Kirkus Review
A sweeping history of "the place where the United States worked out its extraordinary national debate over immigration for over three decades." Approximately 12 million immigrants passed through Ellis Island from 1892 to 1924, writes Cannato (History/Univ. of Massachusetts, Boston; The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York, 2001). The last immigrant was processed there in 1954, and Ellis Island is now a national monument. The author reaches back to the island's beginnings in the early 19th century, when, then named Gibbet Island, it served as a venue for hanging convicted pirates. Cannato then chronicles the many different peopleimmigrants, immigration officials, politicians and otherswho made Ellis Island what it was in the early 20th century, delving into the stories of several important individuals lost to mainstream history. These include Prescott Farnsworth Hall, founder of the 19th-century Immigration Restriction League, and Louis Post, who, as acting Secretary of Labor in 1920, prevented the deportation of several individuals during an early Red Scare. Cannato also addresses the long-lasting political debate over immigration in the United States, which was often rooted in economic concerns, particularly during the Depression. In one fascinating section, the author looks at two contradictory 1892 reports, commissioned by Benjamin Harrison's administration, on the plight of Russian Jewish immigrants. One report discussed in detail how the immigrants came to America to flee brutal persecution, while another claimed they were simply paupers and criminals scheming to take jobs away from "native-born" workingmen. Indeed, such bigotry is an unfortunately common theme. Cannato describes an 1896 editorial cartoon that shows the xenophobia that faced new arrivalsa crude sketch of a sickly immigrant carrying baggage marked "Poverty," "Disease," "Superstition" and "Anarchy." Telling details illuminate the vastness of the immigrant experience. So many people came through Ellis Island in 1906, for example, that "it witnessed 327 deaths, 18 births, 2 suicides, and 508 marriages." Ambitious in scope and rooted in solid storytelling. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
While telling a history of the iconic reception facility for immigrants, Cannato emphasizes Ellis Island as the focal point of the administration of American immigration law. The political forces influencing that law supply his narrative's momentum, as he depicts the activities and arguments of immigration advocates, immigration opponents, and, more practically, officials who made on-the-spot decisions. After recounting Congress' creation in 1891 of a federal immigration bureaucracy and its infrastructure on Ellis Island, Cannato expounds on commissioners of the place, their ties to politicians, and their viewpoints on enforcing changes in law that Congress regularly made, culminating in nationality quotas in 1924 that wound down Ellis Island's immigration operations. (It served as a detention center until closing in 1954.) Including many cases of immigrants' lives affected by the Ellis Island processes, Cannato aims to attract those whose ancestors went through Ellis Island, and his carefulness to be historian and not judge of the segment of the traditional American debate about immigration that Ellis Island represents will enlighten present participants in its politics.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2009 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Using a variety of primary sources, Cannato (The Ungovernable City) describes Ellis Island as a place and as an experience for the approximately 12 million immigrants who passed through it from 1892 to 1924. He follows its reincarnation as a detention center for wartime aliens and as a monument and museum, which he admits may celebrate uncritically "ethnic triumphalism" and upward mobility. Cannato writes that understaffing resulted in only perfunctory screening for mental, physical, and moral traits that might have made newcomers public charges, and he disabuses readers of the fallacy that examiners, rather than steamship officials or immigrants bent on assimilation, changed entrants' last names. With a focus on how "actual people created, interpreted, and executed immigration laws," Cannato maintains that regulation, which sometimes degraded into restriction, formed part of Progressive era reform and growing federal involvement to safeguard what was deemed the public interest. This measured book helps to place in perspective discussions-sure to matter to genealogists and those engaged in political discourse-of Ellis Island and the idea of immigration as a privilege rather than a right. Essential reading.-Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Library of Congress (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.