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?