Liberty, resplendent in her greenish hues and holding her torch aloft, was the first thing thousands of Old Worlders saw as their immigrant ships drew into New York harbour.
But perhaps a more eloquent monument to this youthful new nation was the collection of buildings at Ellis Island in upper New York Bay, near the New Jersey shore.
This year, of course, we are still commemorating "An Gorta Mhor", 150 years ago, the great calamity which prompted the scattering, the migration, the diaspora. Diaspora is a good word - a word appropriated, not unfairly, from the Jews, then also stateless, whose own exodus to the US, via Ellis Island, occurred a few decades later.
It is also a full century since a fire destroyed the island's original wooden receiving station, built five years before. The construction of the stone and redbrick building which stands there today began in 1897 and finished three years later. This institution bore testimony to the very best and worst aspects of the nation in whose name it was built. And no retrospective glances at our own diaspora should omit Ellis Island, for millions of Irish the gateway to the New World.
The New York Times of December 31st, 1892 described its opening: "There were three big steamships in the harbour waiting to land their passengers and there was much anxiety among the newcomers to be the first landed at the new station. The honour was reserved for a little rosy-cheeked Irish girl. She was Annie Moore, 15 years of age, lately a resident of Co Cork and yesterday one of 148 steerage passengers landed from the steamship Nevada . . . When the little voyager had been registered, Colonel Weber [the commissioner] presented her with a $10 gold piece and made a short address of welcome. It was the first United States coin she had ever seen and the largest sum of money she had ever possessed . . ."
Deluge of immigrants
The eastern cities of America experienced their first major immigrant deluge during the 1845-51 Famine, when approximately 1.5 million Irish crossed the Atlantic to the United States or British North America (Canada).
During "Black '47" alone, when 214,000 people left Ireland, 30 per cent of those bound for Canada died; the figure for the US was around nine per cent. Public outcry in America led to a tightening of regulations surrounding immigration and the opening, in 1885, of a receiving station at Castle Garden, on the southern tip of Manhattan island.
For a while the place functioned well, especially as immigration slackened around the Civil War years. But by the 1880s, as German-Irish entrants came to be replaced by newcomers from Sicily, Calabria, Austro-Hungary and Russia, public opinion regarding America's "open door" policy became demonstrably less hospitable. New York newspapers, among them Joseph Pulitzer's The World, ran articles lambasting the declining conditions at Castle Garden and in 1888, Congressman Melbourne Ford of Michigan visited the station and found it to be hopelessly inadequate.
In April 1890 Treasury Secretary William Windon announced that responsibility for immigration was to be taken from the city of New York and placed with the federal government. A new station costing $500,000 would be opened at a converted munitions dump on Ellis Island.
Herded through
Would-be Americans disembarking from the ships now entered a cavernous registration hall, to be herded through a maize of aisles, awaiting their turn to meet the registry officer. If they failed the initial examination, they were placed in an enclosure which, depending on the severity of their problem, meant quarantine or the boat home. Those who passed were waved through to the information bureaus, ticket offices or money exchange counters, depending on whether or not they planned to stay in New York.
However, in the 1890s, considerable corruption existed on Ellis Island. Employees frequently cheated the arrivals on money exchanges or overcharged them for food and accommodation. In June 1900, 11 such members of the station staff were sacked.
The advent of Theodore Roosevelt's administration saw Frank Sargent replace the lacklustre Terence Powderly as commissioner of the Bureau of Immigration in Washington. Edward McSweeney, the littleliked commissioner of Ellis Island, was similarly replaced by an idealistic New York lawyer named William Williams. Williams, who served from 1902 to 1905 and again from 1909 to 1913, strove to eradicate corruption among the island staff. President Roosevelt himself even made a surprise visit to Ellis Island on September 1903, personally intervening to secure the release of a female immigrant and her four children, who had been held there for two months. But for all his reforming zeal, Williams was a man who favoured tighter control of immigration.
The river of humanity passing through Ellis Island dwindled rapidly after the Great War and into the 1920s, as Congress imposed the proviso that visas be obtained in the home countries. By this time, there had also been a plethora of deportations. The various "red scares" of the 1920s saw hundreds of radicals, socialists and Marxists expelled such as Emma Goldman, the anarchist arrested in 1916 for distributing birth control information.
Class system
Ellis Island lives in the memory of Middle America, epitomising the good and ill inherent in its character. The very nature of the institution bore witness to America's class system, by which a first- or second-class ticket on an ocean-liner, something well beyond the pockets of most travellers, entailed ensured only a brief on-ship inspection. And the monolithic skyline of New York, seen beyond the island's horizon, belied the multi-ethnic reality of the city, where the immigrant communities built their ghettoes, separated by walls of racism and animosity: the Jews in Manhattan's Lower East Side, Italians in Mulberry Street and Little Italy, Irish in Brooklyn and Queens.
Whatever about Liberty, as symbolised by the great green girl glimpsed by "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses", equality and fraternity were a long time coming for most of the ancestors of four out of every 10 Americans alive today.