ON A TRAIN BOUND FOR Washington, D.C., the governor’s men vowed to defend the Golden State in a deal that was pure brass. Having failed to deny the plague at home, they hoped to strike a bargain with federal officials to cover up the proof of its existence. The delegates—men from the Chronicle, the Examiner, the Union Iron Works, and the Southern Pacific Railroad—agreed with Governor Henry Gage that only secrecy could save California from the ruin of a nationwide trade embargo.
Senators George C. Perkins and Thomas R. Bard of California acted as midwives to the plan. They had wired all the parties—from Governor Gage and the newspapers to the surgeon general’s bosses at the Treasury Department—to make sure everyone was on board.1,2
When the delegates arrived in Washington, they headed straight for a conference with Surgeon General Wyman and his bosses at the Treasury Department. California would clean up San Francisco, they promised, in exchange for a news blackout. There was no need to publicize the matter. Discretion was the key to gaining Governor Gage’s cooperation with federal public health programs.
At the White House, the California delegation met with President McKinley to discuss more pleasant matters, specifically his upcoming trip to the Golden State. San Francisco had planned a lavish reception. The president and Mrs. McKinley would be guests at the Pacific Heights mansion of one of the delegates, Henry Scott, head of the Union Iron Works. McKinley would receive tributes from the state’s Republicans. He would launch one of Scott’s ships. The presidential presence would advertise the state as a mecca of commerce, culture, and health. Everyone would win.
Kinyoun tried to get word to the surgeon general warning him not to trust Gage’s delegates. But the sales job was a brilliant success. Surgeon General Wyman not only agreed, he asked his special plague commissioners to sign on with the plan. They acquiesced, sharing Wyman’s hope that quiet diplomacy would work better than public disclosure to improve the health of San Francisco.
Wyman went further, appealing to Victor Vaughan, dean of the University of Michigan Medical School, to use his influence to discourage the Associated Press from publishing anything about the plague report. The surgeon general was worried that the wire service would break the news nationwide, and only a perfect “seal of silence” could appease California’s governor, he explained.3
But on the anniversary of Wong Chut King’s death at the old Globe, the Sacramento Bee broke the seal of silence. On March 6, the same day that the governor’s men started for Washington, the Bee ran a banner headline on page one to trumpet the news of the federal panel’s findings to its readers in the state capital: BUBONIC PLAGUE EXISTS IN SAN FRANCISCO….4
But the Bee wasn’t finished leaking plague news. In yet another page one headline, the paper next exposed the deal struck between California and the surgeon general:
The story charged that the secrecy pact violated an 1893 quarantine law requiring the surgeon general to publish regular reports on the health status of U.S. ports. Concealing plague in the port of San Francisco was clearly illegal.
But Washington officials were too busy endorsing San Francisco’s health to worry much. “I would feel as safe living in San Francisco as in Washington,” said a top Treasury Department official. “Traveling and business can continue as safely with San Francisco today as a year ago.”6
Kinyoun sent Wyman a telegram arguing against the compromise and predicting that the delegation from California would “promise everything and do nothing” to purge the plague.7 When he read Kinyoun’s warning wire, Wyman brusquely put the quarantine officer in his place. The deal was done, he said. Kinyoun’s desire for public vindication “must be subordinated to maintain attitude of nonpublication,” Wyman added. “The Department and its Officers will maintain this attitude until further orders.”8
The lame duck quarantine officer was now muzzled as well.
But Kinyoun wasn’t alone in protesting the gag order. The man who had come to replace him agreed that silence was a bad idea.
“If the facts are kept secret now,” wrote Joe White to the surgeon general, “they will rise up to damn us in the future….9
“I am at a loss to know what you want me to do,” he told the surgeon general. “This is a most peculiar situation—as I understand it, I am to say nothing about plague and yet supervise the disinfection for it,” he said. But, he asked, “When I recommend moving the Chinese out of a given house and they say as they always do, ‘What for?’ what possible answer can be given?”10
Back at the University of Chicago, Lewellys Barker, who had risked his own health to verify plague in San Francisco, was uneasy with the bargain that had been struck. Besides, he wanted to see his commission’s plague findings published. “The San Francisco Chronicle has been lieing [sic] shamefully lately,” Barker wrote to Surgeon General Wyman on April 6.11 There is “great dissatisfaction among many men because our full report has not been published, and the delay in publication is being misinterpreted,” he said. “If the San Francisco press is still misrepresenting the situation I confess I think them no longer deserving any sympathy, after what they were told by you in Washington. It is a grave reflection upon their honesty.”12
Even though the death toll was still relatively low, Barker wasn’t complacent about San Francisco’s safety. He saw too much similarity with other epidemic zones. In Hong Kong, Calcutta, and Bombay, he had seen the “sneaking progress” of a smoldering plague suddenly flare into a violent outbreak with heavy casualties.13 He feared the worst days might lie ahead.
Back at the University of Michigan, his fellow plague commissioner Frederick Novy was thrust into an emergency after a deadly lab accident. Novy had carried vials containing bubonic plague samples from San Francisco back to Ann Arbor to grow cultures for vaccine production. He assigned star medical student Charles B. Hare to help with bacterial cultures. Having a reputation for careful technique, Hare was the only student allowed to handle bubonic plague. Hare denied having any lab accident. But somehow—perhaps because he was a smoker who rolled his own cigarettes—a droplet of the germ culture contaminated the medical student.
On the night of April 3, Hare’s back began to ache and an odd sensation of numbness crept over him. Overnight, his temperature shot up to 103. Toward morning, he was convulsed by nausea. Later, he began to cough up flecks of mucus streaked with blood. Novy tested it: It was pneumonic plague.
Hare was taken to the pesthouse in a horse-drawn ambulance. His room was sealed and doused with formaldehyde. Novy wired the surgeon general for an emergency shipment of fifty bottles of Yersin’s antiserum. Pneumonic plague, he knew, was the quickest killer and the toughest to treat. After injecting Hare with copious amounts of antiserum, Novy could only wait and hope.14
Hare’s fever hit 105.5, and he sank into delirium. His roommate was isolated with him but against all odds remained well. Then, as Yersin’s antiserum took effect, Hare’s temperature started to subside one degree at a time. Convalescence was slow, but after a month of isolation, Hare was discharged on a stretcher. He finished medical school and went on to practice medicine in California until his death at fifty. But for the remainder of his life, he required twelve hours of bed rest a day; his heart was permanently damaged by the toxin of the plague bacteria.15
Plague may not have jeopardized the medical career of C. B. Hare, but it mortally wounded the career of Joseph Kinyoun. Amid strident demands for his firing, Kinyoun wired the surgeon general, asking for a couple of weeks’ leave to restore his health and visit his family.
Instead of a vacation, Kinyoun received a blow. “You are hereby directed to transfer the public property under your charge to Assistant surgeon L. L. Lumsden, who has been directed to relieve you…. You will proceed to Detroit, Michigan, and assume charge of the Service at that station….”16
He was given three weeks to pack up his family and get to Detroit. No thanks, no acknowledgment of service under difficult conditions—nothing was offered to soften the blow. It was just the blunt, militarystyle transfer favored by Dr. Wyman and the U.S. Marine Hospital Service.
Kinyoun reeled. “The orders were simply without… any explanation,” he wrote to his relatives in the East. “I have been made the scapegoat.”17
Wyman wanted the quarantine officer to make a quick and quiet departure, but retreat was not in Kinyoun’s repertoire. Against Wyman’s wishes, Kinyoun went on the offensive, making speeches at state and county medical societies about plague. He took the advantage on such occasions to take some parting shots at his enemies.
Aiming at the San Francisco doctors who wrote false death certificates, Kinyoun mocked their misdiagnosis of plague as chicken cholera. He joked that they’d actually discovered a new disease, which Kinyoun called “cholera du Chink.” From his once high-minded defense of bacteriology, he had sunk to low puns and crude racial slurs.18
San Francisco bade a bizarre farewell to Kinyoun. On the eve of his departure from San Francisco, police came to Angel Island to arrest him for attempted murder. The charge dated from an incident five months earlier in the cold waters off Angel Island. Back in November 1900, a deaf-mute fisherman was mistaken for an escapee from military detention and fired upon by soldiers. Kinyoun claimed he had rowed out to save the man, not to assault him. But now he was accused of pulling the trigger.
“I did not fire the shots,” he protested. “It is an outrage to arrest me.” Since he was a federal employee, Kinyoun refused to be taken into custody by anyone but a U.S. marshal. Eventually the court dropped the charges.19
As he packed up his family for Detroit, Kinyoun suffered recurrent bouts of paralyzing stomach pain. Gut roiling, he asked for emergency sick leave to treat his “appendicitis.” Once the pain subsided, he planned a research trip to Asia to study plague, unable to let go of his obsession with the disease that had been his downfall.
But Kinyoun’s tenure as a federal public health officer was running out. He was exhausted. He couldn’t help but feel that Wyman, by failing to defend his diagnosis, had devalued his contributions to bacteriology. After his research trip to Asia, he would serve out a brief time in the Marine Hospital Service. But in his heart, he had already resigned.
Bitter in professional exile, Kinyoun wrote long, rambling letters blaming the press, the politicians, and the surgeon general, who—beginning with Kinyoun’s transfer to San Francisco—sought “to simply relegate [him] to oblivion.”20
When a friend suggested that he write his life story, Kinyoun ruefully proposed a title—Les Misérables en Quarantaine.21