American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [83]
Though immigrants did not have a legal right to come to the United States, once they entered the country, became citizens, and put down roots, they too joined the immigration debate. It is no surprise that immigrant groups, especially Jewish and German leaders, would voice their concerns. These were men of high character, as Roosevelt would say, leaders in their community striving toward social betterment. They were the right kind of immigrants. Of Leopold Deutschberger, though, Roosevelt would probably not go so far.
A reporter for the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, the city’s Germanlanguage newspaper and one of the most influential of its kind in the country, Deutschberger covered the Ellis Island beat. Throughout Williams’s tenure at Ellis Island, the German-American journalist published numerous inflammatory articles about alleged abuses of immigrants, with titles such as “Men Weep,” “Disgrace to Country,” “Unrestricted Despotism,” “Barbarous Treatment of Immigrants,” and “No Pity.”
To his supporters, such criticism was proof of Williams’s success. Keeping a close eye on affairs from Boston, Prescott Hall congratulated Williams “on the great tribute which the Staats-Zeitung is paying your administration. . . . I have never known the Staats-Zeitung to abuse anything as much as it has your administration, which of itself is the highest praise.” To Hall, if the paper was criticizing Williams, then he must be doing something right.
Germans were the largest ethnic group in New York City and a political power in the Midwest. The number of German immigrants, however, had fallen off substantially in recent years. In the first two years of Williams’s administration, only about 93,000 German immigrants arrived through Ellis Island, less than 6 percent of all immigrants. Of those only 696 were excluded, or about 0.7 percent.
Although Williams’s animus was largely directed against southern and eastern European immigrants, it was the German press and the German-American community that were most angered by his administration. When Williams banned a German missionary from Ellis Island, a woman from Washington, D.C., wrote him to complain. If he did not reconsider his actions, she warned, millions of GermanAmericans would condemn him. “Do look over the matter again or you have struck trouble,” she warned. With self-confidence bordering on arrogance, Williams responded: “I hasten to assure you that I am utterly indifferent to any unfavorable resolutions that may be passed upon me, or to any that may come to me, as a result of doing the right thing.”
Even the American Hebrew, a prominent voice in the Jewish community, defended Williams, writing that the agitation “is not based on firm ground, and seems to be inspired by some motive other than the unselfish one of securing justice for the immigrant.” The newspaper credited Williams with creating an atmosphere at Ellis Island where immigrants were well-treated and no longer “hauled about like foreign baggage.” The editors encouraged Jews not to complain and “for the sake of their own self-respect refuse to ask for special treatment.”
Despite the support from some quarters, Williams’s problems with the German community continued. In early September 1903, Deutschberger published another article about Ellis Island, entitled “Hell on Earth.” Among its accusations was that “people on the Island were literally eaten