American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [127]
The candidate who was forced to confront immigration most directly during the campaign was the Democratic candidate. Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey, a former political science professor and president of Princeton University, had published a five-volume history of the United States in 1901. In the final volume, the professor delved into immigration. Fitting with the tenor of the times, he condemned the “alteration of stock” brought about by the “multitudes of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland, men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence,” thereby lowering the American standard of living. Wilson contrasted these “sordid and hapless” individuals with Chinese immigrants who, despite possessing “many an unsavory habit,” were at least more intelligent, harder working, and driven to success.
Thanks to newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, who despised Wilson, these long-forgotten words now became front-page news across the country. Wilson was soon put on the defensive and tried to explain away his words. He wrote letters of apology to Italian, Polish, and Hungarian groups. “America has always been proud to open her gates to everyone who loved liberty and sought opportunity,” Wilson declared in one of these letters, “and she will never seek another course under the guidance of the Democratic Party.” He pointed to his membership in the National Liberal Immigration League and began to speak positively about the contribution of immigrants on the campaign stump. “I should be an ignorant man, indeed,” Wilson said, “if I did not realize that America has been built up by the blood and the sinews and the brains of those born in the Old World who recognized an opportunity for freedom denied them there.”
Despite the controversy, Wilson won by a plurality of votes. Taft came in third, and the lame-duck president had one more issue to deal with after his defeat. The Dillingham Commission provided the momentum for another attempt by Congress to pass a literacy test, which it did in early 1913. It was now up to Taft to decide the bill’s fate. The president, whose earnest and guileless temperament was better suited to the judicial bench than the White House, was conflicted about the literacy test. Two years earlier, Taft told Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell that while he had once been in favor of a literacy test, “I am not quite so clear in my mind now.”
For two decades, those who wanted to restrict immigration looked to the literacy test to achieve their goals. However, 122,735 immigrants would have been excluded if the law had been in effect in 1911. Though a large number, it represented only 14 percent of all immigrants that year. Over 90 percent of those who would have been barred as illiterates in 1911 came from eastern and southern Europe. Even still, the proportion of immigrants from these areas would have only dropped from 68 percent to 63 percent. The literacy test would have done little to stem Jewish immigrants; in 1911, only 6,400 who entered the United States were illiterate.
The numbers support the contention of opponents who argued that it was a poor judge of the worth of incoming aliens. “The literacy test is an admirable test of a man’s ability to read, and it tests nothing else,” said noted rabbi Stephen Wise. Others observed that the law would exclude many a “hard-working industrious man who can add to the country’s wealth by his labor,” yet “admit many a shifty, adroit, and conscienceless scamp who will add merely to our sufficient supply of gamblers, grafters, and thieves.” Nor would it keep out educated anarchists and radicals.
With only a few weeks left to his presidency, Taft finally announced his veto with “great reluctance.” In defense of his decision, he appended a long memo from Secretary Charles Nagel, a longtime opponent of the measure, laying out the weaknesses of the literacy test. “To Hell with Jews, Jesuits, and steamships,” a depressed Prescott Hall wrote