undertaken, unless Mr. Cable retires.” Politely but in no uncertain terms he
threatened Taft and the Republican party with the loss of the Jewish vote in
the 1910 elections.^33
The threat apparently worked. On a visit to New York the president
endorsed the diversion of immigration to other ports, which was inter-
preted by Galveston supporters as a change in policy. A few weeks after the
elections, Schiff and three associates were granted a hearing before
Attorney-General George Wickersham, Secretary of Commerce and
Labor Charles Nagel, and Cable. Following an able legal presentation of
the case for Galveston by attorney Max Kohler, an irate Schiff warned that
continued hostility on the government’s part, unwarranted in light of Taft’s
words, would end the movement. As Kohler later told the story, Schiff
jumped up, shook his finger at Nagel, and said: “You act as if my organiza-
tion and I were on trial. You, Mr. Secretary, and your department are on
trial, and the country will rue it, if this undertaking—so conducive to pro-
moting the best interests of our country, as well as humanity—is throttled,
by your department’s unreasonable obstacles!” The banker’s aggressiveness
irritated Nagel, but in the end he admitted to Schiff that he saw nothing il-
legal in the movement. (Less than two months later, however, Nagel spoke
at the convention of the UAHC and defended in principle the policies of
his department.) Throughout the fight against Cable’s “harassment,”
which Schiff continued even after the conference, the banker disclaimed
any pessimism. Indeed, his letters convey a sense of excitement, almost an
enjoyment of confrontation and muscle flexing.^34
Schiff won the skirmish, but the deportations permanently arrested the
movement’s development. Problems of recruitment and funding persisted,
and only in 1913 did the number of arrivals to Galveston, 2,700, exceed the
annual minimum of 2,500 that he had set in 1906. A new rash of deporta-
tions erupted during Wilson’s administration, and for Schiff that was the
last straw. Faulting the government’s attitude, which he described as mark-
edly rigid and repressive, the banker decided in the spring of 1914 to ter-
minate the enterprise. He had seized on a constructive way of defusing re-
strictionist pressure, but largely for reasons beyond his control he failed to
reach his goals.^35
In retrospect one could even argue that the inability of European relief
committees to direct the emigrant flow away from the Atlantic ports after
the onset of the mass exodus had foredoomed the plan. The early immi-
grants who had settled largely on the eastern seaboard were a strong “pull”
for later arrivals. Fewer than ten thousand immigrants made use of Galves-
ton, and from 1907 to 1913 only Texas, Iowa, and Missouri absorbed over a
thousand arrivals. The appeal of the eastern cities never lessened, and sec-
ondarily for Schiff, Zangwill’s search for ITO-land continued as before.
Indeed, it is legitimate to wonder whether Zangwill’s preoccupation with
In Search of a Refuge 167