American Passage

by Vincent J. Cannato

  Throughout the fall, runners would try to cause trouble at Castle Garden or steer immigrants away from the depot, but they were fighting an uphill battle. By December 1855, Castle Garden had been operating for four months and one reporter who visited the depot was pleased with what he saw. The entrance was heavily guarded and those without letters of introduction were turned away. “There is no public undertaking in the city more wise and benevolent.” The reporter continued, “It redeems our city to know that anything so judicious and benevolent could be executed by it.”

  The harassment of Castle Garden officials continued for another year, but the runners and their allies were never able to shut the station down. Between January and April 1856, Castle Garden processed over 16,000 immigrants arriving on 106 ships. In its annual report of that year, the Board of Commissioners made oblique reference to the troubles, stating that “where violence threatened with a strong hand to lay waste and destroy, the police . . . effectually checked the thoughtless and lawless in their course and preserved a valuable property from destruction or damage.”

  Some reports claimed that immigrant runners, faced with failure in New York, had left for California to seek their fortune or else had joined private military expeditions to Mexico and Nicaragua. Rynders managed to cling to political power and was named U.S. Marshall for New York in 1857 as a reward for his work in helping to elect James Buchanan president.

  At Castle Garden, immigrants received reliable information about travel, jobs, and housing. The newcomers could exchange foreign money for American currency and buy railroad tickets without fear of fraud. An employment bureau helped immigrants find work around the country. The sick and disabled were provided with medical care. Immigrants’ baggage was carefully handled and boardinghouses were screened, licensed, and supervised by the board. Decent food at decent prices was available.

  With the runners seemingly vanquished, the Board of Commissioners won lavish praise. Friedrich Kapp, a member of the board, described the institution he helped manage as “one of the most benevolent establishments in the civilized world . . . it forestalls untold misery, need and suffering.” One English emigrant called it “a great national refuge for the emigrant from all lands. . . . It stands alone in its noble and utilitarian character.” In William Dean Howells’s 1890 novel A Hazard of New Fortunes, the book’s main character, Basil March, describes how well officials at Castle Garden treated newcomers. “No one appeared troubled or anxious; the officials had a conscientious civility,” March mused. A journalist called Castle Garden “one of the most beneficent institutions in the world.”

  Despite the accolades, Kapp had trouble understanding the country’s laissez-faire attitude toward immigration. “People look with indifference at this colossal immigration of the European masses,” Kapp wrote in 1870, “whose presence alone will exercise a powerful influence on the destinies of the Western World; National and State legislators care little or nothing for the direction which is given to this foreign element.”

  That would soon change. By the 1880s, it seemed as if all of America had become interested in—even obsessed with—immigration. The industrial revolution was transforming the way Americans worked and lived. The United States was now a continental nation from the Atlantic to the Pacific, unified by transcontinental railroads. The nation saw its population nearly double between 1870 and 1900, while the gross national product increased sixfold. The United States was transforming itself overnight from a predominantly rural, agrarian society into an urban, industrial nation.

  Between 1860 and 1910, the number of Americans living in cities rose from 6 million, or 20 percent of the population, to 44 million, or 40 percent of the population. In 1885, a Protestant minister named Josiah Strong wrote a best-selling book, Our Country, where he complained that cities were “a serious menace to our civilization” and possessed “a peculiar attraction for the immigrant.” Census data showed that these cities had become foreign territories. Immigrants and their children would soon account for nearly 80 percent of the population of cities like New York and Chicago.

  A few years after Strong published his jeremiad, historian Frederick Jackson Turner looked at the 1890 Census and declared that the American frontier was officially closed. Open land, at least in theory, was disappearing. To Turner, open land had made earlier immigration possible, as the frontier became the crucible in which “immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race.”

  If the frontier was now closed, where would new immigrants go? Critics feared that the city would be the new frontier, but without the same ability to assimilate newcomers. Overcrowded cities populated by those who spoke in foreign tongues marked the end of the Republic, as the United States was in danger of becoming just like Europe: corrupt, overindulgent, class-ridden, contemptuous of republican government, and doomed to revolution. Political corruption, alcoholism, and socialism would reign.

  A writer in the Atlantic Monthly worried in 1882 that “our era . . . of happy immunity from those social diseases which are the danger and the humiliation of Europe is passing away.” The new immigrants evoked not just fears of overcrowded and corrupt Old Europe, but also ancient Rome, which had been threatened by an urban rabble and an increasingly non-Roman citizenry: “In spite of the magnificent dimensions of our continent, we are beginning to feel crowded,” said a writer in 1887. “Our cities are filling up with a turbulent foreign proletariat, clamoring for panem et circenses, as in the days of ancient Rome, and threatening the existence of the republic if their demands remain unheeded.”

  Daily newspapers, middle-class magazines, and highbrow intellectual journals devoted increasing space to immigration. The North American Review, the voice of conservative, Northern, native-born Protestants, published two lengthy articles in the early 1880s that detailed how many immigrants were coming and where they were coming from. The articles displayed a marked ambivalence. Immigrants brought great material benefits to the United States, but it was “inevitable, however, that much moral and physical evil will be brought hither by the multitudes who come.”

  Newspapers throughout the country chimed in. The Ohio State Journal asked, “What statesman will be wise enough to sift the hundreds of thousands of emigrants crowding over from Europe and say which . . . should be admitted and which, in the exercise of the sacred right of self-protection, should be excluded?” Such a statesman would be needed since, according to the Philadelphia Telegraph, “ a large percentage of the foreigners to whom we have given welcome are unworthy of it,” because they were “often idle, vicious socialists and anarchists, social pests and incendiaries.”

  There were fears that America was becoming a dumping ground for Europe’s unwanted peasants. The Chicago Times warned that the “presence among us of a large body of socialists, anarchists, nihilists, lunatics, pordioseros [beggars], and other social dregs from the old world is a danger that threatens the destruction of our national edifice by the erosion of its moral foundations.” The New York Times wondered how long would “the people of this country submit cheerfully to this burden shifted to their shoulders from the Old World?”

  A more benign view of immigration still continued to be heard. The Boston Pilot reminded its largely Irish Catholic readers that calls for restriction were an “unsavory reminder of the dark days” of the nativist Know-Nothings. The Milwaukee Journal, with its large German readership, saw immigration as “natural in its movements as the flow of the tides. It is a movement to restore the human equilibrium of the globe.” The paper’s laissez-faire prescriptions rejected government interference, calling it “un-American” and arguing that natural forces would slow or increase immigration based on market forces and social conditions.

  Immigration was “giving us the best blood in the world,” according to the Milwaukee Journal, alluding to the benefits of an expanded gene pool. “American humanity in the end promises to be an advance on all other humanity that has yet appeared on the planet.” Americans were a �
��composite people,” according to the St. Louis Republican. “Our Americanism is continually changing. It is not today what it was a generation ago, and it will not be a generation hence what it is to-day.”

  Others used genetic theory for darker purposes. Senator Justin Morrill argued that the effects of new immigrants were “more dangerous to the individuality and deep-seated stamina of the American people. . . . I refer to those whose inherent deficiencies and iniquities are thoroughbred, and who are as incapable of evolution, whether in this generation or the next.” Morrill, a well-respected Vermont Republican, argued that Americans “must not be coerced to support the weak, vile, and hungry outcasts from hospitals, prisons, and poor-houses, landed here not only to stay themselves but to transmit hereditary taints to the third and fourth generation.”

  It took Episcopal bishop and poet A. Cleveland Coxe to bring this theory to its logical conclusion. Coxe called the new immigrants “invaders” who “come with weapons of fatal import to our civilization and to our race.” America was under attack from “hordes of barbarians,” for which, Coxe warned, historically minded Americans, there was ample precedent. Past invasions made Spain “a mongrel race, and have fastened upon her a chronic state of decay and imbecility.” Of course, the great historical example was the Roman Empire, with “Goths and Vandals pouring into the sunny south.” Coxe argued that new immigrants were hereditarily indisposed to democracy and could endanger the nation’s experiment in self-government.

  Despite Coxe’s florid rhetoric, most people were trying to find a way to reconcile a vision of America as a refuge for immigrants with a desire to accept only desirable newcomers. The Troy Times welcomed “the intelligent, industrious, and honest foreigners who come here to establish homes,” but wanted “the highest and strongest barriers . . . raised” for the “worthless human rubbish.” “What we need,” argued the Minneapolis Tribune, “is the inspection and sifting of intending immigrants.” Such a system, the New York Commercial Advertiser believed, would allow the nation to “defend itself against undesirable additions to its population without crowding out immigrants who are qualified to become good citizens.”

  By the late 1880s, changes in the way America handled immigration were inevitable. Castle Garden had become an anachronism, a quaint relic of a disappearing world. It was a state-run institution trying to deal with a nationwide problem. It was an institution run by machine politicians and private citizens looking to protect the interests of immigrants, not disinterested professionals looking out for the greater good of society. It was a nineteenth-century solution to a (soon to be) twentieth-century problem.

  Castle Garden officials would find themselves under nearly continuous assault. Where Isaiah Rynders and his immigrant runners failed years before, the Supreme Court, the Congress, the Treasury Department, the governor of New York, and crusading journalists succeeded.

  The Supreme Court struck the first blow in 1875 with Henderson v. Mayor of New York, which declared that state laws requiring the immigrant head taxes were unconstitutional because they usurped Congress’s constitutional powers to regulate immigration. The Constitution is fairly oblique in its references to immigration, and Congress had shown little desire to exercise that right previously. A decade after the victory of the Union Army at Appomattox, the Supreme Court was unsympathetic to the idea of states’ rights. “The laws which govern the right to land passengers in the United States from other countries ought to be the same in New York, Boston, New Orleans, and San Francisco,” the Court declared.

  Shortly after the decision, Congress responded by passing the first federal law restricting immigration. The Immigration Act of 1875 banned prostitutes, criminals, and Chinese laborers. However, it was an odd law. Though Congress declared its authority to exclude immigrants, the federal government showed little interest in enforcing the new law and left the task to the states. Back in New York, the Board of Commissioners at Castle Garden, without the revenue from the immigrant head tax, was in debt and could no longer take care of immigrants. For the next six years, Congress ignored pleas from New York State for financial help to enforce federal law. Frustrated, the Board of Commissioners threatened to close down Castle Garden.

  It was not until 1882 that Congress again acted on immigration when it passed two important pieces of legislation. The first placed the power to regulate immigrants more firmly in the hands of the U.S. Treasury Department. As some 476,000 immigrants passed through Castle Garden that year, the Immigration Act of 1882 imposed a head tax of 50 cents on all incoming immigrants. More importantly, it expanded the exclusionary categories to include any “convict, lunatic, idiot, or person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” Congress was expanding the classifications of undesirable immigrants, and the list would soon grow even longer in years to come.

  That same year, Congress passed another law with a different intent. The Chinese Exclusion Act barred the entry of nearly all Chinese immigrants. The number of Chinese immigrants was small—some 250,000 arrived between 1851 and 1880, and they represented less than 3 percent of all immigrants arriving each year—yet Congress succumbed to racial fears, as well as concerns that cheap Chinese labor would lower the standard of living for native-born workers.

  In 1885, Congress again heeded the wishes of labor by passing the Foran Act, also known as the Alien Contract Labor Law, which made it illegal “to assist or encourage the importation or migration of aliens . . . under contract or agreement,” thereby outlawing the recruitment of immigrants whose passage was prepaid by a third party, usually a business agent. Skilled workers, artists, actors, singers, and domestic servants were exempt from the ban on contract labor.

  Even with these new laws, more tolerant attitudes toward immigrants still ran deep in the American psyche. One congressional supporter of the contract-labor law emphasized that the law “in no measure seeks to restrict free immigration; such a proposition would be odious, and justly so, to the American people.” With these laws, Congress made clear that the method for dealing with European and Asian immigrants would be very different. When it came to European immigrants, Americans tried to balance concern for the impact of these new immigrants with a national mythology that welcomed newcomers. The Chinese, however, faced near exclusion solely by their race.

  How to enforce these laws was still an open question. Neither the Treasury Department nor anyone else in Washington had the capacity to monitor, investigate, and examine hundreds of thousands of immigrants. To solve this problem, the secretary of the Treasury simply contracted with state governments and groups like the Board of Commissioners to continue what they had already been doing.

  The Board of Commissioners was being asked to shoulder a greater burden at the same time that it was under increasing criticism. In 1883, New York’s newly elected Democratic governor, Grover Cleveland, attacked Castle Garden as “a scandal and a reproach to civilization,” a place where “barefaced jobbery has been permitted, and the poor emigrant, who looks to the institutions for protection, finds that his helplessness and forlorn condition afford the readily seized opportunity for imposition and swindling.”

  Although Castle Garden had been created in an altruistic spirit, it soon became enmeshed in a battle between Republican state officials and Democratic city officials. Cleveland was echoing partisan criticisms that Castle Garden had been a Republican patronage pot in the middle of Democratic New York City. Many people were angry that the Board of Commissioners was constantly demanding more money from the state for the operation of Castle Garden, while private companies reaped profits inside it thanks to the monopoly granted them by their Republican patrons.

  Of the estimated one hundred workers at Castle Garden, 90 percent were Republicans. Profits were being made there, and New York Democrats had little to say over who got the spoils. Privileges at the immigrant depot, such as railroad tickets and money changing, were given away to politically connected firms. It was estimated that railroads d
id over $2.5 million worth of business at Castle Garden in 1886.

  To many, this cried out for intervention from the federal government. The Times editorialized that if only “foreign immigration were taken in hand by the national government . . . it is certain that great waste would be prevented, many scandals be avoided, and an important public interest would be placed where it properly belongs.”

  Yet there was more to the criticism and the demands for a federal takeover than just blind partisanship. No matter the good intentions of those administering Castle Garden, the situation had certainly deteriorated, so much so that by the 1880s Jewish immigrants coined a new Yiddish phrase—kesel garten—that became synonymous with chaos. The old vigilance against runners and others sharks had weakened, and immigrants could not be guaranteed complete security from scams and thieves.

  In 1880, a twenty-two-year-old English miner named Robert Watchorn arrived at Castle Garden. With gnawing hunger, he spied a pie stand. After dropping 50 cents at the counter, Watchorn devoured his 10-cent piece of apple pie. When he asked for his change back, the salesman refused. Watchorn tried to jump the counter to retrieve his money, but a policeman intervened and threatened to charge him with assault. In one telling of the story, he got his money back and went on his way, but in another he did not get his money back, but gained “a great deal of sad experience.” Either way, it was an incident that would remain with Watchorn even a quarter-century later when he would become the man in charge of processing immigrants in New York.

  Another sign that conditions at Castle Garden were deteriorating was the creation of the Catholic Church’s Mission of Our Lady of the Rosary’s Home for Irish Immigrant Girls in 1883. The Home was founded by Father John Riordan and located directly across from the Battery at 7 State Street. Writing in 1899 of the early days of the Home, Father M. J. Henry made clear that even with the protection of Castle Garden, the old predators of immigrants still survived outside its walls.