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Ellis Island: A People's History

2022; Polish American Historical Association; Volume: 79; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/23300833.79.1.10

2330-0833

Beth Holmgren,

Polish Historical and Cultural Studies

Małgorzata Szejnert (1936–), a prize-winning journalist, cofounder of Gazeta Wyborcza, and for fifteen years (1990–2005) the editor of that newspaper's reportaż section (Duży format), has just had her first of many books translated into English. In the frank fashion befitting a master of nonfictional, personalized Polish reportaż, Szejnert explains that she wrote Ellis Island: A People's History to fill an important gap for Polish-language readers. After becoming enthralled with the history of the in/famous immigration station in the United States, Szejnert discovered that no Polish books or books translated into Polish addressed the topic. In her 2009 Polish original edition, Szejnert obliges Polish readers with ample references to Polish sites, politics, and specific immigrants from Polish territory—Catholic peasants from the villages and Ashkenazi Jews from the shtetls. She attests that Ellis Island was smaller than Kraków's large market square before dockworkers augmented it with silt, clay, sand, and gravel. She describes how Ellis Island Station's first commissioner, Union army colonel John Baptiste Weber, was dispatched to the Russian empire before assuming his post “in an attempt to determine why all the Jews of that country wish to come to America” (p. 15). After a thorough investigation of workers, soldiers, students, bankers, and victims of the pogroms, a shocked Weber concludes in his report to Washington that “it is inhumane of us to push these people back into the pit from which they have crawled” (p. 18).Szejnert also laments the fact that Weber could not know and therefore did not intervene when tsarist authorities confiscated the two-way correspondence between one group of Polish peasant immigrants and those they left behind. She cites the plaintive letters that never reached their recipients in fin-de-siècle Poland's Russian partition and attests that letters sent from Russian Poland to America were likewise stuffed into “the censor's box.” Spinning out one of the human-interest threads that bind her narrative together, Szejnert speculates intermittently about what transpired between one Józef Jagielski from Russian Poland and his wife, Franciszka. Having immigrated to America in the late 1880s, Józef was already driven to threats of divorce due to Franciszka's “silence” by 1891: “In America a man can get lots of wifes [sic] for not much money” (p. 9). Szejnert ultimately gleans from a ship's manifest that Franciszka arrived at Ellis in 1912, twenty-one years later, traveling alone and expecting to meet her husband at the station. Thereafter, the trail goes cold (pp. 126–27).In Sean Gasper Bye's deft, well-pitched English translation, Szejnert's Polish references, even quotations from semiliterate peasant letters, are not likely to put off American readers because she lavishes the same sort of individualized details on all of her subjects—from other Slavic, German, Greek, and Italian immigrants coming to America to the established Yankees who staffed the upper echelons of Ellis Island as commissioners and doctors. We learn, for example, about Commissioner Weber's determined search to staff his brand new post with the best employees. We subsequently read about the wrath of interpreter Fiorello La Guardia (New York City's future mayor) over the immigrant inspectors’ prejudices against his compatriots. Szejnert periodically revisits the efforts of Ellis Island doctors to develop less exclusionary tests of mental competence, progressing from questions that presumed immigrant knowledge about life in a big modern city to jigsaw puzzles of more generally familiar objects such as faces and ships.At the same time, Szejnert has it on the authority of the chief baggage handler, Peter Macdonald, that Slavic peasant women were particularly loath to check their possessions, preferring to haul iron pots and kettles wrapped in huge eiderdowns slung over their shoulders. Whenever possible, Szejnert enhances the realism of her narrative with photographs: an unattributed two-page photo (pp. 28–29) captures a small group of sturdy Slavs from behind and on the move, accentuating the huge, seemingly puffy bundles they bear and their ruffled skirts flying out below. More often, Szejnert draws on the less candid shots taken by Augustus Sherman, an Ellis Island clerk who functioned as its de facto, highly selective photographer. At least one of Sherman's 250 photos stages a very different portrait of a Pole, though it likewise accentuates its subject's physical prowess. The professional wrestler Zbyszko Cyganiewicz is also posed with his back to the camera, but the well-endowed young man has stripped down to his woolen underpants, turns his head to show off his profile, and flexes his muscles as he would for any paying audience in the arena (p. 71). Zbyszko (misspelled Zybszko) qualified as one of Sherman's remarkable specimens.Szejnert's Polish title, Wyspa klucz (The island key), conveys her intent to make her historical reportage of immediate relevance to readers in our current era of rising nationalist populism and anti-immigrant sentiment. In her perception, Ellis Island functioned as a key that could unlock or lock a world of assumed safety and opportunity. Though Szejnert the reporterka concentrates as much as her sources allow on the experiences and recorded words of individuals, her “people's history” (the subtitle of the book's English version) includes both those seeking admission and those overseeing immigrant selection: “What was their interaction like with those pressing in on those gates? How did they reconcile the virtues they learned in their homes and democratic institutions with the cruelty their service often demanded?” (p. 343). Researching Ellis Island's “people” on both sides of the gates, Szejnert spotlights a nation that long has touted the role of immigrants in its success story, even as its political administrations and well-established citizens feared and fought to restrict the immigrant flood.Ellis Island never proceeds programmatically, but Szejnert's narrative alternates, as her sources do, between descriptions of the immigrants’ sufferings and anxieties and the gatekeepers’ ethnic/racial prejudices and duties, which included official judgments to be enforced and individual efforts to be just and understanding. Most of the immigrants endured their transatlantic passage in filthy, overcrowded steerage, commercially advertised as “third-class,” but more aptly described as “Purgatory” (p. 21). Szejnert observes how steamships packed with newcomers often languished for days in New York Harbor, waiting until the station could accommodate them or, in the worst cases, being rerouted to another island because too many in steerage were infected with a deadly disease such as cholera. Once the immigrants were transferred by ferry from ship to island, they remained suspect as health hazards, “public charges” likely to burden America's inadequate social network. Medical inspectors, projecting a terrifying authority in their military-like uniforms, subjected all the immigrants to “six-second specials” (p. 80) that entailed, among other things, examining the skin of the head, face, neck, and arms. They turned back each immigrant's eyelids with a buttonhook, checking for signs of trachoma (a serious eye disease), and chalk marked a sickly looking individual's clothing with code letters that designated flaws ranging from goiter to senility. Lengthier examinations by doctors determined if marked immigrants would be deported, be they an elderly patriarch, a mother of ten, or a youngest child.Szejnert fathoms the depth of the divide between immigrants and gatekeepers by quoting the first reactions of those Stateside workers ready to sympathize. Josephine Friedman, a teenager who worked as a nurses’ aide, was initially stunned to discover that the female detainees whose hygiene she was to oversee were unfamiliar with bathtubs or toilets: “They would go and they wouldn't know what to do and then they would be ashamed to call you to find out” (pp. 181–82). Ludmila Foxlee, a Czech who had come to the United States as a girl and subsequently served as a highly effective immigrant advocate on Ellis, noticed that the peasant women seated in a room with a breathtaking “view of Manhattan and the ships in the Bay” listlessly stared elsewhere. On the page opposite, a group photo of similarly despondent women confronts us with the same opacity. Both Foxlee and we must learn how to read these unfamiliar subjects differently: the women were not insensible creatures from a primitive land but detainees deprived of hope (pp. 196–97).Regardless of Commissioner Weber's fact-finding mission in Russia, it was clear from Ellis Island's opening day that some ethnic groups would always remain more equal than others. Szejnert wryly describes the officials’ choice of fifteen-year-old Annie Moore, “a neat little [Irish] Cinderella,” to be the first immigrant at the gates. Though most of the steerage passengers in Annie's ship were Jews, these “immigrants [were] not viewed as suitable godparents for a new immigration station, whose opening [could not] risk offending America” (pp. 22–23). As the numbers of immigrants from the poor regions of eastern and southern Europe swelled, Anglo-Saxon “nativist’ antipathy to them spiked, fueled by their misperceptions of Slavs, Jews, and Italians as subhuman in feature, uncivilized in behavior, and in the anti-democratic thrall of non-Protestant faiths. Szejnert quotes novelist Henry James's elitist recoil after visiting Ellis Island at the height of its flood. Known for his chronicling of American naïveté in response to upper-class Europeans’ cynical worldliness, James confesses in his 1907 collection of travel writing, The American Scene, that he empathizes with “the decent American” appalled by a horde of inconceivable aliens: “I like to think of him, I positively have to think of him, as going about ever afterwards with a new look, for those who can see it, in his face, the outward sign of the new chill in his heart” (p. 83).James had visited Ellis as the guest of then commissioner William C. Williams—a Yankee, a lawyer, and a graduate of Yale and Harvard. Though Williams strived hard to make sure the new immigrants were treated with honesty and respect, firing bullies on his staff and evicting immigration services that exploited rather than aided their patrons, his chilled heart persuaded him that limits should soon be set. In comparison with “the older wave [of immigrants] from the northern regions,” Williams maintained that these newcomers “are physically weaker, sick or sickly, and mentally slack” (p. 86).After World War I and the ensuing Red Scare, many more chilled hearts in the US government voted to implement immigrant quotas by nation, devised in such a way as to favor those from “superior” northern Europe. With her sure eye for illustrative drama, Szejnert first focuses on how steamships raced each other to Ellis so that they could deliver their various nationals before the monthly quotas were filled. In tragic cases, late ships were ordered back to their home ports, their exhausted travelers barred from inspection. As one witness testifies, the soon-to-be-deported “screamed and bawled and beat about like wild animals, breaking the waiting-room furniture and attacking the attendants, several of whom were severely hurt” (p. 201). Szejnert then shifts the scene from Ellis to Long Branch, New Jersey, a beach town sixty miles south, where, a few weeks after a second, more restrictive, quota law had been passed, the Ku Klux Klan marched down the main street in broad daylight, their rage targeting “Jews, Slavs, Italians, Asians, Latin Americans, and all immigrants alien to the former Protestant, white America” (p. 222). Her juxtaposition of duped, desperate refugees with hooded, privileged racists defending “the nation” captures a drama of prejudice and hatred that continues to play out in these United States.In sum, Szejnert's well-calibrated balancing act between a wide array of highlighted, revisited individuals and a larger sociopolitical context, narrated without clichés or sentimentality, delivers an unsettling experiential account of Ellis Island during its thirty-two-year tenure (1892–1924) as America's primary border checkpoint. Her Ellis Island constitutes a remarkably affective, interhuman, if not strictly academic, historical account. I recommend it highly for general readers and as a perfect text for courses on the American immigrant experience. Lastly, Szejnert's Ellis Island conveys, like much of her writing, an evocative sense of physical place—an unremarkable, low-lying island off the southern tip of Manhattan that was once the home and hunting grounds of the Lenni Lenape tribe and now the site of an attempted reconciliation of peoples, featuring, on the one hand, the Ellis Island Museum and its dozens of buildings yet to be renovated and, on the other, the reinterred remains of the tribe, bones “intermixed with the oyster shells” that originally sealed up the bodies of the dead.