Transcription
[Music] The boat would bring in these patients who were ill; they would bring them up, and we would have to take them into this room and wash their hair. Some of them had never seen a bathtub, and they were afraid to get in the water. I remember crying; my mother would have had to push me to go there with this [Music] nurse that day.
Must have been about three or four ships; must have been about 5 or 6,000 people jammed. I remember it was August, hot as a pistol, and I'm wearing my long johns and a heavy Irish tweed suit. I'm dying with the heat. So you're not concerned; you don't realize that this is history in the making. You're just—you want to get in, get the hell out of there, and get off, you know what I'm saying? They got off the boat and then walked in, in a parade, up those stairs into the building. Many of them came through with all their bedding and their last possessions, you know, that they owned. They looked pretty bad.
These buildings were filled with people who were desperate, whether from hunger or [Music] discrimination. They didn't leave where they came from because life was so good for them; it wasn't. Whatever they had here was better, and that's what I feel now. I feel these people all around me, so desperate to cross this little body of water. [Music]
A century ago, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, one of the world's great public hospitals was built. The hospital was America's first line of defense against contagious disease. It was here that the germs of the world converged: malaria and typhus from the tropics; cholera from the Mediterranean; hookworm from the rice patties of Canton; favus and trachoma from Central and Eastern [Music] Europe.
The Ellis Island Hospital was massive: 22 buildings crammed onto two small, small islands, man-made from rock and dirt excavated while building the New York Subway system. The hospital was where America's conflicting beliefs about immigration collided—at once welcoming and threatening. Those judged healthy enough to work were allowed entry to America; those thought incurable, insane, or weak were deported. "Let no one believe that landing on the shores is a pleasant experience. It is a hard, harsh fact, surrounded by the grinding machinery of the law, which sifts, picks, and chooses, admitting the fit and excluding the weak and hopeless"—Edward Steiner, *On the Trail of the Immigrant*. [Music]
Three short decades after the Ellis Island Hospital opened, it was abandoned, left to ruin, as America, after World War I, closed its border to all but a favored few. The hospital fell into disuse and decay, and then into emptiness; its medical wards left open only to the salt air of the New York Harbor. The story of the Great Ellis Island Hospital has gone largely untold, forgotten by all but the generation that lived it.
The medical officer examined us and found out we had measles, and we hadn't the foggiest idea where we were going, I really—why we were going. It's a journey that many people took and remembered; others would like to forget. I wanted to [Music] remember.
Between 1880 and 1924, nearly 25 million immigrants left their homelands for America; half came through Ellis Island. Most were from Northern, Southern, and Eastern Europe; in much smaller numbers, they came from China, Canada, and Mexico. Of the 12 million who came through Ellis Island, tens of thousands of immigrants failed the mandatory medical examination and were detained at the [Music] hospital.
The hospital was commanding in its size. The General Hospital was built first and housed 120 beds; it would grow to three times that size. Then the psychopathic hospital, with its 50 beds and isolation rooms, was constructed last, built with the wards of the 450-bed contagious disease hospital, which sprawled across two of the islands and was the complex's flagship. One observer said that the Ellis Island Hospital dealt with every sort of disorder, ranging from slight injury to obscure tropical disease. It's at once a maternity home and an insane [Music] asylum.
The hospital could be an overwhelming place: the language, the food, the customs, and even the care was strange to many of the immigrant patients. 350 babies were born in the hospital; many of these instant citizens were named after the doctors and nurses who delivered them. 3,500 immigrants died in the Ellis Island Hospital. For most of the others, the hospital marked the beginning of their new life in a new country.
The immigrants to Ellis Island brought their hopes, but many also carried dangerous diseases. In the era before antibiotics, contagious diseases like cholera, diphtheria, typhus, tuberculosis, and polio could be [Music] fatal.
In 1907, panic and death spread through the boroughs of New York City when Mary Mallon, an immigrant kitchen worker, infected dozens of people. During the 19th century, there were three major cholera pandemics that did cross the Atlantic Ocean and spread like wildfire in the United States. There was a lot of experience with these epidemics, and because there were no treatments and they didn't even understand at the time what caused cholera, a lot of people [Music] died.
Americans, on the one hand, wanted immigrants to come; on the other hand, when they came, and they came in droves, Americans were very concerned and very, very ambivalent in their feelings toward these newcomers. The medical inspection was directed at the immigrants who traveled second or third class; the wealthier first-class passengers received little more than a glance from public health physicians. For these immigrants, citizenship was nearly automatic; for the others, the medical inspection stood between them and a life in [Music] America.
I think, frankly, the worst memory I have of Ellis Island was the physical. The doctors were seated at a long table with a basin full of potassium chloride. You had to stand in front of them, and you had to reveal yourself. They gave you what we used to, in the army, they call a short-arm inspection, right there in front of [Music] everyone. We went to this big, like an open room, and there were a couple of doctors there, and then they tell you to strip. My mother had never ever—and rested in front of us. You know, those days, nobody ever would. [Music]
They came up stolidly, steadily, submissively, like so many cattle. "The first thing they see," explained the official, "is the American flag as it hangs below us here, and all hats must come off before it"—Bronen Brandenburg, author.
Every immigrant who came to Ellis Island had to climb the large staircase that led to the Great Hall. At the top of the staircase stood uniformed Public Health Service doctors who watched intently for signs of heart trouble, breathing difficulty, any kind of [Music] disability. It was the first test of the immigrant's fitness to become the laborers America was seeking. They would then be interrogated by members of the US Immigration Bureau, and they would be asked by these officers: Why are you coming to the United States? How do you intend to support yourself? Where are you going? They might be asked about their political beliefs, whether or not they were anarchists, and so on. But all of this took a few hours; it could take more if there were several ships that had come in at one time. As many as 6,000 immigrants a day were herded past the dozen doctors working the line. The doctors had less than 30 seconds to judge whether an immigrant required a more thorough medical exam. One in five immigrants received a chalk mark indicating a suspected condition; that mark could mean separation from family and involuntary stay at the hospital, and even deportation.
"Ours would be the painful duty of singling out one of the children and of saying, 'She has trachoma; she cannot enter.' The mother and the rest of the children would have to return to Europe with the diseased one, and until the boat sailed, the father, wretched and unhappy, would haunt the detention quarters while his family kept up a constant wailing and crying"—Dr. Victor Heiser, United States Public Health Service.
In order to bring a family over, the father made arrangements with various banks and so on and bought a passage at a great sacrifice, because these fathers who were here lived on practically nothing but a herring and a piece of bread, and they worked very hard in sweatshops and brought their family over. Now, some of them had five or seven children; well, they had to pay for every child. For most, it was momentarily traumatic, but they passed through rather quickly. But for those who were held for medical reasons, the ordeal was just beginning.
The doctors on Ellis Island had conflicting duties: as physicians, they had taken an oath to heal the sick; as Public Health Service officers, they had the job of gatekeeper, deciding which immigrants were healthy enough to become productive citizens. Public Health doctors have a broader tableau because they're protecting the public's health as well, but there was something worked into the system, because if you were sick, they then treated you, which was remarkable. If you were terribly ill, or not even that terribly ill, it didn't just end at the inspection and you were told to go home; you were cared for, sometimes cured, and sometimes stabilized until you could go home.
In 1902, the year that the hospital opened, President Theodore Roosevelt chose a man much like himself to serve as Ellis Island's Commissioner of Immigration. William Williams was an Ivy League-educated patrician who had served with Roosevelt in the Spanish-American War. In accepting Roosevelt's offer, he also accepted an 80% cut in the salary he had been making as a Wall Street lawyer. During the day, from his office window overlooking the landing dock, William Williams watched as thousands of immigrants took their first step in America. At night, he retired to the private world of the University Club, his residence on New York's Fifth Avenue. There he assembled a scrapbook filled with photographs, writings, and press clippings of his tenure at Ellis Island. A millionaire bachelor, he spent his evenings in the luxury of the University Club; his days, even his Sundays, he spent over at Ellis Island, with all of its squalor, its filth, its sorrow—newspaper clipping.
When Williams returned in 1909 to 1912 for a second term as Ellis Island commissioner, he sought to restrict immigration. However, in his first term, from 1902 to 1905, when the demand for immigrant labor was high, Williams presided over the construction of one of the world's largest public health [Music] hospitals. In his first memo as commissioner, Williams issued a strict command that set the standard for his administration: "Immigrants shall be treated with kindness and consideration by everyone at Ellis Island; neither harsh language nor rough handling will be tolerated"—William Williams. [Music]
As Williams was settling in as commissioner of immigration, the public health movement was gaining strength in New York City. The movement was driven by two concerns: immigrants and disease. Tens of thousands of the newcomers had settled in neighborhoods that were beginning to resemble the slums of Europe, straining public services. "Have to think about the nature of public health in the United States. In some aspects, the purpose of public health was to intrude upon people and to limit their activities for the sake of the common good. So that meant reporting diseases to Public Health Service officers, inspecting immigrants, turning them back if they were not suitable. But what is a very common theme—it doesn't matter if it's Russian, Jewish immigrants, or Chinese immigrants, or African immigrants—that perception of immigrant as diseased; that's a very unhealthy combination."
To me, it was like the House of Babel, because there were so many languages and so many people, and everybody huddled together, and it was so full of fear. It was pathetic, because the ones that were being held there could be deported, and so we lived in constant fear that they could be [Music] deported.
"The United States did not intend to be the hospital of the nations of the earth; it did not intend to be burdened by these [Music] [Applause] newcomers."
They would send word up that a ship had come in and to be prepared for patients, and then they used to call them, I guess, runners, and they would bring two or three patients up to you, and then you would have this big long room with a bathtub and a big table, and you had a chart where you wrote down their name and their [Music] number.
We got on the boat; I had a wonderful time on the boat. But by the time we came to New York, we had somehow—the experience in—other sounds had aged us. We didn't want to sing anymore; we were all grown [Music] up.
The Ellis Island Hospital was known as the hospital of all nations. In 1914, when the hospital was fully operational, 10,000 patients from 75 different countries walked, hobbled, or were wheeled on gurneys or in wheelchairs through the hospital's double doors. We had Greeks, [Music] Armenians; we had a lot of Germans, and we had a lot from—Jewish people, and Irish—a lot of Irish came over, and English. We had a mixture of—a little bit of everything.
Many of the patients arrived with little more than the clothes on their backs. Their ignorance of medical procedures, like the recently invented x-ray, made the hospital a harrowing place. "Bosa is a Polish woman; she had not the slightest idea what an x-ray meant and thought police wanted her photograph. 'I am not a bad woman,' she said, 'and I won't have my photograph taken with no clothes on'"—Red Cross narrative [Music] report.
As some of the patients would get very nasty if you tried to take their clothes from them; they thought you were stealing their clothes. And then we found out why: some of them had money sewed in the hems, the bills, and even in the seams; they had the money rolled up and sewed in the seams of their clothes.
It was the young children for whom the hospital could be the most frightening, separated from their parents and often unable to understand what the staff was saying; they felt abandoned. John Gair, who was hospitalized with diphtheria upon arriving from France, returned to the hospital 70 years later: "I was five—about five months old—having been born in Paris. I only spoke French, and everything around me was a big muddle because I didn't understand what was going on or even what language was being spoken. I was not sick; there was nothing ailing or, you know, bad with me; I just—I guess—under observation. They took me away from my mother; I didn't know what was happening; she didn't know what was happening, and I was here—here in this place—away from her, never knowing if I was going to see her again. Well, I was there five days before they decided that it was nothing contagious, that it was just a sore throat that had passed, and—by the end of that time I was used to the routine, but I still missed my parents and thought they had gone on without me. I was in the children's ward—all those beds in a huge room—and I tried so hard to ask to find out how long I would have to be there and what was wrong with me. I just wanted to talk, and they couldn't understand me; they couldn't speak German, and I couldn't speak English."
Over 300 nurses, attendants, ward matrons, and orderlies staffed the hospital; many of them lived in dormitories located above the wards. Red Cross workers also helped staff the hospital and tried to make the children feel at home with treats and gifts, which, for the poorest children, was the stuff of dreams. "This year distributed about 1,000 toys, 500 picture books, 500 sticks of candy, 500 cakes of chocolate"—Elizabeth Gardener, Red Cross social worker.
"Miss Hannah—she was so good—she was a nurse that I can dream about. She'd always bring me a present from New York City when she'd come. I had a doll, and I had some leather gloves. The little ladies in white—we used to call them—they were very nice. I mean, they talked to the children; they stroked their hair and they touched their cheeks and held our hands; they were nice."
No amount of goodwill from the Red Cross, however, could substitute for what the children wanted most: to be with their [Music] parents.
"I was put into a little wagon and pushed across a narrow bridge with windows on each side and taken to the hospital. There I was very frightened, and I was very, very upset not to be with my mother, and I used to think to myself, 'How can I escape?'"
The hospital had four operating rooms and 28 wards, including separate wards for women, men, children, surgical patients, and the [Music] insane. Electrical power was provided by a generating plant on the first, first island. The laundry room staff of 15 workers washed 2,000 to 3,000 sheets and towels a day. A mattress autoclave, a modern marvel at the time, was used to sterilize entire beds.
Medical treatment at the hospital was as advanced as anywhere in the world. The newest antiseptic techniques governed the hospital's operating rooms; doctors and nurses wore rubber gloves, used only sterilized instruments, and applied only disinfected dressings. A fresh can of ether for each operation was mandated, and a nurse maintained an exact count of the antiseptic sponges inserted and removed from the patient during surgery. "A rare variety of diseases is seen—rare tropical diseases, unusual internal disorders, strange skin lesions"—Dr. Alfred Reed.
The hospital's autopsy amphitheater, complete with an eight-cadaver refrigerator, became a renowned teaching hall. Observers included doctors and medical students from Bellevue and other area hospitals. It was not unusual to see European physicians in attendance. "Well, you could see anything under the sun; you could have seen typhus, cholera, hookworm disease. I would submit to you that if you took a list of all the autopsies done at Ellis Island, 1900 to 1930, it would look very similar to the index of a textbook of medicine; you basically saw everything."
For certain diseases like trachoma, the treatment was more medieval than modern; penicillin had not yet been invented, and sulfur compounds were no match for trachoma, a disease which can lead to blindness. Its victims were barred from entry unless cured. Treatment was painful and costly; patients had to pay their own hospital bills, although immigrant aid societies often helped out. The treatment was brutal; the thought was, by these doctors, if you could remove the disease tissue, hopefully healthy tissue would grow back in its place, and so they devised all these treatments that would strip that disease tissue away. One of the most common things to start with was something called copper sulfate, and this would strip that tissue away; it would fall off; it's disgusting, it's gross, and it's painful.
"Yeah, I remember the doctors coming and going, you know; they used to hold my legs and hands to—to treat me with some kind of a blue stone. You know, they didn't have medicine those days, not for trachoma. Well, they used to use silver nitrate and blue stone; they used to rub their lids—turn the lids inside out—and burn. By any stretch of the imagination, it was a horrible, horrible way to go. Now, having said that, Ellis Island probably offered the best care for trachoma in the world at that time because they had so much experience."
Of the 3,500 immigrants who died on Ellis Island, many were children. Few vaccines had been developed, and unlike most of their parents, the children had not developed a natural immunity against childhood diseases. In 1909, for example, one in eight children detained at the Ellis Island Hospital with measles, diphtheria, or scarlet fever did not survive. Those who died of infectious disease were tied up in sheets soaked with disinfectant. Since burial was not allowed on the island, the bodies were stored in the hospital morgue until burial was arranged, often through an aid society, because many of the immigrants had died penniless. Some were buried in pauper's graves on Hart Island or in unmarked graves in local cemeteries like Mount Olivet in [Music] [Music] Queens.
Not all of the patients in the hospital were immigrants. Nineteen-year-old Orman Joseph McDermott was a visitor to America. His initial act of forgetfulness—leaving his passport on board ship—coupled with his questionable employment status led to his detention on Ellis Island for nine days. The young salesman waited in crowded dormitories as authorities sought to verify his position as a sales apprentice rather than a contract laborer. During his detention, McDermott developed the hellish red rash of scarlet [Music] fever. When he was admitted to the contagious disease hospital on February 25th, 1921, his temperature was 105°, and his heart was beating 150 times a minute. McDermott's medical record, one of the few left from the hospital archives, shows the limits of early 20th-century medicine. Lucy Simpson, his public health nurse, could do little more than comfort him with aspirin and swab his throat with antiseptic. "Patient in mild delirium all day; has to be watched closely; condition very poor; pulse weak."
The pain and suffering that he must have gone through—a young man, 19, so far, far from home, so far from his family, all alone in a strange country, and so very, very sick—it broke my heart. "Patient's mind is wandering; he's restless and wants to see his friend; heart rate rapid; rash is spreading; given digitalis and camphor oil; died March 2nd, 12:25 a.m." [Music]
"It's a retrospective diagnosis, but what I suspect happened is that the strep, which were still in his body—there were no antibiotics to wipe it out—had secreted this toxin; it circulated; he probably developed either pneumonia and/or heart disease; he couldn't breathe very well, and he died. This was not—sadly, this was not an uncommon result of scarlet fever back then."
Ellis Island was a place of great happiness and great sorrow. The coming together of families that had been separated for years was marvelous to see. Unfortunately, times did occur when a family had to be separated because of deportation or—then [Music] then you wish you were somewhere [Music] else.
"The old cry, 'America is the asylum of the oppressed of the world,' is too threadbare to withstand the assaults of disease. At any rate, there exists no reason why the United States should become the hospital of the nations of the earth"—Terence Powderly, Commissioner General of Immigration.
Barely more than a decade after it opened, the Ellis Island Hospital became entangled in the politics of immigration. The rapid industrial expansion that had fueled demand for labor was slowing, and heavy concentrations of new immigrants were straining the capacity of local governments and schools. In 1909, President William Howard Taft persuaded William Williams, a fellow Yale man, to return to Ellis Island for a second term as commissioner. The previous commissioner, Robert Watchorn, a former immigrant, had overseen the arrival of a record number of newcomers. William Williams vowed to tighten the standards for entry, and he made it clear that he felt that certain persons from Western and Northern Europe would be easier in assimilating into American culture as a whole, while it was more difficult, he felt, for others. And, of course, he—he had a strict policy; he was very honest and very fair-minded, but he definitely had a bias against Eastern European and Southern Europeans and others. "Now is the time to take greater precautions to differentiate between the good and the bad immigrant"—William Williams.
Commissioner Williams noted with satisfaction that the review boards were now excluding a great deal of the riffraff and scum which is constantly seeking to enter. [Music]
Many people who were coming overseas to the United States were impoverished; were very likely to be have some contact or affiliation with an infectious disease. And, of course, people who were not just afraid of the immigrant menace—and there were many people who were afraid of immigrants and what they would do to the social and economic health of the United States—but there were many concerned citizens who were just concerned about public health. When immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe began to outnumber those from Northern Europe, more restrictions aimed mainly at Jews, Slavs, and Italians were imposed. Many members of Congress endorsed the theory of eugenics, claiming that the American gene pool was being weakened by the newcomers. In Congressional testimony, William Williams argued for expanding the list of medical exclusions. The testing for mental illness was where assumptions about the immigrants merged with the limits of medical knowledge to form an ugly chapter in the hospital's history. Federal law prohibited the admission of the feeble-minded, a term that applied to a wide array of symptoms. Thousands of hopeful arrivals, mostly of Southern and Eastern European origin, were diagnosed as mentally unfit and denied entry.
These types of mental exams were promoted by the political elite and a particular strand of the scientific and medical community that had become very concerned that immigrants from these Eastern European countries were simply inferior, physically and genetically, to what they called Native Americans. There was a great deal of nativism in the United States, a great deal of anti-immigrant feeling, and one of the charges that nativists often made was that immigrants were of an inferior emotional and mental stock; they were enfeebled and bringing their enfeeblement to the United States. "There are today in the public schools of New York many children of immigrants who are feeble-minded or mentally backward, and one reason is that they arrived very young"—William Williams.
Ashland Commissioner of Immigration, William Williams, was interested in Eugenics, the emerging theory that held that Society was no stronger than its gene pool. Henry H. Goddard, one of America's best-known psychologists, believed that intelligence tests developed by France's Alfred Binet could be used to identify the mentally defective. Goddard was the first to translate Binet's test into English and the first to adapt it to mental health. He devised the terms "[__]", imbecile, and idiot to describe mental deficiency.
Goddard's work caught the attention of Commissioner Williams, who hired him to test arriving immigrants. Goddard suspected that certain ethnic groups were less intelligent than others, but his testing did not fully support his suspicion. So, he adjusted the results. Goddard claimed that roughly 80% of the tested Italians, Eastern European Jews, and Russians were mentally deficient, a claim aired in Congress, bolstering the arguments of those who wanted to keep them out of the country. Now, he was not persuaded by the data he had collected, and he did something that perhaps no medical scientist, uh, no scientist of any kind should do: he corrected his results with a pencil, uh, rather than questioning and retesting and doing all the things he might have done. And so his data, which was flawed, was published, and it created quite a stir.
Goddard's test was not the only basis for identifying feeble-mindedness. Facial appearance was also used, and every effort was made to pick out those whose appearance even remotely suggests the existence of mental disease or the possession of a psychopathic organization. Dr. Thomas Salmon: "Facial expression is a very valuable aid. Individuals possessing dull, stupid, indifferent, and apathetic countenances devoid of expression should be investigated more thoroughly for feeble-mindedness." Dr. Howard Knox: "Looking at both photographs and the writings, the terms used are so dated, and they, for the most part, create an immediate negative reaction on the part of myself and others of our time: feeble-minded, imbecile, uh, insane, idiot, um, these were operative terms at the time, uh, in a rudimentary science was trying to distinguish, uh, between normal and abnormal and various levels of abnormality, but to, uh, develop diagnostic criteria and say this is this type of mental defect and this is that type based on a facial characteristic strikes me as a, as an early science trying to find its footing."
Belief in Eugenics was not confined to people like Goddard or the politicians who exploited his findings. Senior Public Health Service Physicians, including some at Ellis Island, supported the Eugenics movement and had no hesitancy in fingering the ethnic groups they deemed inferior. However, other Ellis Island psychiatrists, including Howard Knox and Eugene Mullen, had doubts about Goddard's methods and devised other ways to test mental capacity. Mental examinations of immigrants were usually done in a quiet room, mostly with a board test, putting blocks back together, and the Knox Cube test—block and puzzle tests enabled some immigrants to pass the mental screening. But the Eugenics movement was entrenched at Ellis Island. Questionable mental health practices continued. Hospital records include a request for one set of anthropometric instruments consisting of three metal calipers, which were used to measure the circumference of immigrants' heads, and they made extensive notations by race and ethnic background. And, uh, this was, uh, something that had that interested the immigration service and interested Congress at a great, uh, great level because they did think, you know, they began to wonder what is the future of America, what will happen to this country. Actually, Eugenics did affect the laws and closing the open [Music] door.
We were tested, and my father, he got through his tests, okay, and Mother and I, we got through our tests. We were all ready to land, but they found faults with my sister. They said that her eyes were weak. They said that she had eye trouble, and then also from her crying and being so nervous all the time, they declared her that she was intellectually subnormal. Before the psychopathic Pavilion was built, the Ellis Island Hospital had no special facility for those suspected of mental illness. They were housed side by side in the hospital wards with the physically ill. The limits of this arrangement were exposed in 1906 when two psychiatric patients committed suicide. He became so obstreperous as to render it necessary to lock him in one of the cells where he succeeded in grasping an electric light wire with which he strangled himself. Had we had the proper accommodation, neither of these suicides would have been possible. Red Cross narrative report.
In the first decades of the 20th century, psychiatric treatment often took the form of restraints, locked wards, and straight jackets at Ellis Island. These devices were employed, but so too were more humane methods. Most of the patients in the psychopathic Hospital were housed in open wards. When the psychiatric staff was offered a wire-encased Maniac bed by its Austrian inventor, Chief Medical Officer C.H. Lavender replied, "There is no desire to make a trial of it at this institution." Well, there was very little treatment. I mean, the Psychiatry as we call it today was really at its beginnings at that point of time. There have been mentally ill people probably since there had been people, but what we could do for them was rather poultry. So they could diagnose these people perhaps, but there wasn't a lot you could really do for someone with, say, schizophrenia or terrible depression or bipolar disease, or no drugs or no medications and so on. But what the doctors really tried to do is make the hospital open and airy, uh, attractive, a pleasant place to be, and they worked very hard to try to gain the trust of these people who were alienated on so many levels. My aunt was coming here, hopefully to live here forever. She told my parents and her husband that when it came her turn to be questioned, they asked her how many feet does a horse have, and she thought he was making a fool of her, that that was a stupid question, and she was detained on Ellis Island.
As a child, Leah Shane had visited her Aunt Pearl Yablonski while she was detained in the psychopathic Hospital. Seven decades later, Leah returned to the site, remembering the family's despair when Pearl was deported to her home country, where she would later die in the Holocaust. I remember coming into a long, dark [Music] room. It had very long tables, bare wood. It had wooden benches, not chairs. You heard lots of noise, all kinds of languages. We were all in the same boat. Everybody was miserable. Nobody was [Music] happy. I always suffered greatly when I was assigned to interpret for mental cases in the Ellis Island Hospital. Many of those classified as mental cases were so classified because of ignorance on the part of the immigrants or doctors and the inability of the doctors to understand the particular immigrant's norm or standard. Fella LaGuardia, Ellis Island interpreter.
After Hildegard Hren was diagnosed as feeble-minded, she was deported back to her native Sweden, where she lived out her life separated from her family in America. Her mother's diary told the story of her departure. Then came the day for deportation. When we landed in Borg, we were homeless. We had sold our home and all of our possessions before we left for the U.S. We now live in hope that God will direct us so that our separation with our children in America will not be too long. Ellis Island was called either the island of Hope or the island of tears, but for my family, it was really an island of tears all our lives. It has been… I was astounded to discover that less than 1% in any given year were actually sent back because of a contagious disease. Roughly 2% were sent back for other reasons total, but everybody knew somebody or knew somebody who knew somebody who was sent back, and that scared the living hell out of them. And because of that, it's spread like wildfire that when it's your time to come up, you could be sent back.
Two decades after opening, the hospital on Ellis Island was in decline, not because the facility was outmoded, but because America was closing its borders to immigrants of the kind the hospital served. World War I had intensified Americans' fears of Eastern Europeans, and the Bolshevik Revolution raised fears of all things Russian. In May of 1921, by a vote of 78 to 1, the United States Congress passed the first bill restricting the number of immigrants. Three years later, the National Origins Act was signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge. The nation's door would remain partially open to certain Northern Europeans, largely closed to Southern and Eastern Europeans, and slammed shut on Asians. That same year, President Coolidge dedicated the Statue of Liberty as a National Monument, saying without a hint of irony that people who do not want to be partakers of the American Spirit ought not to settle in [Music] America.
In addition to restricting immigration, the 1924 legislation forced immigrants to undergo physical examinations at U.S. consulates abroad. Henceforth, the weak and the sick would not be allowed to board ship to America. The hospital complex retained some signs of life. The FBI had an office there in the 1930s. During World War II, disabled American servicemen were housed there, as were some German and Italian prisoners of war. In 1954, however, the complex's last occupant, the U.S. Coast Guard, shut down operations, and the complex was left to ruin.
At the Ellis Island Hospital, thousands died, hundreds were born, and tens of thousands gained the health they needed to enter America. The hospital was a place where America's ideals were tested, and a new policy called public health was implemented. No major epidemic can be traced to an immigrant who entered America after treatment in the hospital. The Ellis Island Hospital was not immune from restrictionist fever; the Eugenics program is proof of that. Yet, nine of every 10 patients held at the hospital were cured and were freed to become citizens. For them, it would always be a special [Music] place. And so, when we think of Ellis Island as this Monument to the masses, we might take a look at those hospitals; we might revisit those hospitals, uh, and see them as part of this Monument, as part of this tribute, uh, to all those who came to this country, who brought their efforts and their energies and their talents and, uh, and their culture and contributed to our society. Not all of them passed through the process easily; many of them ended up in the hospital on Ellis Island. And so, for them, their first taste of American life and their first experience with Americans was the experience of care and compassion. To those who went through it, it was one of the most precious gifts that they were ever given because when you were sick, you can't do anything about it, but here was a place that rescued you, that made you feel good, that you were still being cared for, and in a strange place thousands of miles away. So people can never say that, uh, that America isn't the place of compassion and understanding because they certainly proved it there. [Music] [Applause] [Music]