American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [220]
In 1914, a writer named Mary Antin argued that the “ghost of the Mayflower pilots every immigrant ship, and Ellis Island is another name for Plymouth Rock.” For a Russian Jewish immigrant like Antin, linking Plymouth Rock to Ellis Island was a forthright way to express her Americanness and rebuke opponents of immigration.
That an immigrant like Antin would have the temerity to equate Plymouth Rock with Ellis Island was too much for the novelist Agnes Repplier. “Had the Pilgrim Fathers been met on Plymouth Rock by immigration officials, had their children been placed immediately in good free schools, and given the care of doctors, dentists, and nurses,” she asked, “what pioneer virtues would they have developed.” To equate Plymouth Rock with Ellis Island assumed that modern immigrants were the equal of the original settlers and their descendants, a leap of judgment that was just too far-fetched for Repplier.
Other native-born Americans nervously saw the passing of the baton from Plymouth Rock to Ellis Island as inevitable. A New York City schoolteacher in the early twentieth century was unable to get her largely first- and second-generation pupils to answer basic questions about U.S. history. When all else failed, she asked: Where is Ellis Island? She had finally hit upon the right question, as every hand in the room was raised and “the light of intelligence gleamed from every pair of eyes.” While the teacher had always looked with veneration upon Plymouth Rock, the history of these schoolchildren and millions of new Americans now began at Ellis Island.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, a Slovenian immigrant named Louis Adamic traveled the country giving a speech entitled “Plymouth Rock and Ellis Island.”
The beginning of their vital American background as groups is not the glorified Mayflower, but the as yet unglorified immigrant steerage; not Plymouth Rock or Jamestown, but Castle Garden or Ellis Island or Angel Island or the International Bridge or the Mexican and Canadian border, not the wilderness of New England, but the social-economic jungle of the city slums and the factory system.
With the United States heading toward involvement in another European war, Adamic hoped the inclusion of Ellis Island into America’s historic pantheon would help unify the diverse nation. “Let’s make America safe for differences,” he exhorted his audiences. “Let us work for unity within diversity.”
After the war, Ellis Island fell off the nation’s collective radar, finding itself uncomfortably in the news with the detentions of enemy aliens during World War II and suspected radicals during the Cold War. However, the revival of white ethnic identity during the late 1960s and 1970s helped bring more attention to Ellis Island.
In deeply nostalgic tones, Leo Rosten wrote an article for Look in 1968 entitled: “Not So Long Ago, There Was a Magic Island.” Around the same time, Senator Ted Kennedy, a descendant of pre-Ellis Island Irish immigrants, penned a piece in Esquire about Ellis Island and those who passed through it. “They came—creative, industrious, unafraid,” Kennedy wrote. “Today Ellis Island stands as a symbol, in new glory, of the oldest theme in our history. It reminds us all that the nobility to which America has risen was born of humble origins.” In 1975, National Parks Service historian Thomas Pitkin published the first comprehensive history of Ellis Island. “There is nothing really fanciful in calling Ellis Island, as has been done, the Plymouth Rock of its day,” Pitkin wrote in conclusion. “There is no single point in the country where American social history for a generation and more comes to a sharper focus.”
In the late 1970s, a group of Armenian-Americans gathered at Ellis Island “to express gratitude to their adopted land of freedom.” Set Charles