Or prospective Americans such as those depicted below, the view of the Statue of Liberty was cause for jubilation. Next to this symbol of hope, however, lay Ellis Island, the receiving station where immigrants' aspirations might yet be dashed.
Having docked at Hudson River Pier, passengers boarded a ferry to Ellis island. In the depot's reception hall, their generally meager baggage was held while they were shepherded upstairs to the Registry Hall. There they faced a two-tier inspection designed to determine their eligibility for citizenship. Asked to wait in a labyrinth of pens and gangways, they underwent a thorough medical examination before a registration inspector interviewed them about their occupation, solvency, and politics. Most immigrants were processed in less than a day and were ferried to Manhattan; others were held longer as their status was investigated; and a few—mainly paupers and criminals—were deported.
Since its opening in 1892, Ellis Island had been the filter through which 70 percent of immigrants passed before embarking on their new lives. After the peak years at the beginning of the century, the gates to the New World narrowed with each new piece of legislation. And after quotas set drastic curbs on immigration in 1921 and 1924, the flood of humanity passing through Ellis island dwindled to a trickle.
An Albanian woman wears national garb.
Fatigue hoods an Armenian Jew's eyes. Age seams a Czech woman's face.
Laden with baggage, an Italian family leaves the ferry that has carried them to Ellis Island. Apprehension that they might fail the subsequent medical examination and be deported led many immigrants to dub the place "Heartbreak Island."
During the early years of the century, a kaleidoscope of hopefuls reached the new shore, increasingly coming from troubled lands in southern and eastern Europe. Later legislation, however, limited annual entry to two percent of ethnic stocks already present in 1890.
A uniformed inspector carefully examines the eyes of a would-be American citizen. At the ports of departure, immigrants were issued a certificate of good health. Even so, on arrival in America, they had to undergo a rigorous medical examination for communicable diseases. Trachoma, a blinding ailment, was one of the most common reasons for medical detention.
Travel-weary immigrants crowd the iron pens of Ellis Island's cavernous Registry Hall following a mental-health inspection. Legislation passed in 1907 forbade the entry of those with mental deficiencies that might prevent them from earning a living.
Standing at the remote testing ground of Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina, aviation pioneer Wilbur Wright looks on as his brother Orville makes history in the world's first manned, powered, and sustained flight. The ingredients for flight—advances in aerodynamics, structural engineering, fuel technology, and engine development—were already in existence. It remained only for the Wright brothers to combine them in a practical machine. Years spent watching the flight of birds and hundreds of experiments with gliders culminated on December 17, 1903, when the Wrights' biplane, powered by a lightweight engine and propellers, took to the air and traveled 852 feet in fifty-nine seconds.
That hardly any part of the body politic seemed clear. It flowed out of politics into vice and crime, out of politics into business, and back again into politics. ... A system is in control of the land.
Some muckrakers turned their attentions to specific industries. Journalist Ida Tarbell compiled a three-volume history of Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company, a well-documented dossier of double-dealing, chicanery, and strong-arm tactics. The appalling lack of sanitation and horrendous working conditions in the Chicago meatpacking industry, exposed in The Jungle, a novel by Upton Sinclair, nauseated the American public and inspired the United States Congress to draft a stringent Pure Food and Drug Act.
Into this bracing political climate came the youngest American president to date. Theodore Roosevelt was six weeks short of his forty-third birthday when he took the oath of office. His admirers extolled his vigor, bravado, and progressive zeal: No leader was better suited to steer the country into the dawning century. Others were less enthusiastic. Mark Hanna, national chairman of Roosevelt's own party, made no secret of his dismay: "Now that damned cowboy is in the White House!"
The tag of cowboy might have seemed incongruous for the Harvard-educated scion of one of New York State's wealthy old Dutch families. But Roosevelt had overcome a sickly childhood to become a robust, sports-loving outdoorsman. Shortly after graduation, he had used a portion of his inherited riches to purchase a ranch in the wild northern territory of the Dakotas. At first, his cowhands had mocked his eastern accent and patrician style, but soon realized that their boss, working alongside them in all weather on the range, was no mere city slicker. "He wasn't a purty
Soaring almost 800 feet high, the Woolworth Building dwarfs its Manhattan neighbors. Completed by architect Cass Gilbert in 1913 as the headquarters for Frank W. Woolworth's chain-store empire, the Gothic-style Cathedral of Commerce, as it was later nicknamed, remained for seventeen years the tallest structure In the world. What made the time ripe for building such an edifice was the availability of inexpensive steel for girders and other structural elements, and newly efficient elevators for whisking the occupants up and down.
Rider, but he was a hell of a good rider," acknowledged one of his cowboys.
The demands of ranching consumed only a fraction of Roosevelt's prodigious energy. He carved out a career as a writer and historian—indeed, he had completed his first published work, a history of the War of 1812, while still an undergraduate. Biographies, narratives of hunting trips and cowboy life, and a best-selling account of the conquest of the American West flowed from his pen. Yet his principal passion was politics. In 1882, at the age of twenty-three, he was elected to the New York State legislature, where he rapidly made his mark as a reformer, sponsoring or supporting bills for factory safety and improved working conditions.
Moving from the legislature into a series of appointed posts, as head of the Civil Service Commission and president of the New York Board of Police Commissioners, he gained a reputation as an enemy of all forms of corruption and an advocate of fair-employment practices. He swept away the old system of distributing plum jobs to political cronies and the party faithful, in favor of a system of examinations for public posts. As a dedicated supporter of women's rights, he opened to female applicants a range of civil-service occupations previously limited to men. In 1897, he was brought into the federal government as assistant secretary of the U. S. Navy, just in time for a pugnacious episode that would turn him into a national hero.
Tensions were mounting in the Caribbean, as relations between the United States and Spain, the region's dominant imperial power, rapidly deteriorated. The main bone of contention was the sugar-growing island of Cuba. For 400 years, it had been a Spanish colony, part of a once-large empire in the Americas and the Pacific Ocean, but a growing independence movement now sought to throw off the imperial yoke. In the United States, public opinion—fueled by a campaign in the popular press— was firmly in favor of a Spanish withdrawal. Spanish rule had been harsh, but American support for a Cuban revolution was not founded solely on humanitarian grounds. The United States had invested heavily in the island's economy, and a free Cuba made good financial sense to its northern backers.
An opportunity to safeguard that investment came on February 15, 1898. While paying an allegedly friendly visit to Cuba's harbor capital, Havana, the battleship USS Maine blew up, with the loss of 266 men. The cause of the explosion was never ascertained, but a U. S. Navy court of inquiry was quick to pin the blame on a Spanish mine, and in mid-April, the United States went to war. A naval blockade was set up to help the Cuban insurgents, and preparations were made for the landing of U. S. troops. A decisive victory for the invaders in July, at the battle of San Juan Hill, was accompanied by the defeat of Spain's two flotillas off the port of Santiago de Cuba and near the Philippine capital of Manila, and within four months, the fighting was over. It had been, in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, "a splendid little war."
And much of the splendor rubbed off on Roosevelt himself, who, inspired by the Cuban cause, had resigned his post at the Navy Department and handpicked a volunteer regiment of cavalry, known as the Rough Riders. This valiant but unconventional band of Dakota cowboys, American Indians, New York City mounted policemen, and college football stars fought its way to fame and victory at the battle of San Juan Hill. The actual winning of the war may have had more to do with the strength of the U. S. Navy than with military action on Cuban soil, but in the minds of the American public, "Teddy" and his Rough Riders were the heroes of the hour.
In 1898, Roosevelt was elected governor of New York State. He remained in office scarcely a year before answering his party's call to serve as President McKinley's
Caribbean Sea
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