PLAGUE CASES NOW HOPSCOTCHED randomly across Chinatown. As doctors puzzled over the elusive link among the dozen people who had died, they began marking cases on the map of Chinatown with pastel-colored pencil dots—pale green for 1900. Later, they would switch to marking red dots and black crosses for each case of sickness or death. The dots on the map multiplied.
But as the second quarantine stretched on, hunger afflicted the residents of Chinatown more than the plague did. There was nothing to buy and no money to buy it. The Chinese Six Companies asked the city for 25 cents a day to feed the hungry. But a city health board member vetoed the request as too high; the almshouse, he said, fed its inmates for 8 cents a day.1
The city made a strategic counteroffer, dangling food relief as an incentive to the Chinese to move to the detention centers being planned for Mission Rock or Angel Island. The Chinese Six Companies refused: It was better to be hungry and free than fed in prison. The Chinese vowed to resist relocation by law or by force.
The desperation of the Chinese was scarcely noticed by most whites. And when it was, as it was by a story in the
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.
While the newspapers turned a suicide into slapstick, a few Chinese took their anger to court. Jew Ho, a grocer on Stockton Street, was incensed to discover that the cordons encircling his store curved to exclude a white plumber and coal dealer next door. Starved of business, he filed a lawsuit on June 5, charging that the quarantine violated his constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the law. He demanded that Caucasian physicians not be barred from crossing the quarantine line to attend their Chinese patients.2
Like other lawsuits before it, the heart of Jew Ho’s claim was that there was no plague in San Francisco. But even if there were plague, the suit argued, a mass quarantine didn’t protect the Chinese but heightened their risk by sealing them up inside an infected district. The complaint asked the court to end the quarantine and restrict isolation to only the infected homes and shops.
Kinyoun backed the city’s plan to round up the Chinese and relocate them to Angel Island or Mission Rock. But the circuit court issued a temporary restraining order barring Chinese detention centers. The court allowed doctors designated by the Chinese Six Companies to cross the quarantine lines to see their patients.3
Criminals hungrily exploited the situation. There was a brisk trade in counterfeit health certificates. And a Caucasian man—never identified—falsely promised to raise the quarantine for $10,000. Chinese merchants began raising the cash. Newspapers exposed the fraud, but the con man was never caught.4
Agitated Chinese—one thousand strong—descended on Portsmouth Square, where quarantine officers had pitched tents to give shots and fumigate clothing of people who had to cross the quarantine lines. Rumors were circulating that the officers were forcibly inoculating the Chinese with the Haffkine vaccine. Special police—detailed to keep peace inside the quarantine lines—charged at the crowds, brandishing their clubs and dispersing the demonstrators. But the mob ran uphill and assembled at a shop on Waverly Place, where the owner was believed to be collaborating with the white doctors. This time, the police lines couldn’t hold them back.
Hurling cobblestones pried from the street, the Chinese demonstrators smashed the shop windows and then charged into the shop, breaking up furniture and pitching pieces onto the sidewalk. The next day, as the shopkeeper surveyed the ruins of his store, the newspapers reported that there was no forced vaccination plot. The Chinese who entered the tents that day did so willingly, so they could have their clothes fumigated and leave Chinatown to join a shipping expedition to Siberia.5
A delivery to a Chinatown coffin shop was the spark that ignited a second riot. Seething crowds saw the approach of the lumbering delivery wagon and believed the coffin shipment was part of a plot to make it look as if a rampant epidemic were under way. As the horse cart entered Chinatown, swaying under its somber freight, three hundred demonstrators attacked it, dumping empty coffins onto the cobblestones of Sacramento Street. Then they ransacked the coffin shop, tearing down hangings and heaving furniture into the street.
Uniformed officers struck savagely with their clubs, raining blows on the demonstrators. “Heads were not spared,” the
In court, the Chinese relentlessly pounded away at the theme that the quarantine was an act of racial bias, not public health. “Real prison has iron bars,” said the counsel for the Chinese Six Companies, a former judge named James Maguire. “But when you surround the area with ropes and hurdles and restrict the freedom of the people, it is also imprisonment,” he said. “Do they want to starve 10,000 Chinese to death?”7 Now the Chinese launched a private food drive, distributing rations of rice, cabbage, and pork.
Judge John J. De Haven chiseled the first legal chip off the quarantine by granting a habeas corpus petition. He ordered the release of a Chinese cook who lived with his white employers on Bush Street but who got trapped in the quarantine zone while visiting friends in Chinatown. Judge De Haven forbade the health board from restrictingthe liberty of anyone—Asian or white—who wasn’t in direct contact with the plague.8
In Washington, the Chinese minister Wu Ting-Fang sent the U.S. government a bill for $30,000 for each day his subjects were incarcerated in Chinatown. Presented with this bill, Secretary of State John Hay wired Governor Gage, asking whether plague really existed in California.
On June 14, Governor Gage issued a fourteen-point proclamation denying that there was any plague in “the great and healthful city of San Francisco.”
Gage’s no-plague manifesto bore the signatures of San Francisco’s elite, including blue jeans manufacturer Levi Strauss. Plague was, after all, bad for business. But in a shocking show of complicity, the deans of three medical schools also signed the denial, including Levi Cooper Lane, president of Cooper Medical College, which would become Stanford University Medical School. None had firsthand experience with bubonic plague.9
On June 15, the courtroom was packed to hear arguments in the Jew Ho lawsuit. Consul Ho Yow was there, as were forty Christian missionaries and about a hundred Chinese spectators. Ng Poon Chew, the crusading editor of the
Jew Ho called a parade of expert medical witnesses, who gave sworn testimony that there was no plague. Physician Minnie Worley asserted that the young maid Chin Moon had died of typhoid fever. Judge Morrow listened attentively from the bench. If it were the court’s job to rule on the truth of the diagnosis, Judge Morrow said, “I think upon such testimony as that given by these physicians I should be compelled to hold that the plague did not exist and has not existed in San Francisco.”10
Though it wasn’t the court’s job to settle matters of science, Judge Morrow threw the quarantine out on legal grounds. It lumped all Chinese homes and businesses together, while exempting white-occupied buildings. It didn’t distinguish between homes of plague-infected and homes of healthy Chinese, but confined them all together, increasing risk of transmission. It forbade the Chinese from access to physicians of their choice. For all these reasons, said Judge Morrow, echoing the U.S. Supreme Court in a prior discrimination case, the San Francisco quarantine was imposed with “an evil eye and an unequal hand.”
“This quarantine,” he went on, “cannot be continued by reason of the fact that it is unreasonable, unjust, and oppressive… discriminating in its character [and] contrary to the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.”11
Within hours of Judge Morrow’s ruling, the city health board repealed the quarantine. The good news crackled through the alleyways of Chinatown like a string of New Year firecrackers. Expectant crowds sifted into the streets, swelling and pressing against the barriers near Portsmouth Square. That afternoon, a police wagon pulled up to the intersection of Kearny and Clay. A captain in civilian clothes jumped out, broke down the fences, and rolled up the barbed wire.12
Chinese poured through the lines, their lean faces awash with joy and relief. For the first time in two weeks, workers returned to their jobs—shelves were restocked, tables set, and hollow bellies filled.
During the litigation, however, the plague bacteria hadn’t slept. New victims fell sick just doors away from
