American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [3]
The man has come upon a gate that provides entry past a high stone wall. A pillar at the gate reads: “United States of America: Admittance Free: Walk In: Welcome.” Standing in the middle of the gate is Uncle Sam. Much taller than the immigrant, the unhappy Uncle Sam is decked out in full patriotic regalia. He is holding his nose, while looking down contemptuously at the man standing before him. Holding one’s nose implies the existence of a foul odor, but it also means that one is forced to do something that one does not want to do. And that’s just the fix that Uncle Sam is in.
“Can I come in?” the immigrant asks Uncle Sam.
“I s’pose you can; there’s no law to keep you out,” a disgusted Uncle Sam replies.
According to this cartoonist, the gates to America were wide open to the dregs of Europe, and the government could do nothing to stop them. Although a powerful idea to many Americans, by 1896 this notion had become outdated. Congress was now creating a list of reasons that immigrants could be excluded at the nation’s gates, and that list would grow longer as the years passed.
To enforce those new laws, the federal government built a new inspection station. Almost 80 percent of immigrants to America passed through the Port of New York, and this new facility was located on an island in New York Harbor called Ellis Island.
The symbolism of the gate is important. Each day, inspectors, doctors, and other government officials stood at the gate and examined those who sought to enter the country. They deliberated over which immigrants could pass through and which would find the gate closed.
At the gate, Ellis Island acted as a sieve. Government officials sought to sift through immigrants, separating out the desirable and the undesirable. America wanted to keep the nation’s traditional welcome to immigrants, but only to those it deemed desirable. For undesirables, the gates of America would be shut forever. Federal law defined such categories, but the enforcement and interpretation of those laws were left up to officials at places like Ellis Island.
The process at Ellis Island was not a happy event, wrote Edward Steiner, but rather “a hard, harsh fact, surrounded by the grinding machinery of the law, which sifts, picks, and chooses; admitting the fit and excluding the weak and helpless.” To another observer of the process, this sifting process resembled “the screening of coal in a great breaker tower.”
The central sifting at Ellis Island occurred at the inspection line. All immigrants would march in a single-file line toward a medical officer. Sometimes having to process thousands of immigrants a day, these officials had only a few seconds to make an initial judgment. They would pay careful attention to the scalp, face, neck, hands, walk, and overall mental and physical condition. The immigrant would then make a right turn in front of the doctor that allowed a rear and side view. Often, doctors would touch the immigrants, feeling for muscular development or fever, or inspect hands that might betray more serious health concerns. They might also ask brief questions. Doctors developed their own methods of observation. As one noted, “Every movement of the body has its own peculiar meaning and that by careful practice we can learn quickly to interpret the significance of the thousand-and-one variations from the normal.”
After 1905, all immigrants would then pass before another doctor whose sole job was to perform a quick eye exam. If any of these medical officers found any sign of possible deficiency, they would use chalk to mark the immigrant with a letter. L stood for lameness and E stood for eye problems, for instance. Those chalk-marked immigrants, some 15 to 20 percent of all arrivals, would then be set aside for further physical or mental testing.
Immigration officials largely based their decisions of the desirability of immigrants on their mental, physical, and moral capacities. To modern ears, the notion of classifying any