Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [129]
If the New York inspectors found no quarantinable diseases aboard, they left the ship. At that point, physicians of the Marine-Hospital Service’s Boarding Division took over. They gave passengers in the first- and second-class cabins a perfunctory inspection. Rarely was a first-class passenger singled out for closer inspection; and when this did occur, it usually happened not because the passenger looked especially unhealthy, but because some unspecified social marker made him appear out of place. As one officer of the Service explained, “If a passenger is seen in the first cabin, but his appearance stamps him as belonging in the steerage or second cabin, his examination usually follows.”32
When the steamship at last arrived at its destination, a wharf or dock in New York City, only passengers traveling in third-class or steerage were ferried to the federal government’s immigration depot at Ellis Island to run the gauntlet of medical inspectors known, in Service parlance, as “the line.” The inspection at Ellis Island began as soon as the immigrants stepped off the barge. They lined up under the watchful eyes of the medical inspectors, who scanned the crowd for any individual possessing a mental or physical defect. Carrying their baggage, the immigrants climbed the steep stairs to the Registry Room, also known as the Great Hall. Watching from the top of the stairs, Service physicians looked for signs of weakness or heavy breathing that might indicate heart trouble. As the immigrants made their way through the congested gates and cordoned-off areas of the facility, officers examined eyes and scalps, hands and throats, all the while looking for signs that the passenger was unfit to enter the American nation.33
The power to exclude migrants from the political space of the nation—ordering their return to their port of origin, at the expense of the steamship company—was the ultimate power entrusted to U.S. officials at points of entry. The exercise of this authority rested upon the medical expertise of the Marine-Hospital Service officers, who by 1903 inspected nearly 900,000 immigrants each year at thirty-two American ports and several overseas. The power to exclude was not exercised often. In an average year, U.S. officials turned back fewer than 1 percent of all arriving immigrants. But medical criteria, rather than political radicalism or poverty, became an increasingly important reason for exclusion, until it was the principal one. No wonder many recalled those hours at Ellis Island as the longest of their entire journey.34
Immigrants from a smallpox-infected ship, detained in 1901 at the quarantine station on Hoffman Island, N.Y. Photo by Elizabeth Allen Austen. COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Along the borders with Canada and Mexico, U.S. quarantine law called for aliens to enter only through designated points. Such rules proved difficult to enforce, particularly along the Rio Grande. Many Mexicans, accustomed to traveling freely across the border for work or to visit relatives, viewed the tightening system of inspection around the turn of the century as a violation of their rights. In a single week in February 1899, Acting Assistant Surgeon H. J. Hamilton and his staff at Laredo, Texas, inspected more than 2,500 migrants crossing the Rio Grande via the Laredo Foot Bridge, a truss bridge built in the 1880s, or by ferry or train. Most of the people he met at the footbridge insisted upon their “right to pass” without inspection. But that was a privilege the Service extended only to affluent travelers. While the Service routinely inspected all arriving passenger trains from Mexico, checking all second- and third-class passengers for “recent vaccine scars,” inspectors allowed travelers in the Pullman cars simply to