American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [123]
Before the hearings had taken place, Williams tried to play down the criticism from the German press, calling them “so silly and extravagant as to make it seem beneath one’s dignity to notice them.” He told Prescott Hall that while the charges might poison the minds of “ignorant persons” concerning the operations at Ellis Island, “on the whole I have paid little or no attention to this matter.”
Williams was much more thin-skinned than he let on. He obsessively kept detailed records of the attacks against him by the German press, having each article translated into English. He answered nearly every allegation of abuse against an immigrant at Ellis Island, usually in letters or memos to his superiors in Washington.
Still, while the earlier criticism had been merely irritating, the charges made against him before a congressional committee caused Williams to fume. He had not been present at the May hearing, but had received a transcript of the hearing from Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. “I may feel differently tomorrow but just now I am outraged at the falsehoods told about my administration,” he wrote to Charles Nagel. “These criticisms pass the bounds of decency and in some manner the persons making them ought to be told what decent people think about them.” He would not appear before the committee until it reconvened in July, but promised not to let the accusations go unanswered.
“The law is a difficult one to administer,” Williams claimed in his written opening statement to the committee, “particularly in regard to the determination of who is ‘likely to become a public charge.’ ” While recounting some of the accusations against him, Williams said it was all part of the uncertainty and vagueness of immigration law that bedeviled those sworn to execute it. However, he resented “as wholly untruthful the use of such words as those quoted to characterize the work at Ellis Island.” He produced details of specific cases of deported immigrants that had appeared in the German press and contradicted the claims of administrative misconduct, all while defending the necessity to tighten the inspection process in the name of enforcing the law.
Williams again repeated his standard line regarding his personal views of immigration. “I will say that I have as little sympathy with those who would curtail all immigration as I have with those who would admit all intending immigrants—good, bad, or indifferent,” he said. Daniel Keefe and Charles Nagel both appeared and defended Williams. Unlike Williams, Nagel was torn by the human tragedies that daily crossed his desk. “It is well enough to make a rule under lamplight,” Nagel told the committee, “but it is very hard to enforce that rule when you see a pair of eyes looking at you.”
In Williams’s previous two years at Ellis Island, most of the criticism came from German- and Jewish-American groups. One of the bitterest witnesses against him at the hearing, however, was one of those few Anglo-Saxons who sometimes passed through Ellis Island. The Reverend Sydney Herbert Bass, a minister from England, told the committee about what he was forced to endure while temporarily detained at Ellis Island. “I, too, have photographs,” he testified, “but mine are engraved on my mind and heart and burned into my soul as by a red-hot iron.”
He had arrived in January 1911, headed for a new congregation in Pennsylvania. Bass traveled in steerage—“for purposes and reasons of my own”—on the White Star’s Adriatic. The steerage passengers were marched single file into the main building of Ellis Island. As they headed up the stairs towards the Great Hall, Bass remembered that an inspector yelled at them: “Anyone who comes steerage is cattle, you will soon have a nice little pen.”
Bass was then marked in chalk with “2 hieroglyphics” on his overcoat that designated him for further inspection. After a quick examination, a doctor found that Bass suffered from