Emanuel Celler

Immigration and Civil Rights Champion

Wayne Dawkins

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781496829870
  9781496805355
• eBook ISBN:
  9781496829887
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Congressman Emanuel Celler (1888–1981) was a New York City congressman who served in the United States House of Representatives from 1923 to 1973. Celler's almost fifty-year career was highlighted by his long fight to eliminate national origin quotas as a basis for immigration restrictions and his battles for civil rights legislation. In Emanuel Celler: Immigration and Civil Rights Champion, author Wayne Dawkins introduces new readers to a figure integral to our contemporary political system. Celler's own immigrant background framed his lifelong opposition to immigration restrictions and his corresponding support for reducing barriers for immigrant entry into the United States. After decades of struggle, he proposed and steered through the House the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which eliminated national origins as a consideration for immigration, profoundly shaping modern America. Celler was also a consistent advocate for civil rights. As chairman of the House Judiciary Committee from 1949 to 1973 (except for a break from 1953 to 1955), Celler was involved in drafting and passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968. During his career he was also deeply involved in landmark antitrust legislation, the establishment of US ties with the state of Israel, and the Gun Control Act of 1968, and was the author of three constitutional amendments, including the 25th that established presidential succession. Dawkins profiles a complex politician who shaped the central tenets of Democratic Party liberalism for much of the twentieth century and whose work remains central to the nation, and our political debates, today.
From author Wayne Dawkins: Emanuel Celler (1888–1981) could be the most significant US legislator of the twentieth century. He cosponsored three Constitutional amendments—the twenty-third (voting rights for District of Columbia residents), the twenty-fourth (poll taxes banned), and the twenty-fifth (clear succession established if the president is removed from office). And, as a longtime chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, he reluctantly cosponsored a fourth—the twenty-sixth amendment (18-year-old voting rights).He is also linked to three-hundred laws, notably the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1968; the Voting Rights Act of 1965; and his masterpiece, the Hart-Celler Immigration Reform Act of 1965.Over the past decade, Celler, who served fifty years in Congress, has been a supporting cast member in at least a dozen books about immigration or civil rights. He was frequently cited in One Mighty and Irresistible Tide (2020) and noted in two key moments of The Guarded Gate (2019). And he was cited generously in Goliath (2019), a book about Celler's other passion—antitrust and monopoly busting.But this fall, he will at last be the focus of a full-length biography, Emanuel Celler: Immigration and Civil Rights Champion. And I believe it will become the go-to book for anyone wanting to know more about this history-making legislator.

1

Early Life, 1888–1906

Two years before Emanuel Celler was born, clergyman, editor, and author Josiah Strong wrote Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis that inspired many American’s opinions of their country’s place in the world. Strong’s thesis was that global Anglo-Saxon power was based in America and it was God’s will for white Protestants to rule America—and as needed, to flex its muscles anywhere it pleased. Moneymaking power was a striking feature of Anglo-Saxon Americans, wrote Strong. So was another exceptional characteristic of English-speaking whites, an “instinct or genius for colonizing. His unequaled energy, his indomitable perseverance, and his personal independence, made him a pioneer.”¹

The notion that there was such a thing as a white race was new; the concept emerged about the time post–Civil War Reconstruction ended in 1877 and the notion was conventional wisdom by the time of American involvement in World War I, forty years later in 1917.² Being American and Caucasian at the dawn of the twentieth century, according to Strong, meant that at home and globally “any remaining unsettled land will be colonized and made English.”³ Theology and morality merged into a (white) Protestant ethic of disciplined achievement, yet capitalistic sorcery contradicted the high-minded ideals, explained historian Jackson Lears. Success was a slippery business and Gilded Age titans too often operated as insincere confidence men.⁴

The attitudes of Strong and like-minded peers contradicted American isolationist instincts that traced back to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. A century after the American Revolution, America had become a booming industrial power. New inventions and new ideas emerged every day. Expansion seemed inevitable.

When Emanuel Celler was born, Booker T. Washington was in his seventh year of running Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Washington keenly took note of the hundreds of thousands of European immigrants streaming into America, additional people who could dilute the potential of the formerly enslaved black population and render those freed men and women useless. Washington preached compliant industriousness. He counseled Negroes to pursue practical educations and learn trades, but he did not suggest competing with whites for political and economic power.

Washington’s attempt to bargain with the Gilded Age South was futile. In that region there was something profoundly different about racism in the nineteenth century—it was more self-conscious, more systematic, more determined to assert scientific legitimacy. The whole concept of race, never more the flimsiest of cultural constructions, acquired unprecedented biological authority during the decades between Reconstruction and World War I.⁵

In 1883, the US Supreme Court ruled that the 1875 Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional. Although the Civil War–era Fourteenth Amendment said that ex-slaves and free northern blacks were citizens, the high court’s ruling undermined the law. Post-slavery blacks effectively became serfs in a feudal society, which was evident in the South, and occasionally, in the North, Midwest, and far West. With European immigration surging, by 1890, black people represented 11.6 percent of nearly 75 million American inhabitants. Their share was significantly down from the previous decade when they comprised 13.1 percent of a nation of about 50 million people.⁶

In 1848, the year revolutions erupted in Germany and Austria, fifteen-year-old Ernest Mueller fled Hanover, Bavaria, Germany for the United States in pursuit of political freedom, liberty, and economic opportunity. Peasants and bourgeoisie rebelled against entrenched monarchs across Europe. The lower and middle classes made many gains, but the elites cracked down violently. Many Europeans left for America, away from the bloody chaos. Mueller was one of those escapees.⁷ He took the months-long journey on a crowded, grimy passenger ship with hundreds of other immigrants. With the destination, New York Harbor, in sight, the ship began to sink. A young woman on board panicked and jumped overboard. Young Mueller instinctively jumped in and rescued the stranger.⁸

In a matter of months, the teenage boy and girl, strangers in a strange land, married after a brief but intense courtship. Ernest Mueller was Catholic. The teenage girl he married was Jewish. Ernest Mueller converted to Judaism in order to marry. The couple lived in Brooklyn, the former five Dutch towns of the 1600s that by the mid-1800s was a city of 139,000 people that resembled a network of quaint villages.

Across the water was New York City—Manhattan Island—accessible only by boats. The Mueller family’s neighbors in Brooklyn included colonial-rooted Anglos and Dutch, free Africans, and arriving Irish, German, and other European immigrants.⁹

Ernest Mueller made his living as a tassel maker. He and his wife raised a family during an era of booming Irish immigration into America. The potato blight in the old country destroyed several years of crops and starved thousands of Irish citizens. The Irish had another reason to flee. Many of them were tired of British rule that denied the rural Catholic Irish self-governance, property ownership, and other rights.¹⁰

The Muellers produced nine children in the marriage, six girls and three boys. All of the girls married men of the Jewish faith. Josephine, the fourth-from-eldest daughter, married Henry H. Celler.¹¹ Emanuel Celler was born May 6, 1888, in a frame house on Sumner Avenue off Floyd Street. He was the third of four children. His siblings were Mortimer, born in 1880; Jessie, born in 1882; and Lillian, born in 1889.¹²

The Brooklyn neighborhood where they lived was the southernmost end of Williamsburg, the former town that began to bleed into Bedford Corner, part of a neighborhood that would be renamed Bedford-Stuyvesant in the next century. Emanuel was born six weeks after a blizzard crippled the East Coast and virtually shut down New York City for two days. The storm began as pre-spring rain, then temperatures dropped from twenty degrees to a low of one degree below zero and snow accumulated. Winds whipped as high as eighty miles per hour. People ran out of provisions. Bread and milk trucks halted deliveries. Hundreds of people died—two hundred in New York City, four hundred in Maine and as far south as Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay—from lack of sustenance, or from exertion in the thigh-deep snow. Damages from fires during that freeze were estimated at $25 million.¹³ One of those who succumbed was Republican Party stalwart Roscoe Conkling, the former US senator from New York and a Radical Republican during a dozen years of post–Civil War Reconstruction.¹⁴

Among ordinary people, milkman Xavier Zwinge of Livingston, New Jersey, ignored the snowfall and departed on his rounds. But after wading through the snow Zwinge abandoned his route. He parked the horse outside of a tavern that had a red-hot stove, beverages, and neighbors.

Hours passed and the horse, tired of waiting in the cold, trotted home and placidly munched oats in the barn. Mrs. Zwinge saw the horse but no husband. She screamed and assumed Xavier Zwinge died. A local newspaperman published a tale of the milkman’s last ride. The next morning, Xavier Zwinge staggered the three miles home. He opened the door and faced red-eyed relatives and long-faced neighbors. His wife looked at him and fainted. “My God, Xavier! You’re dead! It says so in the newspaper.” “I don’t give a damn what it says in that sheet,” roared the milkman. “The hell I’m dead. I’m drunk, that’s what I am!” He then passed out.¹⁵

When Emanuel was an infant, Grover Cleveland was president of the United States. Cleveland served most of his term without a vice president because Thomas A. Hendricks died a year after the 1884 election and was not replaced. In November 1888, the incumbent lost to Republican Benjamin Harrison of Indiana. Cleveland, a former New York governor, won the popular vote by 96,000 ballots of nearly 11 million cast. However, Harrison beat him handily in the electoral college, 233–168.¹⁶

A political dirty trick may have denied Cleveland reelection. When the British ambassador was asked who would win the presidency, he said “Cleveland,” and believed the query was from a naturalized American and former Briton. However, the question was written in a letter from a member of the California Republican Party. The correspondence was circulated in the press, intended to inflame Irish American voters. The tactic succeeded.¹⁷

Emanuel was born into an America that was a mainland consisting of forty-two coast-to-coast states. A few western territories, including Oklahoma and Arizona, were not yet part of the union. Hawaii was a collection of islands settled by American planters. Soon, with the help of Washington, those settlers toppled the queen and colonized the lands.

Emanuel was born five years after the Brooklyn Bridge connected his city with New York. Two years before his birth, the Statue of Liberty was placed in New York Harbor. The gift from France depicted a giant woman emerging from chains, wearing a crown, and holding a torch, welcoming the “huddled masses” to America.

The new bridge transformed Brooklyn. More families streamed across the bridge from Manhattan to settle in homes in the village-style borough—still a separate city. Before the great bridge, Kings County grew quickly in the 1800s. In 1820, this westernmost piece of Long Island was a town of 7,000, unlike the 130,000 people packed in the lower third of Manhattan Island.

Thirty-five years later in 1855, Brooklyn consolidated the towns of Williamsburg and Bushwick into a city of 205,000 inhabitants. Brooklyn had become America’s third-largest city, a mix of industry and country life—shipyards; warehouses; glass, furnace-casting, and stone-cutting factories, breweries, and tanneries.¹⁸

By 1860, 37 percent—104,000—of Brooklyn inhabitants were foreign born. Among them, 54 percent were Irish and 25 percent were German. The black population of 4,920 continued to shrink and would dwindle to 1 percent of the city by 1870.¹⁹

Emanuel’s Brooklyn, the northwest section, was without a doubt urban, although it was not unusual to see pigs roam the street, or goats and cows in neighbors’ backyards. Dairymen stopped passersby and attempted to sell raw milk. South of where the Cellers lived in the village-like neighborhoods of Flatbush, Flatlands, and Gravesend, farms were still common and very productive. Through the 1880s, Kings County was the nation’s second-highest producer of vegetables and fruit; its neighbor on the eastern border, Queens County, was number one.²⁰ Horse-drawn carts hauled cabbages, celery, beans, and peas to eager consumers—including Manhattanites who no longer lived near farms.

Yet between two tumultuous decades, 1890–1910, the years Emanuel attended elementary and high school, then as an adolescent finished college, the hyper-industrialization of Brooklyn wiped out the farms.²¹

Emanuel lived on a street named after abolitionist Charles Sumner, a US senator from Massachusetts. Sumner’s antislavery convictions were so strong that an opponent to the Republican senator in 1856 beat him to a bloody pulp with a cane on the chamber floor. US representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina had taken great offense to Sumner’s antislavery speech that mocked fellow Carolinian, US senator Andrew Butler.²² Sumner’s passion for equality and justice would live on in the mid-twentieth century through the thoughts and actions of Brooklyn-born Emanuel Celler.

Tammany Hall ran New York City political life in the late 1800s. Tammany was synonymous with William Marcy “Boss” Tweed, but he was prosecuted and forced out. By 1878 he was in jail and in disgrace.²³ Tammany became cleaner, yet it was still a political machine to which many immigrant families owed their jobs. That machine often functioned as the center of social life. It sponsored boat rides and picnics that doubled as opportunities to network and secure jobs. Emanuel’s father, Henry, was a Democratic district leader.

In 1896 when Emanuel was eight years old, he walked about a half mile east with his father to Arion Hall in Bushwick.²⁴ They went there to hear William Jennings Bryan, a Democratic Party advocate for farmers and working-class laborers. Henry Celler hoisted Emanuel on his shoulders so the boy could see and hear the fiery speaker from the heartland. That July, Bryan proclaimed in an impassioned speech that US currency should not be based solely on a gold standard simply because Europeans and the Gilded Age robber barons wanted it. “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns,” he said. “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”²⁵

The Celler family was respectably middle class. The parents had the means to afford a maid-of-all-work. They favored music, so their home included violins and a piano. There were also books in the house, although those seemed to rank after the passion for musical instruments. Impressionable Emanuel liked what he called “dress up night,” the third Mondays of opera season, when there was a flush of excitement on Mom’s face, and Dad seemed two inches taller. “La Traviata,” “Il Trovatore,” and “Aida,” Mom’s favorites, became Emanuel’s too.²⁶

When Emanuel walked a few blocks away from his house at Sumner and Floyd, he could hear and smell his neighbors’ poverty. He quickly realized that many neighbors were the working poor. Not far from his frame house were the Brooklyn dockyards where laborers toiled. When Emanuel reached early adolescence, he became keenly conscious of his ambition. What would it take to experience places beyond the Brooklyn streets? Emanuel read anything he could get, and self-identified as the scholar of the family. He grew impatient with the structured and unquestioning pace of family life.

There were “things” to be done, parents and elders would say, but they were routines that would not challenge the established order. Why was it acceptable to see suffering poor people? the teenager wondered, when he caught glimpses of Fifth Avenue’s gilded elegance. Emanuel read intensely, in search of answers.²⁷

Introspectively, he perceived himself as a snob. Emanuel also took note that his parents encouraged his pursuit of a life of the mind. His mother, Josephine—small, round, blue-eyed, and prematurely gray—was instinctively shy, yet the shyness disappeared when she tal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Early Life, 1888–1906
• 2 Columbia University, Young Lawyer, 1906–1921
• 3 Elected to Congress, 1922–1923
• 4 Passion, Emotion, Fear, and Hate, 1924–1927
• 5 Celler Asserts Self, Chips at Immigration, 1930s
• 6 World War II, FDR, and Jewish Refugees
• 7 Post–World War II, Truman, and the State of Israel
• 8 Antitrust, Cold War, Incremental Immigration
• 9 You Never Leave Brooklyn, Early 1950s
• 10 Suez-cide and Civil Rights, 1950s
• 11 Celler and the 1964 Civil Rights Act
• 12 Hart-Celler Immigration Reform, 1965
• 13 Voting Rights Act, 1965
• 14 Congressional Bulldog, 1967–1971
• 15 Old-World Liberal Celler Is Upset, 1972–1973
• 16 Post-Congressional Life, 1973–1981
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Author