Authors: Vincent J. Cannato
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 crossexamination 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.
N
EW 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 “forlornlooking 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.