American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [100]
Hall took his case against Straus directly to President Roosevelt, who did not seem terribly disturbed by the charge. Nevertheless, he would pass along Hall’s criticism to Henry Cabot Lodge for further investigation.
Lodge had been a staunch ally of the IRL and the main point man in Congress for the literacy test. After looking into the charges against Straus, however, Lodge came away unimpressed. “Hall is both honest and able but he is extreme and does not understand that it is one thing to make general charges on hearsay and another to sustain them by proof,” he wrote to Roosevelt. Lodge admitted that Straus was “averse to the laws which affect the entry of poor Jews,” a fact he found unfortunate. Nevertheless, he could find no proof that Straus had ordered any easing of the enforcement of the law. In fact, Lodge told Roosevelt that reversals of deportation orders on appeal to Washington had not increased under Straus’s tenure.
Lodge, however, was not quite correct. In the first full year before Straus took office, almost 52 percent of immigrants who appealed their deportations to Washington lost their case. In 1908, Straus’s first full year as secretary, that figure dropped to 44 percent. In 1910, the first year after Straus left office, the number of lost appeal cases jumped to over 60 percent. On the whole, however, this relatively minor dip hardly proves a lax administration of the law.
That even Henry Cabot Lodge was defending Straus must have galled Hall. He later told Roosevelt that Straus “has deceived you time and again in regard to many immigration matters . . . he is one of the most subtly insidiously unscrupulous officials that ever breathed.” Such words would do little to dent Roosevelt’s admiration and respect for Straus.
Hall also aimed his fire at the man he saw as the other villain in this piece. “Watchorn has been a crook ever since he immigrated to this country,” Hall told Roosevelt. “His naturalization papers were fraudulent.” He also accused Watchorn of stealing the addresses of union members in a political campaign in 1890. “I am absolutely sure of Watchorn’s dishonesty and unscrupulousness,” he raged.
Roosevelt had sought to mollify Watchorn’s critics in late 1906 by asking IRL member James B. Reynolds to investigate operations at Ellis Island. When he had completed his report, Reynolds did not come up with an indictment of Watchorn’s administration, but instead issued a strong condemnation of the treatment of mentally ill immigrants in detention. This is not what Prescott Hall was looking for.
Part of Hall’s anger stemmed from the fact that Watchorn had tried to play both sides of the immigration debate. He accurately sensed a slippery nature to Watchorn’s personality. He had already proved himself a man a little too eager to please his superiors, someone who easily switched from Democrat to Republican when it suited his career. Watchorn appeared tough on immigration early in his term, but later trimmed his sails when he began reporting to Oscar Straus.
In July 1905, Watchorn wrote to Robert DeC. Ward, explaining that he had no qualms about separating families when one member was ordered excluded and the rest admitted. “What sort of protection would be afforded the United States,” wrote Watchorn, “if any such minor children, wife or parents are of the kind who are going to furnish as a legacy a progeny of the sort which you and I and all thoughtful persons must of necessity view with no little apprehension?” In words that would have shocked those who saw him as an advocate for immigrants, Watchorn told Ward that he wondered whether “misplaced sympathy is not