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the Republic from tens of thousands of illiterate undesirables. Yet the

IRL continued the fight for a literacy bill, single-mindedly working on

the issue for twenty more years, publishing pamphlets and lobbying

newspaper editors and elected officials.

While these Bostonians attempted to exert power at the elite level

of the debate, another New Englander with very different ideas was

perhaps the most powerful person in charge of immigration policy at

Ellis Island in the late 1890s. For years, Edward McSweeney did his

work quietly until scandal forced his name onto the pages of newspapers, again raising doubts about Ellis Island’s ability to enforce the

nation’s immigration laws.

Chapter 6

Feud

I have not been understood by many. —Terence V. Powderly

McSweeney . . . is governed by his motives, resentment, and inordinate desire for distinction. . . . [He] is now surrounded by a lot of servile, obsequious flatterers.

—Roman Dobler, Ellis Island Inspector, 1900

JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT ON JUNE 15, 1897, A FIRE BROKE out in the northeast tower of the main building on Ellis Island. The fire’s location made it hard to reach with water hoses. The building, constructed largely of Georgia pine, burned quickly; within a half hour the roof had collapsed. Immigration records dating back to the Castle Garden era, which had been held in half-buried stone and concrete magazines from the island’s former days as an ammunitions depot, were completely burned. The fire quickly spread to other buildings on the island, with flames that lit the night sky. An official investigation into the cause of the fire would later fail to solve the mystery; however, Victor Safford, a doctor at Ellis Island, thought that it was set deliberately, probably by a disgruntled night watchman who should long before have been declared insane.

Whatever its cause, the fire drove out nearly two hundred immigrants who were detained on the island. Most of them were Italians, but the group also included several Hindus in colorful robes and bead hats who had arrived as part of a traveling exhibition. In addition, thirty-one workers, including guards, an apothecary, a cook, two doctors, and three nurses were stationed on the premises.

To some, it was a reminder of the flimsy nature of the original buildings. Harper’s Weekly said the buildings had been “monuments of ugliness” and “wretched barns and architectural rubbish heaps.” The New York World blamed the government for constructing “great piles of rosin-soaked lumber, admirably arranged for burning.” Commissioner Joseph Senner condemned the buildings as firetraps and said that he had been haunted by the fear of fire for years. “Every day as I left the island during the past four years,” Senner told the Times, “I gave a farewell look at the buildings, for I expected to return the next day and find them all in ashes.” His prophecy finally came true.

Thankfully, no one was hurt in the fire, but officials had a bigger problem. An estimated seven thousand immigrants were already on ships in the Atlantic headed for New York, with over six hundred scheduled to arrive the day after the fire. As the ruins on Ellis Island continued to smolder, immigration officials set up a temporary inspection center on the piers at the Battery, on the tip of Manhattan. That first day after the fire, fifty-five immigrants were detained for further inspection.

Officials then moved into the old Barge Office in the southeastern section of the Battery, which had served as a temporary facility after Castle Garden’s closing. The fanciful Venetian Renaissance gray stone building, with its tall, thin turret overlooking the harbor, would again serve as the nation’s primary immigration depot for two and a half more years. The immigration service chartered the steamboat Narragansett, now docked at the island, to serve as a temporary, floating dormitory for as many as eight hundred immigrants who had not yet passed inspection at the Barge Office.

As talk began about rebuilding the facilities on Ellis Island, it became clear