Authors: Vincent J. Cannato
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 wrote 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.
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.