Surgeon General Wyman relented and let Colby Rucker stay with the campaign. When the spring sun dried the roads, Rucker returned to the East Bay hills leading a handful of men armed with sacks of poisoned wheat.
But during the years of delay, the infected squirrels had dispersed widely, migrating over a vast swath of north central California. By mid-1909, plague had invaded 1,500 square miles of suburban and rural terrain—more than thirty times the space it had occupied in the forty-nine-square-mile city of San Francisco.
Surveying this new infected zone, Rucker underwent “the most terrifying and grizzly experience of [his] life.” One Sunday morning, he and two colleagues struck out to explore some infected burrows with a load of guinea pigs. To test for infected fleas, the scientists tied a string to a guinea pig’s leg and lowered it into a suspect burrow as a flea magnet. Then they would fish out the guinea pig, comb it for insects, and analyze them for plague. That day, however, they needed no guinea pig. From several paces away, they beheld a graveyard of squirrel skulls around an abandoned burrow, out of which swarmed a strangely pale cloud—fleas.
Three feet above its opening, the famished fleas attacked the men. “Is your life insurance paid up?” one colleague joked nervously. Rucker fought the urge to run away. Now the fleas jumped and wriggled under his clothes, biting furiously. When the work was done, Rucker returned to his hotel and stripped off his fatigues to find his skin as mottled with bites as if he’d had a full-blown case of measles.
An entomologist on the team assured him the fleas were hatchlings, too young to have sucked the blood of plague squirrels. Rucker thought grimly of all the corpses he had seen, bulbous and stained with the blue-black tokens of plague. “I knew just what they would find on my body at post-mortem,” he said. But the entomologist was right: The beige hatchlings were baby fleas. All three men escaped unscathed.9
The squirrel plague worsened inexorably, as did Annette’s health.
“It is impossible for me to be in so many places at one time,” Rucker confessed, and asked for an assistant. “Mrs. Rucker’s condition is very critical,” he said. “It is only a matter of time until I shall be obliged to ask for a leave on her account, and I would very much regret seeing my work pass into untrained hands.”10
Rucker stayed with the campaign. To carry him on his rural surveys, he got a noisy Buick roadster, which lurched over country roads. He left the ailing Annette in camp with a trained nurse. But fearing his son might contract tuberculosis if left by his mother’s side, Rucker took the boy on his road trips, tying him into the car with an improvised seat belt to keep him from bouncing out over the country roads.11
Rucker found that about 1.2 percent of the animals were infected already. Burrow to burrow, the infected squirrels were crossing the coastal hills, migrating eastward toward the Sierra Nevada. Surgeon General Walter Wyman asked his officers to map the territory, so Rucker sketched the state of California and shaded the plague zone with black ink.
Studying the plague map, Surgeon General Wyman finally beheld the results of years of red tape and delay: The lands now inhabited by wildlife infected by the plague spread out to cover a vast area that resembled a giant letter
Digging in for a protracted battle against the squirrel plague in 1909 and 1910, Blue closed up the old Victorian headquarters on Fillmore and moved his office to San Francisco’s rebuilt downtown area. On New Montgomery Street, he outfitted his office with unusually posh appointments: a swivel chair, a rolltop desk, and a $35 rug from W. & J. Sloane. He now divided his time between the city and travels abroad as the government’s epidemic expert-at-large. When Chile suffered a plague outbreak in 1910, he sailed down to the coastal town of Iquique, where one hundred patients languished in a rat-infested lazaretto. When Panama and Hawaii were menaced by yellow fever mosquitoes, Blue advised the canal zone and the islands on epidemic control.
While Blue was on assignment overseas, Rucker remained in Berkeley, where his wife, Annette, died of tuberculosis in May 1910. Rucker and his son, Colby, transported her body to Milwaukee for burial. He remained in the Midwest for a year.13
In November 1911, Surgeon General Walter Wyman was shaving around his trademark walrus mustache when his razor slipped. The sixty-three-year-old Wyman was a diabetic, so a simple shaving nick posed a special threat. His diabetes-damaged vascular system couldn’t fight off the infection that grew in the flesh wound. Gangrene set in. With no antibiotics to fend off the infection, toxicity streamed from the wound into his bloodstream. Helpless against the overwhelming sepsis, Wyman fell into a coma from which he never recovered. He died, leaving the nation’s public health service without a leader.
As President William Howard Taft launched a search for Wyman’s successor, candidates sprang up from the ranks of senior officers to jockey for the job. The front-runner was Joseph White, Blue’s onetime commander and critic in the plague war. It was White who in 1901 initially disparaged the younger man as genial but inert, devoid of the energy and tact required of a plague commander. In the end, the two fought both plague and yellow fever side by side. Now they found themselves rivals for the public health service’s top post.
Joe White had seniority, and conventional wisdom gave him the inside track to become the next surgeon general. Rupert Blue was clearly his junior, but his success in San Francisco had raised his public profile and cachet as a man of action.
Colby Rucker, after a rough year in Milwaukee, returned to the public health service and began to lobby for Blue for surgeon general. Realizing he hadn’t actually consulted Blue about this, he sent a telegram in Hawaii: “Wyman dead. Have entered you in race. Too late [to] back out now.”
Blue wired back: “Go to it.”14
The campaign intensified and press speculation mounted. President Taft teased reporters a bit by saying they could pick their favorite color. One way or another, he hinted, the new surgeon general would be Dr. White or Dr. Blue. But the president didn’t deny he was favoring Blue.15
Blue was summoned to Washington. He kept his family in the dark about his rising fortunes. “Let us hope that the best man wins, for we need a Moses to lead us out of the wilderness of political intrigue,” Blue wrote to Kate just before Christmas. He coyly added that he expected to get “orders at any moment to get me hence to the alfalfa patch faraway beyond the Rocky Mountains.”16
But another tour of duty in the West wasn’t his destiny. On January 5, 1912, President Taft flouted convention and sent to the Senate his nomination of Rupert Lee Blue for surgeon general. Blue was confirmed, amid a groundswell of support for his record as an epidemic fighter.
The forty-six-year-old South Carolinian “was promoted over the heads of many older men,” commented the
Blue was moved his fellow officers thought him worthy of holding the highest office in the corps. His joy was incomplete, however. His mother, Annie Maria Blue, died that autumn in Marion, months before her youngest son became the highest physician in the land.
Blue’s first task as surgeon general was anything but exalted. He had to inspect the health of government buildings—a job he’d handled for Wyman back in 1906. Little had changed: Unsanitary cuspidors steeped the State Department in the scent of tobacco juice. Rats overran the Department of Justice.18 Toilets and drinking water were petri dishes for germs. Blue focused on the common drinking cup, a foul feature of many public facilities, and began replacing it with fountains, a simple change that slashed the cases of contagious disease.
Blue sketched for his family the life of a presidential appointee: the long days and nights at his desk, marked by moments of ceremony, such as donning his best bib and tucker to wish Happy New Year to the outgoing President Taft on January 1, 1913. He rarely made it home to Marion to see his sisters. His brother Victor and sister-in-law Nellie sent him a gift of Christmas cake, its taste recalling “the days of long ago when I had no responsibilities and few troubles.” He worked through the holiday, confessing, “All seasons and days are alike to me….”19 Now that he was deskbound, his once athletic frame thickened.
As surgeon general, Blue broadened his agenda to embrace a revolutionary new concept: national health insurance. Although it was as radical a notion then as now, national health insurance drew support from the American Medical Association (AMA). Good health is a right, Blue insisted. Promoting it was, in his view, the surest way to enhance the moral stature and happiness of a people. Moreover, he argued, it was a good investment, and every dollar spent on public health would be returned a hundredfold.
“Public health is a public utility,” he said in a speech before a 1913 convention of life insurance executives. “It is the great glory of the period in which we live that we have recognized our responsibility as our brothers’ keeper.”20
