The Barbary Plague

Their grim task completed, and their lips sealed about their findings, the expert panel trio prepared to leave for home. But a trickle of leaks about the plague report in the Sacramento Bee alerted Governor Gage to impending trouble. He demanded an audience at the Palace Hotel.

Billing his visit as a courtesy call, Gage brought a delegation and prepared to lobby the scientists to head off any threat to his state. The plague commissioners, in no mood to be bullied, gave it to him straight: The state had the plague, and they intended to report it to the surgeon general. The governor retreated to Sacramento to plot his next move.³¹

On February 28, he summoned newspaper and railroad executives. They chartered a special train to the capital and huddled with the governor until four A.M. Then, their plan of action decided, they went home to pack for Washington, D.C.³²

Sidelined, Kinyoun watched helplessly. He tried to forewarn Surgeon General Wyman about the governor’s delegation and its rumored mission to suppress the panel’s findings.³³ Now in charge, Joseph White dined with the mayor and medics to muster support for his plague-control operations. But privately, he despaired. “The people and the place here,” he wrote the surgeon general, “are a law unto themselves….”³⁴

“The situation here is worse than you think,” he added. “I cannot foretell the outcome, but I fear disaster. A year ago it might have been checked but now I am extremely doubtful of any success…. I fear the service has met… a Waterloo.”³⁵

Seal of Silence

ON A TRAIN BOUND FOR Washington, D.C., the governor’s men vowed to defend the Golden State in a deal that was pure brass. Having failed to deny the plague at home, they hoped to strike a bargain with federal officials to cover up the proof of its existence. The delegates—men from the Chronicle, the Examiner, the Union Iron Works, and the Southern Pacific Railroad—agreed with Governor Henry Gage that only secrecy could save California from the ruin of a nationwide trade embargo.

Senators George C. Perkins and Thomas R. Bard of California acted as midwives to the plan. They had wired all the parties—from Governor Gage and the newspapers to the surgeon general’s bosses at the Treasury Department—to make sure everyone was on board.¹,²

When the delegates arrived in Washington, they headed straight for a conference with Surgeon General Wyman and his bosses at the Treasury Department. California would clean up San Francisco, they promised, in exchange for a news blackout. There was no need to publicize the matter. Discretion was the key to gaining Governor Gage’s cooperation with federal public health programs.

At the White House, the California delegation met with President McKinley to discuss more pleasant matters, specifically his upcoming trip to the Golden State. San Francisco had planned a lavish reception. The president and Mrs. McKinley would be guests at the Pacific Heights mansion of one of the delegates, Henry Scott, head of the Union Iron Works. McKinley would receive tributes from the state’s Republicans. He would launch one of Scott’s ships. The presidential presence would advertise the state as a mecca of commerce, culture, and health. Everyone would win.

Kinyoun tried to get word to the surgeon general warning him not to trust Gage’s delegates. But the sales job was a brilliant success. Surgeon General Wyman not only agreed, he asked his special plague commissioners to sign on with the plan. They acquiesced, sharing Wyman’s hope that quiet diplomacy would work better than public disclosure to improve the health of San Francisco.

Wyman went further, appealing to Victor Vaughan, dean of the University of Michigan Medical School, to use his influence to discourage the Associated Press from publishing anything about the plague report. The surgeon general was worried that the wire service would break the news nationwide, and only a perfect “seal of silence” could appease California’s governor, he explained.³

But on the anniversary of Wong Chut King’s death at the old Globe, the Sacramento Bee broke the seal of silence. On March 6, the same day that the governor’s men started for Washington, the Bee ran a banner headline on page one to trumpet the news of the federal panel’s findings to its readers in the state capital: BUBONIC PLAGUE EXISTS IN SAN FRANCISCO….⁴

But the Bee wasn’t finished leaking plague news. In yet another page one headline, the paper next exposed the deal struck between California and the surgeon general:

INFAMOUS COMPACT

SIGNED BY WYMAN:

MAKES AGREEMENT WITH GAGE

NOT TO LET FACTS BECOME

KNOWN CONTRARY TO

FEDERAL LAW⁵

The story charged that the secrecy pact violated an 1893 quarantine law requiring the surgeon general to publish regular reports on the health status of U.S. ports. Concealing plague in the port of San Francisco was clearly illegal.

But Washington officials were too busy endorsing San Francisco’s health to worry much. “I would feel as safe living in San Francisco as in Washington,” said a top Treasury Department official. “Traveling and business can continue as safely with San Francisco today as a year ago.”⁶

Kinyoun sent Wyman a telegram arguing against the compromise and predicting that the delegation from California would “promise everything and do nothing” to purge the plague.⁷ When he read Kinyoun’s warning wire, Wyman brusquely put the quarantine officer in his place. The deal was done, he said. Kinyoun’s desire for public vindication “must be subordinated to maintain attitude of nonpublication,” Wyman added. “The Department and its Officers will maintain this attitude until further orders.”⁸

The lame duck quarantine officer was now muzzled as well.

But Kinyoun wasn’t alone in protesting the gag order. The man who had come to replace him agreed that silence was a bad idea.

“If the facts are kept secret now,” wrote Joe White to the surgeon general, “they will rise up to damn us in the future….⁹

“I am at a loss to know what you want me to do,” he told the surgeon general. “This is a most peculiar situation—as I understand it, I am to say nothing about plague and yet supervise the disinfection for it,” he said. But, he asked, “When I recommend moving the Chinese out of a given house and they say as they always do, ‘What for?’ what possible answer can be given?”¹⁰

Back at the University of Chicago, Lewellys Barker, who had risked his own health to verify plague in San Francisco, was uneasy with the bargain that had been struck. Besides, he wanted to see his commission’s plague findings published. “The San Francisco Chronicle has been lieing [sic] shamefully lately,” Barker wrote to Surgeon General Wyman on April 6.¹¹ There is “great dissatisfaction among many men because our full report has not been published, and the delay in publication is being misinterpreted,” he said. “If the San Francisco press is still misrepresenting the situation I confess I think them no longer deserving any sympathy, after what they were told by you in Washington. It is a grave reflection upon their honesty.”¹²

Even though the death toll was still relatively low, Barker wasn’t complacent about San Francisco’s safety. He saw too much similarity with other epidemic zones. In Hong Kong, Calcutta, and Bombay, he had seen the “sneaking progress” of a smoldering plague suddenly flare into a violent outbreak with heavy casualties.¹³ He feared the worst days might lie ahead.

Back at the University of Michigan, his fellow plague commissioner Frederick Novy was thrust into an emergency after a deadly lab accident. Novy had carried vials containing bubonic plague samples from San