When President Harrison opened US doors to Jews
Little known and even less hailed, President Benjamin Harrison played a crucial role in the immigration of Eastern European Jewry to this country in the 1890s and into the early decades of the 20th century.
In “American Passage: The History of Ellis Island” (Harper Collins, 2009), journalist and historian Vincent J. Cannato details facts, stories, personalities, and geographic as well as political details, that spell out the history of one of the most fabled islands on the American continent — Ellis Island, New York.
To American Jewry, especially those who came from Eastern Europe from the late 1880s to the late 1920s, Ellis Island, with its backdrop of the Statue of Liberty, represented the portal to a new world, a world of religious and economic freedom never before experienced by Jews in the Diaspora.
In 487 pages, this tells their story.
One particular episode in this book came to represent all that America means to me as one who cares so much for the welfare of this blessed republic.
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In 1891, President Harrison appointed a special commission to investigate what motivated the mass immigration of millions of Europeans to the United States. He also, through this commission, wanted to know to what extent criminals, paupers, the insane and those afflicted with dangerous diseases were encouraged to emigrate to these shores.
As if these legitimate concerns were not enough to concern the Harrison Administration, there was another concern that bothered the president — that of the increasing number of Russian Jews landing on American shores.
As a reward for his help in getting him elected in 1888, Harrison appointed his Civil War buddy John B. Weber as commissioner of immigration at the Port of New York and, in addition, to oversee the construction of new immigration intake facilities at Ellis Island. Harrison entrusted into Weber’s hands the chairmanship of the special commission.
This was to prove to be a most fateful decision to the future of American Jewry.
Before Weber set sail for Europe, Harrison called him to his seaside cottage at Cape May, NJ, were he was vacationing, to task him with one additional mission: to personally investigate the condition of Russian Jewry and to report back directly to him on this matter.
On his way to Europe Weber was joined by his traveling companion, Dr. Walter Kempster, a fellow Civil War vet who fought at Gettysburg.
Together, according to Cannato, they city-hopped from Liverpool to Paris, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Berlin and then on to cities not normally on the itineraries of American diplomats of that era. They visited St. Petersburg, Moscow, Minsk, Vilna, Bialystok, Grodno, Warsaw, Cracow, Budapest, and Vienna. They ended up in Bremen, Germany.
During this trip they met with members of the US diplomatic corp in each city and country, visited local Jewish neighborhoods, and spoke with officials from the various steamship lines. It was a grueling yet productive fact-gathering mission for President Harrison.
Weber and Kempster issued their report in January 1892.
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They concluded that people left Europe largely because they believed, based by what they had heard from others — including friends and relatives who preceded them to these shores — that there were “superior conditions of living in the United States.
The report also detailed the horrid conditions under which the Jews of Russia lived.
Cannato noted that, “Following his instructions from Harrison, Weber paid special attention to the plight of Jews.
“The situation in Russia was beginning to have repercussions for the United States. Mary Antin had already emigrated and wrote a memoire of her family’s journey from Russia to America. During those bleak times, she wrote, ‘America was in everybody’s mouth. Businessmen talked of it over their accounts æ people who had relatives in the famous land went around reading their letters.’ The number of immigrants coming from Russia, the vast majority Jewish, was increasing dramatically.”
The author goes into great detail as to what motivated this human deluge and of the antisemitic reaction to wave of immigrants in America.
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Weber and Kempster did not hide their sympathy for the Jews they encountered in the Pale of Settlement and were candid with Harrison about what they witnessed. In effect, the Weber-Kempster Report was a sharp and severe rebuke to bigots who wished to curtail and ultimately restrict Jewish East European immigration in its infancy.
We have a lot to be grateful for to President Benjamin Harrison and his appointees, Weber and Klempster, for their personal resolve and exercise of true leadership, and for their sincere acts of brotherhood toward our people in a time of dire distress.
What they did, did not have to be done. They could have easily played along with the mob and restricted Jewish immigration, and thus prevented the establishment of the large American Jewish community of which we are a proud part to this very day. Let us not forget this fact, and of the personalities who played crucial roles in making this possible.
If you have not yet visited Ellis Island and its museum, do so, with your kids, before the end of summer vacation. It will be an experience you will never forget.
And, while you are at it, read “American Passage” and enjoy the scholarship of a gifted journalist and historian, Vincent Cannato. This will surely help enrich your visit to Ellis Island, and reinforce your love for our country and its history.
Originally published in 2009.
