More than a decade after he abandoned his family, Julius Rosen returned to the United States. A few months later, Sarah Rosen wrote a plaintive letter to William Williams at Ellis Island regarding her husband. Her children were now fourteen, twenty, and twenty-three. She had managed to raise them by herself and attain some measure of prosperity. The family lived in Brooklyn and ran a stationery store. Sarah appeared to own some real estate, and she believed that Julius’s return was motivated by money.
She complained that Julius was making her life miserable and bothering her family. “I am not seeking any revenge,” Sarah wrote, “all I desire is to be left alone, to continue to support my little family, and not to be interfered with.” She wanted Williams to deport Julius on the grounds that he was a bigamist. “It seems to me that my husband is not a proper person to enjoy the liberties in this country, and I ask that you take steps to force him to return to the place he came from,” she asked Williams. She even provided Williams with the addresses that Julius was known to frequent.
A few weeks later, Julius was taken to Ellis Island. He continued to claim that his first marriage was illegal and that he had done nothing wrong by remarrying. Augustus Sherman, acting in place of William Williams, argued that the legality of Julius’s marriage to Sarah was a moot point. “If legal, he has committed bigamy; if illegal, he is the father of three illegitimate children,” Sherman wrote. Either way, Julius was guilty of a crime of moral turpitude. He was ordered deported.
Officials in Washington upheld the decision to deport Julius Rosen. However, Rosen hired former congressman William Bennet as his lawyer. Bennet took Julius’s case all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled against him. Julius was finally deported in February 1914. While living in Canada, Julius would request permission, through Bennet, to enter the United States many times over the next decade. Even though Julius’s second wife had died, the government still considered him a bigamist and he was barred from ever entering the country and bothering Sarah or their children.
These cases show immigration officials struggling with how to enforce the moral turpitude clause. They tried to interpret it in a broad manner while upholding community standards that encouraged marriage, rather than cohabitation, especially when children were involved, and discouraged extramarital or premarital sexual relations.
Oftentimes, the moral turpitude clause covered more than just sexual relations and could sometimes place Ellis Island in the middle of international intrigue. Known as the “Lion of the Andes,” Cipriano Castro had ruled Venezuela as a military dictator from 1899 until 1908, during which time he plundered the nation’s wealth and executed political enemies. Castro, a cross between Napoléon, Boss Tweed, and P. T. Barnum, with a little bit of Nero thrown in, was worth $5 million, much of it stashed in European banks. Secretary of State Elihu Root referred to him as a “crazy brute.” Castro’s regime led to the creation of one of the most famous American foreign policy statements: the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.
When Castro refused to honor the debts his country owed to European banks, England and Germany erected a naval blockade of Venezuela. Theodore Roosevelt feared this would be a backdoor to allow European colonization in the Western Hemisphere and declared in 1904 that “chronic wrongdoing” on the part of the Latin American nations would lead the United States to intervene in those nations’ affairs, so as to prevent the meddling of European powers in its own backyard.
In 1908, Castro left Venezuela for kidney surgery in Germany, leaving the country in the hands of General Juan Vicente Gomez, who wasted little time in declaring himself ruler and expropriating Castro’s properties. With that, Castro was a man without a country. To make things worse, the American government was still mad at him and feared he was planning to return to power. French and English authorities made it clear that Castro was not welcome at any of their Caribbean colonies. The U.S. Navy followed Castro’s every move and American officials kept him under constant surveillance. He finally ended up in the Canary Islands.
In December 1912, Castro decided to visit the United States, but the State Department ordered William Williams to hold Castro at Ellis Island. Like Vera Cathcart, Castro was only coming for a short visit, not to settle permanently. Having caught wind of the State Department’s efforts to bar him, Castro fired a wireless telegram to the New York Times complaining about the effort. “That you should insult me simply because I visit you is inconceivable,” Castro complained.
He arrived on the last day of 1912 and was taken to one of Ellis Island’s hospitals for examination. Doctors could find no medical reason to exclude the former dictator, although Assistant Commissioner Uhl remembered that Castro’s body was covered with scars and saber wounds. He described the former dictator as a “blackguard and a cutthroat,” but still said he admired the man he described as a “little runt.”
At his hearing, Castro told his inquisitors: “At present I have no profession. I am traveling for pleasure.” However, because of the inconveniences he was being put through, he decided he wanted to go back to Europe. Then Castro changed his mind and demanded to be admitted to America. While officials in Washington decided his fate, Castro would spend more than a month at Ellis Island, in a detention area reserved for nonsteerage detainees, with a private room, bed, washbasin, and nightstand.
Officials had little with which to hold Castro. He was not sick or diseased, had never been convicted of a felony or other crime, and was not, in the words of a government attorney, “accompanied by a lewd woman.” There was one thing that officials hoped they could use to bar him from the country. The Gomez government in Venezuela had implicated Castro in the execution of a rebel general named Paredes.
Castro had a number of hearings while on Ellis Island and proved increasingly uncooperative. When asked about his actions as president and the source of his wealth, Castro refused to respond. When asked about General Paredes, he replied that since he was not in a criminal court, he would refuse to answer. Byron Uhl remembered Castro as “vociferous” and “obstreperous” during the hearings, the most picturesque alien he encountered in his over forty years at Ellis Island. Despite the stress, Castro lived well at Ellis Island. He paid for his own meals and ate voraciously, while dressed in a skullcap of black velvet trimmed with gold, and gold-embossed cloth slippers.
After more than two weeks of detention and hearings, a board of special inquiry denied Castro the right to land. It called him an unreliable witness whose refusal to answer questions, along with his manner and demeanor, constituted an admission to the crime of killing Paredes and therefore a crime of moral turpitude.
William Williams, who had spent hours personally interviewing Castro, was uneasy about the decision. To exclude Castro, there would either have to be a conviction for the crime or an admission of the crime, and officials had neither in this case. Another hearing was held, this time in Castro’s room, while he was having breakfast. Castro would have none of it. He threw a fit and locked himself in the bathroom. The board then held its hearing in the adjoining room and again voted to deport Castro.
One month after Castro’s arrival, Commerce and Labor Secretary Charles Nagel upheld the decision to deport Castro. Admitting that it was an unusual and difficult case and that Castro would not have been detained had it not been for the request from the State Department, he nevertheless argued that Castro’s refusal to submit to the hearings on Ellis Island was cause enough for exclusion. Since entry to the country was a privilege, it was incumbent that aliens submit to a hearing.
Meanwhile, New York Democrats took on Castro’s case and provided him with legal help, arguing that the death of Paredes was a political act and therefore did not qualify as grounds for exclusion. With this support, Castro was freed on bail after a month in detention. Two weeks later, a federal judge allowed Castro to remain in the country as long as he wished. The judge ruled that the government needed more proof of his crime than just his lack of cooperation and evasiveness.
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nbsp; In the spring, Castro left for Havana and would later settle on the island of Trinidad, hoping that revolutionaries would prevail against Gomez and return him to power. The revolution never materialized and Castro continued to live in exile.
Castro returned to America in 1916 and the State Department again demanded his exclusion. This time, Byron Uhl noted a different Castro. Unlike the proud and difficult man he had seen three years earlier, Uhl found that Castro’s “spirit seemed broken.” All hope for returning to power had vanished. Castro, traveling with his wife, now only wanted to land in America temporarily while waiting for a boat that would take him to Puerto Rico. He answered the questions of the board of special inquiry and denied that he had anything to do with the killing of Paredes. The board was still not happy with his answers and ordered his exclusion on the grounds of moral turpitude. His wife was excluded on the grounds that she was likely to become a public charge.
This time, however, officials in Washington sustained Castro’s appeal and ordered him released. After spending two days at Ellis Island where they were given a suite of rooms with a private bathroom and complete freedom of access to the entire island, the Castros were released and made their way to Puerto Rico, where the former dictator lived out the rest of his days. He never returned to his native Venezuela and died broke and alone in San Juan from a stomach hemorrhage in 1924. The Times remembered him not too fondly as “one of the most remarkable adventurers who ever strutted on the stage of Latin America.” The term “moral turpitude,” the Times editorialized, “fitted him beyond a doubt, for he had never had any principles.”
THE NUMBER OF MILITARY dictators attempting to enter the United States was fairly small, but immigrants who violated middle-class sexual mores were more abundant. In 1911, Daniel Keefe, commissioner-general of immigration, argued that adultery was a crime of moral turpitude and therefore an excludable offense. “That offenses that are contrary to chastity and decency, or so far contrary to the moral law, as interpreted by the general moral sense of the community,” argued Keefe, “that the offender is no longer generally respected or is deprived of social recognition by good living persons, involve moral turpitude is so well established as to be axiomatic.” This was in direct contradiction to the orders of Frank Larned from just two years earlier.
The solicitor of the Department of Commerce and Labor overruled Keefe, going back to the more lenient standard set out by Larned. Officials should not regard “specific instances of sexual immorality as necessarily amounting to crimes of misdemeanor involving moral turpitude,” the solicitor concluded, as long as the alien was “clearly not of an essentially immoral character.” This hardly cleared up the problem, but it did give officials room to allow immigrants to enter the country despite previous moral lapses.
The case of Marya Kocik, a married Polish woman, showed the difficulty of measuring immoral character. Marya’s husband was already living in America and was now able to bring over Marya and their three children. However, Marya was five months pregnant, even though she had not seen her husband in over a year.
After her husband left Poland, she and the children were placed in the home of a friend of Marya’s husband. Soon after, Marya began having sexual relations with this man and became pregnant. Now that she was arriving in the United States, Marya’s husband freely accepted her and agreed to raise the other man’s child as his own. Although this was a clear case of adultery, the department’s chief lawyer argued that officials were not bound to exclude Marya, considering it best for the family to reunite with the father.
These debates might seem like the work of excessively prudish male officials, but like the rest of the immigration bureaucracy, the regulation of middle-class sexual morality was one of balancing various interests. Officials often showed leniency to immigrants who had committed adultery or engaged in premarital sex, while still upholding the middle-class sexual norms that held that marriage was the ideal institution within which to deal with human sexuality and raise children.
Officials became concerned where sexual promiscuity verged into prostitution. A twenty-two-year-old Croatian woman named Jelka Presniak, who had recently arrived in the country, was arrested on the grounds that she was a prostitute. She admitted to officials that she had sex with a number of men, but denied ever accepting money. The Labor Department’s solicitor ruled that the term “prostitute” could be used for any woman who “for hire or without hire offers her body to indiscriminate intercourse with men.” Jelka was ordered deported, but managed to elude authorities. She traveled from upstate New York to Pennsylvania to Ohio, living in different Slavic communities under various aliases, working in restaurants and as a prostitute. She was never found.
Eva Ranc provided officials with a similar dilemma. Like many cases, Ranc’s troubles began when Ellis Island officials received an anonymous note in early 1916 warning that a Frenchwoman named Eva Vigneron, traveling under the name of Ranc, was coming to America for an “immoral purpose” with funds provided by a wealthy American businessman named Sig Tynberg.
Ranc arrived in New York Harbor on March 1 and was taken from her second-class cabin on the SS Rochambeau for a hearing at Ellis Island. A divorcée and mother of a teenage daughter, the thirty-sixyear-old Ranc claimed to be a designer of ladies’ dresses in Paris. This was her third trip to the United States.
At her hearing, inspectors asked Ranc where she had lived when she was previously in New York and whether she had received any male visitors then. She swore to officials that she had not, although she did admit that Tynberg had given her money in the past. They wanted to get married, but Ranc claimed that Tynberg’s father did not approve of his son marrying a Gentile. Officials asked whether Ranc had a sexual relationship with Tynberg or any other men, which she answered in the negative.
The board then interviewed Tynberg, asking him whether he had had any “immoral connection” with Ranc. “No,” he responded, “I have the highest respect for that woman.” Tynberg was the owner of an insurance company and president of the North American Fuel Company, with an office in lower Manhattan. He vouched that even though he had occasionally paid Ranc’s rent during her past visits to New York, there was “nothing, absolutely, immoral about her.” He would marry her if it were not for his eighty-year-old father, an observant Jew, who opposed the idea of intermarriage.
Later in the day, the case against Ranc became clearer. A woman named Myrna Light testified and stated her purpose bluntly: to make sure that Eva Ranc could not enter the country. Light had been engaged to Tynberg for over four years. The anonymous letter warning officials about Eva had come from Myrna. When she asked Tynberg why they could not marry, he told her it was because he was afraid of his mistress and what she might do to Myrna. He told Myrna that Ranc was the stumbling block, the “kind of woman who comes into every bachelor’s life and as soon as he got rid of her everything would be settled with us.” Myrna claimed that Tynberg was scared of Ranc, telling her once that the “French hooker would tear you to pieces if I married you.”
Myrna found out about Ranc’s most recent arrival from Tynberg’s secretary, who was also romantically interested in her boss. The secretary had wired money to Ranc for her trip to New York and, perhaps out of jealousy, told Myrna of the deal. Sig Tynberg had been stringing Myrna Light along for over four years, and now a scorned Myrna was having her revenge. She had once filed a $25,000 suit against Tynberg for breach of promise, but dropped the suit. Going after Eva Ranc seemed a better strategy.
For two nights, Ranc was held in detention at Ellis Island, while investigators interviewed Tynberg’s father, as well as the building superintendents of the two buildings where Ranc had previously stayed in New York. Tynberg’s father told the investigator that he did not object to his son marrying a Gentile, only “a colored girl or a girl upon whose reputation there is any stain.” The senior Tynberg claimed that a relative went to Paris to seek information on Eva and learned that the woman was “something awful.” The sup
ers told investigators they had seen Ranc and Tynberg in bed together and that Tynberg had stayed most nights with Ranc.
With this information, the board ordered Ranc deported. Tynberg again appeared to plead for Ranc. He said he had never slept with Ranc, that he loved her and was going to marry her. Because of the emotional strain, Tynberg made his case in peculiar language. “I think she should be given to me,” he pleaded in front of the board, “that woman belongs to me and there is nothing about her I am ashamed of.”
Tynberg claimed that his good name and character was known throughout New York’s business community. He even brought his friend and business associate, a finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania, to testify on his behalf. That testimony, along with proof of Eva’s divorce from her first husband in France and the stated desire of both Ranc and Tynberg to marry, led a majority of the board to overturn its earlier decision and allow Ranc to enter the country. One dissenting member of the board, however, believed there was something fishy about Ranc. Under the rules, the dissenting member could appeal the decision to his superiors.
Ellis Island commissioner Fred Howe looked at the evidence and agreed that while it appeared that Tynberg and Ranc had probably lived together, they had showed genuine love for each other and would get married. Howe complained of the “humiliation—and to my mind unnecessary cruelty” of deporting Ranc. He upheld Ranc’s admission, a decision affirmed by his superiors in Washington. Eva Ranc entered the country and married Sig Tynberg shortly after her arrival. Immigration officials had delved deeply into the personal lives of these individuals. Although Ranc was ultimately admitted, the experience was no doubt painfully embarrassing for both Tynberg and her.
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