American Passage (31 page)

Despite all his outward stoicism both to the pain of families such as the Czurylos and to the constant barrage of criticism against him, Williams had had enough of Ellis Island. He tendered his resignation in June 1913 to President Wilson, who accepted it and expressed his appreciation for Williams’s “peculiarly intelligent service.” Williams had served a total of six and a half years under three presidents. Wilson named no immediate replacement, so Williams’s deputy, Byron Uhl, took over as acting commissioner, a move that promised no immediate change in the execution of immigration law at Ellis Island.

The uncertainty as to who would succeed Williams highlighted the fact that in almost twenty years of agitation in favor of greater restrictions on immigrants, Prescott Hall and his colleagues had precious little to show for their efforts. The Immigration Restriction League’s silver bullet, the literacy test, had twice failed to become law over presidential vetoes. The one sliver of hope for Hall and his comrades had been the work of William Williams. “In a world which does not suit me in many ways,” the melancholic Hall wrote to Williams, “your work at Ellis Island is a bright spot.”

Others remembered Williams not for his restrictionist views but rather for his efforts to improve life at Ellis Island. A letter signed by representatives of twenty-four missionary organizations noted their “high esteem” for Williams, calling him “just always” and “charitable when necessary.” Their letter noted: “Even the most casual observer must be conscious of the great improvement in Ellis Island under your guidance, both physically and officially. . . . We believe that those who have attacked your administration have done so either in ignorance or malice.”

Others took issue with this sentiment. Unsurprisingly, the
Morgen Journal
shed no tears at the resignation of the man they dubbed the “Czar of the Isle of Tears” who made immigrants “dance to his whip.”

Although no one would have known it at the time, the incessant attacks against Williams represented the high point of German-American ethnic identity. Though they did not succeed in removing Williams from office, German-Americans were the leading voice for opposition to immigration restriction. Both the German-language press—shrill and exaggerated—and William Williams—crabbed and snobbish—kept each other in check as the nation navigated this unsettling era of mass immigration. Within a short time, that delicate balance would be destroyed and immigration policy would never fully recover. Nor would the German-American community.

William Williams, however, would move on to other things. In February 1914, the new reform mayor of New York City, John Purroy Mitchell, named Williams commissioner of Water Supply, Gas, and Electricity. After this stint in city government, he returned to the military at the age of fifty-five as a lieutenant colonel during World War I, stationed with the army’s procurement division in Washington.

After the war, Williams returned to his law practice in lower Manhattan, where he regularly went to work right up until his death in February 1947 at the age of eighty-four. He made few public remarks on immigration in the decades that preceded his death. We will never know if he lived long enough to temper his views about some of the “scum” who arrived at Ellis Island during his tenure.

T
WO MONTHS BEFORE HIS
1910 visit to Ellis Island where he learned from the Thornton family a lesson in the perils of meddling in immigration cases, President Taft found himself dragged into the case of the Pocziwa family. Benjamin Pocziwa lived in Passaic, New Jersey, where he owned his own store. Earning $20 a week and having saved some $500, Benjamin was now able to bring over his wife, Mine; his six-yearold daughter, Anna; and his nine-year-old son, Lipe. All three arrived at Ellis Island in July 1910.

“This child is an imbecile and it is obvious to the layman that he is one,” declared William Williams, and young Lipe was ordered excluded by law. His mother, Anna, was also ordered excluded so as to accompany her son back to Russia. Officials with HIAS requested that the deportation be delayed so that the mother could find someone else to escort Lipe back.

Benjamin sought the legal help of Leonard Spitz, who also lived in Passaic and practiced law in Manhattan. Spitz filed a habeas corpus petition on behalf of Lipe. He admitted that little Lipe was “not everything that one of his age should be; his appearance is dull,” but explained that the boy had been pampered by his mother and “not allowed by her to run around like the ordinary children of his age, she considering him very precious and always having fear for his welfare.”

Local newspapers took up the case of this shy and sheltered country boy frightened by his arrival in America. Spitz spoke about the case with Victor Mason, a businessman who had an office in the same building as Spitz. Mason happened to be a friend of Taft and would be visiting the president at his summer home in Beverly, Massachusetts, in early August. There, Mason explained the case to the president, who ordered that the child not be deported until Secretary Nagel returned to Washington from his extended vacation.

A few days later, Taft reversed himself. “The President has decided not to interfere in the matter of the deportation of Lipe Pocziwa,” read the telegram from Taft’s secretary, Charles Norton, to the Department of Commerce and Labor. Victor Mason again wrote the president asking him to reconsider his decision, and Taft dutifully changed his mind yet again. “Would the Department be embarrassed in any way if the request were sent down to hold up the deportation of Lipe Pocziwa and his sister and mother until Secretary Nagel’s return,” Norton again telegrammed Washington.

The Pocziwa family was neither rich nor famous, nor infamous, yet the president of the United States had become involved in their case. For immigration officials, however, Taft’s interference and vacillation must have been irritating. Acting secretary of Commerce and Labor Benjamin Cable wrote back to Norton that he would again stay the deportation until Nagel’s return, but warned that his boss would not return until sometime in mid-September; this would mean that the family would have to remain in detention at Ellis Island during the dog days of August.

When Nagel returned in September, he ordered that the mother and daughter be allowed to enter the country and rejoin Benjamin; however, young Lipe would have to be sent back to Europe with a suitable attendant. His decision was based on the medical certificate that Lipe was an imbecile, and not a shy and frightened child, and therefore excluded. The law was the law, and it said that no one medically certified as an imbecile could enter the country under any circumstance.

William Williams called on government “to make far greater efforts than it does to prevent the landing of feeble-minded immigrants,” since mental deficiencies were “becoming more and more important in civilized countries and the nature and bearings of this taint are being carefully studied by scientists.” A feebleminded immigrant would not just become a public charge, he feared, but “may leave feeble-minded descendants and so start a vicious strain that will lead to misery and loss in future generations.”

Ellis Island officials would increasingly find themselves drawn into the uncharted territory of using science to determine the mental capacity of those who knocked at America’s gate. The Pocziwa family was on the receiving end of those efforts. Even the president of the United States could do nothing about it.

It is of vast import that the feeble-minded be detected, not alone because they are predisposed to become public charges, but because they and their offspring contribute so largely to the criminal element. All grades of moral, physical, and social degeneracy appear in their descendants.

DURING THE DEPTHS OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION IN 1933, a Youngstown, Ohio, steelworker named Salvatore Zitello sat down to compose a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The new president had been in office for less than a year, but already Americans felt comfortable enough to write to him by the thousands describing their woes and asking for help. Salvatore Zitello was not complaining about losing his job or his house or any other financial problem. Instead, he was writing about his thirty-six-year-old daughter Gemma.

Salvatore’s problems began in February 1916, when his wife Anna and five children arrived at Ellis Island. (Salvatore had arrived a few years earlier.) Gemma was the oldest at nineteen and four-year-old Dionisis, the only son, was the youngest. Having sold everything to come to America, the Zitellos now found themselves stranded at Ellis Island. Doctors declared Gemma an imbecile and ordered her excluded. To make matters worse, the two youngest Zitello children, Dionisis and nine-year-old Alessandra, were sick—one with meningitis and the other with diphtheria—and confined to the hospital.

Three days after the family’s arrival, Salvatore received a telegram from Ellis Island. In cold, blunt language, it read: “Doctors find Gemma Zitella [
sic
] an imbecile. If you are citizen of United States submit papers at once. Also send affidavit showing your ability and willingness to receive remainder of family.”

A week later, Salvatore managed to take time off from his $3-a-day job and make his way to New York to plead for his family. Two days after Salvatore’s arrival, Ellis Island commissioner Frederic Howe reiterated the view that Gemma was an imbecile, a condition he thought “obvious even to a layman.” Because officials had suspended deportations to Mediterranean ports because of the war in Europe, the family was ordered to remain in detention.

Salvatore was not without help. The Reverend Stefano Testa, a minister with the Italian Mission of the Central Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, took an interest in the case because his mother had been friendly with Anna Zitello back in Italy. He later accompanied Salvatore to Washington, where they hoped to meet with the secretary of Labor, but instead met with the commissioner-general of immigration, Anthony Caminetti. Rev. Testa asked that the family be released from Ellis Island and that Gemma be paroled into his care, but Caminetti refused. He feared that if the nineteen-year-old girl were released, she would get married, have children, and produce more imbeciles.

Unable to free his family from Ellis Island, a dejected Salvatore returned to his job in Ohio only to find more tragedy. One month after the family’s arrival, four-year-old Dionisis died at the Ellis Island hospital. The emotional toll of that loss came on top of the possibility that Salvatore’s family might be permanently banished from the country.

After nearly two months in detention, the Zitellos received some good news. Officials would allow the entire family to enter America, except Gemma, who was still ordered deported. On April 21, 1916, Anna and three of her daughters left Gemma at Ellis Island and took the train west to Ohio to reunite with Salvatore.

For the next year, Gemma remained at Ellis Island, excluded from entering the country because of her condition but unable to return to Italy because of the war. Her family was in Ohio, but Rev. Testa visited her often and claimed to have witnessed great improvements since her arrival. Why, Testa asked Caminetti, could she not be released on bond to her parents? Salvatore’s hometown congressman also wrote to Washington on behalf of Gemma. The government’s answer was always the same: Gemma was an imbecile who was “mandatorily excluded from admission into the United States.”

Once America entered the war, Ellis Island was needed to house German enemy aliens, and Gemma was soon transferred to a smaller immigration center in Gloucester City, New Jersey. Her chances of joining her family looked hopeless.

More than two years after his family’s arrival, Salvatore wrote directly to President Woodrow Wilson. He explained his family’s sad story and complained that because his daughter could not count backwards from twenty, doctors ordered her detained. Since her transfer to Gloucester City, Gemma would write to her father often, complaining that she did not have proper clothing or shoes. She cried every day for her parents.

“I spent the last cent I earned for her and I couldn’t do anything,” the grieving father wrote to President Wilson. He emphasized his patriotism and boasted that he had bought Liberty Bonds to contribute to the war effort, “I do good right along,” Salvatore wrote. Couldn’t the president release his daughter, Salvatore wondered?

His response came a month later from Commissioner Caminetti. In coldly bureaucratic words that Salvatore had no doubt become accustomed to, Caminetti wrote: “You are, of course, aware that your daughter Gemma is mandatorily excluded from the United States, and there is no other course that can be pursued except to return her to Italy when it becomes possible to do so.”

The war officially ended on November 11, 1918, and the only rationale for keeping Gemma detained had now vanished. The government wasted little time, and on November 20, Gemma Zitello was sent back to Italy. Since she had few decent clothes, authorities had to furnish her with a shirt, pants, undervest, and hose before her journey.

Salvatore, his wife, and three surviving children continued their lives in Youngstown without Gemma. Salvatore and Anna even managed to conceive another child, a boy named Anthony, who was born around the time of Gemma’s deportation.

Yet Salvatore never completely gave up hope that he would be reunited with his daughter. That is why the foreign-born steelworker wrote his second letter to an American president in 1933. “I, a citizen of the U.S. and a resident of Youngstown, Ohio, am appealing to you for help as only you can under the circumstance,” Salvatore began his letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt. He explained that his daughter had been deported back to Italy and for the past fifteen years he had tried many times to bring her to America. Now thirty-six, Gemma was living in Campobasso, Italy. Salvatore had received word that the people with whom she was living were tired of having to care for her and were mistreating her.

For seventeen years, the Zitello family found themselves staring at the concrete wall of American immigration law. And no letter seemed to make that wall move.

B
EGINNING IN
1882, C
ONGRESS
enshrined the word “idiot” into law. As harsh as it sounds, all of those deemed “idiots” and “lunatics” were barred from entering the country. While in most cases it was relatively easy to determine physical defects among immigrants, a bigger problem was how to probe the minds of those who knocked at America’s gates. By law, immigrants had to prove not just their sanity but also their intelligence.

At first, doctors were more concerned with weeding out immigrants thought to be suffering from mental illness. Between 1892 and 1903, only thirty-six people were barred from the country for being “idiots,” or in other words suffering from low intelligence. During that same period, almost five times as many people were barred for insanity.

When Dr. Thomas Salmon arrived at Ellis Island in 1904, he had no formal training in psychiatry, having begun his career as a country doctor in upstate New York and made his mark investigating an outbreak of diphtheria. At Ellis Island he was one of three doctors tasked with weeding out mentally deficient immigrants.

Salmon saw the chance to filter out immigrants with mental and emotional problems as a great professional opportunity. However, he also understood the limits. He lacked the proper equipment, possessing only, in his words, “a little knowledge of psychiatry in my head, a little piece of chalk in my hand and four seconds of time.” With that chalk and the little knowledge of psychiatry, Salmon had mere moments to make a decision on the mental state of an immigrant. If someone on the inspection line struck Salmon as being mentally defective, the doctor would make an
X
on the individual’s coat, selecting that person for further examination.

Salmon was on the lookout for what he called the “well-marked stigmata of degeneration,” such as immigrants who seemed “unduly animated, apathetic, supercilious, or apprehensive” or whose facial expression was “vacant or abstracted.” A tremor of the lips during the eversion of the eye for the trachoma test or an “oddity of dress,” unequally sized pupils, a “hint of negativism,” or any “unusual decoration worn on the clothing” could mean further examination and detention.

The results of Salmon’s work were stark. In 1906 alone, 92 immigrants were certified as idiots and 139 were certified as insane. All were deported. However, a dispute with Commissioner Robert Watchorn led Salmon to be suspended from his duties. He was eventually transferred to the U.S. Marine Hospital in Chelsea, Massachusetts.

Just as Salmon was leaving Ellis Island, Congress was further expanding its categories of restriction. The Immigration Act of 1907 added two more terms—“feebleminded” and “imbeciles”—to the excluded list. In addition, immigrants deemed mentally defective to the extent that it prevented their earning a living could also be excluded. The new law shifted the focus away from those with mental illnesses and focused greater attention on measuring the intelligence of new immigrants.

As Congress expanded the list of undesirables, Ellis Island found itself testing that most difficult of concepts: human intelligence. What was the difference between an idiot, an imbecile, and someone defined as feebleminded? The Public Health Service informed its doctors that feeblemindedness was defined by a “demonstrated defective mentality” relative to the immigrant’s age, but this was of little help. That is where Dr. Henry H. Goddard came in.

About a hundred miles south of Ellis Island, in the southern New Jersey town of Vineland, Goddard was working on measuring, classifying, and treating the feebleminded. Armed with a PhD in psychology, Goddard was the director of the Vineland Training School for Feeble Minded Girls and Boys. His great success was in translating and popularizing a series of tests to measure intelligence created by French psychologist Alfred Binet.

At the time, intelligence tests were a step forward compared to what had preceded them. Craniometry, the measurements of skull sizes, had been the main tool used to measure intelligence in the late 1800s. Unhappy with this crude measure, Binet created a series of tests that would measure the reasoning and comprehension skills of its subjects. Those subjects were largely French schoolchildren. Schools used the tests to help target children in need of special instruction. The tasks were classified by the age at which the subject should be able to complete them. Children who then completed the tests were assigned a mental age, as opposed to their actual age.

Intelligence tests satisfied the needs of early twentieth-century scientists for greater precision and empiricism. However, the question of whether humans possessed a single, fixed, and discrete entity called intelligence that could be accurately measured would continue to be a highly controversial idea for decades to come.

Goddard set out to define the terms “idiot” and “imbecile.” An idiot was an individual with a mental age below three years, while an imbecile scored between the ages of three and seven years. These were people who suffered from obvious and severe mental retardation. What about those who scored at levels equivalent to a mental age of between eight and twelve? Their supposed infirmity was not readily apparent to the casual observer, but Goddard felt that intelligence tests could weed out these individuals.

There was also the problem of what to call such individuals. Though they were often called feebleminded, this caused confusion, since it was common to refer to all those with below-average intelligence as feebleminded. So Goddard invented the term “moron” to classify individuals with a mental age between eight and twelve years old. Goddard took the term from the Greek word for foolish. The word has so completely seeped into the English vocabulary that it is hard to believe its origin dates only to the first decade of the twentieth century.

If there was some innate quality called intelligence, Goddard believed, then it was to be found on a human gene that could be passed down through generations. If intelligence was a hereditary trait, then society should make sure that mental defectives did not reproduce. Eugenics, a term coined in the mid-1800s and derived from the Greek meaning “well born,” gradually seeped into the public consciousness. In 1910, a biologist named Charles Davenport formed the Eugenics Record Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island to encourage so-called heartier stock to reproduce and discourage the weak from having children. He was already serving as secretary of the American Breeders Association and that same year he came out with
Eugenics: The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding
.

Though some advocated forced sterilization, Goddard preferred the establishment of institutions like Vineland to care for the feebleminded while making sure they did not reproduce. Though Goddard’s famous study of the hereditary effects of feeblemindedness centered on a native-born, old-stock family pseudonymously named the Kallikaks, it was no surprise that advocates of eugenics would turn their attention to immigrants. “The idea of a ‘melting pot’ belongs to a pre-Mendelian age,” Davenport noted. “Now we recognize that characters are inherited as units and do not readily break up.”

In 1911, Davenport recommended the formation of a committee to study “the hereditary traits that immigrants were bringing into the country.” Later that year, Davenport’s Immigration Committee of the Eugenics Section of the American Breeders Association found that the unfit were not being properly excluded because of inadequate inspection, poor facilities, and too few medical inspectors.