American Passage

by Vincent J. Cannato

  For immigrants suffering from “dementia, mental deficiency, or epilepsy,” doctors were on the lookout for “stupidity, confusion, inattention, lack of comprehension, facial expressions of earnestness or preoccupation . . . general untidiness . . . talking to one’s self, incoherent talk . . . evidence of negativism, silly laughing, hallucinating, awkward manner, biting nail.” In a sample of about 30,000 steerage passengers inspected at Ellis Island in the summer of 1916, some 3,000 received a chalk mark X, although after the battery of tests were completed, only 108 were certified as feebleminded.

  Ellis Island doctors also paid attention to ethnic characteristics when assessing mental capacity. While it was perfectly normal for an Italian to show emotion “on the slightest provocation,” if an Italian showed the “solidity and indifference” of a Pole or a Russian, that would signal a need for further testing. Similarly, English and Germans should answer questions in a straightforward manner, but if they became “evasive as do the Hebrews, we would be inclined to question their sanity.” If an Englishman behaved like an Irishman, Dr. E. H. Mullan argued, inspectors would suspect him of mental problems. If an Italian behaved like a Finn, depression might be suspected.

  Howard Knox was one of the leading experts on mental testing there. The twenty-seven-year-old Knox arrived at Ellis Island in the spring of 1912, around the same time as Henry Goddard’s second visit. He had spent less than three years as a doctor in the Army Medical Corps before resigning in April 1911. The Dartmouth-educated doctor, whose round, fleshy face bore a resemblance to Babe Ruth, had been married three times in as many years. (When he left Ellis Island in 1916, he would be on marriage number four.) Knox then applied for a position in the Public Health and Marine-Hospital Service and was assigned to Ellis Island. Like Thomas Salmon, he had not been trained as a psychologist.

  Knox shared many of the prejudices and biases of the time. He believed mentally defective immigrants were like drops of ink in a barrel of water, polluting the nation’s bloodstream. If the feebleminded were not caught at Ellis Island, Knox argued, they would “start a line of defectives whose progeny, like the brook, will go on forever, branching off here in an imbecile and there in an epileptic.”

  Knox was also sensitive to the flaws in intelligence tests and recognized that many immigrants did poorly not because of innate inferiority but because of a lack of formal education. He warned that intelligence tests like the ones Goddard used would make nearly all immigrants from peasant backgrounds appear to be mentally defective. Another Ellis Island doctor, E. K. Sprague, argued that using Binet tests originally designed for French schoolchildren on poor, uneducated immigrants “is as sensible as to claim that with a single instrument any operation in surgery can be successfully performed.”

  “After studying carefully the methods used at the various schools for the feebleminded,” Knox wrote, “the medical officers at Ellis Island were obliged to discard the great majority of them as unsuitable for their work and unfair to the immigrant.” Knox claimed that one of Goddard’s female assistants had pulled out and tested thirty-six immigrants as mentally deficient. When she turned them over to be certified by Knox and his colleagues, they refused. Using their own methods, they found that in each case the immigrant was either of normal intelligence or suffered from poor vision.

  Their day-to-day familiarity with immigrants caused Ellis Island’s doctors to reject the overly deterministic testing conducted by Goddard’s team, and they were not shy about airing their criticisms in print. Knox repeatedly criticized the methods of Goddard and his staff, calling them “lay-workers with no knowledge of medicine, psychiatry, or neurology.” He complained that they often confused temporary psychological disorders, brought about by environmental conditions, with a mental defect and “call such a patient ‘stupid’ or rate him as ‘seven years old on the Binet.’ ”

  Knox noted one case of an immigrant selected by the Goddard team as feebleminded because of a head shape that Knox classified as “simian reversion type with stigmata including malformation of helix.” To Goddard’s team, the shape of the man’s head placed him lower on the evolutionary scale and signified low intelligence. When Knox’s colleagues tested the man, they found that he had above average intelligence and spoke three languages fluently. He was admitted.

  Another Ellis Island doctor, Bernard Glueck, told the story of a thirty-five-year-old southern Italian man. Based on intelligence tests similar to those used by Goddard, the immigrant was classified with a mental age of between eight and ten, a certifiable moron. Yet Glueck discovered that the man had been in the country before, working as a laborer for two years, during which time he sent back to his family in Italy some $400. He was married with two children, owned property in Italy that he had bought with money earned in the United States, and was returning to earn still more money. “I have no doubt that he will succeed in doing this,” recalled Glueck, who saw the story as a refutation of the Binet test’s ability to measure intelligence. “I am inclined to assume in this case the existence of strongly presumptive evidence that this particular individual is not feebleminded,” concluded Glueck.

  Ignoring Goddard’s work, Ellis Island doctors created their own system of testing the mental capacity of immigrants. Knox began with the realization that the conditions under which immigrants arrived at Ellis Island were less than ideal. “After ten days of sea-sickness, fatigue, and excitement,” Knox wrote, such an individual “could not be expected to do himself justice.” Therefore, immigrants should have a solid meal, bath, and good night’s sleep before taking any mental tests.

  The testing room should be no warmer than 70 degrees, well ventilated, and quiet, and there should be no more than three people in the room. Those administering the test should “have a pleasant and kindly manner.” To ease the mind of the person being tested, Knox argued that the room should not have “an official air,” but instead resemble a den in someone’s home. If possible, tests should be conducted over two days. Doctors should make allowances for the “fear and mental stress under which the subject may be laboring.” While these precautions may have been cold comfort for dazed and confused immigrants, they at least show that doctors were aware of the pitfalls of their assignment.

  Once the conditions had been established, doctors began with a battery of questions. What day of the week is it? What is the date? Where is the immigrant? Next came questions that dealt with common knowledge, such as the number of hours in a day, months in a year, and names of flowers and animals. Immigrants were asked questions about their homeland, such as the capital of their native country and the name of their currency. Other questions were more culturally subjective, such as the significance of Easter. In a random survey of fifty uneducated Polish immigrants, Glueck found that while 98 percent knew the number of months of the year, only 66 percent knew the significance of Easter. Glueck admitted that these questions were relatively useless in judging intelligence among uneducated immigrants.

  Other questions would test mathematical ability with simple addition problems. Immigrants would next be asked to repeat back a series of four to seven numbers given to them by their examiner and were then asked to count to twenty, sometimes by twos, and then count backwards from twenty. They were tested on their ability to gain new knowledge, so they were asked the name of the steamship they arrived on, what port they left from, and how the ships were powered.

  This battery of questions confused Codger Nutt, a boy actor and mascot of the Drury Lane Theatre in London, who was coming to New York to appear in a play. The diminutive thespian could neither read nor write, spoke with a strong Cockney accent, and seemed lost at Ellis Island. Doctors suspected him of being feebleminded, so they asked him whether he knew the difference between a horse and a cow. “I told ’em that an ’orse could be driven but ye couldn’t drive a cow,” Nutt replied. Then they asked him what he would do if he saw someone in the road “cut up into a ’undred pieces,” to which he responded that he would report it to the polic
e. Officials were not convinced by the diminutive actor’s answers, but Secretary Charles Nagel allowed him to enter the country and join the rest of his acting troupe, as long as he left the country after a year.

  The questions that Codger Nutt and others faced were only the beginning of the testing. Doctors went beyond testing math or memory skills and tried to measure the creative powers and imagination of immigrants. “Some of us having gazed into the smoke of a choice cigar or into an open fireplace,” wrote Knox, “may have seen, perhaps, the sweetheart of other days, or the vision of a farmhouse away off in some old country town.” With that in mind, Knox set out to use inkblots of various shapes. Each figure vaguely resembled some object, such as a house, a strawberry, a snake, a leaf.

  Knox conducted a small study using these inkblots among twentyfive Italian immigrants deemed normal and twenty-five deemed mentally defective. The answers from the mental defectives were often accompanied by a “negative tongue noise” or “I don’t know.” Knox also recorded his impression of each individual, which ranged from “stupid and indifferent” to “stupid, emotional, high tempered, and willful.” He concluded that “there are no Jules Vernes” among the group. The reaction time for those deemed mentally defective was nearly twice as slow as the normal group and the mental defectives possessed more asymmetrical heads and faces, harkening back to Goddard’s belief that observation alone could weed out mental defectives.

  Immigrants were also given pictures to describe. One of them, entitled “Last Honors to Bunny,” depicted three young children mourning their dead pet rabbit. Immigrants were asked six questions, including what was going on, what the boy and girl were doing, and why one of the boys was digging a hole.

  Ellis Island doctor E. H. Mullan found that most of the immigrants poorly described the picture, but that should have come as no surprise. Hard as it may be to believe, some immigrants had little familiarity with pictures. More importantly, many immigrants were puzzled by what they saw in the drawing. They had rarely seen pets treated well and were not used to seeing rabbits as pets. Some were unfamiliar with the custom of placing flowers on graves. Mullan concluded that pictures were unhelpful in judging the mental capacity of immigrants unless they depicted scenes easily recognizable to European peasants.

  Ellis Island doctors were increasingly bothered by the subjectivity of their intelligence tests. One manual admitted that testing the knowledge and intelligence of immigrants was a difficult, perhaps impossible, task. “What are likely to be considered matters of universal knowledge may be absolutely unknown to them on account of the extreme limitations of their surroundings,” it stated. The average American, these doctors were informed, could not grasp how narrow were the lives of most European peasants arriving at Ellis Island. These men and women lived lives of “sordidness and hard-working monotony almost beyond belief, resulting in a mental equipment which is correspondingly limited and stunted.”

  With this in mind, Ellis Island doctors made use of nonverbal performance tests, many of which they created themselves. Most were little more than glorified jigsaw puzzles. Wooden boards had shapes of different sizes cut out, and immigrants had to put the pieces back in their proper place. Some of the figures were abstract, while others portrayed a face in profile or a horse.

  Howard Knox created another test, referred to as the Knox Imitation Cube Test. It consisted of four one-inch cubes placed four inches apart. The doctor then took a smaller cube and, facing the immigrant, proceeded to touch the blocks in a set pattern in a slow and methodical manner. The immigrant would have to repeat the pattern. There were five levels of difficulty, beginning with four moves that touched each cube in order and proceeding to more difficult moves requiring up to six moves that touched the cubes out of sequence. There were five different sets of movements, and success at each level was tied to various levels of intelligence, from idiot to imbecile to moron to normal to highly intelligent.

  These tests were about more than just the subject’s ability to accomplish the task successfully. Immigrants were constantly being watched, observed, and judged. The inspecting doctor was not just concerned about whether the immigrant could accomplish the task. He was interested in how fast it was accomplished, the immigrant’s facial expression while completing the task, his muscle control, the speed of his movement, his mental state, and attention span.

  From the moment immigrants set foot on Ellis Island, they were under observation At least a dozen pairs of eyes were on them constantly. It is hard to imagine that immigrants could not feel the penetrating gaze of doctors and inspectors bearing down on them, judging them in a calculating, yet not totally dispassionate, manner. Ellis Island doctors were aware of the need to provide a proper environment, but the observational effect upon the immigrants must have caused a great deal of nervousness, performance anxiety, and even belligerence.

  It is not surprising that officials began to uncover more mentally defective immigrants through the years. From 1908 to 1912, the total number of idiots, imbeciles, and feebleminded diagnosed remained relatively constant at between 160 and 190 per year. Yet 1913 proved to be a crucial year. That year, the New York Times warned that “15,000 Defectives Menace New York,” Goddard was conducting his tests at Ellis Island, and Howard Knox first began publishing articles outlining the methods used by the Public Health Service doctors.

  In 1913, the number of mental defectives detected rose to 555, and then almost 1,000 in the following year. The dramatic increase came almost exclusively from the category of feebleminded—those who did not appear at first glance to be mentally defective. From 1908 to 1912, the number of feebleminded immigrants was around 120 per year; by 1913 it had risen to 483, and in 1914 it reached 890. The reliance on intelligence testing increased the number of immigrants deemed to have below-average intelligence. Restrictionists believed that science was finally allowing the proper sifting of undesirable immigrants.

  Knox sometimes shared the concerns of restrictionists and eugenicists, but he and his colleagues also stressed common sense. Immigrants would be tested on at least three separate occasions before being classified as mentally defective. No single test would seal the diagnosis, and immigrants were never deported for failing just one test. Instead, doctors looked at the entirety of the results on common knowledge, memory, reasoning, learning capacity, and performance tests. Still, mental testing at Ellis Island was fraught with cultural biases, as well as the unstated assumption that something called intelligence could be tested.

  Like others involved in the immigration debate, Knox was a complex man. In June 1913, he could tell a scientific conference he was confident he would find the missing link among immigrants at Ellis Island, implying that some he saw there were subhuman. A few months earlier, though, he could warn readers of a medical journal that they “should have infinite compassion and pity for those whom the French have feelingly called les enfants du bon Dieu and the Scotch the daft bairns, and the innocents, for a soul is a soul regardless of what functional tests may show of the intellect.” Such compassion would have been cold comfort to the Zitello family. For all the supposedly dispassionate science, intelligence tests were not conducted in a vacuum.

  A few weeks after writing his letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, Salvatore Zitello received his response. It came not from the president, but from the office of the immigration commissioner. They were words he had heard before. Gemma, the letter stated, “was excluded because she could not qualify under the mental requirements of the law. I am sorry to be obliged to advise you that she comes within a class manditorily excluded.” There would be no leniency for Gemma Zitello. She would never be reunited with her family in America.

  Chapter 13

  Moral Turpitude

  Poor little me, why did they consider me a dangerous woman? —Vera, Countess of Cathcart, 1926

  DRESSED IN A LARGE GREEN FELT HAT WITH A MAT CHING coat trimmed with brown fox fur, flesh-colored silk stockings, and black velvet slippers, Vera, Coun
tess of Cathcart, was ready to take on New York. The attractive and petite thirty-something member of England’s fashionable set had arrived in New York in February 1926 armed with a copy of her play Ashes of Love and dreams of Broadway fame.

  Instead of becoming a star or literary sensation, the countess ended up a different kind of celebrity, an international cause célèbre who introduced the concept of moral turpitude to people on both sides of the Atlantic.

  Vera’s problems began when immigration officials boarded her ship as it entered New York Harbor. In a routine check of first-class passengers, the inspectors discovered that, five years earlier, the countess’s marriage to her second husband, the Earl of Cathcart, had ended in divorce. Another member of the British aristocracy, the Earl of Craven, was named as the cause of the divorce. Vera had left her husband—some thirty years her senior—and their three children to run off to South Africa with the married Earl of Craven. Their positions among England’s minor nobility added to the tabloid quality of the scandal.

  By marking herself as divorced on her papers, Cathcart attracted extra scrutiny from officials. It is unclear how they managed to go from Vera’s divorced status to her adulterous affair with the Earl of Craven. Maybe someone remembered the scandal, or perhaps, as Vera suggested, she had an enemy in New York who alerted authorities to both her arrival and her scandalous background.

  Immigration officials declared that since Vera was an adulterer, she was guilty of a crime of moral turpitude and excludable under law. Most Americans had little idea what that peculiar phrase meant. Black’s Law Dictionary defines moral turpitude as “general, shameful wickedness—so extreme a departure from ordinary standards of honest, good morals, justice, or ethics as to be shocking to the moral sense of the community . . . an act of baseness, vileness, or the depravity in private and social duties which one person owes to another, or to society in general, contrary to the accepted and customary rule of right and duty between people.”