Chapter 12
It is of vast import that the feeble-minded be detected, not alone because they are predisposed to become public charges, but because they and their offspring contribute so largely to the criminal element. All grades of moral, physical, and social degeneracy appear in their descendants.
—Dr. Alfred C. Reed, Ellis Island, 1912
DURING THE DEPTHS OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION IN 1933, a Youngstown, Ohio, steelworker named Salvatore Zitello sat down to compose a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The new president had been in office for less than a year, but already Americans felt comfortable enough to write to him by the thousands describing their woes and asking for help. Salvatore Zitello was not complaining about losing his job or his house or any other financial problem. Instead, he was writing about his thirty-six-year-old daughter Gemma.
Salvatore’s problems began in February 1916, when his wife Anna and five children arrived at Ellis Island. (Salvatore had arrived a few years earlier.) Gemma was the oldest at nineteen and four-year-old Dionisis, the only son, was the youngest. Having sold everything to come to America, the Zitellos now found themselves stranded at Ellis Island. Doctors declared Gemma an imbecile and ordered her excluded. To make matters worse, the two youngest Zitello children, Dionisis and nine-year-old Alessandra, were sick—one with meningitis and the other with diphtheria—and confined to the hospital.
Three days after the family’s arrival, Salvatore received a telegram from Ellis Island. In cold, blunt language, it read: “Doctors find Gemma Zitella [sic] an imbecile. If you are citizen of United States submit papers at once. Also send affidavit showing your ability and willingness to receive remainder of family.”
A week later, Salvatore managed to take time off from his $3-a-day job and make his way to New York to plead for his family. Two days after Salvatore’s arrival, Ellis Island commissioner Frederic Howe reiterated the view that Gemma was an imbecile, a condition he thought “obvious even to a layman.” Because officials had suspended deportations to Mediterranean ports because of the war in Europe, the family was ordered to remain in detention.
Salvatore was not without help. The Reverend Stefano Testa, a minister with the Italian Mission of the Central Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, took an interest in the case because his mother had been friendly with Anna Zitello back in Italy. He later accompanied Salvatore to Washington, where they hoped to meet with the secretary of Labor, but instead met with the commissioner-general of immigration, Anthony Caminetti. Rev. Testa asked that the family be released from Ellis Island and that Gemma be paroled into his care, but Caminetti refused. He feared that if the nineteen-year-old girl were released, she would get married, have children, and produce more imbeciles.
Unable to free his family from Ellis Island, a dejected Salvatore returned to his job in Ohio only to find more tragedy. One month after the family’s arrival, four-year-old Dionisis died at the Ellis Island hospital. The emotional toll of that loss came on top of the possibility that Salvatore’s family might be permanently banished from the country.
After nearly two months in detention, the Zitellos received some good news. Officials would allow the entire family to enter America, except Gemma, who was still ordered deported. On April 21, 1916, Anna and three of her daughters left Gemma at Ellis Island and took the train west to Ohio to reunite with Salvatore.
For the next year, Gemma remained at Ellis Island, excluded from entering the country because of her condition but unable to return to Italy because of the war. Her family was in Ohio, but Rev. Testa visited her often and claimed to have witnessed great improvements since her arrival. Why, Testa asked Caminetti, could she not be released on bond to her parents? Salvatore’s hometown congressman also wrote to Washington on behalf of Gemma. The government’s answer was always the same: Gemma was an imbecile who was “mandatorily excluded from admission into the United States.”
Once America entered the war, Ellis Island was needed to house German enemy aliens, and Gemma was soon transferred to a smaller immigration center in Gloucester City, New Jersey. Her chances of joining her family looked hopeless.
More than two years after his family’s arrival, Salvatore wrote directly to President Woodrow Wilson. He explained his family’s sad story and complained that because his daughter could not count backwards from twenty, doctors ordered her detained. Since her transfer to Gloucester City, Gemma would write to her father often, complaining that she did not have proper clothing or shoes. She cried every day for her parents.
“I spent the last cent I earned for her and I couldn’t do anything,” the grieving father wrote to President Wilson. He emphasized his patriotism and boasted that he had bought Liberty Bonds to contribute to the war effort, “I do good right along,” Salvatore wrote. Couldn’t the president release his daughter, Salvatore wondered?
His response came a month later from Commissioner Caminetti. In coldly bureaucratic words that Salvatore had no doubt become accustomed to, Caminetti wrote: “You are, of course, aware that your daughter Gemma is mandatorily excluded from the United States, and there is no other course that can be pursued except to return her to Italy when it becomes possible to do so.”
The war officially ended on November 11, 1918, and the only rationale for keeping Gemma detained had now vanished. The government wasted little time, and on November 20, Gemma Zitello was sent back to Italy. Since she had few decent clothes, authorities had to furnish her with a shirt, pants, undervest, and hose before her journey.
Salvatore, his wife, and three surviving children continued their lives in Youngstown without Gemma. Salvatore and Anna even managed to conceive another child, a boy named Anthony, who was born around the time of Gemma’s deportation.
Yet Salvatore never completely gave up hope that he would be reunited with his daughter. That is why the foreign-born steelworker wrote his second letter to an American president in 1933. “I, a citizen of the U.S. and a resident of Youngstown, Ohio, am appealing to you for help as only you can under the circumstance,” Salvatore began his letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt. He explained that his daughter had been deported back to Italy and for the past fifteen years he had tried many times to bring her to America. Now thirty-six, Gemma was living in Campobasso, Italy. Salvatore had received word that the people with whom she was living were tired of having to care for her and were mistreating her.
For seventeen years, the Zitello family found themselves staring at the concrete wall of American immigration law. And no letter seemed to make that wall move.
BEGINNING IN 1882, CONGRESS enshrined the word “idiot” into law. As harsh as it sounds, all of those deemed “idiots” and “lunatics” were barred from entering the country. While in most cases it was relatively easy to determine physical defects among immigrants, a bigger problem was how to probe the minds of those who knocked at America’s gates. By law, immigrants had to prove not just their sanity but also their intelligence.
At first, doctors were more concerned with weeding out immigrants thought to be suffering from mental illness. Between 1892 and 1903, only thirty-six people were barred from the country for being “idiots,” or in other words suffering from low intelligence. During that same period, almost five times as many people were barred for insanity.
When Dr. Thomas Salmon arrived at Ellis Island in 1904, he had no formal training in psychiatry, having begun his career as a country doctor in upstate New York and made his mark investigating an outbreak of diphtheria. At Ellis Island he was one of three doctors tasked with weeding out mentally deficient immigrants.
Salmon saw the chance to filter out immigrants with mental and emotional problems as a great professional opportunity. However, he also understood the limits. He lacked the proper equipment, possessing only, in his words, “a little knowledge of psychiatry in my head, a little piece of chalk in my hand and four seconds of time.” With that chalk and the little knowledge of psychiatry, Salmon had mere moments to make a decision on the mental state of an immigrant. If someone on the inspection line struck Salmon as being mentally defective, the doctor would make an X on the individual’s coat, selecting that person for further examination.
Salmon was on the lookout for what he called the “well-marked stigmata of degeneration,” such as immigrants who seemed “unduly animated, apathetic, supercilious, or apprehensive” or whose facial expression was “vacant or abstracted.” A tremor of the lips during the eversion of the eye for the trachoma test or an “oddity of dress,” unequally sized pupils, a “hint of negativism,” or any “unusual decoration worn on the clothing” could mean further examination and detention.
The results of Salmon’s work were stark. In 1906 alone, 92 immigrants were certified as idiots and 139 were certified as insane. All were deported. However, a dispute with Commissioner Robert Watchorn led Salmon to be suspended from his duties. He was eventually transferred to the U.S. Marine Hospital in Chelsea, Massachusetts.
Just as Salmon was leaving Ellis Island, Congress was further expanding its categories of restriction. The Immigration Act of 1907 added two more terms—“feebleminded” and “imbeciles”—to the excluded list. In addition, immigrants deemed mentally defective to the extent that it prevented their earning a living could also be excluded. The new law shifted the focus away from those with mental illnesses and focused greater attention on measuring the intelligence of new immigrants.
As Congress expanded the list of undesirables, Ellis Island found itself testing that most difficult of concepts: human intelligence. What was the difference between an idiot, an imbecile, and someone defined as feebleminded? The Public Health Service informed its doctors that feeblemindedness was defined by a “demonstrated defective mentality” relative to the immigrant’s age, but this was of little help. That is where Dr. Henry H. Goddard came in.
About a hundred miles south of Ellis Island, in the southern New Jersey town of Vineland, Goddard was working on measuring, classifying, and treating the feebleminded. Armed with a PhD in psychology, Goddard was the director of the Vineland Training School for Feeble Minded Girls and Boys. His great success was in translating and popularizing a series of tests to measure intelligence created by French psychologist Alfred Binet.
At the time, intelligence tests were a step forward compared to what had preceded them. Craniometry, the measurements of skull sizes, had been the main tool used to measure intelligence in the late 1800s. Unhappy with this crude measure, Binet created a series of tests that would measure the reasoning and comprehension skills of its subjects. Those subjects were largely French schoolchildren. Schools used the tests to help target children in need of special instruction. The tasks were classified by the age at which the subject should be able to complete them. Children who then completed the tests were assigned a mental age, as opposed to their actual age.
Intelligence tests satisfied the needs of early twentieth-century scientists for greater precision and empiricism. However, the question of whether humans possessed a single, fixed, and discrete entity called intelligence that could be accurately measured would continue to be a highly controversial idea for decades to come.
Goddard set out to define the terms “idiot” and “imbecile.” An idiot was an individual with a mental age below three years, while an imbecile scored between the ages of three and seven years. These were people who suffered from obvious and severe mental retardation. What about those who scored at levels equivalent to a mental age of between eight and twelve? Their supposed infirmity was not readily apparent to the casual observer, but Goddard felt that intelligence tests could weed out these individuals.
There was also the problem of what to call such individuals. Though they were often called feebleminded, this caused confusion, since it was common to refer to all those with below-average intelligence as feeble-minded. So Goddard invented the term “moron” to classify individuals with a mental age between eight and twelve years old. Goddard took the term from the Greek word for foolish. The word has so completely seeped into the English vocabulary that it is hard to believe its origin dates only to the first decade of the twentieth century.
If there was some innate quality called intelligence, Goddard believed, then it was to be found on a human gene that could be passed down through generations. If intelligence was a hereditary trait, then society should make sure that mental defectives did not reproduce. Eugenics, a term coined in the mid-1800s and derived from the Greek meaning “well born,” gradually seeped into the public consciousness. In 1910, a biologist named Charles Davenport formed the Eugenics Record Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island to encourage so-called heartier stock to reproduce and discourage the weak from having children. He was already serving as secretary of the American Breeders Association and that same year he came out with Eugenics: The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding.
Though some advocated forced sterilization, Goddard preferred the establishment of institutions like Vineland to care for the feebleminded while making sure they did not reproduce. Though Goddard’s famous study of the hereditary effects of feeblemindedness centered on a native-born, old-stock family pseudonymously named the Kallikaks, it was no surprise that advocates of eugenics would turn their attention to immigrants. “The idea of a ‘melting pot’ belongs to a pre-Mendelian age,” Davenport noted. “Now we recognize that characters are inherited as units and do not readily break up.”
In 1911, Davenport recommended the formation of a committee to study “the hereditary traits that immigrants were bringing into the country.” Later that year, Davenport’s Immigration Committee of the Eugenics Section of the American Breeders Association found that the unfit were not being properly excluded because of inadequate inspection, poor facilities, and too few medical inspectors.
Two members of the committee were Immigration Restriction League (IRL) officials Prescott Hall and Robert DeC. Ward. For the past two decades, these men had tried to convince their fellow Americans of the threat that immigrants posed. Although they never advocated closing the nation’s gates, they continually lobbied for tougher inspection of immigrants and the exclusion of those they deemed undesirable. They had hoped the literacy test would be the vehicle that would keep out many undesirable immigrants, but they had been thwarted in their attempts for twenty years.
Now many IRL members took up the banner of eugenics. Ward hoped that immigration officials could practice “eugenic principles in the selection of the fathers and mothers of future American children.” It was feebleminded immigrants more than the insane, Ward believed, who posed the greatest threat to the Republic. “The latter are to a considerable extent segregated and thus prevented from breeding,” he wrote, “but the former are far oftener at liberty, and are thus usually free to breed as they will.”
For Prescott Hall, the ability to sort populations by their genetic stock was a beneficial result of the spread of science. The rise of science and the decline of religion, Hall noted approvingly, “turned men’s gaze in large part from the next world to this.” With a heady mixture of Darwin, Theodore Roosevelt, and Nietzsche, Hall spoke of the new “Christ ideal” rooted not in religious faith but in “human perfection.” He praised the “superman, working in a strenuous life to produce a better world here and now.”
One answer for Hall was birth control. Both the restriction of immigration and the use of birth control should, in his words, be applied both to “defective and delinquent stocks of all races,” as well as “less desirable races.” Why, he asked, was science so devoted to using its new knowledge to breeding animals and plants, but not humans?
As to whether humans were affected more by their environment than by their genes, Hall sided with nature. “You cannot make bad stock into good by changing its meridian, any more than you can turn a cart horse into a hunter by putting it into a fine stable, or make a mongrel into a fine dog by teaching it tricks,” he argued. Hall held out little hope that life in America would have any effect on the intelligence of immigrants. He approvingly quoted eugenicist Karl Pearson, that one “cannot change the leopard’s spots and you cannot change bad stock to good; you may dilute it, possibly spread it over a large area, spoiling good stock, but until it ceases to multiply it will not cease to be.”
At the intersection of eugenics and immigration restriction was the dark pessimism of native-born Anglo-Saxons that their culture would be washed away in a tide of southern and eastern Europeans. Some asked whether the Anglo-Saxon would go the way of the American Indian and the buffalo: to extinction.
Progressive sociologist Edward A. Ross was one of those asking that question. In 1913, Ross gave a lecture on immigration in which he prophesized that when “the blood of the old pioneering breed has faded out of the motley, polyglot, polychrome, caste-riven population that will crowd this Continent to a Chinese density, let there be reared a commemorative monument bearing these words: ‘To the American Pioneering Breed, The Victim of too much Humanitarianism and too little Common Sense.’”
One late afternoon, Ross planted himself in New York’s Union Square as garment workers left their jobs and headed back to their tenement homes. At six feet, four inches tall, the patrician academic from Wisconsin must have towered over the diverse, multi-ethnic crowd milling about Union Square. Ross took a quick scan of 368 individuals as they passed him and reported that only 38 “had the type of face one would find at a county fair in the West or the South.”
Ross proudly noted that a trained eye could see that the physiognomy of many ethnic groups painted them as decidedly inferior. So just what kind of faces did Ross see in Union Square and in immigrant enclaves across the country? One was what he called the “Caliban type,” defined by men who were “hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality” and who “clearly belong in skins, in wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice Age.” These were men, Ross confidently proclaimed, who were the “descendants of those who always stayed behind.”
Whatever Ross’s descriptions lacked in historical or scientific accuracy, they were not lacking in vivid language. When he saw foreign-born men, Ross was struck by their “narrow and sloping foreheads” and asymmetrical faces. The women were no better. He found them largely unattractive, with every face betraying some fatal flaw—“lips thick, mouth coarse, upper lip too long, cheekbones too high, chin poorly formed, the bridge of the nose hollowed, the base of the nose tilted or else the whole face prognathous.” It seemed that almost every foreign face Ross encountered betrayed a deep inferiority that bordered on the subhuman. “There were so many sugar-loaf heads, moon-faces, slit mouths, lantern jaws, and goose-bill noses that one might imagine a malicious jinn had amused himself by casting human beings in a set of skew-molds discarded by the Creator,” he wrote. That these men and women were contributing their genes to the American melting pot was enough to make men like Ross despondent.
A leading academic, Ross was also a Progressive, yet so many of his observations seemed rooted more in prejudice than in social science. To Ross, Jews were small, weak, and “exceedingly sensitive to pain.” Slavs were “immune to certain kinds of dirt,” while Mediterranean types were skilled at “nimble lying.”
Ross predicted that these new immigrants would cause “a mysterious slackening in social progress” and an overall decline in national intelligence. All of this inferior genetic material floating in the American gene pool would create an increasingly sluggish people, in contrast to the hearty and independent Anglo-Saxon settlers. Crime, drunkenness, sexual immorality, and venereal disease would rise, while “intelligence, self-restraint, refinement, orderliness and efficiency” would decline.
These descriptions placed immigrants on the evolutionary scale far behind the vigorous Anglo-Saxons who settled America. Such stereotypes could take a tragicomic twist, as when a member of the Ellis Island medical staff, Howard Knox, told a meeting of the Eugenics Research Association at Columbia University that a recently deported thirty-nine-year-old Finnish immigrant closely resembled the “missing link” that scientists have searched for to explain the evolutionary gap between apes and humans.
To Knox, this immigrant resembled a man from the early Stone Age, with a low, receding forehead, long, shaggy eyebrows, thick, protruding lips, a massive jaw, long arms, teeth angled outward, and each finger resembling a thumb. The man’s profession—a linesman for the telephone company—seemed to prove Knox’s thesis, “since he may have inherited the characteristics of his ancestors who perhaps often found it necessary to climb to the tree tops to escape some giant animal of their time.” He further explained that while he had never found a man with a tail, he held out hope that he would find such a creature at Ellis Island.
Amidst such pressing concerns for the future of American genetic stock, Henry Goddard offered his services to officials at Ellis Island, where he found a willing ally in William Williams. During his second term as commissioner, Williams was even more convinced that too many undesirable immigrants were entering the country. He was concerned that mentally defective immigrants would “start vicious strains which lead to misery and loss in future generations and influence unfavorably the character and lives of hundreds of persons.” Robert DeC. Ward praised Williams for doing “more than anyone else to keep the blood of our race pure.”
Williams complained to his superiors in Washington that under the current law “many families of poor stock are admissible who practically never rise out of a certain narrow border-land between independence and dependence.” As part of his work, he sent an inspector to report on some three dozen Italian and Jewish children in New York City deemed feebleminded by local schools and hospitals. The longer the families had been in America, Williams argued, the worse off they were. These families, he wrote, came from classes that “have been going down hill for some time” due to “bad living conditions, in-breeding, over-breeding, the strain of persecution.”
Neither Congress nor President William Howard Taft seemed willing to secure extra funding to weed out mentally defective immigrants, so Williams was forced to look in another direction, and Goddard offered a scientific method that would aid doctors in doing so. In 1910, Goddard and his colleague Edward Johnstone visited Ellis Island. The two men came away disappointed, discouraged, and overwhelmed, both by the enormity of the daily immigrant tide they saw on that one day—some five thousand immigrants—as well as the lack of proper facilities. Goddard felt there was little he could contribute to the effort to weed out mental defectives in such an environment.
So discouraged was Goddard that he did not return again to Ellis Island until the spring of 1912, when Williams invited him back to perform some experiments. Goddard came on a Saturday when no immigrants arrived, but there were a few still on the island preparing to leave for the mainland. Goddard picked out one young man and gave him the Binet test. He tested at a mental age of eight years old, an obvious defective to Goddard.
Williams seemed pleased enough with the results to invite the psychologist back the following week. This time Goddard brought two female assistants with him and set out to construct an experiment. One woman would stand on the inspection line and pick out immigrants for further testing, while the second assistant would sit in a room and administer the Binet tests to those selected. Based solely on observation, Goddard’s assistant picked out nine individuals who appeared to be mentally deficient, as well as three more who appeared normal. The twelve were then tested, and Goddard reported that all nine suspected of being mentally deficient had tested so, while the three in the control group had tested normal.
Believing this was proof of the scientific validity of intelligence testing, Goddard requested a return engagement in the fall of 1912. For one week, Goddard and his female assistants administered Binet tests. In one experiment, Goddard’s assistants selected eleven immigrants whom they believed were mentally defective, while Public Health Service doctors pulled out thirty-three. All were given the Binet tests. Goddard reported that fewer than half of those chosen by the medical staff qualified as mentally defective, while his own assistants proved correct in nine out of the eleven cases.
Confident of its ability to pick out mentally defective immigrants, Goddard’s team moved to another experiment. Working with Ellis Island medical officials, both groups stood in an inspection line of some 1,260 incoming immigrants. Goddard’s assistants picked out 83 suspected mental defectives, while the medical inspectors picked out only 18. Extrapolating from his earlier experiment, Goddard argued that his assistants would have excluded some 72 immigrants, while the medical inspectors would only have caught 8. Goddard believed he had now scientifically proved what William Williams, Prescott Hall, and others believed—that mentally inferior immigrants were slipping past inadequate inspection at Ellis Island.
Goddard magnanimously said that he did not mean to disparage the quality and professionalism of the Ellis Island medical staff. They simply were not specialists, he argued, and his staff showed just what experts in psychology could provide. All that was needed was better training of the medical staff at immigration stations, something on the order of a year or two medical residency at an institution like the Vineland School. With such training, he wrote, officials could then “pick out with marvelous accuracy every case of mental defect in all those who are above the infant age.” Women, he said, were best fit for the job because they possessed a keener sense of observation.
Goddard’s test did not go completely without a hitch. He was concerned that most of the immigrants did not speak English, forcing his assistants to rely on interpreters to administer the tests. How could you be sure, Goddard worried, that the interpreters were correctly translating both the questions and the immigrants’ responses? However, he did not ask whether cultural biases could subvert the results of the tests. Were intelligence tests conceived for use with French schoolchildren suitable instruments to measure the intelligence of peasants from southern and eastern Europe?
Nevertheless, Goddard carried on with his experiments, raising more funds to send another group of testers to Ellis Island in the spring of 1913 for two and a half months. What came from this round of testing was one of the most infamous and misunderstood psychological studies of the twentieth century.
Goddard’s staff chose a total of 191 immigrants—Jews, Italians, Russians, and Hungarians—for a battery of five intelligence tests. To arrive at this group, Goddard first weeded out those of obvious low intelligence, as well as those who clearly appeared intellectually suitable for admission. What was left was a group that Goddard defined as borderline feebleminded, who may or may not be qualified for admission.
Although Goddard’s staff conducted the test in 1913, the results were not presented publicly until a 1916 conference and not published until 1917. Why did Goddard, whose professional goal was to get intelligence tests accepted by the general public, take so long to report his results?
One reason is that the results shocked even Goddard. They showed that 83 percent of Jews, 80 percent of Hungarians, and 79 percent of Italians tested were clearly feebleminded. Worse still, Goddard’s team could only pinpoint six individuals whose measured level of intelligence was without a doubt acceptable for admission. The remaining subjects possessed a level of intelligence that would make their legal admission to the United States unlikely.
The results, wrote Goddard, “are so surprising and difficult of acceptance that they can hardly stand by themselves as valid.” Unlike Edward Ross, Goddard did not set out to prove the inferiority of immigrants. He wondered whether the tests were too hard and began omitting certain questions from the test. After rejiggering the results, Goddard lowered his estimate of those clearly feebleminded to almost 40 percent.
When Goddard finally published these results in 1917, his paper displayed less of the confidence of a modern scientist than the confused and self-contradictory response of a man working his way around complex sociological and psychological problems. Within the same article, Goddard repeatedly contradicts himself as he tries to explain the data.
How did Goddard determine the intelligence of immigrants? When asked, through a translator, to give the definition of common terms such as “table” or “horse,” the feebleminded immigrant would respond only with that object’s most common use. A table is “something to eat on” and a horse “is to ride.” These answers showed Goddard a lack of imagination or creativity. In a similar vein, many immigrants had trouble taking three words and creating a sentence from them; nor could most dissect sentences, produce rhymes, or draw a design of an object from memory. Just as disconcerting, Goddard found that most of these immigrants did not know the current date.
Goddard asked whether these supposed failures were due to hereditary defects, as many eugenicists believed, or whether they were affected by environmental factors. To test this question, he set out to track those same immigrants to see whether their lives in the United States confirmed the original diagnosis of feeblemindedness. (Goddard’s tests were not legally binding on the admissibility of the immigrants.)
Two years after these tests were conducted, Goddard’s staff attempted to track the addresses of as many of their subjects as possible, traveling as far as St. Louis. Much to Goddard’s chagrin, few of the immigrants could be found. His staff encountered numerous problems, from incorrect addresses, immigrants who had moved, and uncertainty about the spelling of names. Tenement dwellers were often unwilling to help Goddard’s dutiful and earnest young female staffers.
The wild goose chase probably helped cause the delay in reporting Goddard’s results. So did the gnawing uncertainty Goddard felt about his study. He asked in his 1917 paper: “Are these results reasonable?” Goddard had already answered that question by cutting his initial estimate of feebleminded immigrants in half.
As for whether intelligence was inherited, Goddard repeated the mantra, “Morons beget morons.” Yet he also wrote in the same article that it seemed more likely that the poor showing of immigrants on these intelligence tests was due to environmental causes rather than genetic defects. Unlike the work of Edward Ross, Goddard avoided linking new immigrants to the weakening of America’s genetic stock. In fact, he mused with little evidence that “a very large percentage of these immigrants make good after a fashion.” On top of that, he said, these feebleminded immigrants did the work that Americans would not do. There was plenty of drudge work that needed to be done that required minimal intelligence.
Even a nonscientist can quickly point out the shoddy methodology of Goddard’s Ellis Island research. His own writings betrayed his second thoughts about his scientific discoveries. Goddard was attempting to make science useful to mankind to help create a more rational and healthier society. He also sought to establish psychology as a respected and useful part of the medical profession. Yet his science too often fell victim to the popular biases of the time.
The Survey, the nation’s leading periodical for social workers, helped publicize Goddard’s study. “Two Immigrants Out of Five Feeble-minded” ran a headline in the magazine’s editorial on the subject. “If you had gone over to Ellis Island shortly before the war began and placed your hand at random on one of the aliens waiting to be examined by government inspectors, you would very likely have found that your choice was feebleminded,” the editorial announced. Though the journal used the less inflammatory numbers from Goddard’s study, it still treated his work as scientific proof of large-scale immigrant deficiency. The editorial failed to inform its readers that Goddard’s tests were given to less than two hundred individuals who were not chosen from a representative sample.
Yet when Goddard began his work, he was agnostic on the relationship between immigrants and feeblemindedness. Before leaving for Ellis Island, Goddard had set out to test the opinion that many residents of American mental asylums and institutions were foreign-born. Looking at sixteen such institutions across the nation, he found less than 5 percent of the more than eleven thousand inmates were foreign-born. The fear that mentally ill immigrants were swamping the nation’s hospitals, schools, and institutions, Goddard wrote, was “grossly overestimated.”
For all the attention that Goddard received for his studies at Ellis Island, it was only a small part of intelligence testing taking place there. Not surprisingly, medical officers who sorted through thousands of immigrants each day resented Goddard and his team, who swooped into Ellis Island with great fanfare and then quickly left, leaving the heavy lifting of the daily inspection and testing to the doctors of the Public Health Service, whom Goddard implied were untrained for weeding out mental defectives and had let far too many immigrants of low intelligence slip through.
Goddard had been particularly critical of the powers of observation of Ellis Island doctors, yet their writings show that these officials also put a great deal of faith in initial observations of immigrants. Dr. C. P. Knight described in detail the easily detectable warning signs of a possible idiot, ranging from “low receding forehead” to the size of a face out of proportion the size of the head, to deformed or twisted ears, to excessively deep eye sockets created by a protruding brow. Idiots drooled, and were often apathetic or overly excited. “The expression is stupid, the eyes dull, the speech defective, the tongue swollen and protruding, while the limbs are short and bent and the skin is thick, sallow and greasy,” Knight wrote.
For immigrants suffering from “dementia, mental deficiency, or epilepsy,” doctors were on the lookout for “stupidity, confusion, inattention, lack of comprehension, facial expressions of earnestness or preoccupation…general untidiness…talking to one’s self, incoherent talk…evidence of negativism, silly laughing, hallucinating, awkward manner, biting nail.” In a sample of about 30,000 steerage passengers inspected at Ellis Island in the summer of 1916, some 3,000 received a chalk mark X, although after the battery of tests were completed, only 108 were certified as feebleminded.
Ellis Island doctors also paid attention to ethnic characteristics when assessing mental capacity. While it was perfectly normal for an Italian to show emotion “on the slightest provocation,” if an Italian showed the “solidity and indifference” of a Pole or a Russian, that would signal a need for further testing. Similarly, English and Germans should answer questions in a straightforward manner, but if they became “evasive as do the Hebrews, we would be inclined to question their sanity.” If an Englishman behaved like an Irishman, Dr. E. H. Mullan argued, inspectors would suspect him of mental problems. If an Italian behaved like a Finn, depression might be suspected.
Howard Knox was one of the leading experts on mental testing there. The twenty-seven-year-old Knox arrived at Ellis Island in the spring of 1912, around the same time as Henry Goddard’s second visit. He had spent less than three years as a doctor in the Army Medical Corps before resigning in April 1911. The Dartmouth-educated doctor, whose round, fleshy face bore a resemblance to Babe Ruth, had been married three times in as many years. (When he left Ellis Island in 1916, he would be on marriage number four.) Knox then applied for a position in the Public Health and Marine-Hospital Service and was assigned to Ellis Island. Like Thomas Salmon, he had not been trained as a psychologist.
Knox shared many of the prejudices and biases of the time. He believed mentally defective immigrants were like drops of ink in a barrel of water, polluting the nation’s bloodstream. If the feebleminded were not caught at Ellis Island, Knox argued, they would “start a line of defectives whose progeny, like the brook, will go on forever, branching off here in an imbecile and there in an epileptic.”
Knox was also sensitive to the flaws in intelligence tests and recognized that many immigrants did poorly not because of innate inferiority but because of a lack of formal education. He warned that intelligence tests like the ones Goddard used would make nearly all immigrants from peasant backgrounds appear to be mentally defective. Another Ellis Island doctor, E. K. Sprague, argued that using Binet tests originally designed for French schoolchildren on poor, uneducated immigrants “is as sensible as to claim that with a single instrument any operation in surgery can be successfully performed.”
“After studying carefully the methods used at the various schools for the feebleminded,” Knox wrote, “the medical officers at Ellis Island were obliged to discard the great majority of them as unsuitable for their work and unfair to the immigrant.” Knox claimed that one of Goddard’s female assistants had pulled out and tested thirty-six immigrants as mentally deficient. When she turned them over to be certified by Knox and his colleagues, they refused. Using their own methods, they found that in each case the immigrant was either of normal intelligence or suffered from poor vision.
Their day-to-day familiarity with immigrants caused Ellis Island’s doctors to reject the overly deterministic testing conducted by Goddard’s team, and they were not shy about airing their criticisms in print. Knox repeatedly criticized the methods of Goddard and his staff, calling them “lay-workers with no knowledge of medicine, psychiatry, or neurology.” He complained that they often confused temporary psychological disorders, brought about by environmental conditions, with a mental defect and “call such a patient ‘stupid’ or rate him as ‘seven years old on the Binet.’”
Knox noted one case of an immigrant selected by the Goddard team as feebleminded because of a head shape that Knox classified as “simian reversion type with stigmata including malformation of helix.” To Goddard’s team, the shape of the man’s head placed him lower on the evolutionary scale and signified low intelligence. When Knox’s colleagues tested the man, they found that he had above average intelligence and spoke three languages fluently. He was admitted.
Another Ellis Island doctor, Bernard Glueck, told the story of a thirty-five-year-old southern Italian man. Based on intelligence tests similar to those used by Goddard, the immigrant was classified with a mental age of between eight and ten, a certifiable moron. Yet Glueck discovered that the man had been in the country before, working as a laborer for two years, during which time he sent back to his family in Italy some $400. He was married with two children, owned property in Italy that he had bought with money earned in the United States, and was returning to earn still more money. “I have no doubt that he will succeed in doing this,” recalled Glueck, who saw the story as a refutation of the Binet test’s ability to measure intelligence. “I am inclined to assume in this case the existence of strongly presumptive evidence that this particular individual is not feebleminded,” concluded Glueck.
Ignoring Goddard’s work, Ellis Island doctors created their own system of testing the mental capacity of immigrants. Knox began with the realization that the conditions under which immigrants arrived at Ellis Island were less than ideal. “After ten days of sea-sickness, fatigue, and excitement,” Knox wrote, such an individual “could not be expected to do himself justice.” Therefore, immigrants should have a solid meal, bath, and good night’s sleep before taking any mental tests.
The testing room should be no warmer than 70 degrees, well ventilated, and quiet, and there should be no more than three people in the room. Those administering the test should “have a pleasant and kindly manner.” To ease the mind of the person being tested, Knox argued that the room should not have “an official air,” but instead resemble a den in someone’s home. If possible, tests should be conducted over two days. Doctors should make allowances for the “fear and mental stress under which the subject may be laboring.” While these precautions may have been cold comfort for dazed and confused immigrants, they at least show that doctors were aware of the pitfalls of their assignment.
Once the conditions had been established, doctors began with a battery of questions. What day of the week is it? What is the date? Where is the immigrant? Next came questions that dealt with common knowledge, such as the number of hours in a day, months in a year, and names of flowers and animals. Immigrants were asked questions about their homeland, such as the capital of their native country and the name of their currency. Other questions were more culturally subjective, such as the significance of Easter. In a random survey of fifty uneducated Polish immigrants, Glueck found that while 98 percent knew the number of months of the year, only 66 percent knew the significance of Easter. Glueck admitted that these questions were relatively useless in judging intelligence among uneducated immigrants.
Other questions would test mathematical ability with simple addition problems. Immigrants would next be asked to repeat back a series of four to seven numbers given to them by their examiner and were then asked to count to twenty, sometimes by twos, and then count backwards from twenty. They were tested on their ability to gain new knowledge, so they were asked the name of the steamship they arrived on, what port they left from, and how the ships were powered.
This battery of questions confused Codger Nutt, a boy actor and mascot of the Drury Lane Theatre in London, who was coming to New York to appear in a play. The diminutive thespian could neither read nor write, spoke with a strong Cockney accent, and seemed lost at Ellis Island. Doctors suspected him of being feebleminded, so they asked him whether he knew the difference between a horse and a cow. “I told ’em that an ’orse could be driven but ye couldn’t drive a cow,” Nutt replied. Then they asked him what he would do if he saw someone in the road “cut up into a ’undred pieces,” to which he responded that he would report it to the police. Officials were not convinced by the diminutive actor’s answers, but Secretary Charles Nagel allowed him to enter the country and join the rest of his acting troupe, as long as he left the country after a year.
The questions that Codger Nutt and others faced were only the beginning of the testing. Doctors went beyond testing math or memory skills and tried to measure the creative powers and imagination of immigrants. “Some of us having gazed into the smoke of a choice cigar or into an open fireplace,” wrote Knox, “may have seen, perhaps, the sweetheart of other days, or the vision of a farmhouse away off in some old country town.” With that in mind, Knox set out to use ink-blots of various shapes. Each figure vaguely resembled some object, such as a house, a strawberry, a snake, a leaf.
Knox conducted a small study using these ink-blots among twenty-five Italian immigrants deemed normal and twenty-five deemed mentally defective. The answers from the mental defectives were often accompanied by a “negative tongue noise” or “I don’t know.” Knox also recorded his impression of each individual, which ranged from “stupid and indifferent” to “stupid, emotional, high tempered, and willful.” He concluded that “there are no Jules Vernes” among the group. The reaction time for those deemed mentally defective was nearly twice as slow as the normal group and the mental defectives possessed more asymmetrical heads and faces, harkening back to Goddard’s belief that observation alone could weed out mental defectives.
Immigrants were also given pictures to describe. One of them, entitled “Last Honors to Bunny,” depicted three young children mourning their dead pet rabbit. Immigrants were asked six questions, including what was going on, what the boy and girl were doing, and why one of the boys was digging a hole.
Ellis Island doctor E. H. Mullan found that most of the immigrants poorly described the picture, but that should have come as no surprise. Hard as it may be to believe, some immigrants had little familiarity with pictures. More importantly, many immigrants were puzzled by what they saw in the drawing. They had rarely seen pets treated well and were not used to seeing rabbits as pets. Some were unfamiliar with the custom of placing flowers on graves. Mullan concluded that pictures were unhelpful in judging the mental capacity of immigrants unless they depicted scenes easily recognizable to European peasants.
Ellis Island doctors were increasingly bothered by the subjectivity of their intelligence tests. One manual admitted that testing the knowledge and intelligence of immigrants was a difficult, perhaps impossible, task. “What are likely to be considered matters of universal knowledge may be absolutely unknown to them on account of the extreme limitations of their surroundings,” it stated. The average American, these doctors were informed, could not grasp how narrow were the lives of most European peasants arriving at Ellis Island. These men and women lived lives of “sordidness and hard-working monotony almost beyond belief, resulting in a mental equipment which is correspondingly limited and stunted.”
With this in mind, Ellis Island doctors made use of nonverbal performance tests, many of which they created themselves. Most were little more than glorified jigsaw puzzles. Wooden boards had shapes of different sizes cut out, and immigrants had to put the pieces back in their proper place. Some of the figures were abstract, while others portrayed a face in profile or a horse.
Howard Knox created another test, referred to as the Knox Imitation Cube Test. It consisted of four one-inch cubes placed four inches apart. The doctor then took a smaller cube and, facing the immigrant, proceeded to touch the blocks in a set pattern in a slow and methodical manner. The immigrant would have to repeat the pattern. There were five levels of difficulty, beginning with four moves that touched each cube in order and proceeding to more difficult moves requiring up to six moves that touched the cubes out of sequence. There were five different sets of movements, and success at each level was tied to various levels of intelligence, from idiot to imbecile to moron to normal to highly intelligent.
These tests were about more than just the subject’s ability to accomplish the task successfully. Immigrants were constantly being watched, observed, and judged. The inspecting doctor was not just concerned about whether the immigrant could accomplish the task. He was interested in how fast it was accomplished, the immigrant’s facial expression while completing the task, his muscle control, the speed of his movement, his mental state, and attention span.
From the moment immigrants set foot on Ellis Island, they were under observation At least a dozen pairs of eyes were on them constantly. It is hard to imagine that immigrants could not feel the penetrating gaze of doctors and inspectors bearing down on them, judging them in a calculating, yet not totally dispassionate, manner. Ellis Island doctors were aware of the need to provide a proper environment, but the observational effect upon the immigrants must have caused a great deal of nervousness, performance anxiety, and even belligerence.
It is not surprising that officials began to uncover more mentally defective immigrants through the years. From 1908 to 1912, the total number of idiots, imbeciles, and feebleminded diagnosed remained relatively constant at between 160 and 190 per year. Yet 1913 proved to be a crucial year. That year, the New York Times warned that “15,000 Defectives Menace New York,” Goddard was conducting his tests at Ellis Island, and Howard Knox first began publishing articles outlining the methods used by the Public Health Service doctors.
In 1913, the number of mental defectives detected rose to 555, and then almost 1,000 in the following year. The dramatic increase came almost exclusively from the category of feebleminded—those who did not appear at first glance to be mentally defective. From 1908 to 1912, the number of feebleminded immigrants was around 120 per year; by 1913 it had risen to 483, and in 1914 it reached 890. The reliance on intelligence testing increased the number of immigrants deemed to have below-average intelligence. Restrictionists believed that science was finally allowing the proper sifting of undesirable immigrants.
Knox sometimes shared the concerns of restrictionists and eugenicists, but he and his colleagues also stressed common sense. Immigrants would be tested on at least three separate occasions before being classified as mentally defective. No single test would seal the diagnosis, and immigrants were never deported for failing just one test. Instead, doctors looked at the entirety of the results on common knowledge, memory, reasoning, learning capacity, and performance tests. Still, mental testing at Ellis Island was fraught with cultural biases, as well as the unstated assumption that something called intelligence could be tested.
Like others involved in the immigration debate, Knox was a complex man. In June 1913, he could tell a scientific conference he was confident he would find the missing link among immigrants at Ellis Island, implying that some he saw there were subhuman. A few months earlier, though, he could warn readers of a medical journal that they “should have infinite compassion and pity for those whom the French have feelingly called les enfants du bon Dieu and the Scotch the daft bairns, and the innocents, for a soul is a soul regardless of what functional tests may show of the intellect.” Such compassion would have been cold comfort to the Zitello family. For all the supposedly dispassionate science, intelligence tests were not conducted in a vacuum.
A few weeks after writing his letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, Salvatore Zitello received his response. It came not from the president, but from the office of the immigration commissioner. They were words he had heard before. Gemma, the letter stated, “was excluded because she could not qualify under the mental requirements of the law. I am sorry to be obliged to advise you that she comes within a class manditorily excluded.” There would be no leniency for Gemma Zitello. She would never be reunited with her family in America.