NOBODY GOES THERE

The Indians called it Island of Gulls. In the days of Peter Stuyvesant, it was Oyster Island, a romantic picnic spot of green meadows. Later, it became Gibbet Island, where curious crowds lined the shores in small boats to watch the hangings of pirates. In the 1920s, an Italian writer named it Isle of Tears, while many knew it only as the Island of Detention. Officially, it still bears the name of the merchant who owned it briefly in the late 1700s, Sam Ellis. In 1956, the United States government put Ellis Island up for sale. A New York builder offered $200,000 with a plan to turn it into a lavish resort. A nonprofit organization for the treatment of dope addicts bid $24.12 in beads and cloth. One corporation bid a nickel. But private interests were not to have what belonged to the nation. For on May 11th, 1965, a presidential proclamation decreed Ellis Island an historic national shrine. On the eve of the 20th century, a 50-man crew wrenched the levers and roused the generators of its new power station. It was the era of the great migration. A relentless stream of humanity pouring in from Europe to the United States until the outbreak of the First World War. There were no quotas then, no visas, no passports. The golden door was wide open, and Ellis Island was the gateway. Irish, Russians, Poles, Italians, Germans, Czechs, English, Romanians, Scandinavians, sometimes 5,000 a day, shambled past the inspectors for a full view, an eye exam, and a 2-minute oral quiz. Then all were tagged and herded onto the ferry for the mainland. Rarely was anyone detained or deported. For we were growing then. We were still building our nation of immigrants. But after the war, increasingly selective laws transfigured the gateway into a fine-meshed sieve, into island of scrutiny. What is your profession? Where did you get your job training? How much money do you have? You are nearsighted. What would you do if you broke your spectacles? You could not see, could not earn a living. The law is very explicit. You are held pending decision by the Board of Special Inquiry. Take off your hat and gloves. Show your hands. Inspector had to make sure that hair was free from lice, that hands were not paralyzed or artificial, or that a watery eye was not evidence of trachoma, for the threat of epidemic was constant. Six wards in the hospital section were crammed with cases of smallpox and typhus, cholera, and even plague. Corridors were alive with cockroaches and mice. But conditions were not so much the result of neglect or cruelty as the inevitable refuse of vast numbers democratically herded together. The educated with the simple, the civilized with the semi-barbaric. Everyone waited at Ellis Island. At night, they waited in cots piled one above the other. The dormitories were locked. And from time to time, a guard peered through a grating in the ceiling overhead. The smell and the filth, the questions and the commands, these were sufferable. The real anguish of Ellis Island was a mental anguish, suspense and forced idleness its greatest ordeals. One was treated in a necessarily formal way. There was no conscious insult, but neither the faintest whisper of welcome. With clean dispatch, the laws facilitated what an Irish poet called organized charity, scrimped and iced in the name of a cautious, statistical Christ. Statistics, of the 42 million people who have migrated to the new world since 1607, 30 million have passed through Ellis Island. Today, nobody goes there except the watchman brought by a Coast Guard cutter from the mainland. Monday through Friday, 9:00 to 5:00, he guards the ghosts. Tomorrow, the bulldozers and steam shovels will come to Sam Ellis's Island, and it will change for the last time. The day after tomorrow, sightseers and tourists will visit the immigrant museum and stroll on landscaped lawns. Once again, people from all over the world will come carrying cameras instead of hand-tied bundles and straw suitcases, drawn there by curiosity instead of hope.