American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [45]
Despite the congressional investigation and the publicity that ensued, for the time being the recommendations of the Chandler committee went nowhere. Another crisis loomed later in 1892, however, that threatened to bring the restrictionist agenda back on the front burner.
Traveling from Turkey to Russia to Germany to France to England, a worldwide cholera outbreak was threatening to land on American shores. Some wanted President Harrison to order a temporary halt to immigration in hopes of stopping cholera from entering the country. But it was Congress, not the president, that held such power.
What was within Harrison’s authority was to declare a strict quarantine of twenty days for all ships coming from Europe, although some complained that the president did not even possess this limited power. Still, Harrison ordered the quarantine on September 1 and local authorities carried out the plan.
If typhus fever scared New Yorkers, the possible scourge of cholera provoked a near panic across the country, especially in densely packed urban areas. A hideous disease that kills its victims by massive dehydration from diarrhea, cholera had devastated New York in the past. During the city’s worst outbreak, over 5,000 people perished in 1849. In the last major outbreak, over 1,100 people died in 1866.
Now, in the fall of 1892, cholera victims were on steamships in the Atlantic heading for New York. Most of these ships were immediately put under quarantine. Within days, the quarantine hospitals at Swinburne and Hoffman Islands were filled to capacity with cholera victims and suspected victims. Other passengers would remain on their ships for the duration of the quarantine.
At the same time, cholera victims began appearing in the city. On September 6, Charles McAvoy, who had arrived from Ireland eight years earlier, died of the disease. By the end of the month, there were nine additional cases in the city, with seven more deaths. All the victims were immigrants, with the exception of the infant daughter of an immigrant couple. Yet strangely all, with one exception, had been in the country for over two years. None could be linked to recently arrived immigrants.
Still, the brunt of the disease was borne by immigrants coming over in steamships and trapped in quarantine. Forty-four individuals, many of them Russian Jews, died of cholera in New York’s quarantine stations, in addition to the seventy-six who had died of the disease at sea. As the cholera scare in Europe abated, it appeared that the quarantine had spared the city the worst of the outbreak. Isolating European immigrants had seemingly served its purpose, but with a price. Those destined for quarantine received poor medical treatment in overcrowded conditions. Many of those quarantined were Jews who were prevented from following kosher food regulations. Worse still, contrary to Jewish burial practices, many of the Jewish victims were cremated.
The quarantine policy lasted until February 1893. As a result, immigration from Europe fell off dramatically in late 1892 and early 1893. Steamship companies could not afford to keep their ships tied up in quarantine for twenty days without a serious dent in profits. The federal government also felt the financial pinch since the Immigration Service operated through a 50-cent head tax on every immigrant, paid by the steamship company. With so few immigrants, the coffers dried up. In the face of cost-cutting measures, Colonel Weber offered to resign. Some worried about the effects of the quarantine on the upcoming World Exposition in Chicago in 1893, leading the Times to call the quarantine an “opera bouffe order . . . a delayed April-fool proceeding.”
The cholera scare provided Chandler with an opportunity to put forth a more restrictive immigration bill, something that he chose not to do after the typhus scare earlier in 1892. He introduced a bill in the Senate in January 1893 that would suspend all immigration