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through Ellis Island, brings up larger questions about the memorialization of Ellis Island. Should it be seen as a shrine to celebrate the experiences of those who passed through it? Should it represent immigrants

from every era of American history? Or should it commemorate the

experiences of everyone who came to America in myriad ways, from

eighteenth-century slave ships to early nineteenth-century coffin ships

to modern immigrants who arrive at airports?

Even though the restoration of Ellis Island has drawn public acclaim, many scholars have been critical of its evolution into a national

icon. Their concerns revolve around three issues. First, the memorializing of Ellis Island should not be used to make negative comparisons

with newer immigrant groups. Second, the refurbished Ellis Island

should not lead to ideological celebrations of the free-market or “upby-the-bootstraps” homilies. Last, critics contend that the “nation of

immigrants” saga embodied in the Ellis Island story leaves out groups

that did not voluntarily emigrate to the United States, namely American Indians and the descendants of African slaves.

Historians are supposed to clear out the fog created by the construction of historical memory, but too often their work betrays an

attempt to construct a historical memory that serves an ideological

purpose. For example, historian Mike Wallace complained about the

lack of “fresh thinking” at the island’s museum and helpfully suggested

exhibits on “the effect on immigration flows of actions taken by the International Monetary Fund, major multinationals, and the Central Intelligence Agency.” He believed that the new immigration museum had

nothing that would help people probe contemporary anti-immigrant attitudes. “It would be perfectly possible to leave Ellis,” Wallace writes, “with warm feelings toward the old migrants and preexisting resent

ments of gooks, spicks and towel-heads left intact.”

In addition, Wallace and other leftists were concerned that the restoration of Ellis Island abetted the rise of American conservatism. “At

the heart of the Reagan/Iacocca reading of the history of immigration

was the ‘up-from-poverty’ saga of the model of white ethnics,” wrote

Wallace. This amounted to nothing more than an “antigovernment

screed” that facilitated the contemporary policies of the Reagan administration.

Art professor Erica Rand sees Ellis Island through the edgier

prisms of gender and queer studies. Her 2005 book Ellis Island Snow

Globe devotes space not only to predictable denunciations of commercialism, but also to more entertaining discussions of same-sex eroticism, with chapters such as “Breeders on a Golf Ball: Normalizing Sex

at Ellis Island.” Rand is also concerned about the exclusionary nature

of the site, which she sees as privileging the historical narrative of

one group. She worried that the “claim that the Ellis Island museum

honors all immigrants, all migrants, or even all who ‘people America’

also functions to mask the inequity involved in the concentration of

heritage resources at a site that honors and documents primarily white

people.”

It is hard for some to disentangle the memory of Ellis Island from

discussions of race. Many black Americans felt left out of the celebrations of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, even though few Americans seem aware that black nationalist Marcus Garvey, social scientist

Kenneth Clark, and Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay were

among the roughly 143,000 black immigrants—mostly from the Caribbean—who came through Ellis Island between 1899 and 1937. The disconnect was exemplified by black historian John Hope Franklin, who

admitted that the renovation of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island

was “a celebration for immigrants and that has nothing to do with me.

I’m interested in it as an event, but I don’t feel involved in it.” David Roediger’s Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs

exemplifies this unease.