Precarious Prescriptions Laurie B

Precarious Prescriptions Laurie B. Green, John Mckiernan-González, Martin Summers

Published by University of Minnesota Press

Green, L. B. & Mckiernan-González, J. & Summers, M.. Precarious Prescriptions: Contested Histories of Race and Health in North America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.

For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/31212

Access provided by Yale University Library (12 Jan 2017 17:42 GMT) 4 At the Nation’s Edge African American Migrants and Smallpox in the Late-Nineteenth-Century Mexican–American Borderlands

JOHN MCKIERNAN-GONZÁLEZ

on july 23, 1895, secretary of state Edwin Uhl received a telegram from Torreon, Coahuila, stating that “one-hundred and fifty three negroes from [Tlahualilo] colony are here destitute. Surrounded by Mexican police to prevent them from entering town. Wire what to do. All are American citizens.”1 Secretary Uhl told the consul in Torreon to wait. Two days later, Uhl read a report that the group of “negroes [were] starving and almost in open rebellion to all authority. ...I anticipate serious trouble.”2 Apparently, John McCaughan, a regionally prominent landowner, mine manager, and U.S. consul, had told the group of African Americans that they “must not be choice about the kind of work, nor particular as the amount of pay. They should scatter as much as possible. It will be impossible to find employment together, and by remaining in a body they only make it more difficult for aid and employment.”3 McCaughan’s prediction was wrong. By refusing to move as a body and continuing to articulate their collective demands, the migrants in Torreon catalyzed an executive branch decision on their behalf. On July 26, 1895 president Grover Cleveland ended the standoff: “War department will issue rations for one week. . . . If return to the colony is not practicable or consistent with humane considerations, let the consuls assure the railroad company that payment for the transportation of the sufferers to their homes will be strongly recommended.”4 The U.S. government now vouched for the costs of the railroad trip home to Alabama; however, the migrants had to find ways to guarantee food and shelter for their trip back home to Alabama. This labor rebellion in northern Durango—led by black migrant families originally from Alabama, working on a cotton plantation in

67 68 JOHN MCKIERNAN-GONZÁLEZ northern Mexico in 1895—forced the United States to go into Mexico and intervene on behalf of American citizens. The State Department seized on the presence of smallpox among the families to transform the politically volatile conflict between black American citizens and the powerful Compañía Agricola Tlahualilo into an American medical mission to protect American refugees from Mexico. Most histories of the Tlahualilo migration end their analysis of the migrants’ situation with the declaration of a smallpox quarantine in Eagle Pass, Texas.5 This chapter goes against the general grain of scholarship on race and medicine in the Progressive Era and argues that, in addition to treating labor migrants as medical threats, the medical mission and the sub- sequent U.S. Marine Hospital Service (USMHS) smallpox serum field trial strengthened the collective negotiating position of the migrants. This chapter examines how black southerners in Mexico found their newfound status as the objects of an American medical mission useful to their demands to return home to Alabama. Moreover, they leveraged their status as objects of a federal smallpox serum field trial to guarantee their return against the wishes of white southern political authorities. The migrants’ return is a compelling story of African American workers exploiting their role as commodities in an emerging laboratory-based American research economy, just as federal health officers exploited the migrants’ high-profile illness while also laboring on behalf of the migrants’ survival. The 153-person collective in Torreon was part of a larger group of one hundred families (866 black men, women, and children, according to the railroad manifest) who left central Alabama in late January 1895 to work as sharecroppers in Mexico. Lured by promises given them by black emigration activist William Ellis and the Compañía Agricola Tlahualilo of racial democracy, higher shares, housing, and full rail passage to Mexico, they left Alabama by train expecting a familiar work setting in a foreign place. As diplomatic historian Fred Rippy argues, the Compañía Agricola Tlahualilo banked on the promise of skilled black southern labor, turning the migration into a “private venture conducted for the profit of a Mexican land company and a member of the Negro race.” The Compañía’s investors had already put a large amount of capital into building a sixty-mile-long private canal to irrigate a 17,000-acre dry lakebed and a private rail line connecting the tiny town of Mapimi with the Mexican International Railroad in Torreon.6 AT THE NATION’S EDGE 69

The appearance of the railroad in the iron-rich regions of the Mapimi basin led many Mexicans and foreign investors to believe the Great Mapimi Basin could become the next Mexican breadbasket. However, investors in the region’s mines, farms, and plantations faced a common challenge: bringing in enough workers to match capital investment in a region that numbered maybe five thousand people in 1890. Leaving kin and community for work outside the United States may have been a difficult decision for many of these families. However, the attraction of leaving the racial terror associated with Alabama after three years of an economic depression and two nationally infamous racially volatile gubernatorial and presidential elections is not so hard to imagine. The populist challenge to the Democratic Party in Alabama led to vitriolic and violent attacks on black and white men suspected of voting for the Populist Reuben Kolb over Democratic or Republican candidates.7 Moreover, iron mines and steel mills in Alabama had begun to rely more heavily on the convict lease system for substantial numbers of their workers. In the aftermath of its sweeping victory in state elections in 1894, the Alabama Democratic Party moved to excise any claims black residents had on public office, public goods, public services, or public space. Because the majority of the migrants came of age during the twenty years after the Civil War, when African Americans openly voted in Alabama elections, these actions directly attacked their identities as citizens. The indifference to Alabama’s political violence and coercive labor regimes must have made leaving industrializing urban Alabama for industrializing rural Mexico seem attractive.8 The general American indifference to recent events in Alabama made the migrants’ ability to attract attention to their situation in Mexico even more striking. Migrant and coal miner Sam Claiborne set events in motion when he convinced the consul in Chihuahua that the migrants “found themselves in the worst form of bondage with [no] hope of ever securing liberty.”9 Migrant advocates presented the conditions as an issue for Americans in Mexico, a problem the American government ought to fix. Democratic president Grover Cleveland’s directive to the State Department to guarantee passage to Alabama is a reminder of the success of this effort. The migrants’ collective actions outside the nation’s edge remind us of the importance, in historian Natalia Molina’s words, of understanding how those “who are not citizens negotiate a sense of national identity, calibrating notions of citizenship and democracy in 70 JOHN MCKIERNAN-GONZÁLEZ the process.”10 Although the migrants were citizens, collective actions against black southerners that preceded their decision to leave for Mexico in 1895 put the migrants on the margins of the American body politic. This is what makes their negotiations with the federal medical authority a window into the paradox of American medical citizenship: the simultaneous way sympathy and exclusion organize access to health care in the United States. Rather than focus on the dynamics of exclusion, the interpretation here argues that Camp Jenner was more a case of sympathy and exploitation, a twist on Beatrix Hoffman’s succinct analysis of immigration and health care policy.11 This chapter argues that these black southern migrants engaged a politics of entitlement to turn an American public health commitment to medical progress into an instrument of social membership and a vehicle for their return home.12 In the process, this chapter calls attention to the obvious dependence of American medical authority on the tacit and active cooperation of their (detained) black migrant subjects.

FROM MIGRANTS TO REFUGEES: THE JOURNEY FROM TORREON TO EAGLE PASS

A week after the standoff in Torreon, two hundred migrants stepped out of boxcars into the border town of Piedras Negras, Coahuila. Consul Jesse Sparks walked this group across the Rio Grande into Eagle Pass, Texas. The Associated Press remarked approvingly that Grover Cleveland, “regarding the case as one of the greatest emergencies involv- ing the lives of American citizens,” had guaranteed funds and rations in Eagle Pass.13 Texas state health officer Jack Evans inspected the first group and “found them all healthy” but still placed them in abandoned boxcars under “quarantine with guards.”14 The call to quarantine the migrants ignored the absence of illness. Two days later, 170 more migrants arrived at Eagle Pass, and this time there were eight cases of smallpox. After repeated complaints by Eagle Pass customs collector William Fitch, state authorities moved the boxcars three miles north of Eagle Pass and assigned two armed guards to detain the migrants.15 When Fitch informed the secretary of the Treasury that there was “smallpox among negro refugees from Mexico,” these five words added medical value to the existing federal investment in these black migrants. Smallpox structured the “commodity relationship” through which the AT THE NATION’S EDGE 71

USMHS gained value from these black diasporic subjects; the USMHS provided food, shelter, nurses, and doctors partly to guarantee stable clinical conditions among the detained migrants for their field trial. In turn, the migrants used this visible public space to force the USMHS to confront southern state authorities to allow the migrants to return home.16 The actual practice of this Texas quarantine challenged most theories of quarantine. Fitch reported, “There are no guards to prevent the sick and well from intermingling and intercourse between the two camps is open.” Furthermore, he cautioned, “if the negroes desired to escape there would have been no difficulty in their so doing, nor would their absence have been detected unless a large number escaped.” People were willing to “mingle with these negroes when they were in town.” Vendors treated the quarantined workers as a market opportunity. Eagle Pass residents openly ignored state dictums regarding the medical threat posed by the detained migrants, and this exasperated the local customs collector.17 Some exploited the detainees’ vulnerable status and ransacked their possessions, even though the city stationed four guards at the clearing. USMHS surgeon George Magruder blamed the “Mexicans and lower class of whites in the vicinity” for this outrage.18 The theft confirmed Fitch’s low opinion of the Texas State Health Office: “I do not believe the State Health Officer stationed at this place has a proper conception of the importance of isolation and precautionary measures.”19 For Fitch, the quarantine provided contact zones, not boundaries, between the town and the camp, between sick and well, and between black refugees and multiracial Eagle Pass.20 The USMHS representative was more anxious about smallpox treatment within the Texas quarantine. Magruder expressed shock at the extent to which the detainees made their own medical decisions: “Practically no attempt was made towards nursing or furnishing medical treatment to the sick, the management of each case is left to the individual fancy of the friends or relations and the burning of sage and drinking of yarb tea and other forms of negro medication were in progress at the time of my visit.”21 The trope “negro medication” registered his concern with the relative power and autonomy of the Tlahualilo migrants. The indifference of Texas state authorities provided the space for detainees to invert the relationship between state health officer and patient. Magruder considered the “fancy of friends and relations” 72 JOHN MCKIERNAN-GONZÁLEZ to be a dangerous African American takeover of state-sanctioned medical spaces. He expected state medical authorities to provide food and water, tents, buildings, shelter, blankets, certified doctors, and nurses to attend to the smallpox patients. The modern American ideal embodied and promoted by the USMHS did not include black family members making the primary health care decisions and treatments in a state quarantine.22 For Magruder, the Texas quarantine paralleled what historian Pekka Hammalainen and Samuel Truett call key characteristics of borderlands situations: “spatial mobility, situational identity, local contingency and the ambiguities of power.”23 This world turned upside down in the boxcar quarantine justified federal intervention. Claiming that the threatened appearance of yellow fever in Galveston demanded his full attention, Texas state health officer Swearingen informed the USMHS that Texas was abdicating responsibility for the detainees.24 Magruder took control of the detainees. The administra- tive transfer permitted the transformation of people ill with smallpox into subjects of a larger attempt to cure and prevent smallpox. At this point, the detainees became part of a larger history of American medical experimentation.

A COMMUNITY OF RESEARCHERS: THE USMHS, CAMP JENNER, AND THE PROMISE OF SERUM THERAPY

In the 1890s, American clinical researchers were making dramatic progress against the threats of germ-borne illnesses. The successful 1892 campaign to confine typhus to the Lower East Side in New York gave the USMHS leverage to demand more quarantine authority over ports across the United States. This authority became unilateral when Congress passed the 1893 National Quarantine Act.25 Moreover, New York City’s successful campaign against diphtheria made it clear, in city health officer Dr. Herman Bigg’s words, that “disease is a removable evil,” and consequently with the proper political will, “public health is purchasable.”26 For bacteriologists in the United States, antitoxin research was a promising way to develop cures and treatment for communicable diseases. News of diseased bodies crossing a distant and politically insignificant border provided a fortuitous chance to capitalize on the expanded USMHS mandate. When the USMHS as- sumed “charge of the negro colonists returning from Mexico,” National AT THE NATION’S EDGE 73

Hygienic Laboratory director J. J. Kinyoun and Surgeon General Walter Wyman called this situation “an opportunity not to be lost to put the serum therapy into effect.”27 Smallpox among a large number of detained migrants became a medical opportunity to demonstrate that the USMHS was in the international vanguard of serum therapy. Magruder brought the detainees from the quarantine into a new space he named Camp Jenner, a place where the USMHS could combine their recently established authority over America’s medical borders with innovative clinically based research.28 The USMHS moved the detained migrants to a river bluff and meadow northwest of Eagle Pass, a locale effectively isolated by a creek over which they built a bridge to control the traffic between Camp Jenner and Eagle Pass.29 USMHS staff separated men from women and children. Instead of one central camp, the USMHS built four smaller detention camps in the compound and assigned each colonist to one after thorough disinfection of their persons and their blankets. The USMHS increased rations, brought 140 tents from Waynesville, Georgia, and placed twenty armed guards around these camps. A two-hundred-bed tent hospital and a fourteen by twenty foot commissary addressed the immediate food and medical needs of the detainees. Nineteen additional people oversaw the detainees and maintained daily roll calls. Healthy people and smallpox survivors stayed in the camps, and those under treatment moved to the field hospital in Camp Jenner. The USMHS enhanced the material conditions and eliminated the general mobility of the Tlahualilo migrants, in return for their compliance as research subjects. Until the post–World War II period, many doctors considered char- ity medical situations a reciprocal exchange between people needing medical services and doctors needing research opportunities.30 But this exchange was also open to debate, for nineteenth-century doctors as distinguished as Sir William Osler considered clinical opportunities to have the potential to tear “the sacred cord binding doctor and patient.”31 Camp Jenner thus became a place where research principles challenged the imperative to help heal the sick. The detained migrants cooperated with the USMHS at the border because of their displacement, coerced detention, and hunger.32 For the USMHS, the dependent status of the detainees opened up clinical research possibilities into a high-profile illness while proving the agency’s ability to intervene in emergency epidemic situations to protect the nation’s health. Although Magruder 74 JOHN MCKIERNAN-GONZÁLEZ deplored the medical ambiguities of the Texas quarantine, the double status of Camp Jenner as a smallpox field trial and refugee camp with medical facilities undercut the research process and accepted medical principles. In late February 1895, Kinyoun actively started applying diphtheria antitoxin methods to smallpox. Kinyoun and the USMHS wanted to demonstrate the general principle that serum application could induce a state of immunity. Kinyoun argued that USMHS Surgeon General George Miller Sternberg’s observation that “the blood serum of an immune animal destroys the potency of vaccine lymph” meant that “[the filtered blood serum of an immune animal] could be used in the treatment of smallpox.” Kinyoun and Sternberg believed the diphtheria model could work with other communicable diseases such as typhus and yellow fever.33 In the introduction to his 1895 monograph on immunol- ogy, Sternberg made the following argument for smallpox serotherapy: “We infer that the blood and tissue juices of an individual who has recently suffered an attack of smallpox or scarlet fever contains an antitoxin which would neutralize the active poison of the disease in the cir- culation of another person immediately after infection. [This] can only be decided by experiment; but the experiment seems to me a legitimate one.” The reasoning in this passage was important. Sternberg was confi- dent that smallpox antitoxin could be obtained from vaccinated calves. The “practical application of bacteriological research” meant injecting smallpox antitoxin serum into human bodies as soon as possible.34 On his return from Germany, Kinyoun transferred diphtheria antitoxin production methods to smallpox.35 Kinyoun told the public that “his special study of Roux’s methods for the treatment of diphtheria by serum injection” was “one of the great discoveries in medicine, and has passed through the experimental stage and laid a new foundation for preventive medicine.”36 Kinyoun was hard at work establishing the same protocols for smallpox.37 Public hospitals in New York City provided the first human trial of smallpox antitoxin therapy. Kinyoun prepared filtered smallpox serum in New York’s vaccine farm on December 23, 1894.38 Dr. Elliot, director of the New York City smallpox hospital, identified two “well developed” African American twenty-something male patients “with strong constitutions” in the early stages of the disease and injected fifteen milliliters of the serum into them.39 The four-serum injection had no effect on one patient’s bleeding, high AT THE NATION’S EDGE 75 fevers, pulse, respiration rate, or retention of water. The second patient survived but made his anger at the seven injections of vaccinated calf serum clear to Dr. Elliot.40 The New York Times editorial board com- mented on the results, opining “that it was unwise to assume anything based on the improvement in one case” but expressed optimism for the potential of an “antitoxic serum which will reduce the severity of the disease at the early stages, and lower the mortality percentage for those who have failed to protect themselves by vaccination.”41 After a field trial in the Brooklyn Children’s Hospital indicated a quicker recovery period among these children than other nonvaccinated people, Kinyoun knew he needed a larger field trial.42 The presence of smallpox among the Eagle Pass detainees sparked Wyman and Kinyoun’s interest. They ordered rising young star Dr. Milton Rosenau, assistant director of the National Hygienic Laboratory, to Eagle Pass “with instructions to institute the treatment in a sufficient number of cases.”43 The promise of the antitoxin therapy gave Rosenau’s trip west a heroic dimension. The Houston Post reported, “It is intimated that, aside from his going to supervise the sanitary precau- tions rendered necessary by the presence of a great number of refugees bound for Alabama from Mexico, Dr. Rosenau is especially designated to conduct scientific experiments in a new process of inoculating the smallpox virus.”44 Observers believed Rosenau was saving the migrants for science and for the welfare of the nation. These national hopes for the medical experiment in vaccination complicated the relationship between the migrants and the USMHS. As the migrants fell under the control of the USMHS, antitoxin research transformed them from medical detainees to research subjects. Rosenau’s arrival in Eagle Pass meant the end of open quarantine boundaries, commercial exchange between detained migrants and local residents, and, in general, migrant autonomy in the camps. Rosenau reported, “Discipline as strict as the circumstances seemed to demand was inaugurated; system and order soon followed the chaotic conditions which had prevailed.”45 Newspapers reported that Kinyoun was “manu- facturing anti-toxine [sic] for diphtheria,” and his partner Rosenau was “hard at work attending the negro colonists returning from Mexico.”46 The press made it clear that smallpox antitoxin was going to be part of the migrants’ lives, grimly touching on the importance of black bodies to American clinical research efforts. Despite their previous defiance 76 JOHN MCKIERNAN-GONZÁLEZ of the politically connected Compañía Tlahualilo and their skillful negotiations with the American State Department, the migrants’ voices disappeared from the public record just as their bodies’ actions grew increasingly well documented. As a doctor with the USMHS, Rosenau had two working principles. The first was to treat people with smallpox to the best of his ability. The second was to test the smallpox antitoxin under field conditions. Camp Jenner was a field trial of the efficacy of serum vaccination before smallpox infection and, in a few cases, serum therapy after the onset of smallpox. In his report, Rosenau compared the clinical course of smallpox in people who received what he called a vaccination—that is, the smallpox serum antitoxin—to the course of smallpox among people denied a vaccination by authorities who under every other circumstance believed in vaccination. The results of the field trial were very clear. The serum did not cure or prevent smallpox. There were 154 cases of smallpox in the camp. The USMHS treated 138 detainees from onset to recovery or death, 78 of whom survived discrete cases of smallpox, 35 of whom survived severe (or confluent) smallpox, and 25 of whom died. Doctors diagnose discrete cases when the pus blisters (pox) stay separate from each other; doctors diagnose confluent cases when the pox blisters expand into each other, creating wide and painful internal and external swaths of bleeding blisters. Both discrete and congruent cases of smallpox can be fatal; however, a person with discrete variola has a greater chance of survival. A second list, “fatal cases by vaccination status,” indicated that the serum field trial also meant observing the effects of unprevented and untreated smallpox infections on detained black migrants. Rosenau noted that the USMHS did not vaccinate fifty-five of the people they treated for smallpox. The USMHS did vaccinate approximately fifty different people before the onset of their smallpox. Moreover, some people received USMHS vaccinations after the onset of their infections. Most astoundingly, the USMHS “successfully vaccinated” fifty-five people who subsequently came down with smallpox. Ten of these “successfully vaccinated” people died of smallpox. In medical terms, a “successful” vaccination meant that the antitoxin provoked an immune response that looked similar to that of smallpox vaccination. The fifty-five cases of smallpox demonstrated that the immune response to the smallpox serum seemed to have little to do with smallpox infection. A successful TABLE 4.1. Cases of smallpox, sorted by type (discrete, confluent, and fatal) and patient age, under U.S. Marine Hospital Service care at Camp Jenner

Number of Smallpox Cases Patient Age Discrete Confluent Fatal Total Under 10 years 302335 Between 10 and 20 years 20 15 9 44 Between 20 and 30 years 18 13 6 37 Between 30 and 40 years 6 1 2 9 Over 40 years 44513 Total 78 35 25 138

Note. In a discrete case of smallpox, the small and painful pus blisters (small pox) are independent. In a confluent case, the small blisters breach the tissue separating them, leading to severe internal and external bleeding. Both types can be fatal. Data from Milton Rosenau, “Report on the Camp Jenner Epidemic, Eagle Pass, Texas,” Annual Report of the Supervising Surgeon General (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1895), 234.

Vaccination Status Number Total cases with childhood vaccination 5 Total unvaccinated cases 21 Total successful vaccinations, take recorded 10 Total unsuccessful vaccinations 8 No immune response to serum No immunity to smallpox Total vaccinations, no take recorded 9 No immune response to serum Total 53 figure 4.1. Fatal smallpox cases by vaccination status, Camp Jenner, 1895. From Milton Rosenau, “Report on the Camp Jenner Epidemic, Eagle Pass, Texas,” in Annual Report of the Supervising Surgeon General (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1895), 234. 78 JOHN MCKIERNAN-GONZÁLEZ vaccination take (a familiar immune response to the antitoxin serum) provided no guarantee against smallpox. The list of fatal smallpox cases by vaccination status indicates a desire by Rosenau to compare the impact of smallpox serum vaccination with conventional smallpox therapy, because twenty-seven people received vaccinations and twenty-six people did not. Rosenau noted eight deaths among the people who did not show an immune response to the vaccination serum and ten among the people who did show an immune response to the USMHS vaccination. This did not prove that the successful serum vaccination mitigated the course of illness. However, Rosenau and Magruder believed that the smallpox serum could mitigate more severe cases of smallpox. Thus, they may have treated more severe cases among the detainees with whatever means they had available. Moreover, the vaccinated detainees were slightly older than the cohort average. The average age of the people who came down with smallpox in Camp Jenner was 20. The average age of people vaccinated against smallpox in Camp Jenner was 22.65, and the average age of people not vaccinated against smallpox in Camp Jenner was 16.5. Perceptions of the severity of the disease and the age of the patient with smallpox tilted Rosenau and Magruder’s decision to use the serum. Rosenau clearly established some controls, but the controls did not rise to the double-blind ideal currently held for clinical trials.47 Did Rosenau use the severity of smallpox as the key calculus for use of the serum? This is impossible to know, because Rosenau prob- ably would have been unable to predict who would come down with smallpox after receiving a vaccination. Instead, Rosenau held the black victims of smallpox and the Tlahualilo Company responsible for the serum’s failure to mitigate the horrors of smallpox infection: “Smallpox is supposed to be a more fatal disease in the Negro. The epidemic had favorable soil on which to work on, viz: a number of pure-blooded, unvaccinated negroes with vitality depressed from bad and insufficient food, and exhausted from traveling on crowded freight cars.”48 Given that all the migrants shared the same miserable conditions in Tlahualilo and Eagle Pass, the claim that African Americans were more vulnerable to smallpox could not explain why some African Americans in Camp Jenner were able to survive their bout of smallpox. Nonetheless, Rosenau used full-throated racial metaphors to account for the diver- gence between the ambiguous clinical results in New York’s Smallpox AT THE NATION’S EDGE 79

Hospital and his dispiriting clinical observations in Camp Jenner. Camp Jenner marked the failure of the USMHS’s smallpox antitoxin research endeavor. There was no double-blind clinical study or equal treatment of every patient in camp. The research at Camp Jenner did not result in the USMHS’s conquest of smallpox. Instead, the Camp Jenner field trial and quarantine reflected mixed motives: to treat smallpox among American citizens, to contain smallpox among a large (racialized, stigmatized) population, and to test the smallpox antitoxin among a large cohort of people. Unsurprisingly, muddy medical intentions led to mixed outcomes. Camp Jenner ended up being a place where the USMHS kept American citizens “cooped up” until the State Department found a way to get the migrants back as a group to central Alabama.49 In the fullest historical discussion of the camps in Eagle Pass, Karl Jacoby remarked that “Texas authorities responded to the potential passage of these sick migrants across their territory with what was to become an increasingly common tactic: recasting the U.S.–Mexico border as a medical boundary.” Smallpox and quarantine mark the endpoint of inquiry rather than an opportunity to peer behind the medical terms of belonging in the United States.50 As scholars shift to examine the tangled place of U.S. minorities in America’s medical histories, the surprising actions by African American migrants while at the nation’s edge make Camp Jenner a particularly fruitful place to emphasize contingency and complexity. For the migrants, Camp Jenner became the ground where they negotiated the conditions of their return to Alabama.

REFUGEES, DETAINEES, AND COLONISTS: MIGRANTS REWORK THE BOUNDARIES OF CITIZENSHIP

Leaving Camp Jenner was an endeavor in collective negotiation. The migrants refused to leave as individuals. The mayor of Birmingham and the governor of Alabama worked to prevent their return to their home state. The USMHS stopped funding the camp in mid-October. Rosenau left the detainees in the hands of USMHS surgeon Magruder, Texas state health officer Jack Evans, and the people in Eagle Pass, and he left on the Southern Pacific Railroad to help with bubonic plague in San Francisco. The majority of migrants stayed in Camp Jenner nearly a month and a half after Rosenau treated the last case of smallpox. Although that might have been their choice, every major 80 JOHN MCKIERNAN-GONZÁLEZ city between Eagle Pass and Birmingham banned the entrance of the detained migrants, regardless of whether they had medical certifica- tion.51 The perception that the migrants posed a medical threat to the New South overrode the USMHS guarantee that the detainees were free of smallpox. These decisions frustrated the State Department. As Sparks stated about Birmingham, “Every one of these negroes has a clean bill of health signed by Dr Magruder. No one permitted to get on the train without it. The action of this mayor is certainly arbitrary.”52 Despite these delays, Eagle Pass residents and the USMHS allowed the migrants to stay in Camp Jenner until the Southern Pacific Railroad could guarantee their trip home. Concern with the condition of the migrants in Camp Jenner preceded Rosenau’s departure; however, the migrants’ situation in the camp provoked different forms of sympathy. In Eagle Pass, the county commissioners and the town agreed to continue feeding and clothing the migrants in the camps. The migrants’ situation at the border had already struck a sense of sympathy and solidarity among African Americans in Texas. The Houston Post reported that President Abner of the Colored Baptist Association discussed “the condition of the colored people in Mexico. The president talked on the subject of these negroes abroad for about an hour, and their bad condition in Mexico.”53 According to a Post reporter in Luling, Texas, “The negroes all over this region are giving suppers and by other means raising money for the negro colonists quarantined at Eagle Pass.”54 Two months later, the Post’s coverage of the Foreign Mission of the Colored Baptists emphasized their successes in clothing and feeding the migrants, recognized support in Eagle Pass for the migrants’ situation, and requested funds for food and winter clothing.55 There seemed to be a subterranean thread of support for the migrants across black and some white communities in Texas. The relative invisibility of individual white donations in the news coverage irked some in Texas’s black communities. L. L. Campbell, edi- tor of the black newspaper Austin Herald, penned a bristly response to calls by the Austin Statesman for black funds for the detainees in Camp Jenner: “Now do you mean to say that the Negroes are the only people who should be interested in this matter? It should concern every citizen. Let white men take steps to help these people. I am reliably told that white men led them there.”56 Campbell emphasized the shared American responsibility for the migrants’ plight in Eagle Pass. Other Americans openly rejected any shared connections with the AT THE NATION’S EDGE 81

figure 4.2. One of the designated tent compounds in Camp Jenner, 1895. From J. D. Whelpley, “Failure of Negro Colonization in Mexico,” Frank Leslie’s Weekly, October 31, 1895, p. 286. Collection no. 4289, M. J. Rosenau Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. experiences of the migrants in Texas. The San Antonio Express editorial board argued that the migrants’ inability to achieve settler status in Mexico justified American intervention, for “even though the colonists forfeited their citizenship by leaving the United States to settle in Mexico, the burden of American responsibility should be extended to rescue the colonists of Tlahualilo from their attempt to establish an independent existence.”57 In this vision of an American political community, it was the responsibility of federal authorities to free the freedmen and their adult children of their delusions of independence and self-ownership. This was an expression of sympathy for the migrants, as long as they accepted their position at the margins of American society. Many used their editorial space to reject potential attempts to express sympathy for the migrants. As the Birmingham Age Herald noted, “The press both North and South charged with more triumph than pity, declare negroes as colonists are and always have been a failure, which is the equivalent that a negro is incapable of self-government.”58 This was a mandate for racial domination, easily confirmed by the spectacle of Camp Jenner. Southern authorities considered the migrants to be a political threat and used the language of medicine to justify their exclusion. Mayor 82 JOHN MCKIERNAN-GONZÁLEZ

Vanhoose repeatedly banned the appearance of “diseased colonists” in Tuscaloosa and threatened to expel the migrants after their return.59 The mayor of Birmingham declared that he would refuse to allow any train with Tlahualilo migrants aboard to stop at the train station.60 The Tlahualilo migrants’ successful appropriation of federal authority prompted local public quarantines against healthy ex-detainees by prominent partisans of the New South’s racial order. Yet the Camp Jenner detainees used federal medical authority to defy southern political borders. The migrants refused to leave Camp Jenner until the USMHS guaranteed their return to Alabama.61 Camp Jenner provided the physical space to help the migrants force the USMHS to ad- vocate on their behalf. They demanded that USMHS surgeon Magruder certify that they were free of smallpox.62 They refused to accept local employment, perhaps for fear of being left isolated on another unfamil- iar plantation, this time in Texas.63 Their fears proved to be warranted. Despite the USMHS promise to guarantee their return home, the state of Alabama allowed women and children who arrived in Birmingham to detrain but transferred the adult men to the Campion mines in Blunt County, Alabama, 100 miles away from Tuscaloosa, where they were forced to work.64 These miner conscripts were fortunate because within a week, they had made their way back to Tuscaloosa.65 In other cases, Southern Pacific employees stopped their trains in the woods between Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, allowing the migrants off the train and permitting the rest of the train to stop in Birmingham.66 Ultimately, the migrants outlasted the Compañia Tlahualilo, the state of Texas, the USMHS, and the governor of Alabama and made their way home. Camp Jenner raised visible boundaries around the Tlahualilo migrants, symbolically separating these four hundred people from the rest of the United States. Historians have focused on Camp Jenner as a medical border, a final medical tragedy to the difficult odyssey of these African American migrants.67 However, the migrants’ own actions disrupt this conventional narrative. Their position as highly visible wards of the USMHS forced the American federal state to move them through San Antonio, Houston, New Orleans, and Birmingham, against the express wishes of powerful white southern political authorities. On October 17, the migrants formed a committee composed of Reverend Charles Cook, Reverend G. W. Smith, Henry Wilson, Thomas Means, and Reverend T. P. Phillips to express “the heartfelt gratitude of the AT THE NATION’S EDGE 83 refugees to the people of Eagle Pass for their many charitable deeds towards the unfortunate returning colonists.” They also expressed ap- preciation to Magruder for the “masterly manner Camp Jenner was conducted and to Dr. Evans for his unsparing labors on behalf of the colonists.” Finally, they thanked consul Sparks for his efforts in helping them “out of bondage in Mexico.” Samuel Parnell made this very clear when he sent Sparks a telegram from Tuscaloosa expressing “all of the dew respects for you kind and pernevolent aid and asistern of aiding us to our Homes you have did a great thing for the poore colored colney that went to Mexico and I truly thank you.”68 Magruder, Texas state health officer Jack Evans, and Sparks were the people who helped them meet their key demands on federal authority. Sparks helped force the con- frontation between the first group of migrants and consul McCaughan in Torreon. He was also the key liaison in the negotiations between the Southern Pacific Railroad and the Tlahualilo migrants. Magruder emerged in importance in mid-October to defend their right to return home, especially when he sought to ensure that the USMHS passport en- abled passage through the hometown quarantines awaiting the migrants. Finally, Evans and the neighbors in Eagle Pass never registered a com- plaint about the presence of Camp Jenner in Eagle Pass. Instead, they treated the migrants like new residents and, after mid-September, helped provide food and local employment. Parnell’s telegram spoke to the importance the migrants placed on their return home and a willingness to recognize that the people who detained them met their key demand. Movements and negotiations across stark medical boundaries—the actions of Camp Jenner’s many communities—better illustrate the com- plex intersection of race and disease status in a nation with a growing research economy. Camp Jenner did more than define the conditions for life stripped of political and social rights.69 Rather, the migrants turned Camp Jenner into a site of ongoing negotiation where national authorities wrestled with American citizens over basic questions of illness, citizenship, and national identity. The migrants and their medical authorities turned a meadow north of Eagle Pass into a border space that was also central to national medical institutions, a political situation that linked medical exploitation and community assertion, a place both in the margin and in the mainstream.70 Black southern migrants in Mexico made Camp Jenner the nation’s edge.71 84 JOHN MCKIERNAN-GONZÁLEZ

NOTES

I acknowledge the work of Martin Summers, Laurie B. Green, Laura Briggs, and Sarah Deutsch. These issues are covered in far more depth in my book Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas–Mexico Border, 1848–1942 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012).

1 Consul Jesse Sparks, “Fifteen cases of contagious disease. Surrounded by Mexican police to prevent entry into town, July 21, 1895,” Failure of Scheme to Colonize Negroes in Mexico, House Document 169, 54th Congress, 13. 2 Sparks, “Negroes almost in open rebellion, July 23, 1895,” Failure of Scheme, 13. 3 Consul John McCaughan, “Erroneous belief consular officers offer financial relief (July 19, 1895),” Failure of Scheme, 17. For McCaughan’s prominent career as an industrialist in Torreon, see John Mason Hart, Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 201–5. 4 Grover Cleveland, “If return to the colony is not practicable (July 26, 1895),” Failure of Scheme, 13. 5 Karl Jacoby calls the migrants’ detention “an early medicalization of the Mexican border.” His analysis is the first public connection of the black migrants to the general scholarship on the history of Mexican migration to the United States. Jacoby, “Between North and South: The Alternative Borderlands of William Ellis and the African American Colony of 1895,” in Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.–Mexico Borderlands History, ed. Samuel Truett and Elliott Young, 209–39 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004). 6 J. Fred Rippy, “A Negro Colonization Project in Mexico,” Journal of Negro History 6, no. 1 (1921): 66–73, esp. 67; William K. Meyers, “Politics, Vested Rights and Economic Growth in Porfirian Mexico: The Company Tlahualilo in the Comarca Lagunera,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 57, no. 3 (1977): 435. 7 Michael Fitzgerald, Urban Emancipation: Popular Politics in Reconstruction Mobile (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002); Fitzgerald, The Union League Movement in the Deep South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989). 8 For scholarship that examines organized white violence and the persis- tence of black political participation and property ownership, see W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935; repr., New York: Free Press, 1992); C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955); Jane Dailey, Glenda Gilmore, and Bryant Simon, eds., Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics from the Civil War to Civil Rights (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The AT THE NATION’S EDGE 85

Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Anchor Press, 2009). 9 “Mr. Burke to Mr. Uhl, May 28, 1895” (received June 4, 1895), 54th Cong., 1st sess., H.R. Doc. No. 169, Enclosure No. 12, p. 2. 10 Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 3. For Angel Island, Ellis Island, and the El Paso border, see Anna Pegler Gordon, In Sight of America: Photography and Immigration Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). See also Amy Fairchild, Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Creation of the Modern Industrial Labor Force (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). For the impact of state heteronormativity on communities of color, see Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Frontiers and Faultlines of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); and Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 11 Beatrix Hoffman, “Sympathy and Exclusion: Access to Health Care for Undocumented Immigrants in the United States,” in A Death Retold: Jesica Santillan, the Bungled Transplant, and Paradoxes of Medical Citizenship, Keith Wailoo, Julie Livingston, and Peter Guarnaccia, eds. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 238–41. 12 This argument challenges the periodization for the shift in the politics of race in public health from regulation to entitlement as sketched out in Shah, Contagious Divides, 6–7. For two key examples of this periodization in the United States, see Barbara Guttman Rosenkrantz, Public Health and the State: Changing Views in Massachusetts, 1842–1936 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 178–84; and Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Struggle against Medical Discrimination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 5–11. There is an ongoing tension between entitlement and exclusion around medicine, a tension that can be seen in slave medicine and colonial medical practices. In this case, the Tlahualilo migrants were able to engage a politics of entitlement in an age of open exclusion. 13 “Deluded Colonists,” Los Angeles Times, July 30, 1895, 3. 14 “Will Feed the Negroes,” Houston Post, July 28, 1895, 2. 15 “Collector William Fitch to Surgeon General Wyman, August 4, 1895,” Box 150, Entry 11.1, Correspondence with Southern Quarantine Camps, Record Group 90, United States Marine Hospital Service, National Archives, Washington, D.C. 16 William Fitch, “Smallpox among Negro Refugees from Mexico,” Weekly Abstract of Sanitary Reports 10, no. 31 (August 3, 1895), 619–20; Keith Wailoo, Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 7–9. 17 Fitch, “Smallpox among Negro Refugees from Mexico,” 619–20. 86 JOHN MCKIERNAN-GONZÁLEZ

18 George Magruder, “August 4, 1895,” 1, Box 150, Entry 11.1, Correspondence with Southern Quarantine Camps, Record Group 90, United States Marine Hospital Service, National Archives. 19 William Fitch, “Report, August 4, 1895,” 4, Box 150, Entry 11.1, Correspondence with Southern Quarantine Camps, Record Group 90, United States Marine Hospital Service, National Archives. 20 On contact zones, see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 6. 21 George Magruder, “August 4, 1895,” Box 150, Entry 11.1, Correspondence with Southern Quarantine Camps, Record Group 90, United States Marine Hospital Service, National Archives. 22 Sharla Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 61–82, esp. 72 and 74; Bernard Vogel, American Indian Medicine (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970); Todd Savitt, “Black Health on the Plantation: Masters, Slaves and Physicians,” in Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health, 3rd ed., ed. Judith W. Leavitt and Ronald Numbers, 351–68 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997). 23 Pekka Hammalainen and Samuel Truett, “On Borderlands,” Journal of American History 98, no. 2 (September 2011): 338. 24 Milton Rosenau, “Report on the Camp Jenner Epidemic, Eagle Pass, Texas,” Annual Report of the Supervising Surgeon General (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1895); “Telegram, R. M. Swearingen to Surgeon General Walter Wyman, August 10, 1895,” in ibid., 234. 25 Howard Markel, Quarantine! East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 166–80. 26 Evelynn Hammonds, Childhood’s Deadly Scourge: The Campaign to Control Diphtheria in New York City (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 221. 27 J. J. Kinyoun, “The Application of Serotherapy,” in Annual Report of the Supervising Surgeon General of the United States Marine Hospital Service (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1897), 779. 28 See Markel, Quarantine!, 40–58, and Lucy Salyer, Laws Like Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of American Immigration Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 37–68. 29 George Magruder, “Smallpox at Eagle Pass, Texas among Negro Colonists Returning from Mexico,” in Annual Report of the Supervising Surgeon General (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1895), 370–73. 30 Susan Lederer, Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before World War II (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 2–8. 31 Ibid., 1, 2, 22–25. Magruder and Rosenau fit Harriet Washington’s trans- AT THE NATION’S EDGE 87

historical portrait of “overachieving adepts with sterling reputations, im- pressive credentials, and social skill sufficient to secure positions of great responsibility.” See Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 13. 32 The World Health Organization currently prohibits medical research in refugee camps. 33 Kinyoun, “Application of Serotherapy,” 767, 772–73. 34 George Miller Sternberg, Immunity, Protective Inoculation and Serotherapy (New York: William and Wood, 1895), v, iv. 35 “Surgeon Kinyoun at Koch’s Laboratory,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 18, 1891, 3. 36 “Roux’s Diphtheria Treatment. Dr. Kinyoun to Introduce It in This Country,” Daily Charlotte Observer, October 20, 1894, 2. 37 Sternberg, Immunity, v. 38 “J. J. Kinyoun: Smallpox Serum Remedy Tested,” New York Times, January 23, 1895, 4. 39 Kinyoun, “Application of Serotherapy,” 775. Contemporary sources reveal no first name for Dr. Elliot. 40 “J. J. Kinyoun: Smallpox Serum Remedy Tested,” 4. 41 Ibid. 42 Kinyoun, “Application of Serotherapy,” 779. 43 Ibid.; “Help for the Prodigals,” The State (Columbia, South Carolina), August 9, 1895, 1. 44 New Orleans Picayune, “A Government Scientist Sent to Texas on an Important Mission.” Reprinted in the Houston Post, August 7, 1895, 4. 45 “Milton Rosenau to Walter Wyman, August 14, 1895,” Box 150, Entry 11.1, Correspondence with Southern Quarantine Camps, Record Group 90, United States Marine Hospital Service, National Archives. 46 “Mr. Eccles Brings News of His Trip,” Daily Charlotte Observer, August 25, 1895, 1. 47 Lederer, Subjected to Science, 1–25, esp. 20–25. Also John Harley Warner, The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge, and Identity in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 235–50. 48 Milton Rosenau, “Smallpox—some peculiarities of the Camp Jenner epidemic—a clinical study of 137 cases,” in Annual Report of the Supervising Surgeon General of the United States Marine Hospital Service for the Fiscal Year 1896 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1896), 234–44. 49 “Negroes Who Have Been Cooped Up in Camp Jenner to Be Sent Back to Alabama,” Dallas Morning News, September 23, 1895, 1. 50 Jacoby, “Between North and South,” 224; Donald Hopkins called Camp Jenner “an unusual importation of cases.” See Hopkins, The Greatest Killer: Smallpox in History, with a New Introduction (Chicago: University of 88 JOHN MCKIERNAN-GONZÁLEZ

Chicago Press, 2002), 324. Historians and public health officers treat the emerging research economy separately from smallpox interventions. See T. R. Bender and J. M. Michael, “Fighting Smallpox on the Texas Border: An Episode from the Public Health Service’s Proud Past,” Public Health Reports 99, no. 6 (1984): 579–82; and James Colgrove, State of Immunity: The Politics of Vaccination in 20th Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). Michael Willrich, Pox: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 65–68, 112, 179, 194, treats Rosenau and Magruder as antagonists; their commitment to research in the field linked the two. 51 “Birmingham Quarantine against Negro Colonists,” Houston Post, October 15, 1895, 2. 52 Jesse Sparks, “Birmingham to Prevent Negroes En-Route from Entering City, October 3, 1895,” United States Consulate, the State Department, Despatches from United State Consuls in Piedras Negras, 1876–1906 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives, 1963), reel 1. 53 “Church Meeting,” Houston Post, July 26, 1895, 2. 54 “Negroes Giving Suppers,” Houston Post, August 17, 1895. 55 “Foreign Mission of Colored Baptists of Texas in Session,” Houston Post, October 16, 1895, 1. 56 L. L. Campbell, “The Statesman Calls for Colored Help,” Austin Herald, August 3, 1895, 2. 57 “The Negro as a Pioneer,” San Antonio Express, July 28, 1895, 4. 58 J. T. Harris, “The Mexican Failure,” Birmingham Age Herald, August 24, 1895, 3. 59 Birmingham State Herald, “Homeward Bound,” reprinted in Tuscaloosa Times, October 16, 1895, 1. 60 “Birmingham Quarantine against Negro Colonists,” Houston Post, October 15, 1895, 2. 61 L. L. Campbell, “Negro Colonists: Trying to Secure Homes for the Unfortunate,” Austin Herald, August 18, 1895, 3. 62 George Magruder, “Report on the Establishment and Administration of Camp Jenner, Eagle Pass, TX,” Weekly Abstract of Sanitary Reports 10, no. 45 (October 25, 1895): 957–59. 63 Sparks, “Birmingham to Prevent Negroes En-Route from Entering City.” 64 Birmingham News, “Ungrateful Are the Negroes Brought Back to Alabama,” reprinted in Tuscaloosa Times, October 8, 1895. 65 Birmingham State Herald, “Homeward Bound,” reprinted in Tuscaloosa Times, October 16, 1895, 1. 66 Newspaper, Eagle Pass Guide, “Clippings from the Eagle Pass Guide Newspaper, November 3, 1895,” United States Consulate, the State Department, Despatches from United State Consuls in Piedras Negras, 1876–1906 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives, 1963), reel 1. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. AT THE NATION’S EDGE 89

69 Giorgio Agamben, Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998). Agamben argues that extreme conditions in spaces such as labor camps and immigrant detention zones define the exercise of sovereignty, where the state demonstrates its ability to operate outside its own scrutiny. For this argument for the Mexican borderlands, see Gilberto Rosas, “The Thickening Borderlands: Diffused Exceptionality and ‘Immigrant’ Social Struggles during the ‘War on Terror,’” Cultural Dynamics 18 (2006): 335–49. 70 John Nieto Phillips, “From Margin to Mainstream: The Brave New World of Borderlands History,” Journal of American History 98, no. 2 (September 2011): 338. 71 Susan M. Reverby, Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Study and Its Legacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 56–71. This page intentionally left blank