The Barbary Plague

two began to win popular support.

But Blue needed more than public approval. He also needed muscle and money from the city’s business elite. So he urged the state medical society to invite six hundred of the city’s civic, commercial, and professional leaders to a summit on the health crisis. A mass meeting planned for January 18 would galvanize the public, Blue was certain. But when the day came, it was a huge letdown.

Only sixty people showed up. The handful of physicians and public-spirited laymen looked lost in the vast hall. Despite the meager showing, those who attended resolved to grab the public by the lapels and draft civilians as active-duty soldiers in the war on rats. Mayor Taylor appointed a citizens’ committee of twenty-five, led by Bank of California president Homer S. King and Chamber of Commerce president C. C. Moore. They formed the core of the Citizens’ Health Committee, San Francisco’s first grassroots army dedicated to fighting plague. The committee cranked out thousands of handbills. It issued a civic call to arms—summoning every profession, trade, church, temple, lodge, and ladies’ club to rally for San Francisco’s survival.

On January 28, hundreds of men in bowlers and fedoras came by buggy, cable car, and automobile to the granite-pillared Merchants’ Exchange. The steel-framed neoclassical tower, designed by Willis Polk and Daniel Burnham, architect of New York City’s Flatiron Building, had weathered the 1906 earthquake to become a symbol of survival. Its fifteenth floor held a cavernous mahogany ballroom and a curved bar as big as a whale where deal makers drank. On the exchange floor, Blue in uniform was flanked by Governor Gillett and Mayor Taylor.

No new human plague cases had developed in the last three weeks, Blue told them. But it was just a winter intermission. Rat infection levels had tripled since the fall. Without total eradication, the warm weather would rekindle the epidemic. If it flared as it did in the Orient, San Francisco would face massive mortality, quarantine, and economic ruin.

“Unless we obtain the support of the people,” Blue said, “the task is hopeless.” An optimist by nature, Blue had never uttered this word in public. Hopeless. He saw the effect on his listeners’ faces; he was not displeased.¹⁵

There was another incentive, too. President Theodore Roosevelt was sending the Great White Fleet west, and it was due to arrive in San Francisco the first week in May. The flotilla of sixteen gleaming white-and-gold battleships of the Atlantic Fleet, with sixteen thousand sailors aboard, was circumnavigating the globe in a display of national pride and military might. The fleet gave San Francisco a chance to revel in patriotism and advertise its strategic advantages as a commercial and military port. It would show the world that, after earthquake and fire, the city of iron and gold was back. Its visit would boost business and real estate values. Even now, reception committees were wiring huge “Welcome” signs with strands of sparkling lights to gleam from every hilltop down to the bay. The pulses of hotel keepers, restaurateurs, and saloon owners quickened at the thought of so many visitors.

But to this city aquiver with anticipation, Blue delivered a sober warning: Admiral Robley D. Evans, commanding officer of the Atlantic Fleet, would ask about health conditions before landing. If the city couldn’t guarantee it was plague-free, there would be trouble.¹⁶ The fleet would be diverted to Seattle.

“Gentlemen, Admiral Evans is now en voyage to San Francisco with the fleet,” he said. “When his ship anchors, the first thing he will do will be to send his senior medical officer to me to ask if it will be safe to land his officers and men. I very much hope that I can give you a clean bill of health so that he will not have to go up to Seattle without accepting the wonderful hospitality which you are preparing for him.”

As Colby Rucker remembered it, “The silence was broken only by the busy click of business men’s brains and in a moment all were busily scrambling for a seat on the sanitary bandwagon.”¹⁷ All at once, the business leaders had a goal and a deadline. They had three months to spruce up for the fleet or face cancellation of the most magnificent military pageant in city history. They hurled themselves into a frenzy of civic hygiene. They began to organize all the city’s trades to hold meetings for their members. Corporate angels and individual donors heeded the call for funds to support the Citizens’ Health Committee—including some donors who had been reluctant to recognize plague in the earlier outbreak. The city’s commercial elite climbed aboard: Levi Strauss & Co., Southern Pacific Railroad, Wells Fargo & Co., Ghirardelli & Co., and the St. Francis and Fairmont Hotels. From utilities to railroads, banks to brewers, jeans makers to chocolatiers, they resolved to raise half a million dollars.¹⁸

Blue’s next target was Butchertown. Every steak and chop, ham and sausage, came from the cattle yards, hog pens, and slaughterhouses set on the bay shore near Islais Creek channel. Butchertown was set far from the city center, so diners couldn’t hear the bawling of doomed cattle or see the swill trough that produced their Sunday roast.

Butchertown’s waterfront setting had long saved slaughterhouses the trouble and expense of incineration and scavenger services. Garbage was simply dumped at the water’s edge and borne away by the tides. The cluster of wood warehouses and shacks stood on piers over the mud flats. As the tide rose, the bay rushed in under the shacks to sweep away the offal. At low tide, it was a groaning board; at high tide, it was a floating banquet for rats who swam up to dine.

“I’ll never forget rowing down Islais Creek, and seeking the great, big, fat rats coming down at low tide to feed to the beach… millions of them,” said one eyewitness, University of California physician Robert Langley Porter.¹⁹

Blue went to inspect Butchertown, his boots clumping along boardwalks rusty with oxidized blood. He sent men to document the innumerable sanitary violations. They didn’t know where to start. Vats of viscera, barrels of intestines, stood waiting to be turned into sausage casings. Carcasses were dragged across soggy planks before being carved up and dressed for sale. Through gaps in the killing room floors, scraps fell to the marshland below. The rats fought fiercely over the spoils.

Blue was a plantation lad, reared in the country, steeped in the rural realities of farm life, so he was not squeamish. But what he saw in Butchertown was so foul that he judged his report unfit for public print—unless the butchers refused to cooperate. In that case, he would release the unsavory details to the newspapers, to be read by San Francisco shoppers and diners. Blue promised to withhold his expose from the public only if the butchers cleaned house.

The city board of health launched hearings on Butchertown and its pork annex, Hogtown.²⁰ Some of the butchers tried to placate the federal doctors by staging a theatrical cleanup. Before a crowd of invited reporters, the butchers unleashed a gang of boys to beat on their wooden walls with sticks, driving gray herds of rats out into the open, where men poured boiling water on the animals. It was a grotesque show.

J. Nonnenman protested that his eponymous slaughterhouse was as clean as any and the victim of a city scheme to drive him out of business. Another competitor tried humor: His rats were the healthiest in the world, he said. The butchers’ defense failed. Six slaughterhouses, several slovenly stables, and an incinerator were all condemned.²¹

Hearst’s Examiner broke unwelcome news: Two percent of rats were now infected—clearly in the danger zone. “If the human population of the city were infected in the same proportion,” the paper said, “there would today be 8,000 cases in San Francisco.” It chided tight businessmen who groused about giving a few hundred or a thousand dollars to the plague campaign. The alternative, one month of quarantine, would cost over $20 million. “It’s a question of our pockets, and perhaps our lives,” the paper said.²²

From the meat markets, Blue turned to the task of cleaning rats from the city’s five thousand stables and countless chicken yards. In the early 1900s, San Franciscan householders insisted on their right to raise eggs at home and stable their own steeds. But the coops and stables provided nests of hay and spilled grain for rats, so Blue ordered them destroyed or rebuilt in rat-proof concrete.

Next, greengrocers along Front Street came under scrutiny. Fruit sellers and vegetable dealers were complacent about tossing banana peels, rotten apples, and wilted produce in the street. The produce district, as a consequence, was second only to Butchertown as a rodent restaurant. One of the city’s largest markets yielded nine infected plague rats. When word got out about the discovery, women threatened to boycott the offending stores. Activists circulated “Don’t patronize” lists of the worst offenders.

Women’s clubs, enlisted by the Citizens’ Health Committee, urged their members to reform their shopping, cooking, and cleaning habits. Patronize pristine food stores only, they argued, and boycott butchers and grocers whose premises are rat havens. Yellow placards were nailed on facades that failed inspection—followed by court summonses if the scofflaws didn’t clean up.²³

At the California Club on Clay Street, maidens and matrons in shirtwaists and smart hats listened as Colby