American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [120]
O. J. Miller of the German Liberal Immigration Bureau sent out a mass mailing to “Citizens of German Blood” calling attention to the “bias and prejudices of ignorant government hirelings” and the “tyranny” they practiced at Ellis Island. Noting that Jews had “organized a powerful system for the shielding of immigrants of their race from political ruffianism and from the chicane and bias of the immigration officials,” Miller called for German-Americans to do the same. He called for every German organization in the country to demand the resignation of William Williams.
Groups such as the Alliance of German Societies of the State of Indiana, the Deutsch-Amerikanischer National Bund of East St. Louis, Illinois, and the German-American Alliance of Hartford, Connecticut, all joined the calls for Williams’s resignation. The Brooklyn League of the National German-American Alliance (NGAA) pronounced “the tyrannical and inhuman practices of Commissioner Williams and his staff of inspectors a blot upon civilization.”
Likening Williams to a “czar” or “pasha” turned the Ellis Island commissioner into a brutal authoritarian who used his power to suppress helpless immigrants. It was imagery designed to raise the hackles of those who had escaped czarist Russia or other monarchical regimes. The use of terms such as “inquisitors,” “star chamber,” and “catacombs” were also meant to hit the raw historical nerves of foreignborn Americans.
At first, Williams was surprised by all the heat he was taking from German groups. “If this hostility were confined to papers representing south Europeans I could at least understand the philosophy of it all,” he wrote to Charles Nagel. “But we are so fond of Germans, so anxious to have them come here, and we send back and detain such a negligible quantity of those who arrive, that we must look for this hostility elsewhere than in the application of the immigration law to Germans.”
Nor could Charles Nagel understand it. The overall rate of rejection of immigrants was “smaller than the general public is prepared to hear,” Nagel told President Taft’s secretary. He believed that Germans and Jews, the two ethnic groups complaining the loudest about Williams, “have fared if anything better than any other race.”
German immigration had slowed. Between 1900 and 1913, nearly 1 million Germans entered the country, but that was only 7.7 percent of all immigrants. In the great divide between old and new immigrants, Germans fell on the right side of the equation. By the early twentieth century, most Americans saw Germans as hearty pioneers who were easy to assimilate, especially when compared to Italians, Greeks, or Russian Jews. Teutonic blood was seen as relatively compatible with that of Anglo-Saxons, as people like Henry Cabot Lodge remembered the origins of their beloved Saxons.
German immigrants had a slim chance of being excluded and were kept out at a rate lower than the average. Between 1904 and 1912, less than 1 percent of all German immigrants were excluded. GermanAmericans would have noticed that the percentage of exclusions was increasing, although that began before William Williams returned to Ellis Island. Still, this was hardly a crusade against German immigrants. There had to be some other reason for these ferocious attacks on Ellis Island.
Harper’s Weekly asked: “Who Is Stirring Up the Germans?” William Williams and the magazine both agreed that the answer could only be explained by the influence of German-owned steamship companies. As Williams stepped up deportations, each one cost the steamship companies