more equitable law than we ourselves enjoy; they imagine that our common
life is permeated by a noble idealism; and while they cannot give
expression to their high anticipations they feel more loftily than we
think them capable of feeling. Many a time I have heard conversations
between those who had read about America and those who were ignorant of
its life, and invariably I have had to keep silence; for had I spoken I
must have destroyed blessed illusions. From the very people whom we call
Sabbath breakers, I have heard glowing descriptions of an ideal American
Sabbath, and from men to whom alcoholic beverages seemed essential to
life, I have heard a defense of laws regulating the sale of liquor. If,
in our superficial touch with them in our own country, we find them
materialistic and dulled to what we call our higher life, they are not
the only ones at fault.
* * * * *
Cabin and steerage passengers alike, soon find the poetry of the moment
disturbed; for the quarantine and custom-house officials are on board,
driving away the tourist’s memories of the splendour of European
capitals by their inquisitiveness as to his purchases. They make him
solemnly swear that he is not a smuggler, and upon landing, immediately
proceed to prove that he is one.
The steerage passengers have before them more rigid examinations which
may have vast consequences; so in spite of the joyous notes of the band,
and the glad greetings shouted to and fro, they sink again into
awe-struck and confused silence. When the last cabin passenger has
disappeared from the dock, the immigrants with their baggage are loaded
into barges and taken to Ellis Island for their final examination.
V
AT THE GATEWAY
The barges on which the immigrants are towed towards the island are of a
somewhat antiquated pattern and if I remember rightly have done service
in the Castle Garden days, and before that some of them at least had
done full service for excursion parties up and down Long Island Sound.
The structure towards which we sail and which gradually rises from the
surrounding sea is rather imposing, and impresses one by its utilitarian
dignity and by its plainly expressed official character.
With tickets fastened to our caps and to the dresses of the women, and
with our own bills of lading in our trembling hands, we pass between
rows of uniformed attendants, and under the huge portal of the vast hall
where the final judgment awaits us. We are cheered somewhat by the fact
that assistance is promised to most of us by the agents of various
National Immigrant Societies who seem both watchful and efficient.
Mechanically and with quick movements we are examined for general
physical defects and for the dreaded trachoma, an eye disease, the
prevalence of which is greater in the imagination of some statisticians
than it is on board immigrant vessels.
From here we pass into passageways made by iron railings, in which only
lately, through the intervention of a humane official, benches have been
placed, upon which, closely crowded, we await our passing before the
inspectors.
Already a sifting process has taken place; and children who clung to
their mother’s skirts have disappeared, families have been divided, and
those remaining intact, cling to each other in a really tragic fear that
they may share the fate of those previously examined.
A Polish woman by my side has suddenly become aware that she has one
child less clinging to her skirts, and she implores me with agonizing
cries, to bring it back to her. In a strange world, at the very entrance
to what is to be her home, without the protection of her husband,
without any knowledge of the English language, and with no one taking
the trouble to explain to her the reason, the child was snatched from
her side. Somewhere it is bitterly crying for its mother, and each is
unconscious of the other’s fate.
“Gdeye moya shena” (where is my wife?) an old Slovak cries as he looks
wildly about for her, whose physique was suspected of being below the
normal and who was passed on for further examination.
A Russian youth, stalwart and strong, is separated from his household
which came together to settle in Dakota; but now he, the mainstay of the
family, is gone and they are perplexed and distracted.
A little girl scarcely five years of age, cries: “Mitter, mitter, ich
will zu meiner mitter gehen”; she is there alone and uncomforted,
surrounded by rough-looking men, while not far away her mother is
working herself into hysterics because she must await in the detention
room the supreme decision.
A woman with three children has two of them taken from her because they
are suspected of disease and found to be afflicted by trachoma; the
mother also has the disease, but her husband, now an American citizen,
comes to claim her, and she passes in while the little ones are held in
custody by the immigration authorities.
One by one we pass the inspectors; we show our money and answer the
questions which are numerous and pertinent.
The average immigrant obeys mechanically; his attitude towards the
inspector being one of great respect. While the truth is not always
told, many of the lies prepared prove both inefficient and unnecessary.
[Illustration: THE SHEEP AND THE GOATS.
In the great examination hall, they wait, some with curiosity, some with
anxiety, the decision that shall give them entrance to the new home or
consign them again to the Old World strife.]
On one of the boats very recently a number of young women were
imported for immoral purposes, and each of them was supposed to be
married to the attendant agent of a firm which conducts an international
business. The young man having announced himself as married to the woman
accompanying him, was asked, “Where were you married?” “In Paris.” “Who
married you?” “Pere Abelard.” “When were you married?” “The fifteenth of
May.” “Were your wife’s parents present?” “Yes.” Next the young woman
was questioned, and announced the marriage as having taken place in
Brussels, some time in June, and that she is an orphan. The case is very
plain, and both will have to face the court of special inquiry.
A young Jewish girl who really escaped the torment of some Russian
persecutions conjures up in her mind a relative in New York whose name
and address are not discovered, and the more she is questioned the more
she entangles herself in a network of lies.
A dear old mother is held, because instead of the one son who awaits
her, she has announced three or four sons residing here; and continued
questioning more and more involves her in useless affirmation.
The examination can be superficial at best; but the eye has been trained
and discoveries are made here, which seem rather remarkable.
Four ways open to the immigrant after he passes the inspector. If he is
destined for New York he goes straightway down the stairs, and there his
friends await him if he has any; and most of them have. If his journey
takes him westward, and there the largest percentage goes, he enters a
large, commodious hall to the right, where the money-changers sit and
the transportation companies have their offices. If he goes to the New
England states he turns to the left into a room which can scarcely hold
those who go to the land of the pilgrims and puritans. The fourth way is
the hardest one and is taken by those who have received a ticket marked
P. C. (Public Charge), which sends the immigrant to the extreme left
where an official sits, in front of a barred gate behind which is the
dreaded detention-room.
The decision one way or the other must be quickly made, and the
immigrant finds himself in a jail-like room often without knowing just
why. There is not much time for explanation.
Imagine a room filled by at least fifty people, many of them doomed to
recross the terrible sea and to be landed upon strange territory, to
find the way unattended, to their obscure little village. When they
arrive there they are usually paupers with a stigma resting upon them;
for were they not rejected in America, and why? Ah, who knows why!
Let us pass through this room. “Brother, why are you here?” A stalwart
Lettish peasant boy answers demurely, “Because I haven’t money enough. I
had some money and they stole it out of my father’s pockets.” The father
and the boy have been marked by the inspector as likely to become a
public charge, because they had neither money in their pockets nor
friends waiting for them. A matter of ten or twenty dollars is between
these men and the fulfillment of all their desires.
The court may be lenient, but the father is old and the boy young and it
is more than probable that they will both end their days on the rough
Baltic, where society now is as turbulent as that northern sea.
A Servian peasant, browned by the hot sun which shone upon the Danubian
plains where he lived, edges up to me, for he hears a familiar Slavic
note in my speech, and he brings this bitter plaint. “How far I have
travelled from Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, and Hamburg. I have spent all
my money and now it looks as if I must go back. Must I go? Tell me.” The
court will tell him to-morrow that he has passed the dreaded dead line,
is over fifty years of age, not too well built, used up by the hardships
of his native country, and that as he is likely to become a public
charge he is marked for deportation. He will be sent back to Hamburg and
how he will find his way home I do not know.
A German woman with three children is the next whom I notice. She is at
the point of a nervous breakdown. She has a husband waiting for her, she
has over $100, but P.C. is marked on her slip; so she must face the
court which will admit her, but she has a long twenty-four hours to wait
and the strain is terrible. She needs to be reassured and comforted.
Two boys under ten years of age came unattended; fine looking boys. Over
their heavy blue coats hung tickets with the mother’s address. How happy
they were to be going to mother. She had preceded them by several years
to work out for herself and for them a new destiny on this side of the
sea; for on the other side life had been blighted by the unfaithfulness
of her husband. At last the hour came when she could send for her
children. How she watched their journeying, and how anxious she was
while they were on the sea! They are on this ship, and she is waiting
for them behind the iron grating at the island. Crowds pour into the
great hall, past the physician, towards the inspectors, towards the
great centre, to the east and the west. Now she sees them; the physician
looks at their faces, and bends low over their chests; but instead of
walking straight towards her they are turned aside with those suspected
of contagious disease.
“Where are you from, my boy?” “Russia.” One of the few real Russian
peasants whom I have met. He measures five feet six inches, is sound as
an oak, and having escaped through the cordons of gendarmes which
separate his native country from the rest of the world, came here to
meet his brother who was at work in the coal mines near Scranton, Pa.
“What about your brother?” “Ah! Barin (sir), my brother they say, was
killed in the mines and they are afraid to let me in; so I suppose I
shall have to go back to Russia,” and the big melancholy peasant cried
like a baby. “Buy this shirt from me, Barin, I need money.”
“What’s the matter with you, why are you so unhappy, you gay, care free
Roumanian?” Half Slav, half Latin, and the whole no one quite knows
what,--he is dressed in a shepherd’s garb, a heavy sheepskin coat over
him. “Look here, Panye (sir). This keeps me from going as a shepherd to
the West;” and he shows me a lacerated breast on which a wolf has
written the shepherd’s story of his faithfulness to the sheep. “Yes, the
wolves came round and round my sheep,” he says, “and I went round and
round between the sheep and the wolves and the nearer they came the
faster I went my rounds between them; but before the morning came they
tore many sheep though they tore me first. I bled and bled and have
remained sore as you see. A younger shepherd took my place and I sold
all and spent all to come here. Ah, well, I could still guard the
sheep.”
The most melancholy of all men are the detained Jews, for they usually
have strong family ties which already bind them to this new world, and
they chafe under the delay. Their children or friends are waiting
impatiently, crowding beyond their allotted limit, trying the severely
taxed patience of the officials, asking useless questions, and wasting
precious time in waiting; for the courts work their allotted tasks with
dispatch, but with care and dignity; and all must wait in deep
uncertainty through the long vigil of a restless night spent on the
clean, but not too comfortable bunks provided by the government.
Let no one believe that landing on the shores of “The land of the free,
and the home of the brave” is a pleasant experience; it is a hard, harsh
fact, surrounded by the grinding machinery of the law, which sifts,
picks, and chooses; admitting the fit and excluding the weak and
helpless.
Much ignorance needs to be dispelled regarding these immigrants. Not
long ago, I heard one of the secretaries of a certain home missionary
society say, with much unction as he pleaded for money for his work, “We
land annually on these shores, a million paupers and criminals.”
Unfortunately, much of such impression prevails. It was my privilege
recently, as a member of the National Conference on Immigration, to be
among the guests of the commissioner of the port of New York, and one of
the spectacles which we witnessed was the landing of a ship-load of
immigrants. We stood in the visitor’s gallery and looked down upon a
hall divided and subdivided by the cold iron railings. Many of the
visitors were beginning to hold their noses in anticipation of the
stenches which would come with these foreigners, and were ready to be
shocked by the horrors of the steerage.
Slowly the bewildered mass came into view; but strange to relate, those
who led the mass appeared like ladies and gentlemen.
The women wore modern, half acre hats a little the worse for wear, but
bought in the city of Prague a few months before; and they were more
becoming to these young Bohemian women than to the majority of their
American sisters.
The men carried band-boxes, silk umbrellas and walking canes, the
remnants of past glories. They were permitted to come in first because
they wore good clothing and passed out quickly into their freedom, the
members of our Congress welcoming them heartily by the clapping of
hands.
After them came Slavic women with no finery except their homespun,
rough, tough and clean; carrying upon their backs piles of feather-beds
and household utensils. Strong limbed men followed them in the
picturesque garb of their native villages; Slovaks, Poles, Roumanians,
Ruthenians, Italians, and finally, Russian Jews; but lo, and behold! no
smells ascended to our nostrils, and no horrors were disclosed.
Taking a group of delegates down among them, we found that they were
wholesome looking people, not devoid of intelligence, and when the
barrier between us was broken down by the sound of their native speech,
they were communicative, at ease, and very human. The first time I
entered New York was at Castle Garden, from the steamer _Fulda_, twenty
years ago; and having watched the tide of immigration ever since, I can
say that I never have seen, at any time, a ship-load of better human
beings disembark than those which came from the steamer _Wilhelm II_, on
December 7, 1905. And of the many who came on this ship, it is just
possible that those who wore neither fashionable hats nor trailing
skirts, and who were not politely treated,--it is just possible that
they may after all, make the best members of this democratic society.
A gentleman from Ohio, a member of the Conference on Immigration said on
the floor, in open debate, and he said it with menacing gesture: “We
don’t want you to send none of them yellow worms from Southern Europe to
our state, we got too many of them now.” No doubt the gentleman from
Ohio and the delegate from Rhode Island who said: “We don’t want no more
iv thim durrty furriners in this grand and glorious counthry of ourn,”
voiced the common prejudice which rests itself entirely upon its
ignorance.
It is true that many criminals come, especially from Italy. Many weak,
impoverished and poorly developed creatures come from among Polish and
Russian Jews, but they are only the tares in the wheat. The stock as a
whole is physically sound; it is crude, common peasant stock, not the
dregs of society, but its basis. Its blood is not blue, but it is red,
wholesomely red, which is more to the purpose. Blue blood we also
receive--thin, worn-out blood, bought at a high price for the daughters
of some of our multi-millionaires; but no one can claim that either they
or we have been specially blessed by it.
The hardships which attend the examination and deportation of immigrants
seem unavoidable, and would not be materially reduced if any other
method were devised. To examine them at the centres of immigration seems
a rather vague and not a feasible plan. First of all because the
immigrant can present himself as physically fit, more easily in his
native country where the agencies already exist, to prepare him for an
examination which most steamship companies rigidly enforce; because the
long journey makes artificial cleansing of diseased eyelids or the
hiding of other physical defects impossible. Again because of the fact
that such commissions would be hard to control so far from home and
would be in constant danger of exposure to “Graft”; a disease not
unknown among American officials at home and abroad. The next reason is,
that these countries might object to the presence of such alien
commissions, which would select the best material and leave the worst;
and the last reason is that it would give foreign governments a very
fine opportunity to detain those who emigrate for political reasons or
those who desire to avoid service in the army.
Much greater responsibility should be put upon the steamship companies,
many of which still practice their ancient wrongs upon their most
profitable passengers. One of the demands which should be made, and made
immediately, is the abolition of the steerage.
Future American citizens should be taught when they step on board of
ship, that people in America are expected to live like human beings, and
not like beasts.
The price they pay for their passage is large enough to entitle them to
better treatment, and if it is not, then the price should be raised to
such a figure as to permit it.
This humane treatment should follow the passenger until the last moment
of his stay under government supervision; for the more humanely the
immigrant is treated, the better citizen he is likely to become.
The steerage is responsible for not a little imported anarchy, and the
sooner it is abolished the better. The more humanely the immigrant is
treated at Ellis Island, the more humanely he will deal with us when he
becomes the master of our national destiny.
VI
“THE MAN AT THE GATE”
“What questions will he ask?” “How much money will he take?” “Will he
deal gently with us?” These are the questions which pass from lip to lip
among those detained; for the subjects of the Czar speak of the State in
the personal pronoun. In fact the State is scarcely known in their
vocabulary. It is the person of the ruler which they know, and which
they fear more than they revere. The State they have known, was to them
very personal; but to the new State, they are just so much human freight
which needs to be inspected. In the past this has been done not only
impersonally but inhumanely as well, and that it is now done more
humanely and justly so far as possible, we owe to “the man at the gate.”
He passed through the gate himself in the old Castle Garden days, when
not much system prevailed, when boarding-house keepers were let loose
upon us, frightening us half out of our senses and completely out of our
change. His dollars were few; but like the average immigrant of to-day
he possessed a buoyant spirit, a strong body, keen wits, and bright eyes
out of which shone good nature and the spirit of the mischievous boy.
He was admitted without difficulty, and drifted into Pennsylvania where
he shared the lot of the miner, his labour and his dangers. The miners
then were recruited from the strongest immigrant stock and when they
felt themselves strong enough to organize, he became one of the leaders.
The fact that he led many a rescue party to save his entombed comrades,
and that he displayed courage and intelligence brought him into
prominence, and the Governor of Pennsylvania chose him as State Factory
Inspector. In this position he made enemies enough among the employers
to prove that he was faithful to the task set before him, which was, to
enforce the laws regulating the conditions of labour in workshops and
factories. Later he was appointed inspector at Ellis Island at a time
when the condition of that federal post was anything but pleasing to
those of us who knew them, and who were concerned for the well-being of
the immigrant.
Roughness, cursing, intimidation and a mild form of blackmail prevailed
to such a degree as to be common. The commissioner in charge at that
time was far above all this, and though made conscious of the conditions
was seemingly powerless to discharge dishonest employees or in any way
improve the morale of the place.
The new spirit had not yet come into politics and the spoils still
belonged to the victors who made full use of the privilege. Among those
who did their full duty and who smarted under the wrong done to this
weak and helpless mass, was the once immigrant, now inspector.
The conditions steadily grew worse; at least the complaints grew more
numerous. Experiences like my own were not rare. I knew that the money
changers were “crooked,” so I passed a twenty mark piece to one of them
for exchange, and was cheated out of nearly seventy-five per cent. of my
money. My change was largely composed of new pennies, whose brightness
was well calculated to deceive any newcomer.
At another time I was approached by an inspector who, in a very friendly
way, intimated that I might have difficulty in being permitted to land,
and that money judiciously placed might accomplish something.
A Bohemian girl whose acquaintance I had made on the steamer, came to me
with tears in her eyes and told me that one of the inspectors had
promised to pass her quickly, if she would promise to meet him at a
certain hotel. In heart-broken tones she asked: “Do I look like that?”
The concessions were in the hands of irresponsible people and I remember
the time when the restaurant was a den of thieves, in which the
immigrant was robbed by the proprietor, whose employees stole from him
and from the immigrant also.
My complaints when I made them were treated with the same neglect as
were those of others, until with the coming in of the Roosevelt
administration they had their resurrection, a change was demanded and
the demand satisfied....
Mr. William Williams, who was just back from Cuba where he had rendered
distinguished service, and who had come under the notice of the
President, was tendered the office of Commissioner of Immigration at
Ellis Island. Upon his acceptance, the President’s instructions were to
“clean out the stables.” A large measure of reform was inaugurated
during the two and one half years of Mr. Williams’s incumbency of this
office.
In looking for a successor, the President consulted the records,
evidently with the purpose of discovering one thoroughly conversant with
the conditions, and of experience coupled with executive ability,
sufficient to further extend the needed reforms. Mr. Robert Watchorn was
chosen for this important office.
This official announcement in relation to the appointment appeared in
the daily press at this time:
“_Washington, January 16, 1905._
“Robert Watchorn will succeed William Williams as United States
Commissioner of Immigration at New York. The appointment will be
solely on merit. Mr. Watchorn is now United States Commissioner of
Immigration at Montreal. He has been in the immigration service for
many years, and his record is perfect.”
I ventured to ask the Commissioner one day if he had been given any
instructions by the President as to the course to be pursued. He
replied: “Yes, the President gave me instructions very brief but very
pointed. ‘Mr. Watchorn, I am sending you to Ellis Island.--You will find
it a very difficult place to manage.--I know you are familiar with the
conditions.--All I ask of you is that you give us an administration as
clean as a hound’s tooth.’”
Should one desire any further evidence that Ellis Island is a difficult
place to manage, let him turn to this incident and its sequel in Senator
Hoar’s “Autobiography of Seventy Years” (_Scribner’s_):