A Disability History of the United States (17 page)

Race also mattered. At Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, where the immigrants were Asian and not European, the examinations were lengthier and deportation rates higher (at least five times that of Ellis Island). As far back as the Page Law of 1875, which had made Chinese immigration very difficult, US congressional reports had determined that “there is not sufficient brain capacity in the Chinese to furnish motive power for self-government.” Their bodies were, in essence, too disabled for democracy. At the southern border, Mexicans who passed the border experienced little surveillance. Prior to 1924, most public officers, employers, and social commentators who paid attention to these immigrants considered them “uniquely able-bodied” for physical labor: ideally made for the harsh labor of farm work or food processing, as long as that was where they stayed, but not for democratic participation or more elite employment.
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At Ellis Island, Dr. Allan McLaughlin of the US Public Health Service warned immigration officials to “ever be on the alert for deception.” The defective immigrant, he warned, would attempt purposeful and shrewd shams in order to enter the United States: “The nonchalant individual with an overcoat on his arm is probably concealing an artificial arm; the child strapped to its mother’s back, and who appears old enough to walk alone, may be unable to walk because of infantile paralysis . . . and a bad case of trachoma may show no external evidence and be detected only upon everting the eyelid.”
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Charles Proteus Steinmetz sailed into New York harbor in 1889. He and a friend, Oscar Asmussen, arrived in New York as two of the ship’s six hundred steerage, or third-class, passengers. Steinmetz, however, barely made it through immigration. Within just a decade he would become an internationally leading inventor, scientist, engineer, and researcher. His adopted hometown of Schenectady, New York, still remembers him as president of the city council, president of the Board of Education, and a philanthropist who bought all local orphans a Christmas present every year.
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In 1889, however, Steinmetz was viewed disparagingly as a Jewish hunchbacked man of short stature, four foot three inches tall. Born to an educated family in the German-speaking city that is now Wroclaw, Poland, he spoke little English and likewise had almost no money. Steinmetz apparently rarely discussed what happened as he went through the immigration process, but immigration officials initially denied him entrance due to his disability and the resulting likelihood that he would become a public charge—the routine practice of the time. His friend Asmussen protested loudly, however, proclaiming Steinmetz’s intellectual brilliance and stating (falsely) that a thick wad of money in his possession belonged to Steinmetz. Immigration officials relented and Steinmetz entered the country. It’s likely at this point, while immigration officials scoffed at him due to his disability, that Steinmetz legally claimed Proteus as his middle name. Proteus, a nickname given him by his professors in Germany, referred to a wise Greek sea god with a hunched back. The name conferred wisdom, not the ableism he experienced at the border. Today Steinmetz remains most widely remembered as a leading engineer at General Electric and a pioneer developer of electric cars, though friends best remembered him for his delicious meatloaf.
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Steinmetz could have been excluded because he fell within the later-developed “poor physique” category. In use by 1905, the Immigration Services defined individuals of “poor physique” as those “who have frail frame, flat chest, and are generally deficient in muscular development,” or “undersized—markedly of short stature—dwarf.” As historian Margot Canaday has shown, immigration officials also used the “poor physique” category to reject individuals suspected of sexual perversion (homosexuality), having bodies with ambiguous sexual organs, or simply being undiscernibly distinctly male or female.
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Many thousands of immigrants, however, did not have the assistance of someone like Asmussen in navigating through immigration, or did not chance upon a lax inspector who gave them a pass, and were deported as “defectives” and “undesirables.” In 1905 Domenico Rocco Vozzo, a thirty-five-year-old Italian immigrant, was rejected while entering the United States for the second time. Earlier he had spent two years in the States earning money and then returned to Italy. He sought to do the same again, but immigration officials determined him as having a “debility” and likely to become a public charge. Vozzo apparently had “a curiously shaped head, and his skin looks rather white, almost bleached, and his ears are quite thin.” Those determining Vozzo’s case used his photo as proof that he was not “a desirable acquisition” and deported him. Donabet Mousekian, an Armenian Turk, lacked male sexual organs—sometimes referred to by immigration officials as “lack of sexual development.” He had made a living as a photographer, was a skilled weaver and dyer of rugs, and could cook well. Aside from that he had relatives in the United States who promised support. None of which swayed officials. “I am not ill,” he said in his appeal, “have no contagious disease; my eyes, feet, hands and ears are sound; only I am deprived of male organs; this is not a fault because it has come from God and my mother: what can I do? It won’t do any harm to my working.” Immigration officials determined Mousekian likely to become a public charge and “weak, emaciated, and really repulsive in appearance”—sexually defective.
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Israel Bosak was similarly deported in 1906 for “poor physique.” The tailor had lost his successful shop in anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia, had some cash, and had relatives who promised to help him establish a business. His unspecified and unexplained “poor physique,” however, meant deportation. In 1913, thirty-year-old deaf blacksmith Moische Fischmann arrived at Ellis Island presumably with high hopes. Already in the country were his brother and sister, both well employed and ready to help him. At the gauntlet of the Public Health Service physician on duty, however, Fischmann was determined to have a physical defect and his case referred to the Board of Special Inquiry. There his siblings attested to their fiscal stability in great detail. Three cousins also promised to help support Fischmann while he sought work, and one of them carried with him a letter from his own employer guaranteeing the skilled blacksmith a job. The board, however, unanimously voted to deport the deaf man back to Russia. His “certified condition,” it concluded, “is such that he would have considerable difficulty in acquiring or retaining employment.” Under further appeal, which was rare, Fischmann’s attorney from the Hebrew Immigrant Sheltering and Aid Society warned of the hostile conditions that Russian Jews faced. A second employer promised Fischmann a job and $12 a week. Despite these arguments, and the two job offers, the commissioner insisted that “there can be little doubt that the applicant’s certified condition will seriously interfere with his earning capacity.” Fischmann was deported. Given the ease with which both Bosak and Fischmann were identified as Jewish, it is possible that their Jewishness, coupled with deafness and “poor physique,” became part of the formula that rendered them unfit.
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The LPC clause, as the “likely to become a public charge” clause has become known, clearly assumed that bodies considered defective rendered them unable to perform wage-earning labor. One immigration official saw no problem with his assumption that the “immigrant of poor physique is not able to perform rough labor, and even if he were able, employers of labor would not hire him.” As historian Douglas Baynton wisely points out, for immigration officials “the belief that an immigrant was unfit to work justified exclusion, but so did the belief that an immigrant was
likely to encounter discrimination
because of a disability.”
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It also meant that if monetary assistance was needed due to a disability, such a need disqualified potential immigrants for US citizenship—quite clearly stating that such citizens already here were far from the ideal.

The issue, however, was not a straightforward economic matter, despite reliance on the LPC clause. Many immigrants rejected for their defective bodies had supported themselves quite well in their home countries. Others, like Moische Fischmann, had jobs awaiting them or relatives offering to support them. The economic rationale of the LPC clause could serve, and often did serve, as a false cover story. Ableism and a desire for a specific form of American bodies motivated the deportation of many potential immigrants.

When Patrick Eagan was refused entry into the United States in 1909, immigration officials noted that he “looks to be able-bodied,” and had “always accomplished the full task of an able-bodied laborer.” That was not enough. Eagan’s penis was considered small by immigration officials (who examined such things) and they then rejected Eagan on the basis that immigrants “effeminately developed” were “undesirable in any community.” Despite Eagan’s solid wage-work history, officials insisted that future wage work was highly unlikely. As historian Margot Canaday explains, “immigration officials associated defective genitalia with perversion, and further viewed perversion as a likely cause of economic dependency.”
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In these immigration policies, able-bodiedness included normative genitalia.

In subtle ways, and sometimes not so subtle ways, the LPC clause also was embedded in class, ethnic, race, sexual, and gender assumptions. The LPC clause required that immigrant women have bodies interpreted as able to perform physical labor for wages, this despite the fact that many women in the United States did not work for wages at this time and were not expected to do so. The LPC clause set gendered requirements of appropriate womanhood that, depending on class, ethnicity or race, domestic-born women did not have to meet. Indeed, the LPC clause defined immigrant women as ineligible for the benefits of native-born womanhood.

The legal structures and the physical gates at US border locales became sites where ideals about the bodies of American citizens were enforced and reinforced. US lawmakers, scientists, and policymakers established which bodily, mental, and moral characteristics (perceived or real) were acceptable parts of the body politic—and which would disable the body politic. When Coolidge proclaimed that “America must be kept American,” he had a very specific American body in mind.
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Alice Smith was not what many had in mind as the ideal American. In May of 1912 the New Jersey Board of Examiners of Feeble-Minded (Including Idiots, Imbeciles and Morons), Epileptics, Criminals and Other Defectives—yes, that really was the bureaucratic name—met to discuss Smith. The four men on the board unanimously determined that “procreation by her is inadvisable,” and based on a 1911 New Jersey law, ordered that the almost twenty-eight-year-old white woman be sterilized. The New Jersey law, signed by then-governor Woodrow Wilson, had authorized sterilization of those individuals deemed “defective.”
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Smith and her four surviving siblings had each been legally committed, at varying times, to the New Jersey State Village for Epileptics, in Skillman, New Jersey. At the initiation of the State Board of Children’s Guardians, Alice had been committed in 1902 by the Court of Common Pleas of Essex County just twelve days short of her eighteenth birthday—likely because such an action was legally easier to achieve before she reached the age of majority. Smith and many of her family members had epilepsy. In 1912 she had not had a seizure for over five years.

Because Smith’s case eventually reached the New Jersey Supreme Court, and because eugenicists relied upon very detailed case histories and genealogical data, more is known about Smith than many others in similar situations. Most of the data, however, is filtered through eugenicist interpretations and little of Smith’s direct voice emerges.

It is clear that Smith’s father, George, was a Civil War veteran who once worked as an engineer (though what that actually meant is not clear). Alice’s mother, Susan Ann, was twelve years younger than her husband. Between 1880 and 1900 the family’s social status had gone steadily downhill. For a brief period after 1900 the couple lived at the New Jersey Soldiers Home for Disabled Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, and Their Wives and Widows in Vineland, but the couple was kicked out because of Susan’s epilepsy. Where their children lived during that period, and the nature of George’s disability, is not clear. The couple had seven children, beginning in the 1870s, five of whom survived childhood.

In 1900 the Smith family lived in the back of a house, bordering an alley, in a largely black neighborhood of Bloomfield, New Jersey. The family generally lived on the $20 per month pension that George received as a disabled veteran of the Civil War, though George worked for a brief period as a railway flagman. Three children had already died: a son had drowned at seven years of age; a daughter died in infancy; and another son died after falling from a second-story window at four years of age. In 1900 Doretta (or Dora) was approximately twenty-seven, George Jr. twenty-three, Emma Jane eighteen, Alice sixteen, and Russell thirteen. Both Emma and Alice had given birth to daughters in the local almshouse, and the baby girls were removed from their unmarried mothers (though when Emma gave birth is not clear). By 1912 all five siblings lived at the State Village for Epileptics. Eugenic investigators from the Village then described mother Susan Smith as “mentally deficient to a fairly marked degree,” with many feeble-minded relatives, and an epileptic who’d had seizures since the age of fourteen. Alice’s father George Smith was “mentally deficient . . . [with] an ugly disposition and an ugly temper,” “commonly known as ‘half-witted.’”
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Smith’s sexuality and pregnancy at a relatively young age, interpreted as proof of her moral and intellectual feeble-mindedness, is hard to interpret. The case files, created by eugenic investigators working out of the Village, noted that Alice became pregnant after she and a neighboring African American man had “indulged in sexual intercourse” in a vacant lot one night. Alice said she had been raped. Later she said that she did not remember what had happened. Village officials “suspected” her “of being a masturbator” and claimed that she exhibited “the hypersexuality which is common in defectiveness.” Possibly even worse, as far as the case report indicated, “This patient did not possess the normal aversions of a white girl to a colored man, who was perhaps nice to her.” Elsewhere the case file indicated that Alice’s father, George, frequently “in fits of anger,” “would turn his daughters out of his house, and they would seek refuge among the negroes about the neighborhood.” Alice lived among African Americans, and clearly had relied upon her black neighbors to avoid her father’s violence. The case file indicated that a “colored man whose name is said to have been Washington” fathered her child. A thirty-two-year-old widowed black man named Charles Washington boarded several houses down the street during the year Alice became pregnant; perhaps he was the father. The true nature of the relationship is near impossible to discern; as is Alice’s home situation. Historian Molly Ladd-Taylor has pointed out that “a disproportionate number” of women in legal situations similar to Alice’s “were probable victims of incest or sexual abuse.” Alice’s case file simply concluded that if released unsterilized, “no doubt when at large she would soon fall victim to another unscrupulous man . . . and she would therefore be a social danger, as she would be the cause of a new generation of epileptics and imbeciles.”
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Smith’s disabling transgressions were racial, sexual, and class based.