Authors: Vincent J. Cannato
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.
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 expelled. 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.
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.