SAN FRANCISCO IN 1900 was a Gold Rush boomtown settling into a gaudy middle age. Fifty years earlier, it had been a miners’ camp pitched upon sand dunes. Now it had a pompous new skyline with skyscrapers nearly twenty stories tall, grand hotels, and Victorian mansions on Nob Hill. Cable cars scaled its hills on chains that jingled like the necklace on a vaudeville soubrette. The city filled three opera houses with the zeal of the nouveaux riches. But underneath its ermine opera cape beat the heart of its rowdy past: the old Barbary Coast was still alive in the saloons and vaudevilles, bawdy houses and “French restaurants,” with dining downstairs and women upstairs.
Keening seagulls rode the cool currents of fog and sun, circling town with their rusty cries. At street level, the city (while eager to embrace electricity and motorcars) still lived on gaslight and horsepower. Horse-drawn buggies and streetcars rattled west from downtown, past churches, temples, and sandlots, toward Ocean Beach. The oblique slash of Market Street bisected the town, running from southwest to northeast, from Castro Street, past the dome of City Hall, past the Palace Hotel, past the Emporium and Golden Rule Bazaar department store, and finally ending at the water’s edge, where the Ferry Building’s clock tower was a traveler’s first view of the city.
The wharf bristled with masts and smokestacks from as many as a thousand sailing ships and steamers arriving each year. To guide their passage through the fog, lighthouses pulsed from every promontory. Decades before modern foghorns, each island in the bay—Angel Island, Alcatraz, and Yerba Buena—had its own sound signature from fog bells, ship’s whistles, sirens, or chimes. On foggy days, the bay must have sounded like an antique calliope, playing its strange music to guide ships’ captains through corridors of mist to a safe harbor.1
But the harbor would not be safe for long. Across the Pacific came an unexpected import, bubonic plague. Sailing from China and Hawaii into the unbridged arms of the Golden Gate, it arrived aboard vessels bearing rich cargoes, hopeful immigrants, and infected vermin. The rats slipped out of their shadowy holds, scuttled down the rigging, and alighted on the wharf. Uphill they scurried, insinuating themselves into the heart of the city.
Two doctors in federal uniform—Joseph Kinyoun and Rupert Blue—would each try in his own way to quell the pestilence. One doctor would try to subdue the outbreak from his laboratory at the quarantine station on Angel Island. The other doctor would work at street level, purging the infection from boardwalk to basement. The public health efforts of the day were handicapped by limited scientific knowledge and bedeviled by the twin demons of denial and discrimination. One man would fail, and the other would succeed to become the top physician in the land. Today, few people know their names. But their mission would foreshadow the challenges posed by epidemics for the century to come.
When plague hit, one doctor would later recall, “We were fighting in the dark.” The scientists were an unwelcome presence in the city by the Golden Gate. Turn-of-the-century San Francisco aspired to be not a plague zone, but the “Paris of the Pacific.” Its mayor, James Phelan, a proponent of the “City Beautiful” movement, sought to build its civic center into a Beaux Arts showplace. In industry, the city was proud to be the shipping power of the Pacific Coast and the western transit center for the U.S. military. As evidenced by the city’s motto, “Gold in peace, iron in war,” San Francisco’s fortunes were forged to metal, bright or dull. Its tycoons got rich by mining ore from the hills and building great banking houses in its financial district. Later, ironworks and shipbuilders kept the city afloat by supplying warships for the Spanish-American War in the Philippines.2
The Spirit of 1900, in a Chronicle newspaper artist’s rendering, depicted the goddess of progress operating a railroad, a telegraph, and a dynamo engine. San Franciscans embraced this ethic of progress, damming the Hetch Hetchy River and razing the Tahoe forest for power and building material—and drawing protests from the aging John Muir and his infant Sierra Club. From boardrooms to church pulpits, the city cheered the Spanish-American conflict as a boon to its economy. As the Union Iron Works and the Southern Pacific Railroad went, so went the city. Sons of the Gold Rush, San Franciscans styled themselves as a new breed of Argonauts, explorers and executors of manifest destiny.3
If the East had the Astors, Carnegies, and Mellons, San Francisco had the “Big Four” railroad barons—Hopkins, Huntington, Crocker, and Stanford—who clustered their palazzi on Nob Hill like Renaissance princes occupying a Tuscan hill town. Soon, other industrialists followed them, abandoning the south of Market Street for the fresher climes of Nob Hill and Pacific Heights, where their mansions mushroomed in a hodgepodge of architectural styles—Italian Renaissance, French baroque, Victorian, Edwardian, and Queen Anne—all elbowing one another for supremacy.
On sunny weekends, a caravan of horse buggies, landaus, calèches, and a few rattletrap automobiles faced into the wind, rambling west through Golden Gate Park, whose green carpet replaced the sand dunes and tamed the sandstorms that once scoured the city’s western fringes. Gliding through the canopy of manicured greenery, the day-trippers rolled on to the gingerbread castle of Cliff House, a wooden Victorian restaurant perched on a promontory overlooking the breakers of the Pacific Ocean and barking sea lions on Seal Rock. Their destination reached, the caravan turned and rolled home, merry and windburned, ahead of the fog that blew in from the west. The weekly parade lasted all day.4
Strollers ambled on Market, Montgomery, or Kearny Street. Men wore broad-shouldered tweeds and bowlers. Ladies, corseted into breathless figure eights, swept past in day gowns of ecru, coral, and celestial blue from fine stores like the White House or the City of Paris. Picture hats resembling platters of meringue and Tuscan straw bonnets were all the rage, crowned with sprays of heliotrope, bunches of cherries, or egret feathers in a nest of net. Sailor-suited children, sated with peanuts and French caramels, trailed their parents home from the matinee.5
At home, supper waited. In those days, Kona coffee cost 20 cents a pound, ocean fish went for 12½ cents a pound, California figs were four pounds for a quarter. Sourdough bread, the Gold Rush staple, cost a dime for two loaves.
Theaters were packed, and there was a spectacle for every taste, from a staging of Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson to a piano recital by Paderewski. There was a French farce at the Alcazar Theatre. The dashing maestro Walter Damrosch conducted The Flying Dutchman at the opera house. Golden youth of the upper classes waltzed demurely at the Greenway balls and the La Jeunesse Cotillions. Showgirls and young swells danced the “buck and wing.”
Once the tycoons migrated to Nob Hill, the working class took over the sunny triangle south of Market Street, turning it from a fashionable neighborhood into a utilitarian zone of boardinghouses and flats. There, a good time was the penny vaudeville or, better yet, free amateur night at Kapp & Street’s Tamale Grotto and Refined Concert Hall, a Market Street establishment that advertised itself as “A Strictly First-Class Vaudeville Show.” In some ways, the town itself was a vaudeville show. But those abandoned by the boomtown often ended their misery with a searing gulp of carbolic acid or an open gaslight jet with the keyhole stuffed tight. For those who survived their misfortune, the last resort was the almshouse on the foggy, windward side of Twin Peaks.
Newcomers to the port of San Francisco sailed or steamed through the Golden Gate and waited while their vessel lay at anchor in the bay’s quarantine station off Angel Island. If you were Chinese, they probed your glands, peered into your throat, and bathed you with disinfectants. If you were white, the doctors spared you the antiseptic baptism. However, you still had to open your mouth for the doctors, and your luggage for the inspectors, before landing at the dock of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company.
The long, low, shedlike warehouse maintained separate reception rooms for the arrival of whites and Chinese. In one room, Victorian travelers disembarked and reunited with their families after a Hawaiian cruise. In another room, immigrants in their padded jackets and cloth shoes were received. Women in silken coats and tiny platformed sandals were claimed by their husbands. Fresh-cheeked country girls were delivered over to madams who dressed in black and wore rings of keys to their cribs in the flesh trade.6
Wagons carried them uphill to Chinatown. A dozen blocks in the heart of the city, Chinatown was a village of balconied brick-and-wooden tenements, incense-spiced temples, groceries hung with mahogany-glazed ducks, pyramids of onions and cabbage, and mounds of oranges and pale jade melons.
Sheltering as many as twenty thousand to thirty thousand Chinese, the neighborhood was a teeming outpost of the empire of China transplanted to the Barbary Coast. To the observer, it was visibly a bachelor society, a colony of mostly male laborers sporting American bowler hats atop their traditional queues. Most lived lean, solitary lives in rooming houses, for it was costly to bring families to San Francisco. Wives and children—usually those of wealthy merchants—were in the minority. Barred from attending school with whites, Chinese children were consigned to a segregated school that stopped at the sixth grade.
Whether denizens or California-born, Chinatown’s people relied on the powerful merchants of the Chinese Six Companies to speak for them. It was a consortium of district associations, composed of people who had come from various regions of China. Also known as the Chinese Benevolent Association, the group wore many hats: It was part philanthropic society, part informal diplomatic corps, and part Chamber of Commerce. It raised funds for the poor, fought bias, and mediated between Chinatown and the city’s white power structure. When turf wars broke out between the tongs—secret societies that controlled gambling and prostitution—the Chinese Six Companies played peacemaker. When Caucasian law discriminated against the Chinese, the Six Companies hired lawyers and went to court. A council of elders for the expatriate community, it helped its people navigate a turbulent white society while they lived, and return their bones to China when they died.
Chinatown’s main thoroughfare was Dupont Street, Do bahn gai in the local dialect. City fathers would later rename it Grant Avenue, but it remains Dupont Street among the old-timers to this day. To the west rose the hotels and mansions of Nob Hill. To the east stretched the financial district, the dockside shipping companies, and the gray silken mirror of the bay. To the south lay the smart shops, restaurants, and theaters—as well as the brothels—clustered near Union Square. To the north were the Barbary Coast saloons and the Latin Quarter, where Romance languages filled the air and bohemian artists met over rough red wine. Few of these enticements were open to Asians—especially poor Asian laborers.7
Victorian men in bowlers and women in prim shirtwaists came to Chinatown to gawk. Some sipped tea and bought curios. For a few coins, others hired a guide to lead them on a tour through the opium dens. They could watch as the smokers reclined on narrow bunks, cradling the paraphernalia of their bliss in a horn box. First they melted the tarry ball of poppy sap on a wire, and then they packed the bubbling, viscous paste into thimble-size stone pipes fitted with long, thin bamboo stems. Then they sipped the pungent fumes, refilling their pipes again and again, until they reached Xanadu, going slack and glassy-eyed at the vision. Some tourists recoiled at the sickly scent of burning poppy sap, while others likened it to roasting peanuts. There were other secret parlors, the guides confided, off-limits to tourists, where even white men and women partook of the pipe.8
Of course, Chinatown had no monopoly on vice. It’s said the storyteller Jack London and his friends democratically surveyed cribs of every color.9 Indeed, the epicenter of downtown vice was Morton Street, an alley just off Union Square, where the women were boldly displayed in the shop windows. Later the city would rechristen the passage Maiden Lane.
Chinatown was born, just as greater San Francisco had been, when the glint of gold drew the eyes of fortune seekers. During the 1850s, thousands of men fled their rural villages in the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong Province, whose capital city is Canton, or Guangzhou. They spent weeks at sea in a dark and vile steerage in order to reach the land they called Gamsaan—“Gold Mountain.” In the 1860s, the railroad bosses recruited still more Chinese to help them blast through the Sierras, lay the track, and pound the spikes of the transcontinental railroad. When those jobs were done, the Chinese left the mines and the rails to pick plums and cut asparagus, following the harvest seasons from the fields of California to as far north as the orchards of Washington and the fisheries of Alaska.
In town, the Chinese washed clothes, stitched shirts, cobbled shoes, and rolled cigars. At the Palace Hotel, they worked as cooks or donned livery as doormen, wielding scoops after the horses that clopped into the carriage entrance. They were butlers and chefs for the hostesses of the haut monde. As laborers, they were discreet, hardworking, and cheap. As small-business owners, they helped form a rising merchant class. Their industry was rewarded with plenty of work in the land of the Stars and Stripes, or, as they called America, “the flowery flag nation.” They became indispensable.
As long as times were good, the Chinese were accepted, but a late-nineteenth-century depression turned the tide. Formerly prized for their productivity, the Chinese now were cast as cunning and insidious job stealers. The incendiary white labor leader Dennis Kearney stirred up sandlot rallies that turned into riots under the war cry “The Chinese must go.”10 Cobblers in the White Labor League stamped their shoes with a mark that guaranteed that no Chinese hand had worked the leather. By buying Caucasian products, consumers were told, “[y]ou will be helping the White shoemakers of this city and State to support themselves and their families.”11 Soon the scapegoating broadened. Chinese were blamed not only for stealing work from white men, but for corrupting the city’s youth with opium and prostitution and for spreading disease.12
Politicians moved to mollify these fears through passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, a law barring the entry of so-called coolie labor. The very word coolie—from the Indian Kulī—conjures up low-caste laborers or bearers of burdens for white masters. As the twentieth century dawned, colonial condescension still engendered hostility that often boiled over into acts of violence.
Strolling the boardwalks and cobblestone streets of San Francisco in 1900, one might see a Chinese man get his queue yanked hard or even chopped off. The long, jet pigtail was a sign of loyalty to the Manchu Dynasty, and a passport home if things became unbearable. Some say these clashes between East and West gave birth to the word hoodlum—after the cry of “Huddle ’em!” shouted by young white toughs accosting a Chinese victim. This might seem fanciful, but even if apocryphal, it holds a kernel of truth.13
On Sunday near the First Congregational Church, one might see what the writer Ambrose Bierce once witnessed: a gang of Sunday schoolers stoning a Chinese man walking on Dupont Street, until the processional hymn called them in to prayer.14
A Chinese laundryman who went into a white saloon to play dice was stuffed into his laundry basket, thrown outside, and robbed to buy drinks for the house. When he went to court seeking justice, a lawyer and judge mocked him. The newspapers portrayed the case as low comedy and the assault as a good-natured attempt to “subdue the Chink’s luck and sporty ways.”15
San Francisco papers pandered openly to the fears of white workers, with “Chink” cartoons depicting caricatured immigrants spouting pidgin. In popular parlance, they were “the heathen Chinee”—a phrase coined by Bret Harte in his verse “Plain Language from Truthful James,” telling of a wily gambler, Ah Sin, who hides cards up his sleeve and cheats white men out of their pay.16 Amid rising paranoia over the “yellow peril,” the caricature of the bland but cunning outsider burned its way into the psyche of Victorian San Francisco. Just as the economic depression had strangled tolerance, so disease outbreaks further fanned race resentments. Poised on the threshold of the Pacific Rim, San Francisco had always been open to imported disease. Now, in 1900, it was about to receive the most famous scourge in history.
Bubonic plague had ravaged Europe, from fourteenth-century Florence to seventeenth-century London. It smoldered along the Himalayan borderlands between India and China into the late nineteenth century. As soldiers crisscrossed the borders, they brought plague into China’s interior, where it flared to a ferocious epidemic that erupted in Hong Kong in 1894. From that port, plague embarked aboard ships sailing to many continents. Among its destinations was the city by the Golden Gate.
Plague traveled in stealth. No one yet knew how it spread. Nineteenth-century theories of its transmission focused on dirt, tainted food, and a “miasma,” or cloud of infectious vapors. In the boomtown of San Francisco, the business and political elite believed plague to be an alien scourge that would tarnish their trade and tourism. So from City Hall to the dome of the state capitol, officials dismissed the threat. The little people would die of it while the powerful debated its existence.
In 1900, the city played an active role in courting catastrophe. Like most Victorian cities, San Francisco neglected its aging sewer system, fouled its bay with garbage, and tolerated a burgeoning population of rats. Victorian cities were a petri dish for all manner of epidemics—like diphtheria, tuberculosis, and smallpox—and none more so than San Francisco. Whispers of “pesthouse” sent a stab of fear through families who never knew when their neighbors would be bundled into an ambulance buggy and carted off to an isolation ward of the county hospital. Mysterious germs, which no one but scientists could see, ran rampant until they closed throats with a white membrane, eroded lungs with coughing, or embossed faces with scars.17
With almost a tenth of the city terraced into its twelve tiny blocks, Chinatown was especially vulnerable to disease. But sickness on Dupont Street, unlike sickness elsewhere, was viewed by city officials as a symptom of alien squalor. Whites held their noses at Chinatown’s smoky stew of scents, as if the very air were a cloud of contagion. Even in medical circles, some doctors cleaved to old notions that the poor and sick could infect others through their exhalations. Another local myth held that Chinatown’s haze—mingling temple incense, pork smokehouses, and opium vapors—was noxious to white nostrils but rendered the denizens immune to the diseases they bred. The Chinese were blamed for the crowding and dilapidation of Chinatown, even though bias barred them from living elsewhere.
For the record, City Hall had published its view of Chinatown’s health a generation earlier, in an 1885 report to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors:
The Chinese brought here with them and successfully maintained and perpetuated the grossest habits of bestiality practiced by the human race [gambling, opium, and prostitution]….[They] have innoculated our youth not only with the virus of immorality in its most hideous form, but have through the same sources physically poisoned the blood of thousands by the innoculation with diseases the most frightful that the flesh is heir to, and furnishing posterity with a line of scrofulous and leprous victims that might better never have been born than to curse themselves and mankind at large with their contagious presence.18
Against this backdrop of blame, the new threat arrived. At first, it was only dimly perceived. Dispatches from Hong Kong told of a violent outbreak, harrowing people living a continent away. But by 1899, steamers and sailing ships were carrying the infection across the Pacific to Hawaii. Cases of fever and swollen glands, followed by a swift death, occurred in Honolulu’s Chinatown. Recognizing that plague had arrived, the city’s health department ordered that the plague houses be burned. But a freak twist of trade winds whipped the flames out of control, igniting a church steeple and throwing a fountain of sparks beyond the reach of fire hoses. Soon Chinatown was engulfed, the flames touching off explosions in fireworks sheds and reducing shops to ashes. When the smoke cleared, six thousand Chinese were homeless in Honolulu.19
Learning the fate of their countrymen in the islands, San Francisco’s Chinese were terror-stricken. It seemed a double curse: epidemic followed by fire. But white San Franciscans felt tropical pestilence could never trouble their hometown, with its cool and misty climate. Capturing this naive optimism, the San Francisco Examiner ran a story headlined WHY SAN FRANCISCO IS PLAGUE-PROOF.20
Safe inside their red velvet drawing rooms with brocaded curtains and satin-covered spittoons, powerful San Franciscans were certain that this Asian plague could never gain a foothold in a city that had bel canto and porcelain bathtubs. The specter of plague was like a wraith in the fog, impossible to grasp.
But plague scares had seized the city before. A year earlier, the Japanese vessel Nippon Maru reached the city after a Pacific crossing marred by two plague deaths. On entering San Francisco Bay, two Asian stowaways jumped overboard. Their bodies were fished from the cold gray swells, still wearing Nippon Maru life preservers. Doctors who performed an autopsy found suspicious-looking germs.21
But isolating the cause of death is difficult in a decomposing corpse, where all manner of bacteria run wild. Experts disputed the stowaways’ cause of death. And the fate of the Nippon Maru—with two dead at sea and two dead in port—was soon forgotten.
On the eve of 1900, another ship appeared on the horizon: the four-masted steamship Australia, making her regular run from Hawaii to the Golden Gate. Around Christmas 1899, when San Franciscans were trimming their trees, the ship had lain at anchor in the infected port of Honolulu. Then the Australia took on cargo, weighed anchor, and made way for San Francisco.
On New Year’s Day 1900, the San Francisco newspapers noted the imminent arrival of the Australia. Stiff southwesterly winds chased the rain and scoured the skies. On January 2 she appeared, as long as a football field, knifing through the steel blue water and into the Golden Gate. She anchored at the quarantine station off Angel Island, while officers searched her from stateroom to steerage. They failed to find any traces of infection, and under constant pressure from impatient shippers, the quarantine officers had no choice but to grant her permission to land.
So the Australia’s bladelike hull turned away from Angel Island toward the port of San Francisco. With a touch of unease, the quarantine officers watched as the V-shaped spume widened in her wake. Easing into the dock, the Australia delivered the sanitized bags of her sixty-eight passengers and a shipment of fumigated mail, along with some four-legged stowaways that, somehow, escaped detection.22