Coal Stove Parts

Century-Old Immigration Debate Has Familiar Sound

Until recently, Morris Claman’s legacy to New York has been the few surviving manhole and coal chute covers in Manhattan and Brooklyn that bear the logo of his stove parts and repair business on Orchard Street as well, of course, as his descendants. But it turns out that he had left something else behind: his anger over an immigration debate that is still being echoed today.

Mr. Claman and some of his fellow Lower East Siders were angered at comments by William Williams, the federal commissioner of immigration for the Port of New York, who in his June 30, 1911, annual report lamented the influx from Southern and Eastern Europe of “backward races with customs and institutions widely different from ours and without the capacity of assimilating with our people as did the early immigrants.”

Singling out residents of Elizabeth, Orchard, Rivington and East Houston Streets, the commissioner complained that they came to America with “filthy habits and are of an ignorance which passes belief” and “often herd together, forming in effect foreign colonies in which the English language is almost unknown.”

Mr. Claman, himself an immigrant from Eastern Europe, joined a citizens committee of other neighborhood residents in a letter and petition (see also below) to President William Howard Taft demanding that Mr. Williams retract his remarks. The commissioner, a Republican who cleaned up corruption on Ellis Island, but also favored rigid restrictions on “low-grade immigrants,” had been reappointed by Mr. Taft after being forced out by President Theodore Roosevelt of New York.

In 1909, deportations rose 35 percent, in part because Mr. Williams concluded that “in most cases it will be unsafe for immigrants to arrive with less than $25 in addition to their railroad ticket to their final destination.” He pointed out that the steamship Raglan Castle had recently landed with 305 steerage passengers — 70 arrived with no money at all.

The committee’s petition was discovered by a reporter rummaging through the National Archives . No response from the president turned up. But the commissioner’s remarks touched off a debate in Congress, fueled, in part, by the committee’s accompanying survey of the average 594 persons living on each of the streets’ 57 blocks. (Morris Claman’s last name was spelled “Claiman” by whoever typed the petition.)

“Although most of the residents of these streets are of foreign birth,” the committee wrote, “they have come to this country for the purpose of establishing permanent homes, of rearing and educating their children as good Americans and of enjoying the blessings of freedom, at the same time assuming and performing the obligations which residence and citizenship entail.

Alaska Coal Stove Parts

Let us be cautious in our forecast, as our site is small, new and has not yet had any advertising or placement for search engines is pointless to choose a with an excessive bandwidth and hosting a huge disk space (money would be wasted), as would be detrimental to a site already established such a quantity of bandwidth is just sufficient to cover the traffic that uses, in this case the important fact is leave much scope for improvement (calculated using intelligence).

Popular Mechanics

Old-House Journal

The American artisan and hardware record

Old-House Journal

Popular Mechanics