American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [167]
Not only was Howe determined to ease the pain of detention; he was also willing to reconsider deportation orders. He sent a team of female social workers to investigate some of the cases. Howe believed that “the great majority of women were casual offenders who would not have been arrested under ordinary circumstances. In many instances their misfortunes were the result of ignorance, almost always of poverty.” In his autobiography, he mentions the case of an immigrant named Sarah, who lived in St. Louis and whose drunken husband abandoned her and her infant. In despair, Sarah sold herself to a man on the street, was arrested, and sent to Ellis Island to be deported.
Alice Gouree was not a prostitute, but she still encountered problems at Ellis Island. Having lived in New York since 1906, the thirtyone-year-old Frenchwoman returned to New York from France the same day that Congress declared war on Germany. Gouree was preceded upon her arrival by an anonymous letter to Ellis Island warning officials that she had had an affair with a married man.
Thanks to the letter, Gouree was detained at Ellis Island and questioned about her sexual past. She admitted to having had sexual relations with the man and that he had paid for her apartment, although she claimed not to know he was married. She also admitted to an affair with another man years earlier who had also paid her rent, as well as a third relationship with another married man. After her hearing, the board ordered Alice excluded as an immoral woman. With deportations suspended until the end of the war, Howe was not interested in keeping Alice detained indefinitely and advised that she be admitted. His superiors in Washington ruled against Howe, calling Gouree a “self-confessed courtesan with very warped ideas of moral uprightness,” and ordered her detained until she could be deported. However, the number two person in the Labor Department, Louis Post, agreed with Howe and ordered Alice paroled to her sister.
But Gouree was not free from the long arm of immigration officials. Investigators monitored her situation, reporting that she had worked as a maid in a hotel after her release from Ellis Island, but that she was fired after a few months for improper behavior with a married waiter named Muhlenberg, who had left his wife and three children to live with Gouree. Seven months later, Gouree was back at Ellis Island to answer for her sexual promiscuity. She admitted to the affair with Muhlenberg, but said she believed he was going to leave his wife to marry her.
In tune with the anti-German hysteria sweeping the country and faced with deportation back to France because of the affair, Gouree told officials that she broke up with Muhlenberg not because he was married and wouldn’t leave his wife, but because he was German. She also informed officials that she believed that Muhlenberg, a German citizen, had not properly registered with the government as an enemy alien. The newly patriotic Gouree begged officials to allow her to stay, admitting her mistake and saying that she had found another job as a maid for a Park Avenue matron.
When it looked as if patriotic, anti-German appeals were not going to win her the right to stay in America, Gouree lashed out. “I have done nothing wrong and was brought back to Ellis Island for no good reason,” she said. “Why should I be kept here?” One can only imagine Gouree’s humiliation at having to discuss her sex life in front of male authorities. It was all too much. Although she was released on bond again in February 1918, she told officials that when the war was over, she would return to France at her own expense. “This sort of treatment will make a bad woman out of any good woman,” Gouree wrote. In 1919, when officials sought Alice’s deportation, they were informed that she had already kept her promise and left America.