American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [211]
Ellis Island’s future would depend on how Americans viewed what had happened—or what they thought had happened—there. If Americans associated negative memories with Ellis Island, then there was no reason why it should not become an oil storage depot or some other commercial venture. But clearly some Americans were beginning to feel the tug of positive memories. As Harvard’s Oscar Handlin put it at the time, the buildings of Ellis Island should “be preserved not simply for their symbolic quality as monuments of an important part of our past but also for the service they can still render.”
“This is not just another piece of real estate,” Edward Corsi told a congressional committee in 1962. Corsi had come through Ellis Island fifty-six years earlier and later became commissioner there in the 1930s. Now he was arguing, along with historians Handlin and Allan Nevins, that the island’s future “should symbolize what it stands for in the history of our nation and in the hearts of countless Americans—the welding of many nationalities, races and religions into a united nation, bound together by freedom and equality of opportunity.”
To Corsi and a growing number of first- and second-generation Americans, Ellis Island was no longer just an inspection center created to soothe the concerns of native-born Americans by weeding out undesirable immigrants. Instead those immigrants and their descendants were beginning to shape the historical memory of Ellis Island. In the midst of the Cold War, the island was slowly becoming a symbol of national unity and freedom. During the much bleaker years of the Great Depression, however, Corsi had taken a much different tack. His 1935 history of Ellis Island included a chapter entitled “Who Shall Apologize?” dealing with the “crimes” committed against immigrants there. The passage of twenty-five years had apparently tempered Corsi’s views.
During that time, eastern and southern European immigrants and their offspring were now entering the American mainstream, slowly shedding the stigma of being considered undesirable immigrants. The fears of nativists like Francis A. Walker, Prescott Hall, and Madison Grant were in fact realized as the descendants of eastern and southern Europeans took their place in American society. In turn, American culture and society became less Anglo-Saxon.
In the midtwentieth century, Americans enjoyed movies like It’s a Wonderful Life and On the Waterfront, directed by Frank Capra and Elia Kazan. They went to Broadway plays like Gypsy and Funny Girl, with music by Jule Styne. They laughed at the jokes of Bob Hope, watched Edward G. Robinson star in movies like Key Largo and Double Indemnity, and revered the football legend of Notre Dame’s Knute Rockne. All arrived as immigrants at Ellis Island. Most poignantly, Americans sang “God Bless America,” written by Irving Berlin, who had arrived at Ellis Island in 1893 as Israel Beilin, the Yiddish-speaking son of a Jewish cantor.
While the nativism of the earlier period was dying, the quotas that severely restricted eastern and southern Europeans still remained in place. Not for much longer. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, a landmark piece of legislation that struck a fatal blow against Jim Crow segregation, prohibited discrimination on the grounds of race, color, religion, or national origin. While such legal prohibitions did not extend to immigration, it became politically and morally unacceptable to retain a form of discrimination based on national origins in immigration policy. The days of the quotas were numbered.
In his 1965 State of the Union address, Lyndon Johnson laid out an ambitious legislative plan known as the Great Society. As part of it, he called for an immigration law “based on the