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they found that only 4.5 percent of the immigrants from northwestern

Europe coming through Ellis Island during their visit were illiterate,

while nearly 48 percent of those from southern and eastern Europe

could not read. To the Boston Brahmins, this alarming trend threatened America’s moral and intellectual fabric.

The IRL members came away from their visit feeling surprisingly

positive toward the enforcement of the current law—perhaps due to

the great deference granted to them by Ellis Island officials. Yet they

called current immigration laws “radically defective” in keeping out undesirables. A miniscule number of immigrants were actually debarred

or deported. In 1892 and 1893, the first years of the new immigration law, the number was around 0.5 percent. With the institution of

boards of special inquiry under the 1893 immigration law, the percentage doubled between 1894 and 1895 to around 1 percent. To rectify

this situation, the IRL continued to press for a literacy test. Such a test would separate desirable from undesirable immigrants,

keep the nation true to its history of welcoming immigrants, and make

exclusion based on individual characteristics, not race, religion, or nationality. Although a literacy test was theoretically race- and ethnicityneutral, restrictionists rightly believed it would have a disparate effect on immigrants. Henry Cabot Lodge used the work of the IRL to push for the literacy test in the Senate and was quite explicit that the test would mostly affect eastern and southern Europeans.

Not all restrictionists were enamored with the literacy test. Although he died in January 1897 before Congress took up the idea, Francis A. Walker, for once applying some of his economist’s skepticism, had earlier noted that the “anarchist, the criminal, the habitual drunkard would be far more likely to pass the ordeal of a reading and writing test than the pocket-book test.”

Eventually, both the House and Senate passed a literacy test in early 1897. The test would consist of roughly twenty-five words from the U.S. Constitution translated in the immigrant’s native language. However, both Joseph Senner and Herman Stump urged President Grover Cleveland to veto the idea. Back in 1893, Stump had been an ally of Senator Chandler in the investigation of Ellis Island and was highly critical of the new immigrants. Now, after four years at the Immigration Bureau, he modified his views.

Writing to the secretary of the Treasury, Stump agreed that the public demanded greater immigration restriction. However, he argued that any such laws “should be tempered with sympathy for our unfortunate fellow beings who are compelled by adversity to abandon their homes to seek an asylum in an unknown country.” Making a familiar argument, Stump said that America needed unskilled labor to “construct railroads, macadamize our highways, build sewers, clear lands,” thereby freeing up native-born Americans from jobs they found distasteful and allowing them “to engage in the higher and more remunerative trades and occupations.”

Such arguments helped sway Cleveland who, in one of his final acts as president, vetoed the literacy bill. Congress was unable to override it. Cleveland’s veto message was a defense of traditional views of immigration. “It is said, however, that the quality of recent immigration is undesirable,” Cleveland stated. “The time is quite within recent memory when the same thing was said of immigrants who, with their descendants, are now numbered among our best citizens.” Cleveland would rather “admit a hundred thousand immigrants who, though unable to read and write, seek among us only a home and opportunity to work, than to admit one of those unruly agitators and enemies of governmental control, who can not only read and write, but delights in arousing by inflammatory speech the illiterate and peacefully inclined

to discontent and tumult.”

For years, immigration restrictionists would speak of the perfidy of

Cleveland’s veto, never forgetting how close they had come