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  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-threeday 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.