Chinese wares or dirty laundry, or food or dust. The agents of infection couldn’t be fenced or quarantined, because they were mobile, sequestered in the walls, slipping in stealth from house to house.
Sick rats had been seen as the harbingers of plague for centuries. However, their link with human casualties remained a mystery. But then Paul-Louis Simond, a Pasteur Institute scientist working in India, theorized that plague in rats and people had a common cause. Simond suspected that the missing link was
Unhappily for patients yet to come, Simond’s breakthrough only drew scorn from medical skeptics. Plague was still seen as a scourge of dark-skinned aliens. These prejudices persisted until 1906, when the British plague commission in India confirmed Simond’s findings. Only then would the medical establishment accept flea-borne transmission as the spark of deadly plague epidemics.
When San Francisco’s plague struck in 1900, Simond’s flea discovery was three years old. Scientists in Sydney that year gave the theory added credence by discovering plague bacteria in the stomach of fleas. The explosive impact of these findings, when taken together, was swamped in a sea of lesser theories.
Surgeon General Walter Wyman had published his own monograph on plague in January 1900. In it, he reviewed a host of hypotheses. Plague, he said, can be contracted by inhaling dust, consuming tainted food or drink, and handling contaminated household goods. In citing a successful German rat bounty, where people were paid 5 pfennig apiece for dead rodents, Wyman neared an insight.
“It is very possible that the fleas which infest rats, and which notoriously leave their bodies as soon as the cadavers become cold after death, may by their bites infect other rats,” he wrote. But after coming so close to the heart of the matter, Wyman retreated. “The bites of insects play a very small role,” he concluded.8 In the end, the surgeon general endorsed the racial theory of plague as a disease that selectively attacked Asians, owing to their poverty and vegetarian diets.
Meanwhile, San Francisco rats bred and spread, heedless of skin color or scientific fashion.
Wong Chung, Detective
RED CIRCLES AND BLACK CROSSES multiplied across the map of Chinatown, marking new cases and deaths. The city health board tried to help, but the state health board blocked Blue at every turn.
Dr. W. P. Mathews, secretary of the state health board, burst into the Merchant Street lab, loudly declaring that the federal doctors had no authority to practice medicine in California. If they kept on diagnosing plague, he threatened, he’d cut off their access to patients.
Blue exploded. “Scant courtesy, singular apathy, and in the end, interference have characterized [the state board] at a time of grave public peril,” he wrote to Surgeon General Wyman.1
In the face of state hostility, Blue told Wyman he was relying more and more on his interpreter, Wong Chung. Wong’s evolution from simple translator to disease sleuth galvanized Blue’s investigation. Wong Chung helped sift fact from fiction in the most difficult cases. And the state health board wasn’t happy about it.
Two physicians working in league with the state, William Lawlor and Elmer Stone, “shamefully abused” Wong Chung for reporting cases to the federal doctors, a worried Mark White told Blue. The state doctors spread word through the streets of Chinatown that federal plague doctors were only out to oppress the community. By assisting them, they added, Wong Chung had turned traitor. White said the two had warned Wong, “[S]omebody was going to get killed.”2
There was no doubt: The Barbary Coast turned the public health canon on its head. Yet even in the depth of their frustration with the state, Rupert Blue and Mark White were learning that they could relax some of the most rigid protocols of quarantine. While showing no mercy to the germ of plague, they began to show more leniency toward its victims. Where Joseph Kinyoun and Joseph White had seen the Chinese as liars, Rupert Blue and Mark White saw instead a people driven from fear to evasion and from evasion into further danger.
“To remove the fear of a ruinous quarantine… will take away one-half the Chinaman’s hostility,” Blue wrote Washington. From now on he would quickly disinfect a plague house, isolate only the patient’s immediate family, and reopen the place in a few days so life could return to normal. Still, suspicions died hard.
“It is almost impossible to catch the Chinese contacts,” Blue admitted. “They seem to know a suspicious case, and depart, like the fleas, before the body cools off. Each case, though, is a law unto itself… and no rule can be set for all of them. We are still working quietly, avoiding friction with the state or the Chinese.”3
In the same letter, Blue warned that plague was unpredictable: “The outcome of the situation here defies any attempt to outline it.”
Every morning, Blue and White left the Occidental Hotel and walked or hopped a streetcar for the half a dozen blocks north toward Chinatown. A briny wind off the bay stirred morning scents of coffee, sourdough, and the deposits left by carriage horses.
When they passed the corner of Clay and Kearny, with Telegraph Hill rising ahead of them, Blue and White continued another half block north and turned into the narrow alley of Merchant Street. Once through the laboratory doors, they entered a cloud of disinfectant vapor mixed with the musky warmth of the animal lab. In autumn 1901, the morgue was receiving a steady drip of customers, and today was no exception.
The hearse driver nodded toward a shrouded figure on a litter. Lifting the sheet, Blue saw the husk of a middle-aged laborer lying still and sallow, with mumpslike swellings jutting under his jaw. Chew Ban Yuen, a forty- year-old migrant worker, had just returned from a season in the Alaska fish canneries when he was felled by a profound weakness and savage sore throat. His friends brought balms from a traditional healer—to no avail. He died September 29 in a fetid, sunless tenement on Waverly Street. His autopsy confirmed plague.
Newspapers were full of the coming mayoral election, but plague was the issue that everyone dodged. The campaign was all about labor and management. After a summer of strike violence, San Franciscans—especially workers—were bruised and vulnerable to seduction by a new party promising a progressive labor stance. This opportunity beckoned to a political kingmaker named Abraham Ruef and his handpicked mayoral candidate, the suave society violinist Eugene Schmitz.4
Schmitz had never given a speech, but he was a Victorian Adonis with a lush black pompadour and beard. Ruef supplied the brains and cash for the campaign. And without ever uttering the word
From the lab on Merchant Street, the public health team watched the race with unease. As dusk fell on Election Day, November 5, crowds gathered at Kearny and Market Streets. Colored fireworks would signal the winner: red for the Democrats, white for the Republicans, and green for Labor. A brass band blared, punctuated by the boom of rockets. In a shower of sparkles that lit the crowd with the color of money, Schmitz was proclaimed mayor. Boisterous joy rocked the working-class districts south of Market Street.5
The joy was short-lived. Once installed, the Union Labor Party was less about principles than power. Now attorney to the mayor, Abe Ruef set about perfecting the art of graft. After hours at the Pup saloon, Ruef nursed a glass of absinthe and received lines of favor seekers, soliciting $1 million in legal retainers—bribes—from utility companies, gambling parlors, boxing clubs, and brothels.6
With so many rich veins of patronage to be mined, City Hall saw scant profit in public health. During the weeks surrounding the election, the rat fleas attacked and sickened seven new people in Chinatown. Before Christmas, a barber, a cobbler, a cigar maker, and a hardware salesman would land in the morgue.
A lucky few were like Huie Jin, who contracted a mild case of plague. Ignoring Mark White’s biopsy results indicating plague, state doctors diagnosed venereal disease. When Huie Jim sued for release from quarantine, the state board of health backed his demand and helped win his release.7
