Steinmetz could have been excluded because he fell within the later-developed “poor physique” category. In use by 1905, the Immigration Services defined individuals of “poor physique” as those “who have frail frame, flat chest, and are generally deficient in muscular development,” or “undersized—markedly of short stature—dwarf.” As historian Margot Canaday has shown, immigration officials also used the “poor physique” category to reject individuals suspected of sexual perversion (homosexuality), having bodies with ambiguous sexual organs, or simply being undiscernibly distinctly male or female.12
Many thousands of immigrants, however, did not have the assistance of someone like Asmussen in navigating through immigration, or did not chance upon a lax inspector who gave them a pass, and were deported as “defectives” and “undesirables.” In 1905 Domenico Rocco Vozzo, a thirty-five-year-old Italian immigrant, was rejected while entering the United States for the second time. Earlier he had spent two years in the States earning money and then returned to Italy. He sought to do the same again, but immigration officials determined him as having a “debility” and likely to become a public charge. Vozzo apparently had “a curiously shaped head, and his skin looks rather white, almost bleached, and his ears are quite thin.” Those determining Vozzo’s case used his photo as proof that he was not “a desirable acquisition” and deported him. Donabet Mousekian, an Armenian Turk, lacked male sexual organs—sometimes referred to by immigration officials as “lack of sexual development.” He had made a living as a photographer, was a skilled weaver and dyer of rugs, and could cook well. Aside from that he had relatives in the United States who promised support. None of which swayed officials. “I am not ill,” he said in his appeal, “have no contagious disease; my eyes, feet, hands and ears are sound; only I am deprived of male organs; this is not a fault because it has come from God and my mother: what can I do? It won’t do any harm to my working.” Immigration officials determined Mousekian likely to become a public charge and “weak, emaciated, and really repulsive in appearance”—sexually defective.13
Israel Bosak was similarly deported in 1906 for “poor physique.” The tailor had lost his successful shop in anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia, had some cash, and had relatives who promised to help him establish a business. His unspecified and unexplained “poor physique,” however, meant deportation. In 1913, thirty-year-old deaf blacksmith Moische Fischmann arrived at Ellis Island presumably with high hopes. Already in the country were his brother and sister, both well employed and ready to help him. At the gauntlet of the Public Health Service physician on duty, however, Fischmann was determined to have a physical defect and his case referred to the Board of Special Inquiry. There his siblings attested to their fiscal stability in great detail. Three cousins also promised to help support Fischmann while he sought work, and one of them carried with him a letter from his own employer guaranteeing the skilled blacksmith a job. The board, however, unanimously voted to deport the deaf man back to Russia. His “certified condition,” it concluded, “is such that he would have considerable difficulty in acquiring or retaining employment.” Under further appeal, which was rare, Fischmann’s attorney from the Hebrew Immigrant Sheltering and Aid Society warned of the hostile conditions that Russian Jews faced. A second employer promised Fischmann a job and $12 a week. Despite these arguments, and the two job offers, the commissioner insisted that “there can be little doubt that the applicant’s certified condition will seriously interfere with his earning capacity.” Fischmann was deported. Given the ease with which both Bosak and Fischmann were identified as Jewish, it is possible that their Jewishness, coupled with deafness and “poor physique,” became part of the formula that rendered them unfit.14
The LPC clause, as the “likely to become a public charge” clause has become known, clearly assumed that bodies considered defective rendered them unable to perform wage-earning labor. One immigration official saw no problem with his assumption that the “immigrant of poor physique is not able to perform rough labor, and even if he were able, employers of labor would not hire him.” As historian Douglas Baynton wisely points out, for immigration officials “the belief that an immigrant was unfit to work justified exclusion, but so did the belief that an immigrant was likely to encounter discrimination because of a disability.”15 It also meant that if monetary assistance was needed due to a disability, such a need disqualified potential immigrants for US citizenship—quite clearly stating that such citizens already here were far from the ideal.
The issue, however, was not a straightforward economic matter, despite reliance on the LPC clause. Many immigrants rejected for their defective bodies had supported themselves quite well in their home countries. Others, like Moische Fischmann, had jobs awaiting them or relatives offering to support them. The economic rationale of the LPC clause could serve, and often did serve, as a false cover story. Ableism and a desire for a specific form of American bodies motivated the deportation of many potential immigrants.
When Patrick Eagan was refused entry into the United States in 1909, immigration officials noted that he “looks to be able-bodied,” and had “always accomplished the full task of an able-bodied laborer.” That was not enough. Eagan’s penis was considered small by immigration officials (who examined such things) and they then rejected Eagan on the basis that immigrants “effeminately developed” were “undesirable in any community.” Despite Eagan’s solid wage-work history, officials insisted that future wage work was highly unlikely. As historian Margot Canaday explains, “immigration officials associated defective genitalia with perversion, and further viewed perversion as a likely cause of economic dependency.”16 In these immigration policies, able-bodiedness included normative genitalia.
In subtle ways, and sometimes not so subtle ways, the LPC clause also was embedded in class, ethnic, race, sexual, and gender assumptions. The LPC clause required that immigrant women have bodies interpreted as able to perform physical labor for wages, this despite the fact that many women in the United States did not work for wages at this time and were not expected to do so. The LPC clause set gendered requirements of appropriate womanhood that, depending on class, ethnicity or race, domestic-born women did not have to meet. Indeed, the LPC clause defined immigrant women as ineligible for the benefits of native-born womanhood.
The legal structures and the physical gates at US border locales became sites where ideals about the bodies of American citizens were enforced and reinforced. US lawmakers, scientists, and policymakers established which bodily, mental, and moral characteristics (perceived or real) were acceptable parts of the body politic—and which would disable the body politic. When Coolidge proclaimed that “America must be kept American,” he had a very specific American body in mind.19
INSTITUTIONS AND THE REPRODUCTION OF THE AMERICAN IDEAL
Alice Smith was not what many had in mind as the ideal American. In May of 1912 the New Jersey Board of Examiners of Feeble-Minded (Including Idiots, Imbeciles and Morons), Epileptics, Criminals and Other Defectives—yes, that really was the bureaucratic name—met to discuss Smith. The four men on the board unanimously determined that “procreation by her is inadvisable,” and based on a 1911 New Jersey law, ordered that the almost twenty-eight-year-old white woman be sterilized. The New Jersey law, signed by then-governor Woodrow Wilson, had authorized sterilization of those individuals deemed “defective.”20
Smith and her four surviving siblings had each been legally committed, at varying times, to the New Jersey State Village for Epileptics, in Skillman, New Jersey. At the initiation of the State Board of Children’s Guardians, Alice had been committed in 1902 by the Court of Common Pleas of Essex County just twelve days short of her eighteenth birthday—likely because such an action was legally easier to achieve before she reached the age of majority. Smith and many of her family members had epilepsy. In 1912 she had not had a seizure for over five years.
Because Smith’s case eventually reached the New Jersey Supreme Court, and becau
se eugenicists relied upon very detailed case histories and genealogical data, more is known about Smith than many others in similar situations. Most of the data, however, is filtered through eugenicist interpretations and little of Smith’s direct voice emerges.
It is clear that Smith’s father, George, was a Civil War veteran who once worked as an engineer (though what that actually meant is not clear). Alice’s mother, Susan Ann, was twelve years younger than her husband. Between 1880 and 1900 the family’s social status had gone steadily downhill. For a brief period after 1900 the couple lived at the New Jersey Soldiers Home for Disabled Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, and Their Wives and Widows in Vineland, but the couple was kicked out because of Susan’s epilepsy. Where their children lived during that period, and the nature of George’s disability, is not clear. The couple had seven children, beginning in the 1870s, five of whom survived childhood.
In 1900 the Smith family lived in the back of a house, bordering an alley, in a largely black neighborhood of Bloomfield, New Jersey. The family generally lived on the $20 per month pension that George received as a disabled veteran of the Civil War, though George worked for a brief period as a railway flagman. Three children had already died: a son had drowned at seven years of age; a daughter died in infancy; and another son died after falling from a second-story window at four years of age. In 1900 Doretta (or Dora) was approximately twenty-seven, George Jr. twenty-three, Emma Jane eighteen, Alice sixteen, and Russell thirteen. Both Emma and Alice had given birth to daughters in the local almshouse, and the baby girls were removed from their unmarried mothers (though when Emma gave birth is not clear). By 1912 all five siblings lived at the State Village for Epileptics. Eugenic investigators from the Village then described mother Susan Smith as “mentally deficient to a fairly marked degree,” with many feeble-minded relatives, and an epileptic who’d had seizures since the age of fourteen. Alice’s father George Smith was “mentally deficient . . . [with] an ugly disposition and an ugly temper,” “commonly known as ‘half-witted.’”21
Smith’s sexuality and pregnancy at a relatively young age, interpreted as proof of her moral and intellectual feeble-mindedness, is hard to interpret. The case files, created by eugenic investigators working out of the Village, noted that Alice became pregnant after she and a neighboring African American man had “indulged in sexual intercourse” in a vacant lot one night. Alice said she had been raped. Later she said that she did not remember what had happened. Village officials “suspected” her “of being a masturbator” and claimed that she exhibited “the hypersexuality which is common in defectiveness.” Possibly even worse, as far as the case report indicated, “This patient did not possess the normal aversions of a white girl to a colored man, who was perhaps nice to her.” Elsewhere the case file indicated that Alice’s father, George, frequently “in fits of anger,” “would turn his daughters out of his house, and they would seek refuge among the negroes about the neighborhood.” Alice lived among African Americans, and clearly had relied upon her black neighbors to avoid her father’s violence. The case file indicated that a “colored man whose name is said to have been Washington” fathered her child. A thirty-two-year-old widowed black man named Charles Washington boarded several houses down the street during the year Alice became pregnant; perhaps he was the father. The true nature of the relationship is near impossible to discern; as is Alice’s home situation. Historian Molly Ladd-Taylor has pointed out that “a disproportionate number” of women in legal situations similar to Alice’s “were probable victims of incest or sexual abuse.” Alice’s case file simply concluded that if released unsterilized, “no doubt when at large she would soon fall victim to another unscrupulous man . . . and she would therefore be a social danger, as she would be the cause of a new generation of epileptics and imbeciles.”22 Smith’s disabling transgressions were racial, sexual, and class based.
Research into Alice’s family—her “pedigree”—was extensive. Informants included her nuclear family, aunts and uncles, great aunts and uncles, cousins and their spouses, second cousins, the local overseer of the poor, local police officers and reporters, and matron of the local Children’s Home. No stone was left unturned in uncovering the sexual, medical, moral, and death histories of each and every person in Smith’s extended family. The result was a four-generation pedigree chart that detailed the moral and physical defectiveness of the entire Smith clan. Such studies were commonly done, and used to determine which individuals should be sterilized and/or segregated within institutions.
The conclusion of the experts of the State Village for Epileptics, and that of eugenics advocate Harry Laughlin, was that Alice Smith was “congenitally defective, and [had] also inherited the epileptic tendency from her parents.” To allow her to return home would be “a crime against society.” Furthermore, “it would be indeed most wasteful to the nation and State to allow this defective to wander about, as it would entail perpetuation of her kind, and other evils due to this lack of proper care and segregation.” Sterilization was thus the solution—to improve Alice Smith’s life, and for the greater good of society.21
Beginning in Indiana in 1907, more than thirty states passed forced-sterilization laws. Their content varied, as did how, if, and to what extent they were put into practice. The model law developed by Harry Laughlin defined “socially inadequate classes” of people very broadly: “(1) Feebleminded; (2) Insane, (including the psychopathic); (3) Criminalistic (including the delinquent and wayward); (4) Epileptic; (5) Inebriate (including drug habitués); (6) Diseased (including the tuberculous, the syphilitic, the leprous, and others with chronic, infectious and legally segregable diseases); (7) Blind (including those with seriously impaired vision); (8) Deaf (including those with seriously impaired hearing); (9) Deformed (including the crippled); and (10) Dependent (including orphans, ne’er-do-wells, the homeless, tramps and paupers).” All state sterilization laws passed prior to 1921, and many after, applied to individuals diagnosed as sexual perverts. Because definitions of insanity included same-sex contact, the laws sometimes doubly impacted gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. And while sterilization laws were never sex-specific, more women than men were sterilized (despite the greater ease of sterilizing men).22
Forced sterilization by state, 1907–1937
State Date No. sterilized
Indiana 1907 2,424
Washington 1909 685
California 1909 20,108
Connecticut 1909 557
Nevada 1911 0
Iowa 1911 1,910
New Jersey 1911 0
New York 1912 42
Oregon 1917 2,341
North Dakota 1913 1,049
Kansas 1913 3,032
Michigan 1913 3,786
Wisconsin 1913 1,823
Nebraska 1915 902
South Dakota 1917 789
New Hampshire 1917 679
Alabama 1919 224
Montana 1923 256
Delaware 1923 945
Virginia 1924 8,300
Idaho 1925 38
Utah 1925 772
Minnesota 1925 2,350
Maine 1925 326
Mississippi 1928 683
West Virginia 1929 98
Arizona 1929 30
Vermont 1931 253
Oklahoma 1931 556
South Carolina 1935 277
Georgia 1937 3,284
Source: Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 294.
Proponents of sterilization argued that it was a patriotic cause, and a better solution than long-term institutionalization. For the health of the nation the electoral body had to be protected against degenerative elements. Politicians, those in the judicial system, educators, and medical experts increasingly conflated political and economic strength with bodily and mental health. In a time of growing class disparities, contested racial and gender power relationships, and large-scale immigration, democracy
had to be protected. For Dr. H. C. Sharp of the Indiana Reformatory, that meant the sterilization of “degenerates”: which, he told the American Prison Association in 1909, included “most of the insane, the epileptic, the imbecile, the idiotic, the sexual perverts; many of the confirmed inebriates, prostitutes, tramps and criminals, as well as the habitual paupers found in our county poor asylums; also many of the children in our orphan homes.” Civic undesirability was slippery and broad; and the definitions of disability, degeneracy, and immorality vague and permeable. Sharp assured his reading and listening audience, however, in ironically patriotic language, that sterilizations (and he performed them without anesthesia) in no way “impaired” the “pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.”23
Perhaps because of the permeability of disability and degeneracy, related concerns spread regarded maintaining able-bodied and able-minded women. Opponents of women’s education such as Edward Clarke had warned in the 1870s that a college education had the potential to permanently damage and disable women. As the movement for female suffrage expanded, and as women’s employment and educational opportunities expanded, so did social concern about the consequences for the female body and greater society. This concern generally did not apply to all women—but focused on white middle- and upper-class women who sought expanded civic engagement.
A Disability History of the United States Page 13