Rupert Blue. But Blue was 2,200 miles away, patrolling the lakefront in Milwaukee.
Wyman wired Glennan a list of instructions and added: “Unless you wire me not needed will send Blue.”11
Glennan, less than two months into this thankless assignment, didn’t hesitate. He wired the surgeon general: “Please send Blue as soon as possible.”12
The Perimeter Widens
“I LEAVE TOMORROW for San Francisco.”1
Rupert Blue jotted the note to his sister Kate from Milwaukee on January 31, 1903, as he packed to leave town. He was clearing out and shipping home to South Carolina all the clothes, books, and assorted truck from his marriage that a roving sanitarian didn’t need in resuming the single life out of a suitcase. Nearly thirty-five, he was starting over.
His train reached San Francisco in February—the month when the rainy season cloaked gay Victorian facades in dour gray and unleashed rivulets of mud down the cobblestones. He checked into the marble-clad Occidental Hotel on Sutter Street. Since Blue last set foot in the city, things had deteriorated. Plague’s toll had almost doubled to ninety-three cases. California’s negligence had made the state a national pariah. Now, as the infection seeped south of the border, its unpopularity spread. Mexico blamed a plague outbreak in Mazatlan on rats in vegetable crates from San Francisco. Ecuador barred all vessels from the state of California.
To prevent a revolt by other states and countries, Glennan told California it must acknowledge the plague and adopt a plan to wipe it out. Businessmen hedged around uneasily, drafting a weasel-worded statement about California’s “alleged plague.” Glennan got angry. Speak plainly, he said, or face ruin. He drafted a declaration, which the businessmen reluctantly signed. Then together they marched to City Hall to confront the mayor.
Mayor Schmitz, outnumbered, couldn’t charm his way out. With Glennan and the businessmen looking on, the mayor grimly scratched his signature. Then Glennan, triumphant, boarded a train for Sacramento to get the governor’s signature. Governor Pardee, while he’d never denied the plague, wasn’t eager to trumpet it to the world, either. But he, too, had no choice. With Schmitz and Pardee inking the deal, and Blue back in town to manage the Chinatown cleanup, Glennan told the surgeon general the situation was under control.2
Blue’s first task was managing a joint plan of action to clean up plague houses and clear out rat refuges. The crux of the plan was this: The state would hire three medical inspectors, two sanitary engineers, and two Chinese interpreters. The city would lay traps and poison bait for rats. Chinatown streets would be washed regularly. Dupont Street would get a coat of asphalt. The public health service would inspect the sick and the dead, run the plague lab, and report to Washington on the cleanup and the caseload.
Blue was confident. “Thing are smoothly moving,” he jotted in the plague lab journal.3 But that season, his public health officers landed in the infirmary. Drs. Glennan, Currie, and Lloyd all came down with influenza. Their stenographer landed in the pesthouse with smallpox. Their second Chinese interpreter, Fong Dont, got measles. Only Blue stayed on his feet.
He had to. Warm weather would soon bring out the fleas in droves. Chinatown’s cleanup went into high gear with a frenzy of cleansing, exterminating, and remodeling. The smoking and scrubbing out of germs continued. Workers lugged hand pumps into buildings, spraying a mist of carbolic acid that left a musty scent of mothballs. They stirred smoking pots of sulfur, casting a fog that reeked of rotten eggs. And they sprinkled chlorinated lime in houses, releasing a vapor of chlorine gas that drove the residents outside, gasping for air. To many Chinese, the treatment seemed like harassment at best, poisoning at worst.
Next Blue undertook his assault on rats. To be successful, he had to appeal to their palates. Blue knew rats were gourmets—they would never take boring bait—so he devised a varied menu, including cheese in a Welsh rabbit and rye bread sandwiches with bacon. He spiked the meals with arsenic or phosphorous poison.
A third front of the war was aimed at the very structure of Chinatown. Over the years, a racially biased housing market had sealed the growing population into the narrow district. Apartments had sprouted ramshackle additions to stretch crowded living space. Wooden porches and balconies, tacked on to buildings, now overhung the streets, leaving the ground below dark and damp under a layer of trash. Blue asked the city board of health to declare the additions unsanitary and schedule them for demolition.
The Chinese protested that the demolitions were unfair. Haphazard extensions were necessary to stretch the overcrowded living space. They weren’t to blame for the overcrowding, they said. They were simply caught in the squeeze.
Landlords sued to block the demolitions. Court injunctions halted the work. Glennan and Blue attended public hearings at the board of health, arguing that porches and balconies were a health nuisance. The campaign was unpopular, but the alternative was even worse: a proposal by white merchants suggested that the city clear the Chinese and relocate them to Hunter’s Point.4 Blue’s program, while tough, at least had the virtue of trying to make Chinatown more habitable.
Finally, sanitary engineers got a green light to begin prying the rotten balconies off Chinatown apartments. Stacks of splintered timber grew in the street.
The woodpiles drew the eyes of poor scavengers.
One sharp-eyed passerby was a Sicilian railroad man named Pietro Spadafora. With his wife, two children, and aged mother, Spadafora lived on an alley in the city’s Latin Quarter, just a few blocks north of Chinatown. Each day, he crossed Chinatown on his way to and from work at the Southern Pacific Railroad yards south of Market Street. Evenings after work, he paused in Chinatown to hunt for bargains among the sidewalk bins of cabbages and bitter greens, oranges and onions. One night he saw an even better bargain: free firewood. Surely a poor man could be forgiven if he took an armload to light his stove and chase the chill of a foggy summer night.
Pietro mounted the steps to his Victorian row house at 19 Jasper Place and presented his family with the makings of dinner and a good fire. A couple of days after this repast, Pietro fell ill. His forehead burned, his muscles ached, his stomach revolted, and all the strength fled from his limbs. Too weak to protest, he was carted off to the Southern Pacific Hospital, his company’s infirmary, on Mission Street.
Shortly after they took her son, Pietro’s mother found a tender lump low in her belly. Her fever rose. She burned and shivered by turns. Still, she did not go to the hospital but remained at home, awaiting her son’s return.
Pietro did not come home. He died on July 19 in the Southern Pacific Hospital, leaving his widow with two small children. When doctors rushed to the house on Jasper Place to investigate, they found his mother, Pietra Brancato, slipping from consciousness into coma. Mrs. Brancato survived her son by little more than a day. Both were victims of bubonic plague.
Blue ruminated about the source of this case, twisting his mustache. Compared to the tenements of Chinatown, a few blocks to the south, the houses in the Latin Quarter were new, spacious, and sound. Next, he pondered Pietro’s travels about town. On his rounds from North Beach to his job in the district south of Market Street, he shopped in Chinatown, but plague seemed unlikely to lurk in his grocery basket. Then there was the matter of the debris.
The rotten timber, discarded from condemned buildings, was being stolen for firewood. After wrestling with the peculiar facts of the case, Blue could only conclude that Pietro Spadafora had carried home kindling from a plague house that was crawling with fleas. For warming his hearth with pilfered wood, he and his mother paid with their lives.5
Suddenly, Blue worried that other scavengers might carry plague-infested wood into other homes. So he quickly ordered that all debris from condemned dwellings be dredged with powdered lime—a disinfectant that rendered it unusable as firewood. The debris would then be guarded by police until it could be safely burned, beyond the reach of poor pilferers. Finally, he ordered inspectors to press northward into the flats and row houses of the bustling Latin Quarter.
In the summer of 1903, when Arthur Glennan was recalled to Washington for a new assignment, Blue finally took formal command of the San Francisco plague operation. It was the function he’d fulfilled for some time, the role he was destined to play. Despite Glennan’s political naivete and tactical missteps, Blue was a gracious
