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.

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, becoming burdens on the government purse, and introducing contagious diseases.

According to Yans, the federal government decided to inspect immigrants to filter out disease carriers, criminals, or people who might wind up as public charges. Ellis Island was made the main East Coast inspection station. (On the West Coast, it was Angel Island in San Francisco Bay.)

Even before the immigrants reached Ellis Island, an undemocratic screening took place on the piers in Manhattan, where first- and second-class passengers had their far-lighter examinations aboard ship. The poorest passengers who had traveled in steerage, having spent 10 days or more amid the crowding, stench, and squalor of the bottom of the steamship, were required to board ferries or barges to Ellis Island. For several hours, they were examined in the huge Registry Room where as many as 5,000 a day were processed.

ONLY THE HEALTHY

The immigrants stripped and doctors listened to their chests for signs of tuberculosis or, using buttonhooks (metal instruments used to pull a button through a buttonhole), checked their eyes for trachoma. Those with suspected diseases had their clothes chalked with letters: E for eye problems, L for lameness, G for goiter. The sick were either treated in an infirmary, quarantined until they were cured, or sent back to Europe.

WASHING STAIRS

Immigrants were also asked a series of questions to determine their politics, means of financial support, criminal history, and mental acuity.

"Would you wash stairs from the top down or from the bottom up?" was one question. One immigrant remembered that she had replied: "I didn't come to America to wash stairs."

Unmarried mothers or single women with no relatives to vouch for them were turned away as potential prostitutes. Families with a diseased child were "also excluded. In some peak years, 10 to 15 percent of those processed were forced to return home.

By 1907, Ellis Island was processing more than 1.2 million immigrants a year. But its role diminished markedly in the 1920s when the U.S. set immigration quotas that favored the British Isles and Western Europe and allowed for inspections of immigrants in their home countries. Designed to preserve the America's Anglo-Saxon identity, the quotas were seen by many as racist and were later responsible for the fact that so few Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe in the 1930s were able to escape the slaughter of the Holocaust.

These quotas lasted until the mid-1960s, when new laws opened the door to more immigrants from Asia and Latin America and made special skills and family reunification the most crucial grounds for admission.

By World War II, Ellis Island had so little traffic it was converted to a detention facility for enemy aliens. In June 1954, The Times reported that "the island's inhabitants now comprise, chiefly, immigrants whose papers are not in order, alien stowaways, seamen who have overstayed their shore leaves, sick immigrants, and aliens being deported."

THE LAST ARRIVAL

Then, on Nov. 13, 1954, in a small article on Page 20, The Times reported that "without ceremony, the career of Ellis island as an immigration station came to a virtual close yesterday." Its final customer was a Norwegian seaman named Arne Peterssen who had overstayed his shore leave. He left the island on the 10:15 a.m. Manhattan-bound ferry to return to his ship.

Today, Ellis Island is a national monument and museum, with an online database of passenger records that anyone can search for clues to the journeys their ancestors made.

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TEACHING OBJECTIVES

On the 50th anniversary of its closing, to help students understand the history and experience of immigrants who came through Ellis Island, and America's opening of its doors (sometimes widely, sometimes not) to 12 million immigrants from 1892 to 1954.

BEFORE READING: Ask students if they regard themselves as immigrants. However they respond, remind them that all Americans are immigrants or descendants of immigrants. Even American Indians are descended from people who migrated to this continent thousands of years ago.

RESEARCH REPORT: Family research is a natural activity to accompany this article. You might assign students to interview their parents, grandparents, or other relatives to obtain details about the origins of their families.

Things to look for would include countries of origin, approximate date of arrival in the U.S., when their family arrived in the region or community where they now live. Students need not write essays; an outline would be sufficient.

Black students' families--most of whom are descendants of slaves-experienced a different kind of immigration. But they also can provide an outline of family history.

SPECIAL SKILLS: The article reports that laws in the 1960s gave preference to immigrants who had special skills. Students might identify skills that they think would be of the greatest value to the country today.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

* Why do you think first- and second-class passengers were subject to less scrutiny than other passengers?

* Why do you think immigrants were asked about their political views?

* Why do you think Americans continue to debate the merits of immigration?

FAST FACT: Laws passed in 1909 required immigrants to have at least $20 in order to be admitted to the U.S.

WEB WATCH: www.ellisisland.org allows visitors to locate records of immigrants. who came through Ellis Island from 1892 to 1954; www.angelisland .org/immigr02.html provides information on Angel Island, the West Coast immigrant station in San Francisco Bay.

QUIZ 3

1. During the peak years of immigration--1899 through 1931--the largest group of immigrants to pass through Ellis Island were

a Germans.

b Irish.

c Italians.

d British.

2. During the late 19th century, the U.S. welcomed large numbers of immigrants because

a it was important to unite Americans of foreign descent with their families from Europe.

b an increasingly industrialized America needed more workers.

c Americans were eager to help people from countries that persecuted minorities.

d it was important to help create a country that was ethnically diverse.

3. Then as now, many Americans debated the merits of immigration. One of the chief concerns was whether

a spies had been planted among the immigrants.

b immigrant children would be able to adapt to American schools.

c immigrants would remain in the U.S. or would return to their home countries.

d immigrants would become a financial burden on the government.

4. Immigrants who were sick when they arrived at Ellis Island faced three possible outcomes. What were they? --

5. How did U.S. immigration policy change between the 1920s and the mid-1960s? --

1. (c) Italians. 2. (b) an increasingly industrialized America needed more workers. 3. (d) immigrants would become a financial burden on the government. 4. be treated in an infirmary; stay quarantined until well; be sent home. 5. Quotas favored immigrants from the British Isles and Western Europe.

Joseph Berger, a Times reporter based in New York, often writes about immigration.