American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [96]
With pull like that, Braun was no ordinary inspector. Soon after his appointment, he was sent to Europe to investigate conditions there. He charged that officials of the Hungarian government were scouring the countryside, encouraging people to come to America and making money from steamship tickets, since the government owned the steamship company. Braun implicated high government officials, including Prime Minister Stephen Tisza.
The charges angered Hungarian authorities, who put Braun under constant surveillance. On a subsequent trip to Budapest in 1905, Braun caught a policeman opening his mail and slapped the man, leading to his arrest. After paying a fine, Braun was released and returned to the United States, where he made the episode public, turning the case into an international diplomatic incident and forcing his patron, President Roosevelt, to privately condemn him for acting with “extreme folly.”
Upon returning home, Braun was given a month’s leave from Ellis Island, after which time he would have to return to work. However, Braun had little desire for the mundane work of immigration inspection and instead asked for a year’s leave, which was denied. Upon returning to work, Braun refused to wear his blue inspector’s uniform. Instead, he resigned. “He didn’t like the uniform because it was a sign of a condition against which he revolted,” said a frustrated Watchorn.
Braun’s situation did not elicit much sympathy. The New York Times headlined its editorial on the incident “In Mockery of Marcus.” Yet his political patron, Theodore Roosevelt saved Braun. The president reinstated him to government service and transferred him to the Immigration Bureau along the Canadian border. In early 1906, Braun resigned yet again, only to be reinstated later that year. Only Roosevelt could say whether the support of the Hungarian Republican Club was worth the trouble of dealing with Marcus Braun.
Theodore Roosevelt showed more judgment when he named Philip Cowen, the editor of the American Hebrew and a second-generation Polish-Jewish-American, as a special inspector at Ellis Island in 1905. In doing so, he bypassed civil service regulations as he had with Joe Murray. For more than twenty years, Cowen would be a presence at the immigration station. When he retired in 1927, the occasion attracted attention from as far away as Germany, where Adolf Hitler called Cowen’s presence at Ellis Island proof that American immigration policy was under the control of “Pan-Jewry.”
Another appointment largely went unnoticed at the time. Unlike Cowen, this new interpreter at Ellis Island got his job in 1907 through a civil service exam, earning the top score among three test takers on the Croatian language test. In addition to Croatian, this twenty-four-yearold son of Italian immigrants also spoke Italian and Yiddish. Fiorello La Guardia earned $1,200 a year at Ellis Island while attending law school at night.
La Guardia was clearly a man on the make. At Ellis Island, he was one of the many men and women who served as an important link between English-speaking inspectors and confused, non-English-speaking immigrants. When a young child named Louis Pittman was forced to stay at the Ellis Island hospital for seventeen months until his trachoma healed, he received periodic visits from a short, round-faced La Guardia bearing gifts of chocolate for Pittman and other sick children.
La Guardia found his coworkers “kindly and considerate,” a big change from the earlier patronage era. His superiors found La Guardia a good worker who showed a keen interest in his job, even if he did manage to lose his official badge once, forcing Washington to send a replacement. In recommending La Guardia for a pay raise, Robert Watchorn described him as “energetic, intelligent, and familiar with a number of foreign languages.” Yet he also noted that La Guardia was “inclined to be peppery.” Perhaps the weight of troubles he witnessed