American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [201]
The Metropolitan Opera was concerned that eight of its singers for the fall season would be barred from the country. One of them was Fedora Barbieri, a twenty-five-year-old Italian mezzo-soprano heading for her debut in Verdi’s Don Carlo. She was briefly held at Ellis Island because as a young girl she had attended Fascist schools in Italy. Of course every Italian schoolchild in the 1930s and early 1940s had gone to Fascist-controlled schools. Victor de Sabata, the conductor at Milan’s La Scala, was also temporarily detained at Ellis Island. Even the great conductor Arturo Toscanini was questioned, though he escaped detention and was allowed to land.
The law also affected average Americans recently married to Europeans. For seven months, Arthur Sweberg, an American serviceman living in New York, had to live apart from his new bride, a German national who had been a member of the Nazi Youth as a child. Josephine Mazzeo, of Evanston, Illinois, married an Italian national in October 1949. Because of the new law, her Italian husband could not enter the country because he had belonged to a Fascist youth organization during the war.
George Voskovec watched this whole scene unfold before him. The forty-five-year-old Czech playwright and actor had been held at Ellis Island since May 1950, before the passage of the new law. Voskovec had lived in the United States from the late 1930s until the end of the war and was married to an American. He had been a vocal anti-Nazi and worked for the Office of War Information during the war. Upon returning to America in May 1950 to apply for citizenship, he was detained at Ellis Island. Authorities were concerned that Voskovec had been allowed to leave Communist Czechoslovakia legally, setting off alarm bells as to his political sympathies. Now he was joined on Ellis Island by hundreds of other suspected subversives.
As Truman predicted, the strict interpretation of the Internal Security Act made the law look foolish, but it was the price he was willing to pay to embarrass Congress into at least tightening the law. And it worked. By late March 1951, Congress amended the Internal Security Act to exempt those who may have been members of a totalitarian organization, but who were under the age of sixteen at the time, were “involuntary members” of the organization, or had joined the group “for purposes of obtaining employment, food rations, or other essentials of living.”
George Voskovec’s detention at Ellis Island would end shortly after Congress revised the Internal Security Act. After ten months and seventeen days at Ellis Island, he was a free man. Only one witness had come forward to accuse him of being a Communist. On the other side, a number of prominent Czechs and Americans vouched for his character, including the playwright Thornton Wilder.
Upon his release, Voskovec noted that none of the inmates at Ellis Island had been mistreated. However, that did not ease the frustration at his imprisonment. Speaking of his situation, he told a reporter that a detainee “isn’t told the particulars of his offense, his accusers are nameless, and the weeks and months pass, as if human beings were no more to be considered than ciphers in a manila folder.” Even more bluntly, Voskovec said of Ellis Island: “I want to go on record that it’s a disgusting place—a prison.”
Voskovec would later dramatize his imprisonment at Ellis Island in a made-for-television play. I Was Accused aired in November 1955, the same year he gained his U.S. citizenship. Voskovec’s career would later take him to Hollywood, where he made a living as a character actor in movies and television, most famously starring as one of the sweaty and stressed-out jurors in the classic film 12 Angry Men.
When Friedrich Gulda was taken to Ellis Island in October 1950, he found nearly two hundred people held there, including George Voskovec and a European war bride. Most likely Gulda was referring to Ellen Knauff, already on her second stay at Ellis