American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [143]
These tests were about more than just the subject’s ability to accomplish the task successfully. Immigrants were constantly being watched, observed, and judged. The inspecting doctor was not just concerned about whether the immigrant could accomplish the task. He was interested in how fast it was accomplished, the immigrant’s facial expression while completing the task, his muscle control, the speed of his movement, his mental state, and attention span.
From the moment immigrants set foot on Ellis Island, they were under observation At least a dozen pairs of eyes were on them constantly. It is hard to imagine that immigrants could not feel the penetrating gaze of doctors and inspectors bearing down on them, judging them in a calculating, yet not totally dispassionate, manner. Ellis Island doctors were aware of the need to provide a proper environment, but the observational effect upon the immigrants must have caused a great deal of nervousness, performance anxiety, and even belligerence.
It is not surprising that officials began to uncover more mentally defective immigrants through the years. From 1908 to 1912, the total number of idiots, imbeciles, and feebleminded diagnosed remained relatively constant at between 160 and 190 per year. Yet 1913 proved to be a crucial year. That year, the New York Times warned that “15,000 Defectives Menace New York,” Goddard was conducting his tests at Ellis Island, and Howard Knox first began publishing articles outlining the methods used by the Public Health Service doctors.
In 1913, the number of mental defectives detected rose to 555, and then almost 1,000 in the following year. The dramatic increase came almost exclusively from the category of feebleminded—those who did not appear at first glance to be mentally defective. From 1908 to 1912, the number of feebleminded immigrants was around 120 per year; by 1913 it had risen to 483, and in 1914 it reached 890. The reliance on intelligence testing increased the number of immigrants deemed to have below-average intelligence. Restrictionists believed that science was finally allowing the proper sifting of undesirable immigrants.
Knox sometimes shared the concerns of restrictionists and eugenicists, but he and his colleagues also stressed common sense. Immigrants would be tested on at least three separate occasions before being classified as mentally defective. No single test would seal the diagnosis, and immigrants were never deported for failing just one test. Instead, doctors looked at the entirety of the results on common knowledge, memory, reasoning, learning capacity, and performance tests. Still, mental testing at Ellis Island was fraught with cultural biases, as well as the unstated assumption that something called intelligence could be tested.
Like others involved in the immigration debate, Knox was a complex man. In June 1913, he could tell a scientific conference he was confident he would find the missing link among immigrants at Ellis Island, implying that some he saw there were subhuman. A few months earlier, though, he could warn readers of a medical journal that they “should have infinite compassion and pity for those whom the French have feelingly called les enfants du bon Dieu and the Scotch the daft bairns, and the innocents, for a soul is a soul regardless of what functional tests may show of the intellect.” Such compassion would have been cold comfort to the Zitello family. For all the supposedly dispassionate science, intelligence