April 17, 1907: America's Biggest Day for Immigration

Ellis Island

April 17, 1907: The registrars at Ellis Island, the U.S. immigration station in the Hudson River, outside New York City, process 11,747 immigrants. As far as the surviving records can determine, it is the largest number of them in a single day. And 1907 would also be the largest calendar year for them: Over 1 million.

From the 1840s onward, due to the Irish Potato Famine, and the fact that so many jobs similar to the ones they already had were available, such as factory work and coal mining, the largest group of immigrants to America were from the British Isles: England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. By the 1880s, political and religious upheavals in the Russian Empire and Southern Europe sent Jews and Eastern Orthodox Catholics to our shores.

The immigrants from Southern, Mediterranean Europe -- Italy, mostly from Naples on south, and Greece and the various lands that would one day make up Yugoslavia -- were darker-skinned, due to more sunlight, but also due to centuries of intermarrying with Africans from across the Mediterranean.

Anti-immigrant sentiment has been an evil part of American life from the beginning, when those who, ahem, immigrated on the Mayflower in Massachusetts, and on the Susan Constant, the Discovery, and the Godspeed in Virginia, looked down on anyone who came later. It was bad for the Irish, whom English editorial cartoonists often drew as apelike.

But for the darker-skinned ones coming later? In 1896, one New York newspaper writer wrote, "The floodgates are open. The bars are down. The sally-ports are unguarded. The dam is washed away. The sewer is unchoked. Europe is vomiting! In other words, the scum of immigration is viscerating upon our shores." (I have looked for a source for this quote, so I could name and shame its composer, but have been unsuccessful.)

And yet, up until "the valve was shut off" in the 1920s, they kept coming, and the vast majority of people alive in America today are descended from those 1845-1924 immigrants. And they assimilated, becoming fully American, while still maintaining many of the traditions of their homeland.

America has often been called a "melting pot," where all the ingredients disappear and create one flavor. It's also been denied, and more accurately compared to a "stewpot": You can still see the pieces of vegetable and the chunks of meat, but the overall flavor is better than any of those items alone.

Sometimes, the assimilation doesn't take hold with the immigrants, who are too tied culturally to the land they were so desperate to escape -- or, if they were better-off, didn't come out of desperation, but out of a chance to make more money, and thus had more reason to still be what they once were, rather than American. Rather, it's the children who become fully American.

In my hometown in New Jersey, I knew plenty of children of immigrants from India, China and Korea who ended up speaking with a New York accent as strong as those of the 3rd-generation-American (grandchildren of immigrants) Italian and Jewish kids in town -- or even, being that it was the 1980s, talking like "Valley Girls," hearing that kind of talk on TV and in movies and adopting it as their own preferred style, even though California was all the way across the country.

My favorite story of the immigrant experience was of a letter dated August 3, 1903, to a newspaper, the Jewish Daily Forward, which, despite the rising cost of ink and paper, still serves New York's Jewish community today. The author wrote:

It makes sense to teach a child to play chess. What is the point of a crazy game like baseball? Here, in educated America, adults play baseball. They run after a leather ball like children. I want my boy to grow up to be a mensch, not a wild American runner. But he cries his head off!

This letter was quoted in Ken Burns' 1994 Baseball miniseries, read by actor Eli Wallach, who was one of those sons of Jewish immigrants, in his case from a town in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but now, with the changing of borders, in southeastern Poland. Fortunately for Eli, his father quickly took to baseball, and taught his son to love the game, too. The response, by the editor, Abraham Kahane, was read by Alan King, a fellow Brooklynite, whose parents came from Russia proper:

Dear Sir: Let your boy play baseball, and play it well, so long as it does not interfere with his education, or get him in to bad company. Let us not so raise the children that they should grow up foreigners in their own birthplace.

Kahane gave the man the loopholes of education and "bad company." But he had a point: You chose to come to this country. Your son did not. And, given all that is used against immigrants and their children -- especially when race and religion get thrown into the mix -- anything that helps them more feel as though America is their country, too, helps.

UPDATE: In 2025, I finally found a definitive date for one of my ancestors reaching America. On February 25, 1909, on the Laura, Pawel Pachołek, an 18-year-old hatmaker from Borki Wielkie in the northeast of Poland, arrived in New York. Settling in Newark, New Jersey, he slightly anglicized his name to Paul Pacholek. He lived until 1961. I was born 8 years later, his first great-grandchild.

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April 17, 1907 was a Wednesday. These baseball games were played that day:

* The New York Highlanders beat the Philadelphia Athletics, 5-4 at Hilltop Park in Upper Manhattan. The Highlanders, who became the Yankees in 1913, scored 3 runs in the bottom of the 9th to win.

* The New York Giants beat the Brooklyn Superbas, 2-1 in 10 innings at Washington Park in Brooklyn. The Superbas became the Dodgers in 1911.

* The Boston Americans beat the Washington Senators, 2-1 at the Huntington Avenue Grounds in Boston. The Americans became the Red Sox the next year.

* The Boston Doves beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 2-1 at National League Park (later Baker Bowl) in Philadelphia. The Dovey brothers would sell their team to William Russell in 1911, and they became the Boston Rustlers. He soon died, and the team was bought in 1912 by James Gaffney, an official in New York's Tammany Hall political organization, a "Brave," and he renamed them the Boston Braves.

* The Chicago Cubs beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 6-2 at Exposition Park in Pittsburgh. Honus Wagner went 1-for-4 with an RBI.

* The Cincinnati Reds beat the St. Louis Cardinals, 8-3 at The Palace of the Fans in Cincinnati.

* The Chicago White Sox beat the Detroit Tigers, 4-1 at Bennett Park in Detroit. Ty Cobb went 0-for-3 with a walk.

* And the Cleveland Naps beat the St. Louis Browns, 5-2 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis. Napoleon "Nap" Lajoie, the slugger, 2nd baseman and manager for whom the Cleveland team was named, went 2-for-4. The Naps became the Indians in 1915, and the Guardians in 2022. The Browns moved, becoming the Baltimore Orioles in 1954.

March 14, 1891: The New Orleans Lynchings

March 14, 1891: In a disgusting reminder that the already-famous city was a part of the American South, 11 Italian immigrants living in New Orleans are murdered by a mob, for their alleged role in the October 16, 1890 murder of police Chief David Hennessy, after some of them had been acquitted at trial.

Although they were shot, rather than "lynched," a term usually meaning hanging without sanction of the government, it was, and remains, considered the largest single "mass lynching" in American history.

Most of the lynching victims accused in the murder had been rounded up and charged due to their Italian ethnicity. Just as it would take until World War I for America to accept Irish-Americans as "white," so, too, would it take until World War II to accept Italian-Americans as such.

The lynching took place the day after the trial of 9 of the 19 men indicted in Hennessy's murder. Of these defendants, 6 were acquitted, and a mistrial was declared for the remaining 3, because the jury failed to agree on their verdicts.

There was a widespread belief in the city that Italian-American organized crime was responsible for the killing of the police chief, in a period of anti-Italian sentiment and rising crime. Italian-American voters were also known to prefer the scandal-plagued city political machine to the new Mayor, Joseph Shakspeare, a Reform Democrat, whose own role in inciting the violence that followed may well have been an attempt to misuse government power for the repression of his political opponents.

Believing the jury had been fixed by organized crime, a mob broke into the jail where the men were being held, and killed 11 of the prisoners, most by shooting. The mob outside the jail numbered in the thousands, and included some of the city's most prominent citizens.

The incident had serious national repercussions. The Italian consul in New Orleans, Pasquale Corte registered a protest, and left the city in May 1891 at his government's direction. The New York Times published a lengthy statement charging city politicians with responsibility for the lynching of the Italians. Italy cut off diplomatic relations with the United States, sparking rumors of war.

Increased anti-Italian sentiment led to calls for restrictions on immigration. The word "Mafia" entered the American lexicon, and this incident increased awareness of it, establishing it in the popular imagination of Americans.

I had long been under the impression that the word "Mafia" was an anagram, for "Morte alla Francia, Italia anela," is an Italian phrase that translates to "Death to France, Italy cries out." This turned out not to be true. It is now believed that it comes from mafiusu, a word in the Sicilian dialect of Italian, which roughly translated means "swagger," but can also be translated as "boldness" or "bravado." This is a bit ironic, since a big part of "the life" is keeping quiet, so as not to give yourself away, and bravado would tend to do that.

A former ironworker, Joseph Shakspeare (not "Shakespeare") was Mayor of New Orleans twice, from 1880 to 1882, and again from 1888 to 1892. He ran for a 3rd term in 1892, but lost. He died in 1896, only 58 years old, but apparently from natural causes.

The "lynchings" led to the establishment of Columbus Day as a holiday, to honor Italian-Americans. In 1892, for the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's voyage, President Benjamin Harrison declared Columbus Day as a one-time national celebration. The proclamation was part of a wider effort after the lynching incident to placate Italian Americans and ease diplomatic tensions with Italy. In 1934, the holiday became permanent, on the 2nd Monday in October, in honor of Columbus sighting land in the Western Hemisphere on October 12, 1492.

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March 14, 1891 was a Saturday. There were no scores in North American sports on this day: Baseball was in Spring Training, football was out of season, hockey was all-amateur, and basketball wouldn't be invented for another 9 months.

But, being a Saturday, there was action in English soccer. Royal Arsenal, the original version of the North London team I would one day support, took the pitch at what was then their home field, the Invicta Ground in Plumstead, then part of Kent but now part of South-East London, and won, 5-1 over Old Harrovians, a team made up of graduates of the prestigious Harrow School of North-West London.