American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [161]
Over three hundred immigrants spending the night at Ellis Island were evacuated to Battery Park, but the mentally ill detainees were kept on the island. They were brought out to the east side of the island, where they were treated to a pyrotechnic extravaganza as rocket shells continually shot over the island like flares, exploding in a large arc of fire. These patients, not aware of what had happened or the danger involved, “clapped their hands and cheered, laughed and cried, thinking it was a show which had been arranged for their particular amusement.”
It took Jersey City authorities little more than twenty-four hours to make their first arrest. The city’s commissioner of public safety, Frank Hague, ordered the arrests of the head of the National Dock and Storage Company and the local agent for the Lehigh Valley Railroad on charges of manslaughter. Hague was upset that the blast had killed one of his own men, Jersey City patrolman James Dougherty, who died when a warehouse collapsed on top of him while he was investigating the original fire.
Authorities were adamant that there was no evidence that foreign plotters were to blame. Officials from the Lehigh Valley Railroad went so far as to chalk up the fire to spontaneous combustion. Never mind that the destruction of so many military explosives would have cheered the German kaiser. Americans were cozily snug in their cocoon, secure in the thought that the vast Atlantic Ocean would buffer them from Europe’s deadly storms. The war in Europe, already two years old, was a distant event for most Americans.
But the nearly $50 million worth of damage caused by the explosion was not a mere accident or spontaneous combustion; rather, it was the deliberate act of human hands. Just before midnight, two German saboteurs, Lothar Witzke and Kurt Jahnke, arrived by rowboat at the lightly guarded Black Tom facility. A third man, Michael Kristoff, joined them by land. The three then lit several small fires and set a number of timed explosives in the boxcars and barges filled with ammunition and shells. Within fifteen minutes, the watchmen at Black Tom began to see fires throughout the complex, which would soon burn out of control. Two hours later, these fires would set off the massive explosions that rocked the New York area.
Witzke, Jahnke, and Kristoff were part of a larger plot by the German government to sabotage the Allied war effort. Though technically neutral, the United States had been aiding its friends in Europe, and now Germany responded by waging a quiet war of sabotage against the United States.
Although the explosion’s immediate effect on Ellis Island was measured mostly in broken windows, its long-term effect would be felt with grave consequences for the way that America viewed immigrants. Americans of English stock would be dismayed by the reaction of German- and Irish-Americans who sympathized with Germany against England. Alien immigrants would morph into alien enemies.
The road to the Japanese internment camps of World War II began at Black Tom Island and continued right through Ellis Island. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was serving as assistant secretary of the navy in 1916, reportedly told an aide after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor: “We don’t want any more Black Toms.”
ITWAS GOOD FRIDAY, April 6, 1917, when Congress declared a state of war with Imperial Germany. After three years of avoiding ethnic squabbles that were ripping apart Europe, and less than a year after the devastation at Black Tom, the United States was officially at war. Two million American soldiers would soon be heading for France, many of them country boys from small-town America who had never ventured far from home.
However, President Woodrow Wilson went beyond simply declaring Germany the enemy of America. More