American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [71]
Jacob Riis called Powderly “a wart that should be removed” and praised McSweeney as “clean and straight.” Even Henry Cabot Lodge supported McSweeney. The alliance between the Boston Brahmin Republican and the Irish Catholic Democrat was an odd pairing, but Massachusetts Republicans worried that a dismissal of McSweeney might hurt Republicans among the state’s Irish voters. “McSweeney has most industriously worked up every kind of influence, political, charitable, and religious, especially Catholic,” Roosevelt complained to Lodge.
What Roosevelt really wanted at Ellis Island, he wrote to a friend, was someone he could trust and “not some man about whom after hearing all the evidence I could be doubtful as to whether I ought to feel distrust.” The word Roosevelt kept getting was that the inspection center was badly run. “Either McSweeney is absolutely incompetent or else he is more responsible than any other one man for these evils.” Despite all of the positive words about McSweeney that he received from his friends, Roosevelt increasingly leaned toward the latter explanation.
Finally, in the spring of 1902, Roosevelt made the only decision that made any sense: he would get rid of the whole lot. He summoned Fitchie and McSweeney to Washington to inform them they would be replaced. Fitchie begged Roosevelt to rethink his actions and send a committee to visit Ellis Island so they could see that the charges were unfounded. Fitchie found the president adamant in his decision. A clean sweep was what he wanted.
Despite his earlier pledge to Powderly, Roosevelt had also concluded that the old labor leader would have to leave his post in Washington. “I believe the jig is up and that I have to go,” a resentful Powderly wrote to his loyal ally Robert Watchorn. Powderly was convinced that his letter asking for McSweeney’s help in the Connecticut political campaign was the main reason for his dismissal.
Powderly demanded to see the president. As humiliated as he was at getting fired, it particularly galled Powderly that he was being “coupled, before the public, with a man [McSweeney] who had, to my knowledge, brought the service beneath the rule of dishonest men.” Roosevelt told Powderly that he was removing everyone who had brought the problems of the Immigration Service into the public eye. Frank Sargent, another Republican labor man and the former head of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, would replace Powderly.
The sheer number of enemies that Powderly had acquired over the years did him in. One was Archbishop Michael Corrigan, who had personally protested Powderly’s behavior to the president. The Catholic Church had been concerned that the Knights of Labor was a secret organization, with its own rituals and vows, which might conflict with Catholic doctrine. Though Powderly was a Catholic, these concerns caused a number of run-ins with his local bishop in Pennsylvania and led to his estrangement from the Church.
McSweeney took advantage of his fellow Irish Catholic’s difficulties. A regular churchgoer who had been president of the Marlborough Catholic Lyceum’s debating society in his youth, McSweeney quickly allied himself with the Treasury Department’s solicitor, Maurice O’Connell, who made it a point to visit with McSweeney during his trips to New York. Both