Ellis Island: the end of an era: it closed 50 years ago this month, but the entry point for millions of immigrants is alive in America's memory.

• Author: Berger, Joseph
• Position: Times Past

Their clothes were marked with chalk as if they were baggage, their eyelids ingloriously flipped with a buttonhook to check for disease. They were asked whether they were polygamists or anarchists, and a handful even had their names changed without their consent. Those who failed the examinations could be torn from their families and sent back to their home countries.

"The immigration officer sat up on the podium like a judge," wrote a young Hungarian immigrant named Alex Eckstein. "And to a child looking up, you know, it was like he was up in the sky."

Yes, the immigrant's experience at Ellis Island was often degrading and heartbreaking. Yet between 1892 and 1954 this small island off southern Manhattan was the first landfall for 12 million immigrants fleeing poverty and mistreatment back home. However harsh their ordeal at Ellis Island, these pioneers--among them 3.5 million Italians and 1.7 million Jews between 1899 and 1931--were on the way to lives far freer and more prosperous.

A POTENT SYMBOL

Indeed, those who passed through Ellis Island, which was closed down 50 years ago this month, went on to become some of this country's leading figures, including Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter (from Austria), actors Bob Hope (England) and Rudolph Valentino (Italy), and helicopter inventor Igor Sikorsky (Russia).

According to some estimates, 40 percent of Americans have an Ellis Island ancestor--which is why Ellis Island, along with its neighbor in New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty, has become a symbol of the epic human migration that helped make the U.S. the great power that it is.

"For a large part of the U.S. population who are descendants of the Ellis Island period, this is the monument to their ancestral past and kind of represents a rite of passage from an old life of poverty, oppression, and religious persecution to political freedom and economic opportunity," says Virginia Yans, a professor of history at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

AN OLD DEBATE

Like many of its alumni, Ellis Island began life in humble fashion. It was a little island known by the Indians as a roost for gulls and by Dutch and English colonists for its oysters. In the late 18th century, its owner was Samuel Ellis, a New York merchant, who gave the island its name.

By the late 19th century, as an increasingly industrialized U.S. craved workers from abroad, a debate raged--as it does today--about whether immigrants were stealing jobs from Americans...