Ellis Island Stories
Ferdinand C. Smith
From Immigration to Deportation: 1924-1954
After World War I, rising nativism and xenophobia led to calls to curtail immigration–particularly non-Western and non-Northern European immigration. Quotas were set based on the 1890 census in order to minimize immigration from non-Northern European peoples. People in the Western hemisphere were not part of this quota, however, and continued to immigrate into the United States.
At the same time that the National Origins Act of 1924 limited the number of immigrants, the procedures for immigration to the U.S. had also changed. Instead of judging the fitness of would-be immigrants upon their embarkation, people were more and more required to apply for visas through the U.S. consulate in their country of origin. No longer a place to process immigration, Ellis Island became more and more a place for internment pending deportation.
During World War II and its aftermath, Ellis Island housed a number of people deemed undesirable by the U.S. government, including U.S. residents suspected as being Nazis and, after the war, people accused of being communists.
The Story of Ferdinand C. Smith
Smith was born in Savanna-la-Mar in Westmoreland Parish, Jamaica in 1893. As part of the British East Indies, Jamaica was embedded in global empires that were fueled by sugar and the slave trade, but the sugar plantations that dominated Westmoreland Parish were not doing well in the face of competition from European beet sugar. Smith became a hotel steward, but the work was still precarious. Like many of his contemporaries, he decided to look for work outside of Jamaica.
Labor recruiters from the United States were swarming Jamaica’s cities, looking for young men to work along the Panama Canal. After taking over the Canal from France and supporting the formation of a Panamanian state, the U.S. was ready to pour resources into the canal’s completion. Many people migrated to Panama as manual laborers.
Organized by the United States, work on the Canal was, like the United States, deeply segregated. With Smith’s experience, though, he managed to migrate to Panama as a steward in a hotel. The Canal was completed (with great loss of life) in 1914, and Smith needed a new job. He found one in Cuba.
After Panama, labor recruiters started signing workers for Cuba to work in mining or agriculture—both large, growth areas in Cuba in the wake of growing U.S. dominance. With the movement of people and investors, there was a commensurate demand for service workers, and he again gained employment as a hotel steward. Finally, he decided to migrate to the United States—this time as ship’s steward on the SS Tuscan out of Mobile, Alabama.
Like work on the Panama Canal, shipping in the United States was segregated, with crews separated by race and even nationality. In general, though, merchant sailors were not treated well, and many compared their work conditions to prisons. Black sailors were treated even more poorly in terms of pay, and many consigned to work below decks. Yet kitchens were one place where Black people could find slightly better employment, and the Ship’s Steward was at the top of that–the manager of staff, meals, and supplies.
But there were still problems. Mobile’s port served much of the Caribbean, Latin America, and South America, but it was also located deep in the Jim Crow South, at a time when terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan were terrorizing African Americans in the South. Ultimately, Smith decided to make his way to New York.
In 1920, New York was the busiest port in the United States, a place where a merchant sailor might easily find employment. The massive “sailortown” in Red Hook (Brooklyn) was filled with sailors from all over the world waiting between their contracts, and New York also had the largest population of Jamaicans in the United States–especially in Harlem, where the Great Migration had led to a sharp growth in New York’s African American population.
Working from a home base in New York, Smith sailed to ports around the world, including Europe and Russia. This gave him a wide knowledge of the world and exposed him to many people and ideas. One thing became clear to Smith: merchant sailors were exploited by shipping companies, and companies used racial and national segregation to minimize resistance to that exploitation. Eventually, Smith joined a union with a strong, Communist leaning: the Marine Workers Industrial Union.
Communism had grown more popular among working-class people during the first decades of the twentieth century, including African American workers. Communists were supposed to build solidarity with each other without respect to race and nationality, and, at a time when racial inequality was increasing in the United States, this proved popular with many African American and Afro-Caribbean sailors.
In 1937, Smith was instrumental in founding the National Maritime Union and became its Vice President in early 1938. Later, he became secretary-treasurer to the organization, and the right-hand to the NMU’s leader, Joseph Curran. The NMU was itself integrated, progressive and quickly became the most powerful maritime labor organization–eclipsing the more conservative International Seamen’s Union.
As war loomed in Europe, and after years of isolationist neglect, the United States began to think of its merchant fleet as a strategic resource, and Smith was invited to President Roosevelt’s White House as part of the war effort. Smith’s prominence mirrored the ascendency of progressive leaders at all levels of government during the FDR years. Yet not everyone welcomed Smith and the NMU as an ally.
Even as the importance of shipping increased in the late 1930s, the moral panic over Communism led to several incidents. There were purges in government, and many unions members criticized Smith’s communist leanings. Nevertheless, Smith never changed his stance; it was evident that he still believed in the promise of solidarity.
This had consequences. In 1947, after revelations that Smith was not a U.S. citizen, he was removed from his position as Secretary of the National Maritime Union. He had begun the citizenship process in 1920, when he filed an “intention” to become a citizen. Like many sailors, though, he had never followed up, and merchant seamen did not have to be a citizen of the United States to work on the U.S. merchant fleet. In early 1947, Smith was arrested for violated the Alien Registration Act of 1940, and sent to Ellis Island for deportation proceedings. Released on bond, he returned for the trial in July.
After the trial and appeals, Smith was ordered in 1949 to leave the country voluntarily. When he refused, he was again imprisoned at Ellis Island pending deportation. Once again, he was able to raise bail money for his release, and filed appeals in order to delay the deportation. Smith had many defenders among progressive leaders in the United States, but after several months of appealing the deportation process, Smith was deported, and moved to Europe to become a labor leader. Finally, he took on leadership positions in Jamaica’s labor movement, and died there in 1961.