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Samuel Gompers, another friend of Sargent, noticed that he had become so “disappointed and crestfallen” working under Straus that he sought reelection to his old post as president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. When he lost his bid, Sargent was faced with the realization that he had to remain in his government job. Needing money to support his family, he could not resign on principle and would have to continue upholding interpretations of the law that compromised his beliefs.

By the summer of 1908, the pressures began to get to Sargent. He struggled with severe stomach problems and would eventually suffer a stroke. After two more strokes and a serious fall, Sargent died in early September at the age of fifty-three. “If ever a man died of a broken heart it was he,” wrote Gompers, “because he found himself in a position which he deemed it necessary to retain and yet was unable to carry out his ideals of public service and righteous conduct.” Remarking on Sargent’s death in his diary, Oscar Straus spoke well of his subordinate, calling him, with a touch of mild condescension, “a good and conscientious official and whatever defects he had were not the result of lack of human sympathy, but education.”

Straus’s views on immigration also had an effect on another old labor restrictionist. Terence V. Powderly had been out of steady work for over three years. By 1906, Roosevelt had made amends with him and sent him on a fact-finding mission to Europe to investigate the causes of European immigration. After Powderly submitted his report, Roosevelt named him to a new position. The old union leader needed a steady government paycheck, but the man who once led Washington’s immigration office now had to take a subordinate position in the agency he once ran.

Powderly was now in charge of the new Division of Information. Its goal was to “promote a beneficial distribution of aliens admitted into the United States.” This was a reform supported by both sides of the immigration debate. In fact, the motto of the National Immigration Restriction League was “Distribution and Education Rather than Restriction.” What Powderly’s new organization did was more prosaic. It collected information on wages and employment throughout the country, put the data together, and got the information into the hands of immigrants at stations like Ellis Island.

It was a rather naïve view of how immigrants behaved. When most immigrants arrived in America, they usually stayed with friends and relatives from their homeland in immigrant ghettos. No matter how overcrowded and bleak these neighborhoods might seem to the outsider, they served as a safety blanket that provided the greenhorn with a foot into America’s golden door. The air of the familiar—language, newspapers, food, music—was more enticing than job opportunities elsewhere. The Lower East Side of Manhattan or the West Side of Chicago were more attractive than the steel mills of Alabama or the farms of Texas.

It is no surprise that Powderly’s efforts were relatively unsuccessful. Between 1908 and 1913 only 23,000 immigrants made use of Powderly’s information. Despite this seeming failure, labor leaders pounced on the new agency. Gompers, who never had much respect for Powderly, called the Division of Information “a strike-breaking agency.” The head of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen told Powderly that his division would only be a success if it could “convince the people of Europe to stay at home.” Gompers’s deputy, John Mitchell, told Powderly he wanted him to distribute unemployment statistics to immigrants to discourage them from coming.

The in-house journal of the Knights of Labor remarked that its former leader had once been known as a restrictionist until he started working for Oscar Straus. Powderly, the journal mused, “must feel greatly embarrassed, when to keep a job, he manufactures new speeches and opinions at variance with those of only yesterday.” It may have been a change of heart brought about by age, but the reality was