American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [82]
For many progressives, being critical of the excesses of capitalism meant not only criticizing the selfish greed of businessmen and the unfair competition of the trusts; it also meant regulating the tide of immigrants fueling industrial America. Being progressive meant being in favor of a strong national government to rein in private interest; it also meant, for Roosevelt, Williams, and many others, that “National ideals and character” existed.
Williams ended his 1903 Annual Report by arguing that a “too rapid filling up of any country with foreign elements is sure to be at the expense of national character when such elements belong to the poorer classes in their own respective homes.” Although the words were published under Williams’s name and no doubt reflected his views, they were actually penned by Theodore Roosevelt, who added those words in his personal edits of the original text.
Perhaps for that reason, Williams was not deterred by Roosevelt’s mild rebuke. Williams could proudly note that “the worst riff-raff of Europe” was kept out of America, yet more work was needed. Many of those who technically did not fall under the excludable categories of immigration law, in Williams’s opinion, were still undesirable.
Over 857,000 immigrants arrived during Williams’s first year, of whom about 60 percent were Italians, Jews, and Slavs. These new immigrants were overwhelmingly male (including 89 percent of all Croatians and 81 percent of all Italians), overwhelmingly unskilled (including 96 percent of all Ruthenians and 89 percent of all Lithuanians), and mostly between the ages of fourteen and forty-five. Anywhere from one-third to one-half of these groups were illiterate, and, on average, they came with about $9 per person. They were mostly young, unskilled, illiterate males with little money but the necessary muscle and brawn to run the country’s mills, factories, and powerhouses and build the subways and skyscrapers. Hardly paupers, yet definitely not professionals, these new immigrants were raw labor pure and simple.
In a 1906 book sympathetic to the plight of immigrants, Edward Steiner, an immigrant himself, described the lumpen masses from which new Americans would be created: “It is true that many criminals come, especially from Italy. Many weak, impoverished and poorly developed creatures come from among Polish and Russian Jews, but they are only the tares in the wheat. The stock as a whole is physically sound; it is crude, common peasant stock, not the dregs of society, but its basis.”
Not everyone agreed. The poet Wallace Irwin took to the pages of a New York newspaper to express his thoughts at the rising tide of immigrants washing ashore in a poem entitled “Ellis Island’s Problems”:
Down the greasy gang-plank See the motley pack
Nothing in the pocketbook Tatters on the back
Pauper, cripple, criminal
Halt and blind and slow
Has Uncle Sammy room enough To give ’em all a show?
Crime, disease, and wretchedness Of a hundred lands
All the world’s incompetence Dumped upon our hands.
It was a sentiment with which William Williams would have agreed. In his 1903 Annual Report, Williams boldly estimated that at least two hundred thousand of the immigrants arriving that year “will be of no benefit to the country.” Had they all stayed home, he argued, nobody “would have missed them,” except of course the steamship companies that made money on their passage. Most of these immigrants came from “some of the most undesirable sources of population” of Italy, Austria, and Russia.
It was a cold but not uncharacteristic sentiment, but Williams was unapologetic. He