This official announcement in relation to the appointment appeared in the daily press at this time:
“Robert Watchorn will succeed William Williams as United States Commissioner of Immigration at New York. The appointment will be solely on merit. Mr. Watchorn is now United States Commissioner of Immigration at Montreal. He has been in the immigration service for many years, and his record is perfect.”
I ventured to ask the Commissioner one day if he had been given any instructions by the President as to the course to be pursued. He replied: “Yes, the President gave me instructions very brief but very pointed. ‘Mr. Watchorn, I am sending you to Ellis Island.--You will find it a very difficult place to manage.--I know you are familiar with the conditions.--All I ask of you is that you give us an administration as clean as a hound’s tooth.’”
Should one desire any further evidence that Ellis Island is a difficult place to manage, let him turn to this incident and its sequel in Senator Hoar’s “Autobiography of Seventy Years” (_Scribner’s_):
During the Christmas holidays of 1901 a very well-known Syrian, a man of high standing and character, came into my son’s office and told him this story:
A neighbour and countryman of his had a few years before emigrated to the United States and established himself in Worcester. Soon afterwards, he formally declared his intention of becoming an American citizen. After a while, he amassed a little money and sent to his wife, whom he had left in Syria, the necessary funds to convey her and their little girl and boy to Worcester. She sold her furniture and whatever other belongings she had, and went across Europe to France, where they sailed from one of the northern ports on a German steamer for New York.
Upon their arrival at New York it appeared that the children had contracted a disease of the eyelids, which the doctors of the Immigration Bureau declared to be trachoma, which is contagious, and in adults incurable. It was ordered that the mother might land, but that the children must be sent back in the ship upon which they arrived, on the following Thursday. This would have resulted in sending them back as paupers, as the steamship company, compelled to take them as passengers free of charge, would have given them only such food as was left by the sailors, and would have dumped them out in France to starve, or get back as beggars to Syria.