The term entered American immigration law as one of the excludable offenses in the 1891 Immigration Act. Courts and immigration officials tried to define the term, but never settled on a firm definition. A wide array of offenses could theoretically be considered crimes of moral turpitude, from passing bad checks to arson to adultery to bigamy to gross indecency and even murder. The arbitrary nature of the term made it problematic for both officials and aliens. In the wake of the Cathcart case, one academic complained that moral turpitude had become “enshrouded by an impenetrable mist.”
Given the murky nature of the charge, it is no surprise that Cathcart was unrepentant, despite the very public moral opprobrium cast down upon her. “I have done nothing in my life that I am ashamed of,” she told reporters. The affair with the Earl of Craven had quickly gone sour in South Africa. After promising to marry Vera, the earl left her for another woman. Later, he returned to his wife.
By 1926, Vera had managed to get over her failed amorous adventure with one earl and her failed marriage to another. She turned her unfortunate love life into a thinly veiled autobiographical play entitled Ashes of Love, and she seemed to be on the rebound. She was now engaged to a commoner, a young playwright named Ralph Neale, who was waiting for her back in England.
Now it looked as if Vera would be seeing her fiancé sooner than expected. She was ordered deported on the same ship on which she arrived. Meanwhile, her friends and the British consulate appealed to Washington, which granted Vera a three-day stay of deportation.
While Vera stewed at Ellis Island, the Earl of Craven was actually in New York, staying with an uncle on Park Avenue. His wife was sick and had come to New York for medical care and the earl was there to be with her. This only added to the soap opera nature of the case. “Why am I to be deported, if the Earl of Craven is to be allowed to remain here,” Vera rightly asked. “He has no more right to be in America than I have. If I am guilty, so is he.” Officials argued that since the earl had declared himself married, he did not attract the attention of officials. This explanation did little to quell the complaints of a pernicious sexual double standard.
Ellis Island officials were aware that their decision was being scrutinized and sent an inspector up to Park Avenue to interview the Earl of Craven. Meanwhile, Vera spent her time at Ellis Island writing her next play, entitled Who Shall Judge?, an autobiographical account of her detention.
Since officials were adamant that Vera not be let into the country, they had no choice but to order an arrest warrant for the Earl of Craven on the same charge. Anticipating the move and no doubt uncomfortable that his affair was once again fodder for the press, the Earl of Craven fled to the Ritz Carlton in Montreal, but he made sure to make his opinion of the affair known before he left town. “Gentlemen, you must be a bunch of Godforsaken idiots,” he wrote immigration officials.
In an interview from Ellis Island, Vera said: “I am not a coward and have not run away, like the Earl of Craven. He has proved himself a coward in many ways.” (This was a man who had lost a leg in combat as a young officer during World War I.) She had become a victim, not just of a caddish former lover, but also of insensitive government authorities. American women’s groups, like Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party, called the deportation order against Vera a case of discrimination.
Many in England saw it as another example of provincial puritanism. The Evening Standard went so far as to accuse American officials of bad manners. As one of Vera’s lawyers said, “Congress did not intend by the enactment of this statute to translate the Department of Labor into a radio of foreign scandal.” Congress, he continued, did not mean for immigration authorities to act “as a censor of international sex morals or to send its agents snooping among the divorce records of foreign countries in order that they might obtain evidence which would enable the department to protect our chaste and puritanical Republic.”
The 1920s were a time of greater freedoms for women, personified by the fun-loving flapper. These women challenged Victorian-era notions of the proper place of women. Vera Cathcart was just such a modern woman. “I think all persons should be at liberty to do what they choose,” she said. Vera symbolized the sexual liberation and right to self-expression of women freed from the conventions of middleclass morality.
Yet traditional morality still held sway with government officials. Despite the national and international uproar, Cathcart remained at Ellis Island, albeit in a private room. In fact, she claimed to be quite comfortable and was surprised by conditions on the island, compared to the horrors she had read about in English newspapers.
Women’s groups enlisted the legal help of Arthur Garfield Hays, one year removed from his work with Clarence Darrow on the defense team at the Scopes trial. Hays argued that there was no reason to deport Vera for a crime of moral turpitude since adultery was not a crime in England, South Africa, or the United States. However, Hays was mistaken. Since the late 1800s, a growing number of states had made adultery illegal.
A federal judge issued a writ of habeas corpus in Vera’s case, and she was released from Ellis Island after signing a $500 personal bond, which allowed her to remain free for ten days. Then, another federal judge ordered that Vera could stay in the country as long as she liked. Government lawyers, reeling under the embarrassing publicity of the case, did not put up much of a fight.
Vera could now attend to her theatrical career. The notoriety led a producer to offer her $5,000 for her play, as well as a percentage deal on gross receipts and motion picture rights. Ashes of Love premiered in London in mid-March, a month after her ordeal began. Her case brought publicity to a previously unknown talent, but it did not prevent negative reviews. One London critic called the play crude: “The dialogue, with few exceptions, is banal and the characters in the piece are wooden and lifeless as dummies.”
After London, the play then moved to Washington, D.C., with Vera taking over the lead role. American critics were no kinder. The Times called it a “naïve . . . rather childish and undramatic story.” Most of the audience seemed attracted only by the curiosity value of Cathcart’s story. The play ran for one week.
Angry at the reception her play received, Vera bought it back from the producer. She vowed to finish her play about her detention at Ellis Island. She was careful to remind the public that despite her title and lifestyle, she was not rich. Her stepfather was a wealthy businessman, but he had not given her any money and she was no longer married to the wealthy Earl of Cathcart. She was an independent woman of dependent means, dependent on her marginal literary talent and even more meager acting talent. Perhaps that is why, when Vera Cathcart sailed back to England at the end of March less than two months after her arrival, she told reporters that her treatment at Ellis Island was kind and generous when compared to what she received from critics. Immigration officials she could forgive; theater critics she could not.
Edward Corsi, who ran Ellis Island a few years after the Cathcart incident, admitted that officials probably were too zealous in “catching these wearers of the cloak of royalty in our immigration net. . . . We have used our democracy as a weapon to allow us deliberately to offend them.” Corsi may have been correct that democratically minded immigration officials enjoyed the chance to take down minor celebrities and members of high society, yet had Vera Cathcart been a poor peasant girl from Poland, the press would not have taken notice of her case, ambassadors would not have complained to Washington, and women’s groups would not have come to her rescue.
Women of all nationalities fell victim to the prying investigations of immigration officials, whether poor Jewish and Italian women or wealthy Englishwomen. There is little evidence to suggest that officials targeted women from eastern and southern Europe for increased scrutiny. In fact, it seemed that the one group most often profiled as potentially immoral was single French women arriving in first- and second-class passage. For Ellis Island officials, policing the border and enforcing the nation’s immigration laws often meant en
forcing middleclass ideas of sexual morality.
G IULIA DEL FAVERO SAID she would rather jump into New York Harbor than submit to the medical exam. She did agree to have the male doctor examine her breasts, which he thought showed a peculiar appearance that might suggest pregnancy.
Giulia was taken out for special examination during the initial line inspection because an official thought that she looked pregnant. Through a translator, Giulia adamantly denied she was pregnant and declared herself to be a morally pure young woman. The breast exam was one thing, but there was no way that the twenty-three-year-old unmarried seamstress was going to let a male stranger give her a vaginal examination.
Ellis Island commissioner Thomas Fitchie was sticking to his guns. He declared that either Giulia would submit to the exam or she would be deported. But Fitchie ran into strong opposition from his own staff. A female matron named Regina Stucklen complained that forcing such a procedure on young women ran the risk “of examining pure and good moral girls, and thereby, perhaps, injure them morally for the rest of their lives.” Even the doctor agreed, telling Fitchie that he thought the young girl was right to refuse the exam, a procedure he believed was “extremely repugnant to a virtuous woman.” Such an exam would say nothing about a woman’s condition if she were less than three months pregnant. Fitchie backed down and the young girl was allowed to enter the country.
Giulia was not married and if she had been pregnant that would have cast doubt on her moral fitness to enter the country. There were other concerns. Young women were never set free from Ellis Island unless in the custody of a male relative or missionary or immigrant aid official. To do otherwise, officials feared, would risk throwing these women to the proverbial lions, whereby unsavory men might entrap them, steal their innocence, and start them on a life of prostitution.
Sometimes, though, those vultures worked inside the immigration station. Inspector John Lederhilger seemed to take a certain relish in closely questioning single women who passed through Ellis Island. “Did he sleep with you on the boat?” Lederhilger reportedly asked an unmarried German girl arriving in New York with a male companion. “Now tell me how often did he put it in?” If Fitchie and others exhibited genuine interest in protecting single women and upholding traditional morality, Lederhilger seemed more interested in his own sexual titillation.
Immigration officials continued to find themselves enmeshed in the personal lives of immigrants. In 1907, the solicitor of Commerce and Labor ruled that moral turpitude covered issues of private sexuality such as adultery and fornication. Twenty-one-year-old Swede Elin Maria Hjerpe found this out when she arrived at Ellis Island in early 1909. Five months pregnant and single, Elin arrived in the company of her intended husband, a naturalized American citizen and the “author of her condition,” as the records state.
Because of her out-of-wedlock pregnancy, the board of special inquiry voted unanimously to exclude her on the grounds of moral turpitude. Yet when the case reached Washington on appeal, Frank Larned, the assistant commissioner-general of immigration, was not convinced. He noted that Elin’s only offense was that she had committed fornication, which he believed, when committed in private so as not to “offend the moral sense of the community,” was not a crime of moral turpitude. Without excusing premarital sex, Larned believed the circumstances called for leniency. Elin’s boyfriend had told officials he wanted to marry Elin as soon as possible. Elin Hjerpe and her boyfriend were married at Ellis Island and she was allowed to enter the country.
A young Serbian woman named Milka Rosceta arrived at Ellis Island a few days later, accompanied by her three-year-old child. Their ultimate destination was Steubenville, Ohio, where Dana Jezdic, the father of the child, resided. Like Elin Hjerpe, Rosceta was detained on the grounds of fornication. An immigrant aid society representative at Ellis Island sent a telegram to Dana about the situation and he responded with an affidavit stating his desire to marry Milka upon her arrival in Stuebenville. He even had a local Serbian Orthodox priest sign an affidavit that he would officiate at the wedding, but this was not good enough for officials.
So Dana took time off from his job at the La Belle Iron Works and traveled by train to New York. Milka and her child were in their sixth day of detention when Dana arrived. There was some discrepancy in their stories. Dana said his girlfriend was only nineteen and they were too young to be married back home; Milka claimed to be twenty-four years old and said the couple could not marry in Europe because Dana had not served in the army. Officials probed Milka’s sexual history, asking her: “What other men, if any, have you been intimate with?” She responded that there had been no other men.
The case wound up in Washington, where Frank Larned ruled on it. He noted that this was also a case of fornication, which was not punished under common law unless it was committed “openly and notoriously.” While officials had every right to exclude Milka under the moral turpitude clause, Larned again called for moving beyond a literal interpretation of the law—but with a twist.
Larned argued that officials could not hold Milka to the standards of middle-class American morality. “If this appellant had been reared in environments similar to those existing in the United States,” he argued, “the commission of her fornication would necessarily impute to her moral turpitude.” She was raised in the Balkans under very different standards. “It is extremely doubtful whether she fell from a higher state of character to a lower when she mated with the man to whom she is now destined,” he argued. Her conduct, in his eyes, was “unmoral,” not immoral. By that same reasoning, Larned argued, officials could not exclude the “wife of a Zulu chieftain from savage Africa” coming to join her mate, even though “they may have mated in no more ceremonial a manner than is observed by the beasts of that country.” Larned ordered that Milka and Dana be married at Ellis Island.
The argument contained many of the contradictory feelings embodied in American immigration law, mixing prejudice with leniency. That Larned would use this rationale for the Serbian Milka and not for the Swedish Elin Hjerpe shows how strongly Americans differentiated between northern Europeans and southern and eastern Europeans. Yet even though the reasoning behind the decisions may have differed, both women were allowed to enter the country after their hasty marriages at Ellis Island.
Young women who transgressed the boundaries of middle-class morality could still feel the long arm of the law even after they had been admitted to the country, since immigrants could be deported within three years of their arrival if they were subsequently found to have violated immigration law. Take the case of twenty-year-old Cecilie Kolb, who arrived in May 1910 and went to live with the family of a German baker in the Bronx. Within a year, the baker wrote to Ellis Island complaining that his young charge possessed an “immoral character and I believe it is useless to try to keep her on the right path.” Cecilie was having difficulty keeping a job and was living with a fortune-teller in Manhattan.
So in August 1911, Kolb was brought to Ellis Island for a deportation hearing. At first, she admitted to having had illicit relations with two men, but then quickly denied it, saying she only went with them to dance halls and bars. Ellis Island doctors examined her and declared her a virgin. Though Assistant Commissioner Uhl wanted to deport Kolb as likely to become a public charge, Washington officials ordered that the girl be freed because of insufficient evidence.
Immigration officials also showed little compunction about enforcing the moral turpitude clause against men, and wealthy Anglo-Saxons at that. Commerce and Labor Secretary Oscar Straus described the case of an immigrant mill manager from Lawrence, Massachusetts, who was married with children. The man went to Canada on a trip and returned with a woman who was not his wife. Inspectors held him at the Canadian border, where he admitted that he had had “improper relations” with his traveling companion. Officials ordered him excluded on the grounds of moral turpitude.
“I had approved exclusion simply to teach the fellow a lesson in morality,” Straus w
rote in his diary. When a former governor of Massachusetts lobbied Straus on behalf of the adulterer, Straus relented and ordered him admitted, saying that he did it for the man’s family, “not because he deserved it.” At the next cabinet meeting, Theodore Roosevelt told Straus he would not have let the man in. Straus figured as much and told the president he had thought of him when deciding the case. “That is a nice affair,” the happily married Roosevelt said jokingly. “You think of me when adultery is committed.”
In another case, a forty-year-old English businessman named Louis Fairbanks arrived in Boston in December 1908. Although he first claimed to be single, Fairbanks later admitted he had a wife in England who suffered from consumption and bronchitis. He also admitted he had taken up with another woman, with whom he had a child. In contrast to Vera Cathcart’s case eighteen years later, immigration officials declared that since ecclesiastical courts in England had declared adultery a crime, they were justified in excluding Fairbanks on the grounds of moral turpitude. Straus agreed and Fairbanks was deported back to England.
Sometimes women could use the moral turpitude clause for their own benefit. Sarah Rosen had married Julius Rosen in Russia in the mid-1880s. A few years later, Julius left for America, and by the late 1890s he was joined by Sarah and their three children, Becky, Mary, and George. According to Sarah, four days after she arrived with her children, Julius deserted the family and left for England. There, Julius married again and had two more children. Julius claimed he was forced into his marriage with Sarah by an uncle, and that the marriage was illegal in Russia because Julius was under the age of eighteen.
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