When Doctors Ran Amok: How Max Kohler Rescued a “Feeble-Minded” Immigrant Girl from Deportation

• In Event: Disability Rights Without Borders: Law, Citizenship, and the Redefinition of the Jewish Body Politic

Abstract

In 1891, the United States Congress revised the public charge statute initially introduced in the 1882 Immigration Act. Commodifying health and pathologizing poverty, the public charge provision excluded and deported any immigrant considered “likely to become a public charge” based on their actual or merely alleged physical, mental, or financial condition. Though the law implicated all immigrants, it particularly impacted eastern European Jews, disturbing American Jews active in pro-immigration work. My paper interrogates how Max Kohler, American Jewish attorney “par excellence,” defended twelve-year-old Pauline Fink, a Jewish immigrant girl nearly deported as likely to become a public charge because of the erroneous diagnosis of feeblemindedness she received from the examining doctor upon her arrival at Ellis Island. Fink’s case, proceeding over the course of years until it finally reached the Supreme Court, exemplifies how governmental and immigration officials verbally and procedurally manipulated the public charge law to debar so-called “undesirable” immigrants, particularly those deemed “defective.” Though Kohler corrected the physician’s initial mistake, the doctor nonetheless continued supervising appellate boards and refused to retract his diagnosis, even in the face of overwhelming medical evidence. Accordingly, American Jewish lawyers, immigration advocates, congressional representatives, immigration officials, the Public Health Service, the Labor Department, and Fink’s teachers and school principal all converged in an extended and messy debate over whether she constituted a “defective” public charge and, therefore, whether she would be forced to leave the country. Literally unable to speak for herself because of her deafness and muteness—her actual condition—Fink’s future depended upon which side of this debate prevailed. In contesting public charge, Kohler emphasized Jews’ “accurate” understanding of fundamental American principles, in contrast to the “misunderstandings” of the officials who enforced the law. I examine how Kohler’s deft defense of Pauline succeeded, as he escalated the case to the highest court in the land, where he condemned officials’ abuse of the law as fundamentally un-American and antithetical to the principles of democracy.

Author

• Hannah Zaves-Greene, University of Pennsylvania