Hello and welcome to This Day, a history show from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, fall 1903, President Teddy Roosevelt is in New York City.

It is a rainy, cold, blustery early fall day.

He boards a ship in New York Harbor and then a tugboat

across towards Ellis Island, which has been the main immigration processing site for this country

for about a generation or so at this point. Now ostensibly Roosevelt is there to examine conditions

at the site. There were reports that the facilities were in disrepair,

and moreover that the processing of new immigrants was not going very smoothly. He announced,

as one does, the appointment of a blue ribbon commission to look into all of this. He also met

with a few families that had been stuck in processing, some of them for months. He negotiated the

entry right there on the spot of one family into the country.

But this was more than just about the way that one immigration facility was run.

Roosevelt, as we will get into, was obsessed with immigration and what it meant for the future of this country, race, birth rates, language, religion, assimilation.

All of this was in the air, and Roosevelt was very open about the

way that controlling immigration felt like it was a way to control the makeup and future of this

country, which of course sounds very familiar, right? Listeners. Anyway, here to discuss, as always,

Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there. Hello, Jody.

Hey there.

And we have a special guest this episode, and that is Andrew Porwant. Your professor of history at Arizona State University. And his latest book is American Maccabee, Theodore Roosevelt and the Jews. We will get into Roosevelt's particular complicated relationship with Jewish immigrants in this conversation as well. But

Andrew, congrats on the new book and welcome to the show. Thanks for doing this.

Thank you so much for having me. So let's start with Roosevelt's visit to Ellis Island.

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