American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [0]
Passage
The History of Ellis Island
VINCENT J. CANNATO
In Memory of
My father
Vincent John Cannato
(1930–2008)
and My grandfather
Vincent Joseph Cannato
(1893–1983)
Contents
Introduction 1
PART I
BEFORE THE DELUGE
Island
Chapter 1 Chapter 2 30
PART II
THE SIFTING BEGINS
Chapter 3 A Proper Sieve 57 Chapter 4 Peril at the Portals 70 Chapter 5
Feud
Chapter 6
PART III
REFORM AND REGULATION
Chapter 7 127
Chapter 8 149
Chapter 9 The Roosevelt Straddle 165
Chapter 10 Likely to Become a Public 191Charge
Chapter 11 “Czar Williams” 216
Chapter 12 238
Chapter 13 Moral Turpitude 260
iv ⁄ Contents
PART IV
DISILLUSION AND RESTRICTION
Chapter 14
Chapter 15 311 Chapter 16Quotas 330
Chapter 17 350
PART V
MEMORY
Chapter 18 379
Chapter 19 The New Plymouth Rock 391
Epilogue 410
Acknowledgments 421 Notes 424
Index 473
About the Author Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
Ellis Island is one of the greatest human nature offices in the world; no week passes without its comedies as well as tragedies. —William Williams, Ellis Island Commissioner, 1912
Ellis Island was the great outpost of the new and vigorous republic. Ellis Island stood guard over the wide-flung portal. Ellis Island resounded for years to the tramp of an endless invading army.
—Harry E. Hull, Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1928
BY 1912, THIRTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD FINNISH CARPENTER Johann Tyni had had enough of America. “I wish to go back to Finland. I didn’t get along well in this country,” he admitted less than three years after he and his family had arrived. The married immigrant with four children was depressed and unemployed. “I worked too hard and I am all played out,” he said. “I am downhearted all the time and the thoughts make me cry.”
The Reverend Kalle McKinen, pastor of Brooklyn’s Finnish Seamen’s Mission, had had enough of Johann Tyni. For the previous year and a half, Finnish charities had been taking care of the Tyni family. “This man has been crazy since he landed here,” McKinen wrote immigration officials. “It is to be regretted that his family were [sic] ever admitted to this country.” He also complained that Tyni’s wife was not very bright and could no longer care for her children. Out of a mixture of desperation, pity, and anger, Reverend McKinen brought the Tyni family to Ellis Island.
After observing Johann on the island’s psychiatric ward, immigration officials decided that they too had had enough of the Tyni family. Doctors at Ellis Island diagnosed Johann with “insanity characterized by depression, sluggish movements, subjective complaints of pain in the head and a feeling of inefficiency.” They also declared that Johann’s nine-year-old son, John, was a “low grade imbecile” who showed “the characteristic stigmata of a mental defective.”
The family had originally arrived at Ellis Island under much happier circumstances. With three children in tow, Johann and his wife arrived with $100 and presented themselves to authorities in good physical and mental health. Less than three years after coming to America, Johann, his wife, two Finnish-born sons, and two American-born children were deported back to Finland from Ellis Island, anxious to get back to Johann’s mother-in-law to rebuild a life that did not make sense in America.
Something had clearly happened since they arrived. Though two more children were born after their arrival, the Tynis lost their twoyear-old Finnish-born son, Eugen, while living in Brooklyn. Perhaps the shock of his son’s death, combined with a new, harsh, and unfamiliar environment, was enough to push Johann Tyni into a deep psychological abyss.
Immigration officials were not interested in the reasons for Tyni’s mental illness. They were only concerned that he could no longer work and support his family. In the official terminology, the entire Tyni family was deemed “likely to become public charges,” a designation that allowed officials to deport them back to their native Finland. Twoyear-old David and infant Mary, both citizens