American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [90]
When Roosevelt was searching for a suitable replacement for William Williams in early 1905, he quickly settled on Watchorn, whom he remembered from his first visit to Ellis Island, when Roosevelt was police commissioner and Watchorn a mere inspector. Morally upright, Watchorn could be expected to continue the vigilance against corruption, patronage, and abuse at Ellis Island, but would accomplish it without the abrasive air of the patrician Williams. As an immigrant himself, Watchorn might enforce immigration law without Williams’s restrictionist touch. Also, Watchorn needed the job—unlike the independently wealthy Williams—and might be less difficult to manage.
On the issue of Joe Murray, Roosevelt only asked that Watchorn give him a fair shake. If Watchorn decided that Murray was incompetent, Roosevelt would transfer his friend. “You will be the absolute judge of his competency or incompetency,” Roosevelt wrote. Watchorn, who had not escaped a life in the coal mines by bucking authority, was not about to take the bait. “I shall respect your wishes, Mr. President, in regard to Mr. Murray, whom I know very well,” Watchorn responded. Murray would end up staying at Ellis Island for the rest of the Roosevelt administration.
Watchorn assured the president that they shared a common vision of immigration. Such agreement was important because America was about to witness its biggest wave of immigration ever. For the first time, more than 1 million immigrants entered the country. Roosevelt put this in historical perspective by noting that more people entered the United States in 1905 than had arrived in the 169 years between the first landing at Jamestown and the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Despite stringent laws, Roosevelt believed that a large number of immigrants were still undesirable because they came not of their own initiative, but were instead enticed by agents from steamship companies interested only in increasing their profits.
Roosevelt was adept at finding that perfect fulcrum of American opinion on immigration, melding fears of alien newcomers with respect for the country’s open-door tradition. “In dealing with this question it is unwise to depart from the old American tradition and to discriminate for or against any man who desires to come here and become a citizen, save on the ground of that man’s fitness for citizenship,” Roosevelt wrote. An immigrant’s character, not his ethnicity or religion, should determine whether he or she be allowed into the country. To him, a Slav of good character was far more preferable than an Englishman of poor character. Of course, the status of excluded Chinese immigrants complicated the president’s argument.
It was a fine statement of the assimilationist credo, but one that rested on the vigorous enforcement of immigration laws at the nation’s gates, with Roosevelt calling for “an increase in the stringency of the laws to keep out insane, idiotic, epileptic, and pauper immigrants.” He already had had four years to push for this, but achieved little more than banning anarchists and prostitutes. Now he wanted not just anarchists excluded, “but every man of Anarchistic tendencies, all violent and disorderly people, all people of bad character, the incompetent, the lazy, the vicious, the physically unfit, defective, or degenerate.”
If Roosevelt wanted a stricter application of immigration laws, Ellis Island was in the best shape since it opened to accomplish that. And just in time. From 1905 to 1907, some 3.5 million immigrants would come to America, nearly 80 percent passing through New York’s inspection station. Having visited at the beginning of this period, novelist Henry James called Ellis Island “a drama that goes on, without a pause, day by day and year by year, this visible act of ingurgitation on the part of our body politic and social, and constituting really an appeal to amazement beyond that of any sword-swallowing or fire-swallowing of the circus.”
With each passing week in the spring and fall—the peak arrival seasons for immigrants