American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [131]
William Williams called on government “to make far greater efforts than it does to prevent the landing of feeble-minded immigrants,” since mental deficiencies were “becoming more and more important in civilized countries and the nature and bearings of this taint are being carefully studied by scientists.” A feebleminded immigrant would not just become a public charge, he feared, but “may leave feeble-minded descendants and so start a vicious strain that will lead to misery and loss in future generations.”
Ellis Island officials would increasingly find themselves drawn into the uncharted territory of using science to determine the mental capacity of those who knocked at America’s gate. The Pocziwa family was on the receiving end of those efforts. Even the president of the United States could do nothing about it.
Chapter 12
Intelligence
It is of vast import that the feeble-minded be detected, not alone because they are predisposed to become public charges, but because they and their offspring contribute so largely to the criminal element. All grades of moral, physical, and social degeneracy appear in their descendants.
—Dr. Alfred C. Reed, Ellis Island, 1912
DURING THE DEPTHS OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION IN 1933, a Youngstown, Ohio, steelworker named Salvatore Zitello sat down to compose a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The new president had been in office for less than a year, but already Americans felt comfortable enough to write to him by the thousands describing their woes and asking for help. Salvatore Zitello was not complaining about losing his job or his house or any other financial problem. Instead, he was writing about his thirty-six-year-old daughter Gemma.
Salvatore’s problems began in February 1916, when his wife Anna and five children arrived at Ellis Island. (Salvatore had arrived a few years earlier.) Gemma was the oldest at nineteen and four-year-old Dionisis, the only son, was the youngest. Having sold everything to come to America, the Zitellos now found themselves stranded at Ellis Island. Doctors declared Gemma an imbecile and ordered her excluded. To make matters worse, the two youngest Zitello children, Dionisis and nine-year-old Alessandra, were sick—one with meningitis and the other with diphtheria—and confined to the hospital.
Three days after the family’s arrival, Salvatore received a telegram from Ellis Island. In cold, blunt language, it read: “Doctors find Gemma Zitella [sic] an imbecile. If you are citizen of United States submit papers at once. Also send affidavit showing your ability and willingness to receive remainder of family.”
A week later, Salvatore managed to take time off from his $3-a-day job and make his way to New York to plead for his family. Two days after Salvatore’s arrival, Ellis Island commissioner Frederic Howe reiterated the view that Gemma was an imbecile, a condition he thought “obvious even to a layman.” Because officials had suspended deportations to Mediterranean ports because of the war in Europe, the family was ordered to remain in detention.
Salvatore was not without help. The Reverend Stefano Testa, a minister with the Italian Mission of the Central Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, took an interest in the case because his mother had been friendly with Anna Zitello back in Italy. He later accompanied Salvatore to Washington, where they hoped to meet with the secretary of Labor, but instead met with the commissioner-general of immigration, Anthony Caminetti. Rev. Testa asked that the family be released from Ellis Island and that Gemma be paroled into his care, but Caminetti refused. He feared that if the nineteen-year-old girl were released, she would get married, have children, and produce more imbeciles.
Unable to free his family