Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [126]
Even without smallpox aboard, travel in steerage was hazardous to the health. Late nineteenth-century American reformers and port officials protested the “heartless treatment” of steerage passengers on journeys that some compared to the “Middle Passage” of the bygone slave trade. Federal law levied a $10 penalty on ship companies for every passenger over eight years of age who died en route to the United States. But as two New York State commissioners of immigration lamented in 1868, the law was little enforced and did nothing for the hundreds of steerage passengers who died each year. The “interest of humanity” and “political economy,” these officials declared, required the reform of a system where “emigrants are treated more like beasts of burden than human beings.” The New York officers urged Congress to require all immigrant ships bound for America to carry a medical officer.20
By the time Congress finally enacted such a law, in 1882, the germ theory was on the rise. “Reasons of hygiene” joined the old “sentiments of charity, morality, and humanity” in congressional deliberations. Consequently, ship surgeons would do much more than care for sick passengers. They would become on-board agents of American quarantine regulations. That same year, 1882, the short-lived National Board of Health called for a new federal law to mandate “the vaccination of all immigrants not previously protected”—a policy that at that time applied only to passengers from foreign ports known to be infected with smallpox. But the board’s argument that compulsory vaccination served the national interest—by preventing the constant importation of smallpox and stopping the amassing of “large numbers of susceptibles in circumscribed localities” (cities)—failed to move Congress to adopt a uniform national policy until another decade had passed.21
Faster ships, more than sharper laws, made the Atlantic crossing safer. In 1867, the journey took fourteen days or more; by 1900, some steamships could make the trip in under six. But the passenger’s relief was the quarantine officer’s headache. Speed altered the nature of the threat from smallpox. The average incubation period for the disease was about twelve days; in the age of sail, if anyone on board was infected that fact was likely to become known well before the vessel reached port. With each new increment of speed, the likelihood increased that infected travelers would reach port without presenting symptoms. As Dr. William M. Smith, health officer of the port of New York, reported in 1888, smallpox was the most difficult “latent contagion” to check by maritime quarantines. In that year alone, Dr. Smith’s medical officers inspected some 383,000 steerage passengers. Given the rising boat speeds, any number of them might have contracted smallpox in a European village, traveled more than three thousand miles to New York, shown no symptoms at quarantine, boarded a train, and not felt the first fever until reaching the American heartland. Outbreaks in Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri were traced to recently arrived immigrants from Europe. According to Smith, this problem of latent contagion had caused “more anxious reflection” among American port health officers “than any other subject during the past nine years.” He called for a strict policy that all passengers not vaccinated within the previous eight years submit to the procedure within two days of boarding a U.S.-bound ship.22
Increasingly, immigrant-receiving ports enforced