RED CIRCLES AND BLACK CROSSES multiplied across the map of Chinatown, marking new cases and deaths. The city health board tried to help, but the state health board blocked Blue at every turn.
Dr. W. P. Mathews, secretary of the state health board, burst into the Merchant Street lab, loudly declaring that the federal doctors had no authority to practice medicine in California. If they kept on diagnosing plague, he threatened, he’d cut off their access to patients.
Blue exploded. “Scant courtesy, singular apathy, and in the end, interference have characterized [the state board] at a time of grave public peril,” he wrote to Surgeon General Wyman.1
In the face of state hostility, Blue told Wyman he was relying more and more on his interpreter, Wong Chung. Wong’s evolution from simple translator to disease sleuth galvanized Blue’s investigation. Wong Chung helped sift fact from fiction in the most difficult cases. And the state health board wasn’t happy about it.
Two physicians working in league with the state, William Lawlor and Elmer Stone, “shamefully abused” Wong Chung for reporting cases to the federal doctors, a worried Mark White told Blue. The state doctors spread word through the streets of Chinatown that federal plague doctors were only out to oppress the community. By assisting them, they added, Wong Chung had turned traitor. White said the two had warned Wong, “[S]omebody was going to get killed.”2
There was no doubt: The Barbary Coast turned the public health canon on its head. Yet even in the depth of their frustration with the state, Rupert Blue and Mark White were learning that they could relax some of the most rigid protocols of quarantine. While showing no mercy to the germ of plague, they began to show more leniency toward its victims. Where Joseph Kinyoun and Joseph White had seen the Chinese as liars, Rupert Blue and Mark White saw instead a people driven from fear to evasion and from evasion into further danger.
“To remove the fear of a ruinous quarantine… will take away one-half the Chinaman’s hostility,” Blue wrote Washington. From now on he would quickly disinfect a plague house, isolate only the patient’s immediate family, and reopen the place in a few days so life could return to normal. Still, suspicions died hard.
“It is almost impossible to catch the Chinese contacts,” Blue admitted. “They seem to know a suspicious case, and depart, like the fleas, before the body cools off. Each case, though, is a law unto itself… and no rule can be set for all of them. We are still working quietly, avoiding friction with the state or the Chinese.”3
In the same letter, Blue warned that plague was unpredictable: “The outcome of the situation here defies any attempt to outline it.”
Every morning, Blue and White left the Occidental Hotel and walked or hopped a streetcar for the half a dozen blocks north toward Chinatown. A briny wind off the bay stirred morning scents of coffee, sourdough, and the deposits left by carriage horses.
When they passed the corner of Clay and Kearny, with Telegraph Hill rising ahead of them, Blue and White continued another half block north and turned into the narrow alley of Merchant Street. Once through the laboratory doors, they entered a cloud of disinfectant vapor mixed with the musky warmth of the animal lab. In autumn 1901, the morgue was receiving a steady drip of customers, and today was no exception.
The hearse driver nodded toward a shrouded figure on a litter. Lifting the sheet, Blue saw the husk of a middle-aged laborer lying still and sallow, with mumpslike swellings jutting under his jaw. Chew Ban Yuen, a forty-year-old migrant worker, had just returned from a season in the Alaska fish canneries when he was felled by a profound weakness and savage sore throat. His friends brought balms from a traditional healer—to no avail. He died September 29 in a fetid, sunless tenement on Waverly Street. His autopsy confirmed plague.
Newspapers were full of the coming mayoral election, but plague was the issue that everyone dodged. The campaign was all about labor and management. After a summer of strike violence, San Franciscans—especially workers—were bruised and vulnerable to seduction by a new party promising a progressive labor stance. This opportunity beckoned to a political kingmaker named Abraham Ruef and his handpicked mayoral candidate, the suave society violinist Eugene Schmitz.4
Schmitz had never given a speech, but he was a Victorian Adonis with a lush black pompadour and beard. Ruef supplied the brains and cash for the campaign. And without ever uttering the word plague, the new Union Labor candidate vaulted into the lead.
From the lab on Merchant Street, the public health team watched the race with unease. As dusk fell on Election Day, November 5, crowds gathered at Kearny and Market Streets. Colored fireworks would signal the winner: red for the Democrats, white for the Republicans, and green for Labor. A brass band blared, punctuated by the boom of rockets. In a shower of sparkles that lit the crowd with the color of money, Schmitz was proclaimed mayor. Boisterous joy rocked the working-class districts south of Market Street.5
The joy was short-lived. Once installed, the Union Labor Party was less about principles than power. Now attorney to the mayor, Abe Ruef set about perfecting the art of graft. After hours at the Pup saloon, Ruef nursed a glass of absinthe and received lines of favor seekers, soliciting $1 million in legal retainers—bribes—from utility companies, gambling parlors, boxing clubs, and brothels.6
With so many rich veins of patronage to be mined, City Hall saw scant profit in public health. During the weeks surrounding the election, the rat fleas attacked and sickened seven new people in Chinatown. Before Christmas, a barber, a cobbler, a cigar maker, and a hardware salesman would land in the morgue.
A lucky few were like Huie Jin, who contracted a mild case of plague. Ignoring Mark White’s biopsy results indicating plague, state doctors diagnosed venereal disease. When Huie Jim sued for release from quarantine, the state board of health backed his demand and helped win his release.7
Huie Jin survived his brush with plague. But the habeas corpus cases further frayed state-federal relations. The new mayor kept mum.
Cold weather was the off-season for plague. Sweeping in ahead of the rainy season, chill winds drove the rats underground, into warm basements and subterranean sewers. There the rat sickness would fester unseen until spring coaxed the animals back into human dwellings.
While disease wintered in the Asian quarter, white San Franciscans felt carefree. With the strikes settled and the election decided, autumn arts and sporting exhibitions took center stage. A covey of divas flocked to town for opera season. Sybil Sanderson came to star in Manon, and Ernestine Schumann-Heink unleashed her throaty contralto in Die Walküre.
After a crowd of 3,300 cheered her performance in Lohengrin, the soprano Emma Eames took a day off and went adventuring in Chinatown. Riding past pearl dealers and fishmongers, she soaked up its mix of splendor and squalor. She took tea at a Dupont Street restaurant, then dashed back to her Palace suite, urging her fellow singers to do Chinatown. Still unsure how the disease spread, the public health officers must have felt uneasy about tourists in a plague zone. But they kept silent about the diva’s visit.
Rupert Blue liked grand opera well enough, but he spent more of his free nights on boxing than bel canto. Billed by promoters as “the arts fistic,” boxing was the municipal sport. The public worshiped icons of the ring like Gentleman Jim Corbett. His mighty physique was displayed across the illustrated sports pages, along with a table of his muscle measurements. His contests in the ring and his turbulent love life were news events. Quacks sold electric belts that promised to turn weaklings into mountains of muscle.
While the silk-hatted and ermine-caped set settled into the plush tiers of the Grand Opera, a crowd of seven thousand boxing fans snaked into the cavernous Mechanics’ Pavilion at Larkin and Grove Streets. For $2 to $20 a ticket, spectators could watch the favorite, Jim Jeffries, pound challenger Gus Ruhlin. The mellow gaslights dimmed. Eighty new arc lights snapped on, flooding the ring in an electric aura “more brilliant than the brightest day.” Grinning and cracking his gum, Jeffries bounded over the ropes and dispatched Ruhlin in five easy rounds. Exiting in a beery haze and crunching peanut shells underfoot, the crowd grumbled that the fight was fixed. Wrote the Chronicle sports reporter: “They were a disgusted lot….”8
Blue, whose forefathers all topped six feet, was a natural heavyweight and a passionate amateur boxer. When Gentleman Jim Corbett visited San Francisco, Blue arranged to meet him.
“I can’t talk you out of it,” Corbett told the southerner with the black handlebar mustache. “So come on out and I’ll box you.” In the smell of canvas and the company of men, Blue found a tonic.9
Spectator or sparring partner, Blue found the fights one way to purge the frustrations of his job. Like the Jeffries-Ruhlin fight, his job was an uneven match. With only medical science on his side, Blue saw the town’s politics, money, and racial polarities aligned against his cause. The odds were disheartening.
ON THANKSGIVING DAY 1901, the holiday’s peace was shattered in Chinatown. A tong member stole a servant girl’s bracelet and pawned it. The petty theft provoked a bloodbath between rival gangs. To be sure, Chinatown was not the only crime zone in the city, but the tong murders were held up by the white press as reason enough to renew the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Tong war casualties totaled fourteen in 1901, but plague deaths exceeded twenty that year alone. More lethal than gang violence, plague was a methodical serial killer, quietly going about its business, while polite society never spoke its name.
Warily, Chinatown watched the exclusion law campaign gain steam. The Chinese Six Companies called on every Chinese in town to donate $1 to help defeat the anti-Chinese laws. Over at the offices of the Chung Sai Yat Po, the Chinatown daily newspaper, editors viewed the campaign with mounting alarm. Editor Ng Poon Chew, who had covered the plague discrimination cases, now saw the nationwide threat that was looming and embarked on an East Coast crusade to try to change American minds.
Barnstorming on behalf of Chinese civil rights, Reverend Chew opened with a selection of hymns, then launched into his speech. The United States needs Asian trade to prosper, he ventured, so it must abolish the Chinese Exclusion Act.10 With his cropped Western haircut, clipped mustache, and starched white collar, the thirty-five-year-old Chew gave audiences a look at Chinatown they had never seen. He was neither a tong hit man, an opium addict, nor a comic-strip coolie, but an educated Chinese American professional man.
Nonetheless, few heard his message. His speeches were drowned out by insistent union demands to oust coolie labor. And that was the message that reached the White House. Unlike the crude rants of the daily press, Roosevelt’s exclusion-law speech was elegant. Bound in fine brown morocco with gold lettering, the president’s address said American labor must be protected from “the presence in this country of any laborers [who] represent a standard of living so depressed that they can undersell our men in the labor market and drag them to a lower level.” Roosevelt concluded: “I regard it as necessary, with this end in view, to re-enact immediately the law excluding Chinese laborers, and to strengthen it.”11
So saying, the president who dined with Booker T. Washington and lowered the black-white barrier used his bully pulpit to preach Chinese exclusion. Reverend Chew returned home defeated to a Chinatown doubly infected by epidemic and exclusion fever.
IT HAD BEEN NINE MONTHS since Rupert Blue had left his quiet post in Milwaukee, having been ordered to San Francisco to wipe out plague. Now, after performing scores of autopsies, confirming dozens of diagnoses, and conducting a cleanup of Chinatown, he had, at best, fought plague to a political stalemate. In his cool soldierly diction, he had filed weekly case reports to the surgeon general, noting the numbers of plague cases and deaths, autopsies and lab tests. Although the state blocked him at every turn, he fought to maintain a stoic sense of calm and command amid the chaos.
But as 1901 drew to a close, Blue wrote to the surgeon general acknowledging his hopes of returning to the Midwest. There, he was truly in charge. There, he could command his station on the Lake Michigan waterfront without obstruction from state politicians. By year’s end, Wyman granted his wish to resume command of the Milwaukee station. However, it would prove to be only a temporary leave from the woes of San Francisco, where the plague took no holiday.
Just before New Year’s Day 1902, a dead rat turned up in a Stockton Street garbage can. Like an ancient augur, Mark White split the animal in two, peered into its liver, and saw plague in the year ahead. As the New Year got under way, White was left in charge of a plague that played hide-and-seek, with stuttering outbreaks and eerie pauses.
Elsewhere, 1902 had promised to be an age of progress. Marconi forecast a world where wireless transmitters would beam messages over continents. Doctors envisioned curing cancer with invisible “X-rays.” In the Examiner on New Year’s Day 1902, San Franciscans read scientific prophecies by the novelist Jules Verne. News would be transmitted by airwaves, Verne predicted. Electricity would banish night and illuminate a twenty-four-hour workday. Only airplanes made him skeptical: Man, he said, would never fly.12
San Francisco’s profile rose to heady heights. On Nob Hill, architects drew up plans for a stone palazzo to be called the Fairmont Hotel. Developers also unveiled a blueprint for a new steel-ribbed skyscraper on California Street: the Merchants’ Exchange. All the new towers boasted that they were earthquake- and fireproof—a claim that just begged to be tested.
Chinatown lit the fuse of the Lunar New Year, but its firecrackers failed to dispel its demons. Consul Ho Yow lost his job amid charges that he spent too much time at the races and too little time fighting the exclusion laws. Katie Wong Him, a twelve-year-old schoolgirl, sought admission to the city’s white schools; she was rejected owing to her race. Still, the rats ran unchecked through the neighborhood. Mark White predicted “the growing likelihood of an epidemic….”13
Swathed in fumes of formaldehyde and carbolic acid, White ruminated in his Merchant Street laboratory over how to interpret the stop-and-start rhythm of the plague cases. Was plague eradicated and then reintroduced? Was it hiding or provoking sporadic cases that went undetected? Or was it killing people whose bodies were shipped out of town in dry goods boxes and buried on Sacramento River ranches? Most likely, he feared, all three things were happening at once.
White planned to brief the new mayor, Eugene Schmitz, and enlist City Hall in the plague fight. But he never got his chance. At five P.M. on March 25, as the sun set behind the City Hall dome, Mayor Schmitz and Abe Ruef burst into the health department, startling a doctor who was giving a vaccination.
“I have removed the present Board of Health and appointed these gentlemen as their successors,” said Schmitz with a flourish toward four doctors trailing behind him. “There is no plague in the city,” the mayor said. By its diagnosis, the old health board was guilty of “injury and injustice to the people and the city of San Francisco.”14 The next morning’s newspapers applauded the mayor’s action. A judge barred the firings because no hearings had been held. But Mayor Schmitz and Boss Ruef charged back to court to defend the purge.
Meanwhile, plague kept up a petty creeping pace.
Then, on the afternoon of May 19, the phone rang at the Chinese Six Companies. Wong Chung, the translator, answered it. A voice reported a corpse at the offices of the Horn Hong Newspaper Co. on Washington Street. The body was that of an editor, Lee Mong, aged forty-six, who had fallen dead at one P.M. The caller then turned skittish, asking for whom Wong worked.
“I work for the doctors of Washington,” said Wong. At this, the caller said he needed to report the death to the state health board and the Chinese Six Companies’ doctor, Elmer Stone. Then he hung up.15
Refusal to yield bodies, false death certificates, patients coached to keep silent—it was all part of the daily game of resistance played by the state doctors, and it had Governor Gage’s fingerprints all over it.
Mark White dashed off a handwritten letter to Dr. Wyman asking for the Secret Service to help find out whether the state health board was helping to conceal Chinese bodies. “I regret [to] suspect Dr. Stone of such rascality, but I believe that he is perfectly suitable for such work.”16
Dr. Stone’s boss, Governor Gage, was just then fighting for his political life. The past year’s strike violence had eroded his popularity. Now fresh scandals erupted. Gage was charged with furnishing his house with prison-made furniture. In a page one exposé in the Call on May 24 and 26, he was linked with a San Quentin Prison procurement fraud featuring damask linens and ladies’ nightgowns—unusual goods in a jail inventory. Gage sued the Call. The Call countersued and got a bench warrant for the governor’s arrest. Republicans wearied of the antics. Finally, the Southern Pacific Railroad Co.—a great engine of Republican power—abandoned Gage for a new candidate, an eye doctor from Oakland named George Pardee.17
Even as his political star waned, Gage was proud and unrepentant about his plague stance. His Chinatown cleanup—part of the deal he cut with the surgeon general—was done on the cheap: fumigating thirty million cubic feet of Chinatown buildings using only three hundred pounds of sulfur—a job that should have taken thirty tons. It was a sham, a show cleanup that left rats and fleas alive. Still, Gage and Dr. Stone told the federal doctors that their mission was over and “should have stopped here long ago.”18
The federal doctors did not pull out, however. The federal public health mission was, in fact, broadening its scope. Under Walter Wyman, the name of the U.S. Marine Hospital Service was changed to the U.S. Public Health and Marine Hospital Service. Just as the plague campaign had broadened from shipboard inspection to investigation of an urban outbreak, so the service was evolving now from a corps of doctors treating sick seamen to a public health service fighting epidemics all over the country.
It was fortunate that the federal doctors stayed on the scene. For in the summer of 1902, the plague came roaring back. After months of quiet infestation, the rats emerged from hiding, coated with ravenous fleas. Suddenly, Mark White and his team had more than they could handle.
On July 12, Chin Guie, an employee of the Chinese consulate, staggered into the Oriental Dispensary. The dispensary gave comfort but delayed calling the federal doctors until Chin was in his final agony. Mark White arrived to find the man near death. In five minutes, Chin was gone. White learned that one of the state board’s doctors, Dr. Fitch, had treated him for syphilis—despite a big bubo on his thigh.
In the weeks that followed, more victims surfaced: a young restaurant worker, an aged cigar maker, a housewife, a cook, another newspaper man, and a blind woman who had never left her apartment. She was case number 71.
The little morgue and lab was strained. Carbolic acid—part of the morgue and lab’s daily disinfection bath—stained its floor the hue of tobacco juice around a spittoon. The building had no rugs and only a single heating grate to dispel the penetrating fog that flowed off the bay. The daily workload increased: collecting the dead, conducting autopsies, taking blood and tissue samples, growing cultures of bacteria, and injecting test animals to confirm a diagnosis. With each new death, the process began again. The small lab staff fell behind. White asked for an extra $25 a month for help in making cultures. Surgeon General Wyman vetoed the plan as too costly.
While the shell game of people moved around San Francisco Bay continued, White learned that someone had paid $100—about two months’ wages—to smuggle a sick teenage boy out of San Francisco to Oakland’s Chinatown. There, three days later, the boy died and a cook fell mortally ill with plague.19 By September 1902, the toll reached eighty cases.
The Chinese government installed a new consul general in San Francisco. The new consul tried again to ban autopsies in Chinatown as a racist practice. The public health doctors refused, ruling that the victim of any suspicious death—irrespective of race—had to undergo a postmortem examination to rule out the possibility of plague. Amid this changing of the guard, the Chinatown gangsters known as “highbinders” grew bolder. Highbinders, named for their habit of coiling their queues high up under their hats, had long waged turf battles for control of lucrative Chinatown rackets.
But now the highbinders took aim at a new target: the interpreter Wong Chung. Where the state health board had seen Wong Chung’s work as troublesome, some Chinese now saw it as treason. The knives were out.
“The Chinese are threatening Wong Chung because he is assisting the Marine Hospital Service in the work of eradicating plague,” Mark White wired the surgeon general. “… Wong has been advised by friends to guard against highbinders. The situation [is] serious.”20
One night, Wong attended a special meeting of his old colleagues at the Chinese Six Companies. As the elders talked business, several highbinders emerged from the crowd. They lunged for Wong Chung. Wong, although deceptively soft and middle-aged, was nimble. He dodged and evaded their grasp, his queue flying. The Chinese Six Companies president threw himself between Wong and his pursuers. In the scuffle, the assailants fled, disappearing into the night streets of Chinatown.21
After the botched assault, U.S. secretary of state John Hay moved in to shield Wong from violence. Hay formally asked the Chinese minister in Washington to help stop the harassment of “Federal Chinese employees in their official duties.”22 Under the cloak of state department protection, Wong Chung continued his medical rounds unmolested.