FOR IMMIGRANTS ONLY: FORGOTTEN ELLIS ISLAND: THE EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF AMERICA'S IMMIGRANT HOSPITAL by Lorie Conway

FORGOTTEN ELLIS ISLAND: The Extraordinary Story of America’s Immigrant Hospital by Lorie Conway (Smithsonian Books, Oct 16, 2007)

Review by Nancy Yanes Hoffman, NYCommunications, 16 San Rafael Drive, Rochester, New York
www.writingdoctor.typepad.com, nywriter@rochester.rr.com,585-385-1515

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           Immigration is a dirty word. At least, in our time.  Echoing the anti-immigrant furor of the 1900s, teens, and 1920s, today’s politicians duck the problem, afraid to say where they stand. Yet we are immigrants all. Or the offspring of immigrants who came here long ago.

           How did your forebears get to these shores?  Knowing the answers helps you know who you are today.  Did they hit Plymouth’s rocky shores after fighting for a place on the overcrowded Mayflower, which never could have held all its claimed descendants?  Did they, like my husband’s family, take the long way through Siberia, China, Japan, Canada, and Seattle? Or did they, like my family, land in Boston, the second largest immigration entry point? 

           No matter where or how our families arrived, most Americans view Ellis Island as a metaphor for the long-ago gateway to hope and success, no matter how darkened by defeat and loss. For although sixty immigration sites lined our coasts and southern ports at the beginning of the 20th century, Ellis Island was the busiest. In its first year, 1892, three out of every four immigrants coming to this country went through “the Island.”

            More than 490 books depict the Ellis Island “experience,” jostling for space in Amazon’s lists. Do we really need yet another book about the hordes of immigrants coming through Ellis Island? Yes. Especially when the book is Lorie Conway’s FORGOTTEN ELLIS ISLAND: The Extraordinary Story of America’s Immigrant Hospital (Smithsonian Books, Oct 16, 2007). Amassing photographs and interviews about the old hospitals, now more disabled than their patients, Conroy has brought the old, tattered General hospital and Contagious Disease Hospital, which have received almost no attention, back to life.

           Ellis Island was not an unmixed blessing. Even though Americans welcomed extra hands for industries booming at the beginning of the 20th century (how times have changed), they feared these strangers. Americans believed they could be infected by the armies of Russian Jews, Slavs, Italians, Irish on their Island doorstep. They feared these newcomers might be carrying cholera, tuberculosis, measles, scarlet fever, whooping cough, and diphtheria. They feared their brain power and inability to support themselves. For many immigrants were deemed “mentally defective,”  considered “feeble-minded” because they could not answer the questions bombarding them in a language they didn’t understand.

           The immigrants’ first stop –possibly their last stop if they were rejected-- was medical screening within the forbidding walls of Ellis Island’s Great Hall. Within these walls, in view of the Statue of Liberty just next door, the huddled masses aching for Lady Liberty’s open arms were often held and sent back to their European homelands. But some needed medical care in the here and now.

           As the immigrant load soared, the Island’s administrators realized they needed a hospital and other medical facilities to warehouse its minions of  the sick—and possibly sick.  By 1902, Ellis Island had expanded. Islands No.2 and No.3 sprouted from the adjoining landfill. The General Hospital with 120 beds (it later enlarged to 275 beds) was built in 1902 from tons of rocks excavated from New York City’s new subway system. Nine years later, the 450-bed Contagious Disease Hospital became the most advanced infectious disease facility in the world. For the ensuing three decades, it was the outstanding hallmark of the Ellis Island Hospital complex.

           Few patients spoke English. As the U.S. Public Health’s Dr. Milton Foster observed in his marvelous 1916 memoir,  GENERAL HOSPITAL FOR ALL NATIONS, the hospital had to cadge interpreters from the Immigration Service because it had none of its own.  From 1907 to 1910, Fiorello La Guardia, worked as a Yiddish, Italian, and Spanish interpreter while attending law school at night. Patients recall La Guardia bringing them chocolate bars to comfort them during their seemingly endless hospital stays.

         Conway traces the ups and finally, the downs of immigration barriers through the first half of the twentieth century. By 1915, Frederick Howe, then Commissioner of Immigration, noted that “Ellis Island is a good-sized city. Some days there are as many as 10,000 people temporarily or permanently upon the island.”

         But Ellis Island did not have so long to live. In 1921, while the hospital admitted 16,666 patients, Congress stringently limited immigration by upping the ante for exclusion. The list contained such new categories as people opposed to owning private property, communists, utopians, and socialists(!). In 1924, Congress passed the National Origins Act, which reduced immigration to 3 percent of the 1890 census, thus opening the door to English, Swedish, and German immigrants and banging it shut against Italians, Poles, Hungarians, and European Jews. By 1925, James Davis, Secretary of Labor and ironically a Welsh immigrant himself, avowed that “the regulation of immigration is about the most important issue facing the country.” Sound familiar?

          Conway’s book is about more than just the building of our first Public Health Hospitals. Conway shows the hospitals' apogee in caring for poor immigrants’ health, their nadir in 1954, when the government abandoned the medical complex to the depredations of rain, salt air, broken windows, the nests of pigeons and gulls, rot and decay.

           FORGOTTEN ELLIS ISLAND is the story of  the forever-with-us Catch-22 of medical care, idealism, public welfare, and the politics of immigration.  Recent interviews with onetime patients, ward matrons, physicians, and nurses fill the pages of FORGOTTEN ELLIS ISLAND.  Their stories remind me of the tales my father, a Naval Officer stationed on Ellis Island in 1916 and 1917, used to tell me about the lonely, frightened immigrant children he befriended at the hospital—and what became of them.

         Christopher Barnes’s many photographs of people and places, in many ways the legacy of Lewis Hines’s early Ellis Island pictorial portrayals, illuminate Conroy’s saga of the rise and fall of the hospitals at the Gateway to Promise.

          If you are of immigrant stock, you need to own this book and follow the trail of its notes and photographs.