American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [34]
His time among Russia’s oppressed Jews had a deep impact on Weber. He and Kempster witnessed the expulsion of Jews from Moscow to the Pale. They met an elderly man with paralysis and partial blindness who was suffering in his own bed because he was refused entry into a Moscow hospital. Many who had lived in Moscow for decades now found their businesses failing. “Among those ordered out while I was there were cashiers, clerks, correspondence chiefs, and bookkeepers of banks; heads of business departments; manufacturers,” Weber remembered.
The two Americans traveled extensively through towns such as Minsk, Wilna, Bialystok, and Grodno. The stories from Russian Jews were “sad and pitiful in the extreme. . . . Everywhere there was gloom and dejection.” Weber encountered pronounced and deep-seated misery. “The emaciated forms, the wan faces, the deep sunken cheeks,” he later remembered about the experience, “the pitiful expression of those great staring eyes reminding one of a hunted animal, are ever present and will never leave me.” Weber was haunted by nightmares of the tragic Jewish figures he encountered and sometimes wondered if he was not suffering from hallucinations.
Weber and Kempster’s report was full of sympathetic observations of Jewish life. They argued that Jewish immigration was forced largely by the religious and ethnic persecution found in Russia. They described in detail life in Jewish ghettos and the history of laws that made life difficult for those of the Jewish faith. After a visit in London with Baron de Hirsch, who used part of his vast fortune to assist Jews fleeing Russia, Weber and Kempster admitted that the case of Russian Jewish immigrants was decidedly different from that of other immigrants.
By the 1890s, Russian Jewish paupers had increased by nearly 30 percent and some estimates counted as many as 40 percent of the Jewish population as luftmenschen, people without jobs, skills, or prospects, floating through the Pale and surviving as best as they could. Here seemed proof of what immigration restrictionists claimed: that assisted immigrants came to America with tickets paid for them by third-party philanthropic groups. They needed to be helped because so many had become paupers.
While Weber and Kempster admitted that some cases of paupers emigrating to America did exist, “that the movement assumes any sort of proportions [as believed by restrictionists] is not warranted by our investigations nor is it believed.” The case of Russian Jews could not be seen simply through the prism of paupers dumped onto U.S. shores. Instead, Weber and Kempster asked that Americans look beyond the temporary condition of immigrants.
A person who by reason of unexpected misfortunes or persecutions is deprived of his accumulations, who has been subjected to pillage and plunder while fleeing from the burdens which have become unbearable, if capable of supporting himself and family, if he has one, with a reasonable certainty after obtaining a foothold, and that foothold is guaranteed by friends or relatives upon landing or strong probable surrounding circumstances, is not, according to our definition, a pauper.
Weber and Kempster’s report was a sharp rebuke to immigration restrictionists.
However, instead of a unified report on European conditions, the committee released four separate ones. Weber’s three other colleagues had conducted their own tours of Europe. The report of Judson Cross most closely resembled the conclusions of Weber and Kempster. Writing about Italian immigration, Cross also described the process of chain migration. Italian immigrants “are constantly bestirring others to go. Each Italian in the United States can easily secure a place for a friend and the process is ever being repeated.” Contrary to some of the reports about these new immigrants, Cross found southern Italians “sober, industrious, and economical and fond of their children.” These Italians left their homelands because of a lack of land, not because they were encouraged to leave by the government.