier, “The Modest Immigrant,”
Atlantic Monthly
, September 1915.
397
Other native-born Americans
: Thomas Darlington, “The Medic-Economic Aspect of the Immigration Problem,”
North American Review
, December 21, 1906. 397
In the late 1930s
: Sollors, “National Identity and Ethnic Diversity,” 108–109; Dan Shiffman,
Rooting Multiculturalism: The Work of Louis Adamic
; Louis Adamic,
From Many Lands
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939), 296–299. 397
In deeply nostalgic
: Leo Rosten, “Not So Long Ago, There Was a Magic Island,”
Look
, December 24, 1968; Edward M. Kennedy, “Ellis Island,”
Esquire
, April 1967; Thomas M. Pitkin,
Keepers of the Gate: A History of Ellis Island
(New York: New York University Press, 1975), 177.
398
In the late 1970s
: “Ellis Island Remembered,” September 23, 1978, NYPL. 398
Riding this wave
: F. Ross Holland,
Idealists, Scoundrels, and the Lady: An Insider’s View of the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Project
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 5–6;
NYT
, July 25, 1981.
399
“The Battle for”
: Michael Barone, “The Battle for Ellis Island,”
Washington Post
, August 14, 1984, and Matthew Frye Jacobson,
Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 320–322.
399
In 1988
:
NYT
, September 4, 1988; Michael Dukakis, “A New Era of Greatness for America”: Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, July 21, 1988; and Jacobson,
Roots Too,
327–331.
399
Ferraro and Dukakis
: Meg Greenfield, “The Immigrant Mystique,”
Newsweek
, August 8, 1988.
400
At the other side
:
NYT
, January 14, 1993, August 11, 2000.
401
What name does
:
NYT
, September 21, 1990.
401
The most famous
: The Sean Ferguson story also appears in Alan M. Kraut,
The Huddled Masses: The Immigrant in American Society, 1880–1921
(Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1982), 56–57. While Kraut calls the story possibly apocryphal, he uses it to illustrate the changing of names by officials at Ellis Island. One possible explanation of the story has the original Sean Ferguson as a Yiddish-speaking actor named Berel Bienstock. When Bienstock came to the United States to seek a career in the movies, his agent suggested that he Americanize his name. When he finally got to California and met with a movie producer who asked him his name, the nervous Bienstock replied in Yiddish “
Schoen fergessen
” and the producer wrote down his name as Sean Ferguson. But that story might also be apocryphal. See Stephen J. Sass, “In the Name of Sean Ferguson,” JewishJournal.com, June 21, 2002, http://www.jewishjournal.com/ home/preview.php?id=8761.
401
The stories multiply
: Ellen Levine, illustrated by Wayne Parmenter,
If Your Name Was Changed at Ellis Island
(New York: Scholastic, 1993); Ellen Levine claims that her grandfather’s original name was Louis Nachinovsky, but immigration inspectors at Ellis Island “changed many Jewish names to Levine or Cohen.” And so her grandfather had become Louis Levine. Another book on Ellis Island, under the header “There’s a Man Goin’ Round Changing Names,” discusses how “tens of thousands” of names were changed at Ellis Island. More discussion of name changes can be found in David M. Brownstone, Irene M. Frank, and Douglass Brownstone,
Island of Hope, Island of Tears
(New York: MetroBooks, 2002), 177–179.
401
In an interview
: Interview with Sophia Kreitzberg, “Voices from Ellis Island.”
402
Then there is the joke
: Joseph Epstein, “Death Benefits,”
Weekly Standard
, May 21, 2007. Although Epstein tells the Moishe Pipik story as a joke, he still believes that the “impatience of officials at Ellis Island altered lots of Eastern European surnames.”
402
Nearly all of these
: On the name change myth, see Alan Berliner’s documentary,
The Sweetest Sound
, reviewed in
WSJ
, June 25, 2001.
403
The inclusive nature
: This issue came up in the development of the plans for the museum in the 1980s. See Holland,
Idealists, Scoundrels, and the Lady,
184–185.
403
Historians are supposed to
:
NYT
, September 7, 1990; Mike Wallace,
Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 70–71. Wallace is wrong to claim that “for all Reagan’s celebration of the Statue as the ‘mother of exiles’ he was then doing his best to slam the open door shut.” Anti-immigration measures were never part of Reagan’s politics or rhetoric. The major piece of immigration legislation during the Reagan years, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, did not call for immigration restriction, but instead created an amnesty program for illegal immigrants already in the country, as well as measures designed to punish employers who employed illegal immigrants. The number of immigrants remained remarkably steady during the Reagan years, going from 530,639 in 1980 to 643,025 in 1988, before jumping to over 1 million in each of the next three years. Peter Schuck has written that the 1980s produced immigration policies that were “remarkably liberal and expansive by historical standards.” Wallace, 58; Peter H. Schuck,
Citizens, Strangers, and In-Between: Essays on Immigration and Citizenship
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 92.
404
In addition
: Wallace,
Mickey Mouse History
, 57. For other academic critics of Ellis Island, see Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett,
Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 177–187, and John Bodnar, “Symbols and Servants: Immigrant America and the Limits of Public History,”
Journal of American History
73, no. 1 (June 1986). For a more positive academic appraisal of Ellis Island, see Judith Smith, “Celebrating Immigration History at Ellis Island,”
American Quarterly
, March 1992. 404
Art professor
: Erica Rand,
The Ellis Island Snow Globe
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 177.
404
It is hard for
: Ira De A. Reid,
The Negro Movement: His Background, Characteristics, and Social Adjustment, 1899–1937
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 42;
NYT
, May 30, 1986.
404
David Roediger’s
: David R. Roediger,
Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs
(New York: Basic Books, 2005).
405
For historian
: Jacboson,
Roots Too
, 204–205.
405
Another group was
: Samuel Huntington,
Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 37–39, 46; Seelye,
Memory’s Nation,
628–629.
405
In the years since
:
NYT
, September 7, 1990.
406
Ellis Island’s iconic status
: For a print version of the TD Ameritrade advertisement, see
NYT
, April 26, 2006, A11.
407
In the 1990s
:
New Jersey v. New York
523 U.S. 767 (1998);
NYT
, April 3, 1997, January 13, 1998, May 26, 1998, August 13, 2001;
WP
, May 27, 1998. 408
To help with fundraising
: On the Arrow advertising and fundraising campaign, see http://www.weareellisisland.org. A collection of recent photographs of the abandoned southern section of the island can be found in Stephen Wilkes,
Ellis Island: Ghosts of Freedom
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2006).
408
In a different context
:
NYT
, August 31, 2001.
408
Whether Ellis Island
:
NYT
, April 3, 1997; Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, “Remarks at Naturalization Ceremony on Ellis Island with President Bush,” July 10, 2001, http://www.nyc.gov/html/rwg/html/2001b/ellis_island.html.

410
“We should not let”
:
Time
, December 15, 1980.
410
Wolf may have believed
:
NYTM
, March 22, 1998.
411
In this most recent
: Matt Towery, “Immigration: The Ellis Island Solution,”
Townhall.com
, May 31, 2007.
412
Unhappy with
: Samuel Huntington,
Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 189, 225.
413
As Barbara Jordan
: “Testimony of Barbara Jordan, Chair, U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, Before a Joint U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims and U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration,” June 28, 1995. See also, Mark Krikorian, “Immigration and Civil Rights in the Wake of September 11th,” Testimony prepared for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, October 12, 2001, http://www.cis.org/articles/2001/msktestimony1001.html.
414
Much of the discussion
: Seyla Benhabib,
The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2, 11.
415
The plenary power
: On recent trends in immigration rights and citizenship, see Peter H. Schuck,
Citizens, Strangers, and In-Between: Essays on Immigration and Citizenship
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 19–87; Linda S. Bosniak,
The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 37–76; and Hiroshi Motomura, “Immigration Law After a Century of Plenary Power: Phantom Constitutional Norms and Statutory Interpretation,”
Yale Law School
, December 1990. Michael Walzer makes a strong case for the retention of some boundaries for national membership in
Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality
(New York: Basic Books, 1983), 31–63.
415
In a 2001 Supreme Court
:
Zadvydas v. Davis
, 533 U.S. 678 (2001). See Trevor Morrison, “The Supreme Court and Immigration Law: A New Commitment to Avoiding Hard Constitutional Questions?” July 31, 2001, http://writ.news. findlaw.com/commentary/20010731_morrison.html.
418
Before the rise
: Schuck,
Citizens, Strangers,
80; Krikorian, “Immigration and Civil Rights in the Wake of September 11th.”