American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [107]
Conditions worsened as more immigrants piled up because of the new rule. “Trouble Feared from the Excluded,” read a New York Times headline, “The 800 Immigrants Held on Ellis Island Not Taking Deportation Easily.” One of the detainees was a twenty-three-year-old Russian medical student named Alexander Rudniew, who was ordered deported as likely to become a public charge because he arrived with less than $25. At one point, a frustrated Rudniew lashed out in Yiddish at Ellis Island officials, who feared that the doctor might stir the detainees to take over the station. A night watchman pulled a gun on Rudniew, which seemed to settle down the crowd. Rudniew would eventually be admitted into the country.
On July 4, Rudniew was one of a hundred detained Russian Jews, ranging in age from eight to fifty-eight, to sign a letter to the Forward, New York’s Yiddish-language newspaper, complaining of crowded conditions at Ellis Island. The editors printed the letter on page one. “Everyone goes around dejected and cries and wails,” the letter read. Many of the detainees had deserted from the Russian army and feared deportation. They called Williams’s $25 rule an “outrage” and “nonsense” and hoped to alert fellow Jews as to “how we suffer here.” The American Hebrew sent a correspondent to Ellis Island and found that none were sick, although most were pale and flustered from their ordeal.
Williams was unmoved by the protests and thoroughly unapologetic. “I have enforced the laws,” he told a reporter. “Why shouldn’t I? That’s what I am here for.”
Many Americans were glad that Williams was there. Russell Bellamy, a member of the Immigration Restriction League, told him his “appointment is most agreeable because we know you will enforce the laws your predecessor and his Chief so shamefully ignored.” Chiming in from Boston, the gloomy Prescott Hall was cheered by Williams’s appointment: “Nothing has made me as happy for a long time as feeling that you are there and seeing, as far as I do from the papers, how you are cleaning things up.”
Eighty-two-year-old Orville Victor, a leading editor in the world of dime-novel publishing, was less genteel. Calling himself an American “of early colonial ancestry,” Victor congratulated Williams on his appointment and wrote: “What a stench in the nostrils of true Americans are the dirty Jew lawyers who rush to the ‘defense’ of their kin whom you would exclude. . . . More power to you, and success to your efforts to keep out the dirty scum of European fields, bogs and warrens.” William Patterson, who described himself simply as an “obscure American,” wrote Williams that “God only knows what havoc is going to be brought upon the United States by the influx of Europe’s scum. . . . You cannot render the country a greater service than by restricting the inflow of worn-out, decadent, and impoverished Europeans.”
Not all of Williams’s correspondents were as sympathetic. An anonymous student from PS 62 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side complained to Williams in ungrammatical, yet heartfelt, prose:
You don’t realize what you are doing. You kill people without a knife. Does money make you a person? A person who has a mind and hands and has not $25 cash is not a person? Has he to be killed? Here is the free America. People how much do they suffer until they come here. [sic] If you would have conscious [sic] in you would not do such things. You think that they are not people but animals. . . . I do not see what do foreigners do harm [sic].
PS 62 had opened its doors a few years earlier to deal with the massive influx of mostly Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side, a neighborhood bursting with overcrowded tenements. Though Williams’s edict may have looked like a patriotic gesture in the Upper East Side, it had a very different effect on those living on the Lower East Side.
The child who wrote that letter was not a lonely voice, as groups such as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) worked to assist Jewish immigrants. Irving