Authors: Vincent J. Cannato
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
Worl d
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
Wo r l d
scored Castle Garden as a monopoly, arguing that the immigrant depot had become a “cumbrous and unwieldy institution.” Railroads, the
Wo r l d
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
Wo r l d
’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
Wo r l d
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 steam-ship 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.