American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [193]
In 1904, he had referred to eastern Europeans as “beaten members of beaten breeds.” More than thirty years later, he recanted. “I rue this sneer,” Ross admitted. The change of heart did nothing to change U.S. immigration quotas, but the newfound attitudes of Powderly, Goddard, and Ross foreshadowed the slow and steady abandonment of racialist thinking that would develop in the twentieth century.
NINE-YEAR-OLD EDOARDO CORSI AND his brother Giuseppe Garibaldi Corsi stood on the deck of the steamship Florida as it sailed into New York Harbor in November 1906. They were two of the over 1 million immigrants who would pass through Ellis Island in that record year. Amid the excitement of the end of their journey, they thought they spied mountains rising out of the haze in the distance and wondered why their peaks were not topped by snow. Their stepfather corrected them. Those were not mountains, but the highest buildings in the world, he said pointing to the Manhattan skyline.
The Corsi family—two young sons, two sisters, mother, and stepfather—had arrived from the Abruzzi region of southern Italy. Adding to the sense of confusion brought on by those mysterious urban mountains, the Corsis felt an apprehension about what lay ahead of them at Ellis Island. Their acceptance into America was not assured, although Edoardo’s stepfather had spent the rest of the family’s money to buy his wife a second-class cabin ticket to ease her entry. “I felt a resentment toward this Ellis Island ahead of us,” Corsi later reminisced.
The child who thought the Manhattan skyline was a mountain range would make his adult life within those urban mountains. Edward Corsi became active in the settlement house movement in New York and a progressive Republican in the mold of his congressman, Fiorello La Guardia. His political connections eventually led him to be named commissioner of Ellis Island in 1931 by Herbert Hoover.
Corsi was not the first foreign-born commissioner, but he was the first to have entered through Ellis Island. He presided over a muchdiminished station. It had once attracted the attention and ire of many Americans. Presidents had visited the island for an up-close view of its operations. Restrictionists thought the system was too lenient; immigration defenders thought it too strict.
Those days were over. As America became mired in the Great Depression, Ellis Island slipped into the far recesses of the collective American mind. “Only occasionally now does this most famous of national gateways appear in the news,” the Literary Digest noted in 1934. When Ellis Island was mentioned, it was often in highly negative tones. A 1934 report commissioned by Labor Secretary Frances Perkins began its findings by noting the popular myth that Ellis Island had been a place of misery, “a dungeon from which the immigrant is lucky to escape.”
The 1930s would represent a low point in U.S. immigration history. The island’s welcoming role continued to shrink, while its more punitive side increased. “An important consequence of restriction has been to make Ellis Island as much an emigrant as an immigrant station,” one newspaper noted. “One may even say that its major activities now are concerned with deportation since of course to slam the front door is to challenge entrance through the back.”
The combination of restrictive quotas and economic distress meant that by 1932, three times as many people left the United States as came to it. In the following year, only 23,068 individuals made the decision to come to immigrate, the smallest number since 1831. Ellis Island had given up its decades-long role as a “proper sieve” to inspect immigrants. By the 1930s, Corsi noted with more than a touch of sadness, “deportation was the big business at Ellis Island.”
With fewer immigrants to process and