• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The book on Williams’s government service was not yet closed. There would be a second act that would both refute and confirm Plunkitt’s suspicions about reformers.

Chapter 9

The Roosevelt Straddle

We can not have too much immigration of the right kind, and we should have none at all of the wrong kind.

—Theodore Roosevelt, 1903

LEANING OVER THE SECOND-ST ORY RAILING IN THE MAIN hall of the reception room at Ellis Island, H. G. Wells surveyed the mazelike rails herding immigrants through the inspection line. “You don’t think they’ll swamp you?” a concerned Wells asked his companion, the new Ellis Island commissioner, Robert Watchorn. Wells had taken the ferry trip to the island as part of research on a book about the future of America. Wells was pessimistic about the future in general, especially regarding technology. Yet as these two Englishmen debated the effects of throngs of southern and eastern Europeans on America, Wells’s question hit upon another uncertainty.

“Now look here,” Watchorn gently rebuked his famous literary guest, “I’m English-born—Derbyshire. I came to America when I was a lad. I had fifteen dollars. And here I am! Well, do you expect me, now I’m here, to shut the door on any other poor chaps who want a start—a start with hope in it, in the New World?”

Wells had cemented his reputation as the premier science fiction writer a decade earlier with a string of successes, including The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds. Now Robert Watchorn was hosting the famous writer at Ellis Island. Both Wells and Watchorn were sons of the British working class who had made good. After the visit, the two men continued on friendly terms. Wells entertained Watchorn on a number of occasions in England, and Watchorn proudly kept an autographed photo of Wells in his office for the rest of his professional life.

This perk of the job, rubbing elbows with the famous and powerful, appealed greatly to Watchorn, whose life story was truly one of rags to riches. It began in the English coal mines and continued through his arrival at Castle Garden in 1880, to his ascension to commissioner of Ellis Island in 1905, and would continue after his time in the immigration service.

Watchorn was the second of seven children born in Alfreton, Derbyshire, to a doting mother and an alcoholic coal-miner father. At age eleven, Watchorn himself went down into the coal pits, where he worked for the next ten years. An intelligent boy, he went to night school, and at the age of twenty-two left for America.

Once there, Watchorn ended up loading coal in the Pennsylvania mines. Soon after, he brought his family over and became involved in the local Knights of Labor chapter, where he befriended Terence V. Powderly, who would remain a lifelong friend and mentor. Watchorn then went on to become the first secretary-treasurer of the newly created United Mine Workers.

Filled with ambition and drive, Watchorn did not remain long with the union. Like another determined member of the working class, Edward McSweeney, Watchorn made the leap from labor activism to politics. The thirty-three-year-old Watchorn became the state’s first chief factory inspector under Robert E. Pattison, Pennsylvania’s first Democratic governor since the Civil War.

Driven to succeed as only one who had escaped the coal pits of both England and Pennsylvania could, Watchorn cleverly amassed important friends, including Powderly and the Pennsylvania senator Matthew Quay, the state’s Republican boss. Politically ambidextrous, Watchorn began his political career working in a Democratic administration but later became a staunch Republican. His ties to Powderly led to a patronage post as an inspector at Ellis Island. During the controversy there with McSweeney, Watchorn became an important ally and friend to Powderly, who later plucked Watchorn from the maelstrom at Ellis Island and promoted him first to Washington and then to Montreal, where he put Watchorn in charge of the immigration service