American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [212]
Although the bill has been widely hailed as a liberal piece of legislation that ended racial and ethnic discrimination in U.S. immigration law, it still kept much of the restrictive apparatus intact. Overall quotas still remained, and restrictions were placed on immigrants from the Western Hemisphere for the first time. In a move that would have a deep impact on the future of U.S. immigration, the bill made family reunification the cornerstone of immigration policy, setting that outside of the overall quota limit.
While legislation to end quotas based on national origin made its way through Congress, Johnson went ahead and settled the question of who should own Ellis Island, if not what the island’s future would look like. In May 1965, Johnson signed a proclamation making Ellis Island a part of the National Park Service by adding it to the Statue of Liberty National Monument. The private sale of the island was now off the table.
With full control over the island, the Johnson administration commissioned architect Philip Johnson to create plans for the development of the island. Frank Lloyd Wright had been drafted a few years earlier to come up with a design for the private development of the island as a self-contained city of the future. His plan went nowhere. Now it was Johnson’s turn and he did not disappoint. Rather than renovating and restoring the main buildings of the island, Johnson called for stabilizing them and keeping them as historical ruins. Vines and trees would be allowed to grow untended about the buildings, adding to the feeling of abandoned ruins. “The effect would be a romantic and nostalgic grouping through which the visitor would pass,” Johnson said.
The centerpiece of Johnson’s plan was a 130-foot-high truncated cone that would be called the Wall of Sixteen Million. Ramps would wind along the cone, allowing visitors to read the names of every immigrant who had passed through Ellis Island. Some in the press dubbed Johnson’s design the “Cult of Instant Ugliness.”
There were other problems. A New York Times editorial argued that Johnson had gotten it all wrong. Ellis Island was built as a “gateway,” not a wall “built to exclude.” Adding some Cold War imagery, the paper saw Johnson’s Wall of Sixteen Million as more akin to the Berlin Wall. This interpretation stripped the restrictive function from Ellis Island’s past; the gate that barred undesirable immigrants had now evolved into a gateway, a welcoming station rather than an obstacle designed to sift out immigrants. The forgetting of the restrictive nature of Ellis Island was not new. In a 1954 article on the “passing of Ellis Island,” the American Mercury falsely noted that prior to 1921 “there were no restrictions on immigration.”
The debate over Ellis Island in the late 1950s and early 1960s took place during an historic lull in U.S. immigration history. The decade following 1955 saw an average of just 288,000 immigrants entering per year. In 1960, just 5.4 percent of all Americans were foreign-born, a historic low, compared to the nearly 15 percent of foreign-born Americans in 1910.
As immigration slowed to a trickle, the children and grandchildren of those who arrived at Ellis Island were assimilating into American life. In this world, Ellis Island was part of the cultural baggage left behind in the rush toward assimilation, together with tenement apartments, European accents, and unpronounceable names. Despite occasional pleas by people like Oscar Handlin and Edward Corsi, there was little public groundswell for saving Ellis Island.
The island was a mess. One newspaper referred to it as “a seedy ghost town.” Though the buildings were structurally sound, vandalism and neglect took their toll. Thieves stole