American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [68]
The relationship between immigration and national character was never far from Roosevelt’s mind. Postulating the definition of “True Americanism,” he gave a rousing, if somewhat vague, definition of American identity and defended American exceptionalism. While Roosevelt’s America accepted European immigrants, it also needed to Americanize them. Roosevelt wrote: “We welcome the German or the Irishman who becomes an American. We have no use for the German or Irishman who remains such . . . we want only Americans, and, provided they are such, we do not care whether they are of native or of Irish or of German ancestry.” Roosevelt noted that the “mighty tide of immigration to our shores has brought in its train much of good and much of evil,” and therefore the nation needed to regulate immigration more strictly.
Roosevelt was a rare individual; a trust-fund patrician broadly read in history and literature, yet one whose curiosity led him to learn firsthand about social conditions. Roosevelt got an education from his friend Jacob Riis, who led him through the teeming slums of lower Manhattan that Riis was about to immortalize in his book How the Other Half Lives. Wanting to see more, Roosevelt, then police commissioner, hopped a ferry to Ellis Island in 1896 to witness the sifting of immigrants firsthand. With characteristic zeal, he eagerly nosed his way around the old facilities, paying careful attention to both the inspectors and the inspected.
A young inspector named Robert Watchorn remembered Roosevelt’s visit. Roosevelt also remembered Watchorn and a decade later would name him commissioner of Ellis Island. Watchorn recalled seeing Roosevelt at a board of special inquiry hearing for a “stalwart, brawny young Swedish stowaway,” as the future president paid rapt attention to the proceedings, noting that Roosevelt “probably regretted that he was powerless to decide the matter at once.” The stowaway, despite his illegal entry into the country and his lack of money, family, or destination, represented the right kind of immigrant to Roosevelt. “I like the looks of that young fellow,” Roosevelt told Watchorn, applauding the decision of the board to allow the stowaway to remain. “We need lots of good, vigorous, healthy blood to mingle with the national stream.”
William McKinley, on the other hand, seemed uninterested in immigration. During his first presidential campaign, he supported a literacy test for immigrants and spoke of the need to prevent the importation of cheap labor. When the campaign ended, McKinley said little more about immigration and paid no attention to what was happening at Ellis Island and the Barge Office, allowing the troubles there to become festering sores. During his four-plus years in office, McKinley thought that silence was the best policy on immigration.
Roosevelt could not have been more different—or so it seemed. While McKinley was solidly middle American in background and outlook, Roosevelt was part of the nation’s urban gentry, a Harvard-educated New Yorker, a politician and scholar with multivolume histories already under his belt. McKinley was the last of the Civil War veteran presidents, while the forty-two-year-old Roosevelt was the nation’s youngest president.
Roosevelt exists in historical memory as a man of bluster, a straighttalking reformer, yet the reality is more complex. The Rough Rider with overseas expansion on his mind was also noted for his quiet diplomacy. He