American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [76]
Then there was the case of Edward McSweeney. Although McSweeney had been dismissed by Roosevelt, controversy still surrounded him. Williams and McSweeney overlapped for three days at the end of April, enough time for the streetwise McSweeney to sell his library of books and periodicals to Williams for the exorbitant price of $100. When Williams took office, not only was the entire service at Ellis Island a mess—from the quality of the inspectors to the quality of the food to the cleanliness of the buildings—but the records and files were also in disarray.
McSweeney had asked Williams if he could store five large boxes at Ellis Island until he could bring them up to Boston, where he was moving. The boxes, he told Williams, contained personal papers and materials. When someone told Williams that McSweeney had placed official documents in the boxes, he referred the matter to his superiors, who then dispatched a Secret Service investigator to New York.
The agent opened the boxes and found inside thousands of documents—4,292 to be exact—relating to official work at Ellis Island. There were letters, special reports, and minutes of boards of special inquiry. When McSweeney wrote to Williams in August asking him to forward the boxes to Boston, he was informed they were being held by order of the secretary of the Treasury. Williams did pack up two small boxes of personal items from the larger boxes and shipped them to Boston.
In addition to the five large boxes, Williams was told that McSweeney had ordered a large cedar chest made at government expense. A Secret Service agent managed to track down the box to a storage facility in Manhattan, but could not open it. Government officials asked McSweeney, through his lawyers, to open the box. After some days of stalling, government officials were allowed to open the chest and found only bed linens. Clearly the chest had been cleaned out. While the original contents of the cedar chest will forever remain a mystery, William Williams made certain to keep a record of what was found in the boxes held at Ellis Island.
According to Williams, McSweeney was in a state of mental anguish when he discovered that the boxes had been opened. One reason was the strange accusation that emerged from those boxes concerning the case of two teenage girls. The Eloy sisters had been caught showing a “filthy and obscene photograph” to other immigrants awaiting inspection. The girls were then brought before McSweeney, who allowed the girls to land. McSweeney later told investigators that the photo in question had mysteriously disappeared. However, all of the material relating to the case, including the photo, was carefully filed away by McSweeney in a small manila folder marked “Eloy girls.”
None of this seemed to slow down the indefatigable McSweeney. While Terence Powderly was at home in Washington sulking, McSweeney was back home in Massachusetts running the campaign of William A. Gaston, the Democratic candidate for governor. Gaston had been Roosevelt’s classmate at Harvard and gave the president his personal assurance that McSweeney could explain the documents if given a chance.
Roosevelt then ordered Henry Burnett, the U.S. attorney in New York, to interview McSweeney. In an interview that lasted almost two days, McSweeney said that he never intended to take away the documents but instead wanted to put them aside to help William Williams, whom he had hoped would call upon him for advice. Williams called the testimony “confused and contradictory.” He had no doubt as to McSweeney’s dishonesty, writing Roosevelt that if he were wrong about McSweeney, then “I am so lacking in intelligence that I am not fit to hold this office one day longer.”
It was not until the summer of 1903 that the president and Burnett agreed to file charges against McSweeney for purloining government documents. McSweeney’s lawyers claimed that the charges were trivial, that he never meant to take official documents, and that the boxes never left Ellis Island. If they were so valuable to McSweeney,