PRESIDENT HARDING AND HIS CABINET
MOOSEHE/1RT
MAGAZINE
the red tape has the sanction of mandatory laws and cannot be lawfully cut, will lessen his perplexities or soften his indignation at the cruelties his official obligations compel him to impose, though his humane instincts be stirred to their depths.
If anything could relieve that sense of official helplessness in the face of human misery which is inseparable from some parts of the job that Secretary Davis has been called to do, it might seem to be those duties of his which are related to the Children’s Bureau, a bureau that was created only a little while before the Department of Labor of which it is a part. The functions of this bureau are to investigate and report upon matters pertaining to the welfare of children and to child life among all classes.
It belongs in the Department of Labor because the child life that most needs such attention is principally among wage-earners—not from any fault of theirs, but from the economic conditions that surround them. The welfare of the children of wage-earners depends upon the wages of their fathers. This is well illustrated by a demonstration the Children’s Bureau has made, that the death rate of infants born to wage-earners varies inversely with the father’s wages, rising when his wages fall and falling when his wages rise. Here is suggestive material for that phase of Secretary Davis’s job which makes it his prime duty to advance the opportunities of wage-earners for profitable employment—a duty which, from his well-known interest in the welfare of children, is not likely to be neglected through any fault of his.
One important phase of the job I am describing is under the immediate direction of the youngest of these statutory bureaus, the only one that became a bureau concurrently with the creation of the Department of Labor. This is the Bureau of Naturalization. It does not control naturalization, as is sometimes inferred, for that is a function of the courts; but, with a field force conveniently distributed over the country, it investigates the¡ thousands of applicants for citizenship and marshals all the pertinent facts in each case before the courts from which they seek naturalization. It also records at Washington every declaration of intention to become a citizen, every judgment of naturalization and every adverse judgment, so that proof of each individual case of naturalization, or of obsolete declaration, or of
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Should this board make a favorable decision unanimously, the immigrant is at once admitted. But on the one hand a dissenting member of the board and on the other an excluded immigrant, has the right to appeal to the Secretary of Labor. It is these appeals that in such cases give the Secretary jurisdiction. They go to him for final decision, and from his decision as to facts there is no further appeal.
Akin to those “exclusion” cases as they are called for short, cases which arise from the immigrant’s application for admission to this country, are the “expulsion” cases. These occur when alien residents here come within the ban of the immigration laws. In some “expulsion” cases the alien who is proceeded against for deportation and expulsion from this country may have lived here from childhood to old age; yet if the Secretary of Labor finds himself bound, by his oath of office and by the facts in the case as they come to him, to decide that the alien is within any of the many classes of alien residents whose expulsion is required by Congress, he must issue a warrant for the alien’s deportation to the country whence he came. There is no discretion left him; if he finds the requisite facts, he must deport the alien regardless of the triviality of the accusation, if it happens to be trivial, regardless of family ties, regardless even of the fact, if fact it be, that the alien’s wife is American born and that his children are American citizens. There is no alternative, no appeal, not even such a trial as criminals get; and the deportable defense may be no crime..
The actual work of making decisions in all cases of exclusion and expulsion is of necessity done by officials acting for the Secretary under general instructions from him. As there are thousands of cases in a year the work is too heavy for one man to do. It would be so even if he had no other duties. Yet it is part of the Secretary’s job to bear the brunt of responsibility for it all. Very often he must bore into the cases himself. When, for instance, a new question arises, the Secretary, in order to be truly on his job, must plunge personally into office files and law books, and in the exercise of his own individual judgment come to his own decision.
In these immigration phases of Secretary Davis’ job, he will encounter much to make his fraternal heart throb with pain, and his philanthropic mind revolt; nor is it likely that entreaties to cut red tape in hardship cases, when
Commerce and Labor—a department now obsolete, out of which the present Department of Labor and the present Department of Commerce were carved at the close of President Taft’s administration. The Bureau of Immigration is the ministerial arm of the Secretary of Labor in his administration of the immigration laws. Under his direction it guides the activities of more than twenty immigration districts. They extend from Ellis Island in the harbor of New York to Angel Island in the Bay of San Francisco; they are located along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts; they are stretched along the Canadian and Mexican borders; they dot the interior at various points; they extend even into Canada under a reciprocal arrangement between that country and ours.
It is in connection with the immigration service that Secretary Davis must encounter some of the most exasperating and heart-troubling problems of his job. The individual sorrows of immigrants will often seem to minimize the importance of abstract immigration questions.. His problems will involve immigrants of most races and languages, of all conditions of purse and health, of both sexes, and of every age from the baby born on shipboard while its parents are on their way hither to old and decrepit folks who come to die with descendants they may have never known except by letter. These immigrants come by hundreds of thousands a year. Some are diseased of body, some are feeble of mind, some are incapable of earning a living, some are Chinese laborers, some are Hindus, some are classed as immoral, some have been convicted of crime, some admit the commission of crime, some are laborers under working contracts. About most of them are pathetic circumstances that challenge the hardest heart to compassion. But all such and many other classes, including those who cannot read forty words in some language or dialect, are barred from this country by imperative Acts of Congress.
Questions relative to their admissibility are determined in the first instance by immigrant inspectors at the place of arrival. If the first inspector who greets an immigrant makes a favorable finding, the immigrant may join his friends or relatives in this country. He is forthwith permitted to become a resident. But if the first inspector’s finding is unfavorable, the immigrant must go for examination before a board of three inspectors.
Divisions in bureaus, half a regiment of clerks of various grades, by messengers to collect and distribute the documentary output of the whole, and by field officers in all parts of the United States, aggregating nearly three thousand persons. Nevertheless, the Secretary himself is responsible for all that is done.
Very often, too, he must actually and in person do what is done. In every doubtful matter within his jurisdiction he must himself decide and personally instruct and direct. Frequently he must personally execute. Not only, then, must Secretary Davis be officially responsible for all the voluminous and varied work of the Department of Labor; he must be personally familiar with it, with the relation to it of its several bureaus and divisions, and often with details minute and confusing yet highly important to his job as a whole.
But from no general glimpse of this job can any notion of its scope be got, much less of its importance and intensity, or of its varieties and variations and perplexities. Even a minute description could not serve that purpose completely. The work can be truly appreciated only in the doing of it. It may, however, be dimly visioned from a rough filling in of the outline sketched above.
Oldest among the bureaus that are now operating subject to the approval of Secretary Davis, and for the activities for which he will be responsible, is the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It is older by some thirty years than the Labor Bureau itself. At one time it was an independent department, but without a cabinet member at its head. It deals in terms of figures with facts of daily life that especially concern wage-earners—wages, family expenditures, occupational diseases, wholesale and retail prices of necessaries, working-class education, industrial accidents, hours of labor. As the functions of this bureau are quite distinctively scientific, the Secretary’s responsibility for its activities is perhaps not so irksome or so charged with embarrassing possiblities as it is with reference to the administrative bureaus. Blame for error is less likely to fall upon the Secretary than exclusively upon the scientific specialists who directly conduct this bureau’s work.
Very different in-that respect is the Bureau of Immigration. This branch of the Department of Labor was organized nearly twenty years ago, but as a branch of the Department of