Forgotten Ellis Island: The Extraordinary Story of America's Immigrant Hospital

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Forgotten Ellis Island

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

As the steamship moravia headed into new york harbor on august 30, 1892, the marine hospital service (mhs) doctors on ellis island braced for the worst.

The cholera epidemic then ravaging Asia and Europe—150,000 dead in Russia alone—had infected the ship's passengers. Twenty-four had been stricken with the illness, and 22 of them had died—all but two of the dead were children under the age of 10. Surviving passengers had panicked, throwing the dead overboard "as if they were dead birds or garbage."²

Three times previously in the 19th century, the United States had suffered a devastating cholera outbreak, each originating abroad. Would the Moravia's arrival mark the start of the fourth?

Opened as a port of entry only eight months earlier, Ellis Island was poorly equipped to handle the threat. Its two-story wooden dispensary had neither the staff nor the laboratory to contain a disease as deadly as cholera. Believing he had no other choice, Dr. W. T. Jenkins, the Port of New York's health officer, ordered the Moravia to anchor offshore until the outbreak was contained. Five days later, two more"death ships," the Rugia and Normannia, steamed into New York Harbor, and they, too, were ordered to anchor offshore. Dr. Jenkins warned that anyone—passenger or crew member—who tried to leave the quarantined ships would be shot. More than a thousand passengers were stranded on the ships, and they begged to be let off, terrified that sick passengers would soon infect them. Their plea was denied. Over the next several days, additional cases broke out, killing most of the infected passengers within a day. Not until nearly three weeks had passed were the healthy passengers finally allowed to disembark.³

Was the inadequacy of the medical facility at Ellis Island partly to blame for the additional deaths?⁴ Health authorities could not easily dismiss the possibility. The arriving passengers might all have lived had they been immediately removed from the ships and quarantined at a safe medical facility.

The issue of how to protect the health of both the nation and the immigrant would hover over Ellis Island for the next decade. Its existing medical facility was not equipped to handle anything but routine illness. When the wooden infirmary caught fire and burned to the ground in 1897, the problem became dire. A makeshift hospital was established in an old house on Ellis Island, but it was small and poorly appointed. Passengers with infectious diseases such as measles and diphtheria were shuttled to neighboring hospitals, which increasingly refused to take them. Although New York's indigent hospital, Bellevue, remained open to immigrants for several years to come, even it eventually stopped taking such patients. The city's health commissioner, Ernst Lederle, told reporters: "The patients from Ellis Island should not be brought into the city limits at all. They are a source of infection from the time they leave the island until they reach the foot of East 16th Street. Besides, they have to be placed in wards where they subject other patients to the danger of mixed infection."⁵

Ironically, fears of immigrant-borne disease were mounting at a time when medical breakthroughs raised hopes that many illnesses could be corralled. The science of medicine was being redefined by the work of Joseph Lister, Louis Pasteur, and Robert Koch. They had identified bacilli responsible for several killer diseases, and experimental vaccines were being developed.

Nevertheless, old ideas about disease had a powerful hold on the general public and fed concerns about immigrants, particularly the huge wave of new entrants from southern and eastern Europe. These arrivals were visibly poorer and less well-kempt than the earlier arrivals from northern Europe and carried strange diseases like favus and trachoma. New Hampshire senator William Chandler said: "No one has suggested a race distinction. We are confronted with the fact, however, that the poorest immigrants do come from certain races."⁶ The New York Times in an editorial was more direct: "We do not want and we ought to refuse to land all or any of these unclean Italians or Russian Hebrews. We have enough dirt, misery, crime, sickness, and death of our own without permitting any more to be thrust upon us."⁷ Alabama senator J. Thomas Heflin, a rabid nativist, called these immigrants "the greatest evil that has confronted us in a century."⁸

Hostility toward the new arrivals was lessened by a hard fact: the United States needed them. America's Industrial Revolution had started later than Europe's but was now overtaking it. Labor was in short supply. "Industry is developing, workers are in demand," wrote one observer. "Without them the country cannot maintain its present pace."⁹

In his first State of the Union message in 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt proposed a change in immigration policy that would thrust the medical facility at Ellis Island into national prominence. Roosevelt said that America should open its gates to the able-bodied while barring entry to the weak and the infirm. "We can not have too much immigration of the right kind," said Roosevelt, "and we should have none of the wrong kind." In order to keep out what he called "undesirable immigrants," Roosevelt proposed "a more rigid system of examination at our immigrant ports."

Although the new policy applied to all points of entry, of which there were more than three dozen, Ellis Island was the central concern. Because of its location in New York Harbor, it handled more arrivals than all the others combined. The numbers were staggering. A reporter described being overwhelmed by the presence of "nineteen hundred immigrants . . . in the buildings," only to be told by an immigration officer: "We sometimes have seven and eight thousand immigrants to handle at once and then we have to work pretty hard. This year we expect a million immigrants."¹⁰

Recognizing that Ellis Island would need strong leadership if it was to institute a more thorough screening process, President Roosevelt turned to William Williams, a Wall Street lawyer who also happened to be a friend . . .

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Excerpted from Forgotten Ellis Island by Lorie Conway Copyright © 2007 by Lorie Conway. Excerpted by permission.
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