American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [128]
A few weeks before Taft’s veto of the literacy test, Woodrow Wilson paid a visit to Ellis Island. Accompanied by his wife, two of his daughters, and a number of friends from New Jersey, the presidentelect was ushered around the inspection station by William Williams. Whereas Roosevelt and Taft had thrown themselves into every aspect of the process on their visits to the island, injecting themselves into the decision-making process and even interrogating immigrants, Wilson was remarkably passive during his trip. “If Mr. Wilson was impressed or otherwise moved by what he saw he did not show it,” one newspaper reported. The president-elect asked few questions and his responses to Commissioner Williams were monosyllabic. Upon leaving Ellis Island, Wilson declined to comment about what he had seen. It was his “day off,” he told the reporter and he was there “for information and not for thought.”
Wilson was far more interested in issues like the tariff, antitrust regulation, and reforming the nation’s banking system than he was in immigration, especially after the drubbing he took on the issue during the campaign. It would have made sense for him to ask immediately for the resignation of Commissioner Williams, which would have been the kind of sweeping statement that would have reassured foreign-born Americans concerned about the new president. Wilson chose not to take that politically expedient path and allowed Williams to remain in office.
In his first month in office, Wilson split the Commerce and Labor Department into two separate cabinet posts. The Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization would reside in the newly created Labor Department. Woodrow Wilson chose the former United Mine Workers official and Scottish immigrant, William B. Wilson, as the first secretary of the new department.
Ethnic groups were heartened by the choice of Secretary Wilson, but concerned that after a few months in office, in the words of the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, he had “not moved a finger in order that the brutal government at Ellis Island may come to an end.” Keeping Williams in office would “brand President Wilson as an enemy of immigration of the same type as Williams is in his heart.” Yet nothing had been done to end Williams’s “reign of terror,” which had turned Ellis Island into an “Island of Horrors.” Therefore, the paper called for Wilson to clean out the immigration service “In the Name of Humanity.”
Throughout the 1912 campaign season and into 1913, the foreignlanguage press kept hammering away at Williams, who continued to catalog and counter every charge. One representative article appeared in the Yiddish paper Warheit: “A Victim of the Murderous Acts on Ellis Island: A Detained Child Held Up for Stammering Dies in Williams’ Catacombs.”
The Deutsches Journal told a tale of “Son Torn from His Mother’s Arms: Was ‘Too Educated’ and ‘Not Muscular’ Enough.” Aron Mosberg had left his home in Galicia to come to America to join his sixtyyear-old mother. The twenty-six-year-old bookkeeper was listed at four feet, eight inches tall. Though he had enough money to travel secondclass instead of steerage, his allegedly “poor physique,” not his financial situation would lead to his deportation. “Not muscular enough” and “marked curvature of spine and deformity of chest” read Mosberg’s medical certificate. The newspaper admitted that Mosberg had no “Jack Johnson shoulders,” but lamented that it now appeared that “in America men are measured by their bone-structure.”
“Sir, You are the murderer of my child, Emilia.” Those were the only words contained in the letter that William Williams received in early May 1913 from a Chicago man named John Czurylo. The man’s wife and two young children had arrived at Ellis Island on March 29. With both eight-year-old Stanislaw and six-year-old Emilia suffering from chronic inflammation of the lymph nodes, all three were forced to remain at Ellis Island. One month later, John, still in Chicago awaiting his family, received a telegram announcing the death of Emilia.