American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [66]
When not bogged down with his battles with McSweeney, Powderly continued to think about the effects of the inspection process. Though Powderly was known as a restrictionist, his views were being tempered by political reality. “Italian, Hungarian, Polish and Oriental immigrants passing through Ellis Island should be treated kindly,” he wrote to McKinley. “Such immigrants in time become citizens and their influence among their compatriots will play no insignificant part in the politics of the future.” When future Republican politicians asked these new Americans for their votes, Powderly worried that they would ask: “Is this the party that was in power at Ellis Island when I landed?”
Powderly understood that while Ellis Island symbolized the nation’s vigilance toward immigration regulation for native-born Americans, it was also becoming a symbol for first-generation Americans. Calls for stricter regulation of immigrants would have to be balanced by the concerns of new immigrant communities.
The new buildings at Ellis Island stood as a testament to a nation entering a new century determined for greater power and glory. The main building impressed upon immigrants that America was a substantive and wondrous land; the power of the federal government and the American nation made their stamp on the immigrant immediately. This same government would soon compel some of those who entered Ellis Island or their children back to Europe as soldiers in World War I. The same government would assist many of these immigrants in their old age with Social Security many years later. Just as every immigrant would feel the force of the federal government at this most important point in their lives, it would be only a matter of time before native-born Americans would experience the presence of the state in their own lives. Immigrants at Ellis Island were just a little ahead of the curve.
The government owed the American people a fitting structure to enforce the law, and it owed immigrants a building that would welcome as well as awe. Unfortunately, the new façade could not mask the disarray and corruption that took place inside its walls.
By the summer of 1901, Inspector Roman Dobler, a Powderly informant, talked about “a bellicose spirit” pervading Ellis Island. As proof, he told the story of Helen Taylor, a twenty-six-year-old assistant matron, who had gotten into an altercation with an inspector named Augustus Theiss, a McSweeney ally. When Theiss passed through an immigrant whose entire family, including wife and two daughters, Miss Taylor had marked for special inspection, an indignant Taylor delivered a “stinging slap across the face” of the short and doughy Theiss. “Do you mean to say I am a liar,” she asked him.
From Washington to New York, tempers had reached a boiling point. Scandals, squabbles, and pettiness reigned. Americans like Henry Cabot Lodge feared a peril at the portals and wanted a gate to guard against the wrong kind of immigrants. The dawn of the twentieth century found Americans still raising questions about not only who was entering through those portals, but also who was guarding those gates.
A restless nation—and more importantly a restless new president— would try to remedy this unhappy situation.
Part III
REFORM AND REGULATION
Chapter 7
Cleaning House
It does seem to me that mental and physical inferiority are the highest recommendations for promotion at this station. —Roman Dobler, Ellis Island Inspector, 1900
Ellis Island has been a place for the harboring of vultures who preyed upon the immigrants and people began to look upon it as the hell hole of America.
—Frank Sargent,