American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [132]
After nearly two months in detention, the Zitellos received some good news. Officials would allow the entire family to enter America, except Gemma, who was still ordered deported. On April 21, 1916, Anna and three of her daughters left Gemma at Ellis Island and took the train west to Ohio to reunite with Salvatore.
For the next year, Gemma remained at Ellis Island, excluded from entering the country because of her condition but unable to return to Italy because of the war. Her family was in Ohio, but Rev. Testa visited her often and claimed to have witnessed great improvements since her arrival. Why, Testa asked Caminetti, could she not be released on bond to her parents? Salvatore’s hometown congressman also wrote to Washington on behalf of Gemma. The government’s answer was always the same: Gemma was an imbecile who was “mandatorily excluded from admission into the United States.”
Once America entered the war, Ellis Island was needed to house German enemy aliens, and Gemma was soon transferred to a smaller immigration center in Gloucester City, New Jersey. Her chances of joining her family looked hopeless.
More than two years after his family’s arrival, Salvatore wrote directly to President Woodrow Wilson. He explained his family’s sad story and complained that because his daughter could not count backwards from twenty, doctors ordered her detained. Since her transfer to Gloucester City, Gemma would write to her father often, complaining that she did not have proper clothing or shoes. She cried every day for her parents.
“I spent the last cent I earned for her and I couldn’t do anything,” the grieving father wrote to President Wilson. He emphasized his patriotism and boasted that he had bought Liberty Bonds to contribute to the war effort, “I do good right along,” Salvatore wrote. Couldn’t the president release his daughter, Salvatore wondered?
His response came a month later from Commissioner Caminetti. In coldly bureaucratic words that Salvatore had no doubt become accustomed to, Caminetti wrote: “You are, of course, aware that your daughter Gemma is mandatorily excluded from the United States, and there is no other course that can be pursued except to return her to Italy when it becomes possible to do so.”
The war officially ended on November 11, 1918, and the only rationale for keeping Gemma detained had now vanished. The government wasted little time, and on November 20, Gemma Zitello was sent back to Italy. Since she had few decent clothes, authorities had to furnish her with a shirt, pants, undervest, and hose before her journey.
Salvatore, his wife, and three surviving children continued their lives in Youngstown without Gemma. Salvatore and Anna even managed to conceive another child, a boy named Anthony, who was born around the time of Gemma’s deportation.
Yet Salvatore never completely gave up hope that he would be reunited with his daughter. That is why the foreign-born steelworker wrote his second letter to an American president in 1933. “I, a citizen of the U.S. and a resident of Youngstown, Ohio, am appealing to you for help as only you can under the circumstance,” Salvatore began his letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt. He explained that his daughter had been deported back to Italy and for the past fifteen years he had tried many times to bring her to America. Now thirty-six, Gemma was living in Campobasso, Italy. Salvatore had received word that the people with whom she was living were tired of having to care for her and were mistreating her.
For seventeen years, the Zitello family found themselves staring at the concrete wall of American immigration law. And no letter seemed to make that wall move.
B EGINNING IN 1882, CONGRESS enshrined the word “idiot” into law. As harsh as