American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [109]
In its place, the commission recommended that all immigrants be classified by their nationality and their race. That is why officials marked Hersch Skuratowski as a Russian Hebrew. As Powderly explained, “an Englishman does not lose his race characteristics by coming from South Africa, a German his by coming from France, or a Hebrew his, though he come from any country on the globe.”
Powderly made clear that officials were using race in the “popular rather than in its strict ethnological sense.” Basically, they meant to use the word as modern Americans would use the term “ethnicity,” while they used the term “color” for what is now called race. However, that qualification did little to settle the controversy.
Powderly and his colleagues also made clear that their endeavor had nothing to do with targeting undesirable immigrants based on their race. Instead, they hoped that better classifications of ethnic backgrounds would assist officials in understanding the nature of immigration, especially as it related to labor issues. “It is not intended as a history of an immigrant’s antecedents but as a clew [sic] to what will be his immediate future after he has landed,” the report concluded.
As Safford noted, Russian Jews had been coming to the United States in larger numbers in the 1890s. “They have for the most part entered well defined fields of labor here and have given rise to special labor problems,” he wrote to Powderly in 1898. “The Immigration Bureau fails to give a clew [sic] to the size of this movement. They are lumped up with Poles, people of a distinct race and of different capacities and who have gone into entirely different fields of industry.” Officials sought better information about who was coming to America, what kinds of work they did, and where they were heading.
For Jews, this new classification was a double-edged sword. Over his many years with HIAS, Simon Wolf protested the Hebrew classification to government officials, arguing that Jews were not a distinct race. However, when he sought to compile the opinions of leading Jewish authorities on the matter, he found that his views were not universally shared. Many Jews, especially Zionists, did consider themselves a “race or people” and had no objection to the government’s classification scheme.
Decades later, even Max Kohler had a change of heart. Such a system, he explained, enabled “the Government to furnish Yiddish-speaking interpreters quickly in the majority of Jewish cases pending before the immigration officials,” he wrote, and “it enabled the Jewish immigrant aid societies quickly to identify their prospective protégés.”
Now it was William Williams’s turn to offer a point-by-point rebuttal of the lawyers’ brief. He defended not only his $25 rule but also the entire structure of administrative law at Ellis Island. He admitted to “certain shortcomings” on the part of the boards of special inquiry, but argued that better training of those who sat on the boards was the answer, not legal challenges. Not only were the lawyers wrong about the law, Williams believed, but their real goal was not the improvement of immigration regulation, but rather “to facilitate the admission of one particular class of immigrants,” no doubt referring to Jewish immigrants.
Williams was not happy about having to defend himself in court. He resented that the court case was brought by “four ignorant aliens who do not know a word of English” and was indignant at the “objectionable manner” in which Kohler and Elkus put forward their critique of his administration. Williams claimed that even before he received the petition, he had already delayed the deportation of these four men in order to rehear their cases. Now that the case was going to court, he told a representative of HIAS that if he was “expecting to compel the granting of a rehearing through the threat of habeas corpus proceedings, I assure you that you will not succeed.”
Williams