Authors: Vincent J. Cannato
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.