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Hellraisers Journal – Monday February 24, 1919
From Seattle to Ellis Island – The Red Special Deportation Train
From The Survey of February 22, 1919:
The Deportations
[Part I]
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FOR several days last week the eyes of newspaper readers were fixed upon a train under heavy guard that passed swiftly across the continent from Seattle. Persons who peered in at the windows (apparently no one was allowed to go aboard) remarked that most of the occupants looked foreign. Few were seen to smile. Apparently there was a commissariat on board, for “no food was taken aboard at Buffalo.” Reaching Hoboken, N. J., its occupants were hurried on board ferries and soon found themselves in the detention quarters of the United States Immigration Station, on Ellis Island, in New York harbor awaiting sailing to various corners of the earth.
The passengers on this curious journey have all been ordered to be deported from the United States. They constitute the vanguard of what is described as an “army of undesirable aliens” soon to leave our shores. For weeks the newspapers have been picturing the “great combing-out process” in which the Department of Labor and the Department of Justice are declared to be cooperating.
Reports of “wholesale deportations of aliens” are unjustified, according to a statement attributed to Anthony Caminetti, commissioner-general of immigration, in an Associated Press dispatch dated February 12. “It is estimated that 6,000 aliens are to be deported, the great majority because they are insane or otherwise public charges,” Mr. Caminetti said. “Most of the rest are diseased or have been found guilty of offenses subjecting them to deportation. A few, comparatively, are agitators who are opposed to our form of government or all organized government.” None of the aliens recently taken from Seattle to Ellis Island have had any connection, said Mr. Caminetti, with the recent strikes at Seattle or other western points. They have been rounded up over a considerable period of time, but could not be deported before because of the shortage of shipping facilities.
The law under which these deportations are taking place is, first, the federal immigration act of 1917 and, second, the amendment to that act passed in October, 1918. Section one of the amendment reads:
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress Assembled, That aliens who are anarchists; aliens who believe in or advocate the overthrow by force or violence of the government of the United States or of all forms of law; aliens who disbelieve in or are opposed to all organized government; aliens who advocate or teach the assassination of public officials; aliens who advocate or teach the unlawful destruction of property; aliens who are members of or affiliated with any organization that entertains a belief in, teaches, or advocates the overthrow by force or violence of the government of the United States or of all forms of law, or that entertains or teaches disbelief in or opposition to all organized government, or that advocates the duty, necessity, or propriety of the unlawful assaulting or killing of any officer or officers, either of specific individuals or of officers generally, of the government of the United States or of any other organized government, because of his or their official character, or that advocates or teaches the unlawful destruction of property shall be excluded from admission into the United States.
This, it will be noticed, provides for the exclusion of the enumerated classes before entry. Section two provides that any alien who, after entering, is found to have been at the time of entry or to have become thereafter a member of any one of the classes enumerated in section one, may be deported. Whether the alien was three or forty years old at the time of entry and how long ago he came to this country, make no difference. Section three makes it a felony for any one so deported to try to return.
[Part I of II.]
[Photograph, paragraph breaks and emphasis added.]
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SOURCE
The Survey, Volume 41
(New York, New York)
-Oct 1918-March 1919
Survey Associates, 1919
https://books.google.com/books?id=trRDAQAAMAAJ
The Survey of Feb 22, 1919
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=trRDAQAAMAAJ&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA717
“The Deportations”
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=trRDAQAAMAAJ&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA722
IMAGE
IWW, HdLn re Red Special Deportation Train, Chg Tb p1, Feb 10, 1919
https://www.newspapers.com/image/355030520/
See also:
Note: According to O’Connor, the Deportation Train, known as the “Red Special,” left Seattle the morning of the beginning of the Seattle General Strike (Feb 6, 1919), see:
Revolution in Seattle: A Memoir
-by Harvey O’Connor
Haymarket Books, 2009
(search: “shameful piece of business”)
https://books.google.com/books?id=ayj5zs40WtoC
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