FOUR MONTHS IN SAN FRANCISCO were enough to break the spirit. Hamstrung by his government’s gag order, Joseph White felt helpless to cure the plague in Chinatown. The place seemed an impenetrable puzzle, hiding the quick and the dead. “You cannot imagine the conditions. I cannot write them,” he wrote the surgeon general. “It would take Charles Dickens to do it.” White pleaded for reinforcements.
“The difficulties here are so great that never before in our history has there been a greater need for tactful and forceful officers,” he wrote, “and mediocrity is I think clean out of place.”
White proposed a candidate for the job, but Surgeon General Wyman had another man in mind: thirty-three-year-old Rupert Blue, who was at that moment stationed in Milwaukee, caring for sick boatmen on Lake Michigan. White had never met Blue, but he’d heard through the service grapevine that Blue was lazy and lacked the subtlety to negotiate with the Chinese.
This job takes tact, White continued. “I learn that Blue has none and is inert beside[s],” he added. “I don’t know Blue and have not a reason under Heaven to dislike him, so there is nothing personal in this matter at all, but I am fully persuaded that he cannot take the lead in this matter now or in the future.”1
Ignoring White’s doubts about his candidate, Wyman shipped Blue his orders to leave the Milwaukee station and proceed at once to San Francisco.
While Blue was en route, pressure was building from outside the state for action. Texas health chief W. F. Blunt demanded a copy of the plague commission’s report. Colorado health chief G. E. Tyler declared, “Concealment of contagious diseases is an unpardonable sin in public health work.”2 Newspapers in New York City and Washington State were beginning to sound alarms about California’s cover-up.
Suddenly the gag order was violated. The Sacramento Bee and a western medical journal, the Occidental Medical Times, obtained bootleg copies of the plague commission’s study from anonymous sources and rushed it into print. Surgeon General Wyman swiftly moved to eclipse the bootleg version by publishing the official special plague commission findings in the U.S. Public Health reports. At last, the word was out nationwide.3
Joe White, relieved to be rid of secrecy, denied he was the source of the leak and added that he didn’t think Kinyoun was, either. Few but the experts on the panel and the surgeon general were privy to the report. The source of the leak was never identified.
Rupert Blue arrived in San Francisco for duty just as the city launched a frenzied beautification project in anticipation of the visit of President William McKinley. On an embankment in front of the Victorian flower conservatory in Golden Gate Park, gardeners planted a tapestry of poppies and pansies spelling out “California’s Welcome to Our President,” flanked by an American eagle and a California grizzly bear. Miles of bunting and millions of red-white-and-blue flags decked the parade route. Market Street was strung with electric bulbs and Chinese lanterns that shed a patriotic radiance, Asian-Pacific style.
The moment he got off the train, Blue inhaled the brine-scented fog, with undercurrents of beer and sewage he remembered from his first visit as a young assistant surgeon on quarantine duty in 1895. The city now had a few more electric lights and motorcars, but its raffish spirit was intact.
Indeed, San Franciscans were intoxicated with speed in the new century. The traditional Sunday carriage caravans through Golden Gate Park were now joined by two dozen rattletrap horseless carriages, tearing through town at fifteen miles an hour. But neither time nor technology had tamed the Barbary Coast, Blue found as he stepped off the train and into a tug-of-war over a corpse.
The corpse was that of a man named Mark Quan Wing. The Chinatown resident had been suffering from tuberculosis—on that, everyone agreed. But the knot of swollen glands under his armpit looked like bubonic plague. Could the two infections coexist? Joseph White demanded a test. Governor Gage’s state health board ridiculed him. “It seems to make no difference then if a Chinaman died with consumption,” huffed a doctor working for the state. “He has got to have buboe and clap, gallstones, appendicitis and everything else just to satisfy some people.”4
“It is an ugly state of affairs,” Joseph White brooded. The state earmarked $25,000 of its $100,000 plague fund for cleaning Chinatown. But so far the state doctors’ main job seemed to be disputing a plague diagnosis.
There was one bright spot, White reported. “Blue is coming out much stronger… than I had thought possible,” he wrote to Washington. “He has done some very good things through self-control and apparently imperturbable good nature.”5
In the midst of the wrangling, he remained unbruised. He didn’t engage the state board and the Chinese head-on. With a genial smile beneath his signature mustache, Blue gave all sides the impression that he saw their respective points. Joseph White had to admit that the unflattering gossip about Blue had been wrong.
But just as Blue arrived to help White clean Chinatown, a mysterious pause in plague cases occurred. Joseph White had his suspicions. “The cases shown to us and the corpses brought to us for examination after death have distinctly the appearance of having been culled,” he reported to the surgeon general. The sick people he was allowed to see suffered from cancer and other chronic ailments; he never saw any acute cases of fever. It was strange for a population of Chinatown’s size. “These people,” he said, “do not wish us to find plague.”6
Poring over death records for Chinatown, White was struck by the plunge in mortality figures to a fraction of the normal toll. “I feel sure that they are hiding the dead,” he told Wyman. So with the chief of police, he plotted a new strategy. The police would conduct raids on gambling dens. Once inside, they would look around for sick people, and they would let White know the results. It was a desperate ploy to reach beyond the few cases he saw that the state doctors had handpicked for him.7
Were bodies stowed beneath the sidewalk? Were they spirited out of the city under cover of darkness? White sent a telegram to Washington requesting authority to fan out around San Francisco for a radius of one hundred miles, in the hope of tracking down missing cases.8
While White wrangled, Blue dug in to inspect the blocks around Dupont Street for sanitary problems. He found cellars afloat with sewage and vermin, the result of years of landlord neglect.
Poking about a garbage heap in back of the store owned by Sing Fah on Dupont Street, Blue was appalled. Sing Fah’s was the finest store in Chinatown, stocking elegant Asian imports. But behind it, Blue found squalor. He recoiled upon discovering a garbage dump with about 150 pounds of rotten meat hidden underneath it.9
Still, they found no plague cases among the trickle of Chinese patients they were allowed to see. State-appointed doctors, meanwhile, insisted on being consulted each time the federal officers disinfected a house or fumigated a sewer. Finally, White could take no more. He fired off a furious letter to the governor, charging his medical team with concealment.
The tally of sick and dead was “ridiculously… preposterously out of proportion” with a community of Chinatown’s size, he wrote.10 He surmised that the sick and dead were being whisked across the bay to Oakland or as far away as Sacramento, one hundred miles to the east. Meanwhile, when White did manage to see a body, Gage’s men would appear at the morgue, demanding tissue samples, arguing over the meaning of symptoms, and pressing competing diagnoses that were naïve or downright fraudulent.
White was fed up. He wrote Wyman that the governor, after promising Washington to clean up Chinatown, had “complied with the meagre letter of the agreement, but not in its full spirit” of plague eradication.11
Moreover, White heard that as soon as six weeks had passed without a new case, Governor Gage planned to declare the plague over and end the campaign. That date—June 9—was fast approaching. White urged Surgeon General Wyman not to make a dishonorable peace with the state. The service should refuse to issue a false certificate of health to the city. It would be better to pull its men out of the state and simply “allow California to work out her own destiny.”12
Throughout this war of nerves, Blue didn’t seem to get riled—by the obstructionism of the state or the passive resistance of the Chinese. He deflected attacks rather than battering opponents head-on. Beneath his charming facade, he was a soldier’s son and a tactician.
White now saw the young officer as a potential successor, one who could free him to return to the East Coast. “Regarding Blue,” White reported to Washington. “His work to date has been most excellent…. The impression [that] he was not a man of pronounced personality and executive ability, although a very nice gentleman, is utterly erroneous. He has untangled a good many rather difficult snarls; has an immense amount of self-possession and good temper, and is altogether fully capable of acting as executive officer….”13
White’s endorsement helped Blue win a promotion. In later years, White might have felt regret. Blue would one day be his rival for high office.
San Franciscans—most oblivious to the plague intrigues—were fixated on a different medical drama. President McKinley arrived on May 13 in a San Francisco decked with bouquets and bunting. But the figure that emerged from the presidential Pullman coach looked not like the commander in chief people expected, but rather like the worried consort of a gravely ill First Lady.14 A string of daily bulletins, hinting at typhoid, said her death was near.
Banquets were canceled and bouquets wilted as Mrs. McKinley remained in a sickbed at the Scott mansion on Laguna and Clay Streets. The president scrapped most of his schedule. Citizens who lined the streets to cheer instead raised their hats and handkerchiefs in a silent salute. After receiving doses of heart stimulants, Mrs. McKinley rallied and returned with her husband to the East Coast.15
Granted his wish to return to Washington, Joseph White also left San Francisco in early June. Staying on to oversee the floundering plague campaign was Rupert Blue—assisted by two other officers.
California’s governor, as predicted, declared plague nonexistent and pulled his money out of San Francisco in June, leaving the federal doctors and the city holding the reins. Blue optimistically forecast that he would complete the hygienic and sanitary overhaul of Chinatown on June 22. But he also quietly set up headquarters that would serve as the nerve center for a much longer siege. He leased a morgue and laboratory for $75 a month on Merchant Street, a small alley near Chinatown’s Portsmouth Square. He was in business.
There was still the delicate matter of the disappearing corpses. Blue proposed that the federal government run its own hearse service. He asked the surgeon general for $35 a month to rent a horse, cart, and driver as the only way to prevent “surreptitious removals or substitution of bodies.”16 Dr. Wyman agreed but promised Governor Gage that Dr. Blue and two assistants would be around just a little while longer.17 He had only a skeleton staff to conduct what Wyman implied was a phaseout of the unpopular plague operation. Dr. Mark J. White inspected the sick, and Dr. Donald H. Currie ran the morgue and lab.
With public health threats apparently under control, San Franciscans now reclined into summer like it was a hammock. The upper class left for resorts in San Rafael or Santa Cruz. In town, Aïda opened the summer season at the Tivoli Opera House.
Just after Independence Day 1901, plague returned in a corner of Chinatown’s demimonde. Blue and his men had just finished testing the corpse of an asparagus harvester for plague on the night of Monday, July 8, and were washing off the smell of the lab, possibly looking forward to a drink, when the calls came. There was a cluster of fever breaking out in a Chinatown crib.
A Japanese physician, Dr. Kurozawa, was the first to arrive at the apartment at 845 Washington Street. The Yoshiwara House was a Japanese brothel in the heart of the Chinese quarter. It had a stable of seven women catering to an Asian and a citywide clientele. That night, three of its women—Miyo, Shina, and Ume—lay prostrate with fever and pain.
Under their kimonos, Shina and Miyo had egg-size lumps protruding from their pelvises. The third patient, Ume, had a tender swelling under her right arm. Alarmed, Dr. Kurozawa called a network of city physicians, who called the bacteriologist H. A. L. Ryfkogel. Ryfkogel alerted Rupert Blue.
All natives of Japan in their mid-twenties, the women had worked at Yoshiwara House for about one year. In late Victorian parlance, such women were called “inmates”—their profession was a life sentence. Some were sold by impoverished families, others accepted passage to America for a job that turned out to be in the flesh trade. Most died young, drained and disfigured by disease.
Ryfkogel and the city health board rushed to the scene, followed by Blue and his men. The city doctors slapped a quarantine on the house, holding the other inmates for observation until Ryfkogel could make a diagnosis. Terrified of quarantine, a girl called Fuku Inaki slipped downstairs and ran four blocks away to a house on Pine Street.
The men proceeded to examine the three prostitutes. The symptoms looked like classic plague, but clinical impressions weren’t enough to confirm a diagnosis. Ryfkogel drew blood samples from Shina, Miyo, and Ume and hopped a streetcar back to his lab on Sutter Street. Confirmatory cultures and animal inoculation tests would take days. Until then, he could do a kind of quick antibody test called an agglutination reaction. In it, he mixed the girls’ blood with plague bacteria cultured in bouillon. If particles in the fluid clumped together, plague was present. The mix curdled into clots. “Immediate and characteristic,” Ryfkogel noted. The test “makes it absolutely certain that the three suffered from the same disease and this disease was bubonic plague.”18
Finding the culprit didn’t change the women’s fate; their illness was far too advanced for treatment. Just hours after they were examined, Shina and Miyo slipped into a coma. With their lymph glands hemorrhaging, the plague toxin raced through their bloodstream. Their blood pressure plunged, and shock set in. The ebony pools of their pupils were frozen, fixed and dilated. Around three A.M. on July 9, the two women died. Their colleague Ume, seething with a fever of 105, wasn’t expected to live.
At twelve noon, Miyo’s shrouded form was carried to the morgue on Commercial Street for autopsy. In attendance were federal and city physicians, with the state doctors hovering to quibble over points of lab technique. The federal doctors donned rubber aprons and began their barehanded autopsy of Miyo, a twenty-six-year-old female, stiffened by rigor mortis. The doctors made a long median incision from sternum to pubis, opened her peritoneum, pushed aside coils of viscera, and found the knot of inflamed lymph glands in her right pelvis. Her spleen was swollen to twice the normal size. The doctors carefully extracted bits of tissue to grow in culture.19
At three P.M., they began the autopsy of Shina, also just twenty-six. She was “a well-developed and well-nourished young woman,” with an unblemished complexion and no sign of venereal disease. After carving carefully around the buboes in her left and right pelvis, the doctors eased out the skein of inflamed lymph glands, which oozed blood.20
With the naked eye, they would later watch as cultures made from those samples, smeared across agar plates, developed into germ colonies with the classic “ground glass” texture of plague. Under the microscope, the colonies were made up of the short-rounded rods of plague bacteria. And the guinea pigs injected with the cultures developed the same swollen glands, the same fatal outcome.
Now Blue began using the health service codebook to wire the test results to Surgeon General Wyman: “Bumpkin malleate …”21 Plague diagnosis confirmed.
About the time her co-workers lay cooling on the autopsy slab, young Ume surprised the doctors by rebounding. Blue declared her to be the first patient ever to survive plague in San Francisco.
But the case of the fugitive Fuku Inaki was hopeless. Health officers caught up with the young prostitute on Pine Street and brought her back to the brothel in Chinatown for observation. The Chinese press protested her return to Chinatown as proof the federal doctors wished them ill and sought to concentrate all the plague in their neighborhood.22 By July 11, she was dead. Kimonos and bedding used by the Yoshiwara women were piled in the street and burned.
Blue’s next task was to worry about the men who had patronized the brothel. It wouldn’t be easy. Before they fell ill, Blue estimated, the women had serviced at least fifty men between them, and so far not a single case of suspicious illness had been reported. “Truly an anomaly,” he puzzled.23
Blue watched his men rushing from brothel to morgue, and morgue to laboratory, hastily disinfecting their equipment in between cases as best they could. With the fumes of formaldehyde and carbolic acid still singeing his nostrils, Blue hinted that the task was more than Wyman had envisioned. To protect themselves, the men were injecting each other regularly with Yersin’s plague antiserum. It was expensive, and it carried the same risks of serum sickness that had troubled Lewellys Barker. But as they were constantly being exposed to plague germs without the modern protection of latex gloves and face shields, it was their only option.
The outbreak also tested Blue’s diplomacy. “Much hard feeling has been engendered over these cases between Bursary [the code word for the California State Health Board] on the one side and Burlesque [the San Francisco Health Board] and Ryfkogel on the other,” he wrote. “Our laboratory technique has been unfairly criticised by [the state physician] Dr. Mathews, and I found it very hard to refrain a retort in kind. There is so much at stake, and as we are only seeking the truth, I shall always try to maintain a friendly relationship with them…. We have borne a good deal and can bear a great deal more for the good of the Service and the cause.”24
Blue had run into the same wall of denial and deceit that had bedeviled Joseph Kinyoun and Joseph White. Now those forces were obstructing his mission, complaining about the lab assistance of Drs. Kellogg and Ryfkogel. However, Blue’s way was not to collide head-on, but rather to circumvent.
“I humored them to the extent of saying that only our Service men should touch or handle preparations in the laboratory. I did this with a view to forestall any unjust criticism that might be given out by them. Of course, I know that Doctors Ryfkogel and Kellogg are as safe to have around as any men in the profession, but I did not want our work discredited on account of local prejudice,” he reported to Washington. “There is some amusement to be gained by yielding to some of their objections, for then we are put on the qui vive.”25 A soldier’s son, Blue remained on the alert, on the qui vive, a French sentry’s cry that means “Who goes there?”
Despite five new cases and four deaths, the newspapers largely ignored the outbreak, and most San Franciscans were oblivious to any hazard that might spoil their summer. Even Ho Yow, the consul of China, took a break from his diplomatic duties in August to attend the summer harness races in the hotbox of Sacramento. There, his mare Solo streaked ahead of the competition. Sore losers attributed Solo’s victory to her driver’s racing silks, with their coiled dragon, which mesmerized the competition.
The city’s long-festering labor unrest exploded in late summer. By a unanimous vote of the City Labor Federation, a general strike was called on July 29. City teamsters were idled, along with fifteen thousand sailors, longshoremen, and freight handlers on the waterfront. The port was paralyzed. Striking workers marched four abreast down Market Street. By August, the strike funds and patience were running out.
On August 28, as five hundred striking teamsters left a benefit baseball game south of Market Street, they ran into dray wagons driven by nonunion men. Hurling rocks, the strikers harried the strikebreakers up 6th Street to Market. The rioters were cheered by five thousand spectators. Special police fired guns to break up the mob. Scores were bloodied in the melee, but no one was killed.26
Plague, however, was still a lethal force. Its next assault occurred in late August, just as Chinatown celebrated a festival of the dead. People donned their fine silk robes. The streets were hung with lanterns and bouquets. Scrolls of poetry were burned, and tables of delicacies were spread out to propitiate the souls of the departed. The very next day they had a new spirit to appease.
On August 31, the body of a twenty-eight-year-old Chinese man, Lee Mon Chou, was carried to the plague morgue. Lee had an infection that ruptured glands in his pelvis and invaded his lungs. He died at the Oso Cigar Factory on Dupont Street, where he worked among a dozen men. With a cough or a sneeze, Lee could have infected them all. The cigar factory was immediately shut down, fumigated with sulfur, and swabbed with formaldehyde. But before the doctors could find the dead man’s co-workers, they disappeared like wisps of incense from a joss stick.27
Just before Labor Day, Blue boarded a train out of San Francisco to settle some personal business, leaving the Merchant Street morgue and lab in the able hands of Mark White and Donald Currie. The bullying of the plague doctors intensified in his absence. For the first time, San Franciscans opened their papers to read about some unorthodox uses of Governor Gage’s plague fund.
The Morse Detective Agency billed the state health board $326.25 for spying on the bacteriologist H. A. L. Ryfkogel and the federal doctors as they made their rounds in Chinatown. They insinuated that Ryfkogel was inoculating Chinese corpses with plague, as they had said Kinyoun was. “Governor Gage has not the instincts of a gentleman,” Ryfkogel told the local press. “I am not a bit surprised to hear that he had my footsteps dogged through Chinatown by hired shadows.”28
But any outrage brewing over the state-funded spying was immediately eclipsed by the report of gunshots three thousand miles away. In Buffalo, New York, while President William McKinley attended a reception inside the Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exposition, an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz rushed up and pumped two bullets into his chest and abdomen. McKinley remained conscious, prayed aloud, comforted his wife, and bade the American people to keep courage. For eight days he fought, but he ultimately succumbed to his wounds.
At 2:15 A.M. on September 14, San Francisco fire stations tolled, ringing fifty-eight times, once for every year of McKinley’s life. Stricken crowds gathered outside the newspaper offices and numbly absorbed the news. Behind his wire rims, the newspapers said, the newly sworn forty-two-year-old President Theodore Roosevelt fought back tears.
Rupert Blue headed back to San Francisco just in time to tie on a black crepe armband for the month of mourning ordered by Surgeon General Wyman.