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A few weeks after writing his letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, Salvatore Zitello received his response. It came not from the president, but from the office of the immigration commissioner. They were words he had heard before. Gemma, the letter stated, “was excluded because she could not qualify under the mental requirements of the law. I am sorry to be obliged to advise you that she comes within a class manditorily excluded.” There would be no leniency for Gemma Zitello. She would never be reunited with her family in America.

Chapter 13

Moral Turpitude

Poor little me, why did they consider me a dangerous woman? —Vera, Countess of Cathcart, 1926

DRESSED IN A LARGE GREEN FELT HAT WITH A MAT CHING coat trimmed with brown fox fur, flesh-colored silk stockings, and black velvet slippers, Vera, Countess of Cathcart, was ready to take on New York. The attractive and petite thirty-something member of England’s fashionable set had arrived in New York in February 1926 armed with a copy of her play Ashes of Love and dreams of Broadway fame.

Instead of becoming a star or literary sensation, the countess ended up a different kind of celebrity, an international cause célèbre who introduced the concept of moral turpitude to people on both sides of the Atlantic.

Vera’s problems began when immigration officials boarded her ship as it entered New York Harbor. In a routine check of first-class passengers, the inspectors discovered that, five years earlier, the countess’s marriage to her second husband, the Earl of Cathcart, had ended in divorce. Another member of the British aristocracy, the Earl of Craven, was named as the cause of the divorce. Vera had left her husband—some thirty years her senior—and their three children to run off to South Africa with the married Earl of Craven. Their positions among England’s minor nobility added to the tabloid quality of the scandal.

By marking herself as divorced on her papers, Cathcart attracted extra scrutiny from officials. It is unclear how they managed to go from Vera’s divorced status to her adulterous affair with the Earl of Craven. Maybe someone remembered the scandal, or perhaps, as Vera suggested, she had an enemy in New York who alerted authorities to both her arrival and her scandalous background.

Immigration officials declared that since Vera was an adulterer, she was guilty of a crime of moral turpitude and excludable under law. Most Americans had little idea what that peculiar phrase meant. Black’s Law Dictionary defines moral turpitude as “general, shameful wickedness—so extreme a departure from ordinary standards of honest, good morals, justice, or ethics as to be shocking to the moral sense of the community . . . an act of baseness, vileness, or the depravity in private and social duties which one person owes to another, or to society in general, contrary to the accepted and customary rule of right and duty between people.”

The term entered American immigration law as one of the excludable offenses in the 1891 Immigration Act. Courts and immigration officials tried to define the term, but never settled on a firm definition. A wide array of offenses could theoretically be considered crimes of moral turpitude, from passing bad checks to arson to adultery to bigamy to gross indecency and even murder. The arbitrary nature of the term made it problematic for both officials and aliens. In the wake of the Cathcart case, one academic complained that moral turpitude had become “enshrouded by an impenetrable mist.”

Given the murky nature of the charge, it is no surprise that Cathcart was unrepentant, despite the very public moral opprobrium cast down upon her. “I have done nothing in my life that I am ashamed of,” she told reporters. The affair with the Earl of Craven had quickly gone sour in South Africa. After promising to marry Vera, the earl left her for another woman. Later, he returned to his wife.

By 1926, Vera had managed to get over her failed amorous adventure with one earl and her failed marriage to another. She turned