American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [186]
Such views were not just isolated to cranky Manhattan snobs. The Saturday Evening Post, the nation’s most widely read weekly magazine and best known for its Norman Rockwell covers that embodied Middle American values, became one of the leading voices of restriction. A 1921 article warned middle-class Americans that “immigration must be stopped. This is a matter of life and death for America.”
America’s postwar attitude toward immigrants had a substantial effect on the fortunes of immigrants such as the accused prostitute Giulietta Lamarca. The war had meant a reprieve from being returned to Europe, but since their deportation orders had never been rescinded, peacetime meant they were again vulnerable. The turmoil of war and the Red Scare briefly pushed these deportation cases into a bureaucratic black hole, but by 1921, as the American mood toward immigration grew darker, the government once again turned its attention to immigrants like Giulietta.
In the summer of 1921, officials reopened her case. Byron Uhl, the assistant commissioner of Ellis Island, noted that Giulietta had been living in open adultery in New Jersey for a few years, despite having a husband and child in Italy. This, coupled with the outstanding deportation order for prostitution from 1915, was enough to warrant another stay for Lamarca at Ellis Island.
This time, her boyfriend, Dana E. Robinson, the son of the Ellis Island doctor to whom Frederic Howe had paroled Giulietta in 1916, wrote officials to plead for mercy. He was very much in love with Giulietta (whom he referred to by her Americanized name, Juliette) and wanted to marry her. There had been no further charges against her in the last five years and Robinson found it “hard indeed to believe that the old charges are true as she has been under the careful and kind attention of my mother for the past three years.” Despite her documented past and abandoned family in Italy, Robinson stated that his beloved Juliette was “as good a girl morally as any” and promised that their mutual love would keep them morally pure.
On the word of Robinson and his mother, Paula, Giulietta was once again released. It appeared that Howe had been correct that she could turn around her life and there appears no evidence that Giulietta had fallen back into a life of prostitution. But the happy ending that Frederic Howe, Dana Robinson, and many others had hoped for never materialized. Within three months, Paula Robinson wrote to the Labor Department. “I have to confess,” she wrote in anguish, “that when I asked for clemency in the case of Juliette Lamarca I made the gravest mistake of my life.”
It is hard to tell what went wrong in those few months, but something clearly did. According to Paula Robinson, Juliette threatened that neither the government nor Paula would “have anything further to say about what she does and that if the Government does anything to her, she will show them what she can do.” Juliette vowed that if she were turned over to immigration officials, she would take her story to the newspapers and ruin the Robinson family by publicizing the fact that Dana was going to marry a former prostitute. She also threatened to have the Black Hand kill both mother and son if they turned her over to immigration authorities.
Did Juliette Lamarca finally have enough of the harassment of immigration officials and the threat of deportation that lingered over her head for five years? Was she merely exerting her independence from a meddling future mother-in-law? Or was she a scheming conniver who had latched onto a prosperous American fiancé and, once married, was going to kick her mother-in-law