Stories of the Past

I visited Ellis Island yesterday. It chanced to be a good day for my purpose. For the first time in its history this filter of immigrant humanity has this week proved inadequate to the demand upon it. It was choked, in half a score of gravid liners were lying uncomfortably up the harbor, repleat with twenty thousand or so of crude Americans from Ireland, and Poland, and Italy, and Syria, and Finland, and Albania; men, women, children, dirt, and bags together. Of immigration, I shall have to write later; what concerns me now is chiefly the wholesale multitudinous quality of that place and its work. I made my way with my introduction along with white passages and through traps and a maze of metal lattices that did for a while succeed in capturing and imprisoning me, to Commissioner Watchorn, in his quiet, green toned office. There, for a time, I sat judiciously and heard him deal methodically, swiftly, sympathetically, with case after case, a string of appeals against the sentences of deportation pronounced in the busy little courts below. First would come one dingy and strangely garbed wild eyed aliens, and then another: Roumanian gypsies, South Indians, Ruthenians, Swedes, each under the intelligent guidance of an interpreter, and the case would be started, a report made to Washington, and they would drop out again, hopeful or sullen or fearful as the evidence might trend… Downstairs we find the courts, and these seen, we traverse long refectories, long isles of tables, in close packed dormitories with banks of steel mattresses, tier above tier, and galleries and passages innumerable, perplexing intricacy that slowly grows systematically with the Commissioner's explanations. Here is a huge, gray, and tidy waiting room, like a big railway depot room full of a sinister crowd of miserable people, loafing about or sitting dejectedly, whom America refuses, and here a second and third, such chamber each with its tragic and evil-looking crowd that hates us, and that even ventures to groan and hiss at us a little four hour glimpse of its large dirty spectacle of hopeless failure, and here, squalled enough indeed, but still to some degree hopeful, are the appeal cases as yet undecided. In one place, at a bank of ranges, works an army of men cooks, in another spins the big machinery of the Ellis Island laundry washing blankets, drying blankets, day in and day out, a big clean steamy place of hurry and rotation. Then, I recall a neat apartment lined to the ceiling with little drawers, a card-index of the names and nationalities and significant circumstances of upward of a million and a half of people who have gone on and who are yet liable to recall. The central hall is the key of this impression. All day long, through an intricate series of mental pens, the long procession files, step by step, bearing bundles and trunks and boxes, past this examiner and that, past the quick, alert medical officers, the tallymen and the clerks. At every point immigrants are being picked out and set aside for futher medical examination, for futher questions, for the busy little courts; but the main procession satifies conditions, passes on. It is a daily procession that, with a yard of space to each, would stretch over three miles, that in any week in the year would more than equal in numbers that daily procession of the unemployer that is becoming a regular feature of the London in winter, that ina year could put a cordon round London or New York of close-marching peope, could populate a new Boston, that ina century-What in a century will it all amount to?

Two undersized old people stand before the commissioner. They are Hungarian Jews whose children have preceded them here, and how, being fairly comfortable, have sent for their parents so they can spend the rest of their lives together. The questions, asked through an interpreter, are pertinent and much the same as those already asked by the court which has decided upon their deportation. The commissioner rules that the children be put under a sufficient bond to guarantee that this aged couple shall not become a burden to the public, and consequently they will be admitted. A Russian Jew and his son are called next. The father is a pitiable-looking object; his large head rests upon a small, emaciated body; the eyes speak of premature loss of power, and are listless, worn out by the study of the Talmud, the graveyard of Israel's history. Beside him stands a stalwart son, neatly attired in the uniform of a Russian college student. His face is Russian rather than Jewish, intelligent rather than shrewd, materialistic rather than spiritual. "Ask them why they came," the commissioner says rather abruptly. The answer is: "We had to." "What was his business in Russia?" "A tailor." "How much does he earn a week?" "Ten to twelve rubles." "What did the son do?" "He went to school." "Who supported him?" "The father." "What do they expect to do in America?" "Work." "Have they any relatives?" "Yes, a son and a brother." "What does he do?" "He is a tailor." "How much does he earn?" "Twelve dollars a week." "Has he a family?" "Wife and four children." "Ask them whether they are willing to be separated; the father to go back and the son to remain here?" They look at each other; no emotion yet visible, the question came to suddenly. Then something in the background of their feelings move, and the father, used to self-denial through his life, says quietly, without pathos and yet tragically, "Of course." And the son says, after casting his eyes to the ground, ashamed to look his father in the face, "Of course." And, "This one shall be taken and the other left," for this was their judgment day.

The railroad ferries come and take their daily host straight from Ellis Island to the train, ticketed now with the name of the route that is to deliver them at their new homes, West and East. And the Battery boat comes every hour for its share. Then the many-hued procession-the women are hooded, one and all, in their gayety shawls for the entry-is led down on a long pathway divided in the middle by a wire screen, form behind which come shrieks of recognition from fathers, brothers, uncles, and aunts that are gathered there in the holiday togs of Mulberry or Division Street. The contrast is sharp-an artist would say all in favor of the newcomers. But they would be the last to agree with him. In another week the rainbow colors will have been laid aside, and the landscape will be poorer for it. On the boat they meet their friends, and the long journey is over, the new life begun. Those who have no friends run the gauntlet of the boarding-house runners, and take their chances with the new freedom, unless the missionary or "the society" of their people holds out a helping hand. For at the barge-office gate Uncle Sam lets go. Through it they must walk alone.

At the ringing of a bell at seven o'clock every morning, I roll out of neither comfortable nor notably uncomfortable bed in my dormitory, where there are about fifty beds, all of them usually occupied. I line up off the adjacent bathrooms and showers, dress, gather up my books and papers and a portable typewriter I've borrowed from an American friend-whatever I intend to use during the day-and am in Passenger Hall before eight o'clock, when the dormitory doors are locked. At eight, another bell rings, and my fellow passengers and I file down to a cafeteria on the ground floor. Except for lunch (twelve to twelve-thirty) and supper (five to five-thirty), I am in Passenger Hall. At nine P.M., a guard blows a whistle, and I go upstairs to my dormitory, put my belongings under my bed-the only place for them-and usually do my laundry. Lights are spanned out at ten-thirty. As you are probably aware, the Russians have long made heavy propaganda use of Ellis Island. They call it a concentration camp, which, of course, is outrageous. No one mistreats us here. Our jailers-nearly all of them, anyway-are very kindly people, who go to extraordinary lengths, within the system, for which they don't pretend to be responsible, to make our stay here as little like a nightmare as they can. They is a movie here every Tuesday and Thursday night; the children get milk six times a day and go to school three hours a day. We are kept warm and fed generously-nothing like the Colony, I assure you, but more than enough. And, as people are always pointing out to us, it doesn't cost us anything. But I will tell you, it is hard to not be depressed at the realization that within the American government, which has rightly been honored so long as the guardian of individual freedom and human dignity, there is one small agency that can seize a man and bring him to his place, where everyday of his life he can look on the mocking face of the Statue of Liberty and where-almost as if this were that other kind of world, behind the Curtain-he is walled in by silence. He isn't told the particulars of his offense, his accusers are nameless, and the weeks and months pass, as if human beings were no more to be considered than ciphers in a manila folder.

Ellis Island is the nations' gateway to the promised land. In a single day it has handled seven thousand immigrants. "How much you got?" shouts the inspector at the head of the long file moving up form the quay between iron rails, and, remembering, in the same breath shrieks out, "Quanto mončta?" with a gesture that brings up from the depths of Pietro's pocket a pitiful handful of paper money. Before he has half of it out, the interpreter has him by the wrist, and with a quick movement shakes the bills out upon the desk as a dice-thrower "chucks" the ivories. Ten, twenty, forty lire. He shakes his head. Not much, but-he glances at the ship's manifest-is he going to friends? "Si, si! signor," says Pietro, eagerly; his brother of the vineyard-oh, a fine vineyard! And he holds up a bundle of grapesticks as evidence. He has brought them all the way from the village at home to set them out in this brother's field. "Ugh," grunts the inspector as he stuffs the money back in the man's pocket, shoves him on, and yells, "Wie viel geld?" at a hapless German next in line. "They won't grow. They never do. Bring 'em just the same."

A handsome, clear-eyed Russian girl of about twenty-years, the daughter of a farmer comes in and sits down before us. She is clean and intelligent looking. She nervously clasps and unclasps her hands and the tears are welling in her eyes. "That girl over there," says the commissioner, "is an interesting and puzzling case. Her father is a farmer in moderate circumstances. A young man with whom she grew up, the son of a neighbor, came here two years ago, and last year wrote to her father that of the girl would come over he would marry her. So she came, alone. But the prospective bridegroom didn't show up. I wrote him-he lives somewhere in New Jersey-and last week he appeared and looked her over. Finally he said he wasn't sure whether he wanted to marry her or not. Naturally her pride was somewhat wounded, and she decided that she had doubts herself. So everything is at a standstill. The girl says she doesn't want to go back, to be laughed at; and I can't let her land. You don't know any lady who wants a servant, do you? She could work! Look at her arms. A nice girl, too. No? Well, I don't know what to do. Are you willing to marry Peter if he comes again?" The girl nods, the tears brimming over. "Well, I'll write to that fellow again and tell him he's a fool. He'll never have such a chance again."

The hardest quota cases were those that separated families. When part of the family had been born in a country with a quota still open, while the other had been born in a country whose quota was exhausted, the law let in the first part and deported the other part. Mothers were torn from children, husbands from wives. The law came down like a sword between them. The Polish wife of a Pennsylvania coal miner-both good Poles, admitted a year before-had gone back suddenly to Poland to visit her old father and mother who had taken sick and might soon die. The visit over, she returned quickly to America. She would be admitted at once, for little visits do not count against quotas. The coal miner was at the island, waiting for her. We told him everything would be all right, but he was unaccountably nervous. Then the ship came in , the Lapland of the Red Star line, from Antwerp, and we found out why the husband was so nervous. On the day before the ship made port, out on the high seas, a baby Pole had been born to the returning mother. The unexpected had happened, "mother and child both doing well" in the Ellis Island hospital, everyone delighted, until-the inspector admitted the mother but excluded the baby Pole. "Why?" asked the father trembling. "Polish quota exhausted," pronounced the helpless inspector. Then they brought the case to me. Deport the baby? I couldn't. And somebody had to be quick, for the mother was not doing well under the idea that her baby would soon be taken from her and "transported far beyond the northern sea." "The baby was not born in Poland," I ruled, "but on a British ship. She is chargeable to the British quota. The deck of a British ship is British soil, anyway in the world." I hummed "Rule Brittania-Brittania rules the waves," hummed I happily, for I knew the British quota was big. "British quota exhausted yesterday," replied the inspector. There was a blow. But I had another shot in my locker. "Come to think of it, the Lapland hails from Antwerp," I remarked. "That's in Belgium. Any ship out of Belgium is merely a peripatetic extension of Belgium soil. The baby is Belgium. Use the Belgium quota." So I directed, quite shamelessly and unabashed. "Belgium quota ran out a week ago." Thus the inspector. I was stumped. "Oh, look here," I began again, widely. "I've got it! How could I have forgotten my law so soon? You see, with children it's the way with wills. We follow the intention. Now it is clear enough that the mother was hurrying back so the baby would be born here and be a native-born American citizen, no immigrant business at all. And the baby had the same intention, only the ship was a day late and that upset everything. But-under the law, mind you, under the law-the baby, by intention, was born in America. It is an American baby-no baby Pole at all-no British, no Belgium-just good American. That's the way I rule-run up the flag!"

The small white steamer, Peter Stuyvesant that delivered the immigrants from the stench and throb of the steerage to the stench and throb of New York tenements, rolled slightly on the water besides the stone quay in the lee of the weathered barracks and new brick buildings of Ellis Island. Her skipper was waiting for the last of the officials, laborers, and guards to embark upon her before he cast off and started for Manhattan. Since this was Saturday afternoon and this was the last trip she would make for the weekend, those left behind might have to stay over till Monday. Her whistle bellowed its hoarse warning. A few figures in overalls sauntered from the high door of the immigration quarters and down the gray pavement that led to the dock. It was May of the year 1907, the year that was destined to bring the greatest number of immigrants to the shores of the United States. All that day, as on all day since spring began, her decks had been thronged by hundreds of upon hundreds of foreigners, natives from almost every land in the world, the jowled close-cropped Teuton, the full-bearded Russian, the scraggly-whiskered Jew, and among them Slovack peasants with docile faces, smooth-cheeked and swarthy Armenians, pimply Greeks, Danes with wrinkled eyelids. All day her decks had been colorful, a matrix of the vivid costumes of other lands, the speckled green-and-yellow aprons, the flowered kerchief, embroidered homespun, the sliver-braided sheepskin vest, the gaudy scarfs, yellow boots, fur caps, caftans, dull gabardines. All day the guttural, the high-pitched voices, the astonished cries, the gasps of wonder, the reiterations of gladness had risen from her decks in a motley billow of sound. But now her decks were empty, quiet, spreading out under the sunlight almost as if the warm boards were relaxing from the strain and pressures of the myriads of feet. All those steerage passengers of the ships that had docked that day who were permitted to enter had entered.

They also questioned people on literacy. My uncle called me aside, when he came to take us off. He said, "Your mother doesn't know how to read." I said, "That's all right." For the reading you faced what they called the commissioners, like judges on a bench. I was surrounded by my aunt and uncle and another uncle who's a pharmacist-my mother was in the center. They said she would have to take a test for reading. So one man said, "She can't speak English." Another man said, "We know that. We will give her a siddur." You know what a siddur is? It's a Jewish book. The night they said this, I knew that she couldn't do that and we would be in trouble. Well, they opened the siddur. There was a certain passage they had you read. I looked at it and I saw right away what it was. I quickly studied it-I knew the whole paragraph. Then I got underneath the two of them there-I was very small-and I told her the words in Yiddish very softly. I had memorized the lines and I said them quietly and she said them louder so the commissioner could here it. She looked at it and it sounded as if she was reading it, but I was doing the talking underneath. I was Charlie McCarthy!

An official-looking lady came toward me and said, "Is somebody waiting for you?" I said, "Oh, yes, my relatives, they're waiting for me." And nobody was waiting for me, nobody. I had nobody. Then I saw the officials approaching another man and they asked him, "Are you Jewish?" He said, "Yes." "Anybody waiting for you?" "No." The official said, "Well, we'll take care of you. We have a Hebrew sheltering organization. Come with us, we'll feed you and take care of you until your relatives pick you up."" Then sheepishly I said to the woman who had approached me before, "I lied to you, because of what I've been through in Hungary." She put her hand on my shoulder. She understood. I didn't realize I was free, I wasn't going to be put in prison.