These supposedly weak and listless new immigrants would never make it in industrial America. Their lack of strength would mean unemployment and poverty. Some Americans believed that the poor physiques and low vitality of immigrants indicated a genetic disposition, not caused by environment or circumstances. Those genes would be passed down to their children and grandchildren, lowering the overall vitality and strength of the American people for generations to come.
In 1902, commissioner-general of immigration Frank Sargent warned William Williams that an immigrant should be excluded unless it “was positive from appearance and the physical condition of the aliens that they could immediately obtain employment, with good wages, whereby they could support themselves and not become public charges.” Hinting at a monetary test, Sargent wrote that, “sturdy Scotchmen, Irishmen, or Germans who land at Ellis Island with but a few dollars can enter immediately and find employment.” Those of other nationalities with little money, however, “should not be permitted to enter unless they produce satisfactory proof of their ability to work and support themselves.”
Medical officials initially classified immigrants with “poor physique” as those suffering from what was called “chicken breast” or displaying symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis, but not necessarily the disease itself. Immigration officials, however, wanted to stretch out the term to encompass a wider range of alleged physical defects.
Sargent defined a “poor physique” as those who were “undersized, poorly developed, with feeble heart action, arteries below standard size . . . physically degenerate.” An immigrant with a poor physique was not just more likely to become a public charge; he would also “transmit his undesirable qualities to his offspring.”
William Williams agreed that a broader interpretation of the term “poor physique” might achieve greater restriction within the law. “I am glad that you approve of my remarks as to the low vitality of many immigrants,” Williams wrote Prescott Hall. “I would like to see some steps taken to keep out immigrants who do not come up to some proper physical standard.”
He had been quite taken with an article written by Allan McLaughlin, a doctor at Ellis Island who noted that “thousands of immigrants of poor physique are recorded as such by the medical inspectors at Ellis Island.” The problem, as McLaughlin understood it, was that nothing in the law mandated that immigrants of poor physiques be excluded, therefore “this mere note of physical defect carries little significance under the present law, and the vast majority of them are admitted by the immigration authorities, because it does not appear that the physical defect noted will make the immigrant a public charge.”
Doctors with the Public Health and Marine Hospital Service were conflicted about the term “poor physique.” Dr. George Stoner, who was stationed at Ellis Island, listed a number of physical maladies that might constitute a poor physique, including respiratory problems, “deficient muscular development,” poor circulation, and an inadequate proportion between height and weight. However, he was concerned that the term itself “does not imply a clinical or pathological entity.” Surgeon General Walter Wyman agreed. “Poor physique is not a diagnosis,” he said.
The Immigration Act of 1907 would provide restrictionists with a way to shoehorn “poor physique” into immigration inspection. Many immigration defenders thought the bill a great success for what was not included: a literacy test. However, the new law expanded classifications for excluding aliens, including one that allowed doctors to certify immigrants with a mental or physical defect that might affect their ability to earn a living. In effect, the new law would allow immigrants to be excluded from entering the country if their physical appearance was poor, to the extent that officials felt they would not be able to survive in America.
This did not mean loathsome diseases or dangerous and contagious diseases (such as trachoma), which were already excludable under the law. Medical officers certified immigrants with these diseases, as well as those suffering from insanity, epilepsy, and low intelligence, as Class A, which meant they were automatically excluded by law. Immigrants with poor physiques and other physical deficiencies were certified as Class B, which meant that their exclusion was at the discretion of immigration officials.
In the first full year that the new law was in effect, 870 immigrants were barred from the country under this new clause. By 1912, that number would grow to over 4,200. However, this did not satisfy Prescott Hall. He wrote to Robert Watchorn, commissioner of Ellis Island at the time, that only 34 percent of immigrants initially classified as having a poor physique were deported, while the rest were allowed to enter on bond or on appeal. Watchorn responded that most of those admitted were older parents coming to stay with their adult children already in the United States, and therefore “not prospective progenitors, for the most part.” There is, of course, something comical about the gaunt and sickly Prescott Hall complaining about the poor physiques of incoming immigrants.
When Williams took over in 1909, he focused more closely on the new law. He made a long list of ailments that might qualify an immigrant for exclusion. It included ankylosis (stiffness) of the joints; arteriosclerosis; chronic inflammation of lymph glands; hernia; goiter; lupus; and varicose veins. Even otherwise productive and healthy immigrants who were deaf or mute might be excluded under the new rules. All immigrants “not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to land” would be pulled aside for a hearing, but only those with ailments “in aggravated form,” to the extent they would affect their ability to earn a living, would find themselves excluded.
In his first annual report since returning to Ellis Island, Williams noted that many of the previous year’s detentions were due to “serious physical defects discovered by our surgeons,” placing these immigrants under what Williams termed the “excellent provision of the law of 1907.” Williams did not believe that these ailments were randomly assigned across the racial and ethnic spectrum. “Relatively few immigrants from Northern Europe are so held,” he wrote. “It is those coming from the other parts of Europe (particularly the southern and south-eastern parts) that constitute the great majority of the doubtful cases.”
The amount of work being done was astounding. In 1911, there were 70,829 board of special inquiry hearings. That came to almost two hundred hearings a day, seven days a week, twelve months a year. Ellis Island possessed a staff, not including medical officials who did not sit on the boards, of 523 workers, although that included many, such as watchmen and maintenance staff, who did not perform inspection duties.
Williams worried about the ability of his staff to carry out that work. “Some of these men will never understand the meaning of the phrase ‘likely to become a public charge’ or how to apply it,” he wrote to Daniel Keefe, the new commissioner-general of immigration. “The fact is we are executing here some of the most difficult laws in the world with much green material.” Ellis Island was running as many as eight board hearings at any one time, necessitating more than thirty officials to sit on those boards. “We have not 32 men here who are qualified to do good Board work,” Williams lamented.
To the thousands of immigrants who passed in front of those boards, like Wolf Konig, Williams’s strict enforcement of the law had real consequences. The seventeen-year-old arrived at Ellis Island alone and penniless in June 1912; doctors certified him as “afflicted with lack of physical and sexual development for age claimed which affects ability to earn a living.” Wolf was headed to his uncle, Nathan Waxman, in Chicago, who owned a stationary store and property worth $3,800. Nathan signed an affidavit that he would support Wolf so that he would not become a public charge.
Irving Lipsitch of HIAS took up the case. He argued that Wolf was sixteen years old and therefore not underdeveloped for his age. “We believe that he can improve himself and his development with the assistance of his relatives who are prepared to help him to get better nourishment and exercise,” Lipsitch told officials. “Being a young boy, and not accustomed to travel, it is quite natural t
hat this first long journey should cause him to become fatigued and to look poorly developed when examined.” Nathan Waxman enlisted the help of two Chicagoarea congressmen to write to Secretary Nagel about their interest in Wolf ’s fate. Ultimately, though, Williams stood his ground. “This boy is frail and obviously weakling [sic],” he concluded. Unfortunately for Wolf, Nagel was away from his office when his appeal reached Washington. In his place, Solicitor General Charles Earl agreed with Williams and ordered the boy back to Galicia.
Michele Sica was also a victim of the new regime at Ellis Island. He was a “bird of passage,” an immigrant who would come to America for a number of years to work and then return to his wife and children back home in Italy with the money he had saved. This would have been Sica’s fourth time in the country, having first arrived in 1901. He had lived in America for seven out of the last ten years.
On his fourth visit, in June 1911, Sica ran into problems. Though he arrived with $21, had a brother-in-law and friends in New York, and had resided in the country for a number of years over the previous decade, Sica was declared likely to become a charge. He was now fortyfive years old and diagnosed with a hernia. “Although there are some favorable features in the case, he is certified to be physically defective,” wrote Assistant Commissioner Byron Uhl, “his general appearance is not good, he is considerably older than when previously in this country and there is great doubt as to his ability to earn a livelihood, afflicted as he is, as a laborer.”
Sica was ordered deported, but his expulsion was postponed until September. That meant Sica would spend the entire summer cooped up at Ellis Island, where temperatures would often rise to over 100 degrees in the poorly ventilated dorm rooms. In the meantime, Sica hired Fiorello La Guardia to argue his case. One year out from his work as an interpreter at Ellis Island, La Guardia now had his own small practice dealing with cases like Sica’s. If Williams believed that too many undesirable immigrants were getting into the country, La Guardia thought that too many desirable immigrants were being kept out.
La Guardia appealed Sica’s case to Washington. During Sica’s last stay in New York, he had worked for a Manhattan lumber company for more than three years and would be rehired if admitted. La Guardia could not claim that Sica already had a job lined up with the firm, since that would mean he was in violation of the contract-labor law. “Considering all these facts it is clear that the medical certificate cannot even incidentally be the cause of this alien’s becoming a public charge,” La Guardia concluded. “He is now in good physical condition and well able to secure and keep profitable employment.” However, La Guardia’s efforts were for naught. After three months in detention, Sica was shipped back to Italy.
Although much younger than Sica, sixteen-year-old Bartolomeo Stallone also faced exclusion. Arriving from Italy in September 1911, Stallone was headed for his brother’s home in St. Louis, where he would work as a barber. At Ellis Island, Dr. E. H. Mullan certified the young man as “afflicted with flat deformed chest, lack of muscular development (poor physique), which affects ability to earn a living.” Stallone appealed his case, but Augustus Sherman, acting in place of William Williams, reaffirmed the deportation order, noting that Stallone was “quite frail in appearance.”
When Stallone’s case landed on the desk of Secretary Nagel, he ordered that the immigrant be admitted on a $500 bond, most likely posted by his brother. After three weeks in detention at Ellis Island, Stallone was released. Two years later, Bartolomeo requested that the bond be canceled. He had to report to officials in St. Louis, who found that the young man was making $12 a week as a barber. Though he had no savings, he told officials: “I live well, dress well, and send money home to my father and mother in Italy, so I haven’t anything saved up.” Impressed by the now-eighteen-year-old, officials canceled the bond and declared him: “Physically fit for admission and that there is little or no likelihood that he will become a public charge.”
Williams himself was not completely hard-hearted in his application of the law. Jacob Duck, a twenty-one-year-old Turkish Jew, arrived in March 1910 headed to a cousin who owned a wholesale lace business on New York’s Lower East Side. Doctors certified Duck as lacking in physical development, and Williams agreed that “he does not present a very robust appearance.” On the other hand, Duck arrived with $47. Williams personally interviewed him and found him intelligent and unlikely to become a public charge. The commissioner agreed to admit Duck, even though he was “the type of immigrant that I care not to see come into this country.” It was a startling admission, both that Williams would put his personal prejudice against Jewish immigrants on an official document and that he still felt compelled to follow the law despite that prejudice.
Though Williams may have occasionally shown leniency, he found that his superiors in Washington often had a different interpretation of the law. In January 1912, Chaie Kaganowitz arrived at Ellis Island with her nine children, ranging in age from three to twenty. Williams declared that the forty-two-year-old Russian Jewish widow with poor eyesight and her youngest children were likely to become public charges. The older children were also ordered excluded for poor physical development. Williams was sitting in his office with Commissioner-General Keefe when he asked to see the family. Both Keefe and Williams agreed with the decision owing to “their extremely poor appearance.” The two older sons were carpenters, but Williams found them to be “frail appearing” and not very “robust.” Only the oldest daughter, a seamstress, made a favorable impression upon Williams and Keefe.
The family appealed its exclusion to Secretary Nagel. As confident as Williams and Keefe were that the Kaganowitzes were undesirable, Nagel thought them to be admissible. Apart from the mother’s poor eyesight, there was not a single medical certificate against any family member that would have classified any of them as excludable. All that officials had stated was that the Kaganowitz family looked poor and weak. Nagel was impressed that “every member of this family who is old enough to work does work.” What more was needed to prove that this family was self-supporting? he argued. “This evidence of a willingness and capacity to work is worth more than all the ordinary money tests that may be applied,” he concluded, in a direct slap at Williams’s beloved monetary test. After almost a month in detention at Ellis Island, the family was admitted, although the six youngest children were released on bond.
Meier Salamy Yacoub, a thirty-seven-year-old Syrian Jew, arrived at Ellis Island three days after the Kaganowitz family. Williams found him to be “an undersized man and his appearance is not good.” He ordered him excluded as likely to become a public charge. “The indications are that he has come here with the expectation of entering that non-producing class of peddlers of which there are now so many,” Williams wrote. For him, the pushcart peddlers who crowded the streets of the Lower East Side and other immigrant ghettos were a nuisance and the nation did not need any more of them. While Keefe agreed, Assistant Secretary Benjamin Cable, acting in place of Nagel for the day, overturned the decision and allowed Yacoub to land. “I do not see how this man is likely to become a public charge,” Cable wrote. Yacoub was allowed to leave Ellis Island after only five days there, leaving behind the Kaganowitzes as they awaited word on their fate.
Jewish groups were sensitive to charges that Jewish immigrants were being certified as having poor physiques, especially peddlers like Yacoub. Simon Wolf defended peddlers, calling them “the pioneer merchants of our country at one time,” adding that “there is no telling what a peddler might become in the course of time, or at least his children, as evidence of what a rail-splitter and a tailor had accomplished when they finally were located in the White House.” Wolf continued with his critique before the National Jewish Immigration Council. “If the immigration officials at the ports of entry and some of those in the Bureau had a little more imagination and a little more red blood percolating for the human species,” Wolf said, “there would not be so many likely to become public charges . . . which provoke a
smile and not a tear—that is hernia and double hernia, diseases that never prevent a man from labor if properly cared for.”
A few months after Williams took office, the New York Times featured a story about complaints that the immigration law was being directed at Jews. “I found that Jews were being singled out among immigrants of other nationalities and the rule of physical development applied to them rigorously,” a reporter for a local Jewish paper told the Times. Assistant Commissioner Uhl admitted that for “some unknown reason there has lately been an unusual number of young men of the Jewish faith who were unable to come up to the physical requirement,” but denied that it was due to any discrimination.
Whether Uhl was being honest or not, it was not unusual to find arguments about the alleged physical weakness of Jews. “On the physical side the Hebrew are the polar opposites of our pioneer breed,” claimed social scientist Edward Ross. “Not only are they undersized and weakmuscled, but they shun bodily activity and are exceedingly sensitive to pain.” Besides fighting against these stereotypes, Jewish groups also argued that since many Jews were not headed for coal mines or steel mills, great physical strength was not always a necessity. Some, like Meier Yacoub, would become peddlers. Still others, like Solomon Meter, were tailors, a job that required delicate skill rather than physical brawn.
Meter was detained at Ellis Island when doctors certified him as suffering from “atrophy, partial paralysis, club foot, shortening and lameness of right lower extremity which affects ability to earn a living,” and therefore likely to become a public charge and ordered excluded.
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