The Year of the Rat

Home , Bubo, Henry Gage, Portsmouth Square, Rupert Blue, Second plague pandemic, Walter Wyman

THE YEAR OF THE RAT:

A SOCIAL AND MEDICAL HISTORY OF BUBONIC PLAGUE IN

SAN FRANCISCO, 1900-1908

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University Thesis Presented to the Faculty

California State University, East Bay

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In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts in History

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Jennifer Nicole Faggiano

May, 2019

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures and Photos ...... v

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1. Gold Mountain: The Chinese In California During the 18th

century...... 12

Chapter 2. The Menagerie: The Chinese in San Francisco ...... 37

Chapter 3. La Piqure de Puce: Plague History and Ecology...... 51

Chapter 4. Fallen Leaves: The Arrival of Plague In San Francisco...... 67

Chapter 5. Fake News: Death, Denial, and Kinyoun’s Attempt to End the

Outbreak ...... 83

Chapter 6. Ashes to Ashes: Rupert Blue, the End of the First Epidemic, and the

San Francisco Earthquake ...... 113

Conclusion ...... 132

Bibliography ...... 141

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 Blaze razes Honolulu’s Chinatown ...... 8

Figure 2 Sheet music featuring racial caricatures ...... 21

Figure 3 Chinese gold miners in Tuolumne County ...... 23

Figure 4 Advertisement for cigars made by white labor ...... 28

Figure 5 San Jose Chinatown, before and after it was razed ...... 30

Figure 6 Bartlett Alley, Chinatown, 1900 ...... 39

Figure 7 Chinatown yard filled with refuse and debris ...... 42

Figure 8 Rat-infested basement in Chinatown ...... 48

Figure 9 Plague doctor mask, fantasy versus reality...... 56

Figure 10 Microscopic view of Yersinia pestis ...... 57

Figure 11 Microscopic view of a flea ...... 60

Figure 12 Patient with visible bubo in their armpit ...... 64

Figure 13 Herbal shop in Chinatown, 1900 ...... 69

Figure 14 First police cordon around Chinatown ...... 74

Figure 15 Specters of disease over Chinatown, political cartoon ...... 75

Figure 16 Horse-drawn wagon used to disinfect buildings ...... 77

Figure 17 “The Raising of the Quarantine” limerick ...... 82

Figure 18 Two Chinese men attempt to hide a sick companion ...... 88

Figure 19 Newspaper Headline: “There is absolutely no reason for alarm” ...... 99

Figure 20 Dr. Shrady’s words of counsel to the Chinese ...... 102

Figure 21 Image of Consul Ho Yow alongside article of extortion scandal ...... 105

Figure 22 J.J. Kinyoun political cartoon ...... 109

Figure 23 Demolition of condemned buildings in Chinatown ...... 124

Figure 24 Ruins of Chinatown after the 1906 earthquake and fire ...... 129

INTRODUCTION

“The Oceanic Steamship Company's Australia arrived yesterday from Hawaii and the Toyo Kisen Kaisha's Nippon Maru from China and Japan via Honolulu. Both vessels were sent into quarantine…The quarantine grounds presented a lively scene throughout the day… The Australia was the vessel to which Dr. Kinyoun devoted most of his attention. She has over 150 cabin passengers aboard from Honolulu, and every one of them will be subjected to a rigid examination before being allowed to land.”

-The San Francisco Call, February 1, 1900.1

In late December 1899, the steamship Australia departed from Honolulu, freshly packed with passengers and goods, and sailed towards San Francisco. This voyage across the Pacific was part of the regular run that the ship frequently made, and thus nothing out of the ordinary was to be expected from the journey. 150 passengers from all walks of life were charioted across the chilly and unforgiving winter waves, waiting with what we can only assume was eagerness to finally catch sight of the Golden Coast that would give them a reprieve from their rough passage. On January 31, 1900, the Australia finally passed through the Golden Gate and docked at the Angel Island quarantine station to await the mandatory inspection and fumigation for all incoming vessels. Waiting to inspect the ship was Dr. Joseph J. Kinyoun, Chief Quarantine Officer of the United States

Marine Hospital.2 A careful and calculated man, Kinyoun was particularly dedicated in his inspection of the Australia, as Honolulu was currently grappling with an outbreak of

1 "Mail Steamers Are Detained in Quarantine - Australia and Nippon Maru Held.," San Francisco Call (San Francisco) February 1, 1900: 7.

2 San Francisco Call, February 1, 1900.

bubonic plague, and unchecked cargo or passengers created the risk of bringing infection

Into San Francisco.

Few others shared Kinyoun’s intense concern over the plague bacillus reaching the city, possibly because, unlike Kinyoun, it was not their job to prevent so from happening. Four days after the arrival of the Australia, the San Francisco Examiner published an article further propagating the idea that it was inconceivable to think that plague could occur in their city. The article, appropriately titled, “Why San Francisco is

Plague Proof,” had the following to say of the supposed immunity of the city:

First is the fact that all vessels coming to San Francisco must stop at the islands, where…they could discharge them if infection had appeared and the ships themselves could be held in quarantine. At San Francisco, again, we have two lines of defense besides the city’s own Health Department. These are the Federal quarantine, with its swift steamer for boarding incoming vessels; its great quarantine station at Angel Island, and the large floating hulk alongside which Pacific liners of the greatest draught may anchor in the bay of California City, and there have their entire hulls and cargoes fumigated. When any vessel from a foreign port enters the Golden Gate, and before any person or thing may leave her, she must stop...3

In bold-faced print, the Examiner acknowledged that a central aspect to San Francisco’s supposed plague immunity lie in the federal quarantine work done by Kinyoun at Angel

Island. Despite this, on January 31 the quarantine inspectors had been placed under immense pressure by impatient shippers and merchants to grant the Australia a clean bill of health, so that she may dock and unload her valuable cargo, which included 7,929 bags of sugar.4 After granting the steamer permission to proceed to the city, the inspectors

3 "Why San Francisco is Plague Proof," San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco) February 4, 1900: 33.

4 San Francisco Call, February 1, 1900.

watched with uncertainty as she sailed across the bay to dock in San Francisco’s port.

There, on the first of February, crewmen on the Australia unloaded passengers and cargo, and quickly turned around for a return trip to Hawaii. As the human passengers disembarked and made their way onto the docks, so too did some four-legged stowaways who had gone undetected as a result of the hurried inspection. At first glance it may appear that these creatures made little difference when added to the city’s already massive subterranean rat population; however, these new arrivals brought with them a deadly new cargo.

January 31 of 1900 did not only see the arrival of the Australia steamship: it also saw the arrival of the first day in the Chinese New Year. The year of the pig had come to an end, and according to the legendary sequence of the Chinese zodiac, the year of the rat had begun. The stories and legends associated with each zodiac animal vary widely throughout Chinese culture, yet it is often held that those born under the sign of the rat exemplify cleverness, are loving to their families, and make good companions in adversity. Alongside this, the rat is a representation of good health. This year, however, a cruel twist of fate would ensure that the year of the rat brought not good health, but its antithesis: pestilence. 5

When the Australia was permitted to dock on February 1, it did so right where the

Chinatown sewers happened to empty into the bay. Here, the rats, who themselves were likely as sick of the sea as their human companions, took their leave through the easily

5 Marilyn Chase, The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco, New York: Random House, 2004: 13.

accessible sewer opening.6 They ventured through the dark underground tunnels, intermingling with the city’s native rat population, and eventually finding their way into the crowded basements and streets of the Chinatown district, all the while carrying their own little stowaways: plague-infested fleas. The newly arrived rats were likely the first to die, having succumbed to the infection raging through their systems, but it did not take long for infection to spread to the local colonies. The people of Chinatown began observing great numbers of rats dying throughout the district – in the streets, on roofs, and inside homes. The Chinese were not blind to the seriousness of what they saw before them. Traditionally in the “old country,” the people believed that rats foreshadowed epidemics, and within any dwelling revealed to contain dead rats, it was believed that human deaths would soon follow. When dead rats were found, action would be taken, or people would flee the dwelling. However, here in their crammed neighborhood of

Chinatown, in the heart of a bustling and spiteful city, they had nowhere else to go.7

Confined to their district by a deep history of racial and cultural prejudice, the Chinese citizens of San Francisco found themselves trapped, with few means of escaping the coming epidemic.

The first victim of bubonic plague in San Francisco died on March 6, 1900, just one month after the arrival of the Australia. Wong Chut King was found dead in the basement of the Globe Hotel on Dupont Street, a cramped and dilapidated hotel-turned-

6 Chase, 28.

7 Chase, 15-16.

tenement which housed hundreds of Chinatown’s citizens.8 King was a 41-year-old lumber salesman who lived a solitary bachelor’s life, like many of those who resided within Chinatown. One morning, King awoke with a sickly weakness that prevented him from working that day, so he stayed in his bed in the dark, damp basement of the Globe

Hotel. There, he suffered cramping and pain in his abdomen and groin, cradling himself in an attempt to relieve his suffering. Local doctors and healers who attended to him attributed his pain to an aging bladder, prescribing him herbs traditionally used to treat such a problem. Unfortunately, the healers were ill-prepared to handle the malady that truly lie before them, and their misdiagnosis was just the first of many that would occur during the course of the epidemic; though theirs was genuinely accidental, and not politically motivated as was sometimes the case. Like many other victims of insect bites,

King likely scratched at the site where the flea had delivered its fatal bite, causing a rush of blood to the area that would chariot the bacteria deeper into his system. The bacteria would then multiply, fighting a winning battle against his struggling lymph glands that grew swollen and inflamed as the bacteria filled them. Gradually, King’s fever spiked, and he fell into a delirium as the plague bacterium surged through his system. Eventually the plague toxins would quite literally rot his blood, killing the tissue of his major organs.

Finally, septic shock set in, and King descended into a coma, dying shortly after.9

King’s unfortunate passing on March 6, 1900, was not initially anything seen as dramatically out of the ordinary. His comatose body was taken to the Sacramento Street

8 Geoffrey Marks and William K. Beatty, Epidemics, New York: C. Scribners Sons, 1976: 257

9 Chase, 16-17.

Undertaker, situated just one block away from the Globe Hotel, who was required by law to report the death to the city’s Health Department. Police surgeon F.P. Wilson arrived on the scene for an examination, during which he noted the presence of the swollen lymph glands in King’s groin. Immediately Wilson grew concerned about the potential cause of

King’s death and called for the assistance of the city health officer A.P. O’Brien and the city bacteriologist Wilfred H. Kellogg. Upon meeting with the two, Wilson shared his fear that King may have succumbed to the very scourge that San Franciscans believed they were impervious to, the exotic Asiatic pestilence that could never reach the Golden

Coast. It was a difficult concept to grasp, as the only recorded incident of plague to ever occur in the western United States had been isolated to a steamer ship, the Nippon Maru, which arrived shortly before the Australia. The Nippon Maru had carried two infected passengers into port. These passengers, two Japanese men, were terrified of the city health officers and jumped overboard in an attempt to escape them, where they drowned in the cold and unforgiving tides of the bay.10 It is worth noting that there has been speculation over whether it was the Nippon Maru or the Australia that was truly responsible for delivering plague to San Francisco; however, it is now predominately accepted that the threat on the Nippon Maru arrived and died with the two infected men, while the Australia was able to successfully carry the disease into port.

Wilson, O’Brien, and Kellogg began performing tests on King’s body to determine whether he had truly been felled by plague. Kellogg delivered tissue samples

10 Tro Harper, “Dealing with the plague,” in San Francisco Sunday Examiner (San Francisco, CA), 1977: 20

to Kinyoun at his Angel Island laboratory, as Kinyoun was experienced and knowledgeable regarding the plague due to his time spent studying the bacteria alongside other prominent plague experts. Kinyoun proceeded to prepare cultures and perform several animal experimentation trials. It would take several days for the results to show as conclusive, but in the meantime the Health Department set out to warn the city of the possible presence of plague. Few within the city took their claims seriously, with many rejecting them as fear mongering, or as bids to win the Health Department more funding.

Instead of awareness and concern, indifference and denial spread throughout the city.11 In many ways this wave of denial was its own epidemic, working hand in hand with the actual plague bacteria to create a catastrophe. Xenophobia and a false sense of security were the vectors of transmission, denial and inaction were the symptoms, and the likely- preventable deaths of plague victims was the outcome.

The group of medical men saw it necessary to enact an immediate quarantine of

Chinatown, and so it was done. A cordon was erected around the district and officers were stationed at all entrances and exits. The immediate goal and concern was to seek out and isolate other cases of plague that may exist within the district. Yet, despite the fervor with which this plan played out, and the intense dedication that these professionals directed towards the prevention of the spread of the disease, they permitted the white citizens of the district to leave the quarantine zone. This may seem counterintuitive, since if plague truly exists within the district, then all inhabitants are at risk of infection. This line of thinking, while logical, was not shared by the San Francisco Health Department

11 Harper, 20-21.

officials in 1900. To them, and many others, the plague was an ancient, exotic, and

Asiatic disease that spread freely among the Chinese and Japanese citizens of the city, yet posed a much smaller threat to everyone else. This sentiment was not new, as it had long been held by Californians that the Chinese were harbingers of filth and disease, and that

Chinatown, or any district which they may inhabit, was a cesspool of pestilence. This is primarily due to long standing prejudice against the Chinese within the State of

California, the history of which stretches back decades into the past before plague ever set foot in the State.

The idea that plague existed within San Francisco was unpopular, with the newspapers and politicians reacting violently to the idea. They independently and cooperatively worked to launch a campaign discrediting the health board and Dr.

Kinyoun, slandering their efforts to treat and prevent the spread of plague. Within

Chinatown, the idea was equally unpopular, yet for a very different reason.

Figure 1: Image from the San Francisco Call, “Two Million Dollar Blaze Razes Honolulu’s Chinatown,” February 1, 1900. Left: Text reads from top to bottom: “Kauma-Kapili Church-“, “Japanese Women being removed to detention camp.” Right: Text reads: “Map of Burned District.”

Alongside the fear of intensified discrimination and subjugation against them, the

Chinese citizens of the city were well aware of the outbreak of plague in Honolulu, and how the Asiatic citizens of the Hawaiian Chinatown suffered at the hands of the officials.

It was decided that the plague houses of the Honolulu Chinatown would be burned, and the inhabitants relocated. The fire grew out of control, destroying the homes and properties of thousands of Chinese and Japanese, leaving them homeless. The officials responded by temporarily housing them within detention camps, escorted by police guard to prevent any unruly resistance.12 Fearing the same could happen to them, and rejecting the concept of themselves as dirty and disease-ridden, the Chinese citizens of San

Francisco joined the newspapers and the politicians in rejecting the claims of the health department.

Chaos and entropy would come to consume the city as doctors and politicians went to war over the presence of the plague. The non-Chinese citizens of San Francisco were afraid and angry, as their livelihoods were being threatened by an invisible enemy whose existence would continue to be hotly debated for years. The Chinese citizens grew more fearful of both the unknown entity that continued to take the lives of their loved- ones and neighbors, and by the risk of increased discrimination due to something they had little control over. The “social epidemic” of denial and xenophobia, stemming from decades of institutionalized racism and oppression against the Chinese, worked hand-in- hand with the plague bacteria to create a series of events that made the San Francisco

12 "Two Million Dollar Blaze Razes Honolulu’s Chinatown.," San Francisco Call (San Francisco) February 1, 1900: 4.

plague worse than it ever should have been. Also guilty were the politicians and merchants who cared more about profits than the health of the people whom they shared the State with, seeing the recognition of plague as economic suicide. What were the deaths of a few Chinese to them, if it meant the protection of their fortunes? While civilians and officials went back and forth, the true threat remained undetected, riding on their four-legged chariots who scurried beneath the city, silently entering homes and businesses and venturing out into the streets. Ultimately, these carriers reached their final destination and went still, succumbing to the deadly toxins of the bacteria in their systems. It was then that their passengers – plague-carrying fleas that disembarked the cold bodies of the rats, and searched for a new host, unconcerned with race or politics.

The role of the flea in the transmission of plague was not accepted on the West coast of the United States until 1907 – close to three years after the first epidemic had ended, and just in time for the second to begin, caused by the great earthquake of 1906. By its end, the first outbreak had seen 121 reported cases of infection, and 113 reported deaths, though the true numbers are likely higher.

Unfortunately, we cannot save those in the past, but what we can do is learn from their suffering and the tragedies that affected their lives and deaths. We can use this information to do better next time we are faced with an epidemic – and there will be a next time. Infectious diseases and epidemics are not gone, they are not some artifact from a bygone era. They walk the earth and affect lives today. Simultaneously, we continue to associate diseases with peoples, instead of associating diseases with their true causes and the social factors that contribute to their predominance among certain groups. AIDS is the

“gay” disease, malaria and cholera are diseases for people living in “third world countries.” Too many people ignore the aspects of society and environment that cause these horrible diseases, and instead live in comfortable ignorance because they’re not one of those people. This concept of other is far beyond the scope of this thesis and is a much more complex problem than I am equipped to solve. However, what this thesis sets out to do is highlight the dangers that social division and racism pose to social health, analyzed through the lens of the epidemic of bubonic plague in San Francisco. Infectious diseases do not care about race, but 1900 San Francisco did.

CHAPTER ONE: GOLD MOUNTAIN The Chinese In California During the Nineteenth Century

“The “Chinese Problem” can be solved by answering the following questions: 1. Are the Chinese in California a benefit or an injury to us? 2. If an injury, have we any legal or moral right to require those who are here to leave the country, or prevent the landing of others who may desire to come? 3. If we have such legal or moral right, how can we enforce it?...I am forced irresistibly to the conclusion, in view of the foregoing facts, that the Chinese in California are no benefit to us, but are, on the contrary, an injury and a curse.”

-F.P. Thompson, Chinese Immigration: Social, Moral, and Political Effect, 1878.1

The above excerpt is taken from an 1878 report to the California State Senate, written by a special committee put together to investigate the social, moral, and political effect that Chinese immigration had on the State of California. This document was published just four years before the first Chinese Exclusion Act was signed into effect by

President Chester A. Arthur, which provided a federal prohibition to the immigration of

Chinese laborers, or “coolies” as they were commonly named. It is no secret that the

Chinese have suffered a difficult and oppressive history since their arrival in the United

States. Far from home and most of the time without their families, these sojourners traveled across the sea to a foreign land for a chance at a better, more fortuitous life, the majority of whom intended to accomplish such through honest and hard work. Given these reasonable and noble goals, it can be difficult to wrap one’s head around how

1 F.P. Thompson, Chinese Immigration: The Social, Moral, and Political Effects of Chinese Immigration, Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1876: 268.

common labor competition and everyday nineteenth century racism ultimately led to the widespread and vehement disdain of the Chinese that ultimately fueled the Chinese

Exclusion Act. If the quote chosen to open this chapter does not quite exemplify the vehement disdain that I speak of, then that is simply because I did not want to open the chapter with such a hateful quote. The same document also writes that the Chinese are a

“monstrous evil,” that “their touch is pollution…they are a nation of thieves…nearly all will be criminals,” and, more upsettingly:

It is gravely asserted that the Chinese are a worn-out, barren, and inferior race. Like a field that has yielded its harvests and can no longer be tilled; like a tree that has borne its fruit and is now withered and dying- in him there is no richness, no vitality, no growth…Two thousand years have not changed a Chinaman. Their development has been arrested. We cannot help them up. They are pulling us down. The poisonous worms of death that are gnawing at their vitals have already fastened upon our youth.2

We will return to this document periodically throughout this chapter, but for now, the reader may be wondering what these vicious words have to do with the plague in San

Francisco? In the previous chapter I presented the argument that institutionalized racism and oppression directed at the Chinese was one of the major causes for the severity of the plague and for the number of victims who perished. In order to fully understand just how ideas about race can make a bacterial plague worse, it is necessary to have a comprehensive understanding of the history of the Chinese in California, and how racism and race relations became so institutionalized.

2 Thompson, 4, 32, 276-277.

Let us go back to the first victim of the plague in San Francisco, Wong Chut

King. King is many things to this story – a hardworking individual, an oppressed man in an aggressive environment, and a victim of plague. He also serves as a typecast of the hardworking Chinese migrant who ventured away from home to pursue dreams of

California Riches. Born sometime around 1859, King originally hails from the small hamlet village of Bi Keng, located in the southwest corner of the Guangdong province of

China. King’s homeland featured rolling hills and farmland, as well as deep conflict between the established farming population and the newcomers to the land, the Hakka people from the North. By the mid-nineteenth century this once-fertile farming territory was struggling to sustain the growing population, and the ensuing conflict killed thousands, contributing to harvest hardships and the spread of disease. To make matters worse, natural disasters such as typhoons, earthquakes, and flooding worsened conditions, driving the inhabitants to begin migrating out of the area.3

These are the conditions which King found himself in as he grew. While the reasons may seem obvious, little concrete evidence exists to explain exactly why he decided to migrate out of China during the 1880s, but surviving reports suggest that this decision was based on demographic pressure and a desire for economic improvement.

Among the Cantonese, California was known as “Gum Shan,” or “Gold Mountain,” and the stories of its riches called like a siren song to those suffering economic hardships.

King was likely one of these men who was seduced by the idea of Gold Mountain,

3 Guenter B. Risse, Plague, Fear, and Politics in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012: 19-20.

though there was one barrier he had to overcome before he up and left: abandoning his family violated his Confucian beliefs. King was young, married, and the sole breadwinner for his family, and leaving could possibly bring them ruin. Yet, at the same time, traveling overseas to work and bring riches back home could also be seen as fulfilling his familial obligation. 4 It is most likely under this justification that he set off for the Golden Coast, his family eagerly awaiting the money he would send in the mail, and eventually, his triumphant return. Unfortunately, he never returned, and instead died on a cold undertaker’s table. His final lucid moments were spent in feverish pain, in his dark and dank basement bunk, where he possibly thought of his family and true home back in China. Was he gripped with fear of his coming death, or did he face it with calm acceptance? We will never know, and we can only hope that his family made do after his passing.

While this all-too brief account of King’s life and death may seem strangely somber for an analytical thesis, I can assure you it serves a purpose. The reader should understand that these victims – both of the plague and of the circumstances they found themselves in – are not nameless statistics or background characters in some greater narrative. They were real individuals with their own names and families and dreams, who made great sacrifices in an attempt to have a better life. The reader must understand this, not just when reading this document but when reading any history. These are the real

4 Risse, 20-21.

experiences of people who had terrible things happen to them, and they should be used to prevent further such things from happening ever again. But I digress, back to history.

On February 2, 1848, a defeated Mexico signed the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, officially ceding the California territory to the United States. This was a terrible loss for

Mexico, and a great gain for the U.S., made even greater by the fact that gold had been discovered just nine days earlier in the California Sierra Nevada’s, completely unbeknownst to Mexico. This knowledge was kept hush-hush, and did not make headlines in San Francisco until March 15, immediately igniting a frenzy as sailing vessels disseminated the information to Mexico, Panama, Chile, and China. San

Francisco essentially shut down as homes and businesses were boarded up, and their inhabitants headed to the mountains. Unemployed and financially struggling men on the

East coast went West, and an abundance of Chinese sailors immediately took off for

California upon hearing the news.5

Like King, all of these men – not just the Chinese – were seeking riches to improve their lives, regardless of what social class or race they descended from. Slightly different than King, however, who left for California close to forty years later, the early

Chinese who came to California during the 1840-50s did so often with the heavy encouragement (i.e. manipulation) of Hong Kong and Canton shipmasters. These shipmasters worked to convince and recruit men to sail to California, a task in which they faced little resistance. Shipping companies distributed maps and leaflets that boasted

5 Jean Pfaelzer, Driven Out: The Hidden War Against Chinese Americans, New York: Random House, 2007: 2-3.

about the abundance of gold just waiting across the ocean, painting America as a land of shining opportunity and equality. The words in the leaflets claimed things such as the following:

Americans are very rich people. They want the Chinaman to come and will make him welcome. There will be big pay, large houses, and food and clothing of the finest description. You can write your friends or send them money any time, and we [shipmasters] will be responsible for the safe delivery. It is a nice country, without mandarins or soldiers…There are a great many Chinamen there now, and it will not be a strange country, China God is there...Never fear, you will be lucky. Come to Hong Kong, or to the sign of this house in Canton and we will instruct you.6

The men who read these leaflets needed little more convincing. It seemed virtually guaranteed that upon reaching this Gold Mountain they would be greeted with open arms and easily find piles of riches. The gullibility of these villagers is not wholly their own fault. They had never set foot on American soil before and knew nothing about the true nature of its inhabitants. Further, they had been struggling with brutal warlords, destitution, and the intrusion of British battleships. Given their circumstances, the venture was worth the risk. Also, I specifically mentioned that it was “men” who ventured out, as few women made the difficult voyage. Most of the Chinese women who arrived in

California during the mid-nineteenth century did so under the ownership of Chinese merchants, and were brought over as sex slaves to serve as prostitutes.7

Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, the benevolent shipmasters who assured these villagers of the totally guaranteed and not-at-all fabricated success they would see across

6 Pfaelzer, 4-5.

7 Pfaelzer, 4-5.

the ocean also expected payment for their services. The often-poor villagers aching to reach Gold Mountain had to find some way to gather the necessary funds to make the voyage, and many sold their farming fields and boats or borrowed money to accomplish this. In many of these instances the men who took out the loans faced difficulty in paying them back, or were unable to pay them back altogether, as their California fortune remained elusive.

Nonetheless, thousands of Chinese men made their way across the Pacific, a difficult voyage taking weeks to complete. Finally, the endless seascape was broken by the briefest glimpse of land, and as it grew larger and larger it eventually dwarfed the vessel which carried them to their dreams. I am sure that their excitement was palpable upon seeing Gold Mountain with their own eyes. Unfortunately, this excitement would be short lived, as they came face to face with the true nature of this gilded land. Upon arriving at the Sierra Nevada’s, the Chinese migrants did not find a glittering land of equality and fortune. Instead, they found severe and violent competition over gold, while

Native Americans and Mexican Americans were facing oppression, forced removal, enslavement, or violent pogroms instigated by their white competitors.8 Nevertheless the

Chinese sojourners pushed on, establishing their own camps and mines, unaware of the violence that would soon be directed towards them.

Labor and financial competition are likely the early motivators for the anti-

Chinese sentiment that grew to become institutionalized in California, though other factors were at play. The white men who had sought their fortune in the Golden State for

8 Pfaelzer, 6.

the most part felt that they had a shared ideology, and they felt unified in their experiences out west. This unity, however, seemed to be locked within their own race, as they were blind to the fact that the Chinese shared the same elements in their experience.

All had faced a long journey, some degree of displacement, and disappointment upon reaching California. Historians have tried to identify why then, if their experiences were so similar, were the Chinese excluded from this ideology of shared experience? Some argue that partial blame lies with the Chinese, who perceived their journey as a “round trip,” only there as temporary sojourners who did not intend to make California their permanent home. Lack of communication is also a possible reason, though there were also communication barriers with groups of European immigrants. The white settlers began lobbing accusations of cheapness towards the Chinese, but again, some European immigrants such as the Irish were seen through a similar lens. No, ultimately what set the

Chinese so far apart in the minds of the white laborers was a psychological barrier that formed due to a conception that the Chinese were fundamentally different than themselves, and therefore lesser.9 The appearance of their faces, the clothing they wore, the queues that adorned their heads, their cultural and spiritual beliefs, and even the way that their names rolled off of the tongue – these were all in such dramatic contrast to the

American way of life, and these all set them apart as so dramatically other.

During the 1850’s the term “assimilation” was becoming fashionable, and the idea of assimilation to being a true American, and therefore “not Chinese,” was seen as crucial

9 Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995: 16-18.

to fitting in to white society.10 In 1855 the idea that the Chinese did not fit in was expressed by prominent republican Hinton Helper, who stated that the Chinese were

“semibarbarians,” and that “No inferior race of men can exist in these United States without becoming subordinate to the will of the Anglo-American.”11 At the same time, the responses to the Chinese of many individual Americans was being shaped by these new sentiments, as well as by earlier responses to Native Americans and enslaved

African Americans. The anti-Chinese exclusions that would come to exist in mining camps and the forced expulsions from land mirrored actions that had been taken against blacks, and many anti-Chinese legislations that developed in California came to reflect the black codes of the Midwest and South. Also, like the black caricatures that wormed their way into the media such as Jim Crow, a caricature of the Chinese, or “Heathen

Chinee,” too found its place in the American media. This place was commonly alongside blackface minstrel shows, presenting a comic and racially stereotyped caricature of the

Chinese.12

Once these divisions and ideas of “other-therefore-lesser” were cemented into the minds of white Californians, it took little time for violence to follow. White laborers and

10 Saxton, 18.

11 Hinton R. Helper, The Land of Gold: Reality Versus Fiction, Baltimore: Published for the Author by Henry Taylor, Sun Iron Building, 1855: 95-96

12 Saxton, 20.

Figure 2: Sheet Music from 1885-86. Taken from Jean Pfaelzer's Driven Out, page 280. Offers an example of an instance where black and Chinese racist caricatures were presented together. miners were greatly disturbed by the concept of sharing “their” land with the Chinese, and for the remainder of the Gold Rush they worked to ensure that no Chinese camps or mines went undisturbed, often through mob violence. One of the earliest instances of this was in 1849, when a mob of white miners in Mariposa County gave a declaration to all

Chinese gold miners that they must leave within twenty-four hours, or “face punishment deemed appropriate by other miners.”13 In the spring of 1852, a mob of sixty white miners stampeded through a chain of Chinese mines, assaulting hundreds of Chinese men and chasing them off of their claims. Later in 1852, the white miners of Tuolumne

County held a convention, during which they called for a ban on citizenship for Asiatic

13 Pfaelzer, 8-9.

immigrants, and all agreed to only vote for state legislators who would “drive coolies from some of [their] mining districts.”14 At Camp Salvado, an arid creek where many

Chinese miners were working under an English stock company, sudden rain exposed clusters of gold. News of gold in a Chinese settlement quickly spread, and yet again a gang of white miners descended upon them, chasing them from the land. The English investors abandoned their workers, and the sixty remaining Chinese traveled to Tuolumne

County where they established Chinese Camp, believed to possibly have been the first all-Chinese town in the United States.15 Unfortunately, they would not go unmolested in the new homes that they found for themselves.

“Roundups” and purges became common practice, during which groups of white miners would storm into Chinese land, typically either claims or camps, and force them to leave via threats or violence. A particularly large incidence of violence occurred during the winter of 1858-59 and was the direct result of these purges. Outside of Shasta City was a large number of Chinese miners who had refused to leave their gold fields, despite the threats from the white miners. 200 white men then rode from Shasta City, armed with guns and ropes, and descended upon one of the Chinese camps in the area, ordering the inhabitants at gunpoint to leave and never return. Fearing for their lives, the Chinese men grabbed their belongings and fled. Cocky by their success, the same group of white men then rode down the river to another camp, and proceeded to do the same to the Chinese

14 Pfaelzer, 10-11.

15 Pfaelzer, 9.

Figure 3: Chinese gold miners in Tuolumne County. Taken from Jean Pfaelzer's Driven Out, page 9. men there. The white aggressors likely believed that they had scored an easy victory, and were surely caught by surprise when the Chinese men returned, armed, and ready to defend their claims.16

The raids and purges of the Chinese camps continued and spread for the next three years. Fortunately, the Chinese in Shasta County did have one relatively powerful ally: Sherriff Clay Stockton, a young 25-year-old boy from Kentucky who diligently pursued the mobs of white miners in an attempt to stop their terror. During a late evening in February in 1859, another mob of white miners descended upon a remote Chinese claim, ordering them to leave. This mob did not stand by and wait for the men to flee, and instead began destroying their belongings and capturing any men they could grab. Most of the Chinese men managed to escape, but seventy-five were captured. The following day the mob paraded the captured men down the main thoroughfare in Shasta City, while

16 Pfaelzer, 14.

gathered crowds jeered and threw stones at the prisoners. Stockton, with a contingent of armed deputies, intercepted the sick parade, arrested fifteen of the white men, and freed the captives. Four days later a separate gang of white miners attacked Chinese claims near Shasta City, and once again paraded their badly-wounded prisoners through the city.

Stockton again intercepted the mob and freed the imprisoned men, this time numbering almost two-hundred. Fearing a civil war could erupt from the intensifying aggression,

Sheriff Stockton sent a plea to Governor John Weller to send arms, so that he may equip a militia of law enforcers. After some initial resistance, Weller agreed to send one- hundred and thirteen rifles to aid in Stockton’s efforts. Upon hearing word that Stockton had essentially formed a small army and was arresting white vigilantes, the Chinese celebrated. During the course of his work, Stockton would effectively save the lives of hundreds of Chinese men, but not even his efforts could curb the intensifying racism growing within the State.17

White miners clung to the belief that the Chinese were all “coolies, a derelict species of slave,” which was supplemented by the U.S. government’s lack of initiative in enforcing a ban on the trade of Chinese slaves, most of whom were women. The federal and State governments played a significant role in the continuation and growth of anti-

Chinese sentiment, largely through the many anti-Chinese legislations and ordinances that were passed during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Despite the economic failures that the Chinese underwent in California, and the legislative actions taken against

17 Pfaelzer, 14-16.

them, more of their countrymen continued to come to America, soon forming one tenth of

California’s population.

As more men continued to chase their dream of Gold Mountain, officials turned to racial stereotypes as a basis for their expulsion policies and made numerous attempts to stop or restrict continued immigration of Chinese workers, and to force the existing workers to have a more difficult time getting by. The earliest, and perhaps most commonly known instance of this legislation was the 1852 Foreign Miners Tax. The

1852 law was actually a reinstatement of an earlier law passed in 1850, which was more targeted towards Mexicans and Chileans. The new law passed in 1852 called for a $3.00 tax-per-month for the legal right to mine. By 1855 the tax had been raised to $6.00, and

$2.00 more every year after. Those who did not or could not pay had their tools and belongings sold. Both real and fake tax collectors harassed the Chinese for payment, and between 1852 and 1870, the Chinese had paid approximately $58 million to the State.

The Foreign Miners Tax was, to many, a justification for increased violence against

Chinese miners. One common practice among the “collectors” was to take the men’s queue (their traditional long braids) and use it to tie groups of men together, or individual men to trees. Once they were incapacitated, the “collectors” would look through/loot their belongings in an act of legalized robbery. Some men attempted to protect themselves from the collectors through bribery, or simply by hiding. Surprisingly, not all

Californians agreed with the Mining Taxes and collecting, arguing that it was “taxation without representation,” and that if the Chinese were going to be taxed then they should

be afforded the right to citizenship. Others didn’t like the tax simply because they thought it would make it harder for the Chinese to make enough money to leave.18

The Foreign Miners Tax was just the first in a succession of legislated attempts to beat the Chinese out of the State. Between 1855-56 California legislature’s Committee on

Mines made an official declaration that the Chinese were “odious and degrading,” further solidifying their “differentness” to the white race. Further, the Committee argued that

“Mongolian and Asiatic races are not white,” and were therefore threatening the

“superior race.” Earlier in 1855 a different legislative blow was taken against the

Chinese, as a law was passed that called for a $50.00 fee from any immigrant who could not become a citizen of California. Among those unqualified for citizenship were the

Chinese, and because they could not become naturalized they had to pay.19

The first attempt to officially expel the Chinese from the State occurred in 1862.

The lengthily-titled “Act to Protect Free White Labor Against Competition with Chinese

Coolie Labor, and to Discourage the Immigration of the Chinese into the State of

California” called for all Chinese to pay a monthly head tax of $2.50 to the police. This act was ultimately a failure, as it attempted to go above federal authority, and was shot down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. This is not to say that the Supreme Court was against the removal of the Chinese, they just had to follow the law. Again in 1862

California attempted to expel the Chinese via a “police tax,” which called for a tax of

$2.50/month from any Chinese over the age of eighteen who was not participating in

18 Pfaelzer, 31-32.

19 Pfaelzer, 29-30.

mining or the production of rice, sugar, tea, or coffee. Strangely enough, rice, sugar, tea, and coffee were not grown in California at the time. Also passed was the Communication

Tax Act, which required shipowners to pay $500.00 for each Chinese on board, and for each individual Chinese to pay an additional $5.00.20

Despite the vigilante violence and State legislation attempting to dissuade them, the Chinese persevered, and more continued to come. Now other opportunities were being sought after, as the violence and oppression that they had faced during their participation in the Gold Rush effectively purged the gold mines of Chinese laborers. In

1853 approximately three thousand Chinese men could be found in the riverbeds and creeks of Shasta County. By 1860, only 160 remained.21 The roundups and expulsions that they faced while mining only foretold the violent roundups that would continue.

Being so far from home, and in a foreign and unwelcoming land, the Chinese migrants sought to make their experience more bearable by preserving their identity and remaining within a community. Miners wore their traditional clothing, ate traditional cuisine often imported from home, and proudly wore their queues, unwilling to cut them off. When homes and businesses were established, they were often done so in a protective, side-by-side way, creating an environment that was comparatively cramped.

China Camp in Shasta County remained the center for culture and community among the

Chinese until railroad work during the Civil War began pulling some away.22 Throughout

20 Pfaelzer, 30-31.

21 Pfaelzer, 16.

22 Pfaelzer, 42-43.

California, ex-miners found work in labor, agriculture, or small businesses, often cooking, laundry, or barbering.

The white hostility and competition towards the Chinese did not end with the

Gold Rush in 1855, instead continuing on into other labor markets. This was exacerbated in February of 1855, when California suffered an economic crisis after the end of the

Gold Rush. Banks closed, and crops struggled due to a lack of rain. The newly formed

Anti-Chinese clubs blamed the financial difficulties on the Chinese, even though neither groups were finding much success. It was during the Civil War that many Chinese men made the decision to remain within California, and after the War when the State’s

Figure 4: Advertisement for cigars made by white labor, from Humboldt Times, February 3, 1886. Taken From Driven Out, page 136.

economy began to stabilize, the Chinese in California entered the budding industrial sector, finding work in canning, cigar-rolling, infrastructure, and agriculture.23

Because there were now large numbers of Chinese who had decided to make

California their permanent home, many settled down and built families, and from this sprouted numerous “Chinatowns” throughout the State. These new communities did not go un-accosted, as there was still a large and aggressive portion of the population that wanted them gone. Increasingly violent and destructive “roundups” occurred, facilitated by anti-Chinese zealots who were willing to stop at nothing to reach their goals. One of these groups was formed in 1876, calling themselves the Supreme Order of the

Caucasians. This group utilized boycotting, arson, and murder to reach their ultimate goal of removing the Chinese from the State, while also showing aggression towards anyone who was even as much as sympathetic to the plight of the Asiatic. To get this point across, they published the following list of “public enemies”:

1. Anyone who removed a white man or woman or black man or woman (native born) and instates an Asiatic in his place. 2. He who retains in his family an Asiatic nurse, 3. He who gives bail or bond to an Asiatic. 4. He who defends an Asiatic against a white in a court of law. 5. All proprietors of saloons, coffee houses, cigar stores, restaurants, etc. who employ Asiatic. 6. He who teaches Asiatic any of the trades or arts of the Caucasian civilization. 7. He who rents property to an Asiatic. 8. Newspapers advocating the presence of Mongolians in America.24

23 Pfaelzer, 46.

24 Pfaelzer, 65.

Discriminatory ideas have the power to exacerbate a bacterial plague. I bring this up now because I want to reiterate that ideas can be dangerous. Thinking that someone is filthy, lesser, unworthy, or un-belonging is a dangerous line of thinking, and it can have catastrophic consequences. The idea itself cannot hurt someone, but it can be the reason why someone pulls the trigger. The ideas and beliefs that the Supreme Order of the

Caucasians held about the Chinese were the result of all of the anti-Chinese sentiment that had grown since the beginning of the Gold Rush, and led to some severe moments of violence. It became an all-too-common practice for these “Chinatowns” to be set alight by arsonists with no investigations following the acts. The Chinese citizens responded with protest and anger, but it had little effect. During one particular fire, a Chinese man attempted to save his burning barn which housed six horses. A white gang likely involved in the fire shot at him, and in the morning all six horses lie dead in the ashes.25 There are

Figure 5: Market Street Chinatown in San Jose, 1887. Left: Before the fire. Right: White citizens observe the burning of the neighborhood. From Driven Out, page 239.

25 Pfaelzer, 68-69.

too many individual instances of violence to recount in this small thesis, and there is not enough space to dedicate to telling all of these stories. However, I will share one particularly gruesome event in order to really give the reader an impression of the hostile environment that the California Chinese found themselves in.

In 1877 anti-Chinese sentiments and actions were on the rise in Chico. The town council had recently appointed several new members who were firmly anti-Chinese, sparking off a new wave of terror. In February, fires were lit at night in the barns where

Chinese workers slept, and in March, zealots attempted to completely burn the Chico

Chinatown to the ground. The Chinese had armed themselves in an attempt at self- defense, as the civic leaders made no efforts to investigate the attacks. White women in

Chico mostly supported the Chinese, though this was largely due to the fact that they served as inexpensive servants, allowing the women more leisure time and freedom.

When the women learned that their local minister Lysander Dickerman was involved in anti-Chinese meetings, they boycotted his services. Dickerman responded by banishing the women from the congregation and turning the church into a center for anti-Chinese activities.26

This was the environment that led to the particular event in question: the Lemm ranch murders, perhaps a quintessential example of the anti-Chinese ideals that permeated late nineteenth century California. On March 14 1877, six Chinese men retired for the night in the bunkhouse provided by their employer, a German immigrant named

Christian Lemm. Lemm had hired the men to clear brush on his property, ignoring the

26 Pfaelzer, 67-68.

warnings sent to him which demanded he remove his Chinese employees at once. That evening a group of white zealots decided to set fire to the bunkhouse, however upon arriving they realized that several of the men inside were still awake. Unwilling to risk any witnesses, the white men barged into the bunkhouse and held the Chinese men at gunpoint and searched their belongings for money (which they found a whopping $2-3).

Only two of the Chinese men survived the encounter, one of which was Wo Ah Lin, who provided this harrowing account of the night’s events:

Six men came into the cabin, one of them searched for money while the [intelligible] held pistols near us. We were sitting on the bed, and hung down our heads, afraid that the men would fire at us. They got between two and three dollars. They took some of the clothes off the bed, put them into a pile in the center of the room, threw coal oil on the pile, and then fired the shots which killed my companions. Their final deed was to set fire to the oil drenched clothes.27

The men had fired upon Lin’s companions at point blank, and he had managed to survive by throwing his hand across his face. The bullet only grazed his arm, and he threw himself back and played dead. Once the attackers had gone, he got up and threw himself on the fire to put it out and ran for help. He found none; not even the Lemm family, his employers, were willing to help. The newly-appointed anti-Chinese members of the town council sided with the murderers, and refused to allow Lin to hire a physician or rent a wagon to move his injured and dead friends to where they might receive care or burial.

News of the massacre spread throughout the country, and the Chinese residents of

Chico called on the aid of the Chinese Six Companies to help find the murderers. The Six

Companies had been a highly influential and important group for the Chinese immigrants

27 Pfaelzer, 69-70.

in California, as they aided with brokering passage, finding jobs, providing medicine, overseeing disputes, and helping unite the community. Unfortunately, no real progress was made, and attacks continued against Chico’s Chinese citizens. Both the Chinese and their supporters continued to receive threats that their homes would be burned down, and

Chinatown had to maintain a guard rotation to put out any fires that sprung up. Further, the zealots warned against eating produce harvested by the Chinese, arguing that it was contaminated with leprosy and diphtheria. We will come back to this later.

A breakthrough was finally made in the case when a postal worker recognized the handwriting in one of the threatening letters, and arrests were made. Fred Conway, one of those involved in the massacre, confessed to his participation after two days in jail, and named his accomplices. Twenty-Nine more men were arrested, and the Order of

Caucasians threatened to kill anyone who gave any information – so the jail keeper threw the Order’s leaders in jail as well. Soon, all of the imprisoned men were confessing and attempting to implicate everyone else, and the Order quickly backed off and denied any association with the murderers. The men were ultimately found guilty, and sentenced to

12-25 years in San Quentin, but by 1881 Governor George Perkins had received hundreds of petitions calling for the pardoning and release of the men.28

The race relations with and violence against the Chinese over the forty years that they had been in the country culminated in 1882 with the passing of the Chinese

Exclusion Act. The act was passed with the intention of preventing further immigration of Chinese laborers, while simultaneously maintaining the current level of Chinese labor

28 Pfaelzer, 69-73.

supply. Lawmakers hoped that the existing Chinese population would remain after the act was passed, and that their population would gradually decline as they died or immigrated out. In the meantime, they still served a purpose: they were a supply of cheap labor and servitude, and while the white working-class men did not like this, many others benefitted from their presence.29

Alongside the legal barring of continued labor immigration, the Exclusion Act of

1882 reinforced racial stereotypes against the Chinese. Ideas that they were a dirty, depraved, and morally inept society of people who all looked alike were already widely held, but federal support of their long sought-after exclusion only made these beliefs stronger. By the time plague reached the Pacific coast in San Francisco, these ideas had persisted for over fifty years, and had shaped the lives of the Chinese accordingly.

In 1855, southern journalist Hinton R. Helper wrote an investigative piece on the morality of California, affording close detail to the Chinese. Helper personally visited

California in order to investigate this “modern El Dorado,” describing it as “a weary and rather unprofitable sojourn of three years…[which] afforded me ample time and opportunity to become too thoroughly conversant with its rottenness and its corruption.”30

There is certainly much more history behind why a southerner would feel negatively about California, but the ideas he expresses about the Chinese are no different than those the westerners held:

The national habits and traits of Chinese character, to which they cling with uncompromising tenacity in this country, are strikingly anomalous and distinct

29 Saxton, 230.

30 Helper, vi.

from those of all other nations…The similarity in their garb, features, physical proportions and deportment is so great that one Chinaman looks almost exactly like another, but very unlike anybody else…you would be puzzled to distinguish the women from the men…[they are] full of duplicity, prevarication and pagan prejudices, and so enervated and lazy.31

Helper goes on to say that:

[The] Chinese are more objectionable than other foreigners, because they refuse to have dealing or intercourse with us; consequently there is no chance of making anything of them…Their places could and should be filled with worthier immigrants – Europeans, who would take the oath of allegiance to the country, work both for themselves and for the commonwealth, fraternize with us, and finally, become a part of us.32

Assimilation and likeness seem to be the two main concepts which justified the distinction between the Chinese and the whites during the nineteenth century. The

Chinese were perceived as different, dirty, diseased, and a danger to the white way of life, and they were stealing the jobs of the honest and hard-working whites. Because of these ideas perceived to be the truth, excluding and ostracizing them as a whole seemed perfectly reasonable.

Following the first Chinese Exclusion Act was the passing of the Geary Act in

1893, which allowed the detainment and deportation of any unregistered (and therefore

“illegal”) Chinese. By November of 1893 the majority of Chinese in California had been pressured to register amid failed protests and mass processing. Among those cities who joined in to strongly support the Geary Act was San Francisco, a city much like the rest

31 Helper, 86-92.

32 Helper, 94.

of the state, who’s history with the Chinese is long, complicated, and violent.33

33 Saxton, 231-232.

CHAPTER TWO: THE MENAGERIE The Chinese In San Francisco

“The [Bingham] ordinance commanded the removal of what was a great evil in the heart of the city. The new ordinance, so Humphreys stated, was intended to assist the police powers. He said the ordinance was a lawful exercise of the right of self-defense. The country, so Humphreys stated, had the right to pass and had passed treaties and laws excluding from America’s shores paupers, idiots, lepers, and known criminals likely to do harm to the community at large, and the city had the same privilege to a limited extent. It was not spiteful legislation, but legislation intended to correct an overwhelming evil.”

-The Daily Alta, August 19, 1890.1

If one were to walk the streets of San Francisco today, they would see before them a sprawling and diverse metropolis that exhibits little evidence of its complicated past. No where would one find evidence that the infamous black plague had once ravaged the streets, claiming hundreds of lives over the course of several years. Instead, they would find modern concerns about sidewalk cleanliness or the rising population of peoples suffering from homelessness. One would even be hard pressed to find evidence of the hateful and aggressive history afflicting the Chinese who made the city their home, as modern-day Chinatown succeeds at hiding its difficult past behind brightly colored signs and cheap knick-knacks meant to seduce tourists.

It is true that for well-over one hundred years, San Francisco has been a historically significant and diverse hub on the west coast, with Republican journalist

1 “Bingham Ordinance,” Daily Alta (California) August 19, 1890: 7.

Hinton Helper referring to it as a “complete human menagerie” in 1855.2 It is also true that the history of this “menagerie” is filled with racism and violence, contrary to what its liberal and diverse image today might suggest. In this chapter, we will explore this aspect of San Francisco’s history in relation to its Chinese population, and how the treatment of the Chinese population created an environment perfect for the dissemination of plague once the bacteria reached the Pacific coast in 1900.

During the mid-nineteenth century, Chinese migrants began arriving in San

Francisco, and like their countrymen had done throughout the rest of the State, they tended to settle near each other. Within the city, they just happened to cluster around a small plaza that would later be named Portsmouth Square, likely due to the favorable climate on the Eastern side of the city. Gradually their small community developed into the neighborhood that they named Yang Yen Jie (or, Chinatown as it is now known).

Because of the purges, roundups, and overall racial aggression that other Chinese communities had been facing throughout the State, those coming to San Francisco had little control over where they could establish their homes and businesses. Despite this, they accepted their limited options and settled in hastily built, temporary dwellings, that were often constructed out of discarded lumber. By 1854 Yang Yen Jie already had a population of approximately two thousand migrants and was already being dubbed “Little

China.” As San Francisco grew and its waterfront expanded eastward, non-Chinese businesses and homes followed. Little China now found itself stuck in the middle of a

2 Hinton R. Helper, The Land of Gold: Reality Versus Fiction, Baltimore: Published for the Author by Henry Taylor, Sun Iron Building, 1855: 47.

transitory zone. The Gold Rush had triggered a real estate boom, leading to the majority of San Francisco properties now being owned by white landlords. Also gaining a foothold during this chaotic period were several wealthy Chinese merchant associations that managed to secure and own their own headquarters. This early acquisition was fortuitous, for in 1878 a new law forbade any aliens from obtaining property rights.3

Being that the majority of property owners were white, this also meant that the inhabitants of Little China fell under the discretion of their white landlords. These landlords were often merchants and bankers of Italian, German, and French descent, overcharging their residents while remaining absent, and neglecting to make the repairs demanded by their inhabitants. Gradually, most of the non-Chinese residents moved out

Figure 6: Bartlett Alley, Chinatown, 1900. Displays the wooden balconies and additions built onto the sides of the cramped buildings. From Plague, Fear, and Politics, page 23.

3 Guenter B. Risse, Plague, Fear, and Politics in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012: 20-22.

of the neighborhood, and Little China began taking on more of the appearance of a foreign colony than an urban neighborhood. Architecturally the aesthetic began to change as the Chinese occupants remodeled their dwellings, attempting to recreate an environment more reminiscent of home. Commonly, wooden additions would be added to the buildings, creating balconies that afforded the cramped residents slightly more living space.4 This environment was a sanctuary in a foreign land. Their options were limited, and they had no space to expand outward, so they made do.

The Chinese were seen as ideal tenants to have, not because landlords respected them, but instead because they were seen as easy to take advantage of. The migrants were often desperate and could be talked into signing expensive leases, to which they would make good on their monthly payments. As Chinatown’s population grew, so too did the problems associated with their living situation. The additions and extensions built onto homes began blocking the sunshine from reaching the streets in certain areas. Basements and space below street level were being excavated to make room for more lodging and business space. Unable to expand outside of their small district due to racial discrimination, the citizens of Little China had to expand in other directions – typically either up or down. District congestion dramatically worsened during the 1860’s as thousands of railroad workers returned to the city. Poorer residents opted to rent out even the smallest spaces in their dwelling, whether it was a nook or just a couch, and in at least one four-story building there were two-hundred people sharing a 34-by-137-foot space.5

4 Risse, 22-23.

5 Risse, 24-25.

The absent nature of the white landlords led to decades of neglect and minimal upkeep of their properties, resulting in the dilapidation of many of Little China’s dwellings. The inhabitants attempted to fix what they could, but repairs were costly, and when forced to choose between repairing a structural problem or sending money back to one’s dependent family in China, repairs took the back seat. Instead, tenants covered broken windows with paper, supported crumbling walls with planks, and when possible mended the holes dotting the structures. On top of all of this, the Chinese still had to pay extremely high rents to their neglectful landlords, who were wholly unconcerned with the poor living conditions of their tenants. In an attempt to legitimize their neglect, the landlords petitioned the San Francisco Board of Equalization to perform lower assessments on the crumbling properties, and made no attempts to repair the structures until they were threatened to do so by the Board of Health during the first plague epidemic.6

The degrading conditions of the Chinese neighborhood only served to reinforce the negative stereotypes of the Chinese inhabitants. The dilapidated nature of their district was, in the eyes of the non-Chinese, more evidence that they were dirty, depraved, without morals, sub-human, and above all, spreaders of disease. These stereotypes, of course, ignored the fact that the Chinese were not responsible for their living conditions falling into such disrepair. Nevertheless, San Francisco had time and time again used the idea that Chinatown had the shadow of disease hanging over it in attempts to justify the

6 Risse, 25.

Figure 7: A backyard in Chinatown filled with debris and refuse, early 1900s. From Plague, Fear, and Politics in San Francisco's Chinatown, page 75. segregation of the Chinese population. Previous attempts had included rumors of cholera, smallpox, leprosy, and syphilis present within the district, and all attempts failed to have the Chinese removed from their desirable position in the city.

It would ultimately come to be the misfortune of the Chinese that they ended up settling where they did in the city. They had no way of knowing that their small, isolated settlement would end up cozying up to the area that would become San Francisco’s central business district. As their little neighborhood grew with the rest of the city, the inhabitants found themselves increasingly subjected to the burning glare of the

Caucasians, who saw the growth in population and subsequent rise in sanitary problems occurring within the district, and turned their noses in disgust. It is certainly no lie that the Chinese district had abundant sanitary issues, however this is what happened in any

poor, overcrowded nineteenth century city. The Chinese were certainly not alone in suffering this unfortunate byproduct of city growth. However, given that they were

Chinese, and that their neighborhood was seen as encroaching on the center of the city, their Caucasian neighbors grew contemptuous at the living conditions within the district.7

Caucasian complaints about overcrowding and sanitation issues within the

Chinese district of San Francisco, along with calls for the city to intervene, go back to the beginning of Chinese immigration in the early nineteenth century. In 1854, the San

Francisco Herald published an editorial which called for the relocation of the Chinese to a less desirable part of the city, and later that same year the San Francisco Board of

Health attempted to declare Chinatown a nuisance, calling for the removal of its inhabitants to a specific district made for them, or outside the city altogether. In 1885, hysterics over the Chinese presence were elevated, and a special committee released a report which referred to the Chinese district as “a moral cancer on the city…a Mongolian vampire sapping [San Francisco’s] vitals,” and suggesting the need to remove them from the entire State.8

In 1890, the city decided it was time to put these words into action and began a serious campaign to expel the Chinese from their neighborhood. On February 3, city supervisor Henry Bingham presented a board resolution that granted the Chinese sixty days to relocate to an allotted district, and that to reside or do business outside of this

7 Charles J. McClain, In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle against Discrimination in Nineteenth- Century America, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994: 223.

8 McClain, 223-224.

district after the sixty days would be unlawful. The district selected to be their new home was in the South of the city, and had previously been designated as a zone for slaughterhouses, tallow and hog factories, and other businesses considered to be detrimental to the public health. Bingham’s proposal, which came to be called the

Bingham Ordinance, was widely supported, and it was widely held that the removal of the Chinese would contribute to the healthy growth of business and an increased quality of life for whites. At a meeting held to discuss the ordinance, the Central Committee for the Democratic Party expressed their support, stating: “We have in our midst hordes of

Chinese who have located in the heart of our city and there erected one of the most pernicious plague spots ever known in the history of civilization.”9 This blatant expression of Sinophobia was uttered ten years before plague ever even looked in the direction of the Pacific Coast.

On February 17, 1890, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to pass the relocation measure, and with the Mayor’s approval on March 10, the

Bingham Ordinance went into effect. The authorities had pieced together a plan of action which they had gotten the Chinese consulate to agree to. First, a single arrest would occur as punishment for violating the new law, and it was hoped that this arrest would quickly motivate all other Chinese to fall in line and cooperate. This strategic arrest occurred on

March 12, when a Chinese merchant was detained, processed, and released on a $2,000 bail to await his trial on July 14. The plan seemed foolproof, until it was ruined by

Bingham himself, who was apparently too impatient to wait it out and needed the

9 McClain, 224-225.

Chinese out now. On May 20 he traveled to the police court and had 75 arrest warrants issued. The warrants called for the arrests of 75 Chinese individuals who had allegedly violated the law, however he had no real names to list, and instead used misnomers such as “Jack Pot” and “One Lung.” With their contrived warrants in hand the police descended upon Chinatown, where they arrested twenty random Chinese individuals. The scene was not for the faint of heart. One of those arrested was a father who was forcibly pulled from the side of his sick child, and those who were arrested were tied together in the street to prevent any escapes.10

The Chinese consulate, who had agreed to the careful arrest of one individual, was outraged by the act of aggression that had transpired. Within hours, Consul Bee of the San Francisco consulate had filed a writ of habeas corpus for all twenty arrested individuals with the Circuit Court for the Northern District of California, arguing that the arrests were in direct violation of the federal constitution. The city managed to postpone the trial by several weeks, allotting them time to devise their reply. Historians of this era have referred to their presented pleading as one of the more “appalling statements of racial bigotry in Western legal history,” which argued the following:

That the Chinese were as a race criminal, vicious, and immoral; that they were all incorrigible perjurers; that they abandon their sick in the street to die; that their occupation of property anywhere decreased the value of surrounding property; that their presence in any number anywhere was so offensive to the senses and dangerous to the morals of other races; and that these racial and national characteristics could only be made tolerable if they were removed from the center of town to a remote area where they would have less contact with other races.11

10 McClain, 225-226.

11 McClain, 228-229.

The case was presented before Circuit Judge Lorenzo Sawyer on August 18, with the city arguing for the self-defense of San Francisco. The attorney for the Chinese was

Thomas Riordan, who presented the argument that the relocation would have detrimental financial consequences for the Chinese, whose business operations throughout the city amounted to over $15 million per year, and most of which would be lost in the move. To put it simply, Sawyer was not in favor of the Ordinance, not because he harbored any special love for the Chinese, but on the grounds that it was blatantly discriminatory and in direct violation of the fourteenth amendment and the Burlingame treaty with China. The

Burlingame treaty established that “Chinese subjects, visiting or residing in the United

States, shall enjoy the same privileges, immunities, exemptions, in respect to travel or residence, as may there be enjoyed by the citizens or subjects of the most favored nation.”12 On August 25, Judge Sawyer read his opinion in open court.

The discrimination against the Chinese, and the gross inequality of the operation of this ordinance upon the Chinese, as compared with others, in violation of the constitutional, treaty, and statutory provisions cited, are so manifest upon its face, that I am unable to comprehend how this discrimination and inequality…can fail to be apparent to the mind of every intelligent person, be he lawyer or layman…That this ordinance is a direct violation, of, not only, the express provisions of the constitution of the United States, in several particulars, but also of the express provisions of our several treaties with China…is so obvious, that I shall not waste more time, or words in discussing the matter. To any reasonably intelligent and well balanced mind, discussion or argument would be wholly unnecessary and superfluous. To those minds, which are so constituted, that the invalidity of this ordinance is not apparent upon inspection…discussion or argument would be useless.13

12 In Re Lee Sing ET AL, (Circuit Court for the Northern District of California April 25, 1890): 3.

13 In Re Lee Sing ET AL, 4-5.

Having minced absolutely no words in his condemnation of the Bingham Ordinance and its supporters, Judge Sawyer killed what would ultimately be the last, genuine attempt at relocation of San Francisco’s Chinese. This would not, however, be the last attempt of city officials to isolate the Chinese, and another half-hearted attempt at relocation would be tried by the Board of Health during the plague epidemic. Still, the trial was over and life was able to return to normal, or at least as normal as it had been before. The city was still plagued with racism and hatred for the Chinese, and the Chinese themselves still lived in their small, poor, and dilapidated neighborhood which was experiencing an increase in Tong-related gang violence.

This crowded, crumbling, and chaotic environment was the one that Wong Chut

King found himself in upon arriving in California. He had come to find his fortune, and thus arrived with little. Like the other poor men in the Chinese district, he too had to find a small corner to rent out. For King, this ended up being a small hollowed out nook below the sidewalk, in what used to be the cellar of the Globe Hotel. The Globe, like much of the district, had once been a glitzy and fashionable location, but over time, again, like much of the district, it had been allowed to fall into disrepair by its landlord,

Ferdinand Hesthal, who was more concerned with the rent he could earn from its

Figure 8: A rat-infested basement in Chinatown with living bunks, early 1900s. From Plague, Fear, and Politics in San Francisco's Chinatown, page 210. hundreds of tenants. Local newspapers came to refer to it as a barrel filled with rats, where “poor, unwashed heathens crowd together in little cubby-holes.”14

For King, and his fellow inhabitants of the Globe, self-gratification came second to familial duty, and so the conditions were tolerated. His living space was shared with numerous other men, some of whom had to share the same bunk. The floor was littered with decaying refuse, and the walls were lined with boards – one which allegedly leaked from a nearby cesspool. Crates were used as tables, and privacy was but a dream.

The air was thick with smoke and a rancid stench. The plumbing connections behind their

14 Risse, 26-27.

walls were broken, and Hesthal permitted the excavation of the cesspool under the cellar.

Once the sewer line was dry, the rats moved in.15

Here, in the dark and dank basement, is where King slept every night for the fifteen years he lived in Chinatown. By day he worked in the lumber yards, by night he returned to his lonely bunk. Wong lived a solitary life in San Francisco and sought to stave off the feelings of loneliness and un-belonging through friendships with other

Chinese men, and by participation in clan and trade groups. The Cantonese had a saying:

“same sound, same air,” which stressed the importance of kinship, social relationships, familiarity, and unity.16 Within Chinatown, this saying was a means to survival, not just physical, but spiritual. This is why the Chinese remained in such close proximity, and in such tight-knit communities. This is why they did not give up and leave when facing poverty and poor living conditions. This is why, after decades of oppression, segregation, and violence, they remained and fought for the right to keep their homes. In his dark and rotting basement bunk is where King lived for fifteen years, spiritually supported by his friends and community, and that dark and rotting bunk is where he spent his last conscious moments, as plague consumed him on March 5, 1900.

The Chinese in California faced decades of oppression and racist legislation that served to both limit their options and drive them closer to one another. Within San

Francisco, this manifested in the form of a desperately tight-knit community who grasped onto one another for companionship and community in a foreign and hateful

15 Risse, 26-27.

16 Risse, 28.

environment. This also manifested in the form of restricted living space and overcrowding within dilapidated dwellings, whose white landlords cared not for their plight. Look at any poor, urban neighborhood in the nineteenth century and you will find crowding, ramshackle dwellings, sanitation issues, and consequently, disease. The conditions of the buildings and the sewers in Chinatown mirrored this structure and presented the ideal breeding conditions for rats, that scurried through the sewer pipes and indulged themselves in the abundance of trash.17 It was unbelievable that any human could survive in such conditions, yet it was believable that a subhuman race could. And so the landlords and city authorities continued to look the other way, blaming the Chinese inhabitants for the problems that they were not solely responsible for, nor solely capable of solving.

On January 31, 1900, when the S.S. Australia finally docked at San Francisco, the rats that had stowed away below deck hurried onto the docks and into the nearby sewers.

After a short while, they came upon what must have been a rat utopia. Dried out pipes, easy access to the surface, and an abundance of filth for them to eat and build their nests with. What more could they ask for? Probably to not have plague, but it was too late for that. It did not take long for the newcomers to intermingle with and infect the resident rats, and at that point had set off a chain reaction of infection that transferred to the human population in just over a month.

17 Risse, 27.

CHAPTER THREE: LA PIQURE DE PUCE Plague History and Ecology

“These Terrors and Apprehensions of the People, led them into a Thousand weak and foolish, and wicked Things…People shut up their Shops, finding indeed no trade; for the Minds of the People, were agitated with other Things; and a kind of Sadness and Horror at these Things, sat upon the Countenances, even of the common people; Death was before their Eyes, and every Body began to think of their Graves.”

-Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, 1722.1

When plague disembarked onto the docks of San Francisco in 1900, it was the first recorded instance of the disease ever appearing in the western hemisphere. In the minds of those in the Americas it was an ancient and oriental disease, often referred to as

“Oriental Levantine” or “Black Death.”2 To them, the disease seemed so far away that it might as well have existed within a reality separate from their own. This ignorance and denial would be to their detriment when plague finally arrived at their shores in 1900.

The people of San Francisco, both out of fear and ignorance, continued to misunderstand the disease and found a comfortable place to let it settle within their preexisting perceptions and prejudices. While it may be easy to vilify and hate these people for the way that they responded to the appearance of such a legendary disease, it is also important to understand that at this point in time the scientific and medical communities did not have a complete understanding of plague, and that this lack of information also

1 Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, 1722, Reprint, London: Penguin Books: 27-30.

2 Marysville Evening Democrat, “Brief History of the Bubonic Plague: read before medical society by Dr. Powell of this city some years ago,” February 11, 1908.

contributed to the response. In chapter three, we will explore a brief history of bubonic plague, the developments in understanding the disease that occurred over time, and the ecology and transmission of the bacteria.

The plague that arrived in San Francisco was part of a much larger epidemic – the sixth great historical outbreak and the third great plague pandemic in recorded history.

The first pandemic was the plague of Justinian, which reached the Byzantine capital of

Constantinople in 541 B.C.E. Much of our knowledge about this plague is due to accounts written by the ancient historian Procopius. This pandemic became so severe that in short time approximately 10,000 people were dying daily. Allegedly Justinian himself also became stricken with the disease, but was one of the lucky ones who managed to recover. The plague eventually left Byzantium, but continued to appear in Asia, Africa, and Europe for several years, and by the end of the pandemic at least twenty-five million lives had been lost – though it is possible that the actual death toll was higher.3

The second plague pandemic is by far the most famous, and what people often think of when hearing about bubonic plague: The Black Death. In 1347, a particularly deadly strain of plague made its way East to Europe, likely via seafaring vessels and trade routes. This pandemic persisted for half of a decade, subsiding around 1353. It is estimated that approximately fifty million people perished – around half of Europe’s population.4 There was little, if any, understanding of the true cause of the disease, and

3 Evan Andrews, “6 Devastating Plagues,” History.com, October 12, 2016, accessed February 15, 2019. https://www.history.com/news/6-devastating-plagues.

4 Andrews, https://www.history.com/news/6-devastating-plagues.

many fell back onto the idea that it was some sort of divine punishment for society’s transgressions. Still, physicians attempted to fight the disease with the limited means at their disposal, though most of their ‘cures’ were entirely useless and ineffective.

Bloodletting was a common practice, as was imbibing a variety of potions and tonics which were often an amalgam of different components. Herbs, mercury, arsenic and ground “unicorn horn” (actually narwhal horn, or other forms of ivory) sometimes made their way into these mixtures, and unfortunately more times than not these potions probably led to further health complications that exacerbated the patient’s condition. A particularly strange form of treatment was the practice of strapping live chickens to the patient’s buboes (yes, I said live chickens).5 The belief was that the chicken would breathe in the poisons from the buboes, pulling them out of the patient and into themselves. It didn’t work. As strange as this treatment seems, it was seen as a perfectly reasonable approach to treating the disease during the fourteenth century. This was due to the miasma theory of contagion, an incredibly long lasting and influential medical theory which persisted into the twentieth century and played a role in the medical response during the San Francisco outbreak.

The Black Death, being the poster-child for bubonic plague, has created some problematic modern misconceptions of the disease, one of which is the image of the nightmare-inducing plague doctor – or more appropriately titled, medieval physician.

One of the images that comes to mind when thinking about bubonic plague is the

5 “The Black Death and Early Public Health Measures,” Brought to Life: Exploring the History of Medicine, accessed February 15, 2019. http://broughttolife.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/themes/publichealth/blackdeath.

frightening plague doctors who roamed the foggy streets as specters of death, looking for dying plague victims. The common portrayal of the spooky plague doctor never really outlines what they did, or where their “doctoring” came into play. Instead, their bird-like masks have come to serve as a symbol of death. In reality, not every plague-treating physician even wore these masks, and those who did wore them for a very specific reason: the miasma theory of contagion.

I should preface this explanation by pointing out that the term “miasma” as a descriptor of this phenomenon was not coined until the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, but for the sake of conciseness it will be used as a blanket term throughout this chapter. The theory of miasma is based on a very simple concept: that bad or corrupt air causes illness and disease. This theory dates back at least to ancient Greece, where the

Greek physician Hippocrates (c. 460-377 B.C.E.) wrote that he believed bad air caused pestilence. Later, the Greco-Roman physician Galen (c. 130-201 C.E.) expanded upon this idea by tying individual susceptibility to miasma in with their balance of humors.6

The humoral theory of medicine, like miasma, dates back to at least ancient Greece, and argues the following: the “humors” exist as liquids within the body and were identified as blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. These four humors were associated with the four elements (earth, water, air, and fire) and the four seasons. Maintaining the four humors was seen as essential to maintaining good health, and disease could result from

6 Carl Sterner, A Brief History of Miasmic Theory, University of Cincinnati, 2007, accessed March 6, 2019: 1. http://www.carlsterner.com/research/files/History_of_Miasmic_Theory_2007.pdf.

any imbalances.7 Imbalances could also make one more susceptible to miasma, which was used as an explanation for why some contracted the plague while others did not.8

During the Middle Ages, the miasma theory of ‘bad air’ was the go-to explanation for disease, particularly the plague, with writers referring to the “putrefaction of air” as the cause of the ailment. Spanish physician Jacme d’Agramont wrote the first known treatise on plague in April 1348. He argued that most diseases came from pestilential and corrupt air and detailed the means by which air can become corrupt. During the same year, the Medical Faculty of the University of Paris released a report which stated that

“the president epidemic or pest comes directly from air corrupted in its substance,” and recommended the use of incense and fragrances in combating miasma, as it “hampers putrefaction of the air, and removes the stench of the air and the corruption [caused by] the stench.”9

Physicians responding to cases of plague during the Black Death ascribed to this theory of bad air, and took measures to protect themselves. One of these methods was the use of a garb that would cover the physicians entire head, preventing the inhalation of putrid and poisonous vapors present in the miasmatic air. To further protect against the foul smell of the miasma, the garb had a special pocket that would sit in front of the physician’s nose and mouth, inside which would be placed flowers and pleasant-smelling

7 “Humours,” Brought To Life: Exploring the History of Medicine, accessed March 6, 2019. http://broughttolife.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/techniques/humours.

8 Sterner, 1.

9 Sterner, 2-3.

herbs believed to provide another layer of protection. These ‘plague doctor masks’ have been exaggerated in modern times to be worthy of a horror film, but in reality, they looked a bit silly, and to the doctors who used them, served what they believed to be a very real purpose.

Another widely used method of combating the plague during the fourteenth century was isolation of infected individuals through quarantine. The practice of isolating those ill with infectious diseases dates back to ancient times, and was widely practiced during the Black Death. During this period the Republic of Venice introduced a new policy which required ships to wait offshore for a specific period of time before being allowed to land in port, in order to prevent diseases from coming ashore. The waiting period was typically forty days, which is where the term quarantine originates from, as quarantina is the Italian word for forty.10 When applied to individuals stricken

Figure 9: Left: Fantasy. Right: Reality.

10 Charles J. McClain, In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle against Discrimination in Nineteenth- Century America, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994: 236.

with plague, typically only the home would be quarantined. As we will see later, when plague appeared in San Francisco this individual quarantine policy was not used, and instead the entire district was quarantined regardless of the limited locations in which the disease had actually appeared. A sort of superstitious mystique would continue to cloak the deadly plague through its subsequent outbreaks, and this shroud would not be lifted until the 1894 Hong Kong epidemic, when doctors Alexandre Yersin and Shibasaburo

Kitasato finally made a breakthrough in plague research. The two scientists finally put a name and a face to the mysterious specter that had terrified the world since the beginning of recorded history: Yersinia pestis, the small oval-shaped bacteria responsible for millions of deaths was finally isolated and identified.11 Exactly how this bacteria was transmitted remained a bit of a mystery, but none-the-less they eventually found their culprit. We now understand that the ancient and fast-killing Y. pestis is a relatively young

Figure 10: A microscopic view of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria which causes plague.

11 Tro Harper, “Dealing with the plague,” in San Francisco Sunday Examiner (San Francisco, CA), 1977: 21-22.

pathogen, somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 years old, which ironically evolved from a relatively harmless strain called Yersinia pseudotuberculosis. Y. pseudotuberculosis caused little more than mild gut infections and stomach discomfort, yet after two pivotal gene mutations, evolved from a simple stomach bug into a horrific and deadly disease that literally rots its victim.12

Yersin and Kitasato’s discovery of Y. pestis in 1894 would be a landmark discovery in plague history; however, as stated previously, they still weren’t entirely sure how the bacteria ended up infecting people. They had a basic understanding that it was related to rodents, but the idea that the flea was also involved was unpopular and uncirculated at the time. Instead, they fell back onto the miasma theory, surmising that there were poisonous vapors in the soil, air, or in food products that served to transmit the disease.13 In 1900, Surgeon General of the Marine Hospital Service Walter Wyman echoed these ideas in an article outlining the known bacteriology of plague:

The conditions favoring plague are similar to those favoring typhus fever, namely, crowd poisoning, bad ventilation and drainage, impure water supply, famine or imperfect nourishment, and inattention to sanitary requirements…the Bacillus may infect food and water…Clothing and other personal effects, bedding etc., maybe infected through the discharges. The bacillus may be carried in the dust rising through the cleansing of dwelling houses which plague patients have occupied. A very important element in the spread of plague in houses and localities are rats…The cause of [rat] infection is still a subject of discussion. The soil becomes infected, and a very common belief in oriental countries is that the rat contracts the disease from miasmatic emanations from the soil, but this has never been scientifically demonstrated…The fact that mortality among rats precedes an outbreak of plague among human beings is explained by the fact that

12 Laura Geggel, “Plague Evolution: How a Mild Stomach Bug Became a Worldwide Killer,” LiveScience, June 30, 2015, accessed February 15, 2019. https://www.livescience.com/51394-plague-evolution.html.

13 McClain, 235.

rats have their snouts about an inch above the floors of houses and are more liable to inspire plague-infected dust than are human beings.14

Wyman admits that their current understanding may not be correct, yet still ascribes to this information and allows it to dictate his response during the San Francisco plague.

Wyman would ultimately be a significant player in the events that unfolded in California, as we will discuss in the following chapters.

The role of the flea in the transmission of plague was not accepted until 1906, though this is not to say that it was not suggested previously. In 1897, three years after

Yersin and Kitasato’s discovery, French bacteriologist Paul-Louis Simond of the Pasteur

Institute had made his own breakthrough by discovering that the flea was the carrier and transmitter of the plague. He had theorized that plague in both rats and humans had come from a common source, and conducted a simple but effective experiment to test his theory. He placed two rats in separate cages that were directly next to each other, but far enough so that the rats could not physically touch. One of the rats was infested with plague fleas, and Simond observed that when this rat died, the fleas went over to the other rat, who also died of plague. Simond had theorized that the missing link in plague transmission was la piqure de puce – “the bite of the flea,” and he now had his proof.

Unfortunately, few took this seriously, likely due to the influence that the miasma theory still held. When the plague struck San Francisco, his theory was six years old. Walter

Wyman briefly considered the possibility of the flea as a vector, but dismissed it and

14 Walter Wyman, The Bubonic Plague, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1900, accessed January 9, 2019: 15-16. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015020611102;view=1up;seq=7.

Figure 11: The true face of evil, the Xenopsylla cheopis flea most commonly associated with transmitting plague. concluded that “the bites of insects play a very small role,” going on to endorse a miasmatic and racial theory of plague.15

We will now take a moment to step away from the history of plague medicine to discuss the true ecology of plague. The plague loves rodents, and is transmitted to them by the aforementioned flea. Typically, the plague is found in the wilderness, and is only rarely found in humans, though when this does happen the rat is often to blame. Rats have evolved alongside humans and have grown to utilize human developments for food and shelter. Often painted as evil and deadly harbingers of disease that sneak into homes to spread their filth, they are in fact just another animal that evolved alongside the growth and spread of human society. It may seem odd to view them as much, but they too are victims of the plague as a result of their exposure to infected fleas. Unfortunately, rats

15 Marilyn Chase, The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco, New York: Random House, 2004: 105-106.

have not yet evolved enough to develop their own healthcare system, so they instead go about their lives unable to do anything about the diseases they contract, and occasionally spread them to humans.16 In urban environments such as San Francisco, rats will happily live in subterranean communities so long as they have access to food and water. If need be, they will enter nearby dwellings to meet these needs. Due to their rapid tooth growth

(about five inches per year), rats are incessant chewers and can easily chew through walls if given enough time. This bode poorly for 1900 San Francisco, as most homes were built of wood, posing little challenge to the rats.17

Ultimately, the rats’ only role in plague transmission is to serve as a vehicle that transports infected fleas to humans. The species of flea most commonly known to carry plague is the Xenopsylla cheopis flea. The adults are very small, often smaller than the size of a single typed letter on this page. Laterally they are quite flat, and the structure of their mouth-area houses a needle-like apparatus called the epipharynx, which punctures through the skin of their host and sucks out the host’s blood.18 On the back end of their body are a set of legs that allow it to leap great lengths, comparable to a human jumping over a sixty-story building. Typically, x. cheopis lives about three months, with the females laying eggs 3-4 times during this period. Surprisingly, the flea is sometimes capable of surviving unfed for over a month, making it possible for the creature to

16 Charles T. Gregg, Plague: An Ancient Disease in the Twentieth Century, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985: 64. 17 Gregg, 67.

18 Tracy V. Wilson, “How Fleas Work,” HowStuffWorks, August 24, 2007, accessed January 10, 2019. https://animals.howstuffworks.com/insects/flea1.htm.

survive long journeys by sea. Healthy rats typically are found to be infested with less fleas than sick ones. An unfortunate consequence of this is that the rats dying from the plague will be thoroughly infested with fleas during the last days of their lives, during the point when their blood is teeming with plague bacilli. This high concentration of bacteria makes it possible for the fleas feeding on the poor creature to become infected, and thus more capable of spreading the plague to other hosts.19

The reason why x. cheopis is so often associated with plague is because it has a particular biological issue that turns it into a plague-transmitting machine. Fleas use their epipharynx to extract blood from their hosts, which then travels through their proboscis and into a forestomach (the proventriculus), before finally reaching their stomach (the ventriculus). The structure of the proventriculus in the x. cheopis sometimes causes ingested blood to become trapped within it, and if this blood is infected with y. pestis, the bacteria releases enzymes that cause the blood to coagulate, creating a clot-nursery for bacteria to grow. The proventriculus and ventriculus are equipped to produce an enzyme that combats clots, and when these two enzymes meet, a battle for the fleas life begins. If the flea wins, as about one-third of infected fleas do, then all is well and he will not spread plague. However, if the y. pestis clot forms quicker than the flea’s enzymes can fight it, a blockage occurs, and the flea will die – but not soon enough. These blockages are serious, as it is the reason that fleas are able to transmit plague. When the proventriculus is blocked, the next time a flea tries to feed, the suction causes a recoil that

19 Gregg, 74.

propels bits of the y. pestis clot into the wound of the host.20 Just like that, plague has been spread.

Fleas can carry over half a million plague bacilli which multiply rapidly. Because of the speed which with they multiply, it takes less than ten bacilli to prove fatal. In laboratory testing on rats, six injected bacilli were observed to have multiplied to over seventy thousand at the end of the first day. By the end of the third, the number could be in the hundred-millions. Fortunately, y. pestis is not particularly hardy, and heat and antibiotics can kill it if treated quickly enough.21 Unfortunately, antibiotics were not discovered until 1928, so this did not help the people of San Francisco during their epidemic.

Plague is considered a pathogenic disease because it meets three main criteria: it penetrates the victims defenses, it multiplies rapidly within the victim, and it destroys the victim’s metabolism - the last of these is what causes the symptoms associated with plague. The immune system does deploy antibodies to combat the invading bacteria, however this process is slow, taking about a week or longer upon first exposure, and only a few days with subsequent exposure. The toxicity of y. pestis is due to the endotoxins embedded within the bacteria’s cell wall. When the bacteria dies, the endotoxins are released, poisoning the victim and causing spleen, liver, and lymph node damage.22

20 Gregg, 76-77.

21 Gregg, 79.

22 Gregg, 80-83.

Figure 12: A bubo, caused by the swelling of the lymph nodes in a patient infected with Yersinia pestis. Upon entering the body, Y. pestis makes a beeline for the lymph nodes – the body’s immune system outpost – where it rapidly multiplies. Once the immune system catches on to the fact that there are microscopic invaders present, the lymph nodes swell up, causing the buboes characteristic to bubonic plague. From this point it is then possible for the bacteria to migrate to the lungs, causing a different, more lethal, and highly contagious strain of plague called pneumonic plague.23 Surprisingly, bubonic plague is not really contagious from person to person since it needs a vector to introduce it into the blood stream. Pneumonic, however, is so contagious because it can be expelled in the victim’s sputum upon coughing or breathing, and then inhaled by those nearby – such as distraught family members or nurses attending to the patient.

23 Alex B. Berezow, “How Does the Plague Kill People,” RealClearScience, February 22, 2014, accessed February 15, 2019. https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/02/how_does_the_plague_kill_people.html

Ultimately, Y. pestis kills you by convincing your body to kill itself. The overabundance of bacteria in the blood stream causes the immune system to panic, triggering septic shock. The blood vessels leak, leading to clotting and organ failure.24 An infected person usually starts showing symptoms between two and six days after infection, though pneumonic plague can show symptoms within one to three days. There is a chance that someone with bubonic plague will make a full recovery, as the pre- antibiotic mortality rate for bubonic plague was 66%. For pneumonic plague, however, the mortality rate was nearly 100%.25

As previously stated, the epidemic of plague that occurred in San Francisco in

1900 was part of a larger pandemic, finding its origins in the Yunnan province of China in 1892. Heavy military traffic, trade caravans, and general migration served to spread the plague outside of the area into Canton, reaching Hong Kong in 1894, having already killed over one hundred-thousand. From the ports in Hong Kong, the disease spread to other major ports in Taiwan, Japan, India, Portugal, Scotland, Australia, and eventually,

San Francisco.26 In May of 1897 America was experiencing a level of concern over the danger of plague, but overall saw it as an avoidable issue. Victor C. Vaughan, then- professor of hygiene at the University of Michigan, posted the question, are we

24 Berezow, https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/02/how_does_the_plague_kill_people.html.

25 “Plague,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2018. https://www.cdc.gov/plague/faq/index.html

26 Mary Ellen Snodgrass, World Epidemics: a cultural chronology of disease from prehistory to the era of SARS, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2003: 233-234.

[America] in danger from the plague? His answer: “Yes, there is danger but this, being foreseen, may be easily avoided.” Two years later he added on to this answer:

In my opinion, our most vulnerable point is along the Pacific coast. With the plague at Hong Kong, it is possible that it may be transferred to Manila, and the transports bringing soldiers to this country may also bring the infection. However, I think the chances of this happening are small.27

San Francisco saw itself as impervious to plague, guided by modern science and medicine and shielded by their Angel Island quarantine station, led by the diligent J.J.

Kinyoun. The white citizens of the city felt even less concern for the overseas scourge, believing themselves to be completely safe within their urban environment, where miasma and filth only affected those undesirable members of society. The laypeople of

San Francisco had other things to worry about, aspects of their lives such as going to work, caring for their families, finding a meal, and making it through another day.

Everyone within the city had their own lives and their own responsibilities to take care of, and on the morning of January 31, 1900, Kinyoun woke up and prepared to handle his responsibilities. In the harbor, the S.S. Australia was waiting for him.

27 Geoffrey Marks and William K. Beatty, Epidemics, New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1976: 257.

CHAPTER FOUR: FALLEN LEAVES The Arrival of Plague in San Francisco

“I failed to see a single case of live plague and saw only one in a corpse. From this standpoint it would seem that the rumor that plague threatens San Francisco is ridiculous and unfounded. One swallow does not make a summer, and one case of plague does not make an epidemic.”

-The San Francisco Call, June 2, 1900 1

During the first month after plague had arrived in San Francisco, the rats and their plague-fleas scurried beneath Chinatown, breeding and dying, and occasionally venturing to the surface to meet whatever survival need they had. Within the dwellings and streets of the small district could be found a smorgasbord of refuse, which provided all the necessary materials that the rats needed for feeding and nest-building. As has been outlined in the preceding chapters, this environment was the result of circumstance and a deep-seated history of racism and oppression against the Chinese within California. The growing population was straining the small district far beyond its limits, and the dehumanization from the city’s Caucasian population and authority figures meant that there was no help to be found. The philosophy of “same sound, same air” and the need for support and kinship meant that the Chinese coming to California would seek out one of the few remaining established communities, and more often than not this was San

Francisco. Further, after the passing and extensions of the Chinese Exclusion Act, many of the new immigrants entered the country illegally, and so finding an environment where

1 “San Francisco Free From Danger of Contagion,” San Francisco Call (San Francisco), June 2, 1900: 1.

they could blend in and receive support and care, including medical care, was especially important.

One of these such immigrants was Wong Chut King, who arrived in San

Francisco after the passing of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Wong was likely recruited by a labor broker selling passage across the Pacific on credit, who then sailed the men to

British Columbia as approximately 20% of migrants coming from Hong Kong did. Once there, the men would then be taken across the Canadian border into America with the aid of human traffickers, and then make their way to one of the few remaining Chinese settlements, with San Francisco being one of the first encountered.2 Despite the hostility that these newcomers faced, there was certainly work to be found within the sprawling metropolis. Turn of the century San Francisco found itself dominated by conservative business interests including the railroad, shipping, and lumber industries, who’s magnates were influential figures in the city.3 These burgeoning industries required a massive workforce in order to continue flourishing, and the large Chinese population in the State served to meet this need. King was one of these laborers, who found work in the rat- infested lumberyard on Pacific Street.4 Historians are uncertain whether he contracted plague at the Pacific Street lumber yard or in his Globe Hotel bunk, as both locations seem likely culprits.

2 Guenter B. Risse, Plague, Fear, and Politics in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012: 20-21. 3 Charles T. Gregg, Plague: An Ancient Disease in the Twentieth Century, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985: 40.

4 Risse, 19.

Regardless of which location delivered his fate, in late February, 1900, King awoke and found himself too weak to go to work and remained in bed, gradually retracting into a fetal position as he cradled the growing knot of pain pulsing in his groin.

Traditionally, spells, rituals, and herbal medicines were used to combat ailments, especially when they were attributed to an imbalance in one’s qi. At this time, qi was believed to be a cosmic force that was responsible for the individual’s vitality, as the body itself was a reflection of the cosmos. Proper eating, temperature, sexual activity, and medicine were necessary to maintain the flow of qi, and breathing techniques were used alongside meditation, exercise, and massage to route the flow. If blockages or imbalances occurred, it could cause disease. Prophylactic and herbal medicines were utilized by local healers and herbal shop owners to combat symptoms, and the people of

Chinatown would often turn to these remedies when self-care did not work. During

King’s time, exotic elixirs and cure-alls became incredibly popular, and many

Figure 13: Herbal shop in Chinatown, 1900. From Guenter B. Risse's Plague, Fear, and Politics In San Francisco's Chinatown, page 47.

citizens became obsessed with diets, exercise, and the consumption of herbal supplements.5

When these methods of healing and restoring the flow of qi failed, the next step would be to visit local medical practitioners. Three days into his illness, experiencing a rising fever and painful urination, King became concerned enough to visit the local physician Ching Bu Bing, who diagnosed King with a cranky and aging bladder, as the bladder was a yang organ that was probably being affected by the excessive exposure to moisture. A continued lack of relief and the addition of a foul smell to his painful urine prompted King to seek a second opinion, worried he may have contracted a venereal disease. This time, he visited prominent community physician Wong Woo. Around the time of this visit, King began complaining of a swollen and painful lump in his groin.

Lumps in men’s groin were not an uncommon symptom among men who frequented the local “Green Mansions” (brothels) to have sex with “hundred-men’s wives” (prostitutes).

Woo’s final diagnosis was similar to Bing’s, attributing the symptoms and lump to improper qi circulation. Woo opted not to cut and drain the lump, a decision that unbeknownst to him likely saved his life, for doing so would expose him to bodily fluids infected with plague. Instead, he likely prescribed a salty diet and herbs that would help drain the accumulation of fluids.6

King, a devout Confucian, was likely ashamed by this diagnosis and the ruin that his vices had brought him. Illicit sex was unfilial and a betrayal of his family duties, and

5 Risse, 46.

6 Risse, 50.

such transgressions would be recorded by the god Zao Shen, overseer of domestic life, who would report the crimes to the underworld where King would one day face punishment. Returning to his small basement abode, he collapsed in bed overcome with physical and spiritual pain, unaware of the havoc that Yersinia pestis was reeking on his system. As his condition worsened, his pain and fever grew, and new symptoms appeared: vomiting and diarrhea. In that small bed in his dark corner King suffered alone.

The Cantonese had an aversion to death, believing that those nearby to the dying one were at risk of becoming tainted, resulting in most avoiding him. Near death, King was transferred to the local undertaker: Wing Sun’s Sau Pan Po (“Everlasting Procreation and

Long Life Coffin Shop”) situated two blocks from the hotel. Chinese funeral homes such as this held a special “hall of tranquility,” rooms where the gravely ill and dying could be brought to spend their few remaining hours resting. Wong Chut King died on March 6,

1900. Those who died in Chinese funeral homes were fortunate, as they were promised a proper funeral and retrieval of bones to be sent home for their final burial.7

It was believed that after death, contact with the corpse should be avoided, as the corpse expelled sat hei (killing airs) that could cling to anyone nearby, causing yin-yang imbalances and disease. The primary purpose of the Chinese funeral rituals and rites was to prevent the yang soul and yin corpse from separating until the proper ritualized exit could be performed. If the funeral was not properly performed, the dearly departed risked their soul escaping and becoming forever lost. Because of these ideas, the Chinese had an aversion to and abhorrence of western postmortem dissections, as they could cause the

7 Risse, 50-51, 56.

soul to become lost, or the sat hei to inflict those nearby.8 Migrants in America had to depend on their clansmen or local associations for transportation of their remains back to

China, and to ensure that bones would be safely preserved, the Chinese had a habit of not reporting deaths to city authorities, instead hiding the corpses to be secretly buried at a later time. Once the body was buried, the burial date would be noted in a “bone book,” and when it was believed that the body had decomposed enough it would be exhumed, the remaining flesh cleaned away, and the bones returned home for final burial. Once the bones had been received by the family back in China, they were buried close to the graves of other family members. This final step was crucial to spiritual fulfillment, as dictated in the Chinese proverb: “Fallen leaves return to their roots.”9

Unfortunately, King’s body would not receive this treatment, as the suspicious nature of his death required the funeral shop owner to contact the city health department.

Calling upon the city officials was also necessary when a death certificate was to be issued, such as if the deceased was a permanent resident of California and would not have their remains shipped back to China. In China, a lack of educational requirements and legal credentialing led healers to create their own professional structure, and upon coming to California none received a license to officially practice within the state. This was based largely upon the different theories and practices of medicine between the two cultures, and because of this, they were not authorized to issue death certificates.10

8 Risse, 57-58

9 Risse, 59-61

10 Risse, 48.

When King died, coffin shop owner Wing Sun was required by law to report the case, and assistant medical officer Frank P. Wilson was sent to perform an examination and autopsy. Upon examining King’s body, Wilson immediately noted the presence of purple blotches under the skin that were surrounded by red rings, as well as the swollen lymph glands in King’s groin. Wilson was well-aware of the recent outbreak of plague in

Honolulu and became instantly concerned with what lay before him. He called upon the

City Health officer A.P. O’Brien and the city bacteriologist Wilfred H. Kellogg, and expressed his concerns that King may have died from plague. Understandably, this was a frightening and difficult concept to grasp, but the men firmly followed their duties and began performing tests to determine whether or not he had truly been felled by the mythological black death.11 Kellogg got to work examining the bacteria in King’s system, and collected tissue samples to be tested by Kinyoun at his secluded Angel Island laboratory. In the meantime, he and his fellow health officers decided it would be best to inform the city officials about the possible presence of plague.

The officials were rightfully concerned; however, their next actions were not grounded in rational thought or medical science, and instead were guided by fear and their deeply rooted Sinophobia. Instead of waiting for the lab to confirm or deny the diagnosis, Dr. O’Brien, Dr. Wilson, and Dr. Kinyoun immediately moved to establish a quarantine around the entire twelve square blocks of Chinatown. Further, the Caucasian citizens who lived within or on the border of the district were ushered out before the

11 Tro Harper, “Dealing with the plague,” in San Francisco Sunday Examiner (San Francisco, CA), 1977: 20-21.

Figure 14: First police cordon/quarantine around Chinatown, New York Journal, March 18, 1900. From Guenter B. Risse's Plague, Fear, and Politics In San Francisco's Chinatown, page 114. quarantine was established, so that it specifically confined only the Chinese.12 This decision defied all logic and went against the historical application of quarantine in instances of plague. Instead of quarantining an entire neighborhood or district, only the homes or structures where plague was found would be isolated, out of the belief that the dwelling and its inhabitants had been exposed and infected. In Chinatown, the entire district was isolated instead of just the locations where plague had made itself apparent.

This decision is illogical, especially when considering that only one person had been reported to have died. Further, if the idea behind isolating an entire district was that anyone within it could have been exposed, then why were the non-Chinese citizens permitted to leave? Were they not equally liable to being exposed? If it was

12 Marilyn Chase, The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco, New York: Random House, 2004: 18.

Figure 15: Cartoon from The Wasp, May 26, 1882. Imagery and words used promote the then-common Sinophobic ideas that diseases were rampant in Chinatown. true that the plague could have truly been so thoroughly distributed throughout the district to justify a complete quarantine, then anyone who had even passed through was at risk of infection.

Of course, these are all hypothetical questions, as the previous chapters have answered the question of why the entire Chinese population was quarantined, and the

Caucasians removed. The Chinese were unjustifiably hated ever since their arrival at

Gold Mountain. This hatred was born from fear and discomfort with a culture so different from their own, as well as from labor competition. Cultural aversion and ignorance bred

feelings that the Chinese were subhuman, morally corrupt, and dirty, and that their lifestyle made them susceptible to disease. Mentally isolating them led to physical isolation, and as they were forcibly driven out from their homes and jobs they had to congregate where they could. Facing such hostility drove them together, finding security and belonging among their own people while under constant attack from outside. San

Francisco’s Chinatown became one of the few places within the state that they could go, but it was overpopulated and filled with poverty. The city would not help, and had time and time again tried to relocate them somewhere worse, such as the district allotted for them under the Bingham Ordinance. In March of 1900, when the quarantine was erected around Chinatown, it was done so because of the prevailing Sinophobia that said these people were diseased, that Chinatown was a hub of pestilence, and that it was their fault.

The Caucasian civilians were permitted to leave because they were innocent and could not have possibly contracted an Asiatic disease. They were not dirty and diseased, but the

Chinese were.

Those trapped within Chinatown were gripped by a fear that the flames which ravaged Honolulu’s Chinatown would in turn take their own. This fear was heightened as they watched King’s clothing and bedding be burned in the streets. King’s body was wrapped in a linen shroud that had been soaked in an antiseptic solution of bichloride of mercury, and then sealed within a lead coffin lined with chloride of lime, all in an effort to seal in the miasma and bacteria. His body was then burned. Both the autopsy and cremation that King underwent was the standard procedure for any victim of epidemic disease, however both also violated Confucianist beliefs. The cutting of the body was an

Figure 16 A horse-drawn wagon used to pump disinfectants into dwellings. From Guenter B. Risse's Plague, Fear, and Politics In San Francisco's Chinatown, page 129. affront to the parents of the deceased, and the cremation was a desecration that left a disembodied spirit lost in the world. His neighbors did not believe that he had died from plague, instead adhering to Woo and Bing’s diagnoses that King was suffering from qi blockage and gonorrhea.13

Ignoring the concerns and objections of the Chinese citizens, the quarantine persisted. Officials sent in sanitation teams to “clean up” the district, leaving acrid clouds of bichloride of lime that suffocated the inhabitants. Those who tried to flee faced the

Billy club of one of the many police officers stationed around their district, but because jobs and food were beyond the cordon, many still attempted to slip through.14 James D.

Phelan, the mayor of San Francisco, supported the initial quarantine, appealing to the

13 Chase, 19.

14 Chase, 20.

Chinese to cooperate. The response of the Caucasian civilians was tepid approval, with most believing that at worst the officials were being overcautious.

The current Chinese consul Ho Yow resided within Chinatown and immediately set to work to combat the quarantine. Speaking nearly-flawless English and holding an appreciation for many western aspects of society, he made the perfect Asian diplomat. He was also personally familiar with the danger that plague presented, as while living in his father’s household in China, two of their servants had died of plague. Despite this intimate encounter with the disease, Yow argued that blockading the district was purely discriminatory, especially when considering how the cordon line zigzagged around white homes and businesses. Also fearing that the quarantine would provoke more support for continuing the Chinese Exclusion Act, he sought out the help of the Chinese Six

Companies, and together they hired a team of lawyers to defend the Chinese of San

Francisco.15 The leading Chinese-language daily newspaper, the Chung Sai Yat Po, posted a headline arguing that the “Blockade Is A Violation of the Law,” and angry crowds began to gather in the streets. Merchants complained that they would suffer severe financial losses with the district being cut off, and the Chinese Six Companies were under pressure to resolve the situation. They failed to release a statement, but

Consul Yow was quick to issue his own on March 7, the same day the quarantine was enacted:

I think the Chinese have been most unfairly treated, and if something is not done to modify the blockade I will try to Obtain relief for the Chinese…it is wrong to close an extensive section like Chinatown simply upon the suspicion that a man

15 Chase, 20-21.

might have died of the plague…it is not right to single out the Chinese and treat them in this way.

He concluded by ordering the Six Companies to oversee all cleaning and disinfecting of homes and businesses.16

While the Chinese attempted to fight the quarantine and city officials attempted to control the situation, the media began questioning the existence of plague; all of this happening in the few days since King’s death on March 6. Across the bay, Kinyoun was at work in his quarantine station on Angel Island, examining and testing the tissue and lymph fluid taken from King’s body. Kinyoun was a “Pasteurian” doctor trained in the new science of bacteriology founded by Louis Pasteur, and because of this he was possibly the most qualified man in the State to determine if plague was truly present in the city. Bacteriology was a breakthrough in the study of infectious diseases. Common symptoms like fever and soreness could be misleading, and bacteriology provided a concrete way to test and diagnose. During his training, he had learned how to isolate and prove that a bacterium caused a disease. The method was as follows:

1. Isolate the germ from the patient 2. Grow the germ in a pure culture 3. Inoculate the germ into a lab animal and reproduce the disease 4. Isolate the identical germ from the lab animal.17

Upon examining the bacteria from King’s samples, Kinyoun quickly recognized the oval- shaped bacteria indicative of plague. He proceeded to the next step of inoculating the

16 Charles J. McClain, In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle against Discrimination in Nineteenth- Century America, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994: 237-238.

17 Chase, 24-25.

bacteria into four different lab animals: one rat, two guinea pigs, and one monkey. He then sent a wire to Walter Wyman informing him of his suspicions. All that he could do now was wait, as it would take several days for the bacteria to take hold and kill the animals.18

After several days had passed without any of Kinyoun’s lab animals dying, the media took off with denouncing the “plague scare.” On March 9, the San Francisco

Examiner posted the headline “NO RESULTS FROM TESTS OF BACTERIOLOGIST.”

Within the article it stated:

The animals that were inoculated at Angel Island by Dr. Kellogg of the Board of health and Dr. Kinyoun of the Federal Quarantine Service had not developed any plague symptoms up to the late hour of yesterday. On the contrary, the creatures seemed to be in very good health. No other suspicious death has been reported, and the indications are satisfactory for a speedy abatement of the flurry in the Chinese quarter.19

Just as quickly as the flood of concern and understanding for the quarantine arrived, had a new wave of cynicism and mistrust taken its place. The media and city officials began denouncing Kinyoun and the actions of the Health Board, recognizing that to admit to the presence of the disease would be to crucify them all. The economic standing of the city could be severely damaged, and that just couldn’t happen.

Back in Chinatown, the quarantine was beginning to unravel. Those trapped within it were gripped by anxiety and fear. Those who believed the plague was real feared being stuck inside an infected zone, and those who doubted its existence – the

18 Chase, 29.

19 “No Results From Tests of Bacteriologist,” San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco), March 9, 1900: 9.

majority of Chinatown’s residents – feared that the quarantine was an act of discrimination, and signaled worsening social conditions. Those outside of the quarantine zone were irritated by the inconvenience of having their indispensable Chinese workforce unavailable, as they worked as cooks, launderers, servants, and industry laborers. On

March 10, after the culmination of pressures from every side, the quarantine was removed only three days after it had been established. There had been no more suspicious deaths, the test animals were still alive, and the Chinese were threatening a lawsuit.20 The streets were flooded with relieved citizens – both Chinese and Caucasian – as life could return to normal and the perceived threat was gone. The San Francisco Examiner once again chimed in, posting the headline “THE QUARANTINE OF CHINATOWN

RAISED, ALL FEARS PROVING GROUNDLESS.” The article opened with a little limerick titled “The Raising of the Quarantine,” accompanied by the following:

And so the siege of Chinatown has been raised! For many of those who before have cheered the sentiment, "The Chinese must go," this means a change of linen. For many who publicly have no use for John Chinaman, but privately relish his cooking, the raising of the siege means better fare than furnished in the past few days by the "better half." Thus the end of the quarantine has brought comfort to many outside of Chinatown.21

All was well, a general air of relief must have been felt throughout most of the city.

Public health officials lifted the quarantine, and newspapers were assuaging the fears of the public. The already-financially struggling Chinese could return to work, and the

20 Chase, 30.

21 “Quarantine of Chinatown Raised, All Fears Proving Groundless,” San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco), March 10, 1900: 4.

Figure 17: "The Raising of the Quarantine" limerick from the San Francisco Examiner, March 10, 1900. Caucasians had their cheap labor force back. Within Chinatown there was still a feeling of uncertainty following the confinement, but at least they were no longer prisoners. On the mainland the status quo had been restored; but two days later, across the bay, the guinea pigs and the rat in Kinyoun’s lab went still, and the next day the monkey followed. Two more days later on March 15 – nine days after the death of King – Chu

Chan Ging, a 22-year-old laborer, died on Sacramento street. Then, on March 17, Ng Ach

King, a 35-year-old cook, died on Dupont Street. The following day, Lee Lun King, a middle-aged workingman, collapsed and died in a small alley called Oneida place.22 All three men showed symptoms of plague.23 Three more leaves had fallen. All was not well, and it was going to get worse.

22 Simon Flexner, F.G. Novy, and Lewellys F. Parker, “Report of the Commission Appointed by the Secretary of the Treasury for the Independent Investigation of Plague in San Francisco,” Public Health Reports (1896-1970), no. 16 (1901): 816. Note: Names of the men may be misspelled, as King’s name was misspelled as “Wing Chut King” within the same document.

23 Chase, 31, 47.

CHAPTER FIVE: FAKE NEWS More Death, More Denial, and Kinyoun’s Attempt to End the Outbreak

“No Microscopic examination will be needed to convince an intelligent man that Kinyoun has buboes on the brain.”

-The San Francisco Call, June 18, 1900.1

The brief interlude between the death of Wong Chut King and Kinyoun’s four lab animals (in all, seven days) was just enough time for the majority of the city to collectively agree that not only was plague nonexistent on their shores, but also that the

Board of Health and Kinyoun were liars, seeking only personal gain. Even mayor Phelan, who had initially been supportive of the Health Board’s quarantine, quickly turned against them. Among the most vicious of the Board’s critics were the newspapers, which wasted no time in denouncing the entire “plague scare” as fictitious and absurd. Being the face of the quarantine station and plague eradication efforts, Kinyoun bore most of the brunt, and eventually was thrown under the bus even by his own collaborators.

Throughout the research done for this thesis, it has been brought to my attention that several historians view Kinyoun as a sort of martyr, due to his efforts and subsequent vilification. This seems uncritical though, as Kinyoun is a difficult character to categorize. He was dedicated to the end in his efforts to truly eradicate the plague from

San Francisco, and stood firm to the fact that plague was present, even in the face of widespread public slander. He let none of this halt his efforts to eliminate the deadly

1 “Kinyoun’s Quarantine Outrage,” San Francisco Call (San Francisco), June 18, 1900: 4.

scourge that continued to claim lives. However, he was also a man quick to anger with a fragile ego, and held no love for the Chinese. He was willing to force upon them a dangerous and experimental vaccine, and was on board with the idea of relocating them to detention centers. He was clearly Sinophobic, but so were the newspapers which criticized him. Kinyoun is a very “grey” character, and during this chapter I want to avoid allowing ideas of martyrdom or vilification interfere with the reader’s understanding of the events that transpired and the role that the media’s “witch hunt” played in the public perception of the epidemic.

The first appearances of denial within the media appeared before the quarantine was even lowered, with these articles criticizing the Health Board’s actions as a grab at more funding. On March 9, the San Francisco Chronicle published the headline

“PLAGUE FAKE IS EXPLODED,” which stated the following:

No reason for health board’s alleged “suspicion.” Mayor Phelan’s Board of Health announced yesterday that the idiotic embargo it has placed upon Chinatown for purposes of “revenue only” but obtain for another two days at the least. Consul-General Ho Yow, speaking as the representative of his empire and the reputable Chinese merchants and residents of the graft-beleaguered district, declared that the fake “quarantine” will be raised to-day if there is power in the courts to do it. The latest bubonic-plague swindle is exploded…it has failed of its purpose. The city’s treasury remains intact.2

The following day on March 10, as the quarantine was lowered, the Chronicle posted another headline, this time stating: “HEALTH BOARD IS FORCED TO ABANDON

ITS BUBONIC BLUFF.” Within this article the Chronicle quoted a report by mayor

2 “Plague Fake is Exploded,” San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco), March 9, 1900: 12.

Phelan, who had been asked if he saw the quarantine as justified. He response was as follows:

The Board of Health consists of professional gentlemen whose standing is unquestionably high among their colleagues. It is their duty to protect the public health and they will be held accountable for any disaster which may befall the city from Asiatic infection to which San Francisco is constantly exposed…As to the 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 Board of Health will, if possible, save San Francisco from plague.3

Phelan’s support for the Health Board and plague effort was short lived, but while it lasted it served purely anti-Chinese purposes. Phelan, a Democratic reformer, was entirely against Chinese immigration, seeing the Chinese as threat to both public health and Californian workers. He would even run for president at a later time under the slogan

“keep California white.” This so-called plague scare was the perfect ammunition for him to use in the upcoming Chinese Exclusion Act renewal, and so his support for the Board was born.4 Phelan knew that a plague would be detrimental to the image of the Chinese, but unfortunately for him, plague was also detrimental to tourism and business. Not immediately making this connection, Phelan was quickly informed by the merchants and businessmen of the city of the colossal economic impact that publicly announcing plague would have on their industrial city. By the end of March, he was already back-pedaling

3 “Health Board is Forced to Abandon Its Bubonic Bluff,” San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco), March 10, 1900: 7.

4 Marilyn Chase, The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco, New York: Random House, 2004: 48.

on his previous announcements, and on March 27 the San Francisco Call published the following front-page headline:

“CITY PLAGUE SCARE A CONFESSED SHAM” The merchants of San Francisco could no longer tolerate the criminal misrepresentation and they appeared yesterday before Mayor Phelan to protest. They demanded that redress be given at once. "You have proclaimed us," as one of them said, "as a community waving a yellow flag in a cave of death." Mayor Phelan, as is his custom, was conciliatory. He penned a telegram to forty American cities and declared that in San Francisco there is not a single case of bubonic plague, and there has not been one for three weeks, that there is not a suspicion or a fear of a case, and that there never was more than the suspicion of a case.5

Mayor Phelan, one of the most publicly influential figures in the city, had now situated himself on the side of the deniers.

In his telegram, Phelan claimed that there had not been a case of plague in three weeks, meaning that he was recognizing only King’s death as having had to do with plague. This would set the course for other deniers to follow, ignoring laboratory evidence and attributing unusual deaths to other illnesses – most commonly “Chicken

Cholera,” which interestingly enough is not contagious to humans.6 With the mayor, businessmen, and media now on board, all that was left was to beat back the Board of

Health and Kinyoun. While the confidence of the deniers is certainly admirable, the unfortunate truth is that science does not care what one believes. What’s true is true, and it was true that Yersinia pestis was within their city. By the time of Phelan’s March 27 announcement, there had been nine reported deaths due to plague.

5 “City Plague Scare A Confessed Sham,” San Francisco Call (San Francisco), June 18, 1900: 4.

6 Walter Wyman, The Bubonic Plague, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1900: 13.

I would like to digress for a moment to explain the necessity in making a distinction that these nine plague deaths were “reported” or “known.” The reason why it is important to emphasize that deaths were reported is that there are likely a large number of deaths that went unreported or were falsely reported, and information was never found to correct the record. Part of this can be attributed to the efforts of the deniers, who claimed that the deaths were due to some other disease. Chicken cholera, syphilis, gonorrhea, consumption (tuberculosis), among many others made their way onto the death certificates of the deceased. There even exists reported instances of city doctors falsifying diagnoses to serve the denial agenda, as we will discuss further in chapter six.

In other instances, misdiagnosis was not due to malicious intent, but instead circumstance. For example, doctor Edward Seltzer visited a Chinese patient in their home who had died from an unknown illness. Due to the aforementioned Chinese aversion to dissection, Seltzer was unable to perform an autopsy, and ultimately misdiagnosed the patient as having died from pneumonia.7

The other main reason why the reported number of plague victims is likely different from the true number is that, to put it simply, the Chinese were hiding their dead. Before the plague, city and federal doctors had ordered that any Chinese individual who died unattended by a physician, or had an unknown medical history, must be autopsied to ascertain the cause of death. This in part fueled the practice of hiding the deceased, so that their soul would not become lost before proper funeral rites were performed. However, without an autopsy, plague – especially pneumonic – can easily be

7 Chase, 52.

Figure 18: A newspaper sketch depicting two Chinese men attempting to hide their sick companion, described by the paper as a “consumptive”, caught in the act by a policeman. From the San Francisco Examiner, March 24, 1900. misdiagnosed as pneumonia. Because of this, the city Board of Health issued an order that any Chinese dying from suspected pneumonia, or who shown swollen glands or fever, must be autopsied. Not coincidentally, shortly after the order was issued the monthly reports of death and illness in Chinatown decreased.8

As was par for the course, the media took these “rumors” that the Chinese were hiding their dead and ran with it. On March 24, the San Francisco Examiner published following:

“CHINESE HIDE THEIR SICK FROM OFFICIALS.” A policeman on duty in Chinatown caught two Chinese yesterday secreting a consumptive on the roofs where health inspectors could not find the sufferer. This is supposed to be but one of many instances of Chinese baffling the officials… Fear that their friend might be subjected to the doctors' knife after death prompted them to convey him through a narrow corridor and up through a skylight to the

8 Chase, 51.

roof… The corps working under Drs. Fitzsimmons and Hay discovered a sick Chinese at 13 Waverly Place, in an out-of-the-way room, where he evidently had been hidden. His face was black and the neck swollen and the doctors saw that he was a victim of consumption.9

This article is dripping with plague denial. When faced with blackened skin and buboes – two archetypal symptoms of plague – the newspaper instead claimed that the man was ill with tuberculosis. For the record, tuberculosis is a bacterial infection of the lungs, which can exhibit the following symptoms: bad cough, chest pain, coughing up blood, weakness, weight loss, chills, fever, and night sweats.10 Absent from this list are the symptoms that the deceased was exhibiting. There is no way to know for certain if this man was a plague victim, but it is likely that he was, and remains an unaccounted-for death. The Chinese people of San Francisco were not obscuring deaths out of malice, but instead did so in an attempt to defend themselves and their afterlives against the invasion of white doctors and authority figures.11 Remember, most of the Chinese joined in the chorus of denial, not believing plague to exist within the city.

Back in Kinyoun’s Angel Island lab, the quarantine officer prepared his report on the death of his four animals, confirming that the same plague bacteria had been found within their systems. Unfortunately, the seeds of distrust had already been sewn, and when Kinyoun came forward with his confirmed diagnosis there were few willing to

9 “Chinese Hide Their Sick From Officials,” San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco), March 24, 1900: 7.

10 “Plague: Signs and Symptoms,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2018, accessed March 6, 2019. https://www.cdc.gov/tb/topic/basics/signsandsymptoms.html.

11 Chase, 52.

listen. Partly to blame was a general mistrust of bacteriology. Like many innovative medical practices that deviate from tradition, the public saw it as mysterious and inferior to trusted methods. Bacteriology was, in the public eye, ghoulish, especially when it required a living creature be injected with fluids or tissue from the deceased. Rumors against Kinyoun began to spread, with some claiming that he had poisoned the lab animals, or that simply injecting fluids from the glands of any corpse could prove fatal.

Fluid from a corpse was perceived as the liquid of putrefaction, teeming with rot and not disease germs.12 In a March 14 article, the San Francisco Chronicle blamed the death of the monkey on neglect, and further denounced the Board of Health:

“NO PLAGUE IS FOUND” Twenty-five physicians, acting under authority of the Board of health, and with a squad of policemen behind them, were unable yesterday to find any signs of the bubonic plague in Chinatown… The monkey that had been keeping a lonely vigil on Angel island stood out until yesterday afternoon against the large dose of Chinese bacilli, and then, probably as a result of neglect and the emaciation that follows close confinement and too persistent attention from eager bacteriologists, died.13

Despite the heckling from the newspapers, Kinyoun moved forward with his efforts.

After sending his initial wire to Walter Wyman, Kinyoun received a response on March

8. Wyman trusted Kinyoun’s judgement and advised him on his next courses of action, which included house-to-house inspections, thorough cleaning and disinfection of suspected homes, and the relocation of the sick and the well (i.e. everybody) to “refugee

12 Chase, 46-47.

13 “No Plague Is Found,” San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco), March 14, 1900: 7.

camps.” Further, he was an energetic supporter of the newly developed Haffkine’s vaccine and Yersin antiserum, recommending their usage immediately.14

The Haffkine vaccine was a controversial medicine, as it had only recently been developed and was still highly experimental – not to mention dangerous. The same pandemic that had made its way to San Francisco also reached India, however there it caused much greater damage and claimed millions of lives. Haffkine was commissioned by the Indian Home Department to research a means of combating the disease, and in short time announced that he had an effective vaccine ready for use. The vaccine contained heat-killed plague bacteria, and a controlled test of the vaccine was performed in a Bombay prison. After semi-promising results the vaccine was then disseminated. It was quickly realized that the vaccine was highly toxic, and inoculation was often accompanied by localized pain, swelling, and high fever. The reactions were so severe that patients would be incapacitated for days, and many died. As these side effects became known, it became difficult to convince people to submit.15

During the month of April, the plague in San Francisco had gone quiet, however on April 24 another victim died. On the whole this death caused little concern, as officials were quite certain that the situation was over; however, four deaths during the first weeks of May would shatter this façade. Wyman decided it was time to get serious, and on May

15 sent a telegram to Kinyoun:

14 Charles J. McClain, In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle against Discrimination in Nineteenth- Century America, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994: 239-240.

15 McClain, 245.

Chinese minister has agreed to wire Consul General, San Francisco, to use his influence to have the Chinese comply cheerfully with necessary measures…have about twenty thousand Haffkine on hand; will be sent to-morrow…Suggest advisability of following measures…reference to Chinese only; house to house inspection with Haffkine inoculation; Chinatown to be restricted…suspects from plague houses to be removed to a suspect house in Chinatown, if you deem necessary to Angel Island.16

Wyman had decided that mass inoculation of only the Chinese population would be the means by which they combatted the outbreak, and they would use force if necessary. In a separate telegram, Wyman instructed Kinyoun to order the railroads to refuse ticket sales to any Chinese who did not hold a valid certificate of inoculation. The Board of Health held a meeting with the Chinese leaders to discuss the inoculation, and Kinyoun believed that there would be no opposition moving forward, especially since the Chinese had to choose between freedom of movement and inoculation.17 Unfortunately for all involved, this was far from the truth.

When the news of mass inoculation broke in early May, chaos erupted. Crowds gathered outside the offices of the Chinese Six Companies announcing their refusal to submit. Everyone was afraid and angry, as the danger and pain of the vaccine was widely understood. The Six Companies, surprised at the opposition and unsure of what to do, assured the public that they would retain a lawyer to bring an injunction against the

Board of Health. On May 18 the Six Companies and Consul Yow sent a joint telegram to the Chinese minister in Washington:

Authorities insist inoculation, even by force. All Chinese object, would rather go back to China than subject. They say there is no plague at all. Please use your

16 McClain, 244.

17 McClain, 246-247.

influence at once have authorities have officers here to facilitate matters as they intend to commence at once. If they inoculate by force there might be trouble and blood-shed.18

The plan for inoculation was set to begin on May 19, but when the fleet of physicians descended upon Chinatown they found few takers. Businesses shut down in protest, groups gathered in the streets, and everyone argued against the experimental vaccine.

Further, there were rumors circulating that Tong gangsters were threatening anyone who submitted, firmly opposing to the interference of Caucasian doctors and officials within their neighborhood. Posters began appearing which threatened the lives of merchants who dared re-open during the protest.19

A small group of Chinese men did agree to be inoculated, as they had business or work interests outside of the city and would not be allowed to leave until they had a certificate. On May 22 reports of these men’s experiences appeared in the Chung Sai Yat

Po, and they were not encouraging. The paper reported that two men had received the injection, and both experienced severe pain, fever, and unconsciousness.

Finally, the Six Companies decided to act, and filed bills of complaint in the U.S.

Circuit Court for the Northern District of California on behalf of Wong Wai, a merchant with business interests in the city. The defendants were J.J. Kinyoun and members of the city Board of Health. The complaint referenced the absurd requirement for a vaccine in order to leave the city, arguing that the vaccine was experimental and toxic, and was not proven to be effective. Further, many argued that the forced vaccine and restrictions

18 McClain, 248.

19 McClain, 250.

violated the fourteenth amendment. The hearing was held on May 25 before Judge

Morrow, a man who had once described the Chinese as “a class destitute of moral qualities.” On May 28 he delivered his ruling, surprising everyone by siding with the

Chinese, stating that the policy was unlawful for the following reasons: 1) The Board of

Health did not have the authority to enact its own legislation; 2) The legislation was overly vague and provided no proposal for securing the public health; and 3) It was in direct violation of the fourteenth amendment. Finally, he argued that the vaccine was a purely preventative vaccine, and served no purpose if administered to someone already exposed to the disease or someone leaving the infected area, thus forcing everyone to accept it was illogical. Kinyoun and the Board of Health left the courtroom with wounded pride.20

This hearing was a real blow to Kinyoun’s mission, but cleanup and sanitation efforts continued in Chinatown. Attempts were still made to have the Chinese submit to inoculation, however since this could no longer be forced, the people would have to be convinced. On May 31, the San Francisco Examiner published an article which recounted the experience of one of their own reporters, who agreed to receive the vaccine. J.A.

Boyle had the following to say about the ordeal:

The inoculation itself is entirely painless…for an hour and a half after the inoculation was performed I was not inconvenienced by it. Within two hours, however, the serum had spread through my system and its effects began to be felt. 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 shooting pains increased considerably and two and one-half hours after taking the injection I decided that it was a decidedly unpleasant operation. I was slightly dizzy, there was a ringing in

20 McClain, 251-257.

my ears, and I felt as if I was drifting into a stupor from which I did not particularly care to rouse myself. At this time this 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.

Boyle concluded by stating that the symptoms slowly abated over the next few hours, and that seven hours after the injection all that remained was soreness in his shoulder.21 It goes without saying that this was a far from convincing account, and likely served to turn more people against the vaccine.

While controversy raged over forced vaccination and stopping the spread of the disease, actual victims continued to die. On May 11, teenage cigar maker Lim Fa Muey became the first female plague victim. Following shortly after her was another teenager, this time a maid named Chin Moon. Moon had experienced dizziness while working and had to lie down. Her dizziness evolved into a headache and stomach pain, then vomiting.

She developed a tenderness in her lower abdomen and had a fever of 105. An attending white physician named Minnie Worley misdiagnosed Moon with typhoid, and on May 13

Moon died. Kinyoun and Kellogg had taken her body for an autopsy where they discovered buboes on her right thigh – something Worley had overlooked. Still, Worley stuck by her diagnosis, arguing that nobody else in Moon’s house had fallen ill, though this logic is due to the prevailing misunderstanding of how plague is transmitted.22 In all, five more people died from plague during May.

21 “How It Feels to be Inoculated With Haffkine Serum,” San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco), May 31, 1900: 3.

22 Chase, 56-57.

Word that plague was within San Francisco was making its way across the nation, and several states began declaring embargoes against passengers and goods from

California. The commerce and tourism emergency that grew from this prompted the

California State Health Board (CSHB) to intervene, and in an unexpected move ordered that San Francisco restore the quarantine of Chinatown, or else the entire city will be quarantined from the rest of the State. Let it be known that this was not the CSHB acknowledging that plague existed, but instead was an attempt to limit the damage caused by negative publicity and statewide embargo.23 One member of the CSHB, Dr. D.D.

Crowley was less in favor of quarantine and instead saw burning down the district as a more appropriate course of action:

“I would advocate the complete destruction of Chinatown by fire as the best and safest method for stamping out the plague.” Said Dr. D.D. Crowley, member of the State Board of Health from Oakland…“Now that there seems to be no further doubt that the disease is here, we should stick at nothing to rid ourselves of it. Fire has at times proved the surest treatment, and we have the best evidence of it right before us in the case of the Hawaiian Islands… Chinatown is a natural plague spot, and, although the local Board of Health has improved the situation much by putting into effect the strictest sanitary measures, yet, in my opinion, the only sure method is to apply the torch”24

Much to Crowley’s dismay, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors opted not to utilize flame, and instead passed a resolution ordering Chinatown to be quarantined for a second time.

A special session was held between federal and local health officers, railroad officers, and portions of the city mercantile community. During this meeting, Dr. W.F.

23 Chase, 61.

24 “Dr. Crowley Would Burn Down Chinatown,” San Francisco Call (San Francisco), May 31, 1900: 1.

Blunt, a Texan health officer who had been sent to California to investigate the plague situation, commented that he was surprised at how freely whites and Chinese were intermingling. To him, it would make much more sense (from a public health standpoint, that is) if the Chinese were simply confined to their district. This would end both the problem of the Chinese needing to leave the city and the problem of the entire city being quarantined. A second meeting was held later that same day between the city and State

Health Boards to discuss the possibility of a second quarantine. Also in attendance were merchants who objected to the plan, arguing that it would conflict with Morrow’s ruling and be shut down again. Ultimately, the group reasoned that this time it was different, because instead of targeting a racial group they would be targeting an “urban district,” which just so happened to be exclusively Chinese, and was therefore very different.25

On May 30 the quarantine was enacted. This time, 159 police officers descended to form a 24/7 guard of the district, which was surrounded by eight-foot walls. Much like the first, this quarantine zigzagged around the white businesses and homes, and business between Caucasians and Chinese was once again halted. Mayor Phelan released an official statement to the press of the nation, which was published in the San Francisco

Examiner:

The city Board of health keeps up a constant inspection in Chinatown, and, in consequence of the decision of the Federal Courts preventing inoculation of Chinese about to leave the city, the Chinese district itself will be quarantined in order to protect outside territory from even the remotest possibility of contagion. There is no fear whatever among the white people of San Francisco, nor is there any danger. There has been no infection in the city proper, although Chinatown has been open during this period. The measures adopted are merely precautionary. No fact is concealed and no danger need be apprehended.

25 McClain, 257-258.

The same article also explained that the primary reason for the quarantine was that by isolating the “infected Mongolian quarters,” the general isolation of the city would be averted.26

Mayor Phelan’s claims that the situation was under control, and that there was no danger to be found, was not so readily accepted. The Health Boards of other states were still incredibly concerned, and were prepared to maintain a general quarantine against

California if need be. In New York, medical reporters were weary of Phelan’s words, and sent Dr. George F. Shrady, medical correspondent for the New York Herald, to investigate. Wyman got wind of this upcoming investigation and instructed Kinyoun to intercept and influence Shrady’s trip. Kinyoun followed this order and met with Shrady upon his arrival in the city, briefing him on all plague cases to date and inviting him to view an autopsy. Shrady would later report that during his tours of Chinatown he had not personally witnessed a single case of plague, however he also explained that Kinyoun’s clinical charts, autopsy notes, and lab tests had convinced him of the truth of the plague.27

After their interactions, Kinyoun was confident that Shrady would return to New York and report the truth. Unfortunately, Kinyoun was not the only one trying to influence

Shrady, and his hopes of truthful reporting on the plague situation would be shattered.

“DR. SHRADY DINED BY MAYOR PHELAN”

26 “Quarantine of the Chinatown District is Now In Effect,” San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco), May 30, 1900: 3.

27 Chase, 63.

Figure 19: Headline from Dr. George F. Shrady's report after being wined and dined by Phelan. Published in the San Francisco Call on May 31, 1900. Dr. George F. Shrady of New York, the eminent medical expert who for the past week has been investigating the plague situation here at the instance of the New York Herald and The Call, was the guest of Mayor Phelan at a dinner at the Pacific Union Club yesterday…After a very elaborate menu had been served the Mayor's guest of honor addressed those present in an entertaining manner. In the afternoon Dr. Shrady took a drive through Golden Gate Park to the Cliff House, and upon returning to town expressed himself as charmed with the beauties of the city's great pleasure ground.28

Dr. Shrady’s visit to San Francisco was widely known and anticipated, and Mayor Phelan had his own plans to intercept and influence the report that Shrady would bring back to

New York. As shown in the newspaper article above, he spared no expense in sucking-up to the medical reporter. The Pacific Union Railroad was also in on the plan, and permitted the grand and eloquent banquet to be held in their private club. Even the governor of California, Henry T. Gage made an appearance and personally visited Shrady in his hotel room. The royal treatment lavished upon him by some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the State was enough to all but wipe away Kinyoun’s efforts.

Shrady’s final report stated the following on June 2:

After having visited every section of Chinatown under 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...I am thoroughly convinced that there really was no danger of the plague and that virtually it did not exist in this city.29

28 “Dr. Shrady Dined By Mayor Phelan,” San Francisco Call (San Francisco), June 3, 1900: 25.

29 Chase, 64-65.

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Meanwhile, on the same day that this report was released, forty-nine-year-old Chen Kuey

Kim died, yet another victim of Yersinia pestis.30 For those outside of the State, the reality of plague was so far off and easy to discount; however, for those within

Chinatown the repercussions were very real, and continued to be felt. Not only were they once again prisoners within their own neighborhood, there were individuals among them that continued to die. Tensions were rising.

After the establishment of the quarantine, a newspaper drew attention to the inequality of the quarantine zone. They noted that “by a careful discrimination in fixing the line of embargo, not one Caucasian doing business on the outer rim of the alleged infected district was affected.” The Chinese also noticed this, as did their attorneys. The day after the quarantine was erected, the Chinese Six Companies issued a cautious statement explaining that they would not currently be taking further legal action, but requested that if (extra emphasis on if) plague truly existed within the district that the health authorities spare no expense in eradicating it. The Six Companies statement also promised Chinese cooperation, but questioned why, if plague did in fact exist within

Chinatown, were no safe and meaningful efforts being made to protect the Chinese against infection? Why were individual buildings not being quarantined? Their statement also questioned how exactly the city intended to care for and feed the thousands of

Chinese that were effectively imprisoned within the district? Consul Ho Yow argued that it was the city’s legal obligation to provide the expenses for the care of the incarcerated.

30 Simon Flexner, F.G. Novy, and Lewellys F. Parker, “Report of the Commission Appointed by the Secretary of the Treasury for the Independent Investigation of Plague in San Francisco,” Public Health Reports (1896-1970), no. 16 (1901): 816.

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Judge Maguire, a legal counselor for the Six Companies, echoed this idea, stating: “It has been held by some of the highest courts that persons in quarantine are in the same position as public prisoners and…[are] therefore…properly a charge on the public treasury.”31

Likely much to the joy of Dr. Crowley, the razing of the Chinese district was once again considered. Understandably, this possibility caused panic among those who lived there, and only served to increase tensions and agitation. Dr. Shrady attempted to placate the Chinese during these considerations, and even spoke to the publishers of the Chung

Sai Yat Po, assuring them that such actions were not out of hatred, but instead out of love and concern. He also explained that they would simply be evacuated (to a detention camp) while their homes were burned to the ground and rebuilt. Lastly, Shrady assured them that everyone would receive compensation for this property loss. The Chung Sai Yat

Po published Shrady’s words, as did the San Francisco Call, which published a special editorial in both English and Chinese.32 To the long-time inhabitants of Chinatown, the idea of relocation while their homes were destroyed harkened them back to previous attempts by the city to force them from their desirable real estate. Cooperation would be hard to come by, and if such events were to occur, there would be violence. Fortunately, neither the relocation to detention camps nor the burning of the district ever came to fruition.

31 McClain, 259-260.

32 McClain, 263.

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Figure 20: Dr. George F. Shrady's appeal to the Chinese to cooperate. Left: A sketch of Shrady. Right: Shrady’s appeal published in both Chinese and English. From the San Francisco Call, June 21, 1900.

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The day after the quarantine was imposed, a reporter for the San Francisco Daily

Examiner toured Chinatown. They remarked that it was reminiscent of “a besieged city surrounded by armed guards…business had been suspended, stores are closed, doors barred and the Asiatics gather on the street corners.”33 For the Chinese, their main concern was food, as the quarantine had cut them off from their sources. Money was also a problem, as many inhabitants had been cut off from their source of livelihood. On May

31, Consul Yow informed the press of the serious food shortage occurring within the district, and that the price of existing food was rapidly inflating. He expressed the need for immediate provisioning, threatening legal action if such was not received.34

To worsen the anxieties of the Chinese people, the Board of Health passed additional ordinances that interfered with their lives. First, the Board of Health ordered autopsies to be performed on any death that occurred in Chinatown, regardless of circumstance or health history. Further, they ordered the inspection and fumigation of

Chinese laundries throughout the entire city to check for Chinese refugees. Unable to prevent these ordinances from moving forward, the Six Companies designated three local physicians to be present for the autopsies.35 This brought little comfort to the district’s inhabitants, however, as hunger was worsening. There was no food to buy and no money to buy it with. The Caucasians of the city continued to be dispassionate towards the plight of the Chinese, with some even ridiculing their desperation. On June 3, the San Francisco

33 McClain, 263.

34 McClain, 263.

35 McClain, 264.

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Call published an article ridiculing the suicide of a Chinese man named Le Chow. The article titled “CHINESE ENDS LIFE IN A NOVEL MANNER” stated the following:

Le Chow, a Chinese confined within the quarantined district, became tired of life and chose a novel means of escaping from this vale of tears. He broke the bulb of a thermometer and swallowed the mercury. In a short time his troubles were over and the Board of health now has his body for autopsy purposes.36

Criminals saw the situation as an opportunity for exploitation, and attempted to take advantage of the vulnerable and desperate Chinese community. In early June, an unknown white man approached a group of prominent Chinese merchants and claimed he had the authority to lift the embargo against Chinese goods and help end the quarantine.

All that he required to do so was a small donation of $10,000. Allegedly this man was able to so thoroughly convince the people of Chinatown that even Consul Yow was moderately assured of his legitimacy. The Chinese merchants allotted the requested funds and gave them to the man, who was never seen or heard from again. A small investigation was initiated to discover who he was, but he remains unidentified.37

On June 5 the Chinese Six Companies finally decided to take legal action, and reappeared in Judge Morrow’s courtroom, this time accompanied by the Chinese Empire

Reform Association, another prominent Chinese organization. Their second appearance in the United States Circuit Court for the Northern District of California was on behalf of

Jew Ho, a grocer in Chinatown whose business had been severely impacted by the

36 “Chinese Ends Life In A Novel Manner,” San Francisco Call (San Francisco), June 3, 1900: 25.

37 “Officials Investigating the Chinese Blackmail Scandal,” San Francisco Call (San Francisco) June 10, 1900: 23.

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Figure 21: Images from a newspaper article discussing the extortion. Images depict a group of Chinese men discussing inoculation of the Haffkine vaccine, and a portrait of Consul Ho Yow. From the San Francisco Call, June 10, 1900. quarantine. Further, Ho was bringing a suit not just on his own behalf, but on behalf of everyone incarcerated within the district – approximately ten thousand people. Like

Wong Wai’s case, the goal was to expose the discriminatory nature of the quarantine.

Their evidence included maps of the quarantine zone that snaked around white homes and businesses, resembling the edges of a key more than a straight perimeter. Their arguments drew attention to the means by which the quarantine was enforced, depriving the Chinese citizens of their freedom and equal protection guaranteed by the constitution,

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and revisited the statements made by the Chinese Six Companies at the beginning of the quarantine: if plague had ever existed within Chinatown, the methods with which the

Board had chosen to handle it was not meant to protect the health of the Chinese, but instead threatened it. Healthy citizens were being trapped within a potentially dangerous area, and they were being denied adequate foodstuffs and care. The complainant concluded that the quarantine and attempted relocation were not orchestrated as a genuine attempt to combat plague and protect the Chinese, but instead were merely done to mitigate rumors that San Francisco was in poor health.38

The Board of health requested and was granted a continuance, and gave their response on June 13. Remembering their failure during the Wong Wai case, they decided to prepare a lengthy and detailed response. During the hearing they granted particular attention to the authority that had been granted to them by the city supervisors, and attempted to claim that their actions were non-discriminatory. The Board claimed that their policies were being enforced equally against everyone within the district, regardless of race, age, sex, or nationality. They denied intentionally zoning the quarantine around

Caucasian homes, claiming that they were “outside the affected area.”39

During the ongoing debate, J.C. Campbell, attorney for the Chinese Six

Companies, invited the presiding judges to come and visit the barriers that had been erected around Chinatown, and see for themselves how the whites had been treated favorably. The Six Companies attorneys also obtained eighteen affidavits from San

38 McClain, 268-269.

39 McClain, 271.

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Francisco physicians which questioned the existing diagnosis of plague, with most questioning how such a highly infectious disease could exist in such a highly populated area, and only have a few cases.40

On June 15 Judge Morrow once again delivered his ruling, announcing the quarantine to be unreasonable and invalid. He argued that historically, the traditional use of quarantine was to isolate individual persons or dwellings where plague has been noted, in order to reduce possibility of contact and transmission. Because the quarantine was not applied in such a way, it threatened to compromise the health of over ten-thousand civilians, and that the restriction of their movement had actually increased the risk of infection. Lastly, Morrow, once again, reasoned that the quarantine was racially discriminatory, and ordered the quarantine be lifted. However, he maintained that the

Board would be permitted to establish quarantines on individual dwellings , and if such situations occurred, a physician chosen by the Chinese Six Companies had the right to tend to the patient and be present for any autopsies.41 The quarantine was lifted within hours of the ruling, and for the first time in two weeks the Chinese were able to leave the district, go to work, and fill their bellies. Despite this success, the plague had not halted its progression, and as the people of Chinatown celebrated, new victims fell sick.

Kinyoun had been severely embittered by the ruling, and immediately began devising his next course of action. If he couldn’t quarantine the Chinese district, then he would quarantine the entire city. It had been twice determined that restricting the travel of

40 McClain, 272.

41 McClain, 273-275.

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Asiatics was unconstitutional, so he took this ruling and used it to justify ordering trains and ships to deny tickets to everyone in the city who did not hold a health certificate signed by himself. He sent letters to the Health Boards of other states, including

Louisiana, Texas, Kansas, Nevada, Oregon, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and

Washington, warning them that the plague was still ongoing, and to remain on the lookout for any passengers or goods arriving from California. With this action, he had dug not only his own grave, but the grave of the entire city. He had lit the fuse, and it did not take long for the explosion of fury to follow. Soon, all of the commercial and political powers for the entire State were coming down on him, screaming about the colossal financial losses that they would incur. Crops, tourism, and railroad transportation brought in millions in revenue, and all would be ground to a halt by Kinyoun’s actions.42

Kinyoun had turned an entire State again him in the pursuit of public health, and soon he became infamous in the media. On June 17, the San Francisco Call published the headline “AN OFFICIAL OUTRAGE:”

Quarantine officer Kinyoun has inflicted upon California a blow which will go far to offset the natural prosperity of the time. He has issued a circular quarantining the whole state, has posted inspectors at the State borders with instructions to allow no passengers from San Francisco to pass the State line unless on presentation of a certificate signed by a Marine Hospital officer…It is not likely that any white person will find much difficulty in obtaining a certificate…The reputation of San Francisco and all California is to be injured, trade hampered, and prosperity checked for the sake of setting up a dummy quarantine!43

42 Chase, 71-72.

43 “An Official Outrage,” San Francisco Call (San Francisco), June 17, 1900: 18.

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Kinyoun’s city-wide travel ban did not last long and was overruled by President

McKinley. San Franciscans rejoiced, interpreting the President’s support as confirmation that the city was perfectly healthy. Governor Gage chimed in with an absurd conspiracy against Kinyoun, that would both discredit the doctor and provide an explanation for how plague came to be within the State. In his report to the press, he claimed that Kinyoun had actually imported the plague bacteria and injected it into the victims, and was therefore single-handedly responsible for the catastrophe. On June 25, Kinyoun was

Figure22: A political cartoon of Dr. J.J. Kinyoun published in The Wasp. Taken from Epidemics, by Geoffrey Marks and William K. Beatty.

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taken to trial for his travel ban and was given a week to prove that it did not violate previous court rulings about unlawful imprisonment. The case was short lived, and on

July 3, Morrow ruled that Kinyoun’s actions were not racially focused, and cleared him of all charges.44

Between June and July only three more victims had succumbed to plague; however, on August 11, thirty-four-year-old carriage driver William Murphy died. In early August Murphy had begun experiencing fever, headaches, sweats, and shivers, and visited the City and County Hospital on 26th and Potrero streets, where the doctors could only guess at his diagnosis. His post-mortem autopsy revealed the true cause of death was plague. Murphy was the first white victim of the San Francisco epidemic. His death was significant, as it extended the outbreak beyond the category of race; however, the death of a white nurse named Anne Roedde on December 3 would extend the outbreak outside the boundaries of Chinatown.45

Roedde had been called to Pacific Avenue to tend to a sick teenage boy experiencing stomach pain and respiratory difficulties, what was assumed to be a standard case of diphtheria. As nurse Roedde was tending to the boy he was gripped with a wave of nausea too quickly for her to dodge, and her face was spattered with vomit. She finished tending to the boy and composed herself. Two days later she began feeling feverish and weak and was admitted to the contagious disease ward of the Children’s

44 Chase, 72-74.

45 Simon Flexner, F.G. Novy, and Lewellys F. Parker, “Report of the Commission Appointed by the Secretary of the Treasury for the Independent Investigation of Plague in San Francisco,” Public Health Reports (1896-1970), no. 16 (1901): 816.

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Hospital on California Street. Three Days later she died. The autopsy and close inspection of her lungs revealed her true killer to be pneumonic plague. Kinyoun believed that her teenage patient was also infected, but the boy was buried without an autopsy.46

By the end of 1900, there had been twenty-five confirmed plague deaths, and likely many more that went unconfirmed. Kinyoun’s career was also dying, as his reputation was being destroyed from all sides. Walter Wyman, orchestrator of many of

Kinyoun’s actions, offered no support and instead threw Kinyoun under the bus, ordering new men to come in and take over. Meanwhile, Governor Henry Gage was working to cover up proof of the plague’s existence in an attempt to save California from a nationwide trade embargo. He sent a delegation to meet with Wyman in Washington, where they struck a deal: a total news blackout in exchange for cleaning up San

Francisco. Wyman agreed and used his influence to prevent the publishing of the official plague report. Kinyoun and his fellow experts were opposed to the cover up, but Wyman would not listen. Lewellys Barker, one of the experts sent by Wyman to replace Kinyoun, was aware of the sneaking progress that plague made, knowing that eventually it would flare into a violent outbreak, and there would be heavy casualties. Still, the cover up seemed to be perfect, until a Sacramento editorial called the Sacramento Bee leaked the report, and exposed the deal struck between the delegates and the surgeon general. The glaring headline read “INFAMOUS COMPACT SIGNED BY WYMAN: MAKES

46 Chase, 75-76.

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AGREEMENT WITH GAGE NOT TO LET FACTS BECOME KNOWN CONTRARY

TO FEDERAL LAW.”47

The whole ordeal had destroyed Kinyoun’s career. To add insult to injury, his request for several weeks’ leave to visit his family and restore his health was met instead with a transfer notice. He was given no acknowledgement for his diligent work in San

Francisco, and had three weeks to pack up his family and report to a station in

Michigan.48 The once-revered doctor was now an angry and bitter man. He denounced the Chinese as crafty, deceitful, and hopelessly contemptuous of science. Upon his reassignment to Michigan he accused the city and State of sacrificing the public’s health on an altar of profit.49 San Francisco was now sans-Kinyoun, but its worries were far from over. Below the streets plague was smoldering, and across the city people were falling ill. When the year of the rat ended, twenty-five people had succumbed. By the end of the first epidemic, eighty-eight more would perish.

47 Chase 80, 86-88

48 Chase, 89.

49 Alan M. Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace”, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1994: 94-96.

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CHAPTER SIX: ASHES TO ASHES Rupert Blue, the End of the First Epidemic, and the San Francisco Earthquake

“Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats, Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats, Grave old plodders, gay young friskers, Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins, Cocking tails and pricking whiskers, Families by tens and dozens, Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives -- Followed the Piper for their lives. From street to street he piped, advancing, And step for step, they followed, dancing, Until they came to the river Weser Wherein all plunged and perished.”

-The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Robert Browning. 1

For several months at the beginning of 1901, San Francisco was without adequate supervision by a competent and skilled health officer. After Kinyoun’s departure, only one man had remained: Joseph White, an infectious disease expert, now solely responsible for handling the plague situation. Unfortunately for White, his expertise lied in cholera and leprosy, and he had little if any experience handling plague. Desperately facing an impasse, White urged Wyman to send reinforcements. His wish was granted, and in early 1901 Walter Wyman ordered physician Rupert Blue to report to the Angel

Island quarantine station. Blue was a bit of a wild card, with an unfortunate rumor of laziness and a lack of tact hanging over his head; however, in a fortunate turn of events

1 Robert Browning, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, London and New York: Frederick Warne and Company, 1888.

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he would prove to be the perfect man for the job, and can reasonably be granted the majority of the credit for ending the first outbreak.2 Where Kinyoun implemented aggression and force, Blue utilized diplomacy, compassion, and logic. It would take close to three more years for San Franciscans to finally receive the long-awaited confirmation that they were plague free, but that day would come, and no more quarantines or threats of relocation would occur.

Back in 1900 when Kinyoun was facing his trial for contempt of court, Rupert

Blue was stationed in the Mediterranean working to combat an outbreak of plague, while simultaneously attempting to convince Washington that the outbreak was happening.3 His work in the Mediterranean gave Blue experience that would be vital to his work in San

Francisco, namely dealing with both plague and stubborn politicians. His arrival in the city could not have happened any sooner, and possibly could not have occurred at any worse of a time. Pressure was building from outside of the State as news of the federal cover up came to light, forcing Wyman to nationally acknowledge the plague. Blue’s arrival also happened to occur just as the city launched a massive “beautification” campaign in anticipation of President McKinley’s ill-fated naval tour, during which one of the stops would have been San Francisco. Lastly, at the same time that all of this was occurring, there had also been a suspicious lapse in plague cases.4 The combined factors of outside pressure, preparation for a visit by the president, and an absence of new cases

2 Marilyn Chase, The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco, New York: Random House, 2004: 80, 91. 3 Chase, 73

4 Chase, 91-93

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would make attempting to deal with the plague even more difficult. The newly-arrived

Blue had his work cut out for him.

Wasting no time, Blue immediately got to work. The main focus of his efforts were cleanup and sanitation, so he met with White to get an update on the financial situation. Unfortunately, the bad news kept on rolling in, and White informed him that the State had only designated them a quarter of their requested cleanup funds - $25,000 of their $100,000 goal. White was also concerned that the lapse in cases was due to an increase in hiding the dead, so he set off to work with Wyman and the Chief of Police, conducting raids to search for the sick or dead. Meanwhile, Blue set off and began his inspections of Chinatown, searching for sanitation issues. What he discovered was the result of decades of landlord neglect and abject poverty: basements flooded with sewage and vermin, concealed refuse dumps, and squalor everywhere. He established a morgue and laboratory on Merchant Street, a small alley near Chinatown, and proposed that the federal government fund a hearse service to help prevent the secretive removal of bodies via privately or State-owned hearses.5

Acting in a way that could only be expected of him by this point, Governor Gage announced that after six weeks had passed without a new case, he would declare the city plague free and end the cleanup effort, ready to be rid of the scandal once and for all.

This date would be June 9, and time was running out. As the weather warmed, the citizens of the city were eager to go out and enjoy their spring and summer activities, typically with more skin exposed. Unbeknownst to all, the winter lull in plague cases was

5 Chase, 94, 96.

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not a sign that the worst was behind them and celebrating too early would be detrimental.

The health professionals still did not have a complete understanding of how plague spread, or the role that la piqure de puce played in bacteria transmission. The disappearance of plague during the winter was not because it was gone – it was because cold weather is an off-season for the flea-transmitted disease. Chilly winds and rain drove the rats underground where they remained until the weather improved. There, in their sewer and basement nests, both the rats and fleas bred, and infection spread even quicker due to the close proximity. The plague festered, and in the spring it returned to the surface.6

On the evening of Monday June 8, Blue and his team were cleaning up their lab and preparing to go home, knowing that the next day Gage would declare the plague over and cut their funding completely. Just as the men were about ready to go home, they received a call urging them to come to a scene where three girls had succumbed to a fever. The men rushed to the site – a Japanese brothel named the Yoshiwara House – and found three young women debilitated with high fevers and intense pain. All three of the women, named Miyo, Shina, and Ume, sported large buboes, and all showed symptoms suggestive of plague; however, laboratory tests would be needed to confirm the diagnosis and rule out venereal diseases. The three women had worked in Yoshiwara House for about a year, and in their profession it was tragically common to contract diseases and die young.

6 Chase, 110.

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Blood samples were taken from all three and were whisked away for testing.

Animal inoculation would take too long, as they had until the morning to prove that this was plague. Instead, Blue and his team used the quick but effective “agglutination reaction” method. In this type of test, the girls’ blood would be mixed with a culture of plague bacteria to test for an antibody reaction. If the fluid clumped together and formed clots, then plague was present. After preparing the mixture, it did not take long for clots to form, confirming the culprit. Unfortunately, their infection was too far advanced to be treated, and around 3 a.m. on July 9, Shina and Miyo died. Ume, on the other hand, managed to rebound and make a complete recovery, and Blue declared her to be the first ever to survive plague in San Francisco. It is likely that there had been others who survived, but again the reported numbers of infection do not align with the true numbers.7

With the confirmation of new plague cases quite literally at the last moment, Gage was unable to call off their efforts. However, the media and citizens of the city were still willing to continue ignoring and denying the reality around them, and when President

William McKinley was assassinated in September, the plague was pushed even farther from their minds. McKinley’s death was a blow to everyone, and even Blue felt shaken by the news. Still, he had an important job to do. The death of a president didn’t halt

Yersinia pestis, so it couldn’t stop Blue either.

Blue’s penchant for diplomacy and patience was a huge boon to his efforts, especially as the skills helped him maintain one of his most valuable allies: Wong Chung, secretary of the Chinese Six Companies. Chung served as a translator and negotiator, as

7Chase, 96-98.

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well as a “cultural emissary” between the doctors and the people of Chinatown. The relationship was mutually beneficial, as Chung also helped keep the leaders of Chinatown informed of the upcoming actions against the plague. His role was personally dangerous, as he could be seen as a traitor to his people, but he continued to help Blue. His insider information to Chinatown’s goings-on helped the medical officers learn about cases of illness and intercept the hiding of bodies.8

Even with Chung’s help, Blue and his team continued to face interference from the State and their doctors. In one particular case, Chung had informed Blue of a 28-year- old grocery clerk who was ill in the basement of the Fook Lung & Company grocery store. The patient, Ng Chan, had a high fever and was sporting a bubo in his groin. The diagnosis was obvious. Unfortunately, the State doctors who also arrived at the scene disagreed, instead declaring Chan to have contracted a venereal disease, and advising him not to cooperate with Blue. Chan rejected the blood tests that Blue wanted to perform, and instead devised a plan to be smuggled outside of the city – with the help of the State

Health Board. A hospital janitor learned of this plan and warned Blue’s team, who posted guards to prevent the spiriting away of the sick.9

The next two victims of plague served as proof that many preconceived notions of the outbreak had been false. Following Chan was Alexander Winters, a white seaman whose case flabbergasted doctors. Winters spent most of his time aboard schooners, and had fallen ill on September 9. Recalling the incident, he stated the following:

8 Chase, 103.

9 Chase, 103-104.

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I made the trip on the Agnes Jones up to Rio Vista to get hay, which was unloaded at the foot of Third Street, San Francisco…while still in the vessels, I had a very heavy chill, with headache, fever, and vomiting, and at the same time I noticed a bubo in my groin. It was very painful and interfered with walking.10

Winters was among the fortunate few who survived his encounter with Yersinia pestis, and his account confused the doctors who insisted that plague was only present among the Chinese; for Winters had no contact with Chinatown.

Following Winters was the less fortunate Marguerete Saggau, a fifty-three-year- old laundress who lived in the Hotel Europa on Broadway. Saggau died on September 27, but her death served as a giant clue that would lead to a breakthrough in combating the plague. Like Winters, her case was puzzling, for all of her family members and laundry customers were perfectly healthy, the latter ruling out the assumption that infection could come from tainted Chinese goods and linens. It was at this point that Blue made the realization that the Hotel Europa was only one block away from Chinatown; outside of the original quarantine zones, but easily crossable by a small and inconspicuous traveler.

The clue was monumental, as it pointed towards rats as the culprits, not the Chinese.11

While the breakthroughs that had been made in the plague case were colossal to

Blue and his team, the rest of the city continued to be apathetic. Sinophobia remained rampant, and instead of worries over public health, the people were focused on the extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act. On December 5, the San Francisco Call assured the city that the “coolies” would continue being barred:

“BARS TO BE KEPT UP AGAINST COOLIE LABOR”

10 Chase, 104.

11 Chase, 105.

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Members of the house in favor of and sure that the Chinese exclusion bill will pass. Positive expressions were obtained from enough house members to show that the exclusion bill will muster 229 votes out of a total 257; at least fifty-six senators will vote for exclusion out of a total ninety.12

While contemplating the discovery of the rat connection, Blue and Chung continued to work together in the streets, and the State was not happy. The State doctors attempted to fight the power-duo by spreading rumors throughout the streets of Chinatown, claiming that the plague doctors sought to implement more oppression and discrimination. They also argued that Wong had turned traitor against his own people by helping Blue, musing that “somebody was going to get killed.” Fortunately, these sabotage efforts were not entirely effective, and Blue’s relaxation of Kinyoun’s protocols and adoption of leniency and mercy went a long way. Kinyoun saw the Chinese as conniving filthy people. Blue saw them as victims who were driven by their fear towards further danger. Still, suspicions died hard.13

Just as things had begun looking more promising, the new mayor of San

Francisco was elected at the end of 1901. Eugene E. Schmitz would take over city hall, and among his first actions as Mayor was an attempt to take down the Board of Health, arguing that “the way to get rid of the plague is to fire the Board of Health.” Governor

Gage must have been ecstatic to have a partner in denial, and continued to refute the

12 “Bars To Be Kept Up Against Coolie Labor,” San Francisco Call (San Francisco), December 5, 1901: 2.

13 Chase, 108.

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existence of plague from every direction, even going as far as to claim that the disease was simply “syphilitic septicemia found only in Chinese.”14

1902 began with another winter lull in plague outbreaks as the rats retreated underground; meanwhile, Blue pushed forward in his efforts which were now being fought by Mayor Schmitz, who wanted to see him removed from the state. Few cases dotted the early months of the year, but when summer finally came the plague surged back to the surface. On July 12 an employee of the Chinese consulate made his way to the Oriental Dispensary, where he died from plague. It was discovered that he had been treated for syphilis by the State doctors, despite the presence of a large bubo on his thigh.

In the following weeks more cases popped up, including a blind woman who never left her apartment. Just over two years into the epidemic seventy-one victims had now contracted plague, with only a handful surviving.15

By autumn the plague had become a national scandal. California officials worked to screen information leaving the State, while other state Health Boards fought to get the true facts. California was condemned, and the State’s inaction was seen as a disgrace.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors begged Gage to acknowledge the outbreak, but he refused. With the election of the new governor approaching, he dug in his heels and maintained his position. Some of Gage’s strongest supporters were the railroad companies, the San Francisco Board of Trade, the Chamber of Commerce, and the

14 Tro Harper, “Dealing with the plague,” in San Francisco Sunday Examiner (San Francisco, CA), 1977: 23.

15 Chase, 115.

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Merchants Association. All of these groups had vehemently denied the existence of plague in pursuit of their financial gains, and in order to maintain their support Gage echoed this.16 Gage went as far as to order his own plague investigation, appointing doctors who would parrot his beliefs. On December 12, shortly before Gage left office in lieu of his replacement, the San Francisco Call published the headline “PLAGUE FAKE

IS EXPOSED.” The article describes the statements made by Gage’s appointed investigators regarding the existence of plague:

Dr. Glennon goes further in his report on the sanitary condition at present existing in Chinatown, and is prepared to report to his superiors in Washington, D.C., that what the Board of Health has continually diagnosed as bubonic plague in specific cases investigated is comparatively a harmless disease known in medical science as chicken cholera…Dr. S.M. Mouser, appointed by Gov. Gage to investigate alleged existence of plague in San Francisco, said: "I concluded and I still maintain that there has been no case of plague in San Francisco. The cases were so reported, I should say, owing to mistaken diagnosis…Had there been an outbreak of the plague, Chinatown would have been long ago depopulated. Chinamen know what the plague is. When it is around they know it. They are a timid people and at the first outbreak of the fatal disease they would have taken to their heels in quick order. There wouldn’t be a Chinaman in such an event left in Chinatown, as they can distinguish the disease instantly.17

It is unclear exactly why these doctors believed that the Chinese had preternatural abilities to detect plague, but needless to say they didn’t. Further, their claims that they could just pack up and go elsewhere suggests their level of ignorance about the real-life experiences and history of the Chinese within California.

Fortunately for everyone but himself, Gage was voted out of office in January

1903, and was replaced by Dr. George C. Pardee. When Gage left office, the number of

16 Chase, 118-119.

17 “Plague Fake Is Exposed,” San Francisco Call (San Francisco), December 12, 1902: 2.

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cases stood at 93.18 Pardee’s governorship would be a complete reversal from Gage’s, as upon entering office he immediately promised that he would do “whatever the Marine

Hospital Service desires me to do in the way of public health preservation…The medical authorities have emphatically declared that plague has existed and does exist in San

Francisco, and that settles it as far as I am concerned.”19 Pardee’s supportive stance further calmed the fears of the neighboring states, as it seemed that action would finally happen.

Almost a full year after Blue had made the connection between rats and the death of Marguerete Saggau – the laundress whose death served as a hint that the rats were involved – did the city began a massive rat-eradication effort. Traps and poisoned bait were laid, and teams began retrieving plague infested rats. Blue then moved forward with a serious effort to clean up the houses in Chinatown and clear out all the rats, transforming himself into a Victorian Pied Piper. The streets of Chinatown were scheduled to be washed regularly, and Dupont would receive a full coat of asphalt. The plan was hampered by illness among Blue’s team members, but the fear of warm weather bringing the rats back to the surface kicked the cleanup into high gear. Chinatown was a frenzy of cleaning, remodeling, and exterminating. Carbolic acid was sprayed into

18 Charles T. Gregg, Plague: An Ancient Disease in the Twentieth Century, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985: 46. 19 Harper, 23.

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Figure 23: Demolition of condemned buildings and additions in Chinatown. From Guenter B. Risse's Plague, Fear, and Politics In San Francisco's Chinatown, page 233. buildings, pots of smoking sulfur were used to fumigate, and chlorinated lime was sprinkled everywhere. The district was once again filled with noxious fumes.20

A major aspect of the effort was the demolition of many of the additions that had been added onto the dwellings by the Chinese inhabitants. The racially segregated housing market and exterior prejudice had sealed the population inside the small district, and the additions that had been built in an attempt to house the growing population were deemed unsanitary. The residents protested and attempted to sue to prevent the demolition of their additions, arguing that they weren’t to blame for overcrowding, and

20 Chase, 120-121, 125.

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the space was necessary. Unfortunately, they lost the battle, and the demolitions began.

Rotten balconies were ripped off of buildings and piles of wood grew in the streets.

Unfortunate scavengers began sneaking in to pilfer wood, such as Pierto Spadafora, resident of the city’s Latin district, now North Beach. Spadafora returned home with his prize, as he and his family needed firewood, but soon he and his mother fell ill and died of bubonic plague. This incident worried Blue that other scavengers would risk spreading plague throughout the city, so he ordered all debris to be covered in powdered lime, rendering it unusable.21

The death of Pietro Spadafora and his mother prompted the inspection of thousands of Caucasian apartments near the Latin quarter. While this shift in inspection targets might suggest a positive change in racial attitudes, old habits die hard, and there were still many who believed there was a connection between race and disease – Walter

Wyman included. Chamber of Commerce members still held profit as their top priority, and once again suggested razing Chinatown. However, for Blue and the rest of the team, learning that whites were equally susceptible to the disease shattered the idea that plague could be isolated within Chinatown, or that it was even directly linked to those of Asiatic descent.22

The cleanup effort continued, becoming ever more intense. Entire foundations of buildings were replaced, as wooden cellars were replaced with hard concrete. Demolition, sanitation, and inspection was ongoing, and even began extending into the Latin quarter.

21 Chase, 126-127

22 Chase, 128

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Despite the frenzy of hard work and resistance by the residents, it all seemed to be paying off as the number of cases was slowing down. By New Years, 1904, Chinatown had seen a dramatic improvement in health and Blue felt mildly confident that the end was in sight.

That is, until Mayor Schmitz installed his own Board of Health and cut funding for the

Chinatown cleanup at the start of the year. Then, in February, a cluster of deaths shook the entire city: All but one member of a white family was killed by pneumonic plague.23

Eighteen-year-old seamstress Katie Cuka brought the infection to her workplace.

After experiencing a fainting spell at work, Katie was brought to the city’s French hospital, where she was quickly sent home after frightened doctors discovered swollen glands. Blue’s team got word of the illness, and quickly set out to investigate. They discovered that Irene Rossi, one of the girls who worked with Katie, was also out sick.

Upon reaching her home in the Latin quarter they found a family in mourning – Irene was already dead. Her grief-stricken parents had hovered over her helplessly as she was racked with severe coughs and spewed blood and sputum. After some gentle prodding,

Blue obtained permission to perform an autopsy. The oppressive grief of the family had masked the fact that they themselves were falling sick. Four days after Irene’s death, her father followed. Five days later, on February 17, her mother joined the rest of the family in death. All three had been taken by pneumonic plague.24

The outbreak and death of an entire white family seemed to be the trigger that finally motivated the city to believe, as doctors now began acknowledging the outbreak

23 Chase, 131-132.

24 Chase, 134-136.

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nearly four years after the death of Wong Chut King. Cleanup and sanitation efforts continued, as did inspection of homes and their inhabitants. A form of rat poison called the Danysz Rat Virus began being used to combat the presence of rats in homes. The

Chinese, while initially hesitant to use the product, eventually realized it was harmless and embraced its use. By late May things were looking good, and it had been one hundred days since the last plague case. Chinatown was pristine, tourists were returning, property values were elevated, and the city was strong.25 On Valentine’s day of 1905,

Blue received a municipal valentine from the San Francisco City Health Department:

Our thanks…to Dr. Rupert Blue for his skillful and energetic co-operation in all that has pertained to the welfare of San Francisco’s high sanitary state and commercial prosperity.26

One year after the last reported case of plague, it was over. Rather unceremoniously, the city received its clean bill of health, and Blue left behind the foggy coast for another assignment. Chinatown, sparkling and pristine, could go un-molested by State and federal doctors. People seemed to be looking at public health a little differently, too. It was as much of a storybook ending as one could have hoped.

Then, at 5:13 a.m. on Wednesday April 18, 1906, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake shook apart the city of San Francisco. Buildings crumbled to the ground, and broken gas mains fueled raging fires. Water mains ruptured, leaving the firemen little to fight the blazes with. Those inside their homes attempted to escape, but the shaking shifted the

25 Chase, 137.

26 Chase, 138.

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frames of the houses, and many found themselves unable to open doors as the house collapsed around them. The earthquake and fires are estimated to have killed approximately 3,000 people, with 400,000 survivors being left homeless. Refugee camps were established in city parks and lots, where the inhabitants slept in tents on top of the dirt. Cooking had to be done in the street, and there was a severe lack of adequate disposal for human waste and trash.27

San Francisco, which had just a year before been as pristine as ever, was now a crumbling and unsanitary ruin of what it once was. The city’s surviving human population was shaken and desperately clinging to the remnants of their city within the camps. Also displaced from their homes by the earthquake were the city’s rat population, who emerged in the thousands from the destruction. Alongside their human neighbors the rats sought refuge at the camps, where they fed on garbage and bred in the ruins. The rat’s exodus-turned-bacchanalia set the stage for an unexpected side-effect of the earthquake: the return of the plague.

The first outbreak of the plague had been felled through diligent sanitation and rat eradication efforts, and in lieu of the earthquake both were abandoned. The city was transformed into a haven for the rats, who were able to multiply and spread uninterrupted.

The fleas took advantage of this situation as well, and their populations exploded. At the end of the first outbreak plague certainly still existed beneath the streets, however it

27 "San Francisco Earthquake, 1906," National Archives and Records Administration, 2018, accessed February 26, 2019. https://www.archives.gov/legislative/features/sf.

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Figure 24: The ruins of Chinatown after the fire and earthquake. From Guenter B. Risse's Plague, Fear, and Politics In San Francisco's Chinatown, page 272. would have likely burnt itself out as the rat population declined. Because of the earthquake, it was allowed to flourish once again.

An in-depth discussion of the second epidemic falls outside of the goal of this thesis: to demonstrate how race-relations and prejudices have a direct influence on housing and public health policies, demonstrated through the lens of Sinophobia and the

San Francisco plague epidemic of 1900. However, nobody likes an incomplete story, so for the sake of the reader I will provide a quick summary of the events that transpired after the earthquake. When the city realized that plague had returned, Wyman once again called upon the services of Rupert Blue, who at that time was heroically battling cockroaches and insufficient spittoons in the nation’s capital. Blue returned to the west coast shortly after the fires had all subsided, and upon reaching the city, took in the scene before him: a once glistening and golden city of pride and commerce, now a blackened

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desert of ash housing the shells of homes and businesses. After making note of the deplorable conditions of the refugee camps and confirming that plague had once again appeared, he got to work.28

The plague of 1907 was a whole different monster than its predecessor in 1900, as it was no longer isolated to a small neighborhood. Outbreaks dotted the entire city. What was once an Asiatic pestilence targeting the Chinese was now a reaper cloaked in black, scurrying through the shadows and killing indiscriminately. People of nearly every race were falling ill; yet, in a dark bit of irony, Chinatown itself seemed to be spared from the second outbreak with only one of its inhabitants perishing. This is likely due to the intense rat-proofing and sanitation done to the district previously. By September 12, twenty-five people had been infected and thirteen had died.29

Recognizing the immense success that rat-proofing had seen before, Blue immediately established a “rattery” as a base of operations and established his team. This time they decided to offer bounties for rat corpses, motivating the beleaguered laypeople of the city to get involved. As happened during the initial outbreak, the media continued to attack the idea that plague existed, but luckily the city would not be swayed so easily this time. The scope and involvement in the campaign saw incredible results, such as one week seeing 20,907 houses inspected and 4,063 rats trapped. By September of 1908 it

28 Chase, 147-150.

29 Chase, 155.

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had been approximately eight months since the last human case in the city, and the number of infected rats was also dropping.30

The campaign was winding down in the autumn of 1908, by the end of which over two-million rats had been killed. Despite the shorter span of the second outbreak, the intensity was far worse. Between May of 1907 and February of 1908, 160 citizens of the city had contracted plague, seventy-eight of whom died. On Thanksgiving Day of 1908,

Walter Wyman declared the Pacific coast free of plague, and once again granted the city its clean bill of health.31 Nine years after the death of Wong Chut King it was over, for good this time.

30 Chase, 184.

31 Chase, 196.

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CONCLUSION

“Even from the abyss of horror in which we try to find our way today, half-blind, our hearts distraught and shattered, I look up again to the ancient constellations of my childhood, comforting myself that, some day, this relapse will appear only an interval in the eternal rhythm of progress onward and upward.”

-Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, 1942.1

The end of the story of the San Francisco plague epidemic is a bittersweet one. On one hand, the story concludes dramatically with the defeat of the dastardly villain

Yersinia pestis, and the hero of the story, Rupert Blue, was celebrated and honored. The people of the city were able to return to the comfort of the status quo, and balance was restored. The city was rebuilt from the ashes of the earthquake, and perhaps even came out a little stronger than before. Cue the inspirational music and roll the credits. This

Hollywood-ending fits perfectly into the narrative that contemporary America loves to weave, but unfortunately this perspective masks reality much in the same way that the media of San Francisco attempted to mask the plague. Yes, San Francisco recovered from the plague, and yes, the people were able to return to their normal lives, but what exactly did this mean?

For the Chinese, it suggested something entirely different than it did for the

Caucasians. Their status quo was isolation and oppression, prejudice and restriction. As they rebuilt their burned homes and attempted to reconstruct their lives, just as everyone within the city did, they knew that they would simply be returning to the same status that

1 Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, London: Cassell and Company Ldt., 2015: 16.

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they held before. The earthquake and the fires may have turned the city into a clean slate, but society would not change. In fact, the recently passed and reinforced Chinese

Exclusion Act and Geary Act further complicated the lives of the Chinese until the laws were repealed in 1943, however they would eventually be replaced by the highly problematic national origins quota system that persisted into the 1960s.2

The purpose of this thesis was not to just tell a story about an outbreak of plague that just so happened to occur in San Francisco – it was to highlight the way in which the deeply rooted and long-standing history of prejudice and Sinophobia within California directly related to the public health response to and perception of disease. Beliefs that

Chinese immigrants were so inherently different than “real Americans” provided the justification necessary to see them as diseased, and therefore threats to the American public. They were so other that it was perfectly plausible to believe that they would come into the country, corrupt the morals and culture of America, and sicken the country.

When plague appeared in 1900 and the first victim just so happened to be a Chinese man within Chinatown, fate had already set the course of events in motion. Wong Chut King was a victim of circumstance, but because he, a Chinese immigrant “coolie,” was the first to die, the disease was immediately labeled Asiatic and attributed to his community. If the first victim had been a white man on the opposite side of the city, it is likely the situation would have unfolded differently.

2 "Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)," Our Documents, accessed January 14, 2019. https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=47.

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So why does any of this matter? Why does an outbreak of a disease over one- hundred years ago have any relevance today, a time when Chinese exclusion no longer exists, and the Chinese in the United States are no longer confined to small districts? First of all, I tell this story because it is a story worth telling. The victims of the plague died a horrible and painful death, and they deserved to be remembered. Between the two outbreaks a reported 191 people died, though there are certainly many more who remain unnamed. In comparison to other outbreaks of plague, 191 may seem like a small number, but it is not. That is 191 lives cut short, 191 individual human beings who were not able to live as long as they deserved. 191 children, husbands, wives, siblings, friends, and neighbors who died deaths that could have possibly been avoided. Perhaps if only

Kinyoun was not rushed through his inspection of the Australia that day, or perhaps if only the Board of Health had acted logically in their treatment of the early cases. Or, perhaps if only people had listened to Paul-Louis Simond in 1897 when he proposed that fleas transmitted the plague bacillus. There are many hypotheticals in this story, but instead of ruminating over what could have been, we can instead use them to do better in the future.

Second, I tell this story because the events which transpired one hundred years ago have never become irrelevant. As much progress as America has made in the last hundred years – and it has made a lot of progress – there are still all-too prevalent problems with deeply-ingrained racial prejudice, xenophobia, and fear of immigrants.

The writing of this thesis happened to coincide with an unfortunately perfect example of this. The media sensationalizing of the migrant caravan heading towards the United

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States was at its peak while I was in the middle of my research period. I would spend hours pouring through hundred-year-old documents which argued against immigrants because they would bring disease, only to open the news and see the exact same thing in

2018. In 1900, the San Francisco Call and Chronicle argued that the Chinese immigrants were diseased and should be barred from entry. In 2018, Fox News said the same about the migrant caravan from Central America. In one particular segment, Fox host Brian

Kilmeade argued against granting asylum to the migrants because they may bring diseases into the country:

What about diseases? I mean, there’s a reason why you can’t bring a kid to school unless he’s inoculated. There’s things that happen in this country…That’s part of the reason why America’s America. There’s a process.

Later, during another Fox News segment, former agent of U.S. Immigration and Customs

Enforcement David Ward claimed that the caravan was “coming in with diseases such as smallpox and leprosy and [tuberculosis] that are going to infect our people in the United

States.”3 Aside from these claims being unconfirmed, the statement about smallpox is a blatant lie. Smallpox was eradicated entirely during the 1970’s. Still, diseases are terrifying, and serve as a great fear tactic against immigrants. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Further, if we look at present day Chinatown, the effects of its history are glaringly apparent. Since 1965 a significant percentage of incoming Chinese immigrants have chosen to settle within Chinatown, exacerbating the preexisting conditions of

3 Jenna Amatulli, “Fox & Friends’ Host Says Migrant Caravan May Be Bringing ‘Diseases’ To America,” The Huffington Post, October 30, 2018.

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unemployment, housing shortages, and health problems. The downward mobility of immigrants is also an ongoing problem, as they are pushed into certain sectors of society seen as “fitting” to them by American stereotypes and prejudices. For example, in 1970 almost 70% of Chinese immigrants reported working in service or domestic work, and a trend which had been observed in certain areas of the country is that these new laborers commonly replaced the existing and aging labor force by taking the same positions.4

San Francisco’s Chinatown as it exists today is not an ethnic community in the traditional sense, despite being perceived as such. It is haphazardly held together by the tourism industry and funded by tourists seeking an “authentic and exotic” Chinese experience without stepping too far outside of their comfort zones. What has resulted is ongoing poverty within the neighborhood, as residents are pressured to sell their services and wares at low prices to keep tourists happy. Chinatown is no longer a homogenous community of like-minded individuals working to preserve their heritage; it is now an attraction meant to appeal to the internal exoticism of tourists who spare not even a second thought for its inhabitants and their experiences. Modern day Chinatown has been carefully crafted by the city’s municipal authorities and is the product of over a century of repressive labor and housing practices, institutionalized racism, and discriminatory legislation. What has resulted from this are high unemployment rates, ongoing health concerns, and poor social conditions.5 The Chinatown of today might be a far cry from

4 Paul Takagi, “Behind The Gilded Ghetto: An Analysis of Race, Class, and Crime in Chinatown,” Crime and Social Justice, no. 9, 1978: 6.

5 Takagi, 22.

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the Chinatown that Wong Chut King lived and died in, but it is still haunted by its history and plagued by the ambivalence of those outside of it.

I would like to conclude this thesis by further discussing public health, race relations, and disease stereotypes, because as the 2018 coverage of the migrant caravan shows us, history is repeating itself. First I would like to argue that the concept of a disease is a political and social construct that society creates. Yes, bacteria and viruses are naturally occurring, and human-kind cannot always control our encounters with them, however what we can control is how we perceive them, and the ideas that we attach to them. Throughout history diseases and disease theory have played large roles in political and social agendas.6 During the Black Death of the fourteenth century, the Church claimed that the disease was punishment for the transgressions of society, and that the ill were sinners. Those ill with leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease, have been vilified and forced away from the rest of the population, such as in nineteenth century Hawaii, where “lepers” were forced into isolation on the island Kalaupapa. Today, sixteen former patients still remain on the island.7 During the late twentieth century, AIDS was labeled as the “gay disease,” and was even satirized by President Ronald Reagan who, during a meeting to discuss the disease, stated to a laughing crowd “I don’t have it, do you?”8

Even today, our society demonizes sexually transmitted diseases and infections, viewing

6 Dorothy porter, Health, Civilization, and the State, London and New York: Routledge, 1999: 81.

7 Meera Senthilingam, “Taken From Their Families: The Dark History of Hawaii’s Leprosy Colony,” CNN, September 9, 2015.

8 Caitlin Gibson, "A Disturbing New Glimpse at the Reagan Administration's Indifference to AIDS," The Washington Post, December 01, 2015.

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the ill as dirty, as though their actions made them deserving of a disease. This persists, despite the fact that sexually transmitted diseases are incredibly common, and the World

Health Organization estimates that two-thirds of the entire human population are infected with some strain of herpes, with many being asymptomatic.9 We attach these meanings to diseases, they do not occur naturally.

This habit becomes even more harmful when these meanings go beyond just the disease and attach themselves to entire populations. This happens when people overlook the cause of a disease, and instead just look at who is sick. Stereotypes are bred this way, and once a stereotype has attached itself to someone it is incredibly difficult to remove.

Because of this, prevention is key. Society needs to do better, and work to prevent these disease associations. It is the duty of the responsible citizen to educate themselves on cultures other than their own, so that their ignorance does not breed fear or contempt. It is also their duty to understand how diseases spread, and that the diseases do not discriminate. The people of San Francisco in 1900 did neither of these things, and because of this, hundreds suffered poverty, racial discrimination, and death at the hands of a horrible disease. It is common for the most disenfranchised and economically deprived to have the least access to proper hygienic facilities, and because of this disease and disease fatalities are most prevalent among society’s least fortunate members.10 They cannot be blamed when they are the victim.

9 "Globally, an Estimated Two-thirds of the Population under 50 Are Infected with Herpes Simplex Virus Type 1," World Health Organization, October 28, 2015.

10 Porter, 79.

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Part of public health is the initiative and responsibility of everyone within a society. It is not just the job of the officials to come in and fix everything; everyone plays a role. The media needs to be responsible in its reporting, avoiding fear mongering and spreading political agendas when it comes to disease and disease victims. Civilians need to be responsible by taking precautions not to spread or contract diseases, and not to give in to fear and point fingers when illness is in their midst. Finally, public health authorities need to make sure that they are indiscriminately protecting the health and welfare of everyone. Examples from history have unfortunately not followed this model, but this is one of the reasons why we study history. Looking at the past can help us understand how colossally certain endeavors and ideas have failed, and help us to understand a better choice of action. Ignoring or shaming people for having a disease never works, so why do we still do this?

Despite all of the horrors of disease and discrimination that history has presented us with, there has still been progress. Polio and smallpox have both been eliminated thanks to responsible public health efforts, and in our present-day we are slowly seeing a shift towards a more open-minded society and the abandonment of old prejudices. We are getting there, slowly, but there is progress. The quote which I chose to open this final section with was written by Stefan Zweig while he was fleeing from the Nazis, during a period in time when oppression and ideas of “social purity” were at an all-time high.11

Amidst all of this, Zweig still believed that society was progressing onward and upward.

11 Jennifer Wright, Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2017: 267.

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Our present-day society is the legacy of what has been achieved since then, and while

Zweig was right that we are making progress, we still have a long way to go. One day, we will see people and diseases for who and what they really are, and one day, we will do better.

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