Revenge at Ellis Island

Under the law some 347 Italian and German opera singers, businessmen, musicians and plain citizens were snatched off ships and planes arriving last week in New York, and packed off behind the wire fences of Ellis Island. There they were 800 yards from the Statue of Liberty, and a good deal farther from the land they had hopefully come to see. They were among the first victims of the new restrictions on immigration in the Communist-control bill passed by the Congress over Harry Truman's veto. Italy was outraged; Western Germany was hurt. Both sent protests to Secretary of State Dean Acheson.

The Letter. Harry Truman had warned Congress of just such trouble. Congress had ignored him, overridden his veto by humiliating majorities. Now Harry Truman was gleefully proving his point by enforcing the law to the letter.

The letter of the law did not give much choice. It banned any alien who "at any time" had been "affiliated" with any "section, branch, affiliate, or subdivision" of any "totalitarian party." Under Hitler, nearly every youth was forced to join one or another of the Hitler Youth organizations; nearly every man who worked for a living had to belong to a Nazi-dominated labor union. In Italy, every school was a Fascist school. Officials estimated that the new law would exclude 90% of all Germans, more than half of all Italians. It would bar all repentant Communists, interfere with trade with Yugoslavia, exclude many of the 55,000 German refugees from East Europe, whose admission Congress had just authorized last June.

Republicans cried that Harry Truman was trying to discredit the whole law. The law provided, they pointed out, that the Attorney General might admit aliens temporarily at his own discretion. But the law also specified that he had to make a full report to Congress on each case every time he did so--and no Attorney General was likely to leave himself open to criticism when rigorous enforcement would save him the trouble.

The Uproar. Last week this policy was creating a very satisfactory uproar. As ship after ship steamed into New York harbor, immigration authorities seized one distinguished victim after another. There was Friedrich Gulda, a talented 20-year-old Austrian pianist who had come to give a concert in Carnegie Hall (Gulda had been required to join a Nazi youth group at the age of ten). Famed Conductor Victor de Sabata, who conducted at Tanglewood earlier this year and was coming again as guest conductor for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, had conducted Milan's La Scala orchestra during the Mussolini regime. A German war bride of Philadelphia, returning from a visit to her mother in Germany, was detained because she had belonged to a Hitler youth organization in her teens. The Metropolitan Opera's mezzo-soprano, Fedora Barbieri, was held (she went to a Fascist school).

The Metropolitan was also worried about one of its star sopranos, Ljuba Welitch. She probably joined the German Labor Front, observed Director Rudolf Bing sadly. "You either joined or you didn't sing," he explained. Arturo Toscanini was waved in though technically he too was suspicious: during Il Duce's regime, he had led an Italian orchestra, once ran for the Italian Senate with Mussolini on the Socialist ticket in 1919. Obviously the Attorney General felt he could make an exception of Toscanini.

Outcries. Most visitors were admitted after a couple of days for a temporary stay. At week's end, with 131 aliens still in custody, the State Department stemmed the flood by canceling temporarily all U.S. visas all over the world. U.S. consulates were swamped with travelers trying to get a new visa under the new rules; many simply canceled passage. In Europe, the Communist press happily crowed about "American political racism" and referred to Ellis Island as "that well-known concentration camp."

There were other problems still unsettled. In Congress, Nevada's Senator McCarran who sponsored the new immigration rules was the bright, particular friend of Spain's Franco; but weren't Spanish Falangists excluded by the act's language? Obviously they were, and presumably if any turned up they could be hustled off to Ellis Island. And what of followers of the Dominican Republic's Dictator Trujillo, or of any of the other Latin American Good Neighbors who had lived under military juntas and strong-man machines during the recent past?

State was considering making a distinction between "nominal" and "undeniable" totalitarian governments. No one had yet grappled with another provision of the law: a requirement that the Attorney General round up and deport all aliens now in the country who cannot qualify under the law. Throwing in the sponge, the Republican New York Herald Tribune admitted sadly: "This newspaper sees no alternative save to grant the President his revenge and insist on amendment of the worst features of the law as soon as the extra session reconvenes."

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