Restrictive gateway to land of the free
The immigration station at Ellis Island opened on Jan. 1, 1892, with appropriate fanfare and a $10 gold piece for the first immigrant to step ashore there, Annie Moore, a 15-year-old from County Cork.
On that same day, by coincidence, the steamship Massilia departed from Marseilles, with immigrants bound for New York, 270 Russian Jews and 457 Italians.
What transpired when the Massilia landed sets the stage for Vincent J. Cannato’s “American Passage,’’ a finely-honed account that encompasses both the human story of the immigrant experience, often a sad one, and the political and bureaucratic responses.
Some 80 percent of the 12 million immigrants who passed through Ellis Island were quickly cleared. While only about 2 percent were rejected, many were members of families broken apart in the screening process, as one person was judged physically or mentally unfit and deported.
Ellis Island was established in response to a national uproar over the changing character and nationality of immigrants, writes Cannato, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. “Its raison d’être was neither the protection of immigrants nor their complete exclusion, but rather their regulation so that only the fittest, ablest, and safest would be permitted to land.’’
The Massilia’s passengers would test that mission.
While some passengers had become ill during the three weeks at sea, nearly all were allowed to land. Within a few days, doctors from local Jewish social agencies discovered several cases of typhus fever. Alarmed as they discovered a growing number of cases in Lower East Side boarding houses, city health officials ordered some thousand residents removed to the city’s quarantine station.
The Italian passengers, separated from the Russian Jews on board, escaped the epidemic as they scattered across the country.
Within a month, the crisis was over, but, Cannato writes, “the incident gave immigration restrictionists an opening to push ahead with their agenda.’’
That push to restrict immigration came from three young Bostonians, former Harvard classmates and scions of the Yankee aristocracy, who formed the Immigration Restriction League in 1894.
Cannato writes that although impelled by a combination of pride and insecurity, the League’s agenda of restriction-by-regulation for humanitarian reasons fit with other Progressive reform movements of the 1890s - banning child labor, advocating for temperance, opening settlement houses, and establishing national parks - and among its members were leaders in those movements.
President Theodore Roosevelt, the embodiment of the Progressive movement, visited Ellis Island, “[diving] right into the process,’’ joining inspectors as they interviewed new arrivals, and pulling out a $5 bill for a young German woman carrying her sleeping baby in a wicker basket.
The early 1900s saw a number of restrictive actions, including the imposition of national quotas that limited the number of immigrants from Italy and southern Europe. World War I and the “Red Scare’’ of the 1920s further limited immigration.
Boston had remained a major entry port even after the opening of Ellis Island, with some 102,000 landing there as late as 1913. But mirroring the overall decline in immigration, a writer for the Federal Writers Project noted in 1937 that the station was “not very busy in the days of restricted immigration.’’
The 1930s, Cannato writes, represented a low point in immigration. By 1932, he notes, three times as many people were leaving the United States as were entering. The role of Ellis Island, according to a contemporary report, had become more one of deportation rather than welcome. Ellis Island itself closed in 1954 and it was turned into a museum in 1990, tracing the facility’s storied past.
Michael Kenney is a Cambridge-based freelance writer. 