American Passage Page 10

  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.