The Barbary Plague

Huie Jin survived his brush with plague. But the habeas corpus cases further frayed state-federal relations. The new mayor kept mum.

Cold weather was the off-season for plague. Sweeping in ahead of the rainy season, chill winds drove the rats underground, into warm basements and subterranean sewers. There the rat sickness would fester unseen until spring coaxed the animals back into human dwellings.

While disease wintered in the Asian quarter, white San Franciscans felt carefree. With the strikes settled and the election decided, autumn arts and sporting exhibitions took center stage. A covey of divas flocked to town for opera season. Sybil Sanderson came to star in Manon, and Ernestine Schumann-Heink unleashed her throaty contralto in Die Walkure.

After a crowd of 3,300 cheered her performance in Lohengrin, the soprano Emma Eames took a day off and went adventuring in Chinatown. Riding past pearl dealers and fishmongers, she soaked up its mix of splendor and squalor. She took tea at a Dupont Street restaurant, then dashed back to her Palace suite, urging her fellow singers to do Chinatown. Still unsure how the disease spread, the public health officers must have felt uneasy about tourists in a plague zone. But they kept silent about the diva’s visit.

Rupert Blue liked grand opera well enough, but he spent more of his free nights on boxing than bel canto. Billed by promoters as “the arts fistic,” boxing was the municipal sport. The public worshiped icons of the ring like Gentleman Jim Corbett. His mighty physique was displayed across the illustrated sports pages, along with a table of his muscle measurements. His contests in the ring and his turbulent love life were news events. Quacks sold electric belts that promised to turn weaklings into mountains of muscle.

While the silk-hatted and ermine-caped set settled into the plush tiers of the Grand Opera, a crowd of seven thousand boxing fans snaked into the cavernous Mechanics’ Pavilion at Larkin and Grove Streets. For $2 to $20 a ticket, spectators could watch the favorite, Jim Jeffries, pound challenger Gus Ruhlin. The mellow gaslights dimmed. Eighty new arc lights snapped on, flooding the ring in an electric aura “more brilliant than the brightest day.” Grinning and cracking his gum, Jeffries bounded over the ropes and dispatched Ruhlin in five easy rounds. Exiting in a beery haze and crunching peanut shells underfoot, the crowd grumbled that the fight was fixed. Wrote the Chronicle sports reporter: “They were a disgusted lot….”⁸

Blue, whose forefathers all topped six feet, was a natural heavyweight and a passionate amateur boxer. When Gentleman Jim Corbett visited San Francisco, Blue arranged to meet him.

“I can’t talk you out of it,” Corbett told the southerner with the black handlebar mustache. “So come on out and I’ll box you.” In the smell of canvas and the company of men, Blue found a tonic.⁹

Spectator or sparring partner, Blue found the fights one way to purge the frustrations of his job. Like the Jeffries-Ruhlin fight, his job was an uneven match. With only medical science on his side, Blue saw the town’s politics, money, and racial polarities aligned against his cause. The odds were disheartening.

ON THANKSGIVING DAY 1901, the holiday’s peace was shattered in Chinatown. A tong member stole a servant girl’s bracelet and pawned it. The petty theft provoked a bloodbath between rival gangs. To be sure, Chinatown was not the only crime zone in the city, but the tong murders were held up by the white press as reason enough to renew the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Tong war casualties totaled fourteen in 1901, but plague deaths exceeded twenty that year alone. More lethal than gang violence, plague was a methodical serial killer, quietly going about its business, while polite society never spoke its name.

Warily, Chinatown watched the exclusion law campaign gain steam. The Chinese Six Companies called on every Chinese in town to donate $1 to help defeat the anti-Chinese laws. Over at the offices of the Chung Sai Yat Po, the Chinatown daily newspaper, editors viewed the campaign with mounting alarm. Editor Ng Poon Chew, who had covered the plague discrimination cases, now saw the nationwide threat that was looming and embarked on an East Coast crusade to try to change American minds.

Barnstorming on behalf of Chinese civil rights, Reverend Chew opened with a selection of hymns, then launched into his speech. The United States needs Asian trade to prosper, he ventured, so it must abolish the Chinese Exclusion Act.¹⁰ With his cropped Western haircut, clipped mustache, and starched white collar, the thirty-five-year-old Chew gave audiences a look at Chinatown they had never seen. He was neither a tong hit man, an opium addict, nor a comic-strip coolie, but an educated Chinese American professional man.

Nonetheless, few heard his message. His speeches were drowned out by insistent union demands to oust coolie labor. And that was the message that reached the White House. Unlike the crude rants of the daily press, Roosevelt’s exclusion-law speech was elegant. Bound in fine brown morocco with gold lettering, the president’s address said American labor must be protected from “the presence in this country of any laborers [who] represent a standard of living so depressed that they can undersell our men in the labor market and drag them to a lower level.” Roosevelt concluded: “I regard it as necessary, with this end in view, to re-enact immediately the law excluding Chinese laborers, and to strengthen it.”¹¹

So saying, the president who dined with Booker T. Washington and lowered the black-white barrier used his bully pulpit to preach Chinese exclusion. Reverend Chew returned home defeated to a Chinatown doubly infected by epidemic and exclusion fever.

IT HAD BEEN NINE MONTHS since Rupert Blue had left his quiet post in Milwaukee, having been ordered to San Francisco to wipe out plague. Now, after performing scores of autopsies, confirming dozens of diagnoses, and conducting a cleanup of Chinatown, he had, at best, fought plague to a political stalemate. In his cool soldierly diction, he had filed weekly case reports to the surgeon general, noting the numbers of plague cases and deaths, autopsies and lab tests. Although the state blocked him at every turn, he fought to maintain a stoic sense of calm and command amid the chaos.

But as 1901 drew to a close, Blue wrote to the surgeon general acknowledging his hopes of returning to the Midwest. There, he was truly in charge. There, he could command his station on the Lake Michigan waterfront without obstruction from state politicians. By year’s end, Wyman granted his wish to resume command of the Milwaukee station. However, it would prove to be only a temporary leave from the woes of San Francisco, where the plague took no holiday.

Just before New Year’s Day 1902, a dead rat turned up in a Stockton Street garbage can. Like an ancient augur, Mark White split the animal in two, peered into its liver, and saw plague in the year ahead. As the New Year got under way, White was left in charge of a plague that played hide-and-seek, with stuttering outbreaks and eerie pauses.

Elsewhere, 1902 had promised to be an age of progress. Marconi forecast a world where wireless transmitters would beam messages over continents. Doctors envisioned curing cancer with invisible “X-rays.” In the Examiner on New Year’s Day 1902, San Franciscans read scientific prophecies by the novelist Jules Verne. News would be transmitted by airwaves, Verne predicted. Electricity would banish night and illuminate a twenty-four-hour workday. Only airplanes made him skeptical: Man, he said, would never fly.¹²

San Francisco’s profile rose to heady heights. On Nob Hill, architects drew up plans for a stone palazzo to be called the Fairmont Hotel. Developers also unveiled a blueprint for a new steel-ribbed skyscraper on California Street: the Merchants’ Exchange. All the new towers boasted that they were earthquake- and fireproof—a claim that just begged to be tested.

Chinatown lit the fuse of the Lunar New Year, but its firecrackers failed to dispel its demons. Consul Ho Yow lost his job amid charges that he spent too much time at the races and too little time fighting the exclusion laws. Katie Wong Him, a twelve-year-old schoolgirl, sought admission to the city’s white schools; she was rejected owing to her race. Still, the rats ran unchecked through the neighborhood. Mark White predicted “the growing likelihood of an epidemic….”¹³

Swathed in fumes of formaldehyde and carbolic acid, White ruminated in his Merchant Street laboratory over how to interpret the stop-and-start rhythm of the plague cases. Was plague eradicated and then reintroduced? Was it hiding or provoking sporadic cases that went undetected? Or was it killing people whose bodies were shipped out of town in dry goods boxes and buried on Sacramento River ranches? Most likely, he feared, all three things were happening at once.

White planned to brief the new mayor, Eugene Schmitz, and enlist City Hall in the plague fight. But he never got his chance. At five P.M. on March 25, as the sun set behind the City Hall dome, Mayor Schmitz and Abe Ruef