Haffkine inoculation; Chinatown to be restricted; pest house in Chinatown …; suspects from plague houses to be moved [if] you deem necessary to Angel Island; a disinfecting corps; destruction of rats….”5
This last point—“destruction of rats”—got little immediate attention in the spring of 1900. Wyman had recognized mounting evidence that rats were the chief agents in the spread of plague from port to port, but he hadn’t yet seen their connection with the infection of people. A report from Sydney, Australia, where doctors discovered plague bacteria in the stomachs of fleas, received scant notice. Only years later would medical science recognize the significance of these fragmentary bits of evidence implicating the rat and the flea.6
The surgeon general also ordered Kinyoun to meet with Consul Ho Yow, to appeal for cooperation. Kinyoun boarded a ferry to San Francisco for an audience with the consul. Ushered in to see Ho Yow, Kinyoun took the measure of the subtle diplomat. He was handsome, clad in the robes of an imperial envoy from the Manchu dynasty. He spoke fluent English.
The city was a hostile territory for those of Chinese descent. When young men of Chinatown offered to join the army of their adopted land, the local press mocked their offer with cartoons of pigtailed enlistees. When elders shipped their bones home for burial in China, they were hit with a ten-dollar bone tax. Now came these draconian plague-control measures and an order from the U.S. government to submit “cheerfully.” It was too much. Ho insisted on reserving certain basic rights for his people.
Kinyoun had begun to brief Ho on the plague outbreak when a knock on the door brought another visitor. The attorney for the Chinese Six Companies entered. Two against one. Ho and the attorney made their case: The Chinese people were terrified of the needle. They would not submit to forced vaccination. They would not stand for forced relocation to detention centers here or on Angel Island.
Kinyoun felt ambushed, outgunned. Up to this point, he had thought of the Chinese Six Companies mainly as a trade association to protect rich merchants’ interests, but now he saw that they functioned as de facto diplomats. Tough negotiators, they would not have public health forced upon them. “Just there, I believe, the opposition to the Marine-Hospital Service, and particularly myself, originated,” he told a friend.7 Far from eliciting the cheerful compliance Wyman envisioned, Kinyoun made no allies that day.
On the streets of Chinatown, and in its press, Kinyoun was dubbed “wolf doctor,” for what they perceived as his snappy and officious manner toward the Chinese.8 If Kinyoun was the wolf doctor, the Chinese refused to be his sacrificial lambs. Most people knew the story of the Haffkine vaccine and its risks: fever, weakness, and even death. From his window at the consular residence, Ho Yow saw angry crowds gathering in the streets. He wired his minister in Washington to seek to cancel the compulsory vaccine order. “The Chinese… would prefer to be kicked back to China. They are very upset and agitated. We are afraid that a riot might happen and that people might be killed. Please go to the Federal Government and plead for an exemption from the shots.”9
Word spread about the little girl at the Presbyterian Mission Home who leapt out a window to evade the white men’s needles, her shattered bones an emblem of the community’s broken trust.10 Demonstrators swarmed like angry bees from a hive, the
If anything, the rebellion only stiffened the resolve of Surgeon General Wyman to force the Chinese into compliance. Invoking the Quarantine Act of 1890, Wyman was authorized by President William McKinley to issue a sweeping order—not just halting travel by plague patients, but forbidding train or boat travel by all “Asiatics and other races particularly liable to the disease.” Now, railroad and shipping companies refused to sell tickets to Asian passengers. No Asian could leave the state without a health certificate issued by Kinyoun. And that required the dreaded Haffkine vaccine.12
It was Kinyoun’s job to enforce the order. The travel ban covered both Chinese and Japanese people. Clusters of Japanese lived and worked near the borders of Chinatown, but as yet no single case of plague had been found in a Japanese resident of San Francisco. It was a clear case of quarantine by color.
Challenges to the ban came quickly. After merchants like Louis Quong were barred from boarding the Oakland ferry, a class-action lawsuit was filed in federal court. Wong Wai, a businessman associated with the Chinese Six Companies, filed the suit charging Kinyoun and the board of health with illegally imprisoning twenty-five thousand Chinese inside San Francisco unless they took the experimental and dangerous Haffkine vaccine.13 The lawsuit charged that the travel restrictions were unconstitutional and demanded that Kinyoun and the health board be enjoined from requiring vaccination or barring their travel.
Left to untangle the snarl of competing federal and local health and civil rights claims was Judge William W. Morrow. Before he ascended the bench, the silver-haired jurist had been a three-term Republican member of Congress. As a lawmaker, Morrow wasn’t known for his love of the Chinese, whom he once labeled “destitute of moral qualities.” As a judge hearing exclusion-law cases, he often sided with the government.14
But on May 28, Judge Morrow ruled in favor of the Chinese. The defendants, Joseph Kinyoun and the city health board, failed to furnish facts that justified singling out the city’s Asian residents as more susceptible to plague. The travel restrictions and forced immunization weren’t dictated by sound science, but instead were “boldly directed against the Asiatic or Mongolian race as a class, without regard to the previous condition, habits, exposure to the disease or residence of the individual; and the only justification offered for this discrimination was a suggestion [that] this particular race is more liable to plague than any other,” the judge wrote. “No evidence has, however, been offered to support this claim….”15
In his decision in the Wong Wai case, Judge Morrow also ruled that ordering the city’s twenty-five thousand Chinese residents to take the Haffkine vaccine as a condition of travel violated Surgeon General Wyman’s own medical judgment. The vaccine was good only before exposure to the germ, not afterward. Giving the vaccine to someone after exposure was not only ineffective, but indeed “dangerous to life.” Giving it to people leaving an infected zone served no public health aim. Thus the whole program—travel restrictions and vaccine—discriminated against Chinese residents, depriving them of liberty in violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. Judge Morrow issued an injunction.
Kinyoun and the city health board, the judge added, failed to prove that there was a plague emergency serious enough to warrant the suspension of rights and due process. The injunction was to remain in effect while the case was being litigated. Word of the plague in San Francisco was seeping out. Texas and Louisiana declared an embargo against all California passengers and goods. And now, the only plan for curbing the infection was halted by court order.
As negative publicity mounted, the California State Health Board jumped into the fray. In a surprise move, it ordered the city to restore the quarantine and threatened to quarantine the entire city from the rest of the state of California if it did not comply. The state board wasn’t admitting the existence of plague—far from it; it was just trying to limit the damage from negative publicity, and shield California’s trade and tourism from a devastating embargo.
In a meeting at the Grand Hotel, the state health board invited local businesspeople to meet with the Southern Pacific Railroad Company and the Fruit Canners’ Union. The fractious crowd was split as to whether quarantine was a necessary evil or a devastating admission to the world that California crops were tainted. Debate was loud and furious.
Dr. Williamson of the San Francisco Health Board despaired that his hands were tied. The local press and businesses billed the plague cleanup as a fraud, and the court injunction left him hamstrung.
But D. D. Crowley of the California State Health Board was unmoved. Crowley had his own preference, and that was to burn Chinatown to the ground. But if he couldn’t use the torch, a fence would do. “Gentlemen,” he ordered at the close of the May 28 meeting, “you must have Chinatown quarantined this evening.”16 With Sacramento holding a gun to its head, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a resolution empowering the health board to quarantine Chinatown for a second time.
Once again, 159 police officers descended on Chinatown. They guarded the district twenty-four hours a day in three shifts, sealing off the rectangle bounded by Stockton, Kearny, California, and Broadway. Now the quarantine zone was enlarged by one block to the north. But again, it zigzagged to exempt white institutions, including the redbrick steeple of St. Mary’s Church at California and Dupont Streets.
Chinatown churned in helpless frustration as the normal ebb and flow of business between whites and Asians
