American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [43]
Another member of the committee, Rep. Herman Stump, who would later be put in charge of the Immigration Service in Washington, continued this line of argument. He believed that immigrants had all the protections of appeal, yet no one spoke for the masses of Americans who wanted tighter controls over immigration. “Only one overcrowded and overworked inspector guards the people against the admission of an illegal immigrant,” Stump argued. “Why not then give the people, as it were, some rights on their side to say any person should not be landed while the officer now has the sole say as to whether it should be done or not?”
To that end, Chandler and Stump proposed a board of special inquiry made up of three or four inspectors who would sit in judgment of all immigrants not landed beyond a reasonable doubt. A majority vote would be needed to land any questionable immigrant. As to why this would lead to greater restrictions, Chandler noted that three men would have a harder heart than just one.
Then there was the question of what caused the outbreak of typhus. The general public, and even many doctors, were mystified by its origins. Was it something in the air? Was it caused by a poor diet? Germ theory was still not widely understood, and it was not until the early decades of the twentieth century that doctors discovered that typhus was transmitted by the common body louse. The overcrowded conditions in Constantinople’s Jewish ghetto most likely led to the outbreak of typhus among Massilia’s passengers.
Typhus, the New York Times claimed, was “caused by filth, overcrowding, destitution, and neglect of the fundamental laws of sanitation. The epidemics of this fever in New York have been imported . . . from Europe in the crowded steerage quarters of steamships.” The immigrants were at fault because their “habits and condition invite deadly infectious diseases.” Therefore, the editorial concluded, the “dreaded disease must bring forcibly to the attention of all intelligent citizens the evils of unrestricted immigration. . . . The doors should be shut against them [diseased immigrants].”
Members of Chandler’s committee continually linked the disease to immigrants and filth. Congressman Stump asked Dr. Edson: “Would a filthy person cause typhus fever—a dirty person or dirty surroundings?” Edson, while admitting that it would take “a large number of filthy persons,” pointed to environmental factors as a leading cause. Stump asked Edson flat out whether “a filthy person in open air could never develop typhus.” Edson replied “Never.”
William Jenkins, the health officer at the Port of New York, echoed Stump’s concerns. He admitted that while he could not pinpoint exactly how the disease developed, he believed that the “Hebrew passengers were a poorly nourished lot of people and from subsequent affidavits I saw very unclean.” Jenkins also blamed kosher food preparation for making the problem worse.
The linkage of Jewish immigrants and filth was common at that time. In an 1888 congressional hearing, the director of the Jewish Immigration Protective Society of New York, was asked about the personal habits of Jews: Were they “nice, clean, tidy people or the reverse?” A doctor stationed in 1892 at Swinburne Island, off Staten Island, which served as a quarantine island for incoming ships, commented on the condition of immigrants he saw there: “They were mostly Russian Polish Jews and filthy beyond description, frequently covered with vermin. They seemed more like animals than human beings, and appeared to possess no desire for personal cleanliness.”
Cyrus Edson, on the other hand, did not buy into these stereotypes. “There is no cause for alarm, much less panic, but there is abundant cause for careful, thorough,