American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [209]
Mezei’s release occurred at the same time that the career of Senator Joe McCarthy was quickly unraveling, thanks to the public humiliation caused by his unwise investigation of alleged Communism in the U.S. Army in the spring of 1954. As Mezei was released from Ellis Island, censure proceedings against McCarthy were about to come to the floor of the Senate. Anti-Communism was not dead, but its rough edges were being sanded down. The Eisenhower administration had no need to burnish its anti-Communist bona fides and could therefore tone down the government’s antiradical crusade.
By 1954, Ellis Island had been tainted by its unfortunate connection to the Cold War detention of aliens, which was increasingly becoming a public relations problem. It was being referred to as a concentration camp, and the United States’ role as the leader of the free world in opposing Communist tyranny made its detention policies untenable. “Unlike the totalitarians and despots,” wrote the New York Times, “we Americans abhor imprisonment by administrative officers’ fiat.”
In this political environment, the Eisenhower administration began to consider closing Ellis Island for good. Publicly, it sold the move as a cost-saving measure. The federal government could move its immigration offices to Manhattan and would no longer have to keep up the many buildings on the twenty-seven-acre compound. But there is little doubt that the public attention of the Knauff and Mezei cases helped seal Ellis Island’s fate.
On Veterans Day 1954, Attorney General Brownell spoke before two massive naturalization ceremonies in New York City. He used the occasion to set out a new policy on immigrant detentions. Those whose admissibility to the United States was under question would now no longer be detained while their cases were decided. Only those deemed “likely to abscond” or whose freedom would be “adverse to the national security or the public safety” would be held. The others would be released under conditional paroles or bonds until their cases were cleared. Brownell estimated that authorities had in the past year temporarily detained some 38,000 people, of whom only 1,600 were excluded from entering the United States. Holding so many individuals in detention had become an administrative, civil liberties, and public relations nightmare.
As part of this new policy, Brownell announced the closing of six detention facilities run by the government, including Ellis Island. Washington would save nearly $1 million a year by shuttering it and moving its offices to Manhattan. No longer needed to inspect and process hundreds of thousands of new immigrants, Ellis Island was now no longer wanted as a detention facility.
Ellis Island closed its doors to little fanfare just a few days after Brownell’s speech. From now on, those lucky enough to qualify for admission, after filling a quota position and proving they were not subversives, would no longer concern themselves with the little island in New York Harbor. After decades of attention from journalists, politicians, missionaries, and immigrant aid societies, Ellis Island was now drifting off the nation’s radar screen. With only 5 percent of Americans claiming foreign birth, the heyday of Ellis Island—with its inspection process, its medical and mental tests, its boards of special inquiry, its hasty wedding ceremonies, its tearful family reunions and even more tearful family separations because of deportation—was over.
Ellis Island’s last detainee was Arne Peterssen. The Norwegian seaman was not an immigrant in the traditional sense, but someone who had overstayed his shore leave. Under the newly relaxed immigration rules, officials released Peterssen on parole with a promise that he would rejoin