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  There was an additional reason for the trip. Before Weber set sail for Europe, President Harrison summoned him to a seaside cottage in Cape May, New Jersey, where the president was vacationing. Harrison wanted Weber to investigate the condition of Russian Jews. Upon arriving in London, where he would meet the other four members of the commission, Weber would choose one of the four to accompany him to Russia. Weber had to leave for Europe only three days after he received his instructions. The other commissioners, whom Weber had never met, were already waiting in London.

  Once in London, Weber chose Dr. Walter Kempster as his traveling companion, leaving the other three members of the commission free to conduct their own investigations. Kempster was born in London and arrived in upstate New York as a young boy. Like Weber, he was a former Civil War officer, having served at Gettysburg. After the war, Kempster became one of the nation’s leading alienists, making the study of the human brain his specialty. He worked at a number of mental hospitals in New York before moving to Wisconsin. In 1881, Kempster served as one of the witnesses for the prosecution in the trial of Charles Guiteau, the assassin of President James A. Garfield.

  Beginning in late July 1891, Weber and Kempster city-hopped from Liverpool to Paris, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Minsk, Wilna, Bialystok, Grodno, Warsaw, Cracow, Budapest, and Vienna. They ended their trip in early October in Bremen, Germany. Along the way, Weber and Kempster met with consular officials, visited local neighborhoods, and spoke with officials from steamship companies. With all of his official duties, Weber had little time for sightseeing, complaining that all he managed was one hour at the Tower of London.

  Weber and Kempster released their report in January 1892 and concluded that individuals left Europe largely because of “superior conditions of living in the United States . . . and the general belief that the United States present [sic] better opportunities for rising to a higher level than are furnished at home.” Europeans mostly received these ideas not from the agents of steamship companies looking to drum up business, but from “the relatives or friends who have preceded and are established in the United States, and who, through letters and newspapers sent from this country, furnish such information.”

  Many argued that new immigrants were assisted or involuntary immigrants brought here on contract by American businesses or enticed by agents of steamship companies. By their estimates, Weber and Kempster concluded that some 60 percent of immigrants did come to America with prepaid tickets. However, these were tickets largely bought by friends and relatives in America and sent to the potential immigrant in Europe. Weber and Kempster were describing chain migration, the process by which recent immigrants, through letters, newspaper clippings, and money, entice family and friends to join them in the New World.

  Weber noted that the country needed these immigrants because Americans traditionally shun hard manual work. “When the foreigner came in, the native engineered the jobs, the former did the shoveling,” he argued. “The foreigner plows and sows, the native reaps; the one builds railroads, the other runs them and waters the stock; one digs canals, the other manages the boats; one burrows in the mines, the other sells the product.” Relying on the connection between immigration and free labor for the health of the economy, Weber asked: “Stop the stream, and where will the new material come from which with a little training and experience develops into useful domestic help?”

  Weber concluded that “the evils of immigration are purely imaginary in some features, greatly exaggerated in others, and susceptible of nearly complete remedy by the amendment of existing laws.” He saw only the need for “rigid inspection at our ports,” to enforce the 1891 law. Of course, just what constituted rigid inspection would become a matter for debate for every immigration official at Ellis Island throughout its history.

  Following his instructions from Harrison, Weber paid special attention to the plight of Jews. The situation in Russia was beginning to have repercussions for the United States. Mary Antin had already emigrated and wrote a memoir of her family’s journey from Russia to America. During those bleak times, she wrote, “America was in everybody’s mouth. Businessmen talked of it over their accounts . . . people who had relatives in the famous land went around reading their letters for the enlightenment of less fortunate folk . . . children played at emigrating . . . all talked of it, but scarcely anyone knew one true fact about this magic land.” The number of immigrants coming from Russia, the vast majority being Jewish, was increasing dramatically. From 1890 to 1891, the number increased from 41,000 to 73,000.

  The emigration of Russian Jews was rooted in the turmoil of latenineteenth-century Russia. Many of the problems can be traced to 1881, when Czar Alexander II, who had inaugurated an era of relative liberalism in Russia, was assassinated by a group of revolutionaries. Jews bore the brunt of the anger of the Russian people and of the new czar, Alexander III, who pursued anti-Jewish policies with a vengeance. Life in the Pale of Settlement, where much of the Jewish population was forced to live, became harder. Jews who had left the Pale in decades past to earn their livings in cities were now being forced out. Petty harassments increased along with the restrictive edicts.

  His time among Russia’s oppressed Jews had a deep impact on Weber. He and Kempster witnessed the expulsion of Jews from Moscow to the Pale. They met an elderly man with paralysis and partial blindness who was suffering in his own bed because he was refused entry into a Moscow hospital. Many who had lived in Moscow for decades now found their businesses failing. “Among those ordered out while I was there were cashiers, clerks, correspondence chiefs, and bookkeepers of banks; heads of business departments; manufacturers,” Weber remembered.

  The two Americans traveled extensively through towns such as Minsk, Wilna, Bialystok, and Grodno. The stories from Russian Jews were “sad and pitiful in the extreme. . . . Everywhere there was gloom and dejection.” Weber encountered pronounced and deep-seated misery. “The emaciated forms, the wan faces, the deep sunken cheeks,” he later remembered about the experience, “the pitiful expression of those great staring eyes reminding one of a hunted animal, are ever present and will never leave me.” Weber was haunted by nightmares of the tragic Jewish figures he encountered and sometimes wondered if he was not suffering from hallucinations.

  Weber and Kempster’s report was full of sympathetic observations of Jewish life. They argued that Jewish immigration was forced largely by the religious and ethnic persecution found in Russia. They described in detail life in Jewish ghettos and the history of laws that made life difficult for those of the Jewish faith. After a visit in London with Baron de Hirsch, who used part of his vast fortune to assist Jews fleeing Russia, Weber and Kempster admitted that the case of Russian Jewish immigrants was decidedly different from that of other immigrants.

  By the 1890s, Russian Jewish paupers had increased by nearly 30 percent and some estimates counted as many as 40 percent of the Jewish population as luftmenschen, people without jobs, skills, or prospects, floating through the Pale and surviving as best as they could. Here seemed proof of what immigration restrictionists claimed: that assisted immigrants came to America with tickets paid for them by third-party philanthropic groups. They needed to be helped because so many had become paupers.

  While Weber and Kempster admitted that some cases of paupers emigrating to America did exist, “that the movement assumes any sort of proportions [as believed by restrictionists] is not warranted by our investigations nor is it believed.” The case of Russian Jews could not be seen simply through the prism of paupers dumped onto U.S. shores. Instead, Weber and Kempster asked that Americans look beyond the temporary condition of immigrants.

  A person who by reason of unexpected misfortunes or persecutions is deprived of his accumulations, who has been subjected to pillage and plunder while fleeing from the burdens which have become unbearable, if capable of supporting himself and family, if he has one, with a reasonable certainty after obtaining a foothold, and that foothold
is guaranteed by friends or relatives upon landing or strong probable surrounding circumstances, is not, according to our definition, a pauper.

  Weber and Kempster’s report was a sharp rebuke to immigration restrictionists.

  However, instead of a unified report on European conditions, the committee released four separate ones. Weber’s three other colleagues had conducted their own tours of Europe. The report of Judson Cross most closely resembled the conclusions of Weber and Kempster. Writing about Italian immigration, Cross also described the process of chain migration. Italian immigrants “are constantly bestirring others to go. Each Italian in the United States can easily secure a place for a friend and the process is ever being repeated.” Contrary to some of the reports about these new immigrants, Cross found southern Italians “sober, industrious, and economical and fond of their children.” These Italians left their homelands because of a lack of land, not because they were encouraged to leave by the government.

  Joseph Powderly, the brother of famed union leader Terrence V. Powderly, was labor’s representative on the committee, and his report mirrored the concerns of many native-born workingmen. He was concerned that workers from eastern Europe were coming to western Pennsylvania and competing with native-born workers in the mines and factories, driving down wages and the quality of life. Unless immigration was restricted, Powderly argued, the native-born American would be driven from the coal mines or else he “will have to come down from his extravagant standard, and be contented with one room for himself, wife, and children in which to live, eat, and sleep.”

  The commission’s final member, Herman J. Schulteis, took issue with the nuanced notion of pauperism found in Weber and Kempster’s report. Schulteis complained that recent immigrants were coming to America with the help of immigrant aid societies and other associations that encouraged paupers and criminals to emigrate. He also reported on the widespread involvement of Italian banks and labor agents in the distribution of prepaid tickets for Italian immigrants. As for whether steamship companies could be trusted to screen out immigrants who might be disqualified under the 1891 Immigration Act, Schulteis answered with an emphatic no, claiming to have witnessed the “sham inspection” of immigrants at the port of Naples.

  While Weber was sympathetic to the plight of Russian Jews, Schulteis wrote of the “alleged” persecutions in Russia, which only existed in the minds of “Russophobists and of persons who have never looked into the economic situation in Russia.” Schulteis approved of Russia’s anti-Jewish edicts, writing that they were “in the interest of the general welfare of the Russian people.” After all, Schulteis noted, while Jews were only 5 percent of the population, they owned half of the wealth of Russia. “This is a matter of general notoriety in Russia and has an important bearing on the social status of the Hebrew,” he concluded.

  It is no surprise that someone who would recycle the anti-Semitism of Russian officials would conclude that throughout Europe, “there are many persons engaged in the business of transferring from the moribund systems of European misgovernment vast members of their ‘dangerous’ pauperized, diseased, decrepit, and criminal population, not

  only a safety valve to their own overstrained machinery, but to serve as

  an element of weakness in this Republic, the greatness of which they

  view with growing alarm.”

  Despite his insensitivity, Schulteis never called for a ban on immigration or the selection of immigrants only from desirable races. Instead, his recommendations included having American inspectors at

  European ports inspect and approve potential immigrants; a bigger

  head tax on immigrants; the end of prepaid tickets; and the granting of

  emergency quarantine powers to the president.

  These dueling reports lay out a spectrum of attitudes toward immigration. To Weber and Kempster, newcomers fled poverty and prejudice in search of opportunities in the New World, where they were

  certain to be molded into independent and productive citizens. By contrast, Powderly voiced the concerns of workingmen eager to protect

  their wages from the competition of cheap foreign labor brought to

  America by greedy businesses. Lastly, Schulteis articulated the darker

  vision of immigration, seeing newcomers as Europe’s refuse dumped

  on America’s shores—a losing equation that would only weaken the

  Republic, while strengthening Europe.

  Rather than a final answer on the root causes and nature of immigration, the Treasury secretary got more of the same contentious

  debate of Americans grappling with the changes that were wrenching

  the nation into the modern world and showed no signs of abating. Ellis

  Island, created as the “proper sieve” to weed out undesirable immigrants, would soon become a lightning rod in this debate.

  Chapter 4

  Peril at the Portals

  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

  COL ONEL 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 Massilia immigrants 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 expell
ed. 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.