Nativism, Nostalgia, and Photography: The Legacy of Augustus F. Sherman’s Ellis Island Photographs in the US Press

ABSTRACT

The following investigation examines the contribution photographer Augustus F. Sherman made to immigration discourse through his early twentieth-century portraiture of Ellis Island immigrants. Sherman’s photographs have been used in both historical and contemporary US press to advance nativist and nostalgic immigration discourse. Using historical archival methods combined with photographic criticism, this article argues that Sherman’s photographs leave behind a legacy of nativist ideology in the US press.

KEYWORDS:

• Augustus F. Sherman
• Ellis Island
• immigration
• photography
• William Williams

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Sophie Lecheler and Claes H. de Vreese, “What a Difference a Day Makes? The Effects of Repetitive and Competitive News Framing over Time,” Communication Research 40, no. 2 (2013): 147–75, https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650212470688; and Anna Pegler-Gordon, In Sight of America: Photography and the Development of US Immigration Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023).

2. Sophie Lecheler, Linda Bos, and Rens Vliegenthart, “The Mediating Role of Emotions: News Framing Effects on Opinions about Immigration,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 92, no. 4 (2015): 812–38, https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699015596338; and Josh Grimm and Julie L. Andsager, “Framing Immigration: Geo-Ethnic Context in California Newspapers,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 88, no. 4 (2011): 771–88, https://doi.org/10.1177/107769901108800406.

3. Grimm and Andsager, “Framing Immigration,” 771–88.

4. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 300–30.

5. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Higham, Strangers in the Land; and Ronald Bayor, Encountering Ellis Island: How European Immigrants Entered America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).

6. Emma Lazarus, “New Colossus,” in Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems and Other Writings, (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2002), 233.

7. Fran Tonkiss, “Discourse Analysis,” Researching Society and Culture 3 (2012): 405–23. In Clive Seale. “Researching society and culture” (London, UK: Sage Publications, 2017): 1-664. LSE Cities (3rd), http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/59104.

8. Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Methodologies (London: Sage Publications, 2016).

9. Rose, Visual Methodologies, 205.

10. Rose, 27–32.

11. Rose, 34–38.

12. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 12–67.

13. Higham, 35–105.

14. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color.

15. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 87–96.

16. Bayor, Encountering Ellis Island, 6–38; Higham, Strangers in the Land, 35–105.

17. Jacobson, 39–90.

18. Higham, 87–105.

19. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 13–136; Higham, Strangers in the Land, 12–105.

20. Jacobson, 91–136.

21. Jacobson, 13–136; and Higham, 35–67.

22. Jacobson, 1–12.

23. Higham, 68–105.

24. Higham, 87.

25. Jürgen Habermas, Sara Lennox, and Frank Lennox, “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964),” New German Critique, no. 3 (Autumn 1974): 49–55, https://doi.org/10.2307/487737.

26. Erica Rand, The Ellis Island Snow Globe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); and Pegler-Gordon, In Sight of America.

27. Pegler-Gordon, Anna. Closing the golden door: Asian migration and the hidden history of exclusion at Ellis Island. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press Books, 2021), 8–9.

28. Augustus F. Sherman and Peter Mesenhöller, Augustus F. Sherman: Ellis Island Portraits, 1905–1920 (New York: Aperture, 2005).

29. Author’s ethnographic visit to Ellis Island, 2016.

30. Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882 (New York: Macmillan, 2005); and Ronald H. Bayor, Encountering Ellis Island: How European Immigrants Entered America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).

31. Bayor, Encountering Ellis Island; and Pegler-Gordon, In Sight of America.

32. Sherman and Mesenhöller, Augustus F. Sherman, 8–9.

33. William Williams quoted in Bayor, Encountering Ellis Island, 85.

34. Sherman and Mesenhöller, Augustus F. Sherman, 6.

35. Bayor, Encountering Ellis Island, 68.

36. Bayor, 39–80.

37. Bayor, 39–80.

38. Ellen Knauff Hernández, quoted in César Cuauhtémoc García, Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants (New York: The New Press, 2023), 33.

39. Harriet L. Porter, quoted in Benjamin D. Rhodes, “The Anglo-American Controversy over Ellis Island, 1921–1924,” New York History 66, no. 3 (1985): 229, 232.

40. Henry P. Guzda, “Ellis Island a Welcome Site? Only after Years of Reform,” Monthly Labor Review, July 30, 1986.

41. “Death of a Merchant,” Wilkes-Barre Semi-Weekly, December 2, 1887.

42. Rand, The Ellis Island Snow Globe, 57–58.

43. Rand, 73–75.

44. Fred Ritchin, Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen (New York: Aperture, 2013).

45. The known universe of Sherman’s work is 250 images. Sherman would often make a photograph of a group, then make photographs of individuals from that group in isolation of the group, and in a few instances, he would make photos of the same individual in different poses. See Sherman and Mesenhöller, Augustus F. Sherman.

46. Klara Stephanie Szlezák, “‘Capturing’ Immigrant Children: The Issue of Americanization in Photographs by Augustus F. Sherman and Lewis W. Hine,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 57, no. 1 (2012): 9–29, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23509456.

47. Diego Jarak, “Visualising Waiting Territories: The Case of Louis de Boccard,” in Waiting Territories in the Americas: Life in the Intervals of Migration and Urban Transit (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 307–33; Lindsey Poremba, “Framing Gender: Ellis Island Immigration Portraits” (thesis project, Skidmore College, 2018), 6–7, https://creativematter.skidmore.edu/art_history_stu_schol/22; Joan Morrison, “Review: Island of Hope, Island of Tears, by Charles Guggenheim,” Public Historian 15, no. 3 (July 1993): 111–12, https://doi.org/10.2307/3378743; Ellen Marie Jensen, “Trans-Atlantic Continuities and Divergences,” in Nordic Whiteness and Migration to the USA: A Historical Exploration of Identity (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020); and Gus Tyler, Look for the Union Label: History of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016).

48. “Commissioner Williams Out,” New York Times, January 16, 1905.

49. Sherman and Mesenhöller, Augustus F. Sherman.

50. Hindu also sometimes spelled Hindoo.

51. The long exposure time required to expose a negative at the time Sherman made the image would make it possible for him to be in the photograph.

52. Collection description, William Williams Papers, 1902–1943, Mss Col 3346, New York Public Library.

53. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 5–6.

54. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 7–9; and Higham, Strangers in the Land, 35–67.

55. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 31.

56. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 35–67.

57. “Some of our Immigrants,” National Geographic, May 1907, 317–33.

58. “Some of our Immigrants,” 332.

59. Author’s ethnographic visit to Ellis Island, 2016.

60. “Commissioner Williams Out,” New York Times, January 16, 1905.

61. “Commissioner Williams Out.”

62. “Commissioner Williams Out.”

63. Newspaper clipping, 1904, Microfilm Roll, ZZ-35401, Mss Col 3346.

64. Scrapbook page, 1902–1919, Microfilm Roll, ZZ-35401, Mss Col 3346.

65. Scrapbook page.

66. Scrapbook page.

67. Scrapbook page.

68. Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, Vintage Books, 1977): 3–69.

69. “Some of our Immigrants,” National Geographic, May 1907, 317–33.

70. Susan Goldberg, “To Rise above the Racism of the Past, We Must Acknowledge It,” National Geographic (April 2018): 4–6.

71. John Edwin Mason, quoted in Susan Goldberg, “To Rise above the Racism of the Past,” 4–6.

72. Mason, quoted in Goldberg.

73. CBS News (@CBSNews), “I have the original papers from when my great grandparents came from Hungary. Grandfather played for the New York philharmonic symphony in 1890’s,” Facebook user comment, November 2, 2015, https://www.facebook.com/CBSNews/posts/10153207709525950?ref=embed_post.

74. CBS News (@CBSNews), “I heard immigrants from Mexico were crossing the borders illegally … ,” Facebook user comment, November 2, 2015, https://www.facebook.com/CBSNews/posts/10153207709525950?ref=embed_post.

75. Anna Swanson, “What America’s Immigrants Looked Like When They Arrived on Ellis Island,” Washington Post, October 24, 2015.

76. Sophie Lecheler, Linda Bos, and Rens Vliegenthart. “The Mediating Role of Emotions: News Framing Effects on Opinions about Immigration,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 92, no. 4 (2015): 812–38, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1077699015596338; and Josh Grimm and Julie L. Andsager, “Framing Immigration: Geo-ethnic Context in California Newspapers,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 88, no. 4 (2011): 771–88, https://proxy.lib.utc.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/framing-immigration-geo-ethnic-context-california/docview/917540783/se-2?accountid=14767.

77. Victoria M. Esses, John F. Dovidio, Lynne M. Jackson, and Tamara L. Armstrong, “The Immigration Dilemma: The Role of Perceived Group Competition, Ethnic Prejudice, and National Identity,” Journal of Social issues 57, no. 3 (2001): 389–412, https://doi.org/10.1111/0022–4537.00220.

78. Marc Lacey, “As Arizona Fire Rages, So Do Rumors on its Origin,” New York Times, June 2, 2011.

79. Linda Qiu, “Republicans Wrongly Tie Biden Immigration Policies to Baby Formula Shortage,” New York Times, May 13, 2022.

80. Elise Stefanik (@RepStefanik), “Joe Biden continues to put America LAST by shipping pallets of baby formula to the southern border as American families face empty shelves … ,” Twitter, May 13, 2022, https://twitter.com/RepStefanik/status/1525083454542696450?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1525083454542696450%7Ctwgr%5Ece5930ac5a124688d0a4e6da60d2fbd5a06c53e5%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2022%2F05%2F13%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Fbaby-formula-shortage-biden-immigration.html.

81. Radhika Chalasani, “Ellis Island circa 1900,” CBSnews.com, November 2, 2015, https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/ellis-island-melting-pot-immigrant-portraits/.

82. Anna Swanson, “What America’s Immigrants Looked Like When They Arrived on Ellis Island,” Washington Post, October 24, 2015.

83. Swanson, “What America’s Immigrants Looked Like When They Arrived on Ellis Island.”

84. “Ellis Island Immigrants: Portraits by Augustus Sherman, circa 1905–1914,” Yahoo! News, January 9, 2018, https://www.yahoo.com/news/ellis-island-immigrants-portraits-augustus-slideshow-wp191437381.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAADO7UaZClVkz5Ysb1elPjz9i5_T1B5gtNdzj-hl4w_jFi1e VkIEgQk0aIjyP-J4sr4t1IIEe6rpYoDE0hS8rBSR9-Ady_elrgWHgXlhgkgo3W45ycbU-OIMW2 hg7e8zK79e-n0W7c7cP1BISHTX5YrHXmttWVbZbzfBopYznKgSY.

85. While Sherman photographed immigrants from countries considered desirable, these immigrants were also identified by some ethnic or religious characteristic that placed them in the classification of undesirable, such as the “English Jew” or “Sami Woman,” which is an indigenous Ugic sub-ethnicity of Finland. In other cases, immigrants from desirable countries were photographed because of physical anomalies such as being conjoined twins, dwarfs or giants, or those embodying some manner of deviance through social taboo.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anthony J. Cepak

Anthony J. Cepak is an assistant professor of communication at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. His research focuses on the relationship between agency and the production of visual messages across levels of inquiry, with particular interest in the effects of culture on the representation of marginalized communities and on historical and contemporary depictions of violence and trauma in the news media.