Chapter 2
The present management of this very important department [Castle Garden] is a scandal and reproach to civilization.
—Governor Grover Cleveland, 1883
Castle Garden is one of the most beneficent institutions in the world.
—Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, June 1884
ON A HOT AUGUST NIGHT IN 1855, A LINE OF OIL LAMPS lit the early evening sky on lower Broadway in Manhattan. Torch-bearing New Yorkers proceeded down the short hill, past Bowling Green, the tiny oval patch of grass surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, and into the Battery. It was a joyous and raucous affair, part political protest and part social outing, with loud shouting, fireworks, and even the firing of cannons as the crowd marched around the Battery carrying banners in German and English. By the time they had arrived, their numbers had grown to some three thousand people.
These men, women, and children were responding to an advertisement that had been posted around the city:
INDIGNATION MEETING!
citizens of the first ward
Assemble in your Might, and vindicate your Rights!
citizens
Do you wish to have
plague and cholera in your midst!
Do you wish to have your Children laid low with Small Pox
and Ship Fever?
New-yorkers
Will we have our most honored and sacred spot desecrated
by the sickly and loathsome Paupers and Refugees of European
Workhouses and Prisons?
Populist mobs were a regular feature in American cities dating back to revolutionary-era protests like those over the Stamp Act. Indignation meetings allowed citizens to blow off steam and flex their collective muscles to authorities.
The object of the crowd’s indignation on this night was the recent opening of a brand-new immigration depot on a rocky outcropping just off the Battery and connected to it by a footbridge. Castle Garden stood on the site of a fort built in 1811 as part of the defensive fortifications of New York Harbor. When the Marquis de Lafayette visited America in 1824, he first arrived at the fort, where more than five thousand guests welcomed him.
The old fort was later converted into a music hall where Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale,” made her American debut in 1850 as part of her cross-country tour financed and publicized by the irrepressible P. T. Barnum. The same seats where the city’s elite once sat to hear Lind were now occupied by immigrants from Ireland and Germany awaiting their chance to enter the country.
The new immigration station riled the crowd. Organizers billed the protest as an “anti-cholera meeting,” playing on the fears of New Yorkers who had endured a number of cholera outbreaks in years past and blamed immigrants for the disease. “Knaves and speculators,” the notice warned, were “introducing paupers and emigrants infected with cholera, small-pox, ship fever, and all the vices of foreign prisons and workhouses.” The advertisement also appealed to the crowd’s patriotism, calling on New Yorkers to protest the desecration of the hallowed ground of Castle Garden, where Presidents George Washington and Andrew Jackson once stood.
The indignation meeting succeeded in drawing a large and lusty crowd. When the assembly had settled down at the Battery, someone read a resolution against Castle Garden, and a number of speakers came forth to voice their opposition. One of them was Captain Isaiah Rynders, who began his speech to raucous cheers and the explosions of roman candles and rockets. As the crowd quieted, Rynders told them he had not originally been invited to speak and was sorry that the crowd “did not call upon somebody else, better able than I am to address you.”
This was an exercise in false modesty, for Rynders was no ordinary speaker and he most clearly belonged at that rally. In fact, Rynders himself was likely the brains behind the protest. Theodore Roosevelt, in his history of New York City, would later describe Rynders as one of “the brutal and turbulent ruffians who led the mob and controlled the politics of the lower wards” who “ruled by force and fraud, and were hand in glove with the disorderly and semi-criminal classes.”
Born in upstate New York to a German-American father and an Irish Protestant mother, Rynders gained the title “Captain” not for his war exploits, but from his time running a ship along the Hudson River. A classic “sporting man” of the 1830s and 1840s, Rynders held no steady job, but devoted himself to the leisurely and manly pursuits of gambling, horses, and politics. At one point, he earned a living as a riverboat gambler on the Mississippi River.
He established a political club called the Empire Club, whose crew of “shoulder hitters” was the political muscle for New York City Democrats. He and his men became a force not only in the seedy underworld of gambling, taverns, and brothels but also in local and national politics. They intimidated voters, broke up opponents’ rallies, and forcibly brought voters to the polls to vote for Democratic candidates. The money brought in from gambling houses and brothels helped support a political organization that could bring out the vote on election day, intimidate opponents, and have enough money left over at the end of the day to make men like Rynders wealthy.
Many credit Rynders with helping James K. Polk win the presidency in 1844. The Tennessee Democrat would have lost the election had he not won New York by a slim margin. The Captain sealed his fame when he helped instigate the bloody 1849 Astor Place Riot. The following year, he tried to break up a meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society led by William Lloyd Garrison, when he stormed the stage to challenge Frederick Douglass, who was in the middle of a speech.
Why Rynders would oppose the opening of an immigration station speaks to another of his roles. Despite its rhetoric, the mob was not really concerned about the tainting of the patriotic memory of Castle Garden or the health dangers posed by the immigrant station. The anti-immigrant tone was made all the more puzzling considering that much of the crowd was first-and second-generation New Yorkers and that many of the banners were in German. In reality, the protest was about money and control. As it turns out, Rynders was more than just a political operative; he was also the chief of the city’s so-called immigrant runners.
Midnineteenth-century New York was a rough and tumble city where the civilizing effects of modernity had not yet smoothed the rough edges of many of its citizens. The struggle for survival predominated, and much of that struggle revolved around business. In the booming commercial emporium of nineteenth-century New York, some people found their business not in trading goods but in another import: greenhorns.
Though it would only later come specifically to define new immigrants, the term “greenhorn” signified anyone new and unfamiliar to the ways of the big city. One’s clothes, one’s accent, and that faraway—part dazzled and part confused—look in the eyes were a signal to savvy New Yorkers that a greenhorn had arrived.
There were certainly a lot of greenhorns on the streets of New York. Between 1820 and 1839, New York received about 25,000 immigrants a year. The numbers kept growing every year. During the 1840s, some 1.2 million people came through New York, which handled three-quarters of the nation’s immigrant arrivals. These numbers may not seem that large, until one considers that the population of Manhattan in 1850 was only slightly more than half a million.
Many New Yorkers looked on these greenhorns with a mix of pity, bemusement, and contempt, but for others these newcomers meant money. The wharves and docks where these immigrants first set foot on American soil were crowded and chaotic. Men like Rynders found opportunity in the chaos. There was profit to be had by exploiting the immigrants’ lack of knowledge and naïveté.
Rynders was at the top of a corrupt totem pole of politicos, gangsters, gamblers, railroad companies, forwarding agents, tavern owners, boardinghouse keepers, and prostitutes. Their base of operations was the taverns and boardinghouses that lined Greenwich, Washington, and Cedar Streets in lower Manhattan. This area, according to one eyewitness, was home to “one hundred and thirty-nine immigrant runners, drinking at boarding houses for immigrants, prostitutes, rummies, watch stuffers, thimble riggers and pocketbook droppers.” There was money to be made in selling railroad tickets at inflated prices, charging exorbitant rates for rooms at boardinghouses, overcharging immigrants for their baggage by playing with the scales, or even outright thievery and extortion. Confusion was the ally of the runner and the enemy of the immigrant.
As soon as a ship docked, runners would board it. If the immigrants were from Germany, the runners would speak German; Irish immigrants would encounter runners who hailed from the old sod. If immigrants were not immediately taken in by these entreaties, runners would forcibly take their luggage to a nearby boardinghouse for “safe-keeping.” When immigrants tried to claim their baggage, they were often induced to stay at the boardinghouse with the promise of cheap lodging and meals. When their stay had ended and it was time to move on, these greenhorns would be handed an excessive bill for their room and food and the storage of their luggage. If they could not pay the inflated bill, lodging house owners would keep the baggage as collateral. It was a prosperous racket, and much of the money made in fleecing immigrants went up the chain to Rynders, who was able to run his operations with little interference from city officials. They were all making a good living from immigration, and now Castle Garden was in danger of putting them out of business.
A committee of the New York State Assembly investigated the situation in the mid-1840s. It had heard the rumors and read the newspaper reports about how runners preyed on immigrants, but the committee confessed that it could not “have believed the extent to which these frauds and outrages have been practiced” until it began to investigate them.
The federal government was largely uninterested in immigration. Occasionally, Congress would be prodded into action to address the overcrowding that afflicted immigrants traveling across the Atlantic in steerage, but it did little in the way of regulating the flow of immigrants. Despite an undertone of anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiment, the growing nation welcomed European immigrants to help settle the country. In the 1840s, President John Tyler lauded “emigrants from all parts of the civilized world, who come among us to partake of the blessings of our free institutions and to aid by their labor to swell the current of our wealth and power.” However, the slaveholding Tyler made clear that his message was for white Europeans only.
The job of regulating immigration was left to states like Massachusetts and New York, which passed laws continuing colonial policies restricting the immigration of criminals, paupers, or those with contagious diseases. States charged ship owners a head tax for each immigrant to pay for the care of poor and sick immigrants and required the posting of a bond for those immigrants deemed likely to become public charges. Although state laws would foreshadow the future of federal immigration regulation, they were weakly enforced, and few immigrants were excluded.
It would be up to private individuals and organizations to protect immigrants from abuse. Ethnic solidarity prompted the creation of immigrant aid societies. New York’s Irish already had some success in this endeavor, forming the Irish Emigrant Society in 1841 to “afford advice, information, aid and protection, to emigrants from Ireland, and generally to promote their welfare.” In 1847, it teamed up with the German Society and lobbied New York State to create the Board of Commissioners of Emigration, which consisted of the mayors of New York and Brooklyn, the heads of the German and Irish Emigrant Societies, and six others appointed by the governor.
A head tax of $1 would be assessed on each immigrant, to be collected by the board. With the money, the board opened the Emigrant Hospital and Refuge on Ward’s Island to care for sick immigrants. By 1854, the board was caring for over 2,500 immigrant patients.
The timing of the idea could not have been better. In 1847, the potato famine in Ireland had begun to drive out large numbers of Irish. For the next few years, poor Irish refugees, fleeing starvation and death, flooded American ports. Nearly 3 million immigrants landed in the United States from 1845 to 1854. Many of them ended up in New York City. Between 1840 and 1850, Manhattan’s population increased by 65 percent; by 1855 over one-half of the city’s 629,904 residents were immigrants and over one-quarter of New Yorkers hailed from Ireland.
If the Board of Commissioners was going to be successful in protecting this flood of immigrants from the predations of runners, it would need its own reception center for new arrivals, a place where immigrants would be processed, their needs met, and their interests protected. For this purpose, in April 1855, the board chose Castle Garden as its immigration depot.
The Board of Commissioners laid out the major benefits of Castle Garden. First and foremost, it would allow for a quicker and easier landing for immigrants and free them from the clutches of immigrant runners, allowing them to land “without having their means impaired, their morals corrupted, and probably their persons diseased.” The board would also begin keeping track of the numbers of immigrants arriving and where they were heading.
The altruism of the board and its interest in the welfare of immigrants was genuine. Not surprisingly, it ran into a good deal of resistance to its idea of converting what had formerly been the city’s premier music hall into an immigration-processing station. City officials were leery of the idea. This would be a state-run program—generating lots of money through the head tax—right in their backyard, and all local officials would get were two seats on the ten-person board.
Wealthy New Yorkers and businessmen in the city’s First Ward also opposed the plan, fearing that an immigrant depot in their neighborhood would cause a decline in property values. They worried that immigrants would bring “pestilential and disagreeable odors” that would blow into the windows of respectable homes in the summertime. Many had hoped that the newly expanded Battery around Castle Garden would become a pleasant harbor-view promenade, but the board had thwarted those plans.
The Times editorialized against the plans for Castle Garden, writing that “one of the delights of the City for nearly thirty years” would “be a delight no more. Hereafter it is to be a nuisance…an offence to the eye, and an ugly obstacle to a view of the magnificent moving panorama of our glorious Bay.” One of those prosperous New Yorkers unhappy with Castle Garden was railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who lived across the street from the Battery and would lend his name to the August indignation meeting. Even with such opponents, Castle Garden opened as planned.
On Castle Garden’s first day, as immigrants streamed through its doors, a group of runners gathered outside, shouting at and intimidating Castle Garden workers. One member of the board was forced to pull a gun on the rowdies. That first night, after midnight, a handful of runners—a “foul brood of villains who have so long fattened upon the plunder of emigrants,” one newspaper called them—tried to crash through the doors of Castle Garden to wreak havoc, but were turned away.
Having failed to stop the opening of Castle Garden, Rynders and his supporters took to the streets in mid-August three days after the station opened. Rynders claimed to be merely seeking “open, fair competition among the emigrant forwarders” and opposed any attempt by the state to grant a monopoly over the business of handling immigrants. In other words, the state of New York and the Board of Commissioners were squeezing Rynders and his men out of business.
After the final speaker addressed the gathering, the crowd left the Battery to the strains of “Yankee Doodle” and took their torchlight procession back through the streets of the city’s First Ward. The Times was not fooled by the patriotic rhetoric or the claims that Castle Garden would endanger the city’s health. The organizers of the indignation meeting, the paper informed its readers, “were the emigrant runners, baggage smashers, boarding-house keepers, and other professional gentry, who have long filled their own pockets by robbing emigrants upon their first arrival.” The Daily Tribune was even more blunt, seeing the meeting as a way “to devise means to throw the immigrants again into the hands of the thieves…who have grown rich by robbing strangers.”
Throughout the fall, runners would try to cause trouble at Castle Garden or steer immigrants away from the depot, but they were fighting an uphill battle. By December 1855, Castle Garden had been operating for four months and one reporter who visited the depot was pleased with what he saw. The entrance was heavily guarded and those without letters of introduction were turned away. “There is no public undertaking in the city more wise and benevolent.” The reporter continued, “It redeems our city to know that anything so judicious and benevolent could be executed by it.”
The harassment of Castle Garden officials continued for another year, but the runners and their allies were never able to shut the station down. Between January and April 1856, Castle Garden processed over 16,000 immigrants arriving on 106 ships. In its annual report of that year, the Board of Commissioners made oblique reference to the troubles, stating that “where violence threatened with a strong hand to lay waste and destroy, the police…effectually checked the thoughtless and lawless in their course and preserved a valuable property from destruction or damage.”
Some reports claimed that immigrant runners, faced with failure in New York, had left for California to seek their fortune or else had joined private military expeditions to Mexico and Nicaragua. Rynders managed to cling to political power and was named U.S. Marshall for New York in 1857 as a reward for his work in helping to elect James Buchanan president.
At Castle Garden, immigrants received reliable information about travel, jobs, and housing. The newcomers could exchange foreign money for American currency and buy railroad tickets without fear of fraud. An employment bureau helped immigrants find work around the country. The sick and disabled were provided with medical care. Immigrants’ baggage was carefully handled and boardinghouses were screened, licensed, and supervised by the board. Decent food at decent prices was available.
With the runners seemingly vanquished, the Board of Commissioners won lavish praise. Friedrich Kapp, a member of the board, described the institution he helped manage as “one of the most benevolent establishments in the civilized world…it forestalls untold misery, need and suffering.” One English emigrant called it “a great national refuge for the emigrant from all lands…. It stands alone in its noble and utilitarian character.” In William Dean Howells’s 1890 novel A Hazard of New Fortunes, the book’s main character, Basil March, describes how well officials at Castle Garden treated newcomers. “No one appeared troubled or anxious; the officials had a conscientious civility,” March mused. A journalist called Castle Garden “one of the most beneficent institutions in the world.”
Despite the accolades, Kapp had trouble understanding the country’s laissez-faire attitude toward immigration. “People look with indifference at this colossal immigration of the European masses,” Kapp wrote in 1870, “whose presence alone will exercise a powerful influence on the destinies of the Western World; National and State legislators care little or nothing for the direction which is given to this foreign element.”
That would soon change. By the 1880s, it seemed as if all of America had become interested in—even obsessed with—immigration. The industrial revolution was transforming the way Americans worked and lived. The United States was now a continental nation from the Atlantic to the Pacific, unified by transcontinental railroads. The nation saw its population nearly double between 1870 and 1900, while the gross national product increased sixfold. The United States was transforming itself overnight from a predominantly rural, agrarian society into an urban, industrial nation.
Between 1860 and 1910, the number of Americans living in cities rose from 6 million, or 20 percent of the population, to 44 million, or 40 percent of the population. In 1885, a Protestant minister named Josiah Strong wrote a best-selling book, Our Country, where he complained that cities were “a serious menace to our civilization” and possessed “a peculiar attraction for the immigrant.” Census data showed that these cities had become foreign territories. Immigrants and their children would soon account for nearly 80 percent of the population of cities like New York and Chicago.
A few years after Strong published his jeremiad, historian Frederick Jackson Turner looked at the 1890 Census and declared that the American frontier was officially closed. Open land, at least in theory, was disappearing. To Turner, open land had made earlier immigration possible, as the frontier became the crucible in which “immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race.”
If the frontier was now closed, where would new immigrants go? Critics feared that the city would be the new frontier, but without the same ability to assimilate newcomers. Overcrowded cities populated by those who spoke in foreign tongues marked the end of the Republic, as the United States was in danger of becoming just like Europe: corrupt, overindulgent, class-ridden, contemptuous of republican government, and doomed to revolution. Political corruption, alcoholism, and socialism would reign.
A writer in the Atlantic Monthly worried in 1882 that “our era…of happy immunity from those social diseases which are the danger and the humiliation of Europe is passing away.” The new immigrants evoked not just fears of overcrowded and corrupt Old Europe, but also ancient Rome, which had been threatened by an urban rabble and an increasingly non-Roman citizenry: “In spite of the magnificent dimensions of our continent, we are beginning to feel crowded,” said a writer in 1887. “Our cities are filling up with a turbulent foreign proletariat, clamoring for panem et circenses, as in the days of ancient Rome, and threatening the existence of the republic if their demands remain unheeded.”
Daily newspapers, middle-class magazines, and highbrow intellectual journals devoted increasing space to immigration. The North American Review, the voice of conservative, Northern, native-born Protestants, published two lengthy articles in the early 1880s that detailed how many immigrants were coming and where they were coming from. The articles displayed a marked ambivalence. Immigrants brought great material benefits to the United States, but it was “inevitable, however, that much moral and physical evil will be brought hither by the multitudes who come.”
Newspapers throughout the country chimed in. The Ohio State Journal asked, “What statesman will be wise enough to sift the hundreds of thousands of emigrants crowding over from Europe and say which…should be admitted and which, in the exercise of the sacred right of self-protection, should be excluded?” Such a statesman would be needed since, according to the Philadelphia Telegraph, “a large percentage of the foreigners to whom we have given welcome are unworthy of it,” because they were “often idle, vicious socialists and anarchists, social pests and incendiaries.”
There were fears that America was becoming a dumping ground for Europe’s unwanted peasants. The Chicago Times warned that the “presence among us of a large body of socialists, anarchists, nihilists, lunatics, pordioseros [beggars], and other social dregs from the old world is a danger that threatens the destruction of our national edifice by the erosion of its moral foundations.” The New York Times wondered how long would “the people of this country submit cheerfully to this burden shifted to their shoulders from the Old World?”
A more benign view of immigration still continued to be heard. The Boston Pilot reminded its largely Irish Catholic readers that calls for restriction were an “unsavory reminder of the dark days” of the nativist Know-Nothings. The Milwaukee Journal, with its large German readership, saw immigration as “natural in its movements as the flow of the tides. It is a movement to restore the human equilibrium of the globe.” The paper’s laissez-faire prescriptions rejected government interference, calling it “un-American” and arguing that natural forces would slow or increase immigration based on market forces and social conditions.
Immigration was “giving us the best blood in the world,” according to the Milwaukee Journal, alluding to the benefits of an expanded gene pool. “American humanity in the end promises to be an advance on all other humanity that has yet appeared on the planet.” Americans were a “composite people,” according to the St. Louis Republican. “Our Americanism is continually changing. It is not today what it was a generation ago, and it will not be a generation hence what it is to-day.”
Others used genetic theory for darker purposes. Senator Justin Morrill argued that the effects of new immigrants were “more dangerous to the individuality and deep-seated stamina of the American people…. I refer to those whose inherent deficiencies and iniquities are thoroughbred, and who are as incapable of evolution, whether in this generation or the next.” Morrill, a well-respected Vermont Republican, argued that Americans “must not be coerced to support the weak, vile, and hungry outcasts from hospitals, prisons, and poor-houses, landed here not only to stay themselves but to transmit hereditary taints to the third and fourth generation.”
It took Episcopal bishop and poet A. Cleveland Coxe to bring this theory to its logical conclusion. Coxe called the new immigrants “invaders” who “come with weapons of fatal import to our civilization and to our race.” America was under attack from “hordes of barbarians,” for which, Coxe warned, historically minded Americans, there was ample precedent. Past invasions made Spain “a mongrel race, and have fastened upon her a chronic state of decay and imbecility.” Of course, the great historical example was the Roman Empire, with “Goths and Vandals pouring into the sunny south.” Coxe argued that new immigrants were hereditarily indisposed to democracy and could endanger the nation’s experiment in self-government.
Despite Coxe’s florid rhetoric, most people were trying to find a way to reconcile a vision of America as a refuge for immigrants with a desire to accept only desirable newcomers. The Troy Times welcomed “the intelligent, industrious, and honest foreigners who come here to establish homes,” but wanted “the highest and strongest barriers…raised” for the “worthless human rubbish.” “What we need,” argued the Minneapolis Tribune, “is the inspection and sifting of intending immigrants.” Such a system, the New York Commercial Advertiser believed, would allow the nation to “defend itself against undesirable additions to its population without crowding out immigrants who are qualified to become good citizens.”
By the late 1880s, changes in the way America handled immigration were inevitable. Castle Garden had become an anachronism, a quaint relic of a disappearing world. It was a state-run institution trying to deal with a nationwide problem. It was an institution run by machine politicians and private citizens looking to protect the interests of immigrants, not disinterested professionals looking out for the greater good of society. It was a nineteenth-century solution to a (soon to be) twentieth-century problem.
Castle Garden officials would find themselves under nearly continuous assault. Where Isaiah Rynders and his immigrant runners failed years before, the Supreme Court, the Congress, the Treasury Department, the governor of New York, and crusading journalists succeeded.
The Supreme Court struck the first blow in 1875 with Hendersonv. Mayor of New York, which declared that state laws requiring the immigrant head taxes were unconstitutional because they usurped Congress’s constitutional powers to regulate immigration. The Constitution is fairly oblique in its references to immigration, and Congress had shown little desire to exercise that right previously. A decade after the victory of the Union Army at Appomattox, the Supreme Court was unsympathetic to the idea of states’ rights. “The laws which govern the right to land passengers in the United States from other countries ought to be the same in New York, Boston, New Orleans, and San Francisco,” the Court declared.
Shortly after the decision, Congress responded by passing the first federal law restricting immigration. The Immigration Act of 1875 banned prostitutes, criminals, and Chinese laborers. However, it was an odd law. Though Congress declared its authority to exclude immigrants, the federal government showed little interest in enforcing the new law and left the task to the states. Back in New York, the Board of Commissioners at Castle Garden, without the revenue from the immigrant head tax, was in debt and could no longer take care of immigrants. For the next six years, Congress ignored pleas from New York State for financial help to enforce federal law. Frustrated, the Board of Commissioners threatened to close down Castle Garden.
It was not until 1882 that Congress again acted on immigration when it passed two important pieces of legislation. The first placed the power to regulate immigrants more firmly in the hands of the U.S. Treasury Department. As some 476,000 immigrants passed through Castle Garden that year, the Immigration Act of 1882 imposed a head tax of 50 cents on all incoming immigrants. More importantly, it expanded the exclusionary categories to include any “convict, lunatic, idiot, or person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” Congress was expanding the classifications of undesirable immigrants, and the list would soon grow even longer in years to come.
That same year, Congress passed another law with a different intent. The Chinese Exclusion Act barred the entry of nearly all Chinese immigrants. The number of Chinese immigrants was small—some 250,000 arrived between 1851 and 1880, and they represented less than 3 percent of all immigrants arriving each year—yet Congress succumbed to racial fears, as well as concerns that cheap Chinese labor would lower the standard of living for native-born workers.
In 1885, Congress again heeded the wishes of labor by passing the Foran Act, also known as the Alien Contract Labor Law, which made it illegal “to assist or encourage the importation or migration of aliens…under contract or agreement,” thereby outlawing the recruitment of immigrants whose passage was prepaid by a third party, usually a business agent. Skilled workers, artists, actors, singers, and domestic servants were exempt from the ban on contract labor.
Even with these new laws, more tolerant attitudes toward immigrants still ran deep in the American psyche. One congressional supporter of the contract-labor law emphasized that the law “in no measure seeks to restrict free immigration; such a proposition would be odious, and justly so, to the American people.” With these laws, Congress made clear that the method for dealing with European and Asian immigrants would be very different. When it came to European immigrants, Americans tried to balance concern for the impact of these new immigrants with a national mythology that welcomed newcomers. The Chinese, however, faced near exclusion solely by their race.
How to enforce these laws was still an open question. Neither the Treasury Department nor anyone else in Washington had the capacity to monitor, investigate, and examine hundreds of thousands of immigrants. To solve this problem, the secretary of the Treasury simply contracted with state governments and groups like the Board of Commissioners to continue what they had already been doing.
The Board of Commissioners was being asked to shoulder a greater burden at the same time that it was under increasing criticism. In 1883, New York’s newly elected Democratic governor, Grover Cleveland, attacked Castle Garden as “a scandal and a reproach to civilization,” a place where “barefaced jobbery has been permitted, and the poor emigrant, who looks to the institutions for protection, finds that his helplessness and forlorn condition afford the readily seized opportunity for imposition and swindling.”
Although Castle Garden had been created in an altruistic spirit, it soon became enmeshed in a battle between Republican state officials and Democratic city officials. Cleveland was echoing partisan criticisms that Castle Garden had been a Republican patronage pot in the middle of Democratic New York City. Many people were angry that the Board of Commissioners was constantly demanding more money from the state for the operation of Castle Garden, while private companies reaped profits inside it thanks to the monopoly granted them by their Republican patrons.
Of the estimated one hundred workers at Castle Garden, 90 percent were Republicans. Profits were being made there, and New York Democrats had little to say over who got the spoils. Privileges at the immigrant depot, such as railroad tickets and money changing, were given away to politically connected firms. It was estimated that railroads did over $2.5 million worth of business at Castle Garden in 1886.
To many, this cried out for intervention from the federal government. The Times editorialized that if only “foreign immigration were taken in hand by the national government…it is certain that great waste would be prevented, many scandals be avoided, and an important public interest would be placed where it properly belongs.”
Yet there was more to the criticism and the demands for a federal takeover than just blind partisanship. No matter the good intentions of those administering Castle Garden, the situation had certainly deteriorated, so much so that by the 1880s Jewish immigrants coined a new Yiddish phrase—kesel garten—that became synonymous with chaos. The old vigilance against runners and others sharks had weakened, and immigrants could not be guaranteed complete security from scams and thieves.
In 1880, a twenty-two-year-old English miner named Robert Watchorn arrived at Castle Garden. With gnawing hunger, he spied a pie stand. After dropping 50 cents at the counter, Watchorn devoured his 10-cent piece of apple pie. When he asked for his change back, the salesman refused. Watchorn tried to jump the counter to retrieve his money, but a policeman intervened and threatened to charge him with assault. In one telling of the story, he got his money back and went on his way, but in another he did not get his money back, but gained “a great deal of sad experience.” Either way, it was an incident that would remain with Watchorn even a quarter-century later when he would become the man in charge of processing immigrants in New York.
Another sign that conditions at Castle Garden were deteriorating was the creation of the Catholic Church’s Mission of Our Lady of the Rosary’s Home for Irish Immigrant Girls in 1883. The Home was founded by Father John Riordan and located directly across from the Battery at 7 State Street. Writing in 1899 of the early days of the Home, Father M. J. Henry made clear that even with the protection of Castle Garden, the old predators of immigrants still survived outside its walls.
Thieves, blackmailers, and agents of bawdy-houses made their harvest on many a hapless immigrant. As long as the immigrants remained in Castle Garden they had protection and also the privilege of a labor bureau established by the Irish Emigrant Society. Once, however, they left the landing depot to seek relatives or friends or to secure boarding houses, they had to run the gantlet of these scheming wretches.
Run by Catholic priests, the Home gave these Irish girls a safe place to stay. The priests watched over the girls from the time of their arrival at Castle Garden. The main concern was the protection of the sexual virtue of these young, single, Catholic girls, and the fear that they might be unwittingly ensnared into the life of prostitution by the leeches who roamed the Battery. In its first sixteen years of operation, an estimated seventy thousand Irish girls were guests at the Home after having first passed through Castle Garden.
Public concern about the affairs at Castle Garden continued to grow in the 1880s when Joseph Pulitzer, editor of the New York World, launched a blistering crusade against Castle Garden. A Hungarian immigrant who had come through Castle Garden decades earlier, Pulitzer turned his newspaper into a forum for populist pursuits. In 1884, he had led his “people’s paper” in a campaign to raise money for the completion of the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. While shaming the wealthy for not giving more, Pulitzer promised to list the name of every person who made a contribution, no matter how small the donation. In response, over $100,000 was raised, the circulation of the World increased, and Pulitzer’s reputation as a crusader grew.
In 1887, Pulitzer trained the cannons of his broadsheet at Castle Garden and never let up. In the first of many articles over a year’s time, the World scored Castle Garden as a monopoly, arguing that the immigrant depot had become a “cumbrous and unwieldy institution.” Railroads, the World charged, were fleecing immigrants with the consent of the board. The paper headlined another editorial on Castle Garden: “Purification Needed.” The commissioners did not take the accusations lying down. One of them called Pulitzer “a mean, dirty, contemptible coward” who “ran away to Europe to save himself from incarceration,” and sued the paper for libel.
Soon after the World’s exposés appeared, Washington took action. Grover Cleveland, who as New York governor had harsh words to say about Castle Garden, was now sitting in the White House. In August 1887, his secretary of the Treasury ordered an investigation. Not only was Castle Garden accused of granting monopolies to companies that cheated immigrants, but it was also accused of not strongly enforcing the 1882 law barring certain classes of undesirable immigrants. J. C. Savory of the American Emigrant Society called Castle Garden “a delusion to the public and a snare to the immigrant.”
The next to pile on Castle Garden was Congress. During the 1880s, it proved unwilling to sit on the sidelines of this increasingly national issue. In an era predating Theodore Roosevelt’s bully pulpit and the imperial presidency, Congress was the true power in Washington. Responding to the ever-growing debate about the meaning of immigration, Congress began to assert its authority.
In 1888, Rep. Melbourne Ford of Michigan chaired a congressional committee to investigate immigration. When Ford brought his committee to New York, Pulitzer’s World was there to greet it and splash the testimony of witnesses on its front page. The committee released its report early the following year. It foreshadowed a coming change in how the nation dealt with immigration. The report described how immigrants were processed at Castle Garden in 1888.
When the vessel containing them has been moored to her dock, the immigrants are transferred to barges, which are towed to Castle Garden. There they disembark, and are required to pass in single file through narrow passage-ways, separated from each other by wooden railings. In about the center of each of these passage-ways there is a desk at which sits a registry clerk who interrogates the immigrant as to his nationality, occupation, destination, etc.—questions calculated to elicit whether or not he is disqualified by law from landing…. These questions must be asked rapidly, and the inspection is necessarily done in a very hurried manner, in order that there may be no undue delay in landing them.
The process was simply not thorough enough to comply with existing immigration law. According to the Ford Report, “large numbers of persons not lawfully entitled to land in the United States are annually received at this port.” The committee reported that one of the Castle Garden commissioners had even called its operations “a perfect farce.”
The report did not stop there. It concluded with some general observations. After paying homage to the benefits of past immigrants settling the West, succeeding with their “industry, frugality, and thrift,” the report asked whether the same could be “said of a large portion of the immigrants we are now receiving.” The congressmen answered their own question: “The committee believe not.”
The committee believed that the “class of immigrants who have lately been imported and employed in the coal regions of this country are not such…as would make desirable inhabitants of the United States.” It described these Slavs and Italians as having low intelligence. Their purpose in the United States was to “accumulate by parsimonious, rigid, and unhealthy economy” enough money to return home. They lived “like beasts” and ate food that “would nauseate and disgust an American workman…. Their habits are vicious, their customs are disgusting.”
The Ford Report echoed much of the contemporary concern about immigration. First, it differentiated between desirable and undesirable immigrants. Government policy, it argued, should sift through these immigrants and separate the wheat from the chaff.
Second, the language of immigration regulation closely mirrored the parallel discussion of economic regulation of trusts, monopolies, and railroads. The vast social changes that Americans experienced could be pinned upon the greed of businessmen who put profit before public interest. Reformers sought to use government power to exert the public interest and reign in selfish private interests. According to the Ford Report:
For the purpose of greed these men have exaggerated the advantages and benefits to be derived by persons immigrating to this country, and have been guilty of erroneous statements in order to secure their commission upon the price of a passage ticket to such an extent that some localities in Europe have been nearly depopulated, and the poor deluded immigrant has come to the United States, arriving here absolutely penniless, to find out that the statements made by the steamship agents were absolutely false, and, in many instances, after a short time, he has become a public charge.
In a time of growing disillusionment with laissez-faire economic theory, immigration restrictionists found their enemies in greedy steamship companies and American businesses that contracted with low-wage immigrants to take jobs from native-born workers.
Third, the Ford Report did not call for the debarment of immigrants from specific countries or races, nor did it call for the suspension and ending of all immigration. In terms of Chinese immigration, the report included only one line, saying that it made no effort to investigate it. The regulation of European immigration would be categorically different from the rigid and near-complete banning of the Chinese.
There was one dissenter. Rep. Francis Spinola, a Democratic congressmen from Brooklyn and one of two Italian-American generals in the Union Army during the Civil War, made it clear that he opposed any attempt to restrict “honest immigration.” However, even Spinola agreed with efforts “to shut out paupers, lunatics, idiots, cripples, and thieves, as well as all other evil-doers, who come here to practice their wickedness and fill our poor-houses and prisons.”
Congress never acted upon the “Bill to Regulate Immigration” that the Ford Committee recommended. However, both the House and the Senate established permanent standing committees on immigration for the first time, thereby assuring continued congressional interest.
As conditions at Castle Garden continued to worsen, its critics became more vocal, driving one member of the Board of Commissioners to the point of despair. “So far as Castle Garden is concerned, the country would be better off if it were wiped out of existence,” Edmund Stephenson told the New York Sun in 1889. He felt understandably beleaguered, caught between those who wanted tougher restriction of immigration, defenders of immigration who wanted lax enforcement, and the usual predators looking to take advantage of any immigrant who made it outside the walls of Castle Garden.
At the end of 1889, Secretary of the Treasury William Windom ordered another report on Castle Garden. The Treasury report also found the inspection of immigrants at Castle Garden inadequate and the arrangement between state and federal officials in the regulation of immigration unsatisfactory. It recommended that the federal government take complete control over the regulation of immigrants. Windom accepted that advice, and in February 1890, he notified the Board of Commissioners at Castle Garden that he was terminating their contract in sixty days.
The decision was inevitable. A Republican named Colonel John B. Weber, who was soon to oversee the federal control of immigration, visited Castle Garden in its waning days. He found that boardinghouse runners were having their way with the confused and bewildered immigrants, with seemingly little interference from officials. A new direction was in order.
On Friday, April 18, 1890, the steamers Bohemia and State of Indiana were the last two ships to drop passengers at Castle Garden, landing 465 people that day. In a spiteful mood, members of the Board of Commissioners had refused to allow the Treasury Department to use Castle Garden until new facilities could be found. A makeshift immigrant depot was set up at the Barge Office on the other side of the Battery. Castle Garden was now closed for business.
TREASURY SECRETARY WINDOM WAS determined to begin anew and erase the memory of Castle Garden by building a new facility for processing immigrants completely under the control of the federal government. Some two weeks after announcing the termination of the Castle Garden contract, Windom made public his desire to place the new immigrant station at Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor.
Bedloe’s Island was also the home of the newly erected Statue of Liberty. Once again, Pulitzer used the pages of the New York World to defend Lady Liberty. For weeks, the World hammered away, warning that the island would “be converted instead into a Babel.” The paper even tracked down Auguste Bartholdi, the statue’s sculptor, who called the decision a “downright desecration.”
In response, a joint House and Senate committee selected another island in New York Harbor for the home of the new federal immigration station. Congress appropriated $75,000 to improve Ellis Island for the purposes of creating a new immigrant depot. The island was a perfect choice in many ways. It was already in the possession of the federal government as an underused munitions depot. Its island location meant that the immigrant runners and other predators could be kept at a distance, but it was only a quick ferry ride to Manhattan or the railroads on the Jersey side of the harbor.
Before the low-lying island could be made usable, a good deal of work was needed. While immigrants were being processed at the Barge Office—mostly by ex–Castle Garden inspectors—work had begun on dredging a deeper channel to Ellis Island. Docks were constructed on the island, as well as a two-story wooden building, which would be the main reception area. It would take nearly two years to complete the project. Meanwhile, the national debate over the meaning of immigration only intensified.
“Give us a rest,” thundered Francis A. Walker. He worried that “no one can be surely enough of an optimist to contemplate without dread the fast rising flood of immigration now setting in upon our shores.” Walker was no average citizen. He was the nation’s most esteemed economist, a late-nineteenth-century combination of Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith.
A well-bred Bostonian descended from generations of Anglo-Saxon stock, Walker possessed an envious résumé that mirrored the great transformations of nineteenth-century America. A Union general in the Civil War by his midtwenties, Walker was in charge of the 1870 and 1880 Censuses and then taught economics at Yale. At the time of his musings on immigration, Walker was president of both MIT and the American Economic Association.
Walker found the new immigrants “ignorant, unskilled, inert, accustomed to the beastliest conditions with little of social aspiration, with none of the expensive tastes for light and air and room, for decent dress and homely comforts.” They were lowering the country’s wages and standard of living.
Walker also saw the birth rates of native-born Americans shrinking, while immigrant families produced more and more children. While most social scientists now see birth rates as a function of class, with birth rates shrinking as incomes rise, Walker had a different explanation: Immigrants brought down the nation’s standard of living, and native-born Americans revolted against this situation by refusing to bring more children into such a degraded world. Walker’s thesis neglected the fact that native-born American birth rates had been declining since the early nineteenth century, with seemingly little correlation to immigration rates.
Walker’s views were echoed by a younger man with an even more distinguished pedigree. Forty-one-year-old Henry Cabot Lodge had already established himself in academia, gaining the first PhD in political science from Harvard. Though he would continue to write, especially about the glory of Anglo-Saxon culture, it was politics, not academia, that beckoned. In the 1890s, first as a congressman and then as a senator, Lodge began sounding the alarm about immigration. He hoped to prove that current immigration showed “a marked tendency to deteriorate in character.”
Lodge used the occasion of the March 1891 lynching of eleven Italian immigrants in New Orleans to argue that changes were needed in the nation’s immigration law. The cause of the attack was not anti-immigrant sentiment, Lodge argued, but rather “the utter carelessness with which we treat immigration to this country.” For Lodge, the lynchings were one more piece of evidence showing that America could no longer “permit this stream to pour in without discrimination or selection or the exclusion of dangerous and undesirable elements.” He called for moderate restriction that did not “exclude a desirable immigrant who seeks in good faith to become a citizen of the United States.”
Whatever benefits immigration might bring, there were other values that took precedence. “More important to a country than wealth and population is the quality of its people,” wrote Lodge. He was articulating the attitude of upper-class Americans dismayed by both the extravagances of the Gilded Age as well as the squalor and poverty brought about by urbanization. Like his close friend Theodore Roosevelt, Lodge was critical of crass materialism. Though this attitude was a luxury confined to those living on inherited wealth, it also reminded Americans that the public interest could not always be calculated by figures in a ledger book.
Walker and Lodge had tapped into a larger national concern. Newspaper headlines in 1891 screamed: “Lunatics and Idiots Shipped from Europe” and “The World’s Dumping Ground.” Alabama Congressman William C. Oates, who had led the Confederate charge up Little Round Top at the Battle of Gettysburg, summed up the growing belief in the undesirability of new immigrants.
A house to house visit to Mulberry Street, in New York [the city’s Little Italy], will satisfy any one that there are thousands of people in this country who should never have been allowed to land here…. Many of the Russian Jews who inhabit other streets in New York, and other cities are of no better class than the Italians just referred to. Many of the mining towns and camps of Pennsylvania and other states are overrun with the most beastly, ignorant foreign laborers who herd together almost as animals and are disgraceful to civilization.
The atmosphere was ripe for a major change in immigration policy. In 1891, while workers were busy constructing the physical edifice of Ellis Island’s facilities, Congress was building the legal structures that would govern what would occur there.
The 1891 Immigration Act expanded the types of undesirable immigrants listed in the 1882 law to include “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.”
Excluded immigrants would be shipped back home at the expense of the steamship company that brought them. The burden of inspecting immigrants would lie not just with American officials, but with steamship companies who now had a financial incentive not to bring over immigrants who would not pass muster at American ports. For the first time since the Alien and Sedition Acts one hundred years earlier, the federal government laid out a method for deporting immigrants.
Immigration was now completely under the control of the federal government. Embedded deep within the law, Congress granted vast powers to this new federal agency. “All decisions made by the inspection officers or their assistants touching on the right of any alien to land…shall be final unless appeal be taken to the superintendent of immigration, whose action shall be subject to review by the Secretary of the Treasury.” Though the language seemed innocuous, this provision would prove to be the most controversial. Congress had effectively declared that immigrants could not appeal their exclusions in court. Instead, all appeals had to be made through the executive branch, with a final decision made by the secretary of the Treasury.
The new immigration system represented a big step for Washington. The federal government of the nineteenth century had been a rather sleepy enterprise. The locus of power was in the political parties that controlled patronage for the few jobs that did exist, as well as the judiciary system. The federal government was a weak shell whose main responsibilities were to deliver the mail and pay the pensions of retired Civil War veterans and their widows. More than half of the federal government’s workforce was employed by the Postal Service.
The growing complexity of the American economy would change all that. Within three years, Congress passed two landmark laws—the Interstate Commerce Act (1887) and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890)—which set the stage for the regulation of private business by the federal government. In many ways, the 1891 Immigration Act deserves to be mentioned with the other two landmark laws. Like those other two laws, the immigration bill was enacted to address what many considered to be a failure of the free market. Almost immediately, it created an immigration service larger in size and manpower than the Interstate Commerce Commission or the anti-trust division of the Justice Department and bestowed upon it greater powers.
Between 1875 and 1891, Congress had seized control of the immigration issue by passing sweeping laws banning the entry of most Chinese immigrants, defining classifications of undesirable immigrants, prohibiting the recruitment and contracting of immigrant laborers, and creating a system that would enforce these measures, with a centralized office in Washington overseen by congressional committees, and federal immigrant inspection stations at ports throughout the nation. The most important of these stations was at Ellis Island. The era of big government was dawning.
THE CONTRAST BETWEEN CASTLE GARDEN and Ellis Island is instructive. Castle Garden was a state operation, created largely at the behest of immigrant aid societies, designed to protect and aid new arrivals to America. Ellis Island was a federal operation, created in response to the national uproar at perceived changes in the type and nature of immigration at the end of the nineteenth century. 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.
Castle Garden has long since receded from the national memory. As the years passed, the old immigrant station evolved first into the city’s aquarium, then into neglect, and then into a historical reconstruction of the original fort. From here, modern tourists buy tickets for the ferry ride to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.
Over 8 million immigrants passed through Castle Garden between 1855 and 1890. Many of their descendants know little of its history, thinking their forebears entered at Ellis Island.
Despite the corruption that plagued Castle Garden, one historian has called it “not only a monumental work, but also a great human expression, which can be placed among the shining achievements of American history during the nineteenth century.”
Yet it is Ellis Island, not Castle Garden and its albeit imperfect history of benevolence and service, which takes center stage in the nation’s tale of immigration.