BLUE HAD NO ILLUSIONS. “The campaign is likely to be a long one,” he warned a colleague in Washington, “and the infestation will be fifty times more difficult of eradication than before. The foci are to be found all over the city, the greater number existing in the burned district where, on account of the protection afforded by the ruins, the rats multiply in countless numbers…. The people are very much alarmed [and] fear a quarantine….”1
At 401 Fillmore Street, Blue organized his command center and the federal laboratory. Tucked into a nondescript annex behind the Victorian headquarters stood the heart of the operation—“the rattery.” The rattery held narrow lead-topped dissection tables, covered in rodent carcasses that were split tip to tail for postmortem analysis. Tacked on the walls of the rattery were sticky rectangles of flypaper to trap any insects that might alight on a rat and then buzz away to spread the germs. It was like a coroner’s office for rats.
Aproned men in shirtsleeves—sometimes gloved—skinned and dipped each carcass in disinfectant. Each rat was numbered, nailed on a shingle, and labeled with the date and address of its capture. With quick, light blade strokes, the men made a long vertical incision, gently, to avoid damaging internal organs. Peering into the split thorax and abdomen, they searched for signs that mirrored human plague symptoms: swollen glands about the throat, enlarged hearts, livers, or spleens. Any sign of infection triggered a further round of tests.
The men summoned Stansfield when they found signs of plague. He then snipped minuscule tissue samples of glands, spleen, or liver. From these, he prepared glass slides for the microscope. He also dotted samples onto culture plates containing a nutrient broth resembling an overripe dish of jellied consommé. Then he watched the culture dish to see if the samples would sprout germ colonies with a ground-glass texture, spreading and thickening into plaques with a pattern that resembled beaten copper—the look of plague bacteria colonies. He injected the germs into guinea pigs and waited to see if the animals lived or died. On such tests, the city’s future health depended.
It was a bloody, reeking business. The rat crews were skinning, splitting, and examining rats as fast as they could. As their speed and efficiency grew, the crews dissected hundreds of rats a day. Each day they filled eight to ten steel garbage cans with split carcasses, which were carted off to be burned in the incinerator. The rank and musky scent clung to their clothes and nostrils. It took bars of strong soap, dousings with eau de cologne, and snifters of brandy to rid themselves of the reek of it at day’s end.
It was always a dangerous operation. Although any rats caught live could be plunged into boiling water, drowned in kerosene, or gassed with formaldehyde, there was always a chance that some stray flea might leap off its doomed host in time to bite the unwary inspector. And for this reason, the men took injections of vaccine or antiserum.
With the growing harvest, Blue’s men acquired an intimate knowledge of the domestic life of Rattus norvegicus. The Norway rat—also known as the brown rat or sewer rat—is a bulky hunchbacked brute with a small head and naked scaly tail. A prolific breeder, it beats its smaller seagoing cousin Rattus rattus (aka the shipboard rat or roof rat) in fecundity. Blue and Rucker analyzed the enemy:
We have found in our work that a rat-run usually branches like a Y. At one extremity of the fork is a little store-house in which may be found corn, wheat, pieces of bread and apple cores. At the other end is the nest made of rags and feathers laid on straw or hay and offering an ideal breeding place for fleas. This display of ingenuity and foresight gives us a clew [sic] to another characteristic of the rat, namely his sagacity… when man begins to fight the rat it is a battle between the intelligence of the one and the instinct of the other with the advantage not always on the side of the former.2
Every day, the laborers hit the streets, searching houses, placing poisons, closing rat holes, and burning garbage. Medical inspectors made rounds to inspect the sick and the dead. Most plague patients were taken to the county’s plague camp—a few blocks from the old condemned hospital—or to its morgue.
The link between rats, people, and plague now captured more of Rupert Blue’s attention. Even during the first outbreak, he’d operated on the assumption that controlling vermin was a key to controlling plague. Only now did the precise role of fleas start to emerge from the shadows.
Blue wrote Washington asking them to send him literature on the spread of plague in India and China. In 1906 the doctors of the plague commission in India and others had just begun to publish their confirmations of what French researcher Paul-Louis Simond had discovered a decade earlier—that a flea bite could spread plague germs. Surgeon General Wyman, recognizing this as a landmark observation, had begun circulating the reports to his men up and down the West Coast in early 1907.
Poring over those reports, Blue began to refine his attack. Rats were the agents of epidemic, dealing death by means of the insects that hid in their pelts. Now Blue began to push his men to autopsy more and more rats every day, as many as the rattery could handle. He began to understand and anticipate the alternating seasons of rat plague and human plague, mediated by a tiny go-between: a glossy brown bloodsucker no bigger than a sesame seed.
The peak season for human plague ran from April to September, Blue observed, coinciding with the balmy months when fleas flourished, bred, and fed avidly. Then from October to March, cold would descend, and the fleas would hibernate. But these winter doldrums were deceiving, for it was high season for rat plague. Wet weather makes them loath to leave their burrows for food, and they turn to cannibalism. Sick members of the colony are defenseless against their predatory kin. As they feed on one another, the infection spreads. In spring, warmth lures the rats into the open just when flea eggs hatch. The cycle begins anew and lasts through the warmth of a San Francisco autumn, until the chilly bands of rain sweep in off the Pacific, driving vermin underground.
After less than a month on site, Blue’s October 3 tally of human plague showed fifty-one positive cases, forty-four suspicious cases, and thirty deaths. With the rats flourishing and the sickness increasing, Blue needed to enlist the city in his campaign. He drafted a circular to be delivered to every home, business, warehouse, factory, bakery, restaurant, and hotel in town. Set out traps and poison, he urged. Plug up rat holes. Seal garbage in metal cans. Make every building rat-proof. He avoided the word plague. The Merchants’ Association liked this soft sell and sent Blue’s circular to every address in San Francisco.3
Of all the stricken blocks in San Francisco, none was more infected than Lobos Square. A refugee camp in the Marina district, Lobos Square was a gridlike village of 750 wooden earthquake cottages built by the Red Cross to shelter two thousand homeless people. It was so vast that it had its own numbered streets and addresses. It also attracted its own resident rats.
The rats slipped into the wooden cottages, their pelts alive with fleas. The fleas alighted on sixteen-month-old Mary Costello, puncturing her tender skin. The toddler fussed and scratched the bite, working the germs deeper into the bite wound. Days later, fever and ominous swellings arose. She died on September 27. A neighbor child, five-year-old Thomasa Herrera, died two weeks later. Living as refugees, dying of epidemic, the girls had few to mourn them. According to city death certificates, their parents were unknown. They were among the camp’s eighteen plague victims.
The next week, on October 18, Blue sent an update in code: “Bumpkin to date: positive sixty five, suspicious thirty eight, deaths thirty eight….”4 Sixty-five cases of confirmed plague, thirty-eight suspicious cases, and thirty-eight dead. Blue usually sent encrypted dispatches under his own name instead of his heroic-sounding code name, “Achieving.”
The rat eradication program was costing $30,000 to $50,000 a month for salaries for his dozen medical officers, wages for three hundred laborers, thousands of traps, tons of cheese bait and mountains of poison, plus the rent on the Victorian headquarters. But the city could ill afford to help; every coin in the municipal coffers was earmarked to mend the earthquake-ruined streets and sewers. Blue haggled with Washington for funds. After his long-lost lab set arrived, smashed in transit, Blue was denied the $250 to replace it. He was ordered to get competitive bids. Federal protocols ground slowly.
Back in Washington from a trip abroad, Surgeon General Walter Wyman leafed through the reports from San Francisco. He was furious—not about the plague, but about Blue’s bookkeeping. He dashed off a stinging critique, demanding that reports be sent in a carefully prescribed style and format.
Blue absorbed this rebuke. It was clear the surgeon general had no notion of the disaster Blue was just barely holding at bay: a city shattered, crawling with rats, deeply plague infested, tended by an unreliable labor force of strikers and political hacks. Blue tidied his reports, swore to unify his men, and drove them to boost their catch—first 1,000 rats a day, then 1,200 rats a day.5
As the rattery’s operations grew, and as Mayor Edward Taylor readied a delegation to plead for federal aid, Secretary of the Treasury George B. Cortelyou relented. The federal government agreed to bear plague expenses of $50,000 a month. Washington’s promised cash infusion came none too soon. The contagion of fear was spreading overseas. In late October, the kingdom of Norway declared a quarantine against San Francisco, Secretary of State Elihu Root told the cabinet. On October 29, Blue reported that San Francisco had counted seventy-eight positive cases of plague, thirty-five suspicious cases, and fifty deaths.
Blue escalated his war on rats. On November 8, he wrote to Surgeon General Wyman that his weekly catch reached a new high of thirteen thousand rats. Still more rats lay dead of plague or poison, hidden in labyrinths under city streets. The sewer men had never seen so many.
But thanks to the rats’ legendary procreative power, they were now breeding faster than they could be trapped. A female rat bears ten to fifteen pups every four months. The pups mature quickly and begin to breed at the age of four months. By the end of a year, one family can produce eight hundred rats. The quake ruins served as both honeymoon bower and nursery. The explosion in the rat population was echoed by a flea baby boom. In winter, Blue observed, his men could comb twenty rats and find only one flea among them. But in warm weather, everything changed: One healthy rat could harbor twenty-five fleas, while a sick one could carry eighty-five.
Amid all these multiplying vermin, everyone in town, rich and poor, was put in harm’s way. Not even the medical profession was immune. The family of a physician identified in records only as “Dr. C.” noticed a high, sweet, sickening odor wafting from the walls of their second-story flat. To root out the source of the stench, the doctor tore out the wainscoting around some plumbing lines. There inside a hollow wall lay two rats in an advanced state of putrefaction. Removing them from the wall took care of the smell, but it was a risky operation. Days later, one family member was dead of plague, and another was critically ill. After an investigation, Blue concluded that rat fleas, which had been trapped and starving on the dead rats in the wall, took advantage of the doctor’s remodeling to escape and prey on his family for their next warm-blooded meal.6
Playing with rats was even deadlier for a family in the Mission district. One day in November, two young Bowers brothers were playing in an unused cellar when they made a thrilling find: a furry rat corpse. After entombing the rat in a shoebox coffin, the brothers performed a funeral service and buried the animal. The macabre game was natural enough, given the profession of their father: Otis Howard Bowers was an undertaker.
Following their solemn service, the boys raced home for dinner at 2888 Mission Street, a strip of Victorian flats over shops along the clamorous commercial thoroughfare named for the white Spanish adobe church of Mission Dolores nearby.
The boys unwittingly brought home a souvenir of their secret game: fleas. The parasites leapt unseen from the rat cadaver onto the children’s legs and hitchhiked home, where the boys rejoined their parents, their grandmother, and their little sister.
Insidiously, the infection took hold. The first to feel its effects was the thirty-seven-year-old father of the family, who discovered a tender lump on his right thigh. Soon, a fever and crushing fatigue forced him to bed. As his wife and mother-in-law hovered around the sickroom, Mr. Bowers grew insensible of his surroundings.
With her husband febrile and unresponsive, a frightened Margaret Bowers called for a doctor. By this time, her husband’s illness was so advanced that the doctor could offer little to help. The infection overflowed from his lymph glands into his bloodstream, throwing him into irreversible shock and organ failure. An hour after the doctor’s visit, Bowers was dead.
By now, one of his boys, three-year-old Joseph, had sprouted a painful lump in his left thigh. The little boy was put in a carriage and taken to the isolation hospital.
Two nights after Howard Bowers died, his widow plunged into a profound malaise. Neighbors might have mistaken her misery for deep mourning. But it wasn’t grief alone that blanched her cheeks and reddened her eyes. Pain pounded her skull and raked her back and limbs. Despite the cool of late fall, fever cloaked her corset in clammy sweat.
When doctors arrived the next morning, they found Margaret Bowers very weak. Her bloodshot gaze was baleful, and her face was a mask of pain and fear—the “pestlike expression” that doctors now saw as a sign of plague. During examination, doctors discovered a mass of swollen, tender glands in her left thigh. Doctors gathered up her limp form, bundled her into a horse-drawn ambulance, and carted her to the isolation hospital, where her three-year-old Joseph lay fighting for his life. There she was admitted and injected with massive amounts of Yersin’s antiserum, her only hope of withstanding the infection. In a nearby bed, the resilient Joseph began to improve.
Meanwhile, at home, Mrs. Bowers’s two-year-old daughter and her sixty-year-old mother, Bridget Noiset, developed ominous fevers and swellings. The toddler and her grandmother were now admitted to the hospital with a diagnosis of bubonic plague. A third Bowers child was hospitalized, but he alone managed to evade the voracious fleas and stay healthy.
Confined in a county hospital isolation cottage, Mrs. Bowers seemed to respond to the antiserum infusions. Her fever wavered and dipped. Doctors hoped she could outlast the siege. But she still complained of an ache beneath her left breast and ribs.
Sudddenly, on the evening of December 6, Margaret Bowers’s fever shot up to 104 degrees. The germs had flowed through her bloodstream, colonizing her lungs. Now she had pneumonic plague.
As she fought to breathe, the bacteria and debris from dead cells clogged the air sacs of her lungs. Her blood frothed but failed to pick up any oxygen. Each breath was labored; she starved for air. On December 8, with her little boy recuperating nearby and her helpless nurses looking on, Margaret Bowers suffocated. Her heart stopped in midcontraction. She was twenty-seven years old.7
The Bowers boys, now orphaned, told the doctors of their dead rat discovery, its mock funeral, and the cardboard tomb. Investigators backtracked to Mission Street, unearthed the coffin, and transported the rat to the plague laboratory at 401 Fillmore Street. There, Blue’s team split, skinned, and autopsied the animal. No one was surprised to find the bacteria of plague.8 An innocent game had killed the boys’ parents.
Not until the second plague was under way did San Francisco address the rats’ portal of entry: the waterfront. Although ships had long been fumigated, few barriers had prevented the rats from scuttling between ship and shore. Now at Blue’s urging, the city began to order the building of metal and concrete wharves and piers, replacing the old, rat-ridden wood pilings. On the hawsers that moored ships to the docks, shippers placed new effective rat guards, some with traps, to thwart the four-legged stowaways. Meanwhile, on dry land, Blue and Rucker refined their training of the rat-catcher corps.
“A man can no more be made into a rat-catcher by giving him a rat trap than he can become a soldier by being provided with a rifle,” Blue wrote.9 He was concerned that his own crew was being undermined by the shoddy and dispirited local laborers they’d hired to catch rats. Many of the men were out-of-work streetcar operators and political hangers-on who had signed up thinking they wouldn’t have to break a sweat. So Blue imposed a merit system, firing the slackers and rewarding the diligent with pay raises. He also transformed rat catching into a precise science.
His executive officer, W. Colby Rucker, wrote a detailed treatise titled “How to Catch Rats.” Take a nineteen-inch French wire trap, placed where rats come to drink, and camouflage it with a layer of hay, straw, or wood, he advised. Then tempt the beasts with an ever-changing smorgasbord of raw meat, cheddar cheese, smoked fish, fresh liver, corned beef, fried bacon, pine nuts, apples, carrots, and corn. Scatter a trail of barley to attract animals to the trap. Smoke the trap with a burning newspaper to mask the telltale scent of human hands. As an added lure, place a small chick or duckling nearby to peep enticingly. When a female rat is caught, leave her in the trap so her cries will summon her suitors and offspring. However, Rucker warned, “It is not wise to kill rats where they are caught, as the squealing may frighten the other rats away.”10 So irresistible was Rucker’s regimen that hundreds of thousands of rats were drawn to their doom.
Khaki-uniformed public health officers patrolled the city’s thirteen plague districts—Blue had added one more district as if to mock superstition, Colby said. The men were becoming a familiar sight to the San Francisco citizenry. Public antagonism now softened a bit. Perhaps overconfidently, Blue chose this moment to venture into the heart of his opposition.
Making an appointment at the editorial offices of the San Francisco Chronicle, Blue requested an audience with Michael Harry de Young. M. H. de Young—an autocratic publisher, Republican power broker, and disappointed Senate hopeful—long had linked the city’s fortunes with his own. A passionate and prodigious collector, he gave the city its first public art gallery, the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. As a lover of beautiful things, the fifty-eight-year-old publisher found no place in his city for anything as hideous as an epidemic. After surviving an attempted assassination and an earthquake, he wouldn’t countenance quarantine. Nor was he about to have his paper’s editorial policy dictated by a federal bureaucrat who would destroy the city for the sake of a scientific theory.
“We need your help,” Blue beseeched. He begged the publisher to offer his readers factual reports on the plague. Without that, the public health service could not engage the support of the people in the gritty business of rat eradication. De Young’s face was opaque, his reply cold and noncommittal. He was used to being courted before a program was launched. Blue’s mission was a failure.
“I had an interview with Mr. De Young,” wrote the crestfallen plague commander to Washington. “He is a strange, stubborn man and may turn his guns on us with greater effect than ever.” However, he noted, “The city authorities, press and people, with the single exception of the Chronicle, seem to be with us heart and soul.”11
Back at the rattery on Fillmore Street, Stansfield and other officers were drained. Yet only a fraction of the lab tests Blue needed was getting done. Fewer than two hundred rats a day were being examined for the infection. He needed more data. The nests of plague—both human and rodent—were so widespread that only three of the city’s thirteen districts remained free from infection.
Just after Thanksgiving, the plague toll reached 106 confirmed cases and 65 deaths. Outwardly, Blue kept up his can-do outlook. His men needed him to be a perfect model of the “sanitarian spirit.” But in private, Blue was anything but cocky.
Blue was late sending funds to his mother and sisters in South Carolina. A bank panic triggered by Washington’s trust-busting made it difficult to buy a draft. So he wrote promising to send his next paycheck home in its entirety and gave his family a report on his progress. “My campaign is showing marked results in reducing the number of cases,” he wrote Annie Maria. But he added, “We have yet a great work to do this winter.”12
Seven days a week, the lights in the mullioned windows of 401 Fillmore Street burned into the night. Weekends and holidays did not interrupt Blue’s calendar. He drove his men hard. They thought him insatiable, a zealot. But remarkably, few men had complained so far. Hundreds of laborers laid thousands of traps, baited with tons of cheese, every month. But the rats still flourished, and the deaths still rose.
By the end of 1907, doctors had diagnosed 136 people with plague and buried 73 of them—almost all in four months. That December, Blue sent Washington a grim prediction for the New Year:
“Conditions are not improving as rapidly as I would like them to…. There can be no doubt that the city is infected from one end to the other,” he said. He felt his campaign was at a crossroads: Rid the city of rats by winter’s end or face “an outbreak of unprecedented proportions.”13
But despite the months of strenuous rat work, eradication seemed as far off as ever. In the war room of his headquarters on Fillmore Street, Rupert Blue paged through medical journals for clues to the plague’s next move. In Manila, when just 2 percent of rats became infected, it ignited an explosive epidemic among the populace. Among San Francisco’s rats, his tests showed that the infection rate was 1.5 percent and rising.
His mission was to exterminate all the rats before the infection rate in San Francisco reached this trigger point. He seized worksheets for the week ended January 11, 1908, and ticked off the figures: 352,000 bits of poisoned bait placed, and thousands of rats collected from traps and the bounty program. He was disheartened to see that the rats’ infection rate had tripled since the fall.
They would have to work harder. Spring was coming on fast. They had little time before new litters of baby rats and hungry hatchling fleas would emerge, ensuring that plague would bloom again.
The logjam in the lab was intolerable, Blue decided. It was moving too slowly; they were testing just one-third of the burgeoning daily rat catch. It was simple: Stansfield must speed up.
Pushing past the glass doors, Blue entered the lab in search of his bacteriologist. There amid the vials and flasks, bathed in the yeasty smell of his bacteria broth, sat Halstead Stansfield. Blue found it hard to choke back his impatience. The lab was falling behind; it needed to run more tests. “I need a trained assistant,” Stansfield replied wearily. Blue replied he’d already asked the surgeon general; the request had been vetoed on budgetary grounds.
Instead of soldiering on, Stansfield was giving up and giving in to his demons. Chronically melancholy, soured by hangover, he’d erupt in a rage when his fellow officers tried to buck him up. Stansfield was still grieving over the deaths of his wife and child. Blue was sorry for his loss, but he had an epidemic to fight.
As if work weren’t troubled enough, an unforeseen accident almost derailed the rat eradication campaign. It was bound to happen in a town as studded with rat bait as a panettone is with raisins. Three children at play spied what looked like a picnic in a French wire basket. Morsels of bread and cheese were buttered with a puree they did not recognize. The children bit into the purloined snack and instantly regretted it.
It was laced with Stearns’ Electric Rat and Roach Paste, containing phosphorous poison, which burns the mucous membranes and leaves a searing trail down one’s throat and stomach. Though wretchedly sick, the children survived. Had they died, the campaign might have died with them.
Blue ordered a ban on phosphorous poison. It was simply too dangerous to use in a densely populated city. The campaign would switch to Danysz virus, the germ that was fatal to rodents but harmless to people. Blue instructed the laboratory at 401 Fillmore to brew up extra-strength batches of the stuff at once.
Once again, Stansfield balked. He now spent days at a time away from his lodgings at the Majestic Hotel. Drowning his grief in alcohol, he was deaf to the pleas of his fellow officers. The lab work languished. Blue had no choice but to ask that Washington replace Stansfield. “I have no hope of a change in him. I have exhausted patience in reasoning with him,” Blue wrote to Assistant Surgeon General Glennan. “The work and the campaign have become so exacting that I scarcely have time to eat and sleep properly, I simply cannot have a controversy with an officer at this time.”14
But Colby Rucker was performing admirably as Blue’s right-hand man. Installed in a modest residential hotel with his wife, Annette, and young son, Colby, he played dominoes and entertained his family with a player piano at night. By day, he and Blue each gave half a dozen speeches to trade and civic groups, schools and clubs. Slowly, the two began to win popular support.
But Blue needed more than public approval. He also needed muscle and money from the city’s business elite. So he urged the state medical society to invite six hundred of the city’s civic, commercial, and professional leaders to a summit on the health crisis. A mass meeting planned for January 18 would galvanize the public, Blue was certain. But when the day came, it was a huge letdown.
Only sixty people showed up. The handful of physicians and public-spirited laymen looked lost in the vast hall. Despite the meager showing, those who attended resolved to grab the public by the lapels and draft civilians as active-duty soldiers in the war on rats. Mayor Taylor appointed a citizens’ committee of twenty-five, led by Bank of California president Homer S. King and Chamber of Commerce president C. C. Moore. They formed the core of the Citizens’ Health Committee, San Francisco’s first grassroots army dedicated to fighting plague. The committee cranked out thousands of handbills. It issued a civic call to arms—summoning every profession, trade, church, temple, lodge, and ladies’ club to rally for San Francisco’s survival.
On January 28, hundreds of men in bowlers and fedoras came by buggy, cable car, and automobile to the granite-pillared Merchants’ Exchange. The steel-framed neoclassical tower, designed by Willis Polk and Daniel Burnham, architect of New York City’s Flatiron Building, had weathered the 1906 earthquake to become a symbol of survival. Its fifteenth floor held a cavernous mahogany ballroom and a curved bar as big as a whale where deal makers drank. On the exchange floor, Blue in uniform was flanked by Governor Gillett and Mayor Taylor.
No new human plague cases had developed in the last three weeks, Blue told them. But it was just a winter intermission. Rat infection levels had tripled since the fall. Without total eradication, the warm weather would rekindle the epidemic. If it flared as it did in the Orient, San Francisco would face massive mortality, quarantine, and economic ruin.
“Unless we obtain the support of the people,” Blue said, “the task is hopeless.” An optimist by nature, Blue had never uttered this word in public. Hopeless. He saw the effect on his listeners’ faces; he was not displeased.15
There was another incentive, too. President Theodore Roosevelt was sending the Great White Fleet west, and it was due to arrive in San Francisco the first week in May. The flotilla of sixteen gleaming white-and-gold battleships of the Atlantic Fleet, with sixteen thousand sailors aboard, was circumnavigating the globe in a display of national pride and military might. The fleet gave San Francisco a chance to revel in patriotism and advertise its strategic advantages as a commercial and military port. It would show the world that, after earthquake and fire, the city of iron and gold was back. Its visit would boost business and real estate values. Even now, reception committees were wiring huge “Welcome” signs with strands of sparkling lights to gleam from every hilltop down to the bay. The pulses of hotel keepers, restaurateurs, and saloon owners quickened at the thought of so many visitors.
But to this city aquiver with anticipation, Blue delivered a sober warning: Admiral Robley D. Evans, commanding officer of the Atlantic Fleet, would ask about health conditions before landing. If the city couldn’t guarantee it was plague-free, there would be trouble.16 The fleet would be diverted to Seattle.
“Gentlemen, Admiral Evans is now en voyage to San Francisco with the fleet,” he said. “When his ship anchors, the first thing he will do will be to send his senior medical officer to me to ask if it will be safe to land his officers and men. I very much hope that I can give you a clean bill of health so that he will not have to go up to Seattle without accepting the wonderful hospitality which you are preparing for him.”
As Colby Rucker remembered it, “The silence was broken only by the busy click of business men’s brains and in a moment all were busily scrambling for a seat on the sanitary bandwagon.”17 All at once, the business leaders had a goal and a deadline. They had three months to spruce up for the fleet or face cancellation of the most magnificent military pageant in city history. They hurled themselves into a frenzy of civic hygiene. They began to organize all the city’s trades to hold meetings for their members. Corporate angels and individual donors heeded the call for funds to support the Citizens’ Health Committee—including some donors who had been reluctant to recognize plague in the earlier outbreak. The city’s commercial elite climbed aboard: Levi Strauss & Co., Southern Pacific Railroad, Wells Fargo & Co., Ghirardelli & Co., and the St. Francis and Fairmont Hotels. From utilities to railroads, banks to brewers, jeans makers to chocolatiers, they resolved to raise half a million dollars.18
Blue’s next target was Butchertown. Every steak and chop, ham and sausage, came from the cattle yards, hog pens, and slaughterhouses set on the bay shore near Islais Creek channel. Butchertown was set far from the city center, so diners couldn’t hear the bawling of doomed cattle or see the swill trough that produced their Sunday roast.
Butchertown’s waterfront setting had long saved slaughterhouses the trouble and expense of incineration and scavenger services. Garbage was simply dumped at the water’s edge and borne away by the tides. The cluster of wood warehouses and shacks stood on piers over the mud flats. As the tide rose, the bay rushed in under the shacks to sweep away the offal. At low tide, it was a groaning board; at high tide, it was a floating banquet for rats who swam up to dine.
“I’ll never forget rowing down Islais Creek, and seeking the great, big, fat rats coming down at low tide to feed to the beach… millions of them,” said one eyewitness, University of California physician Robert Langley Porter.19
Blue went to inspect Butchertown, his boots clumping along boardwalks rusty with oxidized blood. He sent men to document the innumerable sanitary violations. They didn’t know where to start. Vats of viscera, barrels of intestines, stood waiting to be turned into sausage casings. Carcasses were dragged across soggy planks before being carved up and dressed for sale. Through gaps in the killing room floors, scraps fell to the marshland below. The rats fought fiercely over the spoils.
Blue was a plantation lad, reared in the country, steeped in the rural realities of farm life, so he was not squeamish. But what he saw in Butchertown was so foul that he judged his report unfit for public print—unless the butchers refused to cooperate. In that case, he would release the unsavory details to the newspapers, to be read by San Francisco shoppers and diners. Blue promised to withhold his exposé from the public only if the butchers cleaned house.
The city board of health launched hearings on Butchertown and its pork annex, Hogtown.20 Some of the butchers tried to placate the federal doctors by staging a theatrical cleanup. Before a crowd of invited reporters, the butchers unleashed a gang of boys to beat on their wooden walls with sticks, driving gray herds of rats out into the open, where men poured boiling water on the animals. It was a grotesque show.
J. Nonnenman protested that his eponymous slaughterhouse was as clean as any and the victim of a city scheme to drive him out of business. Another competitor tried humor: His rats were the healthiest in the world, he said. The butchers’ defense failed. Six slaughterhouses, several slovenly stables, and an incinerator were all condemned.21
Hearst’s Examiner broke unwelcome news: Two percent of rats were now infected—clearly in the danger zone. “If the human population of the city were infected in the same proportion,” the paper said, “there would today be 8,000 cases in San Francisco.” It chided tight businessmen who groused about giving a few hundred or a thousand dollars to the plague campaign. The alternative, one month of quarantine, would cost over $20 million. “It’s a question of our pockets, and perhaps our lives,” the paper said.22
From the meat markets, Blue turned to the task of cleaning rats from the city’s five thousand stables and countless chicken yards. In the early 1900s, San Franciscan householders insisted on their right to raise eggs at home and stable their own steeds. But the coops and stables provided nests of hay and spilled grain for rats, so Blue ordered them destroyed or rebuilt in rat-proof concrete.
Next, greengrocers along Front Street came under scrutiny. Fruit sellers and vegetable dealers were complacent about tossing banana peels, rotten apples, and wilted produce in the street. The produce district, as a consequence, was second only to Butchertown as a rodent restaurant. One of the city’s largest markets yielded nine infected plague rats. When word got out about the discovery, women threatened to boycott the offending stores. Activists circulated “Don’t patronize” lists of the worst offenders.
Women’s clubs, enlisted by the Citizens’ Health Committee, urged their members to reform their shopping, cooking, and cleaning habits. Patronize pristine food stores only, they argued, and boycott butchers and grocers whose premises are rat havens. Yellow placards were nailed on facades that failed inspection—followed by court summonses if the scofflaws didn’t clean up.23
At the California Club on Clay Street, maidens and matrons in shirtwaists and smart hats listened as Colby Rucker gave a passionate sermon on the new religion of urban hygiene. Poison, trap, and starve them out was the new gospel. The federal plague officers won a host of female converts; the newspapers reveled in stories about the fair warriors in the plague fight.
“When you look in your garbage pails, ladies, think of me!” Colby Rucker said, deadpan.24 Muffled laughter erupted. Rucker’s speech took the starch out of science. He didn’t mind being their poster boy for garbage. Let them laugh, as long as they made their homes plague-free.
Blue was more grateful for Colby’s verbal panache than he ever could express to his face. “Dr. Rucker has been simply invaluable,” he wrote in a letter to Kate on March 11, 1908. “I address audiences because I am compelled to; Rucker does it for the love of the thing. We call him ‘garbage can Rucker’ because that is his hobby.”25
Rucker’s antic speeches, a great favorite with the women’s clubs, hid a tragic irony. While he was lecturing ladies on how to protect their families’ health, his own wife, Annette, was losing hers. She was racked by bouts of coughing—asthma, he thought. He hired buggies to drive her to Ocean Beach so she could fill her lungs with healing drafts of sea air. It helped a little, but her doctor remained worried.
Though public oratory was still a new taste in his mouth, Blue endeavored to remake himself into an ardent preacher for public health. At a noontime meeting of two thousand Southern Pacific freight handlers in the basement of the Flood Building, Rupert Blue led a revival meeting on vermin.
“I intend to kill a rat or two myself tonight, and I want all of you to do the same. It is the noblest work you can do,” he exhorted the men in a South Carolinian’s best imitation of Teddy Roosevelt.26 The rough and callused congregation grumbled skeptically at this doughty, drawling doctor. With his pomaded black hair, center part, and waxed mustache, he looked like a dandy in fatigues. But the railroad workers got the religion, especially after the city board of health boosted the bounty on rats from 10 cents to 25 cents for a male rat and 50 cents for a breeding female.
Blue, for his part, got more comfortable mounting the bully pulpit. And businesses dug deep, none deeper than the railroad. Southern Pacific executives pledged $30,000 to the plague fighters’ war chest.
The evening of Valentine’s Day, Blue ascended the altar to lecture the crowded congregation at the First Unitarian Church. His message was dire. The brawny Norway rat had overrun the city, he told them. Infection abounded as never before; the critical plague prevalence of 2 percent that he had endeavored to avoid was now a reality.27
The clergymen of the city started preaching plague eradication from every church pulpit and temple bima in town. They hit the streets to meet citizens in secular settings. “Cleanliness isn’t next to Godliness,” said Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger of Temple Emanu-El. “Cleanliness is Godliness.”28
The Dutch-born rabbi’s work for the plague campaign that year took an extra measure of fortitude. Just one month earlier, in January 1908, he had lost his daughter Rachel to tuberculosis.
The state board of health, under its president, Martin Regensburger, turned from a tool of plague denial to a firebrand for plague eradication. But like Rabbi Voorsanger, Regensburger had to pause from the plague campaign in January to bury his fourteen-year-old son, Harry, another tuberculosis sufferer.29
Annette Rucker’s coughing grew deep and ragged. Her blooming cheeks grew hollow and wan. Still, she taught young Colby his letters and helped her husband’s career by lunching with the Langley Porters and other members of the medical haut monde. Under her maiden name, Annette Guequierre, she wrote an essay about female plague warriors, saying San Francisco women “fought for the safety of their city as courageously as any Carthaginian mother of old.”30
Blue and Rucker and their fellow officers delivered their speeches to clubwomen, shippers, teamsters, and builders. Mass meetings were convened from union halls and schoolhouses to the Dreamland Skating Rink.
“This city is in danger of a quarantine,” Rucker told a skeptical crowd, “and I want you to understand that if a quarantine is placed on San Francisco, you people will imagine yourselves in the worst corner of hell. The days following the disaster of April 1906 will seem like a holiday picture compared to the days to be spent in a city quarantined for bubonic plague.”31
One group of businessmen urged Blue to get it over with and declare a quarantine, if only to frighten the city’s careless citizens into concerted action. “Friend, have you ever seen a city in quarantine?” Blue asked them gravely. “I have, and I love San Francisco too much to subject her to one.”32
In six weeks, 162 meetings made believers of many. “It got so that a man could hardly go to church to pray, or into a cigar store to punch a slot machine that he did not hear something about rats and the plague,” said local historian Frank Morton Todd.33
After years battling the city’s inertia, Blue found this new momentum heady. For the first time, he sensed he had a shot at success. For the first time since the outbreak, San Franciscans were showing their mettle.
“My dear Mother,” he wrote to Annie Maria in February 1908. “Times have been strenuous with me and the entire staff in this past month. I started an agitation on plague to arouse the citizens to a sense of their danger. This agitation has grown out of my control. The people are aroused. I am making [six] speeches a day. My staff is doing the same. I have received calls for addresses all over the state. I am about worn out but must keep the iron hot and the people demand that I must lead them.” The city’s spirit moved him.
“I thought New Orleans a heroic people,” he wrote his mother, “but find that San Francisco is far greater.”34
By now, Rucker’s throat was so sore from speech making that his swollen uvula hung down the back of his throat. He begged a surgeon to trim the raw tissue. Dubious, the doctor warned he would lose his voice for days.
“Amputate it,” Rucker persisted. He was so exhausted that the enforced silence seemed like a holiday. He spent a week whispering.35
Meanwhile, time had run out on City and County Hospital. The hospital was hopelessly overrun by rodents. In its waning days, Langley Porter and a fellow doctor had returned to the laboratory, where they witnessed the spectacle of rats eating old wound dressings.36
Now vacant of patients, the old clapboard hospital was demolished with dynamite, engines, and cables. Wards and dispensaries that had served poor San Franciscans since 1872 were reduced to a pile of plaster dust and jagged timbers. Then the rubble was torched, flames consuming the infected ruins under the watchful eyes and waiting hoses of the San Francisco Fire Department. After almost four decades of service, it had become one more rat refuge to be destroyed.37
Butchertown’s foul shacks were put to the torch in the spring of 1908. But the fruit vendors, unlike the butchers, routed rats and transformed their businesses into sparkling showplaces. By the end of March 1908, the produce marketplace on Front Street was billed as “clean enough to eat off.” To celebrate this achievement, five hundred citizens spread outdoor tables on Front Street, shaded by white canopies, garlanded with greenery, and set with cornucopias of apples, bananas, pineapples, and figs.
“Perhaps we have killed a million rats, but let us raise the score higher for the sake of San Francisco,” said Mayor Taylor to rousing cheers. Purging plague rats was like evicting grafters from City Hall, he said.
Blue congratulated the greengrocers on their transformation. He tantalized his listeners with a vision of the city’s future as a “health resort”—code words that spelled a tourist bonanza. Then it was Colby Rucker’s turn. After praising the city fathers, he said, it’s time to praise its mothers, the real force behind the cleanup.
“You know that if a woman tells a man to do something, he might as well do it gracefully. He’s got to do it anyhow,” Rucker said. A wave of applause rippled from gloved hands. The ladies gave three cheers for their champion. A brass band struck up “Home Sweet Home.” As Rucker hopped down from the speaker’s chair, his comrades paid tart homage to his speech with a gag gift of a dozen lemons.38