American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [174]
Martin de Wal was one of the unlucky ones whom Judge Hand ruled against. After three months of the tedium of detention, de Wal sent a letter to the editor of The Survey asking readers to send books and other reading material to them. By June, de Wal again wrote to thank readers for the apparently large number of books and pamphlets they had sent, although de Wal noted that they could not tell how many books had actually been sent, since officials at Ellis Island withheld material so as “not to spoil our morals further by allowing us radical or truthful books.” Hopefully, de Wal had enough reading material, for he was to remain at Ellis Island until the end of September.
As de Wal and his colleagues whiled away their time in detention, more than thirty bombs were being mailed to prominent Americans like J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. Postal officials intercepted most of them, but one package they missed arrived at the home of former Georgia senator Thomas Hardwick where it exploded and blew off the hands of Hardwick’s maid. In June, another bomb exploded in front of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s Washington home, damaging the house and killing the man who planted the bomb. To Americans, these seemed like dangerous times.
Meanwhile, despite the hoopla surrounding the big roundup of radicals from the Red Special, only nine of the detainees had actually been deported. Most of those taken from Seattle to Ellis Island were eventually released on parole. The big Red roundup had actually been a bust.
In the middle of this was Fred Howe, a public servant with impeccably bad timing. Not only were suspected radicals being released from his custody, but just a few days before the bomb exploded in front of Palmer’s home, Howe had presided over a Justice to Russia rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden. His presence attracted the attention of Senator William King of Utah, who demanded that Howe be fired. “I don’t think a man who has sanctioned Bolshevism, as he did by presiding at that meeting, is fit to remain in office,” King said. “If there is any hint of Bolshevism at Ellis Island, through which the immigrants of the world pour into the United States, it must be wiped out.” Howe was unapologetic and denied that the meeting was “pro-Bolshevist” or “pro-Soviet.” Yet a Times article claimed that participants cheered for Trotsky and Lenin, while booing the mention of Woodrow Wilson’s name.
Howe was not a Communist, but a Labor Department report showed that he had been solicitous of the comfort of the Red Special detainees. When the radicals complained that they had to get up at six thirty in the morning, but could not eat breakfast until eight thirty, Howe ordered that their mandatory wake-up be postponed closer to breakfast. Howe also allowed detainees to receive such IWW periodicals as The Rebel Worker and The Red Dawn.
The attacks on Howe also came from an unexpected source: Fiorello La Guardia. The former Ellis Island translator, who had recently returned to his House seat after serving in the army during the Great War, lashed out at Howe on the floor of Congress. La Guardia was a liberal and sympathetic to the plight of immigrants at Ellis Island, but was disgusted enough to condemn Howe as a radical and complain that he had allowed anarchist literature to be available to detainees. While Senator King proposed impeaching Howe, La Guardia merely wanted to cut his pay by 50 percent.
In the midst of the criticism, Howe resigned in September 1919. He was mostly guilty of a political tin ear, a victim of political naïveté and poor judgment. The irony is that despite his sympathy for the radicals, one of the intercepted explosive packages sent by anarchists in the spring of 1919 was addressed to Howe, perhaps because he was technically in charge