American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [97]
An acquaintance of young Fiorello described his personality as “a magnificent unrest coupled with a desire to be a leader on his own terms.” La Guardia was a child of the new America and had little sympathy with the daily rigors through which his country put newcomers. “I never managed during the years I worked there to become callous to the mental anguish, the disappointment and the despair I witnessed almost daily,” he wrote years later. As a low-level bureaucrat, he chafed at his own lack of power and at an immigration system of which he was a part, but for which he had little respect. His uncompromising personality and budding social conscience, as well as his relatively low salary, made his position untenable.
After three years at Ellis Island and now armed with a law degree, La Guardia struck out on his own, hanging a proverbial shingle in a small downtown Manhattan law office. His early practice was largely made up of representing immigrants ordered deported, referred to him by his former colleagues. Though many lawyers who plied this trade took advantage of their greenhorn clients, La Guardia did not—not at $10 a case. Years later, many of his clients would pull the lever in the voting booth to make La Guardia mayor of New York City.
T HE IMMIGRATION PROBLEM WAS a conflict between abstract laws and the individual tragedies those laws sometimes created. Thanks to technological improvements in photography, this human element could now be brought directly to average Americans as they sat at home reading the newspaper or one of the growing number of magazines aimed at middle-class audiences.
For Americans who did not have close contact with immigrants, their vision of these newcomers often came from cartoons drawn by unsympathetic hands. Cartoons featured negative characteristics drawn in an exaggerated manner to reinforce stereotypes: the sneering Italian with a dagger, the Jew with a hooked nose, the anarchist immigrant hiding a bomb. The immigrant’s foreignness was often highlighted, as was his general undesirability.
Jacob Riis, an immigrant and close friend of Theodore Roosevelt, had already showed the power of photos when his portrayals of life in New York’s tenement district were published in the 1890 book How the Other Half Lives. To arouse public sentiment for tenement reform or public parks, Riis portrayed the worst aspects of immigrant life—filth, overcrowding, and child exploitation.
In the early years of the twentieth century, middle-class readers began to encounter the faces of the masses that would be transformed into new American citizens. Sometimes these new immigrants would be staring straight into the camera, while others were photographed in profile. Few had smiles on their faces and many had hardened or faraway looks in their eyes. The immigrants were usually anonymous. Photo captions read simply “Russian bookbinder,” “Hungarian farm laborer” or “Pollack girls.” An exception was the Mittelstadt family from Germany—father Jacob, wife, daughter, and seven sons, all lined up from tallest to shortest. “Seven soldiers lost to the Kaiser,” proudly read the New York Times caption.
These men and women may have worn elaborate and strange native costumes and some of their faces may have betrayed a hard life that aged them beyond their years, but these photos hardly portrayed the grave threat to American society that critics feared. Instead, these subjects were proud and dignified, healthy and strong. These photos spoke of the singularity and individuality of the immigrant.
Lewis Hine was one of those photographers drawn to Ellis Island. Originally from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, he came to New York with a zeal for social reform. Though he would later gain fame with his photographic exposés of child labor and his iconic images of the construction of the Empire State Building, Hine’s first large-scale photographic