January 4, 2017: Ellis Island Studying: The Questions

[On January 1, 1892, Ellis Island immigration station opened in New York Harbor. Nearly 500,000 immigrants came through the station in its first year, and the rest is history. Very complex history, though, and so for Ellis’s 125^th anniversary I’ll analyze five contexts for the station and the immigration stories to which it connects. Leading up to a special weekend post on 21^st century immigration!]

On three examples of particularly complex and telling types of questions on the list of 29 that (as I wrote on Monday) were asked of immigrant arrivals to Ellis Island.

1)      Communities: After the basic informational kinds of questions (although some, like “What is your race?,” weren’t quite as simple as they appear), the next group focused on the national and family communities from which arrivals came and which they might be joining here in the U.S. To my mind, one of the most seemingly straightforward questions from this group was also complex and telling: “Who paid for your passage?” Fears of the importation of forced laborers had driven immigration policy since at least California’s controversial 1862 Anti-Coolie Act, and this question could be linked to those concerns. Yet as I’ll highlight in item two, many turn of the 20^th century anti-immigrant narratives focused on nefarious international groups such as “anarchists,” and the question likewise implied that such groups might be financing immigrants sympathetic to their cause. In any case, despite being located between two more factual questions (“What is your final destination in America?” and “How much money do you have with you?”), this one was at least far more loaded.

2)      Threats: Some questions, like “Who paid for your passage?,” implicitly sought to determine if an immigrant might pose a danger to his or her new communities. Some, like the ridiculously overt two-parter “Are you a polygamist? Are you an anarchist?” (yes, those two comprised one of the 29 questions), did so very very explicitly; it’s difficult for me to imagine anyone knowing enough to be aware of those terms’ meanings answering this question in the affirmative. But to my mind the most complex and troubling of this type was another multi-parter: “Have you been in a prison, almshouse, or institution for the care of the insane?” Both convicted criminals (especially political prisoners) and the demonstrably “insane” had been excluded from immigrating since the first national immigration law, 1875’s Page Act, so those designations, while frustratingly slippery and malleable, weren’t new. But asking about those who had stayed in an almshouse—those who had experienced desperate poverty, that is—did represent an addition to these categories; or, to be exact, did link social class and status to crime and mental health in overt and even more frustratingly exclusionary ways.

3)      Civics: If you made it through these other groups of questions, the last and largest group (comprising 11 of the 29 questions) focused on questions about American history and government: “Who was the first President of America?” [BEN: Not sure anyone has occupied that position, but I’m gonna go with either Simón Bolívar or Beyoncé], “What is the 4^th of July?,” “Who signs bills into law?,” and so on. While some of these questions help us understand the natonal self-image Ellis Island sought to create (especially “Which President freed the slaves?”), I’m more interested in the existence and centrality of this category overall. It makes sense that for someone to become a U.S. citizen, he or she has to pass a test featuring such historical and civic topics; but that’s after more than a decade in the country, not upon first arrival to it. (Granted, the citizenship test is far more extensive than was Ellis’ civics portion, but the principle is the same.) Can and should we have expected that newcomers would know these details? I can see both sides of that debate, but in any case this group of questions clearly connects to broader turn of the 20^th century narratives of the need to “Americanize” new immigrants as quickly and fully as possible.

Next IslandStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Ellis Island responses or contexts?

January 3, 2017: Ellis Island Studying: The Changing Facility

[On January 1, 1892, Ellis Island immigration station opened in New York Harbor. Nearly 500,000 immigrants came through the station in its first year, and the rest is history. Very complex history, though, and so for Ellis’s 125^th anniversary I’ll analyze five contexts for the station and the immigration stories to which it connects. Leading up to a special weekend post on 21^st century immigration!]

Three turning points in the immigration station’s space and role.

1)      The Fire: The Ellis Island station had only been open for five years when an 1897 fire destroyed its wooden buildings entirely. For the next three years, immigrants came through The Battery’s Barge Office while a new, brick and limestone main building was constructed (at a stunning cost of $1.5 million); that building opened in 1900 and would continue to be the station’s principal facility (with continual expansions and additions) for its remaining half-century of service. I don’t want to read too much into what was in large part a practical change (and one that undoubtedly reflected advancements in architecture and construction), but at the same time it’s difficult to miss the symbolism of a more flimsy and fragile structure being replaced by a much more expensive and permanent one. Ellis Island, like the national narratives of immigration about which I wrote yesterday, was here to stay.

2)      From Immigration to Detention: In this post on Angel Island, the West Coast immigration station that opened in San Francisco harbor in 1910, I argued that Angel (in contrast to Ellis) was always more of a prison than an immigration station. As of 1910 that was certainly true, but over the next few decades Ellis Island would itself shift toward detaining and excluding many more arrivals than had initially been the case. After the 1921 and 1924 Quota Acts, the first truly all-encompassing immigration laws, virtually every Ellis Island arrival had to be measured against the total number of documented arrivals from his or her nation, and many were held and/or deported as a result. During World War II, this detention function became one of Ellis Island’s primary roles (with serving as a military training facility the other), with nearly 7000 arrivals from Germany, Italy, and Japan (among other nations) detained as “alien enemies.” Our collective memories of Ellis tend, understandably, to focus on those who entered the U.S. through its facilities—but those who did not comprise a vital part of the story as well.

3)      An Evolving Museum: Ellis Island completed its service as an immigration station in 1954, but of course neither the story nor the site ended there. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson’s Proclamation 3656 added the island to the Statue of Liberty National Monument, giving the National Park Service jurisdiction over the facilities. Those facilities were extensively renovated beginning in 1984, a process that culminated in the 1990 opening of both the Ellis Island Immigration Museum and the American Immigrant Wall of Honor. More recently, the Ellis Island Foundation’s Peopling of America Center has opened, a two-part exhibit that interestingly focuses on immigration to the United States both prior and subsequent to Ellis’ 1892-1954 service. By expanding the museum beyond the histories of Ellis itself, this exhibit reflects but also extends and amplifies the island’s status as an embodiment of American immigration overall, a status that seems certain to endure well into the 21^st century.

Next IslandStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Ellis Island responses or contexts?

January 2, 2017: Ellis Island Studying: Castle Garden

[On January 1, 1892, Ellis Island immigration station opened in New York Harbor. Nearly 500,000 immigrants came through the station in its first year, and the rest is history. Very complex history, though, and so for Ellis’s 125^th anniversary I’ll analyze five contexts for the station and the immigration stories to which it connects. Leading up to a special weekend post on 21^st century immigration!]

What didn’t change when Ellis replaced New York’s prior immigration station, and what did.

It isn’t nearly as present in our collective memories as Ellis Island—for some of the reasons I’ll get to in my third paragraph, along with the simpler fact that it’s located further in our past, and moreover in an era with far fewer photographs and no newsreels—but New York City’s Castle Garden was the nation’s first official “immigration station.” Located in The Battery, the park and fortified area at the southern tip of the island of Manhattan, the facilities and grounds known as Castle Garden were leased to the New York State Commissioners of Emigration in 1855, and opened as an official arrival point for immigrants in that same year. (Ships carrying immigrants had been docking in the area since at least 1820, but in a more local and somewhat less catalogued way.) By the time Ellis Island opened in 1892, more than 11 million immigrants had come through Castle Garden, and the excellent CastleGarden.org website features a searchable database of ships and passengers from across those decades (again, prior to 1855 less information was consistently recorded about those arrivals).

We might remember Ellis Island more fully than we do Castle Garden, but the truth, as I’ll come back to in the week’s final post on immigration myths, is that the process of arrival for those immigrants who began coming through Ellis in 1892 was very similar to what had been the case for Castle Garden arrivals. Since the only national immigration laws as of 1892 were those excluding Chinese arrivals, virtually all of whom came to the West Coast, the vast majority of Ellis arrivals were no more subject to legal categorization than had been Castle ones. Instead, the process was defined by two steps: principally, recording the arrivals’ names, countries of origin, and American destinations (information that had been gathered in at least partial form since 1820); and secondarily, assessing arrivals for such potential problems as communicable diseases and status as criminal fugitives. The questions and procedures for both the information gathering and the risk assessments had evolved throughout the decades at Castle Garden, and would likewise evolve at Ellis, culminating in the list of 29 questions about which I’ll write later in the week. But nonetheless those procedures represent much more of a continuity than a change between the Castle and Ellis stations.

If many of the on-the-ground realities connected the two stations, however, the collective images of them were far different—and not only in our 21^st century collective memories, but in Ellis’ own era as well. It’s fair to say that images of immigration had become more nationally prominent overall by 1892, thanks to a variety of factors: the 1886 opening of the Statue of Liberty, which of course would become closely associated with its island neighbor Ellis; the fears and debates that produced the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and all of its aftermaths; the ongoing, largest (by propotion of population) wave of immigration in the nation’s history; and more. But it’s also important to note that prior to the Exclusion Act, and the subsequent Supreme Court decisions which upheld Congress’s ability to pass such an immigration law, immigration had been considered and treated as far more of a local or regional question than a national one. So if Ellis didn’t necessarily do much that Castle Garden hadn’t done before it, it nonetheless entered into—and very fully and enduringly came to embody—a new moment in our images and narratives of immigration. All the more reason to spend a week AmericanStudying it, I’d say!

Next IslandStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Ellis Island responses or contexts?