While Caswell was fighting for his life, the leaders of the State and Provincial Health Boards of North America were fighting to get the facts about San Francisco’s plague. As they gathered for their annual conference in New Haven, Connecticut, members had read dispatches from San Francisco in the New York newspapers. News of the unchecked epidemic, which ran counter to official state denials, infuriated the conferees. They moved plague to the top of their agenda and immediately passed a resolution condemning California. The plague was “a matter of grave national concern,” they declared, branding the state’s inaction an “irretrievable disgrace.”1
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors monitored the meeting with trepidation. The board sent frantic appeals to Governor Gage’s ranch in Downey, where the lame duck governor had gone in the waning days of his administration. They implored Gage to come to the city and acknowledge the outbreak. Gage refused.
Arthur Caswell failed to respond to the injections of antiserum. He died on Halloween, the city’s eighty-ninth case of bubonic plague.
Mark White had no idea how Caswell contracted plague. He lived and worked far from Chinatown and denied visiting there in more than a year. On the plague death list, doctors wrote a footnote labeling Caswell “a rounder,” as if his drinking sprees explained his fate.2
While Mark White struggled against rising plague and obdurate politics, Surgeon General Wyman quietly hedged his bets. He dispatched another doctor, Arthur Glennan, out West. Glennan’s job was to investigate sporadic plague cases in outlying areas of California and to make one last bid for cooperation from the outgoing governor.
Glennan took the train into Southern California. In the fragrant heat of his orange and walnut groves, Gage heartily welcomed Glennan. But when he learned the nature of Glennan’s mission, Gage exploded.
“That God-damned plague again!” he said.3
“The surgeon general only wants to clear up suspicious reports… without any publicity,” Glennan soothed. He added he didn’t want to find plague, only to find out the truth and to suggest quiet remedies.
“I’ll cooperate with Surgeon General Wyman and with you, but damn the others,” said Gage. “Kinyoun would have been mobbed and hanged in San Francisco if I had not prevented it,” he added. “And now, I am sorry that I did.”
Gage still blamed his political downfall on Kinyoun and the plague, but promised to cooperate this time if Glennan could prevent an embargo against the state. Glennan, green but cocky, thought he could do business with this governor. After all, wasn’t he the surgeon general’s new favorite and chosen successor to Mark White?
The race for the California governorship hurtled into its final days, with the Republicans’ new nominee, Dr. George C. Pardee, favored to win. Pardee was the federal doctors’ best hope, since as a physician he might take plague seriously. But to their dismay, Pardee kept silent on the subject of plague throughout his campaign.4
On Election Day, November 4, as San Franciscans lined up to cast their ballots, an urgent meeting convened under the dome of City Hall. U.S. Senator Perkins, who helped arrange the pact of silence about the plague, now acknowledged it openly.
“I know Surgeon General Wyman well,” the senator said. “I can tell you that unless the Governor and the state health authorities recognize the existence of plague here and take steps to eradicate it, the State will be quarantined.”
Governor Gage’s emissary, Dr. Mathews, argued, “The disease is not bubonic plague. Every Chinaman on the West Coast has swollen glands.”5 But it was the last gasp of the Gage era. At that moment, voters were casting ballots for George Pardee. Despite his silence on the campaign trail, Pardee sent private signals to the federal doctors that he would support their fight to wipe out plague. Pardee became the public health service’s best hope.
With the election over and Thanksgiving approaching, the city of San Francisco finally dealt with the rat population. It was a full year after Rupert Blue probed the death of the laundress Marguerete Saggau and concluded that her home’s proximity to Chinatown was “a distance easily covered by rats in their migration.”
Now, at last, the city began laying traps in earnest. Daily rounds yielded a crop of animals for the federal laboratory on Merchant Street to analyze. In Fish Alley, one of Chinatown’s poorest side streets, they found a grizzled rat corpse with plague bacteria in its heart. Dead rats under a sink on Merchant Street, a few doors down from the federal lab, were infected.
In two weeks, teams harvested sixteen plague-infected rats from traps in streets and sewers. Mark White readied himself for this new phase of the campaign. To his shock, he learned he would play no role in it. On December 12, Surgeon General Wyman transferred White to Portland. San Francisco was placed under the command of the newcomer Glennan. White protested that Glennan had undermined his authority by agreeing to let Gage send detectives to spy on White—a fellow officer. It was an outrage. But Wyman didn’t heed the complaint. White was out the revolving door.
Glennan soon learned it was he who had been double-crossed. The
Surgeon General Wyman now decided to visit San Francisco to view the outbreak for himself and to pay a courtesy call on outgoing Governor Gage. Then he visited the federal morgue and lab on Merchant Street. Wyman toured Chinatown—first with the governor’s men and then with his own officers. He peered into plague houses, inhaling the stench of death his men breathed daily. After six days’ immersion, Wyman finally felt his men’s frustration and saw how politics had hamstrung their work.7
But to other state health leaders, the surgeon general continued to play down the threat. Writing to the health chief of Louisiana, he struck a casual and reassuring tone.
“The infection appears to be limited to Chinatown in San Francisco and to be restricted even within the limits of that locality to a very small area,” Gage wrote. “I was informed by the president of the City Board of Health, Dr. Williamson, that in his opinion there was very little of it.”8
Wyman’s letter contradicted the very facts discovered by his own men. For by now, every block of Chinatown was involved in the outbreak. At least half a dozen white people had fallen victim to plague. Odd cases were cropping up in distant corners of San Francisco. Sporadic cases in Oakland were even harder to explain.
Glennan traveled to Sacramento to meet the newly elected governor, George Pardee. When he arrived at the domed white capitol, he recounted how official denial had hamstrung the public health service for three years, and he asked the new governor’s help. Pardee was sympathetic, but he had his own worries. His margin of victory was thin. Open acknowledgment of plague would, he feared, anger his supporters and undermine his administration. He preferred to lend his support behind the scenes.
Glennan’s confidence began to waver. Mired in the fogbank of California politics, he finally saw the impossibility of a frontal assault on the plague. As long as elected officials refused to say the word, doctors were helpless to engage the public’s support. It was, he told the surgeon general, “the most complicated situation I have ever known.”9
In January 1903, state health chiefs convened at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. They were even more irate than they had been in New Haven. Once again, they censured California for its gross neglect and Governor Gage for denial that imperiled the country at large.10
Radicals among the state health chiefs wanted to do more than censure; they wanted to quarantine California. They also wanted the secretary of war to move the military’s Pacific Coast transit service out of San Francisco. San Francisco long had feared losing military business to its rival Seattle. A quarantine and military pullout would cost San Francisco untold millions. The moderate state health chiefs just managed to defeat the measures—for the time being.
But California’s delegate to the conference cautioned that the reprieve wouldn’t last. Matthew Gardner, longtime physician of the Southern Pacific Railroad Co., wired his colleagues that the state now had no choice but to tell the truth. An admission, and a plan of action, were the only way to prevent a nationwide embargo.
Surgeon General Walter Wyman, who had also attended the stormy sessions, wired Arthur Glennan to confirm that the states were in earnest. Any further stalling by California would ensure a financial debacle. More important, California’s denial had to end because it had become an acute embarrassment. The public health service looked weak and ineffectual after a failed three-year effort to wipe out the bubonic plague that the state still called a fake.
It was time to bring back a veteran. One federal colleague knew his way around the city, and that was
