Thieves, blackmailers, and agents of bawdy-houses made their harvest on many a hapless immigrant. As long as the immigrants remained in Castle Garden they had protection and also the privilege of a labor bureau established by the Irish Emigrant Society. Once, however, they left the landing depot to seek relatives or friends or to secure boarding houses, they had to run the gantlet of these scheming wretches.
Run by Catholic priests, the Home gave these Irish girls a safe place to stay. The priests watched over the girls from the time of their arrival at Castle Garden. The main concern was the protection of the sexual virtue of these young, single, Catholic girls, and the fear that they might be unwittingly ensnared into the life of prostitution by the leeches who roamed the Battery. In its first sixteen years of operation, an estimated seventy thousand Irish girls were guests at the Home after having first passed through Castle Garden.
Public concern about the affairs at Castle Garden continued to grow in the 1880s when Joseph Pulitzer, editor of the New York World, launched a blistering crusade against Castle Garden. A Hungarian immigrant who had come through Castle Garden decades earlier, Pulitzer turned his newspaper into a forum for populist pursuits. In 1884, he had led his “people’s paper” in a campaign to raise money for the completion of the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. While shaming the wealthy for not giving more, Pulitzer promised to list the name of every person who made a contribution, no matter how small the donation. In response, over $100,000 was raised, the circulation of the Worl d increased, and Pulitzer’s reputation as a crusader grew.
In 1887, Pulitzer trained the cannons of his broadsheet at Castle Garden and never let up. In the first of many articles over a year’s time, the Wo r l d scored Castle Garden as a monopoly, arguing that the immigrant depot had become a “cumbrous and unwieldy institution.” Railroads, the Wo r l d charged, were fleecing immigrants with the consent of the board. The paper headlined another editorial on Castle Garden: “Purification Needed.” The commissioners did not take the accusations lying down. One of them called Pulitzer “a mean, dirty, contemptible coward” who “ran away to Europe to save himself from incarceration,” and sued the paper for libel.
Soon after the Wo r l d’s exposés appeared, Washington took action. Grover Cleveland, who as New York governor had harsh words to say about Castle Garden, was now sitting in the White House. In August 1887, his secretary of the Treasury ordered an investigation. Not only was Castle Garden accused of granting monopolies to companies that cheated immigrants, but it was also accused of not strongly enforcing the 1882 law barring certain classes of undesirable immigrants. J. C. Savory of the American Emigrant Society called Castle Garden “a delusion to the public and a snare to the immigrant.”
The next to pile on Castle Garden was Congress. During the 1880s, it proved unwilling to sit on the sidelines of this increasingly national issue. In an era predating Theodore Roosevelt’s bully pulpit and the imperial presidency, Congress was the true power in Washington. Responding to the ever-growing debate about the meaning of immigration, Congress began to assert its authority.
In 1888, Rep. Melbourne Ford of Michigan chaired a congressional committee to investigate immigration. When Ford brought his committee to New York, Pulitzer’s Wo r l d was there to greet it and splash the testimony of witnesses on its front page. The committee released its report early the following year. It foreshadowed a coming change in how the nation dealt with immigration. The report described how immigrants were processed at Castle Garden in 1888.
When the vessel containing them has been moored to her dock, the immigrants are transferred to barges, which are towed to Castle Garden. There they disembark, and are required to pass in single file through narrow passage-ways, separated from each other by wooden railings. In about the center of each of these passage-ways there is a desk at which sits a registry clerk who interrogates the immigrant as to his nationality, occupation, destination, etc.—questions calculated to elicit whether or not he is disqualified by law from landing. . . . These questions must be asked rapidly, and the inspection is necessarily done in a very hurried manner, in order that there may be no undue delay in landing them.
The process was simply not thorough enough to comply with existing immigration law. According to the Ford Report, “large numbers of persons not lawfully entitled to land in the United States are annually received at this port.” The committee reported that one of the Castle Garden commissioners had even called its operations “a perfect farce.”
The report did not stop there. It concluded with some general observations. After paying homage to the benefits of past immigrants settling the West, succeeding with their “industry, frugality, and thrift,” the report asked whether the same could be “said of a large portion of the immigrants we are now receiving.” The congressmen answered their own question: “The committee believe not.”
The committee believed that the “class of immigrants who have lately been imported and employed in the coal regions of this country are not such . . . as would make desirable inhabitants of the United States.” It described these Slavs and Italians as having low intelligence. Their purpose in the United States was to “accumulate by parsimonious, rigid, and unhealthy economy” enough money to return home. They lived “like beasts” and ate food that “would nauseate and disgust an American workman. . . . Their habits are vicious, their customs are disgusting.”
The Ford Report echoed much of the contemporary concern about immigration. First, it differentiated between desirable and undesirable immigrants. Government policy, it argued, should sift through these immigrants and separate the wheat from the chaff.
Second, the language of immigration regulation closely mirrored the parallel discussion of economic regulation of trusts, monopolies, and railroads. The vast social changes that Americans experienced could be pinned upon the greed of businessmen who put profit before public interest. Reformers sought to use government power to exert the public interest and reign in selfish private interests. According to the Ford Report:
For the purpose of greed these men have exaggerated the advantages and benefits to be derived by persons immigrating to this country, and have been guilty of erroneous statements in order to secure their commission upon the price of a passage ticket to such an extent that some localities in Europe have been nearly depopulated, and the poor deluded immigrant has come to the United States, arriving here absolutely penniless, to find out that the statements made by the steam-ship agents were absolutely false, and, in many instances, after a short time, he has become a public charge.
In a time of growing disillusionment with laissez-faire economic theory, immigration restrictionists found their enemies in greedy steamship companies and American businesses that contracted with low-wage immigrants to take jobs from native-born workers.
Third, the Ford Report did not call for the debarment of immigrants from specific countries or races, nor did it call for the suspension and ending of all immigration. In terms of Chinese immigration, the report included only one line, saying that it made no effort to investigate it. The regulation of European immigration would be categorically different from the rigid and near-complete banning of the Chinese.
There was one dissenter. Rep. Francis Spinola, a Democratic congressmen from Brooklyn and one of two Italian-American generals in the Union Army during the Civil War, made it clear that he opposed any attempt to restrict “honest immigration.” However, even Spinola agreed with efforts “to shut out paupers, lunatics, idiots, cripples, and thieves, as well as all other evil-doers, who come here to practice their wickedness and fill our poor-houses and prisons.”
Congress never acted upon the “Bill to Regulate Immigration” that the Ford Committee recommended. However, both the House and the Senate established permanent standing committees on immigration for the first time, thereby assuring continued congressional interest.
As conditions at Castle Garden continued to worsen, its critics became more vocal, driving one me
mber of the Board of Commissioners to the point of despair. “So far as Castle Garden is concerned, the country would be better off if it were wiped out of existence,” Edmund Stephenson told the New York Sun in 1889. He felt understandably beleaguered, caught between those who wanted tougher restriction of immigration, defenders of immigration who wanted lax enforcement, and the usual predators looking to take advantage of any immigrant who made it outside the walls of Castle Garden.
At the end of 1889, Secretary of the Treasury William Windom ordered another report on Castle Garden. The Treasury report also found the inspection of immigrants at Castle Garden inadequate and the arrangement between state and federal officials in the regulation of immigration unsatisfactory. It recommended that the federal government take complete control over the regulation of immigrants. Windom accepted that advice, and in February 1890, he notified the Board of Commissioners at Castle Garden that he was terminating their contract in sixty days.
The decision was inevitable. A Republican named Colonel John B. Weber, who was soon to oversee the federal control of immigration, visited Castle Garden in its waning days. He found that boardinghouse runners were having their way with the confused and bewildered immigrants, with seemingly little interference from officials. A new direction was in order.
On Friday, April 18, 1890, the steamers Bohemia and State of Indiana were the last two ships to drop passengers at Castle Garden, landing 465 people that day. In a spiteful mood, members of the Board of Commissioners had refused to allow the Treasury Department to use Castle Garden until new facilities could be found. A makeshift immigrant depot was set up at the Barge Office on the other side of the Battery. Castle Garden was now closed for business.
T REASURY SECRETARY WINDOM WAS determined to begin anew and erase the memory of Castle Garden by building a new facility for processing immigrants completely under the control of the federal government. Some two weeks after announcing the termination of the Castle Garden contract, Windom made public his desire to place the new immigrant station at Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor.
Bedloe’s Island was also the home of the newly erected Statue of Liberty. Once again, Pulitzer used the pages of the New York World to defend Lady Liberty. For weeks, the Wo r l d hammered away, warning that the island would “be converted instead into a Babel.” The paper even tracked down Auguste Bartholdi, the statue’s sculptor, who called the decision a “downright desecration.”
In response, a joint House and Senate committee selected another island in New York Harbor for the home of the new federal immigration station. Congress appropriated $75,000 to improve Ellis Island for the purposes of creating a new immigrant depot. The island was a perfect choice in many ways. It was already in the possession of the federal government as an underused munitions depot. Its island location meant that the immigrant runners and other predators could be kept at a distance, but it was only a quick ferry ride to Manhattan or the railroads on the Jersey side of the harbor.
Before the low-lying island could be made usable, a good deal of work was needed. While immigrants were being processed at the Barge Office—mostly by ex–Castle Garden inspectors—work had begun on dredging a deeper channel to Ellis Island. Docks were constructed on the island, as well as a two-story wooden building, which would be the main reception area. It would take nearly two years to complete the project. Meanwhile, the national debate over the meaning of immigration only intensified.
“Give us a rest,” thundered Francis A. Walker. He worried that “no one can be surely enough of an optimist to contemplate without dread the fast rising flood of immigration now setting in upon our shores.” Walker was no average citizen. He was the nation’s most esteemed economist, a late-nineteenth-century combination of Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith.
A well-bred Bostonian descended from generations of Anglo-Saxon stock, Walker possessed an envious résumé that mirrored the great transformations of nineteenth-century America. A Union general in the Civil War by his midtwenties, Walker was in charge of the 1870 and 1880 Censuses and then taught economics at Yale. At the time of his musings on immigration, Walker was president of both MIT and the American Economic Association.
Walker found the new immigrants “ignorant, unskilled, inert, accustomed to the beastliest conditions with little of social aspiration, with none of the expensive tastes for light and air and room, for decent dress and homely comforts.” They were lowering the country’s wages and standard of living.
Walker also saw the birth rates of native-born Americans shrinking, while immigrant families produced more and more children. While most social scientists now see birth rates as a function of class, with birth rates shrinking as incomes rise, Walker had a different explanation: Immigrants brought down the nation’s standard of living, and native-born Americans revolted against this situation by refusing to bring more children into such a degraded world. Walker’s thesis neglected the fact that native-born American birth rates had been declining since the early nineteenth century, with seemingly little correlation to immigration rates.
Walker’s views were echoed by a younger man with an even more distinguished pedigree. Forty-one-year-old Henry Cabot Lodge had already established himself in academia, gaining the first PhD in political science from Harvard. Though he would continue to write, especially about the glory of Anglo-Saxon culture, it was politics, not academia, that beckoned. In the 1890s, first as a congressman and then as a senator, Lodge began sounding the alarm about immigration. He hoped to prove that current immigration showed “a marked tendency to deteriorate in character.”
Lodge used the occasion of the March 1891 lynching of eleven Italian immigrants in New Orleans to argue that changes were needed in the nation’s immigration law. The cause of the attack was not antiimmigrant sentiment, Lodge argued, but rather “the utter carelessness with which we treat immigration to this country.” For Lodge, the lynchings were one more piece of evidence showing that America could no longer “permit this stream to pour in without discrimination or selection or the exclusion of dangerous and undesirable elements.” He called for moderate restriction that did not “exclude a desirable immigrant who seeks in good faith to become a citizen of the United States.”
Whatever benefits immigration might bring, there were other values that took precedence. “More important to a country than wealth and population is the quality of its people,” wrote Lodge. He was articulating the attitude of upper-class Americans dismayed by both the extravagances of the Gilded Age as well as the squalor and poverty brought about by urbanization. Like his close friend Theodore Roosevelt, Lodge was critical of crass materialism. Though this attitude was a luxury confined to those living on inherited wealth, it also reminded Americans that the public interest could not always be calculated by figures in a ledger book.
Walker and Lodge had tapped into a larger national concern. Newspaper headlines in 1891 screamed: “Lunatics and Idiots Shipped from Europe” and “The World’s Dumping Ground.” Alabama Congressman William C. Oates, who had led the Confederate charge up Little Round Top at the Battle of Gettysburg, summed up the growing belief in the undesirability of new immigrants.
A house to house visit to Mulberry Street, in New York [the city’s Little Italy], will satisfy any one that there are thousands of people in this country who should never have been allowed to land here. . . . Many of the Russian Jews who inhabit other streets in New York, and other cities are of no better class than the Italians just referred to. Many of the mining towns and camps of Pennsylvania and other states are overrun with the most beastly, ignorant foreign laborers who herd together almost as animals and are disgraceful to civilization.
The atmosphere was ripe for a major change in immigration policy. In 1891, while workers were busy constructing the physical edifice of Ellis Island’s facilities, Congress was building the legal structures that would govern what would occur there.
The 1891 Immigration Act expanded the types of undesirable immigrants lis
ted in the 1882 law to include “idiots, insane persons, paupers or persons likely to become public charges, persons suffering from a loathsome or a dangerous disease, persons who have been convicted of a felony or other infamous crime or misdemeanor involving moral turpitude, polygamists.”
Excluded immigrants would be shipped back home at the expense of the steamship company that brought them. The burden of inspecting immigrants would lie not just with American officials, but with steamship companies who now had a financial incentive not to bring over immigrants who would not pass muster at American ports. For the first time since the Alien and Sedition Acts one hundred years earlier, the federal government laid out a method for deporting immigrants.
Immigration was now completely under the control of the federal government. Embedded deep within the law, Congress granted vast powers to this new federal agency. “All decisions made by the inspection officers or their assistants touching on the right of any alien to land . . . shall be final unless appeal be taken to the superintendent of immigration, whose action shall be subject to review by the Secretary of the Treasury.” Though the language seemed innocuous, this provision would prove to be the most controversial. Congress had effectively declared that immigrants could not appeal their exclusions in court. Instead, all appeals had to be made through the executive branch, with a final decision made by the secretary of the Treasury.
The new immigration system represented a big step for Washington. The federal government of the nineteenth century had been a rather sleepy enterprise. The locus of power was in the political parties that controlled patronage for the few jobs that did exist, as well as the judiciary system. The federal government was a weak shell whose main responsibilities were to deliver the mail and pay the pensions of retired Civil War veterans and their widows. More than half of the federal government’s workforce was employed by the Postal Service.
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