American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [164]
Finally, in February 1918, the stress and grief proved too much for Mrs. Byersdorff, who committed suicide almost a year after her husband was taken into custody. Herman received a temporary leave to attend her funeral in Brooklyn, but had to return to North Carolina after two weeks. In June 1918, four months after his wife’s suicide, Herman Byersdorff ’s paperwork finally landed on the right desk and he was granted a parole, a small consolation with his wife and only son dead.
It is unclear why Byersdorff ’s parole should have taken so long. As early as February 1918, William Hausdorffer was paroled. That spring, more paroles followed as the fear of German sabotage subsided. William Koerner left Hot Springs in April 1918.
The militarization of Ellis Island continued after the German detainees were gone. With immigration from Europe slowing to a trickle because of the war, the army took over the island’s hospital for wounded troops, while the navy took over the baggage and dormitory building and used them to quarter sailors waiting for their assignments. At times, as many as 2,500 military men were stationed at Ellis Island, most for no longer than two weeks. At the same time, American soldiers wounded at the European front were also sent to recover at Ellis Island’s hospital. Young American doughboys who had survived the trenches of the Western Front, often at the cost of an arm or a leg, could be seen wandering the grounds of Ellis Island as part of their convalescence.
The man in charge of Ellis Island during this turbulent period was Frederic C. Howe. He knew little about immigration before assuming the job and later admitted that the topic did not interest him greatly. Unlike Ellis Island’s first commissioner, John Weber, whose life was forged in the combat of the Civil War, Howe’s formative experience as a young man was graduate school at Johns Hopkins, where he studied under Professor Woodrow Wilson. Although Howe later became a lawyer, his graduate years instilled in him an idealistic temperament and a restless intellectual curiosity. His job prior to coming to Ellis Island in 1914 was head of the People’s Institute, a debating society for liberal intellectuals in New York.
Whereas William Williams was comfortable, if not smug, with his position in society and his relationship with his ancestors and background, Howe spent most of his life, in his words, “unlearning” the values of his childhood. Raised in a comfortable middle-class, churchgoing, Republican family in western Pennsylvania, Howe worked to rid himself of the lessons and values of his small-town childhood as he moved up in the world and became engaged in politics.
Howe was a Progressive, a man driven to public service to reform a society reeling from the effects of industrialism, mass immigration, and urbanization. Both Williams and Howe possessed a moralism that stoked the engines of reform. Both men saw the world divided between good and bad. For Williams, the good consisted of people of his class and background, the descendants of the Puritan forefathers. The bad were the undesirable new immigrants whose presence brought crime, disease, and political machines and threatened the Republic that Williams’s ancestors had built.
Howe’s heroes were those liberals who also had unlearned the values of their youth and committed themselves to changing the world. His villains were selfish and narrow-minded people who pursued economic self-interest at the expense of the public interest. Unlike William Williams, whose progressivism was based on ideas of efficiency, Howe was a humanist who defined his type of reform as “sentimentality, or the dreaming of dreams.” No one would have ever accused William Williams of being a dreamer.
Howe sought to humanize Ellis Island, a not-too-subtle dig at his predecessor, and saw his new job as “an opportunity to ameliorate the lot of several thousand human beings.” He sought to spruce