"Manhunt:The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer" by James L. Swanson

This is a detailed and surprisingly suspenseful account of John Wilkes Booth's assassination of Lincoln, his twelve-day flight, and the Federal government's pursuit of him. Like many, I'd encountered the basic outline of this story before, much in Swanson's account surprised me. What shocked me was how lacking the security around Lincoln was considering the vehemence of feelings at the time. Petitioners could visit the President without going through any kind of security check. This was a far from peaceful world; There were certainly of guns and armed men in the neighborhood of The White House. Swanson mentions "numerous" assassination attempts on Lincoln prior to Booth's successful one. There was also no dearth of available weapons; Booth used a single-shot pistol to assassinate Lincoln, despite the fact that in wartime Washington "thousands of guns, including small, lightweight pocket-sized revolvers, were for sale"(21).

Booth is difficult to figure. All who encountered him noted his good looks, especially his piercing eyes. He was an accomplished actor and widely recognized. He was well-off and popular with women. And yet, he was "crushed by the fall of Richmond, and by the fire that consumed much of the rebel capital" and when the South surrendered, "Booth wandered the streets in despair,"(5) seeking the quickest means to "'drive away the blues'"(5). His loving sister, Asia Booth Clarke, slanted the picture a bit but captures the mystery of the man when she elegized "'granting that he died in vain, yet he gave his all on earth, youth, beauty, manhood, a great human love, the certainty of excellence in his profession, a powerful brain, the strength of an athelte, health and great wealth, for his cause'"(368-369).

Swanson doesn't deviate from the tight focus of his book to detail the reasons why Booth was so strongly attached to the Southern cause. He simply relates the effects of that attachment. Booth had organized a failed attempt to kidnap the president in the fall of 1864 which was a failure. On the morning of April fifteenth, hungover, he heard the news that the president was going to attend a play at Ford's Theater that night. He decided then and there to not only assassinate the president at the theater, but quickly organized his accomplices and set them on missions to simultaneously assassinate Secretary of State William Seward and Vice President Andrew Johnson.

Swanson provides accounts of all three assassination attempts. The central one, Booth's, succeeded in part thanks in part to the usual dumb luck. It was concocted on the spur of the moment. Booth only heard of Lincoln's visit the morning of and put the event in works over the course of an afternoon. It succeeded despite the fact that Booth was poorly armed. For reasons unexplained, Booth insisted on using an unreliable single-shot pistol rather than a revolver. Half-prepared, he had a hard time finding someone to watch his horse outside the back door of Ford's while he went inside to do the deed. Also, and it's hard to know how anyone knows this, but apparently, just as Booth fired, Lincoln "jerked his head away from Booth"(43). But, not far enough away.

The Seward assassination was a desperate and ugly bungled job undertaken by the 21-year old "loyal, obedient, and hard-fighting" confederate veteran Lewis Powell. Gaining entry surreptitiously as a pharmacy delivery boy, once inside Seward's home, Powell ended up wildly flailing about with a knife as he engaged Seward's army nurse, Seward's two sons, and Seward himself in a vicious, hand-to-hand combat.

Booth threatened to expose the third assassin, a carriage painter named George Atzerodt, when he initially expressed an unwillingness to participate by assassinating Johnson. The coerced Atzerodt never did finished his assigned task, backing off at the last minute. Most likely, he could have easily assassinated Johnson, who occupied a room directly above Atzerodt's at the

Late in the book, Swanson notes the tendency in later times to romanticize Booth: "...his image morphed from evil murderer of a president into fascinating antihero- the brooding, misguided, romantic, and tragic assassin." Observing the use of Booth's image in banners around present day Ford's theater, he rightly observes "the display of Lee Harvey Oswald banners in Dallas, or James Earl Ray banners in Memphis, would be obscene"(383).

Is this romanticizing, this de-fanging, simply a matter or time? Or do writers like Swanson play a part by continuing to paint him as a tragic, romantic anti-hero? Describing Booth's escape from Washington, Swanson goes for Biblical rhetoric: "Like Lot's wife, who paused, turned, and dared look upon the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Booth could see the sleeping city from which he fled, and he knew it would awaken soon and hear of the destruction he had wrought. He had done it. And he had escaped"(68).

None of this proves true. Booth did receive some of the fame he sought. Years afterward, all sorts of "Booth is alive and living in..." stories emerged, such "survival myths...evok[ing] the traditional fate of the damned, of a cursed spirit who can find no rest"(385). Also, Booth wrought considerable destruction. However, he failed to reverse the verdict of the war as he most likely hoped: the war was over and Lincoln's assassination failed to reignite it. Indeed, Lincoln's assassination served to make Lincoln a folk-hero, cementing his image as Father Abraham, deliverer of the nation. And, ultimately Booth did not escape.

It did take 12 days to capture him. The twists and turns of the hunt as rendered by Swanson's telling provide suspense, but this isn't a pursuit and capture that reflects particularly well on the strength, bravery and ingenuity of either the hunter or the hunted. A good portion of Booth's days on "the run" were spent starving, in pain, and holed up in a pine woods. With the aid of the Confederate agent who had arranged the pine woods hidey-hole, Booth eventually secured a boat to take him across the Potomac to Virginia and what he hoped would be a sympathetic and sheltering South. Unfortunately, he and his side-kick, the sycophantic, immature David Herold, got lost on the river and ended up pretty much where they started back in Maryland, albeit a little further North. For reasons unknown, at this point, they stayed an extra day in yet another hiding spot in a swampy woods. Ultimately, they ended up again staying one day too long at their final stop, the Garrett farm house in Virginia. On April 25th, a cavalry patrol surrounded the barn in which the Garret's had locked Booth and Herold after they tricked them into entering.

Swanson's portrays Booth as an actor who was always on stage and casts Booth's assassination as a self-concious performance by which Booth hoped to cement his reputation as a hero for the ages. Swanson argues, "Booth had not only committed murder, he had performed it, fully staged before a packed house...[he] broke the fourth wall between artist and audience by creating a new, dark art-performance assassination"(327). However, at times he comes across as a bit of a diva. While in the piney woods, he insists on getting the papers to read his reviews. When a confederate sympathizer turns him away from his door with just a parcel of food, Booth is incensed by what he views a a breach of hospitality. With time pressing, Booth takes a moment to pen the sympathizer a nasty letter calling him on "the ultimate sin in genteel Virginia society-inhospitality"(268). He not only writes a note, he writes it twice, not satisfied with his first version.

How Booth hoped to escape capture remains a mystery. Booth was a public figure, a member of the well-known Booth theatrical family. According to Swanson, "handsome and charismatic, [Booth] was instantly recognizable to thousands of fans in both the North and the South"(10). Although outside the purview of a book like this, celebrity and public exposure in the early days of photography, prior to the advent of film, warrants a book. Of course, his pursuers were not all Sherlock Holmes. The cavalry troop that eventually captured him only launched their investigation into Virginia on the strenght of an incorrect tip. Once they had Booth and Herold cornered in Garret's tobacco barn, they dithered and negotiated for almost half-a-day rather than take the initiative.

Swanson delivers his tale in melodramatic prose that echoes the style of the 19th century's penny presses. He's fond of perils-of-Pauline reverses and surprises and, at crucial moments in his story, he slows and nearly stops time for dramatic effects. Swanson sometimes lays it on thick: of Lincoln's deathbed, he writes "Death hovered near, impatient to claim the president and escort him on the voyage to that dark and distant shore that had beckoned Lincoln so often in his dreams"(77).

For all his attempts to capture the melodramatic prose style of the period, his quoting from actual period prose make his pale in comparison. Thomas T. Jones was a confederate agent who aided Booth and his side-kick David Herold. For five days, he offered them sustenance while they hid out in a pine grove near his home. He provided them with the boat by which they crossed the Potomac. At one point, while hiding Booth, he became aware of a $100,000 reward for Booth's capture, but, despite the fact that he was not financially well off, he didn't turn in Booth. He rationalizes:

Had I, for MONEY, betrayed the man whose hand I had taken, whose confidence I had won, and to whom I promised succor, I would have been, of all traitors, the most abject and despicable. Money won by such vile means would have been accursed and the pale face of the man whose life I had sold, whold have haunted me to my grave. True, the hopes of the Confederacy WERE like autumn leaves when the blast has swept by. True, the little I had accumulated through twenty years of unremitting toil WAS irrevocably lost. But, thank God, there was something I still possessed-something I could still call my own, and its name was Honor." (210)

Or, Asia Booth's description of a night in the woods with her brother: "It was a cold, dark night...with large fiery stars set far up in the black clouds. A perfect starry floor was the heaven that night, and the smell of the earth-which may be the odor of good men's bones rotting, it is so pleasurable and sanctifying-the aroma of pines, and the rapturous snese of a solemn silence, made us feel happy enough to sing 'Te Deum Laudamus'"(188). Whew!

Sometimes, his point-of-view gets kind of confusing. For instance, Swanson lauds Jones as "a man of true Southern feeling who could not be bought"(210). A confederate soldier, William Jett, informed on Booth after briefly abetting his escape. Swanson describes him repeatedly as "a Judas"(312). At times, he comes across as rooting for Booth. Booth was eventually arrested at Garret's farm on where he seemed to dawdle, enjoying socializing, speaking about Lincoln's assassin in the third person. Swanson loses his distance at one point and erupts "Booth shouldn't be there at all. The manhunters could appear at any moment without warning. He should leave at once; he dare not remain there any longer than one more night"(295). This might not be intended as a work of scholarship, but still, a little more distance seems fitting?

Although I'm not a Lincoln buff and have little interest in true-crime, I read this fast and to the end. In his acknowledgements, Swanson thanks his sister whose "animated spirit and taste for bizarre historical tales encouraged me from the start"(396). Swanson has a good eye for the bizarre and strange and Booth's tale is full of these elements. Whenever my interest started to fail, Swanson would produce a fact or incident that caught my attention. Such as, the man who actually ended up shooting Booth, cavalryman Boston Corbett, was a religious fanatic who castrated himself to avoid sin. Such as, assassin Lewis Powell's head was somehow separated from his body and given a ceremonial burial by sympathizers back in the nineties. Not the 1890's but the 1990's. I checked that again. It's true! Swanson finishes this story: "so Seward's violent assassin rests, if not in peace, then in pieces"(380). This is truly a fun but strange book.

Annette Gordon-Reed: "The Hemingses of Monticello"

History involves a good deal of detective and guess work, particularly when reconstructing the history of people with limited access to power and literacy. In The Hemings of Monticello, Annette Gordon-Reed "seek[s] to know" the enslaved Hemings family of Virginia.

What we know thanks to history heretofore. We know that the Hemings were enslaved. Or perhaps more accurately, the Hemings family members covered by this book were born and most died as slaves: legally speaking (at least according to the perverse legal structure of the antebellum South), the Hemings were the property of Thomas Jefferson. He inherited them from his wife's family. Also, thanks to history, most of us know with a great deal of certainty that Jefferson and Hemings had a long term and intimate relationship leading to the birth of seven children, four of whom lived to adulthood.

Gordon-Reed's book is ambitious. It seeks to know more. Gordon-Reed gives Sally and Thomas's relationship and story it's rightful due, but also wants to see that story within the story of the families that surround these individuals. She "seeks to know" Heming's family in all its particularity and breadth. And, although it occupies a distinctly secondary position in her story, Gordon-Reed also places Sally and Jefferson by offering insight into Jefferson's relationship with his far more documented and written about family. Most daringly, she seeks to guess at the psychologies of slavery, owners and enslaved. What could it possibly feel like to live in a family where certain members were known but not acknowledged as family. How did one justify owning, selling, and controlling a slave who was also your half-sister, your son?

Gordon-Reed's chronicle of the Hemings begins with Sally's mother Elizabeth Hemings, who was born enslaved on the holdings of the wealthy and socially prominent Virgina planter Francis Eppes IV in "abt 1735"(50). Elizabeth was a mulatto according to a contemporary witness(47)and the memoir of her grandson Madison Hemings(49). She had twelve, possibly fourteen, children altogether, six with Wayles. As with the precise number of Elizabeth's children, many facts surrounding the lives of enslaved people remain murky and hard to get at other than by inference and indirect conjecture.

Elizabeth Heming's family was not a "typical" enslaved family by any means. They were inter-racial. This doesn't make them super-unusual. In the 18th and 19th century South, miscegenation was a fact of life, a winked-at, looked-away-from byproduct of the slave system under-girding the economy. The Hemings's true distinction was their two-fold biological connections to a famous and powerful man, Thomas Jefferson. They were connected first via Jefferson's father-in-law, John Wayles, who was father to Sally Hemings and several of her siblings. Jefferson inherited the Hemings from his father-in-law, who was literally a rag-to-riches story. At an even more intimate level, the Hemings were connected to Jefferson via his children with Sally Hemings.

Long before he took up with Sally, Jefferson, like his father-in-law before him, subtly and unintentionally indicated the connection in a number of ways. The Hemings routinely received special treatment. Sally, her mother, and many of her siblings, nieces and nephews were given unusual amounts of freedom. Jefferson excepted the Hemings women from field work. Many of the Hemings men received training in marketable crafts and skills. The often times emotionally vulnerable Jefferson definitely wanted the family to love him and see him as kind.

Jefferson early on took a special interest in the training of Elizabeth's sons and grandsons. Evidence exists that James and Robert were literate, although it is not clear that Jefferson was directly responsible for this. Jefferson arranged for many of her sons and grandsons to pursue trades, albeit often within the orbit of his holdings. The eldest, Martin, served for many years as Jefferson's chief butler at Monticello. Elizabeth's two oldest sons by Wayles, James and Robert, were groomed from an early age to be his carriage driver and manservant. Her youngest son, John was apprenticed to several white carpenters at Monticello; Jefferson placed an especially high value on trades that "made" things like carpentry. Grandson Burwell Colbert was trained as a manservant and his cousin Wormley served as the gardener at Monticello. Eventually, he apprenticed his own sons by Sally to their uncle John.

The book spends a great deal of time detailing the particularly close and peculiar relationships that existed between Jefferson and Robert and James Hemings. These two lived very close to him from a young age and all established affectionate if limited and peculiar bonds with him. Later, when Jefferson served as U.S. Minister to France, James accompanied him and was trained at some expense as a French chef in the hopes that he would eventually serve as such at Monticello. When he was not making use of their services, Jefferson gave both men a large measure of freedom, allowing them to work for themselves and keep their wages. Both could move about with considerable freedom for their time and legal status.

As to the Hemings women, Gordon-Reed offers a lot less in the way of detail. Whenever he left Monticello (and he left for long periods), he would lease out many of his slaves or give directions as to how they were to be employed while he was away. He never left many such explicit directions for the Hemings women. Apparently, they were left to themselves pretty much during these down times (237).

In 1787, at the age of fourteen, Sally accompanied Jefferson's youngest daughter, Polly, to Paris. Jefferson had originally left Polly and his youngest daughter Lucy with their Aunt when he took up a temporary mission to France. Lucy died while he was in France. When his return was postponed by his being appointed Ambassador to France, he sent for his daughter. Originally, Jefferson had requested that an older woman accompany Polly. With nobody fitting that bill available, Jefferson's in-laws sent Polly over with Sally. Landing in London for a way-stop stay, their host, Abigail Adams suggested that Jefferson send Hemings back now that Polly was ashore. For whatever reason, Jefferson did not act on her suggestion.

Polly and her older sister, Martha (Patsy), attended a convent school in France. James was busy learning to chef. That left Sally apparently by herself with little to do. Hemings is convinced that the relationship between Hemings and Jefferson occurred while Jefferson was serving as Ambassador. This paints Jefferson in a less than flattering light. Beyond the power inequity necessarily existing between a master and slave, the difference in their ages adds to modern eyes a second layer of inequality. In addition, Hemings was basically alone, unchaperoned and unsupervised, without recourse to any other adult who might truly protect her.

Gordon-Reed's construction of the events surrounding the relationship that ensued and Heming's possible role in it is fascinating. Of course, her construction is dependent in part on the relationship orginating in France. She traces the origins of the relationship to France based upon her contention that Hemings had her first child in 1790, shortly after she, Jefferson, and her brother James, returned from France. Apparently that child died in delivery or shortly after and their is little documentary evidence for its existence.

The bulk of Gordon-Reed's contention that Jefferson and Hemings began their affair in France in the late 1780's, rests on Jefferson and Sally's son Madison Heming's account of his life which he offered in 1873 when he was 68 years old. He claimed that "'when [Jefferson] was called back home [Sally] was enciente by him'"(326). In this same memoir, he also recalls the child died. Other than this account, there is no direct evidence that Sally and Thomas had a relationship this far back. Gordon-Reed finds testimony backing Madison's account by noting a one-sided exchange of letters between Jefferson and his daughter and her aunt as to Martha's need for a maid. Gordon-Reed believes that Sally would quite naturally been Martha's lady's maid, and without any exchange of letters, but for the fact that she was pregnant at the time and Jefferson intended her as his own afterward. The creative manner in which she reads and assemble evidence in this instance is characterstic and one is left both admiring the skill of her arguments while the depth of her conviction in her conclusions.

I also admire and applaud her willingness to take on questions that many would avoid as impossible to answer. Gordon-Reed wonders whether the Jefferson-Hemings affair may have begun in violence or coercion? Perhaps more provocatively, given the inherently coercive nature of all master-slave relationships, she asks if the two harbored some kind of genuine love, affection and passion for each other. She presents evidence in the affirmative on this latter question while humbly admitting we will never ultimately know. Gordon-Reed is intent on walking a tight-rope of sorts. In limning the possible affective dimensions of their affair, she never discounts the brutal and coercive aspects of even the best possible master-slave relationship; for Gordon-Reed, slavery always involved a simmering battle. Yet, she insists if we don't allow for exceptions and anamolies within that war, if we insist that all slaves acted and reacted to a uniform manner to a uniform condition, we are distorting history and denying the marginal figures in history, like slaves, an essential element of their humanity.

The crux of Sally Hemings story occurs in the late summer of 1789 when ambassador Jefferson begins to make plans to return to America. At this time in France, Sally and her brother James could have sued the French Admiralty court for their freedom and likely won it. Plenty of evidence suggests the two Hemings siblings would have been aware of this. Madison Jefferson's 1873 account of his mother's life indicates that Sally approached Jefferson seeking her freedom and that the two came to a "bargain" or treaty. According to her son Madison's much later account, his mother Sally Hemings "'promised...extraordinary privileges'"(326) secured the eventual freedom of her children if she agreed to return to Jefferson. Although the timing of the bargaining in relation to Jefferson's plans for leaving France are unclear, Sally may have been bargaining with him while cognizant that she was pregnant.

Gordon-Reed reads deeply into Madison's account of his mother's treaty-making with her master. In it, she sees a woman who must have had good reason to trust a man. She sees a man who must have loved a woman; Jefferson apparently bargained with her hoping she would return with him. By Gordon-Reed's lights, if he didn't care, he could have just as easily left her behind. More intriguingly, Gordon-Reed's construction presents a woman who truly loved the man she bargained with; Sally returning with Jefferson basically brought her back to a world of second-hand citizenship and insecurity. At any time prior to her actually attaining her children's freedom, Jefferson could have died suddenly and thrown Sally and her children's fate into the far less friendly hands of his daughter Martha.

In framing Sally's decision to return, Gordon-Reed acknowledges again the difficulty of interpreting a relationship between a man and a woman who also happen to be master and slave. With great eloquence, Gordon-Reed writes, "[Sally Hemings] is ineligible for the mantles of respectable womanhood, conqueror, or rebel, there is no ready vocabulary to describe the young Hemings in Paris who decided to return to America with Jefferson beyond that of presumptive rape victim-so traumatized beyond the power of reason that she did not know better than to negotiate with and trust her rapist-or collaborating whore"(331).

Rectifying this lack, Sally Hemings is reinscribed with this book as a woman who pursued an avenue of resistance by forwarding her interests as a mother. And not only reinscribed as such. Gordon-Reed still insists on Sally as the lover; acknowledging that "the idea of their love has no power to change the basic reality of slavery's essential inhumanity"(365), Gordon-Reed rightfully maintains that to ignore the evidence of their love guided by an assumption of its impossiblity seems an equally dehumanizing interpretive turn.

Slavery certainly dehumanized Jefferson. Jefferson was a man who wanted people to love him and confrontation and coercion were anathema to him. As a slave-owner, he seemed continually torn between his desire to control and his desire to be loved. We really know little about the everyday, intimate give-and-take that characterized his and Sally's relationship over the years. Gordon-Reed surmises "One might say that the lack of information about her was a function of American slavery, an institution that forced most enslaved people into anonymity. Even with that there is something strange about [Sally's] near-invisibility in Jefferson family exchanges"(242). Seconding Fawn Brodies contention that the Jefferson family censored his letters to create a flattering portrait of Jefferson for posterity, she seems convinced that letters with reference to Sally were largely destroyed (243).

Sally's siblings figure more often in Jefferson's documents. One can only hope Sally was treated better than her brothers and sisters. While Jefferson treated her brothers Robert, James and Martin well in many respects, there was ultimately a great deal of strain in the relationship. He often treated him with what almost seems a calculated dose of disrespect. Jefferson let the brothers pursue their own economic agendas but on the condition that they were to come back to him as soon as he needed them. Although at least both James and Robert could read, Jefferson never sent them letters directly but instead directed all his messages to them orally, via third parties. Even after he had granted James his freedom, he attempted to summon him orally when he sought his services to fill the White House chef position. James was apparently quite offended.

The Hemings who were not Wayles (not related to Martha, Jefferson's wife) were often treated in an even more inhumane manner. Sally's half-sister Nancy and her children were given away as a wedding present to Jefferson's sister Anna and her husband Hastings Marks. When Marks decided to sell the family later, Jefferson bought Nancy back and arranged for his son-in-law to buy Nancy's daughter Critta. However, he refused to purchase or arrange a family purchase for Nancy's fifteen year old son who was sold to persons outside the family (519-520).

Sometimes, Jefferson would act humanely but express sentiments that spoke far differently. After Jefferson and Sally's half-brother Martin had a terrible falling out over something that remains a mystery to this day, Martin asked Jefferson to sell him. Jefferson readily agreed. After twenty years of service to him as a butler, Jefferson directed a son-in-law to sell James quickly, to a buyer that would be agreeable to him, regardless of price. Writing to his daughter of various matters Jefferson placed in the hands of her husband, he reminds "'There remains on his hands Martin and the Chariot'"(489), equating Martin with a chariot with a telling swoop of a phrase. What possible affective bond could survive what must have been the recurrent surfacing of such thoughts, assumptions and conceptions.

Yet, Jefferson felt some kind of tangled bond. These tangles were most involved in his relations with Sally and her children. Her two oldest children, William Beverly and Harriet, left Monticello to live as whites, never to return. With great poignancy and condemnation, Gordon-Reed deadpans, (597)"Jefferson arranged to have Harriet put on a stagecoach with fifty dollars when her time came to depart"(643). He legally freed his youngest sons, Madison and Eston. Gordon-Reed alludes to Madison's memories of a father was was "'not in the habit..;[of] partiality or fatherly affection'"(595). As Gordon-Reed wisely points out, Martha Jefferson and children had moved back to Monticello while Madison was young, effectively precluding Jefferson from fathering him or his younger brother Eston in an open and affectionate manner.

We have perhaps no better indication of Jefferson's conflicted feelings about the Hemings than the names he gave his Hemings children. Evidence clearly points to the fact that Jefferson named these children. He wanted to claim them at a certain level. Hemings claims, [the Hemings-Jefferson children] certainly knew they carried the names of people important to their father and had some thoughts on what this meant"(595).

Slavery debases and distorts its practitioners. Jefferson could not put it aside, even when it caused him and those close to him tremendous pain. And, it must have. Gordon-Reed makes this clear when she discusses the names of the Jefferson-Hemings children. She writes, "Names signify identity. Jefferson did not mind that the Hemings children bore names that signaled their identity to anyone knowledgeable about his family and associations. He evidently wanted that. Neither he nor his family, however, wanted to carry that signal of identity into posterity by indiscriminately putting the Hemings children's names into their letters"(620-621). The hurt can never be assuaged. Gordon-Reed's book begins to right the wrong.

Vince Cannato's "American Passage: The History of Ellis Island"

National myths like Ellis Island or Washington's crossing of the Delaware invite the debunking of historians. Ellis Island is an especially inviting target in that it is such a resonant symbol. UMass historian Vincent Cannato attempts to clear away the myth wrapping the famed island in his lively new history American Passage: The History of Ellis Island.

Established as an immigration checkpoint in 1892, Ellis Island was part of the federal government's effort to regulate immigration. Prior to the 1880s,immigration had been loosely policed by the states and various philanthropic agencies; for the most part, only "criminals, paupers, or those with contagious diseases"(35). According to Cannato's reading, this laissez-faire attitude came increasingly under attack in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Throughout the 1880s, there was a growing concern about the size, nature and effects of immigration. There were numerous investigations: two by the Treasury department, in 1887 and 1889, a Congressional investigation in the intervening year, and several newspaper exposes. As with anything much investigated, Congress passed numerous laws in response to the pressure created by findings. There was The Immigration Act of 1882 (imposing a 50 cent head tax and excluding any "'convict, lunatic, idiot or person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge'"(43)), the Foran Act in 1885 (prohibiting immigration under contract), The Immigration Act of 1891 (making immigration a federal matter and creating a federal immigration service under the direction of the Treasury Department).

For the purposes of creating a federal immigration depot, Congress appropriated $75,000 (later, Cannato claims, Congress appropriated $250,000 and spent $360,000) in 1890 to make improvement to a five acre "scratch of land"(60) being used as a munitions depot: Ellis island. It opened on New Years Day 1892; controversy surrounds how Annie Moore became the first woman down the gangplank that day with some suggesting that she'd been chosen thanks to her healthy and wholesome appearance. It wasn't long after that the investigations and legislation resumed. Senator Chandler, head of the new Senate Immigration Committee, launched an investigation after a boat load of immigrants came ashore with Typhus. Appropriately, following on the heels of this investigation, another law was passed in 1893 setting up boards of inspection to hear the cases of suspect immigrants.

And, this was just the start of the numerous, almost continuous, Congressional and Executive Branch investigations of Ellis Island. There was a Treasury Department investigation in 1899, another in 1903, and a massive three year investigation in 1911. The latter generated a 41 volume final report, running 29,000 pages (229). When it came to immigration and the administering of Ellis Island, there was endless fine-tuning.

Cannato argues that Ellis Island and the new approach to immigration which it represented was born of the Progressive impulse to regulate the economy in the interest of the nation as a whole. He stresses that reformers and restrictionists rarely sought to outright prohibit immigration altogether but instead were motivated by a desire to rationally regulate it in the interest of public order and the common good.

While this may be technically true, just surveying the voices Cannato's gathered here incline me to suspect many critics would have been glad to outlawed if that had been politically possible. Among the critics of immigration who kept a close eye on Ellis Island, Cannato gives prominence to the Immigration Restriction League and it's patrician founder Prescott Hall. Hall believed that immigration posed "'a danger that the race which has made our country great will pass away, and that the ideals and instituions which it chas cherished will also pass'"(98). He spent his entire life railing against immigration policy and Ellis Island. The IRL was not a large group but it was a powerful one, working closely with politicians like Henry Cabot Lodge to legislate further restrictions on

Often, their effort didn't come to much. While Congress would pass laws intending to restrict immigration, those laws were dependent upon the people in charge of executing them. Depending on the political winds and their own bents, Commissioners of Ellis Island interpreted the immigration laws variously.

Occasionally, the IRL would have a friend at Ellis Island like two term commissioner William B. Williams (1903 and 1909-1913). Williams read the law strictly in the hopes of cutting down on the influx, especially the influx of certain ethnic groups (Jews, Italians and Eastern Europeans). Williams paid special attention to language in the 1891 Immigration Act advising the exclusion of those "likely" to become a public charge. He defined this as anyone who came into the country with less than $25 ($570 in 2007 dollars, see 196)and without immediate job prospects. The 1907 Immigration Law expanded exclusions to include individuals with mental and physical defects that might result in their becoming public charges. Williams used this to deport people with "'poor physiques'" and "'low vitality'"(204).

Williams enlisted physicians,scientists and recently conceived intelligence tests to aid him in finding out immigrants that were intellectually deficient. With the rise of eugenics in the 20's, the attention to immigrants with mental defects grew. Yet, ultimately, even with increased scrutiny, the number of those deemed "idiots, imbeciles and feebleminded"(258) was never significant. While the number grew from between an average of 160-190 in the years from 1908-1912 and briefly to 890 in 1914, this was a relative drop in the bucket of nearly a million people seeking to come into the country during those years.

Williams effort and determination was rarely matched by his predecessors or successors. George Howe, who succeeded Williams in 1913 exercised a decidedly lighter hand. Howe's Assistant Commissioner, Bryan Uhl, testified that under Howe the admission process became "'largely a matter of checking names'"(316). Howe was a progressive with "an idealistic temperament and a restless curiousity"(297), a reformer who believed in "'sentimentality, the dreaming of dreams'"(298). Uncomfortable with the policing aspects of his job and possessing a "tin ear for politics" Howe continually butted heads with Congress and the press over his handling of women detained for immoral conduct and radical wobblies that the government sought to deport in the late teens.

Howe grew cynical about the powers of government. Speaking of goverment workers, he tellingly complained "'the government was their government'"(305). He came to feel that his job at Ellis Island "was not just irrelevant, but unnecessary" and came to believe that there was "little need to weed out the desirable from the undesirable"(305).

Cannato provides figures that suggest Howe may have had a point. For all the money spent on it, for all the investigations and consternation it generated, Ellis Island kept out relatively few. In the year prior to the opening of Ellis Island, .2% of 472,000 immigrants were refused entry (79). In 1906, 880,000 immigrants were "processed" at Ellis Island(168). Between 1906-1908, during a high tide of immigrants, less than 1% were denied entry (168, 221). Despite the efforts of Congress and rigid Ellis Island czar Williams to make entry more difficult thereafter, the rate of exclusion would never exceed 2%.

Cannato claims "this speaks to the powerful legal, political, social, economic, and ideological consensus that allowed America to accept millions of new immigrants despite the grumbling of those made uneasy by the disruptions that this human wave brought"(221). There was certainly a dollar to be made. In addition to the $4 million dollars a year the immigrant head tax brought to Federal coffers, immigrants came with $46 million dollars in 1910 and sent back $154 million. Most astoundingly, from 1890 to 1922, GNP increased nearly %400 (229).

Theodore Roosevelt claimed "we can not have too much immigration of the right kind, and we should have none at all of the wrong kind"(103). Cannato argues that Ellis Island was part of an effort to achieve "the right kind." However, if so, it didn't often seem a success to people at the time. Ellis Island Commissioner William Williams complained in 1903 that "at least two hundred thousand of the immigrants arriving that year 'will be of no benefit to the country.' Had they all stayed home...nobody 'would have missed them,' except of course the stezamship companies that made money on their passage"(154).

Williams was a hard-line restrictionist and his harsh estimate must be read in that light. One suspects that the endless controversy occasioned by Ellis Island was inevitable given the vague and difficlt task assigned it; what is the right kind of immigration? Is it something to be regulated according to the national interest, or is it to be regulated in the interest of the people immigrating?

The latter would be considered in a humane immigration policy. It wasn't a high priority for immigration officials throughout Ellis Island's history. To the extent they took any interest, immigration officials were looking for people capable of doing "the manual labor that fueled the factories and mines of industrial America"(8) and on the lookout for people who "would not be able to take care of themselves"(8). More disturbingly, they worried that mentally and physically defective immigrants would weaken the gene pool. Yet, that being the goal, how do you test for such undesirables?

In pursuit of that goal, Congress perpetually fine-tuned the list of excludables. When immigration was a state matter, "criminals, paupers, or those with contagious diseases"(35) were excluded. In 1875, Congress added "prostitutes..and Chinese laborers" to the list. In 1882, an immigration law passed barring any "'convict, lunatic, idiot, or person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge'"(43). And, it is worth mentioning, in 1882, The Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited all Chinese from entering, the only outright racial exclusion in the nation's immigration history. In 1885, contract laborers were banned, with the exception of skilled workers, artists, actors, singers and domestic servants"(43). The exclusions from the 1882 law were repeated and modified slightly but importantly with The Immigration Act of 1891. It forbid the entry of "'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"(52). Anarchists were added in 1903 as a result of McKinley's death at the hand of one.

Restrictionists placed most hope in implementing a requirement that immigrants be literate in their native language. After numerous failed attempts to pass such a requirement, Congress eventually did so over Wilson's veto in 1916. According to Survey, ("the nation's leading periodical for social workers"(251)), "122,735 immigrants would have been excluded if the law had been in effect in 1911" (231). Yet, restrictionist hopes were not answered by the literacy test; in the first five year of the test, a little over 6,000 were stopped from entering.

All these efforts to restrict immigration seemed to achieve little; deportation was relatively rare, on average less than 2% of arriving immigrants. Cannato presents Ellis Island as a successful attempt to rationally regulate immigration. However, the restrictions implemented in the first 30 years of Ellis Island did not have much effect. One could argue that the regulation served as window dressing; the political/legislative process allowed regulation but only so much. Prior to 1922, laws restricting immigration seem to placate immigration opponents while keeping the gates pretty much open. Frightened by the war and a red scare, Congress would eventually get serious about restricting immigration in the early 20's by implementing relatively harsh quotas and moving the inspection process overseas to consulates. The blunt force that the quotas represented were successful, more than halving the high rates during immigration's heyday in the early decades of the early twentieth century.

Cannato claims that he wished to avoid creating a "usable past"(417) with his book: "if history teaches anything, it is that the past was filled with imperfect people who made imperfect decision in dealin with an imperfect world"(417). Yet, Cannato does seem fixated on Ellis Island as an institution that was part of a rational policy, even when his evidence doesn't entirely support it. A lot of expense and effort was thrown at restricting entry to a relatively small number of folks.

On a minor note, Cannato's account suffers by failing to present a picture of the facilities at Ellis island; how was it designed and how did that design reflect the mission of the institution? Early on, he compares and contrasts Ellis Island with it's predecessor from 1855-1890, Castle Rock, an old musical hall that sat on "a rocky outcropping"(31)off the battery. Yet, in doing so, he never compares the sites as places: how many buildings, beds, offices were at each site? How did this reflect the intentions and activities of the people who built and operated the two sites?

Jane Mayer's "The Dark Side"

Jane Mayer's The Dark Side is a meticulously researched indictment of the Bush administration's flawed and lawless response to the 9/11 attacks. Cobbled together from a series of long articles that first appeared in The New Yorker, Mayer's book charts the rapid manner in which a small coterie of figures aligned with Vice President Dick Cheney used the attack to enlarge the powers of the presidency.

Mayer's recounts the surprising hurry in which so many of the important policy decisions were made in the wake of 9/11. These were major changes, unprecedented steps, made with little or no debate. Most were made by a small group of largely unelected officials who formed an unofficial inter-agency group called "the war council." This group included Cheney, his aide David Addington, John Yoo (a deputy chief at DoJ's Office of Legal Counsel), William Haynes (the Chief Counsel at the Department of Defense), assistant White House Counsel Tim Flanigan, and his boss Alberto Gonzales. Mayer likens this five man group to "a high-school clique, some of the members played squash and racquetball together and took secret trips together, while mocking those they excluded as "soft and leakers to the press"(66).

The big decision made early on was to treat Al Qaeda as a military problem rather than a matter of criminal justice. Within a week of the attack, the Justice department was effectively sidelined; because "the Department of Defense had no military plan for defeating Al Qada in Afghanistan"(33), the CIA was given the primary responsibility for crafting the initial response. CIA director George Tenent along with the CIA's Center for Counter Terrorism (CTC)Chief Cofer Black needed to spend little time or effort convincing Bush to grant the Agency a long-held wishlist. Within a week, Black managed to get presidential approval for "the inauguration of secret paramilitrary death squads" who would have the authority on Tenent's orders to carry out assassinations in 80 countries(39). In addition, a presidential finding gave "blanket authority ot Tenet to decide on a case-by-case basis whom to kill, whom to kidnap, whom to detain and interrogate, and how"(39).

Prodded by the war council, Bush handed over the bulk of the nation's response to the Agency despite its dismal record dealing with Al Qaeda prior to 9/11. Mayer details how the Agency failed to adequately notify the FBI that two future 9/11 terrorists had entered the United States sometime in 2000; according to the CIA's IG "fifty or sixty individuals within the CIA knew that two Al Qaeda suspects had come to America-but no one officially notified the FBI about this"(16). Although whole virtual unit had been assigned to keep track of the terrorist group Al Qaeda, the Agency did not have a single spy within the terrorist organization. Often, one hears how America was simply unaware of the threat posed by Al Qaeda prior to 9/11. Mayers makes it clear: the Agency was well aware of the threat posed by Al Qaeda but was unable to head it off.

Moreover, the Agency was poorly prepared to carry out the new tasks which they'd asked for and had suddenly assigned to them. The CIA was almost completely lacking in operations muscle at the time; "the [CIA's] Special Activities Division...[a] small paramilitary unit...consisted mostly of inactive vertans of the military's Special Forces"(40). They lacked interrogators with any experience or skill. According to "a former CIA operative involved at the time...'They invented the program of interrogation with people who had no understanding of Al Qaeda or the Arab world'"(144). Worse, according to Mayer, "The CIA knew even less about running prisons than it did about hostile interrogations"(145).

Some claim that there was a pre- and post-9/11 mentality; many argue, we failed to deal with the threat before the attack because we were too concerned with playing by the rules. The Bush administration quickly corrected this over-attention to the rules, and ended up basically throwing away the rule book and writing a new one to their wishes. Specifically, OLC deputy chief attorney John Yoo proved repeatedly instrumental in writing a new rule book for the Bush administration to use in its war on terror. Young, ambitious, bright and highly partisan, Yoo had his fingerprints on nearly all the important legal memos that the Bush administration used to step outside the established laws governing the treatment and handling of detainees.

According to Mayer, the OLC "plays a unique role in the federal government...
iss[uing] opinions that are legally binding on the rest of the executive branch...if the OLC says a previously outlawed practice...is legal, it is nearly impossible to prosecute U.S. officials who followed that advice on good faith." Jack Goldsmith, who became OLC head in 2003, maintains the office controls "'one of the most momentous, and dangerous powers in the government: the power to dispense get-out-of-jail-free cards'"(65).

The OLC under Yoo wrote the Bush administration a lot of get-out-of-jail-free cards. A November 6, 2001 memo authorized the president to establish military commissions and first suggested that detainees picked up in the administration's "war on terror" were not covered by the Geneva Convention. Early in 2002, a series of legal memos took the suggestion further and "enshrined the political position already expressed by Cheney, advising the President that he did not have to comply with the Geneva Conventions or other customary international laws in handling detainees in the war on terror"(121). Supposedly prompted by the expressed needs of the CIA, in August of 2002, the OLC authorized brutal interrogation techniques by redefining what was meant by the word torture. Yoo offered the Defense Department a similar memo in March of 2003.

Mayer does a good job of bringing together and concisely recounting the most egregious and revolting abuse and torture that took place. What she documents is but a part of what went on. We are likely to never know but a part of the administrations application of a torture policy; in possible violation of the law,the CIA destroyed hundreds of hours of video-taped interrogations during which extreme measure were used.

Worse than torture, in at least a couple of cases, the CIA tortured and killed innocent men. Mayer tells the story of Khaled el-Masri a German national who was picked up, sent to a CIA black site and subjected to inhumane treatment. When it became clear that he was not involved with Al Qaeda, the agency simply "dropped him near the border with Serbia and Macedonia...[and] told to start walking and not look back."

Villains abound in this story. Mayers also offers plenty of often quixotic, conflicted heroes. Navy chief counsel Albert Mora began to suspect abusive treatment of detainees at Guantanamo in the Fall of 2002 and pushed hard to get the Department of Defense to adhere to a humane detainee policy. Eventually, he was presented with a Yoo legal memo and told to hush and ultimately policy was issued without his input.

Jack Goldsmith replaced Jay Bybee as the head of the OLC, in October of 2003. Immediately, Gonzales asked him to provide a legal ruling allowing the CIA to render detainees captured in Iraq. Recognizing that these individuals were covered under the Genevea Conventions, Goldsmith declined, earning the dismay of the war council. A staunch conservative, the more he learned, the more Goldsmith grew disillusioned with the Bush approach. Shortly after taking office and looking over the detainne/enhanced interrogation opinions the OLC had rendered in the previous couple years, Goldsmith grew "increasingly alarmed" by what he was reading. Goldsmith attempted to gradually overturn these opinions and rewrite the law governing these matters. He did so despite worrying that doing so seriously impaired his office's authority. Nevertheless, he proceeded by first reversing the opinions Yoo had provided The DoD.

Asked to review CIA Inspector General Helgerson's internal review the CIA's detention program, he was provided with all the gruesome details of that thread of the Bush team's war on terror. Appalled as he was, again Goldsmith was reluctant to pull Yoo's authorizing opinion of August 2002 until it leaked to the press in June of 2004. Apparently, he did so to the considerable consternation of the White House apparently. According to Mayer, Goldsmith and ally James Comey (deputy attorney general) "were both so paranoid by then about the powerful backlash they had provoked inside the administration that they actually thought they might be in physical danger"(294). Ultimately, burned out, Goldsmith withdrew the memo and resigned without putting anything in its place.

The task of possibly writing a more humane policy fell to interim OLC chief Dan Levin. Levin was another Republican conservative whose time within the Bush administration proved scarring. He went to great lengths to create a solid opinion, even subjecting himself to stress positions and water-boarding in hopes of determining whether or not these practices amounted to torture. Levin apparently discovered that waterboarding "could definitely be classified as illegal torture unless, in his view, it was strictly limited in terms of tiem and severity and was closely monitored in a very professional way"(299).

Mayer has done a lot of the reporting on this book. However, at points, it often devolves into long recaps of others' work. For instance, at one point, page after page of Mayer's narrative is almost exclusively based on Bob Woodard's Bush at War. Like Woodard, Mayer uses a large number of unnamed sources. At some level one must trust her. However, in her defense, books like this rely on such sources by necessity. In addition, the book has been out a while and nobody has come forwarded to dispute her account.

The Dark Side is best seen as a laudable work of synthesis. While likely a rough draft on history,it is essential reading and a strong polemic that challenges the reader to make a stand. It reminds us of what we purport to stand for and in lawyerly like fashion accuses the Bush administration of trampling on these principles in a fashion befitting an enemy of our republic. In an epilogue proceeding her afterword, she quotes an incident from the papers of Dr. James McHenry, a delegate to the Federal Convention of 1787. Apparently a lady asked Benjamin Frnaklin "'Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy,'" to which he replied "'A republic...if you can keep it'"(327).