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Reformers like Williams had little respect for the Tammany bosses and the feeling was mutual. To Plunkitt, men like Williams were amateur dabblers with no real understanding of the messiness of democracy and a disdain for the average citizen. They put ideals and morals ahead of practicality. True to Plunkitt’s maxim, Williams would make a good show for a while, but would soon come down like a rocket.

Theodore Roosevelt was a reformer too—at least he styled himself that way. He was equal parts zealotry and flexibility, a combination that served him well in public life. It was a style that even Plunkitt probably could appreciate.

William Williams, on the other hand, was all zealotry and no flexibility. Starchy as the high, white collars favored by men of that era, Williams was convinced of his utter correctness in all matters and had little use for those who might differ with him. That Williams had done yeoman’s work in cleaning up Ellis Island made his attitude even more unfortunate.

Having first moved swiftly to clean up the immigration service in New York, Williams proceeded to tackle what he felt was an even more vital part of his job: a rigid enforcement of the immigration laws.

A year in office at Ellis Island confirmed Williams’s low opinion of America’s new immigrants. What he had seen in his first year on the job was “a particularly undesirable stream of immigration.” In response, Williams stepped up the exclusion of immigrants, keeping an especially close eye on those he considered paupers or likely to become public charges.

Williams’s appointment elated members of the Immigration Restriction League (IRL). For the first time since Ellis Island opened, a true restrictionist and New England patrician was now guarding the gate. Williams kept in contact with members of the IRL, telling Prescott Hall he wanted even stricter exclusionary laws. In the meantime, he would work within the law to prevent undesirable immigrants from entering the country.

Immigrants were on notice. Take the case of twelve-year-old Raffaele Borcelli, suffering from an advanced case of the scalp disease favus. When lawyers tried to intervene on behalf of the young boy, Williams bluntly informed them that America did not want “diseased people in this country and I intend that they shall not come.”

Williams believed that the current laws were not going far enough. He told President Roosevelt that what was needed to “meet the real evils of the situation” was new legislation. In its absence, Williams was going to do his part to protect American civilization. In November 1902, he provided guidance for Ellis Island inspectors in interpreting the law: “Any inspector who passes an alien who may not be ‘clearly beyond a doubt’ entitled to land, violates his oath of office,” Williams informed his subordinates. “The purpose of the statute is to exclude undesirable aliens, not to invite aliens to come here. It casts upon them the burden of proving that they are entitled to admission.” He was going to take the broad and vague classifications for immigration exclusion and tighten them.

Compare Williams’s 1902 edict with McSweeney’s interpretation of the same immigration law from three years earlier. “I have seen cases where an immigrant would fall within the letter of the law [of exclusion] and still in the opinion of the inspectors be a desirable immigrant,” McSweeney told the Industrial Commission on Immigration. Williams believed he was appointed to end just that kind of laxity. He had every reason to believe that the president who appointed him also believed in tightening the law.

In his first Annual Message to Congress, Roosevelt allotted two long paragraphs to the immigration problem, calling the present system unsatisfactory. He went on to call for adding anarchists to the list of excludable categories, as well as some type of education or literacy test. Just as important, Roosevelt felt that all immigrants who were “below a certain standard of economic fitness to enter our industrial fields as