Review: Malgorzata Szejnert's Ellis Island: A People’s History
Reviewed by Sarah Litvin
Ellis Island: A People’s History
By Malgorzata Szejnert (translated by Sean Gasper Bye)
Scribe Publications, 2020
400 pages
Ellis Island: A People’s History, by Polish journalist Malgorzata Szejnert, tells an undulating history of the island through a chronological series of character studies and vignettes. Five sections, aptly entitled “Rising Tide,” “Flood,” “Becalmed,” “Pitch and Toss,” and “Ebb Tide” chart the rise and fall of New York’s famous immigration station that processed more than twelve million people between 1892, when it opened, and 1954, when it closed. Immigration through Ellis Island peaked in 1907, when 3,818 ships delivered more than 1.2 million people, a flood that calmed at the outbreak of WWI, and ebbed as deportations increased during the Red Scare and immigration was restricted by quotas created by the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924. The increased popularity of airplane travel led to the station’s closure in 1954. The last two sections, “Still Waters” and “Pearl Divers,” tell less familiar stories of what happened next: never-realized proposals for an international shopping center and a New York State center to treat alcoholics. This story ends in the present, and offers lovely character portraits of those who ultimately preserved the site as a museum and those who work there now as staff, archivists, and family researchers.
Szejnert recovers, reveals, and at times imagines these interactions between officials and immigrants on the island (and elsewhere) by excerpting and interpreting photographs, letters, diaries, and published works. Some are familiar depictions of the island’s famous passers-through, such as Augustus Sherman’s shot of Emma Goldman at the time of her deportation in 1919. Others offer new perspectives, including the letters of Jozef Jagielski to his wife Franciszka, which were part of a cache of Polish-language letters from 1890-1891 that were caught by the czar’s censor (Szejnert shares the fascinating saga of this cache of letters, which were published in Polish but appear here in English for the first time, in an extended footnote). Her bright reportorial writing often positions the reader as a fly on the wall of a scene she conjures from these rich archival materials. The effect of this style, which leaps from scene to scene, often offering little or no context, can be at times quite jarring. Main themes of the story only emerge by considering the individual pieces as a whole. This zooming in and out again gives the work a particular feeling — almost like riding the waves carrying newcomers, new personalities, and new ideas to the island.
International affairs and US immigration policy frame the narrative of Ellis Island: A People’s History, but the focus is on the millions of personal dramas that unfolded at the island, day by day, over time. In both style and content, Szejnert demonstrates how immigrants’ experiences on the island were made up of scores of interpersonal interactions. Specific bureaucrats, commissioners, immigrants, and island staff acted from their own experiences, predilections, and prejudices as they interpreted and challenged evolving immigration policies. Throughout the book, recurring themes emerge, including how American racial hierarchies and prejudices shaped the creation and implementation of immigration policies, and how the policies of Ellis Island reverberated throughout America.
As immigration to Ellis Island rose from its opening in 1892 through the 1920s, commissioners invented new methods to manage, document, and welcome the flow of newcomers. Textbook histories of the island present the never-realized twenty-five dollar fee, a ban of illiterates, and more, as examples of the nation’s ongoing struggle to determine eligibility for membership and citizenship. But in Szejnert’s telling, these ideas are complex extensions of particular commissioners’ agendas, which were shaped by their own experiences and personalities, and by American racial prejudices. For example, the island’s first Commissioner, John B. Weber, set a precedent for the island to be a space of welcome when he greeted Annie Moore, a passenger on the first ship to arrive, with a gold ten dollar Liberty coin. Yet Weber chose Moore, an Irish immigrant, to be the poster child for the new station out of a recognition of American prejudice against Jews. According Szejnert, “To honor a Jewish immigrant would be to show kindness to the very least-desired group.”
Other Ellis Island leadership were similarly driven by a mixture of effective reform and personal prejudice. William Williams, commissioner from 1902 to 1905 and again from 1909 to 1914, was “a man of honor, order, and discipline,” according to Szejnert. He fired undisciplined staff, created a thorough cleaning regime, and under him, each newcomer received a pre-printed postcard to send for free from Ellis to their families in the United States reporting their whereabouts and how to reach them. Yet Williams’ policies were also strongly influenced by the idea that arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe were weak and undesirable. He was a strong advocate for a literacy test, spoke out in favor of policies to curb immigration from these areas, and fought for the requirement that immigrants arrive with twenty-five dollars.
Between the 1920s and 1960s, the era when quotas restricted Southern and Eastern European migration, Szejnert shows how some of the island’s interpreters, doctors, matrons, and social workers resisted or helped immigrants navigate policies and practices of racial prejudice and exclusion. Drawing from her research into memoirs and oral histories, she concludes that many of the thirty-six interpreters “belong[ed] spiritually to the countries they’ve left.” As a result, they found ways to intervene on behalf of immigrants. For example, a law said no incoming immigrants could arrive with a labor contract in hand. This tripped up many Italian immigrants who were eager to show their capacity to work. To help dissuade an immigrant from being “too truthful” when asked if they had work, an interpreter such as Fiorello La Guardia might “use a pause or a look to give the immigrant something to think about.”
Ludmila Foxlee, who immigrated through Ellis Island when she was nine years old and worked as a YWCA social worker on the island from 1920-1937, communicated an allegiance to new immigrants and an assimilationist ethic through her use of clothing. Following the traditions of their homelands, many immigrant women arrived wearing heavy handmade native costumes. At the time, assimilationist campaigns and policies in schools, settlement houses, and the media taught that American clothing was essential to success and social advancement. Foxlee realized that Americanized family members who were waiting for their daughters, wives, or even fiancees, would balk at these women’s native costumes. To help them, she gently encouraged women to try on new pieces, pulling from a closet of fashionable skirts, shirtwaists, and more that she solicited as donations from charity organizations. The story of Foxlee, which we learn in part from journal excerpts, offers a rare view into the goings-on in the island during the Depression.
Like the dynamic tensions between personality and public opinion and between policies of exclusion and actions of welcoming, Szejnert also reveals how activities on the island were at once hyperlocal and far-reaching. For example, the remarkable story of Paula Pitum shows how policies and decisions made on the island were shaped by a particular moment, but affected American communities long after an immigrant’s arrival. Paula, a nine-year-old Jewish girl, arrived at Ellis Island with her family in 1914 and was marked “retarded” in her examination. Though her father had lived and worked in Olean, New York for two years and acquired a horse and cart worth $200, Paula was nonetheless deemed “likely to become a public charge,” and the entire family was ordered deported.
An uncle and immigrant organizations appealed the decision and it was partially reversed — everyone except Paula was allowed to stay. Paula was en route back to Europe when World War I broke out, so her ship turned around and officials granted her temporary permission to stay with her family. After the war, an Ellis Island official reopened her case, prompting many in the town of Olean (including Paula’s elementary school teacher) to write letters advocating for Paula. Her case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court. In 1925, the court granted Paula permission to stay indefinitely, on condition that her family pay a $3,000 bond and report to Ellis Island on her progress every six months. Though the policies on Ellis Island seemingly governed individual lives, the reach of those decisions were far more influential; they shaped the work of immigrant aid organizations, school teachers, supreme court cases, and community members across the country.
After the immigration station closed in 1954, the General Services Administration, the federal agency overseeing abandoned government property, faced the dilemma of what to do with the abandoned buildings. They tried in vain to find a government or philanthropic agency that could shoulder the cost of repairs, before finally putting the site up for commercial sale. No buyer could be found. In the early 1960s, it was briefly subject to a proposal that would have entailed razing the buildings to create a “self-contained, super-modern” city (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright). After 1965 legislation that brought the island under the purview of the National Park Service, it was the site of two brief activist occupations, one by a group of Lenape inspired by the occupation of Alcatraz, and another by a group called the National Economic Growth and Reconstruction Organization (NEGRO). It was only at the time of the bicentennial, in 1976, that Peter and Sally Sammartino led the effort to lobby Congress and raise the private funds to preserve the island for conversion into a museum. The Museum opened in 1990. Every year, it receives two million visitors from around the country and the world.
Though the book offers no “thesis” per se, Ellis Island: A People’s History is deeply rooted in history and offers valuable new historiographical material for scholars and the general public. To scholars, its introduction of original Polish-language source material and integration of diary entries and personal letters of lower-ranking staff at the island offer valuable insights into the day-to-day life on the island. To the general public, Szjenert offers an accessible, poetic tale that successfully moves our focus away from the mythic and symbolic meanings of Ellis Island as a monument to the immigrant experience, and into the historical experience of what individuals experienced there. Vitally, in sharing the post-1954 history, she calls all of us to realize that it was far from inevitable that this site or collection of stories would be preserved. It was — and continues to be — particular personalities operating with unique reasons at distinct moments in history whose time, money, and vision preserve it.
Sarah Litvin is Director of the Reher Center for Immigrant Culture and History in Kingston, New York. She received her doctorate in US History from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2019.