Chapter 4
There lies the peril at the portals of our land…. In careless strength, with generous hand, we have kept our gates wide open to all the world…. The gates which admit men to the United States and to citizenship in the great Republic should no longer be left unguarded.
—Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, 1896
COLONEL JOHN WEBER WAS BURSTING WITH RIGHTEOUS anger. The commissioner of Ellis Island had braved the cold January winds coming off New York Harbor to witness the procession of some seven hundred immigrants who had arrived on the steamship Massilia. What disturbed Weber was that many of those passing by him were clearly in bad health. These were no rosy-cheeked young Irish girls like Annie Moore. Instead, many of those now crossing the same gangplank to Ellis Island as Moore had four weeks earlier were sick and emaciated—not the hearty lot most Americans hoped for in their future neighbors.
Weber was not resentful toward these predominantly Russian Jewish immigrants. A few months earlier, he had witnessed the tragic plight of oppressed Jews throughout the Pale of Settlement and seeing a similar neglect and obvious lack of concern here at an American port fueled his anger. He was upset that steamship officials had forced these sickly passengers to cross the harbor to Ellis Island in an open barge in frigid weather. The normally even-tempered Weber was so outraged at the lack of care given to these newcomers that he fired off an angry letter to the steamship company, accusing them of “inhuman, if not criminal” behavior and promising to fight for legislation to punish steamships for any future incidents of “brutality and inhumanity.”
Among those worn refugees parading past Weber was the Mermer family: Fayer, her husband Isaac, and their five young children. The Mermers had managed to survive both the trip to Ellis Island and the inspection process and would soon begin their lives in America at a temporary lodging house at 5 Essex Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, provided for them by the United Hebrew Charities.
Twelve days after their arrival, the Mermers’ world was thrown into even greater turmoil. City health officials forcibly entered their Essex Street tenement, dragging Fayer, already sick with fever, out of the building kicking and screaming. Along with her son Pincus and daughter Clara, Fayer was forced into quarantine as city officials moved quickly and brusquely to deal with a highly contagious typhus fever outbreak. One week later, Fayer would be dead, though her children would recover. This outbreak was believed to have originated with the Massiliaimmigrants and was spreading throughout the lodging houses of lower Manhattan.
How the Mermer family and 265 other Russian Jews ended up in America in the first place—and how their case ignited a national panic—is a story of its time.
The Massilia had departed from the port of Marseilles on January 1, 1892, with 270 Russian Jewish passengers. Since the spring of 1891, many had been wandering the continent, landless and countryless, unwanted throughout Europe. Some of them were originally Turkish subjects who, years earlier, had migrated to Russia for better opportunities. With the increasing repression of the Jews in Russia, they found themselves expelled. After their expulsion, they landed in Constantinople with hopes of heading to Palestine. Instead, Turkish authorities refused them passage. For three months, they were trapped in the city’s Jewish ghetto. In December 1891, Turkish officials expelled them, and they headed for Smyrna. Their travails had exhausted what few funds they originally had, leaving them paupers. With the assistance of the Baron de Hirsch Fund, founded that year to assist east European Jews, they made their way from Smyrna to Marseilles and from there boarded the Massilia for New York.
Along with its Jewish passengers, the Massilia also carried fine French wine headed for sale in New York. Instead of leaving directly for America, the ship next made its way southeast toward Naples, where it loaded up on more cargo: macaroni, fruit, and 457 Italians traveling in steerage to America.
The ship would be at sea for over three weeks. By all accounts, it was a stormy trip in the brutal depths of winter. To keep out the cold air, the ship’s hatches were battened down for the entire journey and passengers were kept in close quarters, rarely able to go above deck to stretch their legs in the fresh air.
Considering the traumas of their nearly yearlong trek, it is no surprise that many of the Jewish migrants succumbed to illness. Twenty-three-year-old Julia Hoch, for example, suffered from uterine hemorrhaging on the trip, leading ship doctors to prescribe a treatment of “purgative clysters [enemas] two times a day for obstinate constipation, hot sedative vaginal injections. Internally, a solution of extract of ergot in cognac and peppermint water, strengthening nutrition.”
Despite the treatment, Hoch somehow managed to recover. Young Isaac Holinsky was not so lucky. Seven days out from Marseilles, the nine-year-old Russian boy became afflicted with chronic nephritis, a kidney condition. Doctors subjected him to “a milk diet, to constant applications for wet hot flaxseed poultices on the renal region and on the chest.” The treatment did not work, and four days later Isaac passed away, his body thrown overboard “with all due formality of a sea burial,” according to the ship’s log.
When the ship finally arrived in New York Harbor, Weber made sure that the sick immigrants were immediately taken to the Ellis Island hospital. Besides the sick passengers, officials put aside nearly seventy other Massilia immigrants for further inspection, fearing that their poverty would likely lead to their becoming public charges.
Despite these concerns, nearly all of the 270 Russian immigrants were eventually allowed to land, thanks to a sympathetic ruling by Colonel Weber and the intervention of another Jewish aid society. In the cases of those suspected of not meeting inspection standards, Weber accepted the posting of bonds by the United Hebrew Charities, which then placed the immigrants in boardinghouses on the Lower East Side. Although a few of Massilia’s Jewish passengers scattered across the country after leaving Ellis Island, most landed in this growing Jewish ghetto.
The story of the Massilia should have ended there. Colonel Weber’s charity would have gone unnoticed. The poor treatment of the sickly Jewish travelers by ship officials would have been largely ignored, except for a mild reprimand. On the following day, more ships would have entered New York Harbor, bringing with them more personal stories and more decisions for immigration officials. But the Massilia would not fade so quickly into the city’s past.
On the morning of February 11, 1892, Dr. Cyrus Edson, the chief sanitary inspector of the New York City Health Department, arrived at his office to find four postcards waiting for him. All four were sent by Dr. Leo Dann of the United Hebrew Charities, and dealt with four cases of typhus fever that Dann had discovered among Massilia passengers at a boardinghouse at 42 East 12th Street on the Lower East Side.
Often confused with typhoid fever, typhus had similar symptoms, including high fever, dizziness, muscle ache, nausea, and the outbreak of a reddish-purple rash. Typhus was a fast-spreading disease that had threatened the city in previous years. In 1851, almost a thousand New Yorkers had died from the disease, but since 1887, only five people had succumbed to typhus. City officials were anxious to prevent any new outbreak, so Edson and his staff made the trek that afternoon to the East 12th Street tenement where they found not four but fifteen cases of what Edson later called “that most dreaded of all contagious diseases.”
The thirty-five-year-old Edson, a direct descendant of Rhode Island founder Roger Williams, was also the politically savvy son of a former New York City mayor with strong ties to Tammany Hall. Now Edson was in charge of a potential public health crisis, in a city and a nation already uneasy about immigration.
It quickly became apparent that the disease could be traced to the Massilia. Edson and his team of inspectors, with the help of officials from the United Hebrew Charities, set out to track down every passenger who had arrived on the Massilia and test them for typhus. The task was made easier by the fact that nearly all the Massilia Jews were being housed in eight lodging houses on the Lower East Side.
By nightfall, Edson’s team had inspected residents at all eight tenements and diagnosed nearly seventy with typhus fever, including Fayer Mermer and two of her children. These men, women, and children were then escorted to the foot of East 16th Street at the East River where, in six separate trips, they were forcibly removed to the city’s quarantine hospital on North Brother Island, off the Bronx coast. Unwanted in Russia, Turkey, and France, these poor individuals were hastily and roughly herded into quarantine and must have wondered whether they were even welcome in America.
Within two days, every Russian Jewish immigrant in the city from the Massilia was located. While those with symptoms were sent to North Brother Island, Massilia passengers without symptoms, and anyone else who had lodged in the same tenements as those afflicted with the disease, were rounded up and placed in temporary quarantine at two boardinghouses at 5 Essex Street and 42 East 12th Street, with police stationed outside to prevent anyone from entering or leaving. Health officials fumigated the empty lodging houses by burning sulfur in iron receptacles suspended in water, with the steam aiding the distribution of the sulfur. The rooms were then aired out and scrubbed with a disinfectant of bichloride of mercury.
Meanwhile, the Massilia was at sea heading back to Marseilles. On the return trip, the ship’s fireman, baker, and several sailors came down with serious fevers and delirium, all symptoms of typhus. They survived the trip back to France, but it is unclear what happened to these crew members after they landed.
Edson’s next task was to track down the 457 Italians who had also entered the country on the Massilia. Unlike the Jewish immigrants, who nearly all stayed in Manhattan, as many as a hundred Italians were already scattered across the nation, some as far away as Chicago, Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Bryan, Texas.
Health officials in Trenton, New Jersey, were able to track down two of the Massilia’s Italian passengers and bring them by cattle car to Edson’s office in New York for inspection. Edson was unhappy with the Jersey officials, although it is not clear whether he was more concerned about the forcible taking of the Italians or the fact that potential typhus carriers were brought into the city.
However, only three of the Massilia Italians were eventually found to have the disease. The Italians were lucky to have been almost entirely segregated from Jewish passengers throughout the entire twenty-three-day journey, mingling only when they were transferred by ferry to Ellis Island.
Edson and his staff, with the help of the United Hebrew Charities, had acted quickly and aggressively. “I do not believe there is the slightest danger of an epidemic. We have the situation entirely in our hands,” the young doctor predicted. In addition to the vigorous actions of Edson’s office, Dr. William Jenkins, the health officer of the Port of New York, ordered that all ships with Russian Jewish passengers be held in quarantine, despite the fact that the typhus among the Massilia passengers originated in Turkey, not Russia. Even so, seven cases of typhus would be detected among incoming immigrants at quarantine in the coming months.
Despite his actions, Edson could not completely prevent the spread of disease to other city residents. Less than three weeks after the arrival of the Massilia, a carpenter named Max Busch took sick at his Bowery lodging house. He was diagnosed with typhus and taken to North Brother Island. Each day seemed to bring more stories about more typhus cases, with victims being discovered as far away as Providence, Rhode Island; Newburgh, New York; Baltimore, Maryland; and even St. Louis.
Meanwhile still more cases of typhus fever were being discovered among Massilia passengers in the two Lower East Side quarantine houses. On March 6, Edson took an even more drastic step and ordered everyone in those buildings to be removed to North Brother Island, whether they showed symptoms of the disease or not. During the height of the outbreak, New York officials transferred some thousand people to the quarantine hospital. Those without symptoms were quarantined for twenty-one days—the outer limit of the disease’s incubation period—before being released.
Then the crisis ebbed. By the end of March, the outbreak had largely been contained—with the exception of a few additional cases over the summer and a small, unrelated outbreak in December. In Manhattan, with a population of nearly 1.5 million people, 241 cases of typhus were ultimately diagnosed in 1892 and the final death toll was 45. To Edson, this was a great success. He proudly compared it to the last major outbreak in 1881, when 153 people died. Not only did fewer people die in 1892, but nearly all of the deaths occurred in the first month of the epidemic. In contrast, the 1881 epidemic continued to wreak havoc for over five months.
Newspapers lauded the bold leadership of Edson and his team, though modern critics have complained about the rough and unequal treatment of these Jewish immigrants. Although the handling of the Massilia’s Jewish passengers by city health officials was often brusque and insensitive, Edson and his staff never resorted to overt anti-Semitic finger-pointing. They worked closely with the United Hebrew Charities and focused their attention as closely as possible on the Massilia passengers and those who may have come into contact with them. Still, it was hard to divorce the fear of immigrants from genuine concerns about protecting the public from the ravages of disease.
The actions of Edson and his staff, although excessive by modern medical and social standards, managed to slow the spread of typhus. While many were quarantined under less than ideal conditions, not only did the outbreak slow down considerably by late March, but the death rate among Massilia passengers was relatively low. Although more than half of the Massilia’s Jewish passengers had come down with typhus, only 13 of the 138 victims died from the disease and the rest recovered after receiving medical treatment. In contrast to the less than 10 percent mortality rate among Massilia passengers, the death rate among city residents who came down with typhus was 33 percent (27 deaths) and the mortality rate for nurses, helpers, and policemen with the disease was 38 percent (5 deaths).
The sometimes callous treatment extended beyond Jewish immigrants. An article in the New York Times described how a group from the city’s health office, armed with “strong cigars,” set off for the Bowery. Their goal was to vaccinate the single men—many of whom were native-born—who resided in Bowery flophouses. Although it is not entirely clear what kind of vaccinations these officials were administering, the article was clear that health officials sometimes forcibly entered private rooms and injected these men against their will. Many put up a fight and some managed to escape their pitiful dorms and elude the health inspectors.
In theory, Ellis Island was designed to prevent immigrants from starting such an epidemic in the first place. The 1891 immigration law specified that immigrants with “loathsome or contagious diseases” be excluded. Yet the Massilia immigrants were able to pass through Ellis Island with relative ease, thanks to the kindness of Colonel Weber and the work of the United Hebrew Charities. The Massilia incident gave immigration restrictionists an opening to push ahead with their agenda. For them, the 1891 law and the Ellis Island facility were merely opening bids in the continuing battle for the greater restriction of immigrants.
Only two months after the arrival of Annie Moore and just three weeks after typhus was first discovered on the Lower East Side, Congress began its first investigation of Ellis Island.
New Hampshire senator William Eaton Chandler led the joint House and Senate investigation. As chairman of the newly formed Senate Immigration Committee, Chandler was a leading voice for immigration restriction in the early 1890s. An old-stock New England Yankee, Chandler had a family tree loaded with Puritans who had settled New England. He was ten generations removed from the William Chandler who helped settle Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1637, and his great-great-great-grandfather was one of the founders of Concord, New Hampshire. Despite his father’s illegitimacy—he was the offspring of a married Nathan Chandler and his servant—Senator Chandler was a pure New England Yankee.
Chandler may have been descended from Puritan stock, but unlike Henry Cabot Lodge, Francis Walker, and other anti-immigrant Yankees, the New Hampshire Republican was not descended from wealth. His Yankee inheritance was one of values and pride, not dollars and cents. William’s father had owned a stable and inn in New Hampshire, and although they were not poor, his sons were not raised as country gentlemen.
As easy as it may be to caricature immigration opponents like Chandler, the senator’s political career shows a more complicated man. Though skeptical of the new immigration streaming into the country, Chandler was in many ways a progressive Republican of the time, with all of the contradictions that term implies.
He supported Reconstruction and black voting rights. He was suspicious of big corporations and supported legislation to regulate them. The frugal Yankee was angered by the power, wealth, and arrogance of the new class of capitalists, especially the railroad companies. In 1892, he sought unsuccessfully to incorporate a plank in the Republican platform stating that big business was not the master of the state, but would be obedient to the law. His constant battles against the railroads eventually caused him to lose his Senate seat in 1900.
Back in the spring of 1892, Chandler’s mind was firmly fixed on the dangers of immigration. On the morning of March 5, with the fear of typhus still on the minds of New Yorkers, Chandler led his fifteen-man committee to Ellis Island. Its initial impression of the facility was less than enthusiastic. The congressmen found the buildings to be “very cheap-looking affairs, unsubstantial though comfortable. The wood put in them was evidently soft and poorly seasoned for in the partitions and elsewhere great seams had opened up, through some of which the hand could be placed.”
Chandler’s investigation, which would drag on for more than three months, was a two-pronged attack on Ellis Island, representing both political partisanship and the concerns of immigration restrictionists. At the time, the House and Senate were split between Republican and Democratic control. The year 1892 was a presidential election year and Democrats were eager to use the hearings to excoriate Treasury Department officials in the Republican administration of President Benjamin Harrison.
The Chandler hearings allowed Democrats to home in on what they argued was fraud and waste in the construction of Ellis Island. While Congress had approved $250,000 for the construction of Ellis Island, the project went way over budget and $362,000 more was needed to complete it. The committee concluded that “there has been great waste of public money in the construction of the improvements on Ellis Island” and that the buildings are “badly constructed, of inferior material, and poor workmanship.”
Republican members of the committee dissented from that opinion, noting that everyone had agreed that the old system at Castle Garden was bad and needed to be fixed. They reminded their colleagues of what had been accomplished: Ellis Island was doubled in size, the land was raised, a dock was constructed, and a navigable channel and deep-water basin for ferries were constructed. Republicans admitted, however, that the facilities were “of a somewhat rough and shed-like character.”
Chandler had not brought the committee all the way to New York just to examine accounting records and look at the quality of Georgia pine used in the buildings. He was concerned about the lax enforcement of the nation’s new immigration laws. He believed that the 1891 law was hardly more than a reenactment of the 1882 law and barely made a dent in the problem. The Massilia incident gave him the opportunity to prove that point.
The hearings highlighted what would become a recurring theme throughout Ellis Island’s history: the chasm between immigration law as written and immigration law as enforced. While denying “any willful negligence or dereliction of duty on the part of the commissioner of immigration at the Port of New York and his assistants in the execution of the laws relating to immigration,” Chandler argued, “there have been many undesirable immigrants permitted to land, who, under a reasonable and proper construction of the laws not in force, should have been refused admission.”
Weber came across as a soft touch during the hearings, a characterization he did not deny. “I appreciated the responsibilities and tried to act with the utmost fairness,” Weber wrote in his autobiography. “If I leaned at all it was towards the humanitarian side.” Faced daily with the mass of humanity streaming through Ellis Island, many of whom were strange and foreign even to the second-generation Weber, the commissioner worried that “the frequent scenes of misery would cause callousness on my part, but on the contrary I grew more sympathetic in my regard for these helpless and pathetic creatures with whom I came into daily contact.”
Weber’s tolerance bothered Chandler, who argued that too much power was being placed in the hands of the commissioner, rendering him “liable, not only to be swayed by too generous impulses from within, but also exposes him to influences by outside pressure, formidable and potent.” In 1891, of the 472,000 immigrants entering the Port of New York, only 1,003 were excluded, roughly 0.2 percent. Ellis Island’s new facilities, together with the 1891 Immigration Act, were supposed to lead to a stricter regulation of immigrants. Chandler was not convinced this was happening. “There is a feeling now that has gotten abroad that the Immigration Bureau is nothing more than a Census Bureau,” Chandler argued. Ellis Island was supposed to do more than just provide a head count of newcomers—it was supposed to act as a sieve to filter out undesirable immigrants.
To Chandler and his supporters, the typhus outbreak highlighted a serious flaw in the inspection process. Although typhus was covered under the category of loathsome or contagious disease, carriers of the disease could pass through inspection undetected, not showing symptoms until days after their admittance. Presymptomatic typhus was not something Ellis Island doctors could spot with the naked eye. It was therefore difficult to criticize Weber and his men for failing to find typhus among the Massilia passengers.
Should not some of the Massilia passengers have been excluded for other reasons? Chandler asked. The committee discovered that the initial inspection of the Massilia immigrants led to the temporary detention of seventy passengers on suspicion that they were likely to become public charges. Most were allowed to enter the country under the orders of Weber.
Chandler got Weber to admit that Ellis Island inspectors marked on the cards of immigrants “P.O.” (paid own passage) and “P.P.” (prepaid). Many of the Massilia passengers were marked “P.P.” since the Baron de Hirsch Fund had paid for their tickets. Here seemed proof of what restrictionists had long claimed: new immigrants differed from old immigrants in that they were assisted in coming to America and therefore were of lesser character and more likely to end up as wards of the state or private charity.
To Chandler, all “P.P.” immigrants should have been given a hearing to prove they were eligible to land. Weber’s explanation of his actions repeated his position on paupers as described in his report on European immigration published just weeks earlier. These Jewish immigrants “were possessed of sufficient means on starting [their journey] but it was necessarily expended for sustenance in their wanderings,” Weber told the committee. “Their trials naturally made them an easy prey to disease.” For Weber, these individuals were paupers by circumstance and not by character.
The intervention of the United Hebrew Charities helped sway Weber’s decision. The charity signed guarantees or bonds for those immigrants thought to be paupers, promising that they would not become public charges. Weber admitted he had no idea whether the guarantees could be legally enforced. For Chandler, this was another example of sentiment trumping the “correct practice under the law.”
In this, Chandler was surely correct. There was no feature for the bonding of suspect immigrants under immigration law. This brought up the issue of possible reverse discrimination. Why, one congressman wanted to know, were only Jewish immigrants allowed in with guarantees or bonds? Weber, sensitized and even traumatized by his trip to the Jewish Pale of Settlement during the previous summer, answered that the plight of Jews was different. “The assisted immigrant, however, who comes from Russia comes here assisted because of extraordinary circumstances that have reduced him practically to a state of destitution,” Weber explained.
Chandler’s committee concluded it was impossible to tell how many of the assisted Jewish immigrants on the Massilia had come down with typhus. However, the committee believed “that if its views of the present law had been enforced typhus fever would not have been introduced into the city of New York.”
It is ironic that Jewish charitable agencies came in for such criticism for their role in bonding Jewish immigrants. The spread of typhus would certainly have been much worse without them. Agents of the United Hebrew Charities immediately alerted Edson’s office about the typhus outbreak, and most immigrants were kept together in boardinghouses run by the charity, making it easier to contain the disease. In fact, Edson praised both the Baron de Hirsch Fund and the United Hebrew Charities for their assistance.
But this did little to ease the concerns of Chandler and his allies. They found more fuel for their crusade when the behavior of Weber’s assistant, James O’Beirne, became public. Whenever Weber was away from Ellis Island, O’Beirne assumed the duties of acting commissioner. In one instance, O’Beirne came up with a requirement that all immigrants have $10 in their possession or they would be excluded as paupers. Using this formulation, he detained about three hundred immigrants, but Weber set them free upon his return.
Chandler believed this highlighted the arbitrary nature of the exclusion process. “What we want to get at is how much better or worse the immigrant fares when he is in Col. O’Beirne’s hands than when he is in yours,” Chandler told Weber. For Chandler, this incident, coupled with the Massilia incident and the activities of the Jewish charities, proved that whether or not an immigrant would be excluded “depends upon no statutory provisions, and is decided very much according to the personal feeling or judgment of the person who makes the decision.”
Throughout much of his testimony, Weber was on the defensive. Had he chosen to be more combative, he could have countered that Congress provided no way to determine who was likely to become a public charge. It fell to immigration officials to decide such questions. The modern bureaucratic government had been created almost from scratch. Congress made the laws creating this administrative state, but it was up to the political appointees and bureaucrats of the separate departments to work out detailed instructions and interpretations of the law to operate their agencies. Congress could write new laws or express displeasure through public hearings, but the day-to-day operation of federal agencies was out of its hands.
Given the fact that immigration officials had such wide latitude, Chandler and his allies homed in on one issue they thought showed the inconstancies of immigration policy at Ellis Island. If an immigrant chose to appeal his case, it took the decision of four people—inspector, commissioner, superintendent of immigration in Washington, and secretary of the Treasury—to exclude him. However, it took the decision of only one individual—usually an inspector at Ellis Island—to allow an immigrant to land.
Another member of the committee, Rep. Herman Stump, who would later be put in charge of the Immigration Service in Washington, continued this line of argument. He believed that immigrants had all the protections of appeal, yet no one spoke for the masses of Americans who wanted tighter controls over immigration. “Only one overcrowded and overworked inspector guards the people against the admission of an illegal immigrant,” Stump argued. “Why not then give the people, as it were, some rights on their side to say any person should not be landed while the officer now has the sole say as to whether it should be done or not?”
To that end, Chandler and Stump proposed a board of special inquiry made up of three or four inspectors who would sit in judgment of all immigrants not landed beyond a reasonable doubt. A majority vote would be needed to land any questionable immigrant. As to why this would lead to greater restrictions, Chandler noted that three men would have a harder heart than just one.
Then there was the question of what caused the outbreak of typhus. The general public, and even many doctors, were mystified by its origins. Was it something in the air? Was it caused by a poor diet? Germ theory was still not widely understood, and it was not until the early decades of the twentieth century that doctors discovered that typhus was transmitted by the common body louse. The overcrowded conditions in Constantinople’s Jewish ghetto most likely led to the outbreak of typhus among Massilia’s passengers.
Typhus, the New York Times claimed, was “caused by filth, overcrowding, destitution, and neglect of the fundamental laws of sanitation. The epidemics of this fever in New York have been imported…from Europe in the crowded steerage quarters of steamships.” The immigrants were at fault because their “habits and condition invite deadly infectious diseases.” Therefore, the editorial concluded, the “dreaded disease must bring forcibly to the attention of all intelligent citizens the evils of unrestricted immigration…. The doors should be shut against them [diseased immigrants].”
Members of Chandler’s committee continually linked the disease to immigrants and filth. Congressman Stump asked Dr. Edson: “Would a filthy person cause typhus fever—a dirty person or dirty surroundings?” Edson, while admitting that it would take “a large number of filthy persons,” pointed to environmental factors as a leading cause. Stump asked Edson flat out whether “a filthy person in open air could never develop typhus.” Edson replied “Never.”
William Jenkins, the health officer at the Port of New York, echoed Stump’s concerns. He admitted that while he could not pinpoint exactly how the disease developed, he believed that the “Hebrew passengers were a poorly nourished lot of people and from subsequent affidavits I saw very unclean.” Jenkins also blamed kosher food preparation for making the problem worse.
The linkage of Jewish immigrants and filth was common at that time. In an 1888 congressional hearing, the director of the Jewish Immigration Protective Society of New York, was asked about the personal habits of Jews: Were they “nice, clean, tidy people or the reverse?” A doctor stationed in 1892 at Swinburne Island, off Staten Island, which served as a quarantine island for incoming ships, commented on the condition of immigrants he saw there: “They were mostly Russian Polish Jews and filthy beyond description, frequently covered with vermin. They seemed more like animals than human beings, and appeared to possess no desire for personal cleanliness.”
Cyrus Edson, on the other hand, did not buy into these stereotypes. “There is no cause for alarm, much less panic, but there is abundant cause for careful, thorough, and scientific supervision and watchfulness,” he reassured readers of the North American Review. While unrestricted immigration was a danger, Edson saw no need to shut off immigration of Russian Jews. Yet he was not completely sanguine about the situation, warning that America “should class all Russians and Russian goods as suspects and should treat them accordingly.”
It was this kind of ambivalence that marked the final report of Senator Chandler’s committee. It expressed disappointment not only that so much money had been spent at Ellis Island, but that the “expense certainly justified the expectation that the work of inspection done there should be more thoroughly and effectually conducted than that done at the other ports of entry.” Less than a year into Ellis Island’s career as an immigrant depot, Congress had declared it a disappointing failure.
Though the committee seemed driven by restrictionist concerns, the report did not recommend ending immigration completely or even passing stricter immigration laws. What it did call for was tighter administrative controls that would better sift the incoming immigrants, hopefully raising the exclusion rate higher than 0.2 percent.
Chandler tried to position himself in the ideological middle of the immigration debate. On one side, he placed Henry George, radical author and proponent of the Single Tax, who believed in no “restriction whatever upon the immigration of people from Europe of the Caucasian race, who are not diseased and who are not chronic paupers or criminals.” On the other side, Chandler placed an anonymous citizen from New Jersey who thought immigration “should be stopped entirely and immediately; that it is dangerous to admit more till those that are here are fully Americanized, which it will take years to accomplish.”
In between those extremes, Chandler rejected expanding the categories of excluded classes, but argued for tighter enforcement of current laws. He believed that no member of his committee, including himself, thought that “the time has arrived for the United States to exclude from coming to this country to become citizens, any individuals or families who would make good and valuable members of Society.”
Both extremes of the debate, a political scientist noted in 1892, were “regarded by the majority of thinkers as unsatisfactory; and it is believed that the action called for is neither to bar out all nor to admit all, but rather to take a middle course and restrict immigration by some discriminating measure.” Harper’s Weekly took a similar tack, arguing that although “many of the immigrants who have come to us of late years are not of a desirable kind…we believe also that the evils complained of and the dangers apprehended as springing from the influx of such undesirable immigration are very much exaggerated.” Americans would spend the next thirty years trying to find that middle point between complete restriction and a completely open door.
For Chandler, that middle way called for putting more responsibility on steamship companies to exclude unfit immigrants before sailing for America. His committee called for the creation of boards of special inquiry staffed by four inspectors to evaluate all questionable immigrant cases. The last major recommendation was the abolishment of the bonding system for immigrants thought liable to become public charges.
Not surprisingly, the American Hebrew attacked Chandler’s proposal. If Chandler argued that too much power was in the hands of Ellis Island officials, the paper argued that doing away with bonding “would certainly place in the hands of prejudiced commissioners the power to exclude absolutely all immigrants.” The editorial worried that “the Commissioner of Immigration would thus be invested with a degree of absolute and autocratic power, not possessed by any other official and never contemplated by the constitution to be in the possession of any administrative authority without either legal direction or judicial review.” Although the American Hebrew editors exaggerated the extent of Chandler’s proposal, they correctly noted that the federal bureaucracy was accruing more and more power, with possibly unfortunate results.
Despite the congressional investigation and the publicity that ensued, for the time being the recommendations of the Chandler committee went nowhere. Another crisis loomed later in 1892, however, that threatened to bring the restrictionist agenda back on the front burner.
Traveling from Turkey to Russia to Germany to France to England, a worldwide cholera outbreak was threatening to land on American shores. Some wanted President Harrison to order a temporary halt to immigration in hopes of stopping cholera from entering the country. But it was Congress, not the president, that held such power.
What was within Harrison’s authority was to declare a strict quarantine of twenty days for all ships coming from Europe, although some complained that the president did not even possess this limited power. Still, Harrison ordered the quarantine on September 1 and local authorities carried out the plan.
If typhus fever scared New Yorkers, the possible scourge of cholera provoked a near panic across the country, especially in densely packed urban areas. A hideous disease that kills its victims by massive dehydration from diarrhea, cholera had devastated New York in the past. During the city’s worst outbreak, over 5,000 people perished in 1849. In the last major outbreak, over 1,100 people died in 1866.
Now, in the fall of 1892, cholera victims were on steamships in the Atlantic heading for New York. Most of these ships were immediately put under quarantine. Within days, the quarantine hospitals at Swinburne and Hoffman Islands were filled to capacity with cholera victims and suspected victims. Other passengers would remain on their ships for the duration of the quarantine.
At the same time, cholera victims began appearing in the city. On September 6, Charles McAvoy, who had arrived from Ireland eight years earlier, died of the disease. By the end of the month, there were nine additional cases in the city, with seven more deaths. All the victims were immigrants, with the exception of the infant daughter of an immigrant couple. Yet strangely all, with one exception, had been in the country for over two years. None could be linked to recently arrived immigrants.
Still, the brunt of the disease was borne by immigrants coming over in steamships and trapped in quarantine. Forty-four individuals, many of them Russian Jews, died of cholera in New York’s quarantine stations, in addition to the seventy-six who had died of the disease at sea. As the cholera scare in Europe abated, it appeared that the quarantine had spared the city the worst of the outbreak. Isolating European immigrants had seemingly served its purpose, but with a price. Those destined for quarantine received poor medical treatment in overcrowded conditions. Many of those quarantined were Jews who were prevented from following kosher food regulations. Worse still, contrary to Jewish burial practices, many of the Jewish victims were cremated.
The quarantine policy lasted until February 1893. As a result, immigration from Europe fell off dramatically in late 1892 and early 1893. Steamship companies could not afford to keep their ships tied up in quarantine for twenty days without a serious dent in profits. The federal government also felt the financial pinch since the Immigration Service operated through a 50-cent head tax on every immigrant, paid by the steamship company. With so few immigrants, the coffers dried up. In the face of cost-cutting measures, Colonel Weber offered to resign. Some worried about the effects of the quarantine on the upcoming World Exposition in Chicago in 1893, leading the Times to call the quarantine an “opera bouffe order…a delayed April-fool proceeding.”
The cholera scare provided Chandler with an opportunity to put forth a more restrictive immigration bill, something that he chose not to do after the typhus scare earlier in 1892. He introduced a bill in the Senate in January 1893 that would suspend all immigration for one year, which would give Congress more time to draft a more permanent law restricting immigration.
Weber called Chandler’s bill “a senseless panic among our people.” The Nation called it “a medieval admission of inability to take scientific precautions against cholera.” Others noted that even with a moratorium on immigration, disease could still be transmitted by arriving cabin passengers such as tourists and businessmen, as well as imported cargo arriving in the port.
Despite the fears brought about by the outbreaks of two deadly and contagious diseases linked to immigrants, the effect on national policy was quite the opposite of what might have been expected. Few members of Congress were ready to join Chandler in calling for even a temporary suspension of immigration. Public opinion, despite worries over immigration, was not willing to jettison America’s traditional vision of immigration. Chandler’s bill went nowhere.
Instead, Congress passed the National Quarantine Act in early 1893, which strengthened the federal government’s role in immigration and created new rules governing public health. As a sop to immigration restrictionists, the law formally gave the president the power to suspend immigration in case of an epidemic, a power never used by Harrison or any subsequent president.
The nation did get an immigration bill in 1893. There was no moratorium on immigration, and attempts to expand exclusionary categories to include anarchists and those not able to read and write in their native language failed to survive the bill’s final draft. The pattern of near-absolute exclusion by race as set in the Chinese Exclusion Act would not be followed for white European immigrants. “Exclusion all along the lines is not to be thought of excepting under the pressure of some extraordinary urgency,” one journalist wrote. “It were better for the government to recede from its Chinese policy instead of venturing to extend it.”
What did pass was a series of administrative reforms that tightened the regulation of existing laws to weed out undesirables, as Chandler had proposed in his final report after his 1892 hearings. The system of bonding was allowed to continue, but with greater scrutiny. Bonds could now only be granted under the authority of the superintendent of immigration in Washington.
The new law created boards of special inquiry at each inspection station to hear the cases of all immigrants not clearly entitled to land. Immigrants who appeared before these boards would need to gain a majority vote from the board before being allowed to land. In addition, any dissenting board member had the right to appeal the admissions decision to the commissioner.
The bill called for a more detailed ship’s manifest to be provided by the steamship companies to immigration officials at the port of entry. When Annie Moore landed in January 1892, her manifest listed passenger names and the answers to eight basic questions. Now, besides having to answer the basics—name, age, sex, and occupation—an immigrant would have to answer a total of nineteen questions. Among them were:
· By whom was passage paid?”
· Ever in prison or almshouse or supported by charity?”
· Whether a polygamist”
· Whether under contract, express or implied to labor in the United States”
Steamship officials would also have to make note of the mental and physical condition of immigrants on the manifest and list any deficiencies.
The new manifests would allow steamship companies to better sift immigrants. The detailed questions allowed for a more thorough cross-examination of immigrants. When immigrants arrived at Ellis Island, inspectors would ask them the same questions as appeared on the ship’s manifest, whose answers would be in front of the inspector. If the answers did not align with the information on the ship’s manifest or if the inspector felt there was something wrong with the answers, the immigrant would then be sent to a board of special inquiry hearing. In less than ten months of operation under the new law, the boards heard the cases of 7,367 immigrants, of whom 1,653 were excluded.
These boards of special inquiry were not courts, however. They were administrative hearings within the executive branch, and therefore not bound by the traditional rules of the courtroom. Immigrants who appeared before these boards were not accorded the guarantees of the Bill of Rights. Hearings were not open to the public and immigrants were not allowed to have counsel present. While appeal was an option, immigrants were not eligible for bail as their cases made their way to Washington. Board hearings could rely on informal evidence, such as letters, telegrams, telephone conversations, newspaper clippings, and hearsay. Although boards did attempt to use affidavits and witnesses sworn under oath, critics would soon refer to these as “star chamber” proceedings.
A process of extended grilling of immigrants, coupled with the boards of special inquiry, meant that Ellis Island officials now had more tools with which to exclude immigrants. American officials had now succeeded in erecting an obstacle course for potential immigrants that stretched from the ports of Europe to New York Harbor.
Health concerns helped drive the fear of immigrants. Consequently, a great deal of work at Ellis Island fell to the medical staff of the Marine-Hospital Service. Although it was also part of the Treasury Department, the medical staff at Ellis Island and other inspection stations was not part of the Immigration Service. While a civil service posting at Ellis Island was not exactly a prized position and did not necessarily attract the best doctors in the country, the Marine-Hospital Service—renamed the Public Health Service in 1912—strove toward professionalism. The service was organized along military lines and its doctors wore military-style uniforms, which frightened many immigrants who were raised to fear the military in their homelands. To add to the culture clash at Ellis Island, many of the doctors were Southern-born. The medical staff at Ellis Island was always small, beginning with six in 1892 and increasing to twenty-five by 1915.
Though understaffed, doctors at Ellis Island were faced with over 170 different medical ailments. Many were relatively minor, from cuts to burns to sprained ankles to poison ivy to mysterious itches. Some were simply cosmetic, such as those detained because of acne or warts. Measles, chicken pox, and diphtheria were found among children. The extent of the maladies shows the thoroughness, as well as the intrusiveness, of the medical inspection. Gonorrhea and syphilis, as well as abscesses on the breast, ulcer of the vulva, and ovarian tumors were all spotted by Ellis Island doctors. In 1899, one poor sap was even ordered deported for masturbation. Doctors also marked for further examination and treatment those immigrants they deemed “idiots” or those believed to be insane or merely depressed.
It is no surprise that medical officials also saw their share of death. Between 1893 and 1899, 244 unfortunate souls died at Ellis Island and other medical facilities for immigrants in New York. At the same time, many of the young women who came to New York Harbor for a chance of life in America arrived pregnant. In 1897, seven babies were born at Ellis Island.
Doctors at Ellis Island had a dual role. They were supposed to treat illnesses and disease as best as they could; but they were also supposed to certify immigrants whose medical condition could be considered loathsome or contagious, resulting in their being excluded from entry. Between 1893 and 1899, a relatively slow period of immigration, the immigration service at the Port of New York treated almost 9,000 individuals at the rather primitive and cramped medical facilities there. During those years, medical officials certified over 1,200 immigrants for deportation, although immigration officials made the final determination of exclusion. In fact, doctors would not allow themselves to sit on boards of special inquiry.
The conditions that most concerned officials were favus, a mildly contagious fungal scalp condition, and what doctors classified at first as conjunctivitis and later as trachoma, a contagious disease of the eye. In 1902, Commissioner-General of Immigration Terence V. Powderly noted that “until the tide of immigration swelled up, and began to flow in on us from the countries of southern Europe and the Orient, these diseases were not very prevalent” in the United States. Powderly believed that authorities needed to exclude immigrants with these diseases because, if in the “future we should have occasion to trace the cause why our people are hairless and sightless through Favus and Trachoma, we should have ourselves to blame.” A majority of those ordered deported because of disease suffered from those two ailments.
As time passed, inspection methods would improve and immigration officials would be given more tools with which to inspect, and possibly exclude, immigrants. Public health officials had a duty to cure and heal, but they were also part of the ever-expanding obstacle course through which immigrants who arrived at America’s gate had to pass.
NEW LAWS OR NOT, Senator Chandler would no longer have to worry about Colonel John Weber. Although Chandler may have been saddened that his fellow Republican, President Benjamin Harrison, lost to Democrat Grover Cleveland in the 1892 election, it also meant that Weber would soon lose his job at Ellis Island. Weber would be replaced by Joseph Senner, an editor of the German-language newspaper New Yorker Staats-Zeitung.
The good news was that by mid-1893, the typhus epidemic had been contained and the cholera scare had passed. The bad news was that the national economy had now plunged into a nasty depression, the worst economic downturn until the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The epidemic scares of 1892 had cut in half the numbers of immigrants arriving in New York. Now the economic depression cut that low number even further, and the downward trend continued into the mid-1890s. As many potential immigrants stayed in Europe, growing numbers of foreigners already in the United States decided to pack up and return to their homelands. Newspapers ran headlines such as “More Going Back Than Coming Over” and “Many Leaving the Country.” Senner credited this trend to stricter enforcement of immigration laws, not bad economic times. He approvingly pronounced that “heavy immigration has been made practically an impossibility for the future”—a declaration that would have amused Senner’s successors at Ellis Island.
Although over a million fewer immigrants came to the United States in the 1890s than in the previous decade, the decline masked a deeper and more enduring trend. During the 1880s, almost 3.8 million immigrants from northern and western Europe entered the United States, compared to 956,000 from southern and eastern Europe. By the 1890s, despite the overall decrease in immigration, southern and east European immigrants outnumbered northern and west Europeans by 1.9 million to 1.6 million. By the first decade of the twentieth century, there were three eastern and southern European immigrants for every one from northern and western Europe.
The top three countries of origin for immigrants during the 1880s were Germany, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. By the 1900s, it was Italy, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. In 1884, 13 percent of immigrants came from Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Russia-Poland. In 1891, the figure was 39 percent, and in 1898, 60 percent of all immigrants to America hailed from those regions.
These changes were not lost on most Americans. In 1892, before the depression struck, the New York Times noted that “an increasing proportion of the total volume is of immigration evidently undesirable. Americans are pretty well agreed that the immigration from Italy is very largely, and from Russia and its dependencies almost altogether, of a kind which we are better without.” Just a few months later, the paper repeated its claims about these new immigrants:
The New Yorker who goes to the Barge Office these days gets a good idea of the class of people now seeking homes in the United States. It needs only a glance to assure him that it is a most undesirable class. Ignorance and dirt are the chief characteristics of the average immigrant of to-day…it is plain that the United States would be better off if ignorant Russian Jews and Hungarians were denied a refuge here.
Henry Cabot Lodge captured these feelings when he bemoaned the fact that “the immigration of those races which had thus far built up the United States, and which are related to each other either by blood or language or both, was declining, while the immigration of races totally alien to them was increasing.”
Such feelings extended to top officials at Ellis Island. Even though Colonel Weber was sympathetic to new immigrants, his former assistant was not. After he left his post, General James O’Beirne made a public plea for all Americans to make a pilgrimage to Ellis Island. Once there, the average American would gain “a full appreciation of the present and near impending dangers which seem to me to threaten the future stability of the Republic arising from immigration.”
While the Massilia incident had raised fears about Russian Jews, concerns were soon raised about another new immigrant group also on board that same ship. If filth and disease were the negative traits associated with Jewish immigrants, criminality and violence were the supposed dysfunctional traits of Italian immigrants.
In May 1893, the Times discussed the exclusion of nine Italian immigrants at Ellis Island who admitted to having been in jail in Italy for such minor crimes as quarreling with a relative, throwing stones at a woman, and carrying a concealed weapon. The article described Italy as “the land of the vendetta, the mafia, and the bandit” and southern Italians as “bravos and cutthroats” who seek “to carry on their feuds and bloody quarrels in the United States.”
If the crimes seemed minor, Ellis Island clerk Arthur Erdofy hoped to disabuse his readers of such thoughts. “Fighting…means something more among people of this class than what would be understood by the word here,” explained Erdofy. “It means a pistol or knife being brought into play. All this ‘beating a woman without injuring her’ and ‘hitting a man with a stick without hurting him’…is bosh, pure bosh…. We read between the lines and substitute knifing or shooting for quarreling.”
As deportations increased, Italians struck back at authorities, inflaming public opinion and reinforcing negative stereotypes. Thomas Flynn, an official at Ellis Island and the son of a Democratic city alderman, was attacked in the doorway of his lower Manhattan home one night. He was struck in the head by a large rock, allegedly from the hand of an Italian immigrant. It is unclear how the newspaper knew the attackers were “revengeful Italians.” Perhaps it was because, as the Times dutifully reported, the men had left behind a bag of beans and macaroni. Some time earlier, another official was attacked in Battery Park by a group of Italians who threw a stone at him, missing his head but knocking the cigar he had been smoking out of his mouth.
The anger of Italians soon spilled over at Ellis Island. More focus on undesirable Italian immigrants meant more detainees awaiting deportation and increased congestion. One night in April 1896, eight hundred immigrants were detained. That spring, the exclusion rate among immigrants had been 8 to 10 percent, much higher than usual. Four hundred Italians had been sent back in one week. These pressures were too much for both Ellis Island and the Italian immigrants, who one afternoon staged a mini-riot while cooped up in an outside temporary detention pen. A New York Tribune reporter described the detainees as a “forlorn-looking lot…restless, depressed, degraded and penniless.”
The fear of Italian immigrants was not just confined to New York or Ellis Island. The Boston Globe asked seven prominent individuals: “Are Italians a Menace? Are They Desirable or Dangerous Additions to our Population?” The shortest response came from a representative of the Italian consulate, who complained: “I cannot answer a question of the kind that you put because I cannot accept the implication which it involves that my countrymen compare unfavorably with any other class or race.” Guiseppe De Marco, editor of Boston’s Italian-language newspaper, had a similar reaction: “It is quite a hard thing for an Italian who loves his country to discuss such a question.”
Despite the impolite tone of the question, most of the responses were positive, if somewhat condescending. Unitarian minister Christopher Eliot compared Italian immigrants to “untrained children,” yet argued that Americans “have less to fear than most people think,” as long as native-born Americans helped assimilate, train, and “protect them from their own ignorance and inexperience.”
The head of Boston’s Central Labor Union, John F. O’Sullivan, argued against any “further attempt at restriction of immigration of any kind, unless it be the restriction of laborers under contract, criminals (other than political) and paupers or those likely to become public charges.” Naturally enough, O’Sullivan thought that all Italians needed was to learn to support labor unions.
Yet two responders were decidedly less sympathetic. Prescott Hall and G. Loring Briggs used the forum to push for a literacy bill for all immigrants. Both men were affiliated with a new organization based in Boston dedicated to stemming the tide of immigration. Each took pains to deny any prejudice toward Italians specifically. Briggs wrote that “anyone who states that Italian immigration is necessarily a menace to this country simply because it is Italian is governed by narrow-minded prejudice, which is certainly unbecoming to an American.” However, both Briggs and Hall noted that a majority of Italian immigrants were illiterate and therefore unfit for American citizenship.
Arguments over the suitability of Jewish and Italian immigrants continued throughout the 1890s. The party affiliations of Ellis Island’s workforce may have changed, but the debate over immigration continued, as would the eternal, yet elusive, desire for that proper sieve that would neatly sort out immigrants—good from bad, desirable from undesirable, wheat from chaff.
In this debate, Bostonians like Prescott Hall would continue to lobby for stricter regulation of immigrants. For them, immigration was personal.