When Jewish migrants were trapped and terrified in Florida — like Alligator Alcatraz inmates today
To understand our contemporary failings, we must understand the history that led to them
Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava speaks to the media at the entrance to “Alligator Alcatraz” on Aug. 22 in Ochopee, Florida. The mayor spoke about her support for a decision by a federal judge that ordered an indefinite halt to new construction at the immigration detention facility, and barred any new detainees from being brought to the site, siding with environmental groups who said the facility is endangering the Everglades and its wildlife. Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Alligator Alcatraz — an internment camp in the Florida swamp for detained immigrants, created under President Donald Trump’s administration — has been ordered to close, although the government is appealing. In its brief existence, the facility has drawn comparisons to Nazi concentration camps. Conditions inside the internment center are said to be ferociously inhospitable. One man said his prison cell was “like a dog cage.” There are reports that the prisoners are given only one meal a day, and are subject to physical abuse by the guards. In general, the camp is reported to be unsanitary, mosquito-ridden, and unlivable.
But there’s a better historical comparison than Nazi Germany — a forgotten story from American history itself.
It’s the tale of Joseph Wilensky, known as “Bennie,” a 53-year-old Jewish refugee from Russia. Wilensky, alongside some 50 other immigrant Jews, was preyed upon by employment agencies promising them honest work in Florida in the early 20th century. The group was given transport to Jacksonville, and then in taken to a camp at Buffalo Bluffs, Florida, deep in the swamp.
“There they were prodded like cattle into filthy huts similar to pigsties,” Wilensky once said, in a quote provided to the Forward — or Forverts — in 1906. The huts they were housed in were called “dog houses.” They were not provided with food, but could purchase crackers, sardines and water from the company store at inflated prices that would be deducted from their meagre wages.
Wilensky and his fellow immigrants were not being held in the camp for deportation. But neither were they free.
Their “employer” was Hodges and O’Hara, which ran naval stores and a lumber operation, and set them to work tapping the pine trees in the swamp for turpentine. Cheap labor was in short supply in the southeast United States, because many laborers had been sent to Panama in 1904 to build the Panama Canal. Immigrant labor could meet that shortage, and southern business owners, accustomed to exploiting Black workers, turned to the millions of immigrants in New York City.
In Wilensky’s case, the Manhattan-based S.S.Schwartz agency contracted with Hodges and O’Hara to supply Jewish men to collect turpentine. The agency received $4.00 a head.
Wilensky’s work consisted of carrying tubs into the swamp and, waist deep in foul water, tapping the trees. He and the other immigrants were watched by guards armed with guns and whips, and if they collapsed at work they were flogged.
A Florida law passed in 1891 provided that anyone who left his employer while still indebted to him was guilty of a crime, punishable by imprisonment. As a result, no worker for Hodges and O’Hara could ever leave. The food and water at the company store was priced so that the worker’s pay never exceeded what they owed the company. Everyone was perpetually in debt to their employers. Although the legal term for Wilensky’s condition was “peonage,” the Forverts and others characterized it as slavery.
The reason we know Wilensky’s story at all is because of an activist called Mary Grace Quackenbos. Eventually, Wilensky received a money order from home for $30.00. His guards let him keep $10.00 after paying off his debt, which allowed him to trek through the swamp to Jacksonville and return, emaciated, to New York City with the help of the Jewish Relief Society.
There, he met Quackenbos. During their initial conversation, he removed his shirt to display a back thoroughly scarred by whippings.
Quackenbos — intrepid, driven by a sense of justice, and funded by grants including from the Jewish Aid Society — went undercover to investigate the camps. She spent seven weeks travelling between Florida and Arkansas, gathering affidavits and taking photographs. Eventually, she reported her findings to federal authorities, and news of Wilensky’s ordeal made it to the public through articles published in the Forverts and The New York Times in July, 1906. In New York, S.S.Schwartz lost its license as a labor agent.
Wilensky was lucky compared to those he left behind. The Times obtained a letter from 18-year old Jacob Lerner, an immigrant from Kishinev, to his cousin, Kalman Berlatsky.
“They have fooled me to this place where I cannot escape. I am beaten because I am not strong enough to carry big boards . . . For 20 days I have been sick with fever. They will not let me go. The company says that I owe money for food. Try, try and release me. . . This is worse than Russia and I thought it was a free country.”
Despite Quackenbos’ efforts, peonage like that under which Lerner and Wilensky suffered — which primarily affected Black Americans — continued as a widespread practice in the South until World War II, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt realized it was untenable to ask American soldiers to risk their lives fighting the Nazis when concentration camps existed in the U.S. (That realization came with a shameful exception when it came to the internment of Japanese Americans.)
Today’s internment camp in the Everglades is not identical to the one in operation in central Florida over 100 years ago. But both were created for immigrants, and the living conditions in Alligator Alcatraz appear to be as abominable as the conditions in the peonage camp.
Historical comparisons do not have to be exact to be instructive. The comparison between the two camps is useful to avoid historical naiveté. Upon witnessing the injustices of the last six months it will not do to exclaim ”This is not us!” or feign shock that inhumane institutions like Alligator Alcatraz could exist here.
Sadly, what we are witnessing in the Florida swamps today is, in fact, us; or at least a part of us. We have not only a historical obligation, but a moral obligation to remember our past and those who suffered before. You cannot defeat what you will not acknowledge.
Chana Pollack contributed translations to this op-ed.
