American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [168]
Then there was Giulietta Lamarca. Sent to Ellis Island for prostitution in the summer of 1915, Lamarca remained there for months, unable to be deported back to her native Italy. Her case was one of those that attracted Howe’s attention. “This woman has conducted herself with propriety,” Ellis Island matrons informed Howe. “She has kept away from the men. She has a son in Italy and she wants to make a little money in order to bring him over here.” Howe believed that an abusive husband had forced Giulietta into prostitution and decided to give her a chance.
“I have, I admit, thought of the poor, ignorant, immoral women detained at the Island as human beings entitled to every help to a fair start in the world,” Howe wrote in response to his critics. Working with charitable groups, he sought to find homes that would help rehabilitate these women. Giulietta was released on bond to work as a servant in the home of an Ellis Island doctor who lived in New Jersey.
Giulietta seemed to be a good worker. A year after she left Ellis Island, she was working for another government official living in New Jersey, a man named S. L. Norton. Lamarca only worked for Norton for four days before leaving. Inspector Frank Stone was sent to look into Norton’s complaints against his former employee.
Norton was angry that Lamarca had left his employ early. Giulietta claimed she was hired to be a cook for Norton, but instead had to clean up after Norton’s wife, who was suffering from an ailment that forced her to wear a diaper. Norton took after Lamarca with a vengeance. He told Stone that Giulietta had had indecent contact with his two dogs. His proof: when the dogs left Giulietta’s company, they were panting and excited, which to Norton showed “that she had committed some crime against nature with them.”
Norton also complained that the former prostitute was corrupting the morals of the decent young women of Cranford, New Jersey. Because of her past, Lamarca’s relationship with men was open to investigation. Stone found that although Giulietta had had some conversations with an Italian chauffeur and an Italian garbageman, she had “conducted herself properly while in Cranford.” He concluded that Norton’s charges were “inspired by malice and vindictiveness” and anger at Howe’s policy of releasing prostitutes from detention at Ellis Island.
Ellis Island officials allowed Giulietta to remain free. She continued to live and work in New Jersey. Howe argued that he had found that out of the hundreds of women paroled, “not more than a dozen” had reverted to their former lives of prostitution. Howe possessed a positive view of human nature, that men and women were victims of their environment and that rehabilitation was an exercise in humanity, not futility.
With cases like Giulietta’s seemingly to have turned out so well, Congressman Bennet’s hearings went nowhere. The specific complaints were dropped, the former prostitutes were out on parole, the food concession remained in private hands, and Howe remained in office. At least one of Bennet’s criticisms, though, was on the mark.
Bennet charged that Howe spent less than half of the working week at Ellis Island, making him “the most absentee commissioner” in the station’s history. As if to prove the point, Howe could not be reached for comment on Bennet’s charge because he was vacationing for a week in Nantucket.
Howe described his daily schedule for the congressional committee. He would arrive at Ellis Island sometime between 8:30 and 10:00 A.M., depending on which ferry he caught. Usually, he got to his office around 9:30 A.M. His days on Ellis Island would end around 4:15 P.M., but he admitted that “many days I leave before that when I clean up all the work and there is nothing more to do.”
Howe’s inattention was due less to laziness than to overextension. Howe still spent a great deal of time dabbling in personal intellectual and political pursuits, few of which directly related to immigration. He was more likely to make news for his views on unemployment, the nationalization of railroads, or