American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [92]
Watchorn’s tenure marked an evolution in how Roosevelt handled immigration. Practical politics played no small hand in this change. In 1906, William Randolph Hearst used his fortune to run for governor of New York as a Democrat. Roosevelt could not abide Hearst and resented his “enormous popularity among ignorant and unthinking people.” Hearst used the pages of his New York Journal to take on the mantle of defender of immigrants. He further expanded his reach to the city’s largest ethnic group by starting the German-language paper Morgen Journal. The populism of Hearst’s papers filled the patrician Roosevelt with disgust. He had to be stopped.
Roosevelt threw himself heart and soul into helping the Republican Charles Evans Hughes defeat Hearst. Hughes was a bit of a stiff, but enough of a progressive for Roosevelt—anything to keep Hearst from defiling Roosevelt’s old office. The path to stopping Hearst, Roosevelt soon realized, began with New York’s ethnic communities.
When an opening appeared for secretary of Commerce and Labor, Roosevelt jumped at an opportunity to make a point. Roosevelt conferred with Jewish leaders like New York banker Jacob Schiff and named Oscar Straus to the post. Roosevelt now had a Jew and a Catholic in his cabinet. (Charles Bonaparte, the grandnephew of Napoléon, was attorney general.)
At a dinner celebrating Straus’s appointment, Roosevelt explained that he had chosen Straus without regard to race, color, creed, or party. To that, an elderly and increasingly deaf Jacob Schiff nodded and said in his thick German accent: “Dot’s right, Mr. President. You came to me and said, ‘Chake, who is der best jew I can appoint Segretary of Commerce?’” Though probably apocryphal, the spirit of the story contains a germ of truth. Roosevelt had begun a long tradition, followed by most of his successors, of choosing cabinet members to satisfy various racial, ethnic, and religious groups.
Straus, along with Schiff, belonged to an earlier generation of German Jewish immigrants. Oscar Straus was born in Bavaria in 1850. His father, a Reform Jew and grain merchant, left for the United States in 1852, where he ran a general store in Georgia. Oscar, his brothers, and his mother followed him there two years later. The family’s future was not to be in the South, but rather in New York City. There, the Straus family ran a china and glassware store and later bought out Macy’s. Oscar, however, was not drawn to the world of commerce like his father and brothers. Instead, he opted for a career in law.
As part of his arrangement with Roosevelt, Straus agreed to stump for Hughes in New York, joining Schiff in blunting Hearst’s appeal to the Jewish community. In the end, Hughes squeaked by Hearst with just sixty thousand votes, and Straus took up work at his new job after the election.
The Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, as it was now called, was but one of twelve divisions of the Department of Commerce and Labor, but it was clearly the one that animated Straus the most. “Indeed, no subject in the department occupied my daily attention to the extent that immigration did,” he wrote in his autobiography. Immigration was the most difficult issue because “it is the most human” and “throbs with tearful tragedies,” Straus wrote.
On the morning of December 17, 1906, Straus sat at his desk in his new office and immediately threw himself into the heart-wrenching morass of appeals from immigrants waiting to be deported. He looked at some thirty cases that first day. “I was not surprised to find that most of these cases present difficult questions appealing to the humanity