Free American Passage by Vincent J. Cannato Page A

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.
    T REASURY S ECRETARY W INDOM 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 Wo r l d 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