American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [78]
These were difficult times for Powderly. Writing to his friend Robert Watchorn, Powderly said he was “feeling very blue and lonesome, and am also suffering from an attack of cholera morbus or something akin thereto.” A few days later, he told another friend that he had “never felt so humiliated in all my life as on being turned out of a position that I did everything in my power to make respectable and dignified.”
Powderly’s depression deepened as tragedy continued to shadow his life. On top of being fired, he was still dealing with the grief of his wife’s death in October 1901. In May 1903, his brother Joseph died suddenly. Robert Watchorn had visited Powderly to cheer him up, but he feared that when he left, his friend would “relapse into his morbid and apprehensive mood.” Powderly, whose image once adorned the homes of the nation’s working families, now felt abandoned and forgotten.
But Roosevelt had not forgotten Powderly. In the spring of 1903, less than a year after firing him, the president summoned him to the White House. Roosevelt admitted that he had been wrong to dismiss Powderly, and he wanted to reinstate him elsewhere in government. As plans to prosecute McSweeney were in motion, Roosevelt tried to get Powderly a job in the Justice Department. The president explained to Attorney General Philander Chase Knox that the more he looked into the immigration affair, “the more satisfied I am that Powderly was fundamentally right in his attitude.” Roosevelt alluded to Powderly’s 1898 letter as a mistake for which he had “amply atoned” with his time out of office. Roosevelt told a friend, “my conscience does not approve the action taken in Mr. Powderly’s case, and the more I look into this matter, the more I am convinced that he was wronged, and I was misled.”
Nothing came of the Justice Department job and Powderly sank further into gloom. While McSweeney moved on with his life in Boston, Powderly could not shake the embarrassment of his dismissal. He came to deeply resent Roosevelt. Powderly would vote for him in the 1904 election, despite the fact that he found “no reason to admire him” and felt good reason to dislike him. Powderly still hoped that after the election, the stain on his record would be wiped out and he would be returned to government service.
He would have to wait two more years for that moment to arrive.
LEON CZOLGOSZ’S SIMPLE ACT of murder had elevated one man to the presidency, but it also indirectly led another man to a basement prison at Ellis Island.
On October 23, 1903, seven months after anarchists were legally banned from the country, a contingent of Ellis Island inspectors, Secret Service agents, and New York City policemen raided the Murray Hill Lyceum in Manhattan. They brought with them an arrest warrant for John Turner for espousing anarchist beliefs. A British citizen who had arrived in the United States days earlier, Turner had been invited by anarchist Emma Goldman to give a series of lectures. Now he was being taken to a small cutter waiting to ferry him to Ellis Island. Once there, he would be imprisoned in one of three nine-by-six steel-bar cells in the basement of the main building.
Goldman called Turner’s new home a “fetid dungeon,” not knowing that sixteen years later she too would become a prisoner of Ellis Island. A “philosophical anarchist,” as the papers called him, Turner had the entire basement jail to himself, with the exception of two guards. While in public Goldman railed against Turner’s situation, in private she noted that Turner had gained twenty pounds while at Ellis Island and was “wonderfully evenly balanced and easy going as only an Englishman can be.” Despite this, Turner’s plight proved useful fodder for anarchists like Goldman in their battle against what they saw as a reactionary government and established authority.
Writing from his Ellis Island jail, Turner noted how he was being held and threatened with expulsion because “the