Authors: Vincent J. Cannato
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.”
T
HE 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 supers 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.
At first glance, Ranc’s case appears to be a triumph over immigration officials eager to punish a woman for her sexual behavior, but there was more to the story. Two years later, a letter signed only by “A Loyal American” arrived at the State Department in Washington. Apparently, the marriage of Eva Ranc and Sig Tynberg had been short and unhappy, with Eva soon fleeing back to France. This anonymous letter warned that Eva was seeking to return again to America “to make trouble for those she wronged.”
Officials at Ellis Island sent an investigator to interview Tynberg, who told his sorry tale. He had truly believed that Eva Ranc was a good woman, but found out shortly after their marriage that she was bringing men back to their apartment and meeting others at the Ritz Carlton. Tynberg also believed Eva had fallen in with a group of blackmailers. After less than four months of marriage, Tynberg served divorce papers on Eva, who left the country before the divorce was finalized. Newly remarried, Tynberg now said that he would do everything in his power to prevent her from returning. There is no evidence that she ever tried to return.
Eva Ranc’s case shows just how engaged immigration officials were in the regulation of sexual morality. As Commissioner Keefe noted in 1909, “the purpose of the immigration act is to prevent the introduction into the United States not only of innocent girls who have been seduced into a life of prostitution, but of all girls and women of sexually immoral class.” Ranc would have been classified under the category of “sexually immoral,” but authorities were also on the lookout for those “innocent girls” forced into prostitution.
There was a term for this: white slavery. Americans believed that unscrupulous men—pimps, “cadets,” and “mackerels”—were forcibly trapping thousands of innocent young women into sordid lives of sexual slavery.
The Outlook
warned in 1909 that there was an “extensive traffic in white slaves . . . who are bought, sold, and used as instruments for the gratification of men’s lust.”
The imagery implied in the term was forceful, as anti-prostitution activists positioned themselves as the new abolitionists. No less a reformer than Jane Addams made the connection between the “social evil” of young women being forced to sell their bodies and the enslavement of blacks. Like the battle against race slavery, Addams thought that the fight against white slavery would “claim its martyrs and its heroes.” Reformers were ready to take to the battlefield against this newest injustice. “Few righteous causes have escaped baptism with blood,” Addams prophesized.
Reports began to filter into the press about unimaginable horrors inflicted upon innocent women. “There are some things so far removed from the lives of normal, decent people as to be simply unbelievable by them,” U.S. Attorney Edwin Sims claimed with melodramatic flair. Americans would come to believe that there was a vast and organized system enslaving young women into sexual service, with immigrants at the center of that system, as both victims and victimizers.
E
LLIS
I
SLAND INSPECTOR
M
ARCUS
Braun would never pass up a trip at the government’s expense, especially if it allowed him to avoid the mundane duties of work at Ellis Island. So Braun spent five months in 1909 traveling throughout Europe investigating white slavery for the federal government.
In Paris, Braun visited the hangouts of pimps and prostitutes and, in his words, “simply played the part of a traveling tourist who is curious enough to make, once in a while, foolish inquiries and to spend his good money to satisfy his curiousity.” He collected the names of suspected European pimps and prostitutes, as well as their mug shots.
After five months, Braun reported back to his superiors that he could find “no such thing as an organized traffic for the shipment of alien women for the purpose of prostitution or any other immoral purpose in existence.” Nor did he find “any organized effort of bringing innocent and virtuous women into this country for such purposes of prostitution or other immoral purposes.” However, he did find that many European prostitutes were making their way to America, either by themselves or with the help of someone in the business, but Braun believed there was nothing forced about it.