Beatrice, Response and Primary Source

Response: Historians Who Love Too Much  

              Jill Lepore's Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography provided an avenue for reflection on my own paper, which could be deemed a microhistory according to Lepore. My research centers around Frank Woodhull, a figure whose voice I can only reconstruct through quotes from sensationalized news articles—a supremely unreliable and fickle source. As Lepore writes, microhistorians, “typically denied any such coziness with actual, living informants and motivated by many of the concerns of social history (and its attempt to tell the stories of the ‘inarticulate’), betray those who have left abundant records...to resurrect those who did not” (138). In a sense, my thesis challenges the record-keepers—particularly immigration officials and policy makers—and tells the stories of those turned away from U.S. borders based on gender, sexuality, and/or race.

                Lepore goes on to write that microhistory is concerned with “solving small mysteries about a person’s life as a means to exploring the culture” (141). I did, in fact, start with a small mystery—why was Frank Woodhull admitted into the United States, when Veles and so many others were not? These cases of gender passing, which may seem like bizarre exceptions, shed light on systematic exclusion and how it has been employed to shape American demography and culture. While very few female-bodied, passing people were ever detected and interrogated at Ellis Island, their experience may serve “as an allegory for the culture as a whole” (141)—a culture that equated morality with whiteness and therefore admitted Woodhull, a white Canadian, in spite of his blatant transgression of conventional gender roles.

                Lepore’s last proposition was the one I found the least convincing. It was also (not inconsequentially) the one that applied the least to my own research: “A microhistorian's alter ego may be a figure who investigates or judges the subject” (141). While in some cases this may be true, the record-keeping, institutional forces that the microhistorian “betrays” are often synonymous with the investigating figure. In Woodhull’s case, the Board of Special Inquiry, the reporters, and immigration commissioners are fundamentally different in their investigative approach to understanding unconventional gender presentation. Unlike most modern historians, they regarded Woodhull, Veles, and others as women, making no attempt to see their decision to pass as anything but economic or pathological.

Primary Source

Corsi, Edward. In the Shadow of Liberty. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1935.

Edward Corsi, the Commissioner of Immigration at Ellis Island from 1931-1934, wrote this memoir reflecting on his experiences as both an immigrant and an immigration official. In the chapter “A Picture of 1907,” Corsi relates an interview with interpreter Frank Martocci about Ellis Island in the early 1900s. Here Martocci tells the story of Alejandra Veles. Like Woodhull, Veles was discovered to be passing as a man. Unlike Woodhull, however, Veles was deported, providing a fascinating counterpoint to Woodhull’s story. The passage about Veles is as follows:

 “Occasionally cases of this kind [single women barred from entering the country] did not have the element of tragedy, but were queer and hard to handle. There was, for instance, second-class passenger from Vera Cruz booked under the name of Alejandra Veles. Boyish in appearance, with black hair and an attractive face, she proved to be, upon examination, despite her earlier insistence to the contrary, a young woman. Vehemently she insisted that her identity had not been questioned before. When Dr. Senner asked her why she wore men’s clothes, she answered that she would rather kill herself than wear women’s clothes. Perhaps some psychoanalyst can explain it, but she said she had always wanted to be a man and it was no fault of hers that she had not been born one!

“Finally she broke down and pleaded with us not to expose her. Then, being threatened with arrest for her defiance of rules, she sent for a very prominent lawyer of the city, who, it turned out, had received a fund for her support. He identified her immediately, and after having exacted a pledged that the girl’s identity would not be revealed, he told her amazing story.

‘Alejandra Veles’ was the daughter of a cultured Englishman who had married a wealthy Spanish woman, and then had been sent to represent his government in the Orient. The girl had been born in the Far East and, when a little child, for some reason or other unhappy at being a girl, she had insisted on dressing as a boy. Although her parents did all they could to discipline her, she would tear her dresses to shreds. She defied all control and finally was allowed to grow up as a boy.

“At the age of fifteen she deserted her parents and started drifting. She came to this country and for two years worked as a hostler in a New York stable, after which she went to the West Indies and bossed men around, nobody ever suspecting she was a girl. Her father, frantic and at his wit’s end, had provided this lawyer with a liberal sum for the girl’s support. Was there anything else she wanted, she was asked. ‘Yes—give me two plugs of tobacco and a pipe.’

“These were given to her, and she was allowed to leave the Barge Office on her promise to leave the country at once. This she did, sailing for England to visit her parents” (81-82).