American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [79]
Clarence Darrow soon took up Turner’s case, joined by the poet Edgar Lee Masters. While the case made its way to the Supreme Court, Turner was released on bond in March 1904 after four and a half months in jail at Ellis Island. He continued on his lecture tour, speaking out in favor of the merits of a general strike, by which workers would grind the capitalist system to a halt and bring freedom to the oppressed.
In May 1904, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Turner’s deportation. Perhaps sensing that his legal case was doomed, Turner beat the authorities to the punch and left the country of his own volition two weeks before the decision.
Though Turner was technically never deported, his was the first case of an alien to be ordered deported from the United States because of his political beliefs. In upholding Turner’s arrest and eventual deportation, the Supreme Court once again validated the unique status of the administrative rules in place at Ellis Island. Darrow had turned to the First Amendment to defend his client, but the Court unanimously declared they were unable to understand how immigration law violated the First Amendment.
Turner certainly had his right to speak abridged, but that was merely a function of his exclusion under immigration law. “To appeal to the Constitution is to concede that this is a land governed by that supreme law, and as under it the power to exclude has been determined to exist, those who are excluded cannot assert the rights in general obtaining in a land to which they do not belong as citizens or otherwise,” wrote the Court. In other words, since John Turner did not belong in the United States, the constitutional protections of personal freedoms did not apply to him. It was as if he had never entered America in the first place. As Emma Goldman would discover years later, the precedent of the Turner case would continue to reverberate at Ellis Island.
There was another quirk to the Turner case: he was not an immigrant. Turner had merely come to the United States to lecture and then planned to return to his job in England. Ellis Island was no longer just regulating immigrants, but rather any alien headed to U.S. shores even for the shortest visit. Even a casual tourist could find himself stewing in detention at Ellis Island while authorities decided whether he fell into one of the categories for exclusion.
When Turner’s case made it to the Supreme Court, the named defendant was William Williams. The two men are forever linked in legal history. The commissioner of Ellis Island was not just content to clean up the patronage mess at the immigration station. His real goal was a stricter enforcement of immigration laws that would keep undesirables like John Turner from entering the country. That goal would prove far more controversial than making sure inspectors spoke politely to immigrants.
Chapter 8
Fighting Back
The fact is that a reformer can’t last in politics. He can make a show for a while, but he always comes down like a rocket. . . . He hasn’t been brought up in the difficult business of politics and he makes a mess of it every time.
—George Washington Plunkitt, 1905
GEORGE WASHINGT ON PLUNKITT LIVED JUST THREE LONG city blocks west and three short city blocks south of William Williams’s bachelor accommodations at the upper-crust University Club. But those six blocks were a gulf as wide as any ocean. Plunkitt, who served as a New York state senator while Williams was at Ellis Island, was the epitome of the Tammany Hall ward boss. Working-class Irish Catholics like Plunkitt entered politics as a profession looking for