American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [171]
Instead of rejoicing at victory, Prescott Hall believed that the work of restriction had just begun, hinting that a literacy test would have little effect on immigration. Since, between 1908 and 1917, some 1.6 million illiterate immigrants had entered the country, many had assumed that the new law would bar a large number of aliens. Yet in its first five years, a mere 6,533 people were barred by the literacy test. After a quarter-century of political agitation, this was at best a tepid victory for restrictionists.
The enactment of the literacy test coincided with America’s entry into the Great War, when hostility toward immigrants was channeled toward German-Americans. War propaganda painted the murderous and rapacious Hun as a virulent enemy. Anti-German hysteria spread across the continent as schools stopped teaching German, and Germanlanguage newspapers folded. Anything remotely German was suspect: Americans went so far as to rename sauerkraut as “liberty cabbage.”
The war greatly strengthened the hand of prewar restrictionists. Charles Warren served as assistant attorney general during the war. He had been a founding member of the Immigration Restriction League and though not as prolific a pamphleteer as some of his colleagues, he perhaps had a greater influence in the long term.
At the Justice Department, Warren began work to resuscitate the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to give the government greater control over German alien enemies. Warren was also the architect of the Espionage Act, which passed Congress in 1917 and was designed to go after domestic opponents of the war effort. While Prescott Hall could merely fulminate against the inferiority of the new immigrants, Warren quietly changed the law affecting thousands of people.
The targeting of Germans was also tied to German-owned steamship companies, which had been responsible for much of the immigrant traffic to America in the past quarter century. Otto Wolpert, superintendent of the Hamburg-American docks in Hoboken, and Paul Koenig, the chief detective for Hamburg-American, were accused of assisting German saboteurs and bomb makers. Though only a small percentage of steamship employees were involved in Germany’s covert war effort, it was enough of a link to reinforce negative views of steamship companies and tie wartime sabotage directly to immigration.
Then there was the case of the increasingly hapless Marcus Braun, the former head of the Hungarian Republican Club in New York and sometime friend of Theodore Roosevelt. Braun had pushed his way into a patronage job at Ellis Island in 1903, which led him to his native Hungary to investigate the causes of immigration. After leaving the immigration service, he started his own newspaper, Fair Play.
Braun’s career took a strange turn during the war. In 1915, he was discovered carrying documents from the Austrian consul general in New York to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vienna. Though not illegal, Braun’s activities reinforced notions that foreign-born Americans still held loyalties to their mother countries and were willing to assist them in wartime.
It was later revealed that Count Johann von Bernstorff, Germany’s ambassador to Washington, had secretly purchased Braun’s newspaper. It became apparent that Braun had been a shill for the German government since 1915. Von Bernstorff ’s activities went beyond buying up American newspapers and extended to overseeing the whole operation of German propaganda and sabotage—including the Black Tom explosion.
Braun somehow escaped punishment, but found his reputation and career in ruins. His name came up a number of times during 1918 congressional hearings looking into the relationship between GermanAmerican brewers and German propaganda during the war. The man who had dined with President Roosevelt, inspected immigrants at Ellis Island, and investigated white slavery in