Rucker gave a passionate sermon on the new religion of urban hygiene. Poison, trap, and starve them out was the new gospel. The federal plague officers won a host of female converts; the newspapers reveled in stories about the fair warriors in the plague fight.
“When you look in your garbage pails, ladies, think of me!” Colby Rucker said, deadpan.24 Muffled laughter erupted. Rucker’s speech took the starch out of science. He didn’t mind being their poster boy for garbage. Let them laugh, as long as they made their homes plague-free.
Blue was more grateful for Colby’s verbal panache than he ever could express to his face. “Dr. Rucker has been simply invaluable,” he wrote in a letter to Kate on March 11, 1908. “I address audiences because I am compelled to; Rucker does it for the love of the thing. We call him ‘garbage can Rucker’ because that is his hobby.”25
Rucker’s antic speeches, a great favorite with the women’s clubs, hid a tragic irony. While he was lecturing ladies on how to protect their families’ health, his own wife, Annette, was losing hers. She was racked by bouts of coughing—asthma, he thought. He hired buggies to drive her to Ocean Beach so she could fill her lungs with healing drafts of sea air. It helped a little, but her doctor remained worried.
Though public oratory was still a new taste in his mouth, Blue endeavored to remake himself into an ardent preacher for public health. At a noontime meeting of two thousand Southern Pacific freight handlers in the basement of the Flood Building, Rupert Blue led a revival meeting on vermin.
“I intend to kill a rat or two myself tonight, and I want all of you to do the same. It is the noblest work you can do,” he exhorted the men in a South Carolinian’s best imitation of Teddy Roosevelt.26 The rough and callused congregation grumbled skeptically at this doughty, drawling doctor. With his pomaded black hair, center part, and waxed mustache, he looked like a dandy in fatigues. But the railroad workers got the religion, especially after the city board of health boosted the bounty on rats from 10 cents to 25 cents for a male rat and 50 cents for a breeding female.
Blue, for his part, got more comfortable mounting the bully pulpit. And businesses dug deep, none deeper than the railroad. Southern Pacific executives pledged $30,000 to the plague fighters’ war chest.
The evening of Valentine’s Day, Blue ascended the altar to lecture the crowded congregation at the First Unitarian Church. His message was dire. The brawny Norway rat had overrun the city, he told them. Infection abounded as never before; the critical plague prevalence of 2 percent that he had endeavored to avoid was now a reality.27
The clergymen of the city started preaching plague eradication from every church pulpit and temple
The Dutch-born rabbi’s work for the plague campaign that year took an extra measure of fortitude. Just one month earlier, in January 1908, he had lost his daughter Rachel to tuberculosis.
The state board of health, under its president, Martin Regensburger, turned from a tool of plague denial to a firebrand for plague eradication. But like Rabbi Voorsanger, Regensburger had to pause from the plague campaign in January to bury his fourteen-year-old son, Harry, another tuberculosis sufferer.29
Annette Rucker’s coughing grew deep and ragged. Her blooming cheeks grew hollow and wan. Still, she taught young Colby his letters and helped her husband’s career by lunching with the Langley Porters and other members of the medical haut monde. Under her maiden name, Annette Guequierre, she wrote an essay about female plague warriors, saying San Francisco women “fought for the safety of their city as courageously as any Carthaginian mother of old.”30
Blue and Rucker and their fellow officers delivered their speeches to clubwomen, shippers, teamsters, and builders. Mass meetings were convened from union halls and schoolhouses to the Dreamland Skating Rink.
“This city is in danger of a quarantine,” Rucker told a skeptical crowd, “and I want you to understand that if a quarantine is placed on San Francisco, you people will imagine yourselves in the worst corner of hell. The days following the disaster of April 1906 will seem like a holiday picture compared to the days to be spent in a city quarantined for bubonic plague.”31
One group of businessmen urged Blue to get it over with and declare a quarantine, if only to frighten the city’s careless citizens into concerted action. “Friend, have you ever seen a city in quarantine?” Blue asked them gravely. “I have, and I love San Francisco too much to subject her to one.”32
In six weeks, 162 meetings made believers of many. “It got so that a man could hardly go to church to pray, or into a cigar store to punch a slot machine that he did not hear something about rats and the plague,” said local historian Frank Morton Todd.33
After years battling the city’s inertia, Blue found this new momentum heady. For the first time, he sensed he had a shot at success. For the first time since the outbreak, San Franciscans were showing their mettle.
“My dear Mother,” he wrote to Annie Maria in February 1908. “Times have been strenuous with me and the entire staff in this past month. I started an agitation on plague to arouse the citizens to a sense of their danger. This agitation has grown out of my control. The people are aroused. I am making [six] speeches a day. My staff is doing the same. I have received calls for addresses all over the state. I am about worn out but must keep the iron hot and the people demand that I must lead them.” The city’s spirit moved him.
“I thought New Orleans a heroic people,” he wrote his mother, “but find that San Francisco is far greater.”34
By now, Rucker’s throat was so sore from speech making that his swollen uvula hung down the back of his throat. He begged a surgeon to trim the raw tissue. Dubious, the doctor warned he would lose his voice for days.
“Amputate it,” Rucker persisted. He was so exhausted that the enforced silence seemed like a holiday. He spent a week whispering.35
Meanwhile, time had run out on City and County Hospital. The hospital was hopelessly overrun by rodents. In its waning days, Langley Porter and a fellow doctor had returned to the laboratory, where they witnessed the spectacle of rats eating old wound dressings.36
Now vacant of patients, the old clapboard hospital was demolished with dynamite, engines, and cables. Wards and dispensaries that had served poor San Franciscans since 1872 were reduced to a pile of plaster dust and jagged timbers. Then the rubble was torched, flames consuming the infected ruins under the watchful eyes and waiting hoses of the San Francisco Fire Department. After almost four decades of service, it had become one more rat refuge to be destroyed.37
Butchertown’s foul shacks were put to the torch in the spring of 1908. But the fruit vendors, unlike the butchers, routed rats and transformed their businesses into sparkling showplaces. By the end of March 1908, the produce marketplace on Front Street was billed as “clean enough to eat off.” To celebrate this achievement, five hundred citizens spread outdoor tables on Front Street, shaded by white canopies, garlanded with greenery, and set with cornucopias of apples, bananas, pineapples, and figs.
“Perhaps we have killed a million rats, but let us raise the score higher for the sake of San Francisco,” said Mayor Taylor to rousing cheers. Purging plague rats was like evicting grafters from City Hall, he said.
Blue congratulated the greengrocers on their transformation. He tantalized his listeners with a vision of the city’s future as a “health resort”—code words that spelled a tourist bonanza. Then it was Colby Rucker’s turn. After praising the city fathers, he said, it’s time to praise its mothers, the real force behind the cleanup.
“You know that if a woman tells a man to do something, he might as well do it gracefully. He’s got to do it anyhow,” Rucker said. A wave of applause rippled from gloved hands. The ladies gave three cheers for their champion. A brass band struck up “Home Sweet Home.” As Rucker hopped down from the speaker’s chair, his comrades paid tart homage to his speech with a gag gift of a dozen lemons.38
“Ain’t It Awful?”
“MY CAMPAIGN IS STILL in full blast,” Blue wrote to his sister Kate Lilly in March 1908. A dozen medical officers and over 400 inspectors and laborers had carried on through the winter rains. But, he
