American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [75]
Williams was dead serious about enforcing his edict. He wrote to one employee: “I was very much displeased at the rough and unkind manner in which I heard you address two immigrants in the Discharging Bureau this afternoon. Do not let this occur again.” Williams suspended a gateman named John Bell for two weeks without pay for using “vulgar and abusive language” with an immigrant.
No area of immigration escaped Williams’s attention. He kept a close eye on steamship companies, fearing that they were not doing a proper job of inspecting immigrants in European ports. On his fifth day on the job, he fired off a letter to the French Line complaining that while its manifests listed all immigrants as being in sound physical condition, Ellis Island doctors found a number afflicted with various ailments, such as hernias, blindness, and clubfeet. One immigrant had only one leg, another had one leg shorter than the other, and a third was a hunchback. Williams fined steamship companies for failing to inspect immigrants properly. Between May 1902 and May 1903, Williams collected $6,560 in fines from steamship companies.
Next, Williams aimed his fire at those missionaries at Ellis Island whom he believed were runners in disguise, suckering unwitting immigrants to their rooming houses and taking advantage of them. He barred a German Lutheran minister, a man who ran the Home for Scandinavian Emigrants, and members of the Austro-Hungarian Society for swindling immigrants and keeping an unsanitary and unsafe boardinghouse.
To protect immigrants from falling prey to swindlers, Williams took on the concessions at Ellis Island—the money exchange, baggage transfer contract, and food services. Herbert Parsons, a Republican leader in the city, warned Williams about the food concession. Though the contract was in the name of Schwab & Co., the business was really run by Charles Hess, a local Republican leader connected to the Platt machine. According to Parsons, Hess was “one of the most unmitigated scoundrels in this city.” McSweeney had shielded Hess under the previous administration, but that would change. “I witnessed with my own eyes the fact that immigrants were often fed without knives, forks, or spoons and I saw them extract boiled beef from their bowls of soup with their fingers,” Williams reported.
New bids were put out and new contracts were awarded for the food, baggage, and money exchange privileges. Though the opening of Ellis Island and the federalization of immigration regulation were supposed to have eliminated the kinds of corruption that had existed at Castle Garden, the present state of these privileges showed that little had changed. The owner of the baggage contract had held it since Castle Garden, while the money exchange was in the hands of the nephew of the man who held it at Castle Garden. “This office has been run in the past largely in the interests of the restaurant privilege holder, and partly in the interest of some steamship companies, who have been violating our statutes with impunity,” Williams wrote triumphantly to Roosevelt after the new contract had been awarded. “This office is now being run in the Government’s interest.”
Williams even tackled the landscaping of Ellis Island. While the Times noted that before Williams “there was not a flower or a bush of any kind on the island,” by the summer of 1903 the island was taking the appearance of a “well-regulated and unusually prettily decorated park.” And from the front door of the main building to the dock where the barges dropped off immigrants, a new steel canopy with a glass roof was erected to shelter immigrants as