American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [165]
“I was struck by the dreadful idleness of these poor people,” Howe said of the detainees. “Some three hundred of them were detained here, compelled to sit hour after hour on hard benches in a bare room.” Instead, Howe ordered that benches be brought out of storage and placed on the lawn outside so that immigrants previously cooped up in indoor cells could now enjoy the outdoors. A playground was created for detained children, with an adult supervisor in charge of ball games and jump rope. Sewing materials, periodicals, and toys were now available. English classes were offered, as was schooling for children. One day, an Italian group brought over Enrico Caruso to entertain the detainees for a Sunday afternoon concert.
Despite their differences, Howe and Williams agreed on one thing. Both sought to end discrimination between steerage passengers and those traveling in first- and second-class cabins. The former were always sent to Ellis Island for inspection, while the latter were inspected aboard ship and were only in rare circumstances ordered to Ellis Island.
“Aliens traveling in the cabin are no more exempt from the immigration laws (which apply to all aliens) than they are from the customs laws,” Williams wrote. “Some of the most objectionable of the prohibited classes are likely to have means sufficient to enable them to buy a first-class ticket.” Criminals, pimps, and prostitutes were sometimes found in first-class cabins, and steamship officials sometimes listed aliens as citizens, which meant, to the cost-conscious Williams, that the government coffers were being deprived of its $4 immigrant head tax.
In January 1912, ninety-two first- and second-class passengers on the Carmania were having a pleasant dinner when immigration officials boarded their ship. They were ordered to stop eating, form a line, and answer questions. The inspection lasted forty-five minutes and netted six people who were sent to Ellis Island for further hearings, including four suspected prostitutes and one notorious embezzler.
News of this inspection provoked outrage. A letter signed “One of the Upper Class, Newport, Rhode Island,” complained to the editor of a New York newspaper. “We of the better class consider the action of the immigration authorities a gratuitous insult,” the indignant writer protested. “There is nothing to my mind that strikes a more violent blow at our ‘position’ and ‘caste’ than . . . the intimation that ‘firstclass’ passengers are not one whit better in the social scale than those horrid people who cross the Atlantic in the nauseating and ill-smelling steerage.”
Fred Howe would go a step further and ask for permission to send all second-class passengers through Ellis Island, along with steerage passengers. Steamship companies complained and forced a public hearing on the matter. “There has always been maintained in this country that distinction between the cabin and the steerage,” said a representative of the steamship companies. “Most of the people who travel secondcabin are most self-respecting people.”
Steamship passengers paid a premium for that distinction. The average cost in 1915 for a first-class passage was between $85 and $120; for second-class passage, $50 to $65; and for steerage, $35 to $46. “A man in the first-cabin might consider it almost a joke to be, as he would express it, put with immigrants,” said the man from the steamship company. “A person in the second cabin would regard it as a very serious protest in his own mind.” The fear that such a measure would cut into the profits of steamship companies, as well as ingrained class prejudice against steerage passengers, meant that the reforms of Williams