Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [124]
The mother of the Caballo children—who must have been in that room all along, the “someone” who moved within—struggled with the men as they carried her children and little Antoinette down the stairs to the street. The doctors tried to calm her, assuring her she could accompany her children to the isolation hospital on North Brother Island. Well-behaved mothers were sometimes allowed that privilege, especially if they were nursing infants. But when she continued her protest on the street, the physicians barred her from the ambulance wagon. Mrs. Caballo, the Times reporter wrote, “fought like a tigress on the sidewalk, and her screams aroused the neighborhood for blocks around.” At last, she was driven indoors. The ambulance rolled away.12
By the end of that long night, Blauvelt’s corps had scraped vaccine into the arms of many tenement dwellers, put watches on suspicious people, and removed nine infected children from their homes. Three-year-old Marion Scarroni was already dead when the doctors found her. None of the infected children had ever been vaccinated. In defiance of the law, their families and neighbors had secreted them away for days. Perhaps the parents believed they could best take care of their own children themselves; with smallpox, attentive care could mean the difference between survival and death. Or perhaps the parents feared, as the Times reporter supposed they must, that their little ones would “be taken away from them forever.”13
In the early hours of the morning, the men of the vaccination corps made their way through the still sleeping city to their own homes to get some rest. They would need it. The Department of Health had another raid planned for Italian Harlem the following night.
None of the children had ever been vaccinated. The scarless arms of those nine children of the Italian diaspora tell us something about their political status. Each was, in the words of the Constitution, a “natural born Citizen” of the United States. How could a child’s skin say so much? In the final years of the nineteenth century, in the midst of the greatest sustained wave of human migration the world had ever seen, a vaccination scar had become something more than a sign of immunity from smallpox. The scar had become a sort of passport—a stamp-sized tattoo of political immunity, required by U.S. law and the quarantine regulations of the nation’s major ports for entry into the American body politic. This legal requirement did not apply with equal force to all. The class-based spatial arrangements of the ocean voyage governed migrants’ treatment upon arrival; steerage passengers underwent a far more exhaustive medical inspection than did their shipmates traveling in first- and second-class cabins. This much is reasonably certain: at the turn of the century, no child en route from Italy to a place like East Harlem would have made it through the Port of New York without well-defined pockmarks (proving a previous case of smallpox) or a discernible mark of recent vaccination.14
Twenty-four million people migrated to the United States between 1880 and 1924, two thirds of them entering the country through the Port of New York. The world over, people were on the move. Within Europe, some two million people picked up and moved each year in the late nineteenth century. Others reached ports like Bremen, Naples, or Liverpool and kept going. The promise of decent jobs and a greater measure of political and religious liberty helped make the United States the foremost destination of the global transoceanic migrations of the era. Until the 1920s, U.S. immigration law