American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [133]
At first, doctors were more concerned with weeding out immigrants thought to be suffering from mental illness. Between 1892 and 1903, only thirty-six people were barred from the country for being “idiots,” or in other words suffering from low intelligence. During that same period, almost five times as many people were barred for insanity.
When Dr. Thomas Salmon arrived at Ellis Island in 1904, he had no formal training in psychiatry, having begun his career as a country doctor in upstate New York and made his mark investigating an outbreak of diphtheria. At Ellis Island he was one of three doctors tasked with weeding out mentally deficient immigrants.
Salmon saw the chance to filter out immigrants with mental and emotional problems as a great professional opportunity. However, he also understood the limits. He lacked the proper equipment, possessing only, in his words, “a little knowledge of psychiatry in my head, a little piece of chalk in my hand and four seconds of time.” With that chalk and the little knowledge of psychiatry, Salmon had mere moments to make a decision on the mental state of an immigrant. If someone on the inspection line struck Salmon as being mentally defective, the doctor would make an X on the individual’s coat, selecting that person for further examination.
Salmon was on the lookout for what he called the “well-marked stigmata of degeneration,” such as immigrants who seemed “unduly animated, apathetic, supercilious, or apprehensive” or whose facial expression was “vacant or abstracted.” A tremor of the lips during the eversion of the eye for the trachoma test or an “oddity of dress,” unequally sized pupils, a “hint of negativism,” or any “unusual decoration worn on the clothing” could mean further examination and detention.
The results of Salmon’s work were stark. In 1906 alone, 92 immigrants were certified as idiots and 139 were certified as insane. All were deported. However, a dispute with Commissioner Robert Watchorn led Salmon to be suspended from his duties. He was eventually transferred to the U.S. Marine Hospital in Chelsea, Massachusetts.
Just as Salmon was leaving Ellis Island, Congress was further expanding its categories of restriction. The Immigration Act of 1907 added two more terms—“feebleminded” and “imbeciles”—to the excluded list. In addition, immigrants deemed mentally defective to the extent that it prevented their earning a living could also be excluded. The new law shifted the focus away from those with mental illnesses and focused greater attention on measuring the intelligence of new immigrants.
As Congress expanded the list of undesirables, Ellis Island found itself testing that most difficult of concepts: human intelligence. What was the difference between an idiot, an imbecile, and someone defined as feebleminded? The Public Health Service informed its doctors that feeblemindedness was defined by a “demonstrated defective mentality” relative to the immigrant’s age, but this was of little help. That is where Dr. Henry H. Goddard came in.
About a hundred miles south of Ellis Island, in the southern New Jersey town of Vineland, Goddard was working on measuring, classifying, and treating the feebleminded. Armed with a PhD in psychology, Goddard was the director of the Vineland Training School for Feeble Minded Girls and Boys. His great success was in translating and popularizing a series of tests to measure intelligence created by French psychologist Alfred Binet.
At the time, intelligence tests were a step forward compared to what had preceded them. Craniometry, the measurements of skull sizes, had been the main tool used to measure intelligence in the late 1800s. Unhappy with this crude measure, Binet created a series