American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [148]
The case wound up in Washington, where Frank Larned ruled on it. He noted that this was also a case of fornication, which was not punished under common law unless it was committed “openly and notoriously.” While officials had every right to exclude Milka under the moral turpitude clause, Larned again called for moving beyond a literal interpretation of the law—but with a twist.
Larned argued that officials could not hold Milka to the standards of middle-class American morality. “If this appellant had been reared in environments similar to those existing in the United States,” he argued, “the commission of her fornication would necessarily impute to her moral turpitude.” She was raised in the Balkans under very different standards. “It is extremely doubtful whether she fell from a higher state of character to a lower when she mated with the man to whom she is now destined,” he argued. Her conduct, in his eyes, was “unmoral,” not immoral. By that same reasoning, Larned argued, officials could not exclude the “wife of a Zulu chieftain from savage Africa” coming to join her mate, even though “they may have mated in no more ceremonial a manner than is observed by the beasts of that country.” Larned ordered that Milka and Dana be married at Ellis Island.
The argument contained many of the contradictory feelings embodied in American immigration law, mixing prejudice with leniency. That Larned would use this rationale for the Serbian Milka and not for the Swedish Elin Hjerpe shows how strongly Americans differentiated between northern Europeans and southern and eastern Europeans. Yet even though the reasoning behind the decisions may have differed, both women were allowed to enter the country after their hasty marriages at Ellis Island.
Young women who transgressed the boundaries of middle-class morality could still feel the long arm of the law even after they had been admitted to the country, since immigrants could be deported within three years of their arrival if they were subsequently found to have violated immigration law. Take the case of twenty-year-old Cecilie Kolb, who arrived in May 1910 and went to live with the family of a German baker in the Bronx. Within a year, the baker wrote to Ellis Island complaining that his young charge possessed an “immoral character and I believe it is useless to try to keep her on the right path.” Cecilie was having difficulty keeping a job and was living with a fortune-teller in Manhattan.
So in August 1911, Kolb was brought to Ellis Island for a deportation hearing. At first, she admitted to having had illicit relations with two men, but then quickly denied it, saying she only went with them to dance halls and bars. Ellis Island doctors examined her and declared her a virgin. Though Assistant Commissioner Uhl wanted to deport Kolb as likely to become a public charge, Washington officials ordered that the girl be freed because of insufficient evidence.
Immigration officials also showed little compunction about enforcing the moral turpitude clause against men, and wealthy Anglo-Saxons at that. Commerce and Labor Secretary Oscar Straus described the case of an immigrant mill manager from Lawrence, Massachusetts, who was married with children. The man went to Canada on a trip and returned with a woman who was not his wife. Inspectors held him at the Canadian border, where he admitted that he had had “improper relations” with his traveling companion. Officials ordered him excluded on the grounds of moral turpitude.
“I had approved exclusion simply to teach the fellow a lesson in morality,” Straus wrote in his diary. When a former governor of Massachusetts lobbied Straus on behalf of the adulterer, Straus relented and ordered him admitted, saying that he did it for the man’s family, “not because he deserved it.” At the next cabinet meeting, Theodore Roosevelt told Straus