JOSEPH KINYOUN GRASPED his proof defiantly. With stains and slides, with microscopes and the mute testimony of dead lab animals, he had identified the germ that killed Wong Chut King.
The killer, he now knew, was the same bacteria that had ravaged Asia and Europe since biblical times. Was this the beginning of an epidemic like the one described in The Decameron, one that would send rich and poor to common graves and leave Nob Hill mansions as vacant as Florentine palaces?
Although plague had ravaged Europe for thousands of years, its true nature and cause weren’t discovered until 1894, after a feverish scientific race. Even after the bacterium was identified, how it entered the human body remained a mystery.
In 1894, as bubonic plague inflicted suffering and death on China, two rival scientists, Alexandre Yersin of Paris and Shibasaburo Kitasato of Tokyo, went to Hong Kong to identify the cause of plague. Both were eminent scientists, disciples of the pioneering microbe hunters Robert Koch, who identified the tuberculosis bacterium, and Louis Pasteur, who created the rabies vaccine. Yersin and Kitasato both used a basic technique in their work called Gram’s stain.
The brainchild of a Danish scientist, Hans Christian Joachim Gram, the test cleverly exploits the tendency of different bugs to either soak up or shed certain colored dyes. Whereas growing colonies of bacteria in culture takes days to complete, testing the Gram’s stain takes just minutes and requires only a few vials of blue or pink dye. A scientist drenches a sample of bacteria with blue dye, then rinses it. If the blue dye sticks, the germs are classified as “Gram positive.” If the blue dye washes off and the germs instead absorb a second, pinktinted dye, they are considered “Gram negative.” Some well-known bacteria, such as staphylococcus and streptococcus, turn blue—Gram positive. But plague bacteria shed the blue dye and stain vivid pink—Gram negative. The staining pattern also highlights the distinctive features and shape of a bacterium: The rod-shaped plague bacteria turn deep rose at the rounded tips, so that they resemble closed safety pins.
In their haste to discover plague, however, the rival scientists Kitasato and Yersin announced different results of the Gram’s stain. Kitasato was first to declare his results and rushed to tell the world that the plague bacteria stained blue—Gram positive. Later he vacillated, saying he didn’t know.
Yersin arrived in Hong Kong four days after his rival. Lacking the authority to perform autopsies in the major hospital, he had to improvise. Working in a tent behind his straw hut, he paid British soldiers doing undertaker duty for access to bodies awaiting burial. After opening their coffins and dusting the lime off their bodies, Yersin biopsied their glands and found “a veritable puree of microbes.”1 Once purified and tested with the Gram’s stain, the plague bacteria turned pink—Gram negative. Yersin had found the right answer.
To this day, Kitasato’s blunder is baffling. Some historians speculate that he used a biopsy sample that was accidentally contaminated with staph or strep germs, which stained blue.
Though Kitasato and Yersin are usually credited as codiscoverers of the plague bacterium, it was Yersin’s discovery that prevailed and prompted a name change from Bacillus pestis to Yersinia pestis. The landmark discovery gave scientists all over the world a way to identify the deadly germ.2
Just a baby germ in evolutionary terms, Yersinia pestis is now thought to be anywhere from 1,500 to 20,000 years old. It evolved from an ancient bacterium known as Yersinia pseudotuberculosis, a bug between 400,000 and 1.9 million years old that causes intestinal distress. From this benign parent, a germ of staggering virulence was born, one that when left untreated remains the most lethal bacterium known to humankind. Even today, when doctors have the curative antibiotic drugs that were undiscovered in 1900, bubonic plague is still evolving and springing surprises on the unsuspecting physician. In 1995, a drug-resistant strain of bubonic plague sickened a patient in Madagascar. Fortunately, alert scientists and doctors saved this patient with a sulfa drug combination to which the bug ultimately succumbed. But to shaken scientists, the message was clear: Plague is still active worldwide, one of many contenders in the global contest for microbial supremacy.3
Yersin’s discovery gave Joseph Kinyoun’s culprit a face and a fast tool with which to identify it. There were other tests, too: On culture plates, colonies of plague look like ground glass. And he applied Koch’s postulates to prove that the plague germ had in fact killed Wong Chut King. First he isolated the bacteria. Then he grew them in pure culture. He injected the germs into lab animals. When the animals died of the same disease, he isolated the germ again, and voilà, he had apprehended the killer—bubonic plague.
But to the San Francisco citizen of 1900—even to most practicing physicians—the new bacteriology was still a form of black magic: mysterious, dimly understood, untrustworthy, and inferior to the laying on of hands and the observation of symptoms at the bedside. Fevers and swollen glands could signify anything from strep to syphilis, they said. Many practicing physicians in town dismissed the bacteriologist Kinyoun, and most folks trusted their family doctors.4
Newspapers lampooned the plague cleanup. Cartoonists sketched doctors plucking germs off Chinese scrolls. The bacteria were depicted as grinning, gargoyle-faced tadpoles. Caricatures of pigtailed immigrants were shown fleeing town. And on March 14, the San Francisco Call newspaper published a mock obituary, reporting the death of “A. Monk—At the Angel Island bubonic germ stock farm.”
No one was more skeptical than Ng Poon Chew, the Presbyterian minister who founded and edited Chinatown’s leading newspaper, the Chung Sai Yat Po, or East-West Daily. In his story announcing the results of the plague test, he spoke for an entire community that feared not so much that they would die from plague, but that they would be ruined by it:
…Alas, why should Chinatown’s good name depend on the life and death of a monkey? If this monkey lived, then Chinatown would be exempt from fear and the Chinese would rejoice at the news. We don’t know the implications of the English-language press commentary, and whether they are rooting for Chinatown or the monkey. We don’t know whether luck will favor the physician or Chinatown. But this morning, the monkey was reported to be dead. In the view of this newspaper, the monkey’s death was not caused by plague. Alas, the monkey’s death was due to starvation—a result of its unlucky encounter with this physician.5
Rumors multiplied like bacteria. It was said the quarantine officer had poisoned the test animals to justify his diagnosis. Besides, everyone from Chinatown to Nob Hill believed that injecting fluid from the glands of a corpse—any corpse—could kill you. It was the liquid of putrefaction, not the germs of plague, that was causing death. All agreed that bacteriology was a ghoulish practice.
Daily headlines declared it a fraud. THE PLAGUE A PHANTOM: MORE BOUFFE BUSINESS BY THE HEALTH BOARD, the Chronicle railed on March 13. The next day, the paper proclaimed: NO PLAGUE IS FOUND. By St. Patrick’s Day, with the town in a holiday mood, the paper concluded: BUBONIC SCARE HAS COLLAPSED.
In a counterpoint to the drumbeat of denial, a careful listener could hear the hammers in the coffin shops of Chinatown. On March 15, just one week after the death of Wong Chut King, a twenty-two-year-old laborer died on Sacramento Street. The next victim was a thirty-five-year-old cook, who died on March 17 on Dupont Street. The day after that, a middle-aged workingman collapsed and died on the tiny crooked alley called Oneida Place. All three had the plague stigmata on them.6
The politicians, the merchants, and the Chinese all had good reason for denying the diagnosis. No one wanted to see the yellow flag of pestilence flying over the portal to the Golden State. It would tarnish tourism and trade. It would turn Chinatown into a quarantine zone and subject the Chinese to the interventions of white doctors with their dissection tools, chemicals, and fire. To the Chinese, who were not unacquainted with epidemics, the cure must have seemed far worse than the disease.
But down at City Hall, San Francisco’s mayor indulged the health board. James Duval Phelan was a Democratic reformer sandwiched between corrupt and boss-ridden mayors, but he was also an archenemy of Chinese immigration. And as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was coming up for renewal, the plague scare gave him another reason to sound off on the yellow peril posed by “coolies.” Chinese labor had been sweet enough to railroad tycoons during the building of the transcontinental railroad, but with the dawn of the new century, a labor surplus frayed California’s welcome mat. Phelan viewed Asian workers as a threat to the sons of the Golden State, even though many were native-born San Franciscans. Phelan would later run for the U.S. Senate under the slogan “Keep California White.”7
So when Chinese consul Ho Yow threatened to sue the city for $500,000 to recover Chinatown’s damages from the quarantine, Phelan’s true feelings erupted:
“As to objections and suits by the Chinese, I desire to say that they are fortunate, with the unclean habits of their coolies and their filthy hovels, to be permitted to remain within the corporate limits of any American city,” the mayor exploded. “In an economic sense, their presence has been, and is, a great injury to the working classes, and in a sanitary sense, they are a constant menace to the public health.”8
Meanwhile, Consul Ho struggled to improve the quality of life for his people. He joined with the Chinese Six Companies in founding the new Oriental Dispensary at 828 Sacramento Street. An emergency hospital staffed with a mix of Western physicians and traditional Chinese herbalists, it was equipped with $1,500 in supplies bought with donations. The dispensary aimed to replace an old institution, the so-called halls of tranquillity, where destitute Chinese went to die.
In Washington, D.C., Surgeon General Walter Wyman prescribed a mass vaccination of all the Chinese in Chinatown. The product was a broth of heat-killed bacteria, called the Haffkine vaccine after its creator, Waldemar Haffkine, a Russian scientist who fled his homeland for a post at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Haffkine’s vaccine used the traditional technique of sparking protection by using a small amount of bacteria to arouse an immune reaction. The trouble was, it also provoked severe side effects, ranging from pain and swelling to fever and malaise and, occasionally, death. When it worked, its protection was short-lived. In people already exposed to the plague, the vaccine was extremely dangerous because it accelerated the germ’s lethal attack. With such risks widely known, the vaccine was violently unpopular in Chinatown. Still, Wyman shipped almost two thousand doses of vaccine west the day after Wong Chut King died. He promised to send thirteen thousand more within two days and, after that, a stream of ten thousand doses a week.9
Wyman also sent three hundred bottles of Yersin’s plague antiserum, a completely different product. The antiserum was a solution of antibodies, drawn from the blood of horses that had been exposed to plague. The antiserum could serve as a ready-made immune defense against infection, and it was safer than the vaccine for people already exposed to the plague. However, the antiserum was scarce and costly. Because its manufacture required horses, it was much more difficult and expensive to produce than a colony of bacteria that could simply be grown in a test tube. So the antiserum was used sparingly, and much of it was reserved for the doctors working in the midst of an outbreak.
While urging the mass vaccination—“Haffkinization”—of Chinatown, the surgeon general downplayed the dangers of the situation. He portrayed the measures as necessary simply to keep plague from establishing a base in the city and causing repeated outbreaks throughout the year.10
The Examiner, the newspaper owned by William Randolph Hearst, broke ranks with the other San Francisco papers, which ridiculed or denied plague outright. The Examiner saw the plague as a news opportunity. Enterprising reporter J. A. Boyle rolled up his sleeves and filed a first-person account of what it felt like to be injected with the Haffkine vaccination.
“The inoculation itself is entirely painless…. Within two hours, however, the serum had spread through my system and its effects began to be felt,” wrote the journalistic guinea pig. “Shooting pains, slight at first, began near the point of injection and extended across the chest, down the arm and even up into my neck and head. My left arm felt numb and I moved it with difficulty. The muscles covering my shoulder blade felt as if they were being drawn together as by a rubber band,” he added. “I was slightly dizzy, there was a ringing in my ears and I felt I was drifting into a stupor from which I did not particularly care to rouse myself. All this time, the pain in my shoulder, chest, neck and arm had been increasing until it was quite severe. I was unable to concentrate my mind and felt flushed and feverish.”11 Eight hours later, Boyle’s pain eased, his head cleared, and his fever dropped. His ordeal was over, his story a success. But the stunt did nothing to convince those in Chinatown to roll up their sleeves.
By now, the mere sight of white health officers with their needles was enough to prompt a panic. Some whites who worked in Chinatown, like Donaldina Cameron, director of the Presbyterian Mission Home in Chinatown, attributed fear of the plague vaccine to superstition. She tried to encourage immunization, but the Chinese knew the Haffkine vaccine could sicken or even kill. A few mission girls lined up. One girl broke from the line, dashed to a second-story window, and jumped. Onlookers saw a flash of jacket and a wisp of black hair, and she disappeared. A thud sounded from below, where the girl was alive but in agony, crumpled on the sidewalk with smashed ankle-bones.12
A Presbyterian missionary of Scottish descent, Miss Cameron had one passionate calling: to rescue slave girls and prostitutes from servitude in Chinatown and convert them to Christianity. Sallying forth in her shirtwaists with leg-of-mutton sleeves, her auburn pompadour anchored by prim veiled hats, she raided vice cribs like Carry Nation with a Scots burr. The Chinese, skeptical of her meddling, called her Fan Quai, “White Devil.” To her wards she was Lo Mo, or “Old Mother.”13
One day while the quarantine was in effect, a nine-year-old girl named Ah Ching had come seeking help at the mission for her sister, who was dying of plague. Cameron shed her Victorian gown for Chinese pants, hid her russet head under an umbrella, and slipped past the quarantine lines.
After ascending through a skylight, she hopped roof to roof and found Ah Ching’s boardinghouse. The girl was abandoned and slumped on a wooden chair out on the sidewalk. Miss Cameron carried her to the mission and summoned a doctor. In a surprising turn of events, the physician diagnosed not plague, but appendicitis. She died three hours later, victim of a burst appendix and of neglect spawned by plague phobia.14
Over Chinatown, columns of smoke rose from the bonfires of refuse that burned on Pacific Street. Plumbing was flushed with chemicals, masking the scent of cookery and crowded humanity with stinging clouds of disinfectant vapors. Mounds of white lime powder were scattered in chalky drifts against the balconied apartments, storefronts, and courtyards, so that the district looked like a Sierra village after a snowstorm. An oppressive stench hung over the district.
Downtown, the board of health met with the Chinese consul and the Chinese Six Companies, wrangling over details of the Chinatown cleanup of plague. All they could agree on was the need to clear out basements and dispose of garbage. On that, no one could disagree. The consul issued a statement urging people to clean up their homes and businesses. But autopsies and diagnoses were different.
City and federal doctors ordered that any Chinese person who died unattended by a physician, or whose medical history was unknown, be autopsied in order to ascertain the cause of death. But autopsies outraged the sensibilities of grieving families and friends. To placate authorities, Ho Yow advised his constituents that, when sick, they should send for a “white physician.” If they were too poor to pay, a doctor would be furnished free from the new Oriental Dispensary.
Without an autopsy, however, cases of plague might be mistaken for something else. Plague in the lungs might be misdiagnosed as common pneumonia, fretted city physician O’Brien, who attended to Wong Chut King. The victim suffocates so quickly that the telltale buboes don’t have time to erupt, he said. So the city board of health passed a motion ordering that any Chinese dying of apparent pneumonia, swollen glands, fever, or other symptoms of possible plague be subject to autopsy—“the same as whites.”15
Days after the order was issued, monthly death reports in Chinatown began to subside. The mortality rate was half of normal.
Cases of sickness were being concealed, and deaths as well, the health board concluded. One patient who lived across from the Chinese consulate vanished before inspectors arrived. In another case, a man said to have died the day before was as ripe as a week-old corpse. Whether the corpse was in a state of rapid decomposition due to plague or had simply been abandoned for several days was hard to know. The elderly doctor in charge, who worked behind a pharmacy on Kearny Street, denied concealing plague deaths but admitted he was under pressure to dissemble.
Dr. Edward Seltzer recounted to the health board his hellish house call. He found the patient “unable to lie down, and unable to sit up, and was doubled over suffering terribly, spitting blood and suffocating…. Nothing I could do was of more than at most transient effect, and the man died in my presence…. I was a little undecided as to the cause of death, but gave it as lobar pneumonia because the Chinese have a horror of dissection and begged me to give as the cause of death something which could call for no dissection.”16
Bodies were whisked room to room, stashed in out-of-the-way cubbyholes, or carried over the rooftops—in a shell game to keep the sick and dying from the inspectors. In other cases, San Francisco Bay became a river Styx, with bodies stowed aboard tiny fishing boats, slipped across the water, and interred in an unknown spot. Hiding the dead was Chinatown’s defense against the intrusion of white doctors. How many bodies disappeared, no one knew.17
Some hid in plain sight. One ingenious ruse involved a game of dominoes. During an inspection on Waverly Place in Chinatown, one doctor found five men seated around a game table. The players froze as police officers stormed the apartment, upending the place but finding nothing. Two hours later, one of the players was found to be dead. During the inspection, his companions had propped him up at the game table, with his hand poised upon a domino in such a natural position that he escaped notice.
“Their tricks are manifold,” said the duped doctor, W. G. Hay of the University of California, in a speech to the California Academy of Medicine. Just how to outsmart the inspectors, he fumed, “[t]he wily heathen seemed to know by instinct.”18
Rants against the “heathen” Chinese made Consul Ho Yow heartsick. His ailing constituents were forced to flee for fear of the rough interventions of the white doctors, he said, but he denied that his people were actually hiding the dead.19
An exodus of Chinese began, driven by fears of quarantine, chemical bombardment, and needles. Some scattered to the gardens and factories of their friends in the suburbs. Others were quartered as cooks in private homes within the city. At the old Globe Hotel, the usual three hundred tenants had dwindled to a dozen, who stood with their bags packed, ready to leave if the cordons went up or the torch was threatened again.
On the waterfront, Dr. Kinyoun tried to assert his authority as quarantine officer. But his bluster failed to hold back a rising tide of derision. When a steamer called the Gaelic arrived from Asia with a sick Chinese man aboard, Kinyoun quarantined the vessel. Somehow, despite Kinyoun’s ban on reporters in quarantine, one from the Examiner managed to sneak aboard or to smuggle out stories of Kinyoun in action. The paper published an account of Kinyoun charging about the deck, barking orders, behaving as a bully, acting overbearing to the poor and obsequious to the rich.20
The city board of health, meanwhile, had no cash to pay for the cleanup. The health board begged the board of supervisors for $7,500 to pay men to fork garbage into the incinerator, to sprinkle formaldehyde and shovel lime about Chinatown. The bid for funds inflamed suspicions that the plague was merely a pretext for padding the budget. Newspaper cartoons showed Kinyoun’s monkey, rat, and guinea pig as burglars robbing the city treasury. The Chung Sai Yat Po declared: “If the government didn’t have this $7,500 Buddha, nobody could frame us with the plague.”21
News of San Francisco’s misfortune became impossible to contain, and dispatches reached other states and countries both north and south of the border. Westbound trains traveled empty, abandoned by those afraid of contracting the deadly bacteria. Vacationers favored safer destinations where the greatest concern was sunburn or overeating.
Trading partners began to balk at receiving the city’s infected goods. The Canadian government ordered all steamers from San Francisco quarantined until further notice. And the outbound steamer Curaçao was quarantined in Mazatlán by the government of Mexico. San Francisco businessmen remembered how quarantine had paralyzed Hawaiian sugar shipments after Honolulu’s plague struck. A sickening vision of California wheat stranded on the docks, and its fruit rotting, rose before their eyes.
Editorial pages of the city’s major dailies called it an outrage that the city was being branded a pestilential plague spot rather than the golden vision of health and pleasure they wanted to promote.
Down at the intersection of Market and Kearny—the Times Square of the West—publishers displayed their edifice complex. The de Young family erected the West’s first steel-frame skyscraper for the Chronicle’s headquarters, rising a majestic ten stories. Then William Randolph Hearst hired the same architects to design a loftier tower for the Examiner just across the street. He was topped by Claus Spreckels, the sugar king, who built his newspaper, the Call, a nineteen-story monument.22
Although rivals in every other respect, de Young’s Chronicle and Spreckels’s Call found themselves on the same side of an issue. Both papers relentlessly ridiculed the plague campaign of Kinyoun as a fraud. Ironically, the only newspaper of the big three dailies to engage in serious coverage of the outbreak was that font of yellow journalism, Hearst’s Examiner. To be sure, the so-called saffron sheet pursued the plague story less for its public health import than for its sensational ingredients of death and intrigue. But in the city, its coverage stood alone. Now, however, other city papers charged the Examiner with journalistic treason against San Francisco. Hearst’s New York Journal spread news of the city’s shame, declaring: BLACK PLAGUE CREEPS INTO AMERICA.23
In a stunning admission on March 25, the Call’s editors admitted that they and the Chronicle’s editors had made a mutual pact of silence on the plague. They blasted the Examiner for its heresy. “It will be remembered that the Call and the Chronicle agreed to omit publication of the sensational doings of the Board of Health and the Chief of Police… but the Examiner not only refused to join this proper policy, but wired the lying report to the New York Journal and thence spread it broadcast.”
As the rhetoric mounted, furious merchants converged on City Hall. They vowed the yellow flag of plague would never fly over San Francisco and demanded that the mayor repair the damage to the city’s image.
Mayor Phelan had no choice. He dispatched telegrams to forty American cities, insisting—falsely—that there had been just one isolated case, adding that Chinatown was purged and purified. “There is no future danger,” he promised.
Over the page one story, the Call unfurled a banner headline: CITY PLAGUE SCARE A CONFESSED SHAM.24
As City Hall capitulated to the merchants and newspapers, Kinyoun confirmed three new plague deaths. Word by word, the public health service expanded its codebook. In it, San Francisco’s beleaguered health board acquired a code name that captured the style of the whole town—“Burlesque.”