Famous Nathan Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    From 1901 to 1914, an average of five thousand newcomers a day—and sometimes as many as eight thousand a day—took the same ferry ride to Ellis. Nathan Handwerker arrived near the tail end of America’s second great wave of immigration. The first wave, primarily from famine-struck Ireland, came aboard the “coffin ships” of the mid-nineteenth century. The second lasted from the turn of the century to the beginning of the First World War. During this period, a million immigrants a year passed through Ellis, two-thirds of whom shared backgrounds in eastern, central, or southern Europe.
    The U.S. Congress initially placed immigration regulation and policy under the purview of the federal Treasury Department, the focus being the potential revenue these aspiring citizens would bring to their adopted homeland. But in 1903, the Bureau of Immigration was reassigned to what was then called the Department of Commerce and Labor. The turn-of-the-century influx of European immigrants gave rise to various concerns. Did the new arrivals bring disease? Would they spread their strange customs and their radical politics? Would immigrants flood the labor market, or would hardworking Americans be forced to support them as public wards?
    Ellis Island’s immigrant inspection station was conceived at least in part as a dam against the flood. We tend to forget that Ellis could be a place not only of reception but of rejection, too. Overall, only a small number of those processed—around 2 percent—were denied entry and sent home. Still, anxiety over possible deportation remained a common theme in the recollections of many new arrivals. Ellis soon earned the nickname “the Island of Tears.”
    After the wait offshore—at times hours long and seemingly interminable—the ferries from the West Side docks pulled up to the Ellis Island wharf and discharged their passengers. The inspection station’s main building, just over a decade old when Nathan first saw it, was designed to impress. The French Renaissance rock pile represented a formal gateway to America, Emma Lazarus’s “golden door,” or what another commentary called “the Plymouth Rock of its day.” The redbrick façade featured quoins, elaborate corner belvederes, and three arched entrances. The structure’s exaggerated profile lent the building distinction even when viewed at a distance, as it so often was, across the water.
    Inside, a gauntlet. Medical division staff members from the United States Public Health Service posted themselves along the stairway to the Great Hall on the second floor. They subjected each new arrival to a blazingly fast, six-second medical examination. Shortness of breath while climbing the stairs singled an immigrant out as suffering from lung or heart conditions. The uniformed doctors peeled back eyelids with metal buttonhooks or hairpins, looking for conjunctivitis. Any sign of infectious disease or disability brought out the chalk, and the health inspectors marked the suspect with stigma-like symbols: G for goiter, PG for pregnancy, X for “mental defects.”
    Immigration inspectors checked for viruses not of the biological but the social kind. Officials demanded answers to such questions as “Are you an anarchist?” or “Are you a polygamist?” With much of Europe engulfed in ideological ferment, the largely WASP establishment of America was perhaps more worried about communism than about conjunctivitis.
    A widespread belief exists, spread most prominently by The Joys of Yiddish author Leo Rosten, that Ellis Island was where the term “kike” first surfaced. Originally not an ethnic slur at all (that came later), the word was used by personnel on the island to refer to eastern European Jews like Nathan Handwerker. Illiterate newcomers, or at least those not familiar with the Latin alphabet, were directed to sign their names with an X . Deeply