After World War I, the United States only wanted to let the brightest, best (and wealthiest) immigrants into its borders. At Ellis Island, intelligence testing was used to keep undesirables—depressed people, alcoholics, the senile elderly—out, but also were skewed to keep those who weren’t wealthy enough to travel in a cabin out of the country. Rich immigrants were given a pass, but poor immigrants were pressed with rigorous screenings to ensure that they were mentually fit to enter the country. If not, these immigrants were interred in Ellis Island’s mental hospital or deported.
As immigrants passed through Ellis Island, each one was screened for health defects and mental defects. Mental defects were identified by an alien appearing to be “inattentive" or were stupid-looking” as defined by a 1917 Public Health Report detailing the screening process at the immigration center. Mentally suspect immigrants were marked with a chalk X on their coats and taken to be examined for mental disorder.
These immigrants were examined for pecularity in dress, excessive talkativeness, nervousness, as well as many other factors. The test began with simple quesiotns such as “Where are you going? How old are you? What is your name?" Most immigrants were then asked additional simple arithmetic questions. The difficulty of the questions was determined by age, sex, race and general appearance. For example, a northern Italian girl with apparent schooling would be asked more difficult addition problems than an illiterate Italian man or Greek woman.
If immigrants were then determined to be suspect, the examiner would issue them a yellow “hold card” and the patient was held overnight for a complete mental inspection. About 9 out of every 100 patients during 1917 were held for more mental inspection. Potential mental patients were deemed retarded, apathetic, catatonic, depressive, alcoholic or talkative. One detained woman reported seeing visions of the Virgin Mary and another detained man appeared to be senile, but claimed to be a resident of California with $3,700 in the bank.
The scariest part of these mental health tests were that the immigrants’ inability to speak or read English was also often noted as part of his mental instability. Also, many of the conditions deemed insane by the examiner were products of the immigrant’s long journey, as well as his or her unease in being in a foreign country, a place where she didn’t speak the language.
In addition, in the same swoop, Americans decided that mental illness could only be found in the poor, or that the richer classes of people could enter the country and care for their mental disease themselves. If a passenger travelled in a cabin, he or she was exempt from the testing.
In theory, mental testing was set in place so that immigrants wouldn’t strain American health and mental care facilities. In practice, poor immigrants were often misunderstood as mentally unstable and sometimes spent portions of their sad lives in America as mental institution inmates.
During this time, the United States was not interested in becoming a dumping ground for the world’s mentally diseased. Still, at the same time, we effectively put limits on what we viewed as sanity or insanity, mental health or disease, standards that we still use today.
Sources and further reading:
http://psychology.about.com/od/psychologicaltesting/a/int-history.htm
http://www.gjenvick.com/Immigration/Medical-Mental-InspectionOfImmigrant...