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Since the mid-1960s, Matthew had received at least $11 million in federal loans, grants, and contracts, and the Nixon administration, eager to aid the cause of black capitalism, refused to pull the plug on the Ellis Island operation. In the end, they didn’t have to—the ineptitude and grandiose vision of Dr. Matthew did that for them. By the summer of 1971, only five people remained on the island; by the fall that number had dwindled to three. Instead of a vibrant industrial community with schools and hospitals, Ellis Island remained as it had been before: deteriorated and largely abandoned.

As the Ellis Island colony was falling apart, Matthew’s Interfaith Hospital in Queens was drawing attention for its filthy conditions and poor treatment of patients. Reports suggested that top Nixon administration officials had refused to cooperate with, and even impeded, investigations into the business practices and contracts of NEGRO. In April 1973, Matthew was arrested on charges of illegally diverting $250,000 in Medicaid payments designated for Interfaith Hospital to other NEGRO projects.

By this time, Richard Nixon had been driven from office, Ellis Island remained a fallow wasteland, and Thomas Matthew’s dreams of black capitalism—part scheme and part dream—had long since died.

In the flawed vision of Thomas Matthew, the renewed racial pride of African-Americans could not redeem a decaying and forgotten Ellis Island. Yet black power did bestow a peculiar—and unintended—gift on the descendants of white immigrants. The civil rights and black power movements challenged the concept of the melting pot, noting that black Americans were not so easily melted into the larger American stew. Race was a marker that white Americans did not seem to want to ignore and blacks seemed not to want to forget.

Around the same time, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan published a study of New York racial and ethnic groups entitled Beyond the Melting Pot. If, as the authors suggested, ethnicity had never completely disappeared in the melting pot, the growth of black power and racial pride among African-Americans helped spur white ethnic groups to more public displays of their own identity. “Kiss Me I’m Irish” and “Kiss Me I’m Polish” buttons appeared. By the 1960s, differences became badges of honor, not shame. Ethnic-themed novels like Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and Mario Puzo’s The Godfather climbed the bestseller list.

Ethnic pride and ethnic defensiveness went hand in hand. A young writer of Slovakian descent named Michael Novak published a jeremiad called The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics. Defending white ethnics from a variety of charges, Novak also lashed out against “Nordic prejudices” and moralizing, liberal WASPs. It was now the children and grandchildren of the Ellis Island immigrants who found themselves in conflict against “progressive” Nordics and Anglo-Saxons. Outright prejudice and discrimination may have disappeared, but cultural and political conflicts remained.

In the early twentieth century, Americans debated who should or should not be allowed to enter the country at places like Ellis Island. By the second half of the twentieth century, Ellis Island had been forgotten and sat in New York Harbor as a rotting symbol of a bygone era. Before the twentieth century ended, it would be reborn under a different guise—as a museum and a national monument. But the debate over its meaning would continue.

Chapter 19

The New Plymouth Rock

Once I had set foot again on Ellis Island, I knew that I had come to one of God’s places, and that those of us who had been there were tied to it forever.

—Mark Helprin, Ellis Island and Other Stories

LINO ANTHONY IA COCCA HAD MUCH T O BE PROUD OF on the night of July 3, 1986. At age sixty-one, he already had a successful career in the auto industry, running Ford Motor Company before guiding Chrysler out of bankruptcy—with a little help from Uncle Sam. His recently published autobiography had sold more than 5 million copies. He received