American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [124]
He would remain at Ellis Island for almost thirty hours, an experience that enraged and deeply scarred the British preacher. He was placed in a holding room with some six hundred immigrants from various nationalities. Although freezing outside, the overcrowded room was steaming hot. Bass took off his overcoat, placed it on the floor, and sat on it. Only when he arose later did he notice that the coat was now stained with “a portion of Italian phlegm, as large as a silver dollar piece.”
“The noise alone was a diabolical experience to sensitive people,” Bass later remembered, “and I shall never doubt again the literal truth of Scriptures especially with reference to the Tower of Babel.” No matter what he did, Bass could not escape the rabble with whom he now found himself detained. “I was standing hemmed in on all four sides by Italian immigrants very taller than I,” he told the committee. “They were eating garlic and you can imagine how offensive it was. . . . It made it difficult for me to breathe. The smell was worse than I ever smelled before.”
Forced to put up with such conditions, Bass complained to officials, “as any self-respecting Englishman, or American, or those self-respecting Germans . . . would do under similar conditions.” That injury to pride and racial superiority, more than the loss of a day at Ellis Island, seemed to drive Bass’s anger. What particularly galled him was the treatment of those “delicately nurtured English ladies of much culture and refinement” placed with the rest of the rabble in detention. The whole place was so shocking that it reminded him of Dante’s Inferno and the Black Hole of Calcutta.
Bass would get a chance to explain himself before a board of special inquiry the following day. Meanwhile, he was forced to spend the night at Ellis Island. Bass successfully appealed to an official to have all of the detained Englishmen—and one “perfect French gentleman”— put together in the same room, while four English women, a French woman, and a Swedish woman were kept together in another room.
The men slept on canvas hammocks, suspended from the ceiling, numbering three from top to bottom and nine rows for a total of twenty-seven “beds.” The canvas mats were damp, and the men were left without blankets for hours. To add insult to injury, these English and French gentlemen were not alone in their dormitory room. “The insects were fearful, and I think I can safely say the English at any rate were all a mass of bug bites,” Bass said about the bedbugs.
He was released the following day. Hearst’s muscularly populist New York Evening Journal, always happy to give Ellis Island officials a black eye, ran Bass’s story with the headline: “Pastor Calls Ellis Island Hell on Earth.” The publicity brought Bass’s plight to the attention of Washington, as he complained to the British consulate.
Williams explained his decision to Charles Nagel, calling Bass “an undersized, badly crippled man.” He noted that Bass was showed special consideration at Ellis Island, considering the fact that he was a steerage passenger. Williams concluded that he thought “that this badly crippled alien was fortunate in securing admission,” a view seconded by Nagel, who told Taft’s personal secretary that Bass “was lucky to get in, or rather that we were unlucky to get him in.” Now, seven months after his ordeal, Bass was telling his story to a congressional committee and demanding a full investigation of Ellis Island.
At the end of the second hearing, Sulzer testified that Ellis Island could be improved for the benefit of immigrants and that its problems were not the fault of Secretary Nagel or Commissioner Williams. The fault was with the government for not