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Masses: The Immigrant in American Society, 1880–1921 (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1982), 56–57. While Kraut calls the story possibly apocryphal, he uses it to illustrate the changing of names by officials at Ellis Island. One possible explanation of the story has the original Sean Ferguson as a Yiddish-speaking actor named Berel Bienstock. When Bienstock came to the United States to seek a career in the movies, his agent suggested that he Americanize his name. When he finally got to California and met with a movie producer who asked him his name, the nervous Bienstock replied in Yiddish “Schoen fergessen” and the producer wrote down his name as Sean Ferguson. But that story might also be apocryphal. See Stephen J. Sass, “In the Name of Sean Ferguson,” JewishJournal.com, June 21, 2002, http://www.jewishjournal.com/ home/preview.php?id=8761.

401 The stories multiply: Ellen Levine, illustrated by Wayne Parmenter, If Your Name Was Changed at Ellis Island (New York: Scholastic, 1993); Ellen Levine claims that her grandfather’s original name was Louis Nachinovsky, but immigration inspectors at Ellis Island “changed many Jewish names to Levine or Cohen.” And so her grandfather had become Louis Levine. Another book on Ellis Island, under the header “There’s a Man Goin’ Round Changing Names,” discusses how “tens of thousands” of names were changed at Ellis Island. More discussion of name changes can be found in David M. Brownstone, Irene M. Frank, and Douglass Brownstone, Island of Hope, Island of Tears (New York: MetroBooks, 2002), 177–179.

401 In an interview: Interview with Sophia Kreitzberg, “Voices from Ellis Island.”

402 Then there is the joke: Joseph Epstein, “Death Benefits,” Weekly Standard, May 21, 2007. Although Epstein tells the Moishe Pipik story as a joke, he still believes that the “impatience of officials at Ellis Island altered lots of Eastern European surnames.”

402 Nearly all of these: On the name change myth, see Alan Berliner’s documentary, The Sweetest Sound, reviewed in WSJ, June 25, 2001.

403 The inclusive nature: This issue came up in the development of the plans for the museum in the 1980s. See Holland, Idealists, Scoundrels, and the Lady, 184–185.

403 Historians are supposed to: NYT, September 7, 1990; Mike Wallace, Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 70–71. Wallace is wrong to claim that “for all Reagan’s celebration of the Statue as the ‘mother of exiles’ he was then doing his best to slam the open door shut.” Anti-immigration measures were never part of Reagan’s politics or rhetoric. The major piece of immigration legislation during the Reagan years, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, did not call for immigration restriction, but instead created an amnesty program for illegal immigrants already in the country, as well as measures designed to punish employers who employed illegal immigrants. The number of immigrants remained remarkably steady during the Reagan years, going from 530,639 in 1980 to 643,025 in 1988, before jumping to over 1 million in each of the next three years. Peter Schuck has written that the 1980s produced immigration policies that were “remarkably liberal and expansive by historical standards.” Wallace, 58; Peter H. Schuck, Citizens, Strangers, and In-Between: Essays on Immigration and Citizenship (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 92.

404 In addition: Wallace, Mickey Mouse History, 57. For other academic critics of Ellis Island, see Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 177–187, and John Bodnar, “Symbols and Servants: Immigrant America and the Limits of Public History,” Journal of American History 73, no. 1 (June 1986). For a more positive academic appraisal of Ellis Island, see Judith Smith, “Celebrating Immigration History at Ellis Island,” American Quarterly, March 1992. 404 Art professor: Erica Rand, The Ellis Island Snow Globe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 177.

404 It is hard