American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [119]
But President Taft’s personal judgment was on the line, having publicly vouched for the promising character of the family. Therefore, the secretary of Commerce and Labor, Charles Nagel, who had accompanied Taft to Ellis Island on that foggy October day and also strongly urged that the family be allowed to land, intervened to help Thornton find work. The results of Nagel’s efforts were disappointing. “In the Thornton case I have ignominiously surrendered,” Nagel wrote Taft only a few weeks later. “I find that he does not feel able to do work and that the doctors at Ellis Island evidently knew more about the case than we did.”
These were hard words for Taft to hear. Members of the American Association of Foreign Language Newspapers visited Taft at the White House in January 1911 to voice their concerns about the treatment of immigrants at Ellis Island. In response, the president told the group about his visit there a few months earlier. “I have since followed those cases in which I influenced him [Williams] against his better judgment,” he told the group, “and I am obliged to make the humiliating confession to you that the outcome vindicated him and showed that my judgment was at fault for lack of experience.
“There are certain parts of this Government that I understand very well, but immigration is new to me,” Taft further admitted, “and it is a subject to which I must give as much study as I can, being dependent, however, on the men whom I have selected to administer the law.” Such humility clearly marked Taft a different political animal than Theodore Roosevelt. It also led Taft to place even more faith in William Williams.
For the remainder of his term, no matter how heated the criticism got, Taft always stood behind his fellow Yale man. “In selecting Mr. Williams, I have selected a man whom I thought to be a very just and kindly man, and that is what you need there,” Taft told the foreign-born newspapermen. Moreover, Taft offered a mild criticism of the group, noting that when one is “continually pulling a man’s coattail when he is making a speech you can’t expect anything but a poor speech, and so it is with reference to the administration of the Federal law.” As for the Thornton family, Nagel wrote to Taft shortly after this meeting at the White House to inform the president that he had just “reluctantly signed the warrant for his deportation.”
Never again would Taft meddle in another immigrant case. However, immigrants at Ellis Island did not lack for vocal defenders. During Williams’s second tour of duty, the more he tried to tighten the enforcement of the law, the louder the roar from his critics. In his own mind, William Williams was a fearless upholder of the law who ran Ellis Island as a bulwark against undesirable immigrants. The foreignlanguage press had other ideas. To them, he was a dictator ruling over his fiefdom with an iron fist, enforcing his will upon powerless immigrants and servile employees. He was Czar Williams.
“A WAY WITH CZARISM AT Ellis Island,” screamed an editorial from the German-language newspaper Morgen Journal. “Bestiality Rampant in the Name of the Law,” cried another. The English-language Evening Journal chimed in with an editorial castigating “Brutality at Ellis Island.” Both papers were owned by William Randolph Hearst and were part of a relentless drumbeat of criticism that Williams would face during his second term at Ellis Island.
The Morgen Journal listed almost two dozen German-language papers from Baltimore to Cincinnati, from Buffalo to Denver, from Davenport, Iowa to Sandusky,