Ellis Island

Two days before his twentieth birthday, Bartolomeo Vanzetti left Italy for the United States. After a two-day train ride through France followed by a seven-day voyage across the Atlantic upon the ocean liner, Le Provence, Vanzetti entered the immigration facility of Ellis Island on June 19, 1908. 

From 1892 to 1954, the facilities on the 27.5 acre Ellis Island served as the country's chief immigrant receiving station.  During this time period, over 12 million immigrants entered the country through the station's gates. In 1907 alone, roughly 1.2 million immigrants entered the country through New York Harbor.  Though it was only one of seventy such stations, Ellis Island handled nearly 90% of all immigrants in that year.¹ Newly arrived immigrants would pass the Statute of Liberty before being ferried from their ocean liners to Ellis Island to undergo various legal and medical examinations. Built to accommodate less than 250,000 immigrants per year, the staff of 350 civil servants did their best to process the immigrants, but their resources were inadequate and some 20% of immigrants had to wait days or weeks before being cleared to enter the United States.²

"I had arrived in the Promised Land. New York loomed on the horizon in all its grandness and illusion of happiness...In the immigration station I had my first surprise.  I saw the steerage passengers handled by the officials like so many animals. Not a word of kindness, of encouragement, to lighten the burden of tears that rests heavily upon the newly arrived on American shores. Hope, which lured these immigrants to the new land, wither under the touch of harsh officials...Such is the unfriendly spirit that exists in the immigration barracks." ~Bartolomeo Vanzetti

¹Barbara Benton, Ellis Island: A Pictorial History (New York: Facts on File Publications, 1985) 6-7, 48.
²Ivan Chermayeff, Fred Wasserman and Mary J. Shapiro, Ellis Island: An Illustrated History of the Immigrant Experience (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1991), 18.