American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [85]
After this, Roosevelt and his party were off to a hearing room to witness the boards of special inquiry. One case dealt with a Hungarian man heading to his son-in-law in Pennsylvania with a railroad ticket and $12 in his pocket. Was he likely to become a public charge? Two members of the board voted to defer the decision for further investigation, while one member voted to allow the man to land. “Why should there be any doubt about this man,” the president chimed in. Williams, an upholder of the strict interpretation of the law, tried to explain to Roosevelt that immigrants had to be beyond a doubt entitled to land. Since the old Hungarian had only $12, Williams declared him certain to become a public charge. To that, the German-born Arthur von Briesen, a member of Roosevelt’s party and president of the Legal Aid Society, interjected: “Under the law, Jake Riis should have been sent back when he came over.” That sealed the deal in favor of the Hungarian.
Von Briesen’s presence at Ellis Island that day was important to more than just that Hungarian immigrant. Roosevelt used the trip to announce that he was appointing a commission to investigate the operations at Ellis Island. This was news to William Williams, who had not been previously informed of the decision.
Among those invited to the island that day were the five men Roosevelt had already chosen to sit on the commission, including von Briesen, who would head the commission. From the dramatic, rainsoaked arrival to the surprise announcement, it was vintage Roosevelt. Everyone assumed that Roosevelt created the commission in response to the charges from the Staats-Zeitung. What better way to counter the complaints that Roosevelt’s immigration service was anti-immigrant than to appoint a committee composed of, in the words of a newspaper critical of the president, “two Germans, two Irishmen, and a Jew—not a single native American.”
Roosevelt could not have picked a better commission from his perspective. As von Briesen wrote the president after the completion of the report, the commission was unanimous in agreeing that “desirable immigrants are men and women of good repute and good character and that undesirable immigrants are persons of bad repute and bad character.” This was the Roosevelt party line on immigration, which he had earlier reiterated in a letter to another member of the commission: “My own feeling is that we cannot have too many of the right kind of immigrants and that, on the other hand, we should steadily and consistently endeavor to exclude the man who is physically, mentally or morally unfit to be a good citizen or to beget good citizens.”
It was not only pure Roosevelt, but his immigration axiom neatly encapsulated the broad American consensus toward immigration. A few Americans may have supported unrestricted immigration, and a larger number may have supported a complete shutting of the nation’s gates. Yet even the Immigration Restriction League did not go so far as to lobby for such extreme measures. Public opinion polling was still decades away, so it is difficult to gauge accurately what exactly the American public believed, but the consensus, as witnessed through immigration policy and elite opinion, seemed to support some kind of regulation and selection of immigrants, while upholding the nation’s traditional views on the benefits of good immigrants.
The devil, of course, was in the details. How does one define good and bad immigrants? Each person who worked at Ellis Island, from commissioner to inspector to doctor, had his own interpretation of that dividing line, as did officials in Washington.