YELLOW SULFUR FUMES CAST an amber pall over Chinatown. The Chinese choked and cursed the caustic fog. But the health department insisted the haze was a sign of progress against the plague.
Lim Fa Muey, a teenage cigar maker, was one of those who hurried to work through the veil of chemicals one morning in early May 1900. Once she was inside the cigar factory, the familiar tang of cured tobacco leaves would have been welcome after the stench of fumigation—if it weren’t that she began to feel so ill. The same symptoms that hit her neighbors now assailed the girl. They were the symptoms of a disease that officially didn’t exist: the leaden ache that dragged at her back and limbs. The lurching stomach. The giddy head. The eyes that burned fever bright.
Back at her apartment at 739 Clay Street that evening, her body ached like an old woman’s. Inside, the bacteria overflowed from her lymph glands into her bloodstream, invading tissues of her heart, liver, and spleen. The germ’s poison dissolved vessel walls, so that the blood seeped out in small hemorrhages that bloomed like ink stains beneath the skin. As her cells lost the battle against the invader, the rising fever burned her senseless. From delirium, she lapsed into coma. Her pulse sped, then sank to an imperceptible flutter. One by one, her organs failed. Her heart stopped. On May 11, Lim Fa Muey became the city’s first female plague victim, but not the last.1
On the same day, Minnie Worley, a white physician working in Chinatown, made a house call at 730½ Commercial Street. A family had called her to examine their teenage maid, Chin Moon. While cleaning house, Chin Moon felt a sudden wave of dizziness. She tried to continue her chores, but the vertigo forced her to lie down. Now her head throbbed. She ached from her skull to the pit of her stomach. She vomited and felt better, but only briefly. The pain was relentless. Her lower right abdomen was tender, and she winced at the doctor’s touch. Her temperature was 105 degrees Fahrenheit. Her pulse raced at 120 beats per minute.2
Dr. Worley diagnosed typhoid fever. It was a safe guess, in a day when the typhoid germ lived in tainted milk and water, but Worley was wrong. By morning, Chin Moon was delirious. Sinking into a coma, the unresponsive girl was taken by carriage to Pacific Hospital, but the doctors there were helpless to save her. In the predawn dark of Sunday morning, May 13, she died.
Drs. Kinyoun and Kellogg brought the body of Chin Moon back to the Chinese hospital for an autopsy. There, they discovered the one crucial symptom that Dr. Worley had overlooked: a lump on the inside of the girl’s right thigh. They lanced the lump and exposed a skein of inflamed lymph glands. After drawing fluid into a syringe, they squirted it onto a glass slide and looked at it through the microscope. They saw short, rounded, rod-shaped bacteria. When stained by Gram’s method, the germs glowed with the pink hue of plague.
Unmoved by these findings, Dr. Worley stood by her diagnosis of typhoid. Chin Moon’s killer couldn’t have been plague, she argued. Nobody in her employer’s household—including four women, four children, and several men—had caught the disease from her.3 She didn’t understand that though typhoid races from person to person, via unclean hands, food, and water, plague usually needs a middleman to spread it. The city had no idea that plague most often is spread not by people, but by the capricious appetite of a rat flea.
By mid-May, nine people had officially died from the plague. As he wired Washington about each new case of “bumpkin,” Kinyoun was worried. The local health board, while calling for antiplague measures to stop the outbreak, had limited funds and no experience in epidemic control. Worse, it seemed impossible to extract a medical history from the Chinese.
Terrified of having their homes or shops invaded, the Chinese volunteered little. When asked about a sick or dead relative or neighbor, people often said the deceased had been ill for a month. A long-drawn-out death was at odds with the short, violent course of the plague. Kinyoun suspected that those interviewed were coached to conceal the plague. He felt like a fool, intentionally misled, but he was helpless to stop it.
Surgeon General Wyman resorted to diplomatic maneuvers. He sent a strongly worded letter to Wu Ting-Fang, China’s envoy in Washington, D.C.: “I would respectfully suggest that you send a dispatch to your Consul-General in San Francisco… to use his influence to have the Chinese comply cheerfully with necessary measures of the health officials, and to confer with Surgeon Kinyoun, Angel Island….”4
In a May 15 telegram to Kinyoun, Surgeon General Wyman outlined a master plan for plague control: “Cordon [off] suspected area; guard ferries and R.R. stations with reference to Chinese only; house to house inspection with Haffkine inoculation; Chinatown to be restricted; pest house in Chinatown …; suspects from plague houses to be moved [if] you deem necessary to Angel Island; a disinfecting corps; destruction of rats….”5
This last point—“destruction of rats”—got little immediate attention in the spring of 1900. Wyman had recognized mounting evidence that rats were the chief agents in the spread of plague from port to port, but he hadn’t yet seen their connection with the infection of people. A report from Sydney, Australia, where doctors discovered plague bacteria in the stomachs of fleas, received scant notice. Only years later would medical science recognize the significance of these fragmentary bits of evidence implicating the rat and the flea.6
The surgeon general also ordered Kinyoun to meet with Consul Ho Yow, to appeal for cooperation. Kinyoun boarded a ferry to San Francisco for an audience with the consul. Ushered in to see Ho Yow, Kinyoun took the measure of the subtle diplomat. He was handsome, clad in the robes of an imperial envoy from the Manchu dynasty. He spoke fluent English.
The city was a hostile territory for those of Chinese descent. When young men of Chinatown offered to join the army of their adopted land, the local press mocked their offer with cartoons of pigtailed enlistees. When elders shipped their bones home for burial in China, they were hit with a ten-dollar bone tax. Now came these draconian plague-control measures and an order from the U.S. government to submit “cheerfully.” It was too much. Ho insisted on reserving certain basic rights for his people.
Kinyoun had begun to brief Ho on the plague outbreak when a knock on the door brought another visitor. The attorney for the Chinese Six Companies entered. Two against one. Ho and the attorney made their case: The Chinese people were terrified of the needle. They would not submit to forced vaccination. They would not stand for forced relocation to detention centers here or on Angel Island.
Kinyoun felt ambushed, outgunned. Up to this point, he had thought of the Chinese Six Companies mainly as a trade association to protect rich merchants’ interests, but now he saw that they functioned as de facto diplomats. Tough negotiators, they would not have public health forced upon them. “Just there, I believe, the opposition to the Marine-Hospital Service, and particularly myself, originated,” he told a friend.7 Far from eliciting the cheerful compliance Wyman envisioned, Kinyoun made no allies that day.
On the streets of Chinatown, and in its press, Kinyoun was dubbed “wolf doctor,” for what they perceived as his snappy and officious manner toward the Chinese.8 If Kinyoun was the wolf doctor, the Chinese refused to be his sacrificial lambs. Most people knew the story of the Haffkine vaccine and its risks: fever, weakness, and even death. From his window at the consular residence, Ho Yow saw angry crowds gathering in the streets. He wired his minister in Washington to seek to cancel the compulsory vaccine order. “The Chinese… would prefer to be kicked back to China. They are very upset and agitated. We are afraid that a riot might happen and that people might be killed. Please go to the Federal Government and plead for an exemption from the shots.”9
Word spread about the little girl at the Presbyterian Mission Home who leapt out a window to evade the white men’s needles, her shattered bones an emblem of the community’s broken trust.10 Demonstrators swarmed like angry bees from a hive, the Chung Sai Yat Po reported.11 Chinatown merchants declared a one-day strike, closing their shops in protest against the immunization order. Along the bustling bazaar of Dupont Street, sales of housewares, silks, and ceramics ceased. The street was still and shuttered.
If anything, the rebellion only stiffened the resolve of Surgeon General Wyman to force the Chinese into compliance. Invoking the Quarantine Act of 1890, Wyman was authorized by President William McKinley to issue a sweeping order—not just halting travel by plague patients, but forbidding train or boat travel by all “Asiatics and other races particularly liable to the disease.” Now, railroad and shipping companies refused to sell tickets to Asian passengers. No Asian could leave the state without a health certificate issued by Kinyoun. And that required the dreaded Haffkine vaccine.12
It was Kinyoun’s job to enforce the order. The travel ban covered both Chinese and Japanese people. Clusters of Japanese lived and worked near the borders of Chinatown, but as yet no single case of plague had been found in a Japanese resident of San Francisco. It was a clear case of quarantine by color.
Challenges to the ban came quickly. After merchants like Louis Quong were barred from boarding the Oakland ferry, a class-action lawsuit was filed in federal court. Wong Wai, a businessman associated with the Chinese Six Companies, filed the suit charging Kinyoun and the board of health with illegally imprisoning twenty-five thousand Chinese inside San Francisco unless they took the experimental and dangerous Haffkine vaccine.13 The lawsuit charged that the travel restrictions were unconstitutional and demanded that Kinyoun and the health board be enjoined from requiring vaccination or barring their travel.
Left to untangle the snarl of competing federal and local health and civil rights claims was Judge William W. Morrow. Before he ascended the bench, the silver-haired jurist had been a three-term Republican member of Congress. As a lawmaker, Morrow wasn’t known for his love of the Chinese, whom he once labeled “destitute of moral qualities.” As a judge hearing exclusion-law cases, he often sided with the government.14
But on May 28, Judge Morrow ruled in favor of the Chinese. The defendants, Joseph Kinyoun and the city health board, failed to furnish facts that justified singling out the city’s Asian residents as more susceptible to plague. The travel restrictions and forced immunization weren’t dictated by sound science, but instead were “boldly directed against the Asiatic or Mongolian race as a class, without regard to the previous condition, habits, exposure to the disease or residence of the individual; and the only justification offered for this discrimination was a suggestion [that] this particular race is more liable to plague than any other,” the judge wrote. “No evidence has, however, been offered to support this claim….”15
In his decision in the Wong Wai case, Judge Morrow also ruled that ordering the city’s twenty-five thousand Chinese residents to take the Haffkine vaccine as a condition of travel violated Surgeon General Wyman’s own medical judgment. The vaccine was good only before exposure to the germ, not afterward. Giving the vaccine to someone after exposure was not only ineffective, but indeed “dangerous to life.” Giving it to people leaving an infected zone served no public health aim. Thus the whole program—travel restrictions and vaccine—discriminated against Chinese residents, depriving them of liberty in violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. Judge Morrow issued an injunction.
Kinyoun and the city health board, the judge added, failed to prove that there was a plague emergency serious enough to warrant the suspension of rights and due process. The injunction was to remain in effect while the case was being litigated. Word of the plague in San Francisco was seeping out. Texas and Louisiana declared an embargo against all California passengers and goods. And now, the only plan for curbing the infection was halted by court order.
As negative publicity mounted, the California State Health Board jumped into the fray. In a surprise move, it ordered the city to restore the quarantine and threatened to quarantine the entire city from the rest of the state of California if it did not comply. The state board wasn’t admitting the existence of plague—far from it; it was just trying to limit the damage from negative publicity, and shield California’s trade and tourism from a devastating embargo.
In a meeting at the Grand Hotel, the state health board invited local businesspeople to meet with the Southern Pacific Railroad Company and the Fruit Canners’ Union. The fractious crowd was split as to whether quarantine was a necessary evil or a devastating admission to the world that California crops were tainted. Debate was loud and furious.
Dr. Williamson of the San Francisco Health Board despaired that his hands were tied. The local press and businesses billed the plague cleanup as a fraud, and the court injunction left him hamstrung.
But D. D. Crowley of the California State Health Board was unmoved. Crowley had his own preference, and that was to burn Chinatown to the ground. But if he couldn’t use the torch, a fence would do. “Gentlemen,” he ordered at the close of the May 28 meeting, “you must have Chinatown quarantined this evening.”16 With Sacramento holding a gun to its head, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a resolution empowering the health board to quarantine Chinatown for a second time.
Once again, 159 police officers descended on Chinatown. They guarded the district twenty-four hours a day in three shifts, sealing off the rectangle bounded by Stockton, Kearny, California, and Broadway. Now the quarantine zone was enlarged by one block to the north. But again, it zigzagged to exempt white institutions, including the redbrick steeple of St. Mary’s Church at California and Dupont Streets.
Chinatown churned in helpless frustration as the normal ebb and flow of business between whites and Asians was interrupted. A white woman on Stockton tried to pass garments to a Chinese tailor, but a police officer blocked the exchange. A Chinese man tried to mail a letter outside the zone, but guards spun him around and hustled him back to his quarter. A laundryman staggered up to the rope line under a heap of clean clothes for delivery outside the zone. An officer halted the shipment.17
The first time, it was a penetrable quarantine made of flimsy ropes, but this time, the barricades were hardened with wooden fence posts and barbed wire. A persistent buzz in the neighborhood said the quarantine was a mere prelude to imprisonment. Wyman and Kinyoun were exchanging telegrams discussing a proposal for the mass relocation of the Chinese to plague detention camps on Angel Island near the quarantine station, or on Mission Rock, a tiny, desolate speck of land in the bay near the waterfront warehouses. The news shot a new bolt of fear through the Chinese. Detention camps were a throwback to the medieval lazarettos, isolation hospitals or pest-houses.
Back East, wire service stories about San Francisco’s plague cases were now seeping into the press. With a major news event brewing out West, the dean of New York medical reporters decided to investigate. Dr. George F. Shrady, the burly, bearded medical correspondent for the New York Herald, boarded a train west to determine once and for all whether bubonic plague really existed in San Francisco.
The surgeon general got wind of the reporting trip. Fretting about bad publicity, he commanded Kinyoun to call upon the influential journalist at his hotel and brief him on the plague situation.
Kinyoun fumed. It was like bringing the mountain to Mohammed. Choking back his resentment, he boarded a ferry to the city. From the Ferry Building, he rode west on Market Street to the Palace Hotel on New Montgomery. He walked through the cobblestoned coaches’ entrance, under seven stories of balconies and a glass atrium roof. Once past the 150-foot dining room ablaze with chandeliers, he caught an elevator to Dr. Shrady’s room. The Palace’s rooms had fifteen-foot ceilings, bay windows, coffee served on Haviland china from France, and beds of imported Irish linen. It was the hostelry he could not afford, the scene of his first humiliation by this city, and now the scene of his second.
“I called upon the Doctor and after much struggling I was admitted to the presence,” Kinyoun told a friend. “I found him stowed away up in the Palace, surrounded by stenographers, typewriters, confidential clerks, bell boys, and porters, running as it were, the whole editorial business of the Herald.”18
Shrady assured Kinyoun that he had the editorial freedom to print the truth in his paper, adding that the Call would syndicate his series. Kinyoun suspected that Shrady’s real agenda was to deny plague had existed before his arrival and then to “discover” it during his stay and plant the Herald’s flag on the story. It was an old reporter’s trick, that of reinventing the news. But Kinyoun duly briefed Shrady on the plague cases diagnosed so far and invited him to view an autopsy. As it happened, the plague inconveniently went into hiding that week, so there was little to show.
Shrady toured the plague zone and reported what he saw, but he had to acknowledge that he had yet to see a single living case of plague. However, he reported that Kinyoun showed him all the clinical charts, autopsy notes, and lab tests amassed so far. All this, Shrady said, convinced him that the bubonic plague was real.
“Microscopic preparations… [and] infected organs said to have been removed from the nine dead bodies… now leave such mute but valuable testimony for accurate scientific investigation,” wrote Shrady. “I personally examined every one of them and the existence of bubonic plague bacillus in all of them admits of no shadow of doubt.”19
With a police escort kicking down doors, Shrady returned to tour Chinatown alcoves by candlelight, hoping to see a live plague patient as evidence of the epidemic. It eluded him.
Still, Shrady planned to write an incendiary finale. “He was going to advocate the total destruction of Chinatown by fire, by destruction by dynamite, drive these people out from their abodes,” Kinyoun said. At a time when the vaccine campaign was provoking the Chinese to open revolt, Kinyoun said, “I begged him by everything holy never to advocate such a thing as that at the present time unless he had ten thousand troops at his back.”20
May 30 was Memorial Day, and the streets were draped in bunting, lined with patriotic crowds waving flags and brass bands blaring martial tunes. Amid the festivities, Kinyoun and Kellogg learned of a new suspicious death in Chinatown. They invited Shrady to attend the postmortem.
After pressing through the cheering parade throngs, the trio of doctors got passes to cross the quarantine line and made their way toward their grim errand. Once they reached the morgue, they had to run a gauntlet of angry and mistrustful Chinese before entering. There, they unwrapped a shroud covering the corpse of a forty-year-old laborer, Dang Hong, dressed in his funeral robes.
“All the pathologic phenomena observed were those usually associated with plague,” Shrady wrote. “… On the left side under the jaw, there were evidences of suppuration, due to previous inflammation of the glands…. The glands in the groin were slightly enlarged…. Numerous specimens were removed from the body for future microscopical observation by Drs. Kellogg and Kinyoun.” Later, Kellogg came to Shrady’s hotel with a specimen for Shrady to examine. Both men agreed: The samples contained the bacteria of bubonic plague.21
Indignantly, the Chung Sai Yat Po attacked the diagnosis. The paper deemed the autopsy suspicious because the Chinese Six Companies’ own observers were barred from attending it. “The Chinese knew very well that he did not die of plague,” the Chinese reporter wrote. “They wanted to find out what those wicked doctors were doing.” He compared the Caucasian doctors to greedy vultures attacking carrion. “Perhaps there is a ghost of plague haunting Chinatown,” he wrote. “To quarantine Chinatown is to eat the meat of the ghost of the plague. Do you think there is enough meat for them?”22 After his story on the autopsy of Dang Hong, Shrady became something of a celebrity in San Francisco. The Call reprinted his series. Even the Chinese daily ran his story.23 Kinyoun nursed hopes that this reporter, for all his arrogance, might yet help the plague campaign by writing truthful dispatches. It looked as if that might come to pass. Then, suddenly, Shrady turned from alarmist to apologist.
Shrady’s conversion followed a banquet thrown in his honor by Mayor Phelan at the posh Pacific Union Club. Surrounded by city politicians, Shrady tucked into an elaborate procession of courses at a table garlanded with flowers and cornucopias of California fruits. The visiting journalist rode through Golden Gate Park to the Cliff House, to breathe the sea air while overlooking the Pacific surf. Before retiring for the night at the Palace, Shrady told the press he was charmed by the city’s pleasures. Later that night, who should drop by Shrady’s hotel for a chat but California’s governor, Henry T. Gage.24
“The dinner had the desired effect,” Kinyoun later wrote to his family in the East. “The Doctor [Shrady] had evidently been doctored.”25
After being entertained, Shrady published a finale to his plague series, in which he withdrew any concern he’d earlier expressed:
“After having visited every section of Chinatown under the escort of the police and of the health authorities, both Federal and local, I have come to the conclusion that this plague scare in San Francisco is absolutely unwarranted,” Shrady wrote. “I am thoroughly convinced that there really was no danger of the plague and that virtually it did not exist in this city.”
“The rumor that plague threatens San Francisco is ridiculous and unfounded,” he concluded. “One swallow does not make a summer, and one case of plague does not make an epidemic.”26
Kinyoun was crushed. Now, he feared, the East Coast would never learn the truth from Shrady. “The Philistines,” he said, “had shorn him of his locks.”27
On the same day that the newspaperman recanted, Chew Kuey Kem, a forty-nine-year-old cigar maker, died in Chinatown—one more case of “bumpkin” for the books.
With the city’s trade and prestige at stake, the Call pleaded “in the name of humanity” for Chinatown to be burned. “So long as it stands, so long will there be the menace of the appearence in San Francisco of every form of disease, plague and pestilence which Asian filth and vice generate,” the paper said in its May 31 editorial. “Clear the foul spot from San Francisco and give its debris to the flames.”