American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [183]
Immigration officials stationed at the two forts duly noted the times the ships crossed this line. When the mad midnight dash was over, eleven ships had arrived at Ellis Island, containing over eleven thousand passengers seeking entry to the United States. By morning, immigration officials were busy processing the new arrivals.
To anyone awake at that midnight hour, the throng of massive transatlantic steamers jockeying for position in the middle of the night in New York Harbor must have been a sight to behold. Why were these ships waiting in the harbor for the tolling of the midnight hour? Why did immigration officials patrol an imaginary line along the Narrows in the middle of the night? And why did these ships race across that imaginary line and have their times recorded as if it were an Olympic track meet?
The exact time a steamship crossed that invisible line held the potential to change the lives of thousands of immigrants aboard those vessels and spoke to the dramatic turn in American immigration laws since the end of World War I. The postwar disillusionment meant that the old way of dealing with the regulation and processing of immigrants—sorting the desirable from the undesirable—was over.
Restrictionists had long thought the process at Ellis Island was too lax, while immigration defenders thought it too strict. Yet the little island kept the concerns of both groups in balance, allowing a generally free immigration while barring those few deemed undesirable. War disrupted that balance, and both sides lost faith that government could weed out undesirables while treating its guests with a modicum of respect. Summing up the nation’s disillusionment, the Saturday Evening Post complained in 1921 that “the Department of Labor knows no more about immigration than it knows about the habits of the viviparous blenny or the gambling systems in use at Monte Carlo.”
Though the hysteria of the Red Scare had subsided, economic concerns deepened. The United States had entered a severe postwar recession. With some 2 million Americans out of work—many of them returning soldiers—the prospect of a postwar revival of European immigration was troubling. While four years of war had drastically reduced the number of immigrants, more than 430,000 people arrived between July 1919 and June 1920, and almost double that number would arrive in the following twelve months.
Americans feared that was just the tip of the iceberg. When they looked to Europe, they saw a continent teeming with people living amid the rubble and destruction of war. To those poor souls, America looked more and more attractive. Anthony Caminetti investigated conditions in Europe in late 1920 and reported back that some 25 million Europeans were ready to emigrate. Steamship officials told immigration authorities that some 15 million Europeans were “vociferously demanding immediate passage.” Lothrop Stoddard, author of The
Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, feared as many as 20 million.
“The influx of aliens will be limited only by the capacity of the steamships,” a New York Times editorial warned of this potential deluge of war-displaced Europeans. “Our equipment for handling the alien flood, meanwhile, has pitiably broken down. . . . Ellis Island is a chaos.”
This was all too much for Albert Johnson, the chairman of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. Johnson returned from another visit to Ellis Island in November 1920 and announced that what he found there was so bad that he was sure “the country does not realize the menace of immigration.” He promised that on the first day of the new session of Congress he would offer a bill to restrict immigration.
That is exactly what he did. At first, Johnson pushed for a two-year suspension of immigration, but his colleagues could only be convinced to support