American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [8]
Today, Ellis Island has become a tired cliché for some, a story about the pluck and perseverance of those “poor huddled masses yearning to be free” who found freedom at the end of the inspection line. It is a nostalgic ode to our hardy ancestors who achieved success in spite of their experiences at the infamous Isle of Tears, where bigoted officials made their lives miserable and changed the family’s name from something with six syllables and no vowels to Smith.
In reality, Ellis Island was the place where the United States worked out its extraordinary national debate over immigration for more than three decades. Inspectors, doctors, and political appointees wrestled every day with the problems of interpreting the nation’s immigration laws while being personally confronted with hundreds of thousands of living, breathing individuals. The dry enterprise of executing the law came into direct conflict with the mass of humanity seeking to make new lives in America.
Ellis Island embodies the story of Americans grappling with how best to manage the vast and disruptive changes brought by rapid industrialization and large-scale immigration from Europe. It is the story of a nation struggling with the idea of what it meant to be an American at a time when millions of newcomers from vastly different backgrounds were streaming into the country.
Americans need a history that does not glorify the place in some kind of gauzy, self-congratulatory nostalgia, nor mindlessly condemn what occurred there as the vicious bigotry of ugly nativists. Instead, this book seeks to understand what happened at Ellis Island and why it happened.
This island, so small in size, has imprinted itself on the minds of so many Americans. It is a gritty and tumultuous history, but one that helps to explain why millions of immigrants had to make their American Passage through Ellis Island and how that passage in turn helped shape this nation.
Part I
BEFORE THE DELUGE
Chapter 1
Island
FIFTY THOUSAND NEW YORKERS CL OGGED THE INTERsection of Second Avenue and 13th Street on the afternoon of April 2, 1824. Nearly one-third of the city’s population was there to witness the public hanging of a convicted murderer named John Johnson.
City officials were not happy with the scene. They were less concerned about the question of whether a civilized city should play host to such a gruesome event than they were about the gridlock created by the public spectacle. The city would later order future executions moved to nearby Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island). But the public could not get enough. At the next execution, they arrived in boats so numerous they shut down river traffic and caused a number of boating accidents. The city council then ordered that all future executions take place in the city prison, out of public view.
The city did not have jurisdiction over all executions. The crime of piracy on the high seas was a federal offense and common enough to occupy the minds of federal authorities. While the city banned public executions, the federal government continued to offer such grotesque displays to New Yorkers for a few more years on a small island it controlled in the harbor. Nineteenth-century New Yorkers knew the place as Gibbet Island, but under another name it would later become one of the most famous islands in the nation: Ellis Island. However, its early history can best be described as ignominious.
Pirates bring to mind images of eye-patched swashbucklers, skulland-crossbones flags, and loads of treasure, but real-life piracy was a more mundane, if still violent, pastime. When caught for their crimes, pirates often faced a death sentence. Pirate hangings were not merely about punishment; they were also about deterrence. After