American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [145]
Now it looked as if Vera would be seeing her fiancé sooner than expected. She was ordered deported on the same ship on which she arrived. Meanwhile, her friends and the British consulate appealed to Washington, which granted Vera a three-day stay of deportation.
While Vera stewed at Ellis Island, the Earl of Craven was actually in New York, staying with an uncle on Park Avenue. His wife was sick and had come to New York for medical care and the earl was there to be with her. This only added to the soap opera nature of the case. “Why am I to be deported, if the Earl of Craven is to be allowed to remain here,” Vera rightly asked. “He has no more right to be in America than I have. If I am guilty, so is he.” Officials argued that since the earl had declared himself married, he did not attract the attention of officials. This explanation did little to quell the complaints of a pernicious sexual double standard.
Ellis Island officials were aware that their decision was being scrutinized and sent an inspector up to Park Avenue to interview the Earl of Craven. Meanwhile, Vera spent her time at Ellis Island writing her next play, entitled Who Shall Judge?, an autobiographical account of her detention.
Since officials were adamant that Vera not be let into the country, they had no choice but to order an arrest warrant for the Earl of Craven on the same charge. Anticipating the move and no doubt uncomfortable that his affair was once again fodder for the press, the Earl of Craven fled to the Ritz Carlton in Montreal, but he made sure to make his opinion of the affair known before he left town. “Gentlemen, you must be a bunch of Godforsaken idiots,” he wrote immigration officials.
In an interview from Ellis Island, Vera said: “I am not a coward and have not run away, like the Earl of Craven. He has proved himself a coward in many ways.” (This was a man who had lost a leg in combat as a young officer during World War I.) She had become a victim, not just of a caddish former lover, but also of insensitive government authorities. American women’s groups, like Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party, called the deportation order against Vera a case of discrimination.
Many in England saw it as another example of provincial puritanism. The Evening Standard went so far as to accuse American officials of bad manners. As one of Vera’s lawyers said, “Congress did not intend by the enactment of this statute to translate the Department of Labor into a radio of foreign scandal.” Congress, he continued, did not mean for immigration authorities to act “as a censor of international sex morals or to send its agents snooping among the divorce records of foreign countries in order that they might obtain evidence which would enable the department to protect our chaste and puritanical Republic.”
The 1920s were a time of greater freedoms for women, personified by the fun-loving flapper. These women challenged Victorian-era notions of the proper place of women. Vera Cathcart was just such a modern woman. “I think all persons should be at liberty to do what they choose,” she said. Vera symbolized the sexual liberation and right to self-expression of women freed from the conventions of middleclass morality.
Yet traditional morality still held sway with government officials. Despite the national and international uproar, Cathcart remained at Ellis Island, albeit in a private room. In fact, she claimed to be quite comfortable and was surprised by conditions on the island, compared to the horrors she had read about in English newspapers.
Women’s groups enlisted the legal help of Arthur Garfield Hays, one year removed from his work with Clarence Darrow on the defense team at the Scopes trial. Hays argued that there was no reason to deport Vera for a crime of moral turpitude since adultery was not a crime in England,