American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [180]
It must have been an odd sight, with the middle-aged anarchist and the young federal agent engaged in political conversation. The thin veneer of civility between Goldman and the authorities was a sign of the anarchist’s defeat. Goldman was still bitter at Hoover for not informing her lawyer about the deportation, and she let the young government official know it. “Haven’t I given you a square deal, Miss Goldman?” a defensive Hoover responded. “Oh, I suppose you’ve given me as square a deal as you could,” she replied. She could not refuse one final dig at her adversary: “We shouldn’t expect from any person something beyond his capacity.”
Upon arrival at Fort Wadsworth, the passengers were transferred to the Buford, a thirty-year-old army transport ship that had been in use during the Spanish-American War. Only 51 of the Buford’s passengers were deemed anarchists, including Berkman and Goldman. Some 184 of the deportees were members of the Federation of the Union of Russian Workers, a group designated as advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government. This included Joseph Poluleck, the Methodist whose major offense was that he took math classes at the wrong place. Finally, 9 of the passengers were excluded as likely to become a public charge, while 5 others had violated other parts of the immigration law.
The press was quick to give the Buford a new name, one that would stick throughout history: the Soviet Ark. The Pittsburgh Post called Goldman and the other passengers “the unholiest cargo that ever left our shores.” Because of the supposedly dangerous nature of the Buford’s human cargo, the army provided a contingent of sixty-four soldiers and officers to provide protection and prevent a mutiny, joined by nine officials from the Immigration Service.
Goldman and the others elicited little sympathy from Americans. Contrary to what Goldman and Berkman wrote, their deportation did not signify the beginnings of czarism or the end of freedom in America. Rather it was one of the many big and small events that, when taken as a whole, helped break apart the national consensus on immigration and herald a new era when Ellis Island—and the immigrants who once streamed through its doors—were less relevant to America.
“One could not imagine a more quiet movement of so many people,” Commissioner-General Caminetti reported the next day.
F ROM THE BLACK TOM explosion to the deportation of Emma Goldman, Ellis Island found itself witness to the traumas of the Great War and its aftermath. The war was now over, but the debate over the power of exclusion, detention, and deportation remained.
A few years before Goldman was expelled, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes succinctly summarized the government’s view on deportation. It is not a punishment, Holmes wrote, but instead “simply a refusal by the government to harbor persons whom it does not want.”
The sailing of the Soviet Ark, which forever banished the country’s number one anarchist, emboldened the Justice Department to make further arrests. While the Buford was still on the high seas, hundreds more suspected alien radicals were rounded up as part of the Palmer Raids and brought to Ellis Island for deportation, many of whom belonged to the Communist Party. At the Labor Department, Louis Post tried to rein in the Justice Department’s excesses. With Secretary Wilson still ill, much of the burden fell on Post’s shoulders. He did not save Emma Goldman, but now, at the end of his career and with little to lose, Post ordered the release of over two thousand suspected radicals across the country, although he did uphold the deportations of a few hundred individuals.
Post made enemies with his actions, not the least of whom was J. Edgar Hoover. The young Justice Department official had dug up an affidavit that Post had signed in 1904 in support of anarchist John Turner. In Hoover’s files was a poem entitled “The Bully Bolshevik,” which was “disrespectfully