Tuesday and Friday mornings, beginning at eleven o'clock, were the regular days for the meetings of the Cabinet, then as now. The day after taking office, therefore, I attended my first meeting, taking the chair assigned to me. It was labeled on the back "Secretary of Commerce and Labor, December 17, 1906."
The Cabinet table is oblong, the President seated at the head, and to his right and his left the secretaries in the order in which their departments were created—Secretary of State first to the President's right, Secretary of the Treasury first to the left, and so on. Being head of the ninth and youngest Department, my seat was at the foot of the table, opposite the President.
The meetings were informal and no minutes were taken or other record made. After some brief preliminary talk, in which the President often had some incident to relate or some amusing caricature or savage attack upon himself to exhibit, the business of the day began. The President calls on every secretary, but in no fixed order. He presents such matters as he may deem important, and upon which he may want discussion and advice.
At this meeting I intended not to bring up anything, preferring to wait, as the saying is, until I got "warm in my seat." But an important matter had come up that very morning upon which I had made a decision, based on the carefully reasoned opinion by the solicitor of the department, Mr. Charles Earl. The State of South Carolina, under one of its recent laws, had authorized its State Commissioner of Immigration to go to Europe and select a number of skilled factory hands for the industrial establishments of the State. There were about four hundred and fifty of these immigrants, and there was some question about admitting them. The Immigration Law of 1903, as well as previous laws, excepted the State from its contract labor clauses, and I therefore decided upon their admission.
Indeed, no subject in the department occupied my daily attention to the extent that immigration did. Fortunately, at the chief port of entry, Ellis Island in the New York Bay, there was a capable, conscientious, efficient commissioner, Robert Watchorn.
Copyright by Clinedinst
THE ROOSEVELT CABINET
Left to right: The President, Root, Straus, Garfield, Metcalf, Cortelyou, Taft, Meyer, Wilson, Bonaparte
The right of the immigrant to land, after his medical examination, was based upon the decision of a board of inquiry. This board often made hurried and ill-considered decisions, especially when the immigration was large. In the case of exclusion, the immigrant has the right to appeal to the Secretary of the Department of Commerce and Labor. Of course, cases coming under certain portions of the exclusion provisions, such as contract labor, mental deficiency, affliction with loathsome and contagious diseases, were easily enough disposed of; but under the provision "Likely to become a public charge" there was room for the personal attitude of the members of the board, and the fate of the immigrant then depended on whether or not these men were restrictionists. I felt that there was a domestic tragedy involved in every one of these cases, and as the law placed the ultimate decision upon the Secretary, I decided this responsibility was one that should not be delegated; so day by day I took up these decisions myself, frequently taking the papers home with me and carefully reviewing them before retiring.
Important among the immigration subjects were those which presented phases of the Japanese question, the immigration en masse of Japanese to the Pacific Coast States, California in particular. The question was brought up by Secretary Root at one of the Cabinet meetings. The city of San Francisco had taken action excluding Japanese from the public schools. It was deemed detrimental for the white children of tender ages to be in the same classes with older and even adult Japanese who came to these schools to learn English. My predecessor, who was a resident of California, had investigated and was conversant with all aspects of the case.