American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [40]
Chandler may have been descended from Puritan stock, but unlike Henry Cabot Lodge, Francis Walker, and other anti-immigrant Yankees, the New Hampshire Republican was not descended from wealth. His Yankee inheritance was one of values and pride, not dollars and cents. William’s father had owned a stable and inn in New Hampshire, and although they were not poor, his sons were not raised as country gentlemen.
As easy as it may be to caricature immigration opponents like Chandler, the senator’s political career shows a more complicated man. Though skeptical of the new immigration streaming into the country, Chandler was in many ways a progressive Republican of the time, with all of the contradictions that term implies.
He supported Reconstruction and black voting rights. He was suspicious of big corporations and supported legislation to regulate them. The frugal Yankee was angered by the power, wealth, and arrogance of the new class of capitalists, especially the railroad companies. In 1892, he sought unsuccessfully to incorporate a plank in the Republican platform stating that big business was not the master of the state, but would be obedient to the law. His constant battles against the railroads eventually caused him to lose his Senate seat in 1900.
Back in the spring of 1892, Chandler’s mind was firmly fixed on the dangers of immigration. On the morning of March 5, with the fear of typhus still on the minds of New Yorkers, Chandler led his fifteen-man committee to Ellis Island. Its initial impression of the facility was less than enthusiastic. The congressmen found the buildings to be “very cheap-looking affairs, unsubstantial though comfortable. The wood put in them was evidently soft and poorly seasoned for in the partitions and elsewhere great seams had opened up, through some of which the hand could be placed.”
Chandler’s investigation, which would drag on for more than three months, was a two-pronged attack on Ellis Island, representing both political partisanship and the concerns of immigration restrictionists. At the time, the House and Senate were split between Republican and Democratic control. The year 1892 was a presidential election year and Democrats were eager to use the hearings to excoriate Treasury Department officials in the Republican administration of President Benjamin Harrison.
The Chandler hearings allowed Democrats to home in on what they argued was fraud and waste in the construction of Ellis Island. While Congress had approved $250,000 for the construction of Ellis Island, the project went way over budget and $362,000 more was needed to complete it. The committee concluded that “there has been great waste of public money in the construction of the improvements on Ellis Island” and that the buildings are “badly constructed, of inferior material, and poor workmanship.”
Republican members of the committee dissented from that opinion, noting that everyone had agreed that the old system at Castle Garden was bad and needed to be fixed. They reminded their colleagues of what had been accomplished: Ellis Island was doubled in size, the land was raised, a dock was constructed, and a navigable channel and deep-water basin for ferries were constructed. Republicans admitted, however, that the facilities were “of a somewhat rough and shed-like character.”
Chandler had not brought the committee all the way to New York just to examine accounting records and look