American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [182]
The scars of war remained on the American psyche and disabused many of their positive feelings for government. For liberals, the disillusionment was even more pronounced. They were the ones who had built up the federal government, who hoped to use it to counteract the power of corporations and provide protections for workers and consumers. The government, run by educated, middle-class professionals, was supposed to rescue America from an orgy of commercialism and ignorance, but instead it bumbled into a bloody European war for no apparent reason, stirred up ethnic hatred at home, and used its new police powers to quash dissent.
No one felt this disillusionment more than Fred Howe. “I hated the new state that had arisen, hated its brutalities, its ignorance, its unpatriotic patriotism, that made profit from our sacrifices and used its power to suppress criticism of its acts,” he wrote in his autobiography. The man who once argued that government should take control of public utilities now changed his tune. “I became distrustful of the state,” he complained, “And I think I lost interest in it, just as did thousands of other persons . . . who were turned from love into fear of the state and all that it signified.”
To Howe, the brutality of the state was on display at Ellis Island. A few weeks after the Buford left New York Harbor, Howe penned a scathing critique of U.S. immigration laws, the same laws he had been sworn to carry out for five years. The article’s title said it all: “Lynch Law and the Immigrant Alien.” He condemned deportations as cruel and criticized the secret hearings held at Ellis Island to determine the fate of immigrants. He painted a dark picture of European immigrants living in a “state of panic” and “perpetual fear.” He ominously pronounced: “We have made Americanization impossible.” Of course, in retrospect Howe was wrong. The policies at Ellis Island and the Red Scare had few long-term effects on the attitudes of immigrants to their adopted country, but they certainly scarred Fred Howe.
His disillusionment can also be seen in his shift away from the idea of government control over business and utilities toward the idea of a cooperative “producers’ state,” where workers participated in the management and ownership of business. After leaving Ellis Island, Howe tried to put this idea into practice as the executive director of the Conference on Democratic Railroad Control.
When Howe left in September 1919, he was at the depth of despair. He had been condemned on the floor of the House of Representatives. He had survived one congressional investigation, and another one loomed. He despised his superiors and lost faith in his fellow citizens. He had begun work at Ellis Island hoping “to make it a playhouse for immigrants.” When he left, he found it a prison for aliens deemed unworthy by the government, but it had also, as Wendell Phillips once said about slavery, “made a slave of the master no less than the slave.”
Before leaving Ellis Island for the last time in the fall of 1919, Howe gathered up all of the personal papers that he had been saving to use for a book on his experiences there. Instead of taking them with him, he sent for a porter and the two men carried the materials to the island’s engine room where they threw the papers into the flames.
Chapter 16
Quotas
Americanization is not a mathematical process; it is a human process. Pigs may be imported by mathematical calculation. Ought we to be surprised if piggish methods of regulation of immigration produce brutish resentment and hatred of law and government?
—The Outlook, 1921
Whenever anyone wants something to kick against, they usually pick Ellis Island.
—New York Times, 1923
AT EXA CTLY MIDNIGHT ON JULY 1, 1923, THE STEAMSHIP President Wilson rushed across an imaginary line that spanned the Narrows of New York Harbor. Thirty seconds later, the Washington crossed that same