Made In America - Bill Bryson [90]
By the turn of the century, New York had become easily the most cosmopolitan city the world had ever seen. Eighty per cent of its five million inhabitants were either foreign born or the children of immigrants.8 It had more Italians than the combined populations of Florence, Genoa and Venice, more Irish than anywhere but Dublin, more Russians than Kiev. As Herman Melville put it: ‘We are not so much a nation as a world.’ In 1908 a British Zionist named Israel Zangwill wrote a play about the immigration experience that gave Americans a term for the phenomenon. He called it The Melting-Pot.
The popular image, recreated in countless movies and books from The Godfather to Kane and Abel, is of an immigrant arriving wide-eyed and bewildered at Ellis Island, being herded into a gloomy hall, subjected to an intimidating battery of medical tests and interviews, being issued a mysterious new name by a gruff and distracted immigration official, and finally stepping into the sunshine to realize that he has made it to the New World. Except possibly for the last part, it wasn’t quite like that.
For one thing, until 1897 immigrants didn’t pass through Ellis Island, but through Castle Garden, a former opera house on the Battery. Even after immigration facilities were transferred to Ellis Island only steerage passengers were taken there. First- and second-class passengers were dealt with aboard their ships. Nor was Ellis Island (named, incidentally, for an eighteenth-century owner, Samuel Ellis) the drab, cheerless institution we might imagine. It was a beautiful, richly decorated complex with first-class health facilities, a roof garden with inspiring views of lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty, and good food for the relative few who were subjected to detention. Its Registration Hall, with its brass chandeliers and vaulted ceiling containing 29,000 tiles, each one set by hand by Italian craftsmen, was possibly ‘the grandest single space in New York’, according to one account.9 Although the immigration officials were unquestionably hard-worked – they processed up to 5,000 arrivals a day and just over 1 million, four times Ellis Island’s supposed capacity, in a single peak year, 190710 – they performed their duties with efficiency, dispatch and not a little compassion. (Many were themselves immigrants.)
Though the list of those who could be denied admission was formidable – it included prostitutes, lunatics, polygamists, anarchists, those with ‘loathsome or contagious diseases’, those deemed likely to become public charges, and some ninety other categories of undesirables – only about 2 per cent of applicants were denied entrance, and so few were given names they didn’t willingly accede to as to make the notion effectively mythical. Far from being a cold and insensitive introduction to the New World, it was a dazzling display of America’s wealth, efficiency and respect for the common person – and one that made many truly believe that they had passed into an earthly paradise.
Once landed on Manhattan the new immigrants would immediately find further manifestations of the wondrousness of America. At the landing point they would often be approached by fellow countrymen who spoke their language, but who were friendlier, easier in their manner and far more nattily dressed than any they had seen at home. With astounding magnanimity, these instant friends would offer to help the newly arrived