American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [157]
Investigators set out to discover whether the addresses given by a random selection of sixty-five women who had arrived at Ellis Island in January 1908 matched up. Thirty women were found to be living at the same address they listed on their ship’s manifest. Not surprisingly, many of the other women could not be found because they had moved or the address provided was incorrect. Of the sixty-five, only three were found to be living under suspicious conditions: two appeared to be prostitutes and the third was married to a man who already had a wife.
On the other hand, the Dillingham Commission found that Ellis Island authorities had improved their enforcement of the law against prostitutes and procurers. Between 1904 and 1908, only 205 prostitutes and 49 procurers were barred at the gate. By 1909, officials had grown more vigilant. They arrested 537 people for prostitution, of whom they deported 273. Much of the work was done after landing, as Inspectors Tedesco and Bullis investigated alien prostitutes working in the city and beyond. Suspected prostitutes from as far away as Utah were brought to Ellis Island for deportation.
Single French women, especially those traveling alone in first- or second-class, were always looked upon with suspicion. Of new immigrant groups, however, Jews were most often linked to prostitution. Even Marcus Braun found that a majority of the procurers he came across in Europe were Jewish. Helen Bullis described the workings of the Independent Benevolent Association, which included “practically all the Jewish disorderly house keepers of prominence in New York.” This included the owners of cafés frequented by pimps and prostitutes, clothes dealers who sold their wares in brothels, saloonkeepers, bondsmen, and even doctors who attended to the residents of brothels.
The charge of Jewish involvement in the sex trade could easily descend into anti-Semitism, but the actual numbers show a more complicated picture. In one study in New York, Jewish women made up a little less than half of the 581 prostitution arrests, followed by French, German, and Italian women. In another study, of the ninety-eight women deported for prostitution from Ellis Island in 1907 and 1908, only thirteen were Jewish. Half of these women were French.
The link between prostitution and immigration was a persistent one, even if officials had trouble nailing down exact figures. Marcus Braun estimated that there were 50,000 foreign-born prostitutes and 10,000 foreign-born male pimps in America. He also thought there were around 10,000 immigrant prostitutes in New York, while reformer James Bronson Reynolds argued that the number was three times higher. On the more conservative side, a federal grand jury investigation led by John D. Rockefeller looking into white slavery put the number at only 6,000. The Dillingham Commission had to admit that it was “impossible to secure figures showing the exact extent of the exploitation of women and girls in violation of the immigration act.”
Were most prostitutes foreign-born? The Dillingham Commission examined over 2,000 prostitution cases in New York courts between November 1908 and March 1909, and found that only about one-quarter were foreign-born, in a city that was over 40 percent foreign-born. Three other surveys from this time show similar results, showing that an average of around 75 percent of prostitutes were native-born Americans.
Were large numbers of women forced into lives of prostitution as white slaves? Officials could not make up their minds. Commissioner Keefe warned that an “enormous business is constantly being transacted in the importation and distribution of foreign women for purpose of prostitution.” One year later, he had changed his mind and now believed that “women and girls are rarely imported into this country for purposes of prostitution.”
The Dillingham Commission mixed alarmist rhetoric with