successor. He credited his predecessor for working to unite the city’s warring factions, and he vowed to finish the job.
Under Blue’s direction, the rat trapping and cleanup of Chinatown became more systematic. Each week, he filed reports on the number of dwellings inspected and condemned, the number of rats trapped and autopsied, the number of people visited, both sick and dead. As a part of this grisly accounting, Surgeon General Wyman asked to know the race of each victim. It was a desperate but misguided search for clues, since plague was starting to defy racial theories of susceptibility.
With the death of Pietro Spadafora and his mother, Blue’s team began inspecting thousands of white apartments in the cosmopolitan Latin Quarter. For the first time, Caucasian homes outnumbered those of Chinese on the inspection log.
All hope of containing plague in one geographic area evaporated. Another quarter was now infected, Blue told the surgeon general. Gone, too, was the logic of assessing risk by nationality. The Latin Quarter, now called North Beach, was home to Portuguese, Mexican, Italian, and French households. A melting pot of races, it now turned into a crucible of risk. The perimeter was widening.6
The Chamber of Commerce, unimpressed with moves to make Chinatown more livable, resumed the cry to raze the district outright. “Chinatown menaces every man and every family and every interest in San Francisco, and sooner or later it must be wiped out,” the chamber declared. “No amount of cleansing and scouring will give us permanent relief.”7
But health was just a pretext. The fact was that Chinatown sat on prime land, surrounded by Union Square, Nob Hill, and the financial district. Businessmen wanted to relocate the Chinese people to a spot where a quarantine wouldn’t interrupt downtown businesses. Blue still hoped to make Chinatown healthy.
One day Blue looked up from his labors and was surprised to find his old University of Virginia friend and sometime competitor, Joe Guthrie. They celebrated their reunion like college boys. Touring the San Francisco night spots, they painted the town red. “This we did to the Queen’s taste,” he wrote Kate, “managing however to keep out of the hands of the police….”8
After his night out, Blue must have realized how thoroughly he’d submerged his personal into his professional life since his split with Juliette. During his marriage, his letters were loquacious and charming, filled with wordplay and sketches of the people and places he encountered. Afterward, they were brief, telegraphic, and guarded. Kate, for her part, avoided references to her brother’s doomed marriage. But now Blue lowered his emotional drawbridge, reaching out for more family contact. “Dear child,” he teased her, “don’t count letters with me, but write often.” And he closed, “With dearest love to all, Yours, Rupert.”
Soon enough, it was back to work. Ignoring Chamber of Commerce calls to destroy and relocate Chinatown, Blue pushed deeper into the very foundations of the district. He wanted to replace the porous wooden cellars that served as rat catacombs with hardened, rat-proof concrete basements. He would clear trash-choked cellars and courtyards, scrape away a foot of subsoil, and pour cement floors. He dubbed this phase of the work “building out the plague.”
With cases in Chinatown slowing to a handful, Blue couldn’t suppress his feelings of progress. But the steady pulse of plague cases left him uneasy.
In the case of a fifty-four-year-old actor named Chin Lai, it was the doctors who beheld his final breathtaking performance. While declaiming his lines in a historical drama, Chin was hit by a wave of vertigo, fever, and chills. His friends hastily moved Chin from the theater to a quarantine house on Fish Alley. Federal doctors making a house call were dumbfounded: There sat the actor, robust and animated, talking to doctors until one hour before his death. In a bravura turn, he seemed to defy infection in his glands and bloodstream until a wave of sepsis overwhelmed him. Then he sank swiftly, and the light left his eyes.
Occasionally, the coffin shops got orders for very small boxes. Jew Sue and Slick Chat were seven-year-old girls who lived and played one block apart on Washington Street. The little girls abandoned their sidewalk games and took to bed with fevers almost simultaneously. Surely they would recover. So no one called the federal doctors to come and check the girls until they died, just three days apart on November 4 and 7.
Down at City Hall, Eugene Schmitz and Abe Ruef, though increasingly bold in their graft, swept to easy reelection in November 1903. Not everyone was happy with the incumbents. A crusading newspaper editor Fremont Older of the
Blue brooded and searched his soul about gaps in the plague campaign. He decided that the rat-killing operation was not aggressive enough. He now proposed a bold expansion of the rodent slaughter, one that would cover the whole of San Francisco. Moreover, Blue wanted to offer an incentive to the rat catchers, borrowing a strategy from the sheriffs of the Old West. He would offer citizens a bounty for bringing in rats—dead or alive.10
First, official rat trappers would be paid a bonus of 10 cents in addition to their daily wage for every rat they delivered. The program ran a calculated risk. There was a danger that poor desperadoes might import rodents for the cash, introducing even more vermin into the rat-ridden city. But the need was so great that the bounty program was eventually expanded to include all citizens, and the reward was raised to two and even four bits.
Blue decided to be pragmatic about coaxing support from the newspapers. Without mentioning plague, he asked their support for rat eradication on the grounds of city hygiene. The
IN NOVEMBER, CLOUDBURSTS SWEPT off the Pacific, quenching the long dry season. Seasoned plague fighters knew the cold would force vermin back underground, bringing a deceptive pause in human cases. But, Blue warned his colleagues, the germs were hibernating, and this was only an intermission.
Still, by New Year’s 1904, the normally cautious Blue felt a surge of optimism. Chinatown’s health was looking up. He dared to hope that the outbreak might burn itself out. Success seemed within his reach, if not yet in his grasp.
The city was visibly cleaner. It was also bigger and brassier. The population now topped the four hundred thousand mark. Merchants wired Geary Street with electricity, blazing a light trail in the night labyrinth of the city. The Anti-Saloon League took a dim view of all this, warning that Frisco after dark was “Satan’s seat, sodden with saloons and sated with liquefied sin.”11
Of course, sin drew as many tourists as sunshine, as Blue well knew, having tasted its nightlife.
Just then, a flurry of small earthquakes shook Northern California. It wasn’t enough to do any damage, but it seemed like a premonition. The
At City Hall, Mayor Schmitz finally won the right to install his own city board of health. The old “bubonic board” was out; the new board immediately started cutting the Chinatown cleanup staff. Schmitz wanted the federal doctors to stop work and clear out of town.
To win back City Hall’s fickle support, Blue deployed a charm offensive. He marched down to the board of supervisors, who held the purse strings. He pointed to the visible transformation of Chinatown: The rickety balconies and porches were gone, the buildings had new concrete foundations, and leaky old sewer pipes were repaired—even the air was fresher.
Let us keep trapping rats. Let us keep inspecting the sick and the dead. Let us keep working until the city is restored to health, he implored them. Whether it was because of his logic or his courtly manners, Blue won a reprieve.
Three silent witnesses in January proved the battle wasn’t over: A cucumber farmer, an elderly man on Fish Alley, and a housewife on Jackson Street all died. The woman, twenty-six-year-old Ho Mon Chin Shee, collapsed with a fever of 108.5—the highest recorded since the outbreak.
