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Williams took the time to reply to Czurylo and explain the circumstances of Emilia’s death. He believed that the father had fallen victim to the misrepresentations of the foreign-language press eager to use such tragedies to attack the government. John wrote back to apologize to Williams for “writing you such nonsensical trash.” Touchingly, he ends his letter by asking Williams to have his wife, still in detention, send him a letter since he had not heard from her in a while. Whatever the merits of the policies enforced at Ellis Island, stories like the Czurylos’ were heartbreaking.

Williams, though, was not a sentimentalist. He displayed little outward angst about the fates of people like Mosberg or the Czurylos. He would probably answer that his first duty was to execute the immigration laws fairly and without bias, which meant that Mosberg had to be deported and the Czurylo family had to remain at Ellis Island until the children had been healed. Williams thought sentiment got in the way of public duty. If exceptions were made, as the foreign-language press continually demanded, then the law would become meaningless.

In an April 1913 letter to Washington, Williams said that the personal attacks from the German press did not bother him much. “I attach no importance to them,” he wrote somewhat unconvincingly. Rather, it showed the effects of “foreign influences at work in our midst.” In a few short years, more Americans would join Williams in his concern about “foreign influences” on American politics, especially that of Germans.

Despite all his outward stoicism both to the pain of families such as the Czurylos and to the constant barrage of criticism against him, Williams had had enough of Ellis Island. He tendered his resignation in June 1913 to President Wilson, who accepted it and expressed his appreciation for Williams’s “peculiarly intelligent service.” Williams had served a total of six and a half years under three presidents. Wilson named no immediate replacement, so Williams’s deputy, Byron Uhl, took over as acting commissioner, a move that promised no immediate change in the execution of immigration law at Ellis Island.

The uncertainty as to who would succeed Williams highlighted the fact that in almost twenty years of agitation in favor of greater restrictions on immigrants, Prescott Hall and his colleagues had precious little to show for their efforts. The Immigration Restriction League’s silver bullet, the literacy test, had twice failed to become law over presidential vetoes. The one sliver of hope for Hall and his comrades had been the work of William Williams. “In a world which does not suit me in many ways,” the melancholic Hall wrote to Williams, “your work at Ellis Island is a bright spot.”

Others remembered Williams not for his restrictionist views but rather for his efforts to improve life at Ellis Island. A letter signed by representatives of twenty-four missionary organizations noted their “high esteem” for Williams, calling him “just always” and “charitable when necessary.” Their letter noted: “Even the most casual observer must be conscious of the great improvement in Ellis Island under your guidance, both physically and officially. . . . We believe that those who have attacked your administration have done so either in ignorance or malice.”

Others took issue with this sentiment. Unsurprisingly, the Morgen Journal shed no tears at the resignation of the man they dubbed the “Czar of the Isle of Tears” who made immigrants “dance to his whip.”

Although no one would have known it at the time, the incessant attacks against Williams represented the high point of German-American ethnic identity. Though they did not succeed in removing Williams from office, German-Americans were the leading voice for opposition to immigration restriction. Both the German-language press—shrill and exaggerated—and William Williams—crabbed and snobbish—kept each other in check as the nation navigated this unsettling era of mass immigration. Within a short time,