American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [30]
Not all of the passengers who sailed into New York Harbor alongside Annie Moore would end up at Ellis Island. The ship’s twenty cabin passengers could head directly to their destinations on the mainland, whether U.S. citizens or not. An inkling of the rationale for such differential treatment can be found on the ship’s manifest. Whereas steerage passengers listed their occupations with proper plebian titles like laborer or farmer, the twenty cabin passengers on the Nevada were marked down simply as “Gentleman” or “Lady,” signifying their more rarified social status.
As Annie Moore was entering the facility at Ellis Island, two more ships—the City of Paris and the Victoria—were waiting in the harbor. By noon, some 700 steerage passengers from all three ships were at Ellis Island. It is doubtful that immigration officials would have chosen any of the passengers from the Victoria as their celebrated first immigrant. Having just arrived from the ports of Palermo and Naples, 311 of the Victoria’s 313 steerage passengers hailed from southern Italy.
Colonel Weber noted that while officials processed 700 immigrants the first day, the new facilities could handle thousands more in a day. Most people assumed that such a capacity would never be reached. For now, even the New York World was pleased with the new facilities, noting that during the first day’s business, “everything worked like a charm . . . under the new conditions the comfort and safety of the immigrants will be all that can be desired.”
The immigrants who followed Annie Moore entered the immigrant depot—which was located closer to the ferry slip than its later brick replacement—and then headed up a double staircase to the second floor. Vigilant medical inspectors would watch them as they climbed the stairs, on the lookout for cripples and other invalids.
Once on the second floor, immigrants were herded into ten lines, each of which ended at the desk of a clerk whose job was to crossexamine the immigrants, verifying information from the ship’s manifest and making sure the immigrant did not fall into one of the categories for exclusion. On the second floor were places to buy railroad tickets, information bureaus, telegraph counters, money exchanges, and a lunch counter.
A reporter from Harper’s Weekly visiting Ellis Island in 1893 found it “suggestive of a prison in many of its aspects,” with uniformed guards keeping order. When inspectors questioned immigrants, the reporter found some to be “nervously defiant” while others looked frightened. Still others were “angry, and some stolid with indifference or stupidity.” The long-awaited opening of the federal inspection station did not end the debate over immigration. This five-acre scratch of land sticking out of New York Harbor would now become the focal point for everyone concerned with immigration.
Politicians, journalists, union leaders, and private citizens would now make their way to Ellis Island with their own agendas. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union soon complained about the alleged existence of saloons at Ellis Island. Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, wanted more inspectors to enforce the contract-labor law and visited Ellis Island to make his case to Colonel Weber. Immigration restrictionists went to Ellis Island to make sure the laws were properly enforced. Immigration defenders visited to make sure that newcomers were fairly treated.
“The existing immigration law was framed to sift incomers—to draw a dividing line between desirable and undesirable immigrants,” the superintendent of immigration said in his first annual report, adding that “it is not the serious intention of the Government to prohibit immigration, but from time to time to prohibit the people whom experience has demonstrated fail in some important direction in entering beneficially into American citizenship.”
From the moment Annie Moore stumbled from the gangplank onto Ellis Island,