From the Every Woman’s Encyclopaedia.

Liane de Pougy

Liane de Pougy was literally a cocotte–and the most infamous in Paris. During France’s Belle Epoque, the highest echelon of courtesans were considered celebrities “as firmly established as the top stars of the theatre.” They were the talk of the town, their bon mots were repeated ad nauseum, and the press recorded their every movement, their gowns, their homes, their scandals, and their lovers–and the public lapped it up.

Born Anne Marie Chassaigne, Liane was, in the light of French romantic cynicism, the perfect courtesan, having been raised in a nunnery and escaping it through marriage to a naval officer (who impregnated her in spite of the impenetrable walls of the convent) at age sixteen. In her memoirs, Liane accused her husband of abuse, and she quickly acquired an aristocratic lover, whose prowess no doubt convinced her of her aptitude for amour. She was found in bed with her marquis, whereupon her husband shot at them both, and Liane quickly skipped off for Paris. After attracting the public’s attention while riding in her lover’s carriage to watch the Grand Prix, the Folies Bergère quickly hired her to headline a short skit which was long on showcasing her beauty and short on any talent she did not possess. Liane cemented her career when the Prince of Wales, who happened to be in Paris the night of her debut, accepted her bold request for him to see her onstage.

Tout Paris (the smartest set) and the public were wild about her, and with Emilienne d’Alencon and La Belle Otero, Liane was part of “Le Grande Trois,” though she was undoubtedly the premiere courtesan of France. She was sought after by the wealthiest and most aristocratic of men–and women, of which Natalie Clifford Barney was her most ardent and scandalous of suitors. After glimpsing Liane at the Folies Bergère, Barney presented herself to Liane in a page costume, announcing that she was a “page of love” sent by Sappho, and though Liane had primarily conducted affairs with men, Natalie’s insouciance charmed her, and their brief relationship was the inspiration for Liane’s 1901 tell-all roman à clef, Idylle Saphique (Sapphic Idyll). The book became the talk of Paris and was reprinted at least 69 times in its first year. “Barney was soon well known as the model for one of the characters. By this time, however, the two had already broken up after quarreling repeatedly over Barney’s desire to ‘rescue’ de Pougy from her life as a courtesan.”

After this, Liane moved easily between the aristocratic lesbian clique in Paris and the high-living, frenetic whirl of Tout Paris, though her vicious feud with Caroline Otero took precedence in the press. Their most infamous encounter occurred at Maxim’s, where Otero contrived to outshine Liane and made a startling entrance wearing an extremely decollete evening gown and every jewel she owned on her body. Liane had been tipped off beforehand, and she entered Maxim’s in a plain white gown and a single diamond drop at her throat. But behind her was a maid bearing a large velvet cushion on which as piled a glittering mound of her entire jewel collection.

Liane found religion in her mid-thirties, and she entered a Dominican order in Lausanne, adopting the name Sister Mary Magdalene of the Penitence. This lasted a short while, however, and she shed her veil and habit for chinchilla and diamonds–though she professed to remain devout, having a copy of The Imitation of Christ by her bedside. In 1920, Liane retired from the life of a grand horizontale forever when she wed the Romanian Prince Ghika, whose parents cut him off without a penny when they heard he was to marry a courtesan. The pair nonetheless remained happy on a country estate, with only a brief hiccup in their union before reuniting to remain together until his death. In her widowhood, Liane rejoined the Dominican order and donned her old name, veil, and habit. She became involved in the Asylum of Saint Agnes, devoted to the care of children with birth defects. Late in life she published a couple of light tales (L’Insaisissable and La Mauvaise part-Myrrhille), and after her death in 1950, her memoirs, Mes cahiers bleus (My Blue Notebooks), were published.

Baltimore: the city’s proximity to Washington meant the elites of both cities mingled frequently, and society comprised natives of Baltimore and relations of Washington elites. Possessing one of the largest populations of African-Americans before and after the Civil War, by the late nineteenth century, Baltimore’s elite society emerged from the free families aligned with the city’s civic, educational, and religious life for generations. Tying the black elite together was the presence of George Murray, who was born free in 1773 and lived until 1890. Those living in Baltimore were rather affluent as well, with a black editor calculating the collective wealth of the elites at approximately $500,000, of which $75,000 was the worth of John Locke, the owner of a hack and funeral business. Others gained their wealth from catering, barbering, hod-carrying, brickmaking, and caulking. The wealth and relative leisure permitted vacations, and the most popular spots were Harper’s Ferry, Cape May, and Arundel-on-the-Bay, later called Highland Beach, which was founded by Frederick Douglass’ son Charles.

Charleston: this was the most aristocratic city of the South for blacks and whites, and most if not all, of the black elites in this city had deep (miscegenation) ties to the white aristocrats. During the antebellum era, they existed in a happy plane below whites but above slaves, and indeed, a number owned slaves themselves. They were the most exclusive of black elite circles, and most considered Charleston society superior to any other city.

New Orleans: As with Charleston, a substantial portion of the black elite traced their lineage to free people of color, but they developed on a completely separate line than Charleston due to New Orleans’ unique history. They “enjoyed more privileges and were more respected by their white neighbors than in any other city in the United States” and were considered, at best, quasi citizens. This situation created a “peculiar social system” wherein “men who elsewhere would be called ‘colored’ because of their known African origins, f[ound] their social business here as Creoles.” Though Jim Crow put a crimp in their antebellum status, they nonetheless prided themselves on their education, their breeding, and wealth.

Philadelphia: The old families of this city contained three distinct components: native Philadelphians, the West-Indian group, and fair-complexion, free-born Southerners who migrated there in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Much of the wealth came from catering, and the most renowned and successful cater was Robert Bogle, whose patrons were esteemed white Philadelphians. Black elites here were closely identified with the abolitionist movement, several benevolent societies, various civic and religious enterprises, and especially the prestigious Banneker Institute. Unlike the cities of the South (as you will see with other Northern cities), the old elite quickly adapted to the influx of educated and skilled blacks who migrated north after Reconstruction, retaining their social prominence by entering the fields of law, medicine, education and business.

New York: the black population in the city was small but elegant. They, like the old Philadelphia aristocracy, were made up of native New Yorkers (many of whom traced their lineage to the days of Dutch settlement), migrants to the city, and West Indian emigres. This elite group was divided in two, with the New York and Brooklyn factions battling for exclusiveness. Brooklyn won out, however, especially after the harsh racial climate after the Draft Riots and the influx of black Southerners after the Civil War. In 1895, the New York Times was moved to note that as soon as black New Yorkers “amass a comfortable fortune, they move across the East River [to Brooklyn]“. Most were of the professional class; caterers, physicians, druggists, and so on, with much of their wealth derived from real estate holdings. On the subject of Harlem, blacks did not begin to move to this area until the late 1900s, and most of the wealthy residents were not of the black elite.

Boston: elite black Bostonians were even more tied to abolitionist circles than in Philadelphia. Though they made up only 2% of the black population of the city, they counted attorneys, physicians, salaried employees, business proprietors, and literary and musical people a part of their small, exclusive circle. Their vocations brought them in contact with upper-class whites more often than lower-class blacks, with many taking part in the city’s civic life (for example, George L. Ruffin, a Harvard-educated lawyer, served as a legislator and city judge). Their circle was difficult to pierce, and Boston’s black elite tended to associate with their white neighbors, they employed white servants, attended a few select churches, and vacationed together at Saratoga and Oak Bluff (Martha’s Vineyard). Unlike any other city, black Brahmins were privileged enough to attend public events such as performances at the Boston Symphony, the opera, celebrations at Harvard, and races at Mystic Park, where a few of their horses won cups.

Chicago: the city was first settled by a black sable trader from Santo Domingo, but the black population didn’t become identifiable until the 1840s, and was made up of escaped slaves and free blacks from the North and the South. Though Chicago had a reputation as a “sinkhole of abolition,” this was not the case for black Chicagoans, who lived beneath a yoke of legal and extralegal discrimination. After the Civil War, blacks in Chicago battled discrimination in housing, employment, and the use of public conveyances, but a black elite nevertheless thrived. A unique feature of black Chicago was its professional tone: society was led by physicians, dentists, druggists, and attorneys. Fannie Barrier Williams was certain that the black aristocracy in Chicago was “better dressed, better housed, and better mannered than almost anywhere in the wide west.” Though education was paramount, wealthy black businessmen were able to join society by the 1920s.

The West: black communities on the West coast remained small until WWI, where in 1900, the combined population of blacks in San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, and Los Angeles numbered but 7,191–less than 1/8th of Philadelphia and less than 1/4th of Chicago. San Francisco was the hub of black elites in the West, and the keyword for telling who was who was the use of the word “pioneer.” Los Angeles’ black population surpassed that of San Francisco’s after 1900, and was marked by the city’s founding by blacks and mulattoes, as well as the vast numbers of professional blacks who migrate to Los Angeles after 1890. Seattle’s black population was very small–406 in 1900–but the wealthy residents were considerably well-to-do, the most comfortable being the Caytons, publishers and editors of the Seattle Republican, who lived in spacious house on Capital Hill, the city’s most exclusive neighborhood, and existed between the black and white worlds. Denver’s population grew from 23 in 1866 to 4000 in 1900, more than one wealthy black family gained prominence after the gold rush.

Further Reading:

Aristocrats of Color by Willard B. Gatewood

Though there were three more expositions of significance by the dawn of WWI (St Louis in 1904, Seattle in 1909, and San Francisco in 1915), the one held in 1900 was unique in that it was the first and last fair to bridge the gap between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This was also the pinnacle of imperialism, and the “nadir of race relations in America.” After witnessing the successful campaign for the inclusion of African-Americans in the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, African-Americans viewed the Paris Exhibition as another avenue to promote the progress of their people in the thirty-five years since the end of slavery. The year before the fair, W.E.B. Du Bois, a noted sociologist and activist for African-Americans, began to collect material for the display, and focused on “creating charts, maps, and graphs recording the growth of population, economic power, and literacy among African Americans in Georgia.” In conjunction with Daniel A.P. Murray, assistant to the Librarian of Congress, Du Bois was able to assemble a large collection of written works, which included a bibliography of 1400 titles, 200 books, and many of the 150 periodicals published by black Americans.

Du Bois stated that the objective of the exhibit was quadruple, and by displaying it he hoped to illustrate “the History of the American Negro, the Present condition of the Negro, the Education of the Negro, and Literature of the Negro.” he project was backed with a $15,000 budget appropriated from the American government and amounted to numerous artifacts, including “musical compositions, books by African American authors, and the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, their award-winning display of photographs, books, models, maps, patents, and plans from several black universities, including Atlanta, Fisk, Howard, Hampton, and Tuskegee, showed the world African Americans “studying, examining, and thinking of their own progress, and prospect.”

One highlight of the exhibit utilized nine model displays to depict the progress of Negroes from slavery to the present day. The models began with the homeless freedman and end[ed] with the modern brick schoolhouse and its teachers. Finally, to illustrate the increase in population of the race and to demonstrate other contributions, there were charts showing population growth, the decline in illiteracy and a record of the more than 350 patents granted to black men since 1834. Du Bois stated, concerning the exhibit “we have thus, it may be seen, an honest, straightforward exhibit of a small nation of people, picturing their life and development without apology or gloss, and above all made by themselves.” As a result of its great success, the Negro Exhibit was awarded with seventeen medals during its time on display at the Paris Exposition. Specifically, it received “two grand prizes, four gold medals, seven silver medals, two bronze medals and two honorable mentions” in the various categories of appraisal.

Further Reading:
About Du Bois and the Paris Exposition
The 1900 Paris Exposition
The Exhibit of American Negroes
W.E.B. Du Bois and the 1900 Paris Exhibition
Africans, Darkies and Negroes: Black Faces at the Pan American Exposition of 1901, Buffalo, New York
A small nation of people: W.E.B. Du Bois and African American portraits of progress from the Library of Congress with essays by David Levering Lewis and Deborah Willis.
The Exhibit Online

Paris under water

One hundred years ago, the “gayest city in the world” was drenched with water. The Seine river had risen many times before, but it had retreated before it could do any damage to the “City of Lights.” This changed, however, the morning of January 21st, 1910. The following is an eyewitness account of the flood, courtesy of Esther Singleton’s The World’s Greatest Events, v 9:

AT TEN minutes to eleven on the morning of Friday, January 21, 1910, almost the very hour at which on another January 21 Louis XVI. mounted the scaffold, the power station from which all the public clocks of Paris are worked by compressed air was flooded by the Seine; all the clocks stopped simultaneously with military exactitude, and with a start of surprise Parisians began to realize that the Seine in flood was not a harmless spectacle that could be watched with the cheerful calm of philosophic detachment, and that the river in revolt was an enemy to be feared even by the most civilized city in Europe. Crowds, it is true, had gathered on the embankments, admiring the headlong rush of the silent yellow river that carried with it logs and barrels, broken furniture, the carcasses of animals, and perhaps sometimes a corpse, all racing madly to the sea; they had watched cranes, great piles of stones, and the roofs of sheds emerge for a time from the flooded wharves and then vanish in the swirl of the rising water, while barges and pontoons, generally hidden from sight far below, rose gradually above the level of the streets, notably one great two-storied bathing barge, a vision of unsuspected hideousness, that threatened at any moment, triply moored as it was, to crash into the parapet.

But it was in the order of things that wharves should be flooded; it was sad that the little suburban towns by the river should be swamped, but these incidents could be regarded with altruistic sympathy. The stopping of clocks, however, and the irritating obsession of onze heures moins dix which confronted the Parisian from every street and cafe clock was something new and alarming; with its suggestion that time had stopped dead at the most ill-chosen of moments, this petty but perpetually repeated annoyance was the symbol of all the manifold inconveniences wrought by the flood, the failure of electric light, the disorganization of trams and ‘buses, the bursting of drains and the swamping of houses, and perhaps none of them was more demoralizing.

By the time that Paris woke up to the fact that it was war with water, the most evasive and insidious of enemies, the Seine had made the low-lying suburbs its own. From visits to out-lying districts I retain a vague impression of thick black slime, abject shivering misery and great lakes of yellow water, with here and there the upper story of a house rising like an island from the desolate waste.

From the Ile de la Grande Jatte, where the little restaurants were six feet deep in water, I watched a rescue party row back with difficulty across the river. They had saved a few pathetic sticks of furniture and a great mattress which, as its owner with exultation pointed out to the sympathetic crowd, was perfectly dry. A covered cart was in waiting, but the inside was already full and the mattress was hoisted on to the roof. Alas! for the vanity of human exultation! Hardly had it been tied in place when a storm of torrential rain swept down and drenched the mattress and its poor despairing owner as thoroughly as though they had fallen in the Seine. All the time the Seine was rising remorselessly, and those whose houses were threatened gathered along the banks in the rain, watching the river with the silence of utter dejection, though some of the braver spirits were building walls of masonry across their thresholds— walls over which a few hours later the river had risen.

At Bercy, within the fortifications, the quay was under water. The scene was indescribably desolate: a long row of cheerless houses three feet deep in water, as far as the eye could see; a double row of lighted gas-lamps burning pale and absurd in the gray daylight, because the flood had made it impossible to extinguish them; a punt conveying a workman to his flooded home, poled slowly along by two policemen and bumping monotonously against the poplars and sunken railings; two soldiers on a flimsy raft that the most destitute of mariners would have scorned, steering an erratic course, as one of them paddled desperately with a tin pan; and only one bright touch. From the sixth story of one of the beleaguered houses a scarlet duster shaken by same careful housewife waved defiance to the river.

Parisian life during the Flood

A day or two later the Seine was working havoc. havoc in the very heart of the city. On the left bank the defenses were weakened by the low level railway lines running from the great Orleans terminus of the Quai d’Orsay to the Austerlitz Station and from the Esplanade des Invalides to the Auteuil viaduct. The whole length of these lines was flooded twenty feet deep. The Seine actually flowed through the Orsay terminus as the water poured on to the line higher up the river and then fell back into the Seine through the ventilation shafts of the station, which looked for all the world like a swimming bath. Only the iron gallery, on a level with the entrance from the road, was left unsubmerged; the central depth had been converted into a huge tank of muddy water, while the sightseer looked vainly for the engines and carriages that lay drowned beneath. The unfinished works of the Metropolitan railway, running from north to south, had been converted into a subterranean river at right angles to the Seine two miles long, and were flooding squares and streets a mile away near the Saint Lazare Station.

On the right bank the river was threatened to overflow the embankments, and the problem of defense became a difficult one; for the damage done by the inundation of the Saint Germain quarter by the water from the Orsay Station, and of many streets in the central districts by percolation, would have been nothing to the havoc that would have been wrought by the direct sweep of the Seine over the embankments on the right bank. One of the difficulties of the situation was the Pont de I’Alma, which, with its low arches, was almost submerged, and held back in the center of Paris great masses of water that threatened to sweep over the quays.

Up the Seine on the right bank men were working for dear life by the light of naphtha flares to raise the earthworks along the parapet of the embankment. The Quai de la Conference and the fashionable avenue of Cours la Reine were deep in water, but a thin line of sandbags backed here and there by wooden screens still kept back the surface flood. As the river rose, and it rose eventually over five The seine feet above the level of the embankment, the military engineers raised the height of the barrier, which was half a mile long. That night the water was steadily creeping higher and higher, while a civil engineer, mud-bespattered, with the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor in his button-hole, was standing on the corner of the sandbag bastion by the Pont de la Concorde and measuring its advance. He turned to a stranger beside him and said: “The river is still rising as fast as ever. If the barrier goes, five feet of water will sweep across the Place de la Concorde, the Boulevards—over everywhere,” he added with an expressive gesture, “until it meets the flood that the Metropolitan is pouring out round the Saint Lazare Station.” Then abruptly he turned to a non-commissioned officer awaiting orders behind him: “Give me another tier of sandbags.” Orders were hoarsely shouted, and a crowd of little black figures, each shouldering a sandbag, swarmed like ants along the narrow earthwork, on the one side a few inches above the river, on the other a foot or so above the flood that lay deep on the embankment and on the avenue of Cours la Reine.

Weary as they were, after three days’ unceasing toil, each man swung his sandbag into its place with a will and burst into a soldiers’ chorus that sounded strangely merry amid the desolation around. That night the Quai du Louvre was barred off by the police, and a silent crowd gathered at the barrier, though nothing could be seen, anxious for the safety of the collections that are the pride of France. In the mist the Seine seemed as broad as the Rhine at Cologne, and the eye of fancy could descry Notre Dame between two raging floods, splendid and fearless in the majesty of its builders’ faith. At this point the river flows beneath the Pont des Arts, and as its water poured through the iron supports of the bridge it made the little rippling noise of a hundred small cascades, a sound like malicious laughter even more terrible than its silence.

The roadway along the southern facade of the Louvre was all uneven with the pressure of the overflowing drains beneath it, as though an earthquake had passed, and it sagged down suddenly just beneath the balcony of the splendid Jean-Goujon door. Here out of sight of the anxious crowd there was a scene of feverish activity. Men were tearing up cobbles from the road and building a rough wall across a gap in the parapet, where a flight of steps goes down to the river. There was need of haste; for the water that looked black and stagnant in the glare of the naphtha flares was creeping up apace and licking the lowest tier of cobbles. Others were recklessly digging great holes in the footpath between the poplars, and ramming the earth into bags, or nailing together great pieces of driftwood, fished from the river, to form a screen behind the sandbags on the parapet and hold them against the pressure of the current, while carts kept rumbling in and unloading piles of stone and rubble against the wall and screen. I glanced over the screen that reached my chin, expecting to see the river five feet or so below me, and drew back with a start of alarm when I saw the gleam of water above the stone parapet and realized that it was only held back by the flimsy barrier. A few hours later and the river would have won; all the basements of the Louvre would have been flooded, and the water would have carried ruin across the Rue de Rivoli and Palais Royal.

It was no wonder that a sense of impending disaster hung over Paris; yet there was much in the situation that was simply comic. The special envoys of the King of the Belgians, invited to a lunch at the Foreign Office, were carried there in a large, flat-bottomed boat poled by a couple of watermen. Naval boats of the collapsible Berthon pattern were to be seen on wagons in the Avenue de l’Opera, while bare-footed sailors splashed contentedly in the lake opposite the Saint Lazare Station. At times the incongruity of these things was scarcely realized.

Bridge after bridge was closed to the public as great masses of driftwood that could not be dislodged formed against them, until at one moment traffic was forbidden over all the nine bridges that lie between the Pont Neuf and the Pont de Crenelle. Cabs, carts, and every kind of vehicle concentrated in the unflooded streets, were blocked into a solid mass that surpassed the wildest nightmares of congested traffic. Part of the Place de l’Opera began to collapse, and a cab might take two hours to get from the Opera to the Madeleine, five minutes’ walk. An unreasoning panic seized the cabmen and chauffeurs; they were possessed with the fixed idea that no bridge across the Seine was safe, and no bribe would persuade them to cross the river; while they refused to take fares for even the shortest distance. Men left their homes dry-shod in the morning, and returning from business had to wade up to their knees through unlighted streets or creep perilously along a narrow plank gangway, only to find that it stopped short just where the water was deepest.

One evening I was walking down a street which a few hours before had been thick with traffic. A single cart passed down beside me, and at once, without the slightest warning, the road began to undulate; and the next minute I was in water up to the knees, and one wheel of the cart had sunk through the wood pavement up to the axle. Once wet I plodded on through the water and in the darkness blundered against a plank which formed part of a trestle bridge some five feet from the ground; then climbing up, found myself at a perilous elevation on two exceedingly narrow planks. After cautiously venturing forward some little way, a woman’s shriek sounded so close to me that I almost lost my balance. Then in the obscurity a long row of black figures was discernible all on the bridge and coming in the opposite direction to myself. I succeeded in helping the young woman who had shrieked to pass me; then an elderly business man slipped between the two planks at my feet, and was hauled up with difficulty; then finally there was a crack, a plank broke and some unfortunate person fell flat on his face in two feet of filthy water. At last, somehow or other, I reached higher ground, and found a pathetic group of men and women, lighted by a policeman’s lantern, waiting to take their turn on the remains of the gangway. They were returning to their homes in the street which had been flooded since they went out.

On Saturday, January 29, Paris awoke to a bright sunny morning and the end of its nightmare. Early in the morning crowds gathered along the embankment, no longer murmuring in melancholy chorus, “Qa monte, qa monte” ; but laughing and chattering as they watched with uproarious satisfaction the broadening of the thin dark line which showed that the Seine was no longer rising or stationary, but slowly falling.

Sunshine restored, even in the flooded quarters, the true Parisian gaiety that had for a time been overclouded with a terrible sense of powerlessness and insecurity. The flooded streets were bright and gay in the sunlight, as boats plied to and fro carrying men and women to their work. Every one was good-humored, and even a portly business man swarming down a rope from a first-story window into a police boat, while his wife and children watched his gymnastic prowess with undisguised horror, was laughing heartily, and fully conscious of the humor of the situation. Throughout the day crowds flocked to all the quarters that the river had attacked. To make the scene more gay, soldiers were everywhere, standing on guard at dangerous points or gathered round fires of wood paving blocks and drinking coffee and hot wine. Every one had an air of triumph; for the Seine had at last confessed itself defeated, and it only remained for Paris to show once again its superiority to disaster. In almost every street between Montmartre and the river pumps were hard at work: encouragement came from the news that the Seine was failing to resume what had been before the hopeless task of emptying cellars and basements; there were pumps of every kind, large and small, hand-pumps, smart electric pumps, steam pumps, and monstrous indescribable pieces of machinery that took up half the roadway, obscured the sunshine with clouds of filthy smoke and looked as if they had been rescued from the scrap-heap. Half Paris was in the streets gaping at the excavations, where the water had entangled planks and masonry, s«j>«o< pipes and cables in inextricable confusion and examining the barricades with eager interest while their elders compared them with the barricades of the Commune.

Further Reading:
Flooding in Paris in 1910 – The Guardian
Photos of Paris Flood
Postcard collection of the Paris flood
Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 by Jeffrey H. Jackson
The Knowledge of Water by Sarah Smith (fiction) ****!

To stem the influx of peoples seeking asylum and citizenship, the U.S. Federal Government built Ellis Island Immigrant Station in 1892, about half a mile from the Statue of Liberty, to replace the state-run Castle Garden Immigration Depot (1855–1890) in Manhattan. The first immigrant to pass through the gates of Ellis Island was Annie Moore, a 15 year old from Cork County, Ireland. During that first day, 700 immigrants were processed, and in its first year, Ellis Island processed almost 450,000 immigrants. Disaster struck soon after, for on June 13, 1897, the original wooden structure burned to the ground, destroying all administrative records for Castle Garden, and most of the records for the Barge Office and Ellis facilities. Fortunately, copies of the passenger lists were held by the Customs Collector and abstracts were held in Washington, DC. The station reopened in 1900 and was built of red brick and more importantly, was fireproof. This new building was also much larger in order to accommodate the 5000+ immigrations streaming through the island daily. Immigration peaked in the years leading up to WWI–1907 processed a record of 1,004,756 peoples, and April 17th of 1907 witnessed and all-time daily high of 11,747 immigrants.

The great number of immigrants of the “new immigration” era–that is, emigrants from southern and Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, as opposed to “old immigration” from Western Europe–caused many native-born Americans to grumble that the United States had become a “dumping ground” rather than a “melting pot.” To make matters worse, these immigrants appeared to bring the fears of native-born Americans to fruition: they were dirty, foreign, prone to crime, refused to learn English, practiced weird customs, sent good American money back home rather than spending it in the US, and otherwise wreaked havoc on the sedate, Anglo-Saxon lives of “true Americans.” To combat this, Congress passed a series of immigration laws which at various times excluded, restricted, or refused emigrants from particular countries. In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, and in 1907, the Dillingham Commission tightened the medical requirements for admission, dividing physically and mentally “defective” immigrants into three classes: idiots, imbeciles, epileptics, the feeble-minded, the insane, and those subject to tuberculosis or a dangerous disease. The average wait on Ellis Island was about two to five hours, but for those health inspectors held back, the island became “The Island of Tears” or “Heartbreak Island,” with many spending months in quarantine or held in the detention quarters before the immigration officials rejected their application for entry and deported them back to their homeland.

Medical examination centered on the “line,” which became shorthand for the set of techniques and procedures that medical officers used to examine thousands of immigrants quickly:

After an arriving ship passed the quarantine inspection in New York Harbor, Immigration Service (IS) and United States Public Health Service (PHS) examiners boarded and examined all first- and second-class passengers as the ship proceeded up the harbor. Upon docking, PHS officers transferred steerage or third-class passengers to Ellis Island by barge. Proceeding one after the other and lugging heavy baggage, prospective immigrants entered the station and moved slowly through a series of gated passageways resembling cattle pens. As they reached the end of the line, they slowly filed past one or more PHS officers who, at a glance, surveyed them for a variety of serious and minor diseases and conditions, finally turning back their eyelids with their fingers or a buttonhook to check for trachoma. PHS regulations encouraged officers to place a chalk mark indicating the suspected disease or defect on the clothing of immigrants as they passed through the line: the letters “EX” on the lapel of a coat indicated that the individual should merely be further examined; the letter “C,” that the PHS officer suspected an eye condition; “S” indicated senility; and “X,” insanity.

The procedure was intimidating, and, indeed, between 1891 and 1930 nearly 80,000 immigrants were barred at the nation’s doors for diseases or defects. Yet the vast majority were allowed to enter the country—on average, fewer than 1 percent were ever turned back for medical reasons. Of those who were denied entry, most were certified, not with “loathsome and dangerous contagious diseases,” but with conditions that limited their capacity to perform unskilled labor. Senility (old age), varicose veins, hernias, poor vision, and deformities of the limbs or spine were among the primary causes for exclusion. That so few of the more than 25 million arriving immigrants inspected by the PHS were excluded sets into bold relief the country’s almost insatiable industrial demand for cheap labor.

Immigration through Ellis Island slowly trickled to a halt during World War One, but there was a post-war boom that Congress severely curtailed through a series of immigration acts: the Emergency Quota Act in 1921, followed by the Immigration Act of 1924, which was aimed at further restricting the Southern and Eastern Europeans who had begun to enter the country in large numbers beginning in the 1890s. The latter act placed a quota on European immigration, allowing no more than 2% of the 1890 immigrant stocks into America. In addition, Congress had already passed a literacy act in 1917 to curb the influx of low-skilled immigrants from entering the country.

Despite the laws, the conflict, the harassment and the disappointments many immigrants faced when attempting to enter America, they nonetheless continued to journey to the shores of Ellis Island, weary but rejoicing eyes turned towards the Statue of Liberty and after the installation of the plaque in 1903, its sonnet by Emma Lazarus:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Further Reading:
American Passage: The History of Ellis Island by Vincent J. Cannato
Island Of Hope: The Journey To America And The Ellis Island Experience by Martin Sandler
Forgotten Ellis Island: The Extraordinary Story of America’s Immigrant Hospital by Lorie Conway
On the Trail of the Immigrant‎ by Edward Alfred Steiner
“Immigration and the Public Health,” Popular Science Monthly, October 1913 by Dr Alfred C. Reed
“Going Through Ellis Island,” Popular Science Monthly, October 1913 by Dr Alfred C. Reed

Further Viewing:
Emigrants landing at Ellis Island – 1903
Arrival of Emigrants at Ellis Island – 1906