American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [91]
“Immigrant Type Low, But 1,100,735 Get In” read a Times headline about the record number of immigrants in 1906. Of that figure, Ellis Island processed roughly 880,000 immigrants, 10 percent of whom were detained for board of special inquiry hearings, and 7,877 were excluded, less than 1 percent of all those who arrived. Ellis Island witnessed 327 deaths, 18 births, 2 suicides, and 508 marriages that year.
If Americans thought 1906 was bad, the following year would be even worse. In fact, Americans would not see as many immigrants in one year as they saw in 1907 until 1990. Some days, the flood was unmanageable. On March 27, 1907, 16,000 immigrants entered New York Harbor; May 2 brought 21,755. Ellis Island had to process over a million people in 1907 alone, which came to over 2,700 per day, every day.
Robert Watchorn, who oversaw this flood, was a man apart from his predecessor. “A man of brawn, a man who knows how to use his hands in both the sporting and industrial sense of the phrase,” was how the Times described him. He repeated Roosevelt’s mantra that America could not have enough of the right kind of immigrant and too little of the wrong kind. Unlike Williams, however, Watchorn believed that America was largely getting the right kind of immigrants.
This was a bit of an intellectual shift for Watchorn, a man who would prove himself nothing if not flexible in his beliefs. While working under Powderly, Watchorn portrayed himself in favor of strict regulation of immigrants, especially regarding the contract-labor laws. Now, working under Roosevelt, the former United Mine Workers official changed his tune. He found himself harangued for his pro-immigration views while speaking before crowds of workers.
Watchorn told a Jewish audience on New York’s Lower East Side that “the immigrant has done as much for this country as the country has done for him.” While he supported a careful selection of immigrants to keep out those likely to become a public charge, he hated to order deportations. Even though the editors of the American Hebrew had praised William Williams, they noticed a change in tone at Ellis Island. “Since Mr. Robert Watchorn entered upon his duties as Commissioner, there is an entirely different atmosphere about the place,” the paper wrote. “The immigrant is no longer looked upon as one to be kept out, if the law is strained to do so.”
College professor Edward Steiner dedicated his sympathetic book about the new immigrants to Robert Watchorn.
He does not share the feeling that the immigration of to-day is worse than that of the past; in fact he will say quite freely that it is growing better every day. He has his fears and forebodings; but he knows that the miracle of transformation wrought on us, can still be wrought on this mass of clay in the hands of the potter, which may be moulded just as millions of us have been moulded, into the likeness of a new humanity.
Men like Steiner and Watchorn held a deep faith in the transformative power of America on European immigrants.
Watchorn had a chance to explain his views to a group of female college students visiting Ellis Island. Unanimously opposed to immigration, these well-off young women heard the case of a sixty-sixyear-old Italian man heading to his son in Lynchburg, Virginia. They believed him too old and weak to be admitted, especially since the son was not there to pick up the father. In a scene out of Hollywood, the son showed up at the last moment to an emotional reunion with his father. Should the father be sent back to Italy, Watchorn now asked the young women? “No, no, no, certainly not,” was the unanimous response.
Those