burst into the health department, startling a doctor who was giving a vaccination.
“I have removed the present Board of Health and appointed these gentlemen as their successors,” said Schmitz with a flourish toward four doctors trailing behind him. “There is no plague in the city,” the mayor said. By its diagnosis, the old health board was guilty of “injury and injustice to the people and the city of San Francisco.”14 The next morning’s newspapers applauded the mayor’s action. A judge barred the firings because no hearings had been held. But Mayor Schmitz and Boss Ruef charged back to court to defend the purge.
Meanwhile, plague kept up a petty creeping pace.
Then, on the afternoon of May 19, the phone rang at the Chinese Six Companies. Wong Chung, the translator, answered it. A voice reported a corpse at the offices of the Horn Hong Newspaper Co. on Washington Street. The body was that of an editor, Lee Mong, aged forty-six, who had fallen dead at one P.M. The caller then turned skittish, asking for whom Wong worked.
“I work for the doctors of Washington,” said Wong. At this, the caller said he needed to report the death to the state health board and the Chinese Six Companies’ doctor, Elmer Stone. Then he hung up.15
Refusal to yield bodies, false death certificates, patients coached to keep silent—it was all part of the daily game of resistance played by the state doctors, and it had Governor Gage’s fingerprints all over it.
Mark White dashed off a handwritten letter to Dr. Wyman asking for the Secret Service to help find out whether the state health board was helping to conceal Chinese bodies. “I regret [to] suspect Dr. Stone of such rascality, but I believe that he is perfectly suitable for such work.”16
Dr. Stone’s boss, Governor Gage, was just then fighting for his political life. The past year’s strike violence had eroded his popularity. Now fresh scandals erupted. Gage was charged with furnishing his house with prison- made furniture. In a page one expose in the
Even as his political star waned, Gage was proud and unrepentant about his plague stance. His Chinatown cleanup—part of the deal he cut with the surgeon general—was done on the cheap: fumigating thirty million cubic feet of Chinatown buildings using only three hundred pounds of sulfur—a job that should have taken thirty tons. It was a sham, a show cleanup that left rats and fleas alive. Still, Gage and Dr. Stone told the federal doctors that their mission was over and “should have stopped here long ago.”18
The federal doctors did not pull out, however. The federal public health mission was, in fact, broadening its scope. Under Walter Wyman, the name of the U.S. Marine Hospital Service was changed to the U.S. Public Health and Marine Hospital Service. Just as the plague campaign had broadened from shipboard inspection to investigation of an urban outbreak, so the service was evolving now from a corps of doctors treating sick seamen to a public health service fighting epidemics all over the country.
It was fortunate that the federal doctors stayed on the scene. For in the summer of 1902, the plague came roaring back. After months of quiet infestation, the rats emerged from hiding, coated with ravenous fleas. Suddenly, Mark White and his team had more than they could handle.
On July 12, Chin Guie, an employee of the Chinese consulate, staggered into the Oriental Dispensary. The dispensary gave comfort but delayed calling the federal doctors until Chin was in his final agony. Mark White arrived to find the man near death. In five minutes, Chin was gone. White learned that one of the state board’s doctors, Dr. Fitch, had treated him for syphilis—despite a big bubo on his thigh.
In the weeks that followed, more victims surfaced: a young restaurant worker, an aged cigar maker, a housewife, a cook, another newspaper man, and a blind woman who had never left her apartment. She was case number 71.
The little morgue and lab was strained. Carbolic acid—part of the morgue and lab’s daily disinfection bath— stained its floor the hue of tobacco juice around a spittoon. The building had no rugs and only a single heating grate to dispel the penetrating fog that flowed off the bay. The daily workload increased: collecting the dead, conducting autopsies, taking blood and tissue samples, growing cultures of bacteria, and injecting test animals to confirm a diagnosis. With each new death, the process began again. The small lab staff fell behind. White asked for an extra $25 a month for help in making cultures. Surgeon General Wyman vetoed the plan as too costly.
While the shell game of people moved around San Francisco Bay continued, White learned that someone had paid $100—about two months’ wages—to smuggle a sick teenage boy out of San Francisco to Oakland’s Chinatown. There, three days later, the boy died and a cook fell mortally ill with plague.19 By September 1902, the toll reached eighty cases.
The Chinese government installed a new consul general in San Francisco. The new consul tried again to ban autopsies in Chinatown as a racist practice. The public health doctors refused, ruling that the victim of any suspicious death—irrespective of race—had to undergo a postmortem examination to rule out the possibility of plague. Amid this changing of the guard, the Chinatown gangsters known as “highbinders” grew bolder. Highbinders, named for their habit of coiling their queues high up under their hats, had long waged turf battles for control of lucrative Chinatown rackets.
But now the highbinders took aim at a new target: the interpreter Wong Chung. Where the state health board had seen Wong Chung’s work as troublesome, some Chinese now saw it as treason. The knives were out.
“The Chinese are threatening Wong Chung because he is assisting the Marine Hospital Service in the work of eradicating plague,” Mark White wired the surgeon general. “… Wong has been advised by friends to guard against highbinders. The situation [is] serious.”20
One night, Wong attended a special meeting of his old colleagues at the Chinese Six Companies. As the elders talked business, several highbinders emerged from the crowd. They lunged for Wong Chung. Wong, although deceptively soft and middle-aged, was nimble. He dodged and evaded their grasp, his queue flying. The Chinese Six Companies president threw himself between Wong and his pursuers. In the scuffle, the assailants fled, disappearing into the night streets of Chinatown.21
After the botched assault, U.S. secretary of state John Hay moved in to shield Wong from violence. Hay formally asked the Chinese minister in Washington to help stop the harassment of “Federal Chinese employees in their official duties.”22 Under the cloak of state department protection, Wong Chung continued his medical rounds unmolested.
“Send Blue ASAP”
THE AUTUMN OF 1902 saw California’s plague stalemate become a national scandal that the state could no longer conceal or deny.
In San Francisco, another white patient caught doctors off guard. Arthur Caswell, thirty-three years old, was a hard-drinking salesman at the Adolph Schwartz apparel store on 3rd Street. Caswell spent his days peddling suits, his nights hoisting glasses at a saloon. On Friday, October 24, he worked all day fitting suits on soldiers who had just shipped home from Spanish-American War duty in Manila. That night, he crawled home exhausted. On Saturday, a wave of nausea hit him harder than any hangover ever had. By Sunday morning, Caswell awoke to find a hard red lump and a gnawing pain in his groin.
He rushed to Clara Barton Hospital on Geary Boulevard. Doctors found the tender bulge in his pelvis and diagnosed Caswell with a strangulated hernia, a dangerous condition that occurs when a loop of intestine pokes through the muscle wall and becomes choked off from its blood supply. After scrubbing for emergency surgery, the surgeon made an incision in Caswell’s right groin. He was shocked to find no hernia at all. Instead, he saw a skein of infected lymph glands.
The surgeon bundled Caswell into an ambulance and transferred him to the City and County Hospital. Mark White met the patient there. He examined the infected glands, which were starting to hemorrhage. There was little doubt about the cause. White injected him with Yersin’s plague antiserum, and Caswell hung on.
