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By Root 807 0

Island commissioner Thomas Fitchie was sticking to his guns. He declared that either Giulia would submit to the exam or she would be deported. But Fitchie ran into strong opposition from his own staff. A female matron named Regina Stucklen complained that forcing such a procedure on young women ran the risk “of examining pure and good moral girls, and thereby, perhaps, injure them morally for the rest of their lives.” Even the doctor agreed, telling Fitchie that he thought the young girl was right to refuse the exam, a procedure he believed was “extremely repugnant to a virtuous woman.” Such an exam would say nothing about a woman’s condition if she were less than three months pregnant. Fitchie backed down and the young girl was allowed to enter the country.

Giulia was not married and if she had been pregnant that would have cast doubt on her moral fitness to enter the country. There were other concerns. Young women were never set free from Ellis Island unless in the custody of a male relative or missionary or immigrant aid official. To do otherwise, officials feared, would risk throwing these women to the proverbial lions, whereby unsavory men might entrap them, steal their innocence, and start them on a life of prostitution.

Sometimes, though, those vultures worked inside the immigration station. Inspector John Lederhilger seemed to take a certain relish in closely questioning single women who passed through Ellis Island. “Did he sleep with you on the boat?” Lederhilger reportedly asked an unmarried German girl arriving in New York with a male companion. “Now tell me how often did he put it in?” If Fitchie and others exhibited genuine interest in protecting single women and upholding traditional morality, Lederhilger seemed more interested in his own sexual titillation.

Immigration officials continued to find themselves enmeshed in the personal lives of immigrants. In 1907, the solicitor of Commerce and Labor ruled that moral turpitude covered issues of private sexuality such as adultery and fornication. Twenty-one-year-old Swede Elin Maria Hjerpe found this out when she arrived at Ellis Island in early 1909. Five months pregnant and single, Elin arrived in the company of her intended husband, a naturalized American citizen and the “author of her condition,” as the records state.

Because of her out-of-wedlock pregnancy, the board of special inquiry voted unanimously to exclude her on the grounds of moral turpitude. Yet when the case reached Washington on appeal, Frank Larned, the assistant commissioner-general of immigration, was not convinced. He noted that Elin’s only offense was that she had committed fornication, which he believed, when committed in private so as not to “offend the moral sense of the community,” was not a crime of moral turpitude. Without excusing premarital sex, Larned believed the circumstances called for leniency. Elin’s boyfriend had told officials he wanted to marry Elin as soon as possible. Elin Hjerpe and her boyfriend were married at Ellis Island and she was allowed to enter the country.

A young Serbian woman named Milka Rosceta arrived at Ellis Island a few days later, accompanied by her three-year-old child. Their ultimate destination was Steubenville, Ohio, where Dana Jezdic, the father of the child, resided. Like Elin Hjerpe, Rosceta was detained on the grounds of fornication. An immigrant aid society representative at Ellis Island sent a telegram to Dana about the situation and he responded with an affidavit stating his desire to marry Milka upon her arrival in Stuebenville. He even had a local Serbian Orthodox priest sign an affidavit that he would officiate at the wedding, but this was not good enough for officials.

So Dana took time off from his job at the La Belle Iron Works and traveled by train to New York. Milka and her child were in their sixth day of detention when Dana arrived. There was some discrepancy in their stories. Dana said his girlfriend was only nineteen and they were too young to be married back home; Milka claimed to be twenty-four years old and said the couple