confided, “I fear an outbreak by the advent of dry weather.”1
Worse, if the city’s support flagged and his team couldn’t finish the job right, he predicted the city would have “a plague scare every summer for the next 20 years.”2
Barnstorming on the speaker’s circuit, Blue was becoming a celebrity. Newspapers found that the courtly Carolinian made good copy. Pauline Jacobson, a reporter from the
Colby Rucker escorted Jacobson upstairs, where she saw a six-foot khaki-clad officer behind the desk. He stood and turned his blue gaze on her. If her prose is any indication, she swooned a little. Her story read:
A man of action rather than word—big, broad-shouldered, handsome, commanding in his plain brown officer’s uniform. Yet modest and unassuming… a quaint drawling Southern wit and kindly sympathy always lurking in his eyes and under the slim mustache, one to inspire confidence and to make one feel if worse should come to worse, we would have a man at the helm.3
The reporter wanted to know why San Francisco was so resistant to public health measures and whether it was uniquely obstinate.
“I have encountered it before,” Blue said. “In the South, fighting yellow fever, I have had to deal with a bristling shotgun quarantine.” Here in San Francisco, he added smoothly, “it is your robust optimism.”
Then Jacobson engaged Blue in a discussion of how Western civilization was blinded by hubris to the threat of disease. San Franciscans, she said, were far too smug about “our purifying tradewinds and our wonderful climate… our sanitation [and] our lovely porcelain bathtubs.”4
“Plague is no respecter of individuals or places,” Blue agreed, explaining that San Francisco was as liable to experience plague as India. “The Hindus have a religion which does not allow them to kill vermin of any kind,” he added. “But if they have more vermin to transmit the plague, you have more garbage. You have more food for rats than any city I know of.
“Prejudice and ignorance may frustrate the best efforts of the sanitary authorities,” he concluded. “I do not wish to alarm the people. I want them to get busy.”
“Get busy” became the theme of the campaign. More glowing press followed the
The abundance of good press was irritating to some senior members of the medical profession. And no one was irked more than University of California medical school professor Robert Langley Porter. A distinguished pediatrician, infectious disease specialist, and neurologist, Langley Porter pitched in to help control plague on the city’s waterfront. While he formed a warm bond with Colby Rucker—their two families dined and took carriage rides together—he developed an intense dislike for his commanding officer. “Rupert Blue was just a public relations man,” he grumbled years later. “Colby Rucker was the fellow who really did the work.”6
But Rucker was equally adept at orchestrating publicity for the plague campaign. He was Blue’s disciple, spreading the gospel of urban hygiene. He helped write his speeches and articles. He walked to work with him, lunched with him, planned professional dinners, and drank with him. They dined with officer friends or local politicians at the city’s Bohemian Club, the private preserve of politicians and tycoons, artists and writers. Public health officers weren’t rich enough to be regular members. But as visiting officials, they were welcomed as guest members and even admitted to the club’s extravagant costumed theatricals—called the “jinks”—at the Bohemian Grove in the redwoods north of town. Eating and drinking, singing songs or telling tales, the animated Colby tried to ease Blue’s doubts and dark moods.
Blue was nearing exhaustion, and despite signs of progress, he had plenty to brood about. The rat eradication campaign was superficial. At street level, the city looked cleaner. But what went on beneath city streets? The subterranean life of rodents was a mystery to him. Where did they hide and migrate? Infected rats had been found in every part of town except the city’s sparsely settled western neighborhoods, the Sunset and Richmond districts. Now that many of the rats were trapped, poisoned, and cemented out of homes, where would they go next? He had to find out.
That’s when it hit him—colors. He would dye healthy white laboratory rats red, blue, or green, each color denoting a district. Then he would release the rats back into the sewers, in order to see where they popped up next. The scheme disclosed the animals’ migratory routes and helped him guide exterminators about where to place the tons of rat bait they purchased every month.7
But Blue’s rainbow rats provoked howls of derision in the press.
Clever as it was, the rainbow rats project didn’t produce any breakthroughs for Blue. For the rats were so widespread that nothing but massive, citywide extermination would suffice.
Pulp satirists weren’t Blue’s only problem that spring of 1908. A delicate diplomatic problem arose at headquarters. A friend of President Roosevelt’s, it seemed, had an interest in the Stearns Company, the manufacturer of Stearns’ Electric Rat and Roach Paste, the same product that had accidentally poisoned San Francisco children. In the wake of this mishap, Blue had banned the use of the product as too dangerous. But now Wyman—who knew of the poisonings—wrote a letter asking Blue to review the merits of all products and forcefully promoted Stearns’ Paste as worth another try.
Wyman, never prone to lavish praise of his officers, even sweetened this request with an unwonted compliment. “I have been intending to write you a personal letter, especially to express my gratification at the way things have been handled in San Francisco, but I have been so busy that I have been unable to get at it,” he wrote.9
Would Blue choose science and safety or yield to pressure from the surgeon general? There was only one right answer. Blue steeled himself. The choice of rat bait was a city matter, he replied. (That wasn’t strictly true. True, the city paid for the bait, but Blue got to pick his poison.) Pressure to funnel business to a presidential friend didn’t come every day. However, when the safety of San Francisco’s children was at stake, favoritism toward a hazardous product was out of the question. He turned Wyman and the favor-seeker down.
Now Blue began driving his rat catchers to kill more animals, the laboratory men to run more tests. Carroll Fox, with his black spade-shaped beard and meticulous scientific method, had been appointed to succeed Halstead Stansfield. Blue had tried to brace Stansfield up, but to no avail. Stansfield was mired in depression and undone by drink. Blue was a sanitarian, not a clergyman or counselor. He could only hope Stansfield would master his grief and return to the campaign.
But on the morning of Monday, April 13, Stansfield left his rooms at the Majestic Hotel on Sutter Street. He rode out to Sutro Forest, a eucalyptus grove on the flanks of Twin Peaks. He walked into the brush. From his coat, he withdrew a .38-caliber pistol, put it to his right temple, and squeezed. Two men hiking after dinner found his body in the brush.10
Blue assigned Colby Rucker the grim errand of claiming the corpse and attending the city inquest. Officially ruled a suicide, Stansfield’s death drew an attack on the plague campaign by a popular journal of satire and political commentary called the
