The Pandemic Century

by The Pandemic Century- One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria

  Waking the following morning to find that they were effectively prisoners—“inmates” was the official term used by the health authorities—must have been a terrifying experience for the Mexican residents and anyone else caught up in the dragnet. Indeed, no sooner was the quarantine in place than the authorities began house-to-house inspections. Those who were sick or were suspected of having been in contact with sick persons were removed to the isolation ward at County General, while those left behind were told to prepare a mixture of hot water, salt, and lime juice, and gargle with it several times a day. The chamber of commerce refused to requisition additional funds to provide provisions for the trapped residents of the plague zone. Instead, it was left to local charities to deliver packages of food and milk to stricken families.

  Confined to their homes, waiting to see who would be next to succumb to the Muerto Negro, as Spanish speakers referred to the disease, one can only imagine the images that flashed through people’s minds and the thoughts that they clung to for comfort. As Camus reminds us, in such situations “we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away.” But the plague was not a bogy, it was real and it could strike, without warning, at any time. The only mercy was that the worst suffering took place far from the quarantine zone inside the isolation ward at County General. There, in a desperate effort to halt the course of the disease, doctors placed patients on an intravenous drip of Mercurochrome solution, a mercury-based antiseptic used to treat minor cuts and bruises that was almost certainly useless against plague.‡ The first to receive the treatment was ten-year-old Roberto Samarano, the eldest of Guadalupe’s three sons. He was hooked up to a Mercurochrome drip on October 28 and given three successive injections, only to die two days later, his body “practically riddled with plague infection.” Roberto’s death was followed by that of his younger brother, Gilberto, and Alfredo Burnett, Luciana Samarano’s son from an earlier marriage (Alfredo died on November 11 after a heroic thirteen-day struggle with the disease that saw him slipping in and out of a “restless delirium”). By now two boarders at 742 Clara Street had also died. Incredibly, the only member of the Samarano clan to survive the death house was the Samaranos’ second son, Raul. The eight-year-old was evacuated from Clara Street at the same time as his siblings, but, unlike his brothers, was given plague serum. He lived, growing up to enjoy a career in the navy and the Los Angeles Army Corps of Engineers. Another notable survivor was Mary Costello, a nurse who had attended Guadalupe Samarano at Clara Street. Costello was admitted to County General on October 29. By Halloween both her lungs were showing signs of consolidation and she was bringing up “bloody expectorations,” but after being given Mercurochrome solution Costello showed a slight improvement, and a few days later she also received plague serum. It was this that may have made the difference.

  Incredible as it might seem today, Angelenos in other parts of the city appear to have been largely ignorant of the outbreak and the significance of the quarantine. One man recalled the plague as “a big hush-up,” while his father, who lived within walking distance of Macy Street and was a regular reader of the Los Angeles Times, admitted he had known little about the outbreak. This is not surprising when you consider that the Los Angeles Times and other municipal papers did not refer to the disease by its proper name until November 6, by which time the epidemic had more or less run its course. Even then, they sought to justify their evasion by adding that pneumonic plague was merely the “technical term” for malignant pneumonia. Plague was “not a new phenomenon in California,” Dickie pointed out truthfully, if a little disingenuously. “While an outbreak of plague is always a potential menace . . . there is no reason for public alarm.”

  Outside of Los Angeles, however, it was a different story, as newspapers competed to keep their readers abreast of the latest developments. The call for plague serum and the news of its dramatic journey received particular attention, not least of all because the manufacturer, Mulford Laboratories of Philadelphia, used Los Angeles’s plight as a marketing opportunity to issue regular press updates on the progress of the serum from the West to the East Coast. Pascoe’s appeal for serum had reached Mulford on November 3, prompting the company to dispatch several vials by automobile to Mineola airfield in Long Island. The following day the serum was transferred to a mail plane and flown 3,000 miles to San Francisco and thence to Los Angeles, reaching the city health department on November 5. “Serum for plague speeds by plane to Los Angeles” reported the New York Evening World News on November 5; “5000 more doses of serum go west,” added the Public Ledger of Philadelphia a few days later. Mulford did its best to play up the “thrilling” story of the vaccine’s bicoastal journey, describing how within thirty-six hours of receiving the appeal, “the vials of serum were brought to the front lines where the battle is on against the Terror.” Speed laws were “forgotten” as the precious vials were rushed to Mineola and, though the mail plane was briefly delayed by a storm at Salt Lake City, it was not long before “the messenger of mercy had right of way” again. Reading Mulford’s sensational, self-serving prose must have been an uncomfortable experience for Los Angeles’s own boosters. “It was pneumonic plague or Black Plague—the scourge of the fourteenth century,” declared an announcement in the Mulford company journal, “the dread disease which numbered its victims by the millions.” But Los Angeles business leaders were nothing if not adept at inoculating negative publicity, and soon they were putting their own spin on the episode, reassuring easterners that, as William Lacy, the president of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, put it in an article in the Los Angeles Realtor, the city had suffered “a slight epidemic of pneumonic plague” and there was no reason for anyone to cancel their vacation plans.

  If the outbreak challenged Los Angeles’s carefully cultivated image as an idyllic holiday destination, it was no less of a headache for the State Board of Health and the PHS. In Washington the sensational newspaper reports were read with mounting alarm, leading to demands for reassurance from Congress that federal health officials were doing their utmost to ensure that plague did not spread to other harbor cities. The problem was that, technically, the outbreak in the Mexican quarter was the responsibility of the Los Angeles City Health department and the State Board of Health. Unless and until the outbreak reached the Port of Los Angeles, the PHS had no authority to intervene and could only serve in an advisory capacity. In theory, cooperation was in the interests of bureaucrats at the local, state, and federal level, but the city health commissioner was a political appointee who reported directly to the mayor, George Cryer, who in turn answered to the board of the chamber of commerce. This placed Pascoe in an impossible position, since Cryer was acutely sensitive to any statement that adversely impacted the city’s image and its commercial prospects. Indeed, when Pascoe overstepped his authority by confirming to the eastern papers that the outbreak was due to pneumonic plague, Cryer passed him over for promotion and appointed a more pliant official to head the department. However, Dickie valued Pascoe’s expertise and when, on November 3, at a meeting in Cryer’s office, Dickie was put in charge of the plague cleanup operation, he insisted that Pascoe join his team. It would seem that Cryer had little choice but to accede to this demand; nor could he prevent Dickie offering a place on the advisory committee to James Perry, the PHS surgeon who had been dispatched from San Francisco to monitor the situation, despite the board’s paranoia about word reaching Washington that plague might be encroaching on the environs of the port at San Pedro. Perry found himself in a similarly awkward position vis-à-vis his superiors in Washington, as he had to balance the surgeon general’s concerns that local officials were not up to the job, against interventions that might be seen as interfering with the state’s jurisdiction and undermining Dickie’s authority. Indeed, it would seem that Perry may have gone too far in accommodating local officials, because on November 7, after being reprimanded for not transmitting information to Washington quickly enough, he
explained that Dickie was “keenly desirous” of taking full control himself and that, in any case, there had been some doubt as to whether the outbreak was due to pneumonic plague. Interestingly, it would appear that Perry’s skepticism was also the opinion of other experts, including Kellogg, who had accompanied him to Los Angeles and who had insisted on preparing fresh bacteriological slides before accepting Maner’s diagnosis. Once it became clear that the outbreak was plague and deserved to be treated as such, however, Perry found himself increasingly at odds with Dickie. At the heart of their differences was the question whether the outbreak in the Mexican quarter was due to squirrels or rats, or some combination of both, and the implication that this might have for other parts of the city, including the port. Dickie and his colleagues in the county health department believed the epidemic would eventually be traced to infected squirrels, as had been the case with the Oakland outbreak, meaning that it should end when the last infectious patient had been isolated in the hospital. Indeed, when, at the suggestion of Karl Meyer, a bacteriologist who directed the Hooper Foundation for Medical Research in San Francisco and who had visited McCoy’s plague laboratory to familiarize himself with his techniques, they combed rats in the Mexican quarter for fleas, they discovered a fair number harbored H. anomalus plus another species, Diamanus montanus, more commonly found on ground squirrels. Recalling the case of the boy in Elysian Park who had died of plague after exposure to a squirrel in 1908, Meyer suggested that this meant the outbreak had probably originated in the “hinterland,” not the port. Perry thought otherwise and, responding to increasingly stern telegrams from Washington, insisted that the outbreak had been due to rats and that only a well-financed rodent eradication campaign targeting both the Mexican quarter and the port would be certain to rid Los Angeles of the disease. This was not a verdict the chamber of commerce wished to hear for obvious reasons. Nevertheless, in mid-November the chamber granted $250,000 to finance rodent extermination measures, with the promise of more money should it be needed. The pivotal decision came at a meeting of the chamber and the city council on November 13 when, standing in front of a map of greater Los Angeles studded with black pins representing pneumonic plague cases, Dickie warned: “I realize that the dream of Los Angeles and the dream of officials and the chamber of commerce is the harbor. Your dream will never come true as long as plague exists in Los Angeles and as long as there is any question of doubt in reference to the harbor.” Unless San Pedro received a clean bill of health “half of the commerce of your harbor will quickly vanish,” Dickie predicted, before concluding that “no disease known has such an effect upon the business world as the plague.”

  Los Angeles business leaders must have hoped that by granting substantial monies for antiplague measures, they would convince officials in Washington they were serious about addressing the rat problem and avoid the need for San Pedro to be quarantined. If so, their hopes were dashed. This had little to do with the enthusiasm with which Dickie and the City Health Department prosecuted rodent extermination, and everything to do with the PHS’s concern for its reputation and its suspicion of California politicians and local business leaders. During the rat cleanup campaign in San Francisco, federal health officials had watched aghast as local newspapers, encouraged by Gage, had questioned Kinyoun’s scientific competence. In the end, the reappearance of plague in San Francisco in 1907 had forced Gage to bow to the authority of the federal plague commission and cooperate with the PHS, but the experience had left Blue and Hugh Cumming, his successor as surgeon general who had been a protégé of Kinyoun’s, suspicious of local city health departments and state-appointed health officials. In an attempt to foster closer cooperation between state and federal officials and improve the flow of information to Washington, in 1923 Cumming divided the country into seven public health districts and appointed experienced officers to each. One of the key postings was at the quarantine station at Angel Island, a position which went to Cumming’s close friend and confidant, Assistant Surgeon General Richard H. Creel. From San Francisco, Creel would oversee quarantines for all ports along the United States’ western seaboard, including Los Angeles, and keep a close eye on the progress of Dickie’s campaign, feeding the information back to Cumming in Washington.

  Determined to show that the State Board of Health was up to the task, Dickie moved into the new Pacific Finance Building off Wilshire Boulevard, where he fashioned himself “commander-in-chief.” There, surrounded by color-coded maps studded with pins recording the locations of trapped rodents (red for rats, yellow for squirrels), he presided over 127 rodent exterminators. Under Dickie’s direction, the campaign took on the trappings of a military exercise. One team of rat catchers was assigned exclusively to the harbor, with orders to inspect every arriving vessel and tag any rodent found in the vicinity of the port. The rats would then be removed to the city laboratory on Eighth Street for testing. At the same time, other squads fanned out across the Mexican quarter, performing “plague abatements.” Modeled on the campaign in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1900, these involved removing the sidings from houses in and around Clara Street and raising the dwellings eighteen inches off the ground, so that dogs and cats could freely enter the buildings and flush diseased rodents from their lairs. At the same time, premises were ruthlessly stripped of furniture, clothing, and bedding, and funeral pyres made of tenants’ belongings. These slash-and-burn tactics culminated with fumigation with petroleum, sulfur, or cyanide gas, measures that guaranteed that no creature foolish enough to return to the properties would survive long in the poisoned rooms. Running alongside these plague abatement measures was an equally ferocious rodent trapping and extermination campaign. Squares of bread baited with phosphorus or arsenic were scattered in suspect neighborhoods both inside and outside the quarantine zone. The city health department also offered a bounty of $1 for every dead rat or squirrel brought for counting and testing to its laboratory at Eighth Street. When this did not yield a sufficient bounty of rodents, the health department offered men a fixed salary of $130 a day. For First World War veterans this was considerably more than they could hope to earn in civilian employment, and soon the hunting parties were swelled by former infantrymen eager to demonstrate their sharpshooting skills. It was not long before Macy District echoed to the continuous pop of rifles, and when the hunting parties ran out of rodents within the city limits they fanned out to Belvedere Gardens and other areas in the county. “These surveys may take us a hundred miles or more from Los Angeles before we find the guilty rodent,” Dickie warned.

  Ironically, this campaign turned up far fewer rats in the Mexican quarter than had been expected, and virtually none in the harbor area. Indeed, by November 22, not one of the 1,000 rats trapped in the harbor had tested positive for plague. By contrast, to the embarrassment of the chamber of commerce, rats were readily trapped in the downtown blocks that housed the city’s premier hotels and department stores. Meyer, who accompanied health officials on several of their inspections, recalled how at one downtown rice-cake factory run by a Japanese gentleman he had only to drop a crumb on the floor to “see a rat come up and pick it up.” To Meyer, the scene was like something out of “Zanzibar” with the smart facades concealing a “jungle.” The only way to ensure that such premises were rat-proof, he observed, was to pour concrete over the dirt floors, but that was expensive (and not always effective either).

  By the end of the year, Dickie could boast that his men had trapped more than 25,000 rats and 768 squirrels. In addition, flooring and planking had been removed from countless buildings in and around Clara and Macy Streets, and poison laid at 1,000 premises. However, for all the intensity of the plague abatement measures, Perry was unimpressed by Dickie’s efforts, informing Cumming that the Board’s campaign had been “casual and periodic” and that its laboratory work could not be trusted. “It is apparent that Dr. Dickie does not appreciate the gravity of the situation, or the importance of enlarging the scope of the campaign, or of increasing the eff
iciency of the operations,” Perry informed Cumming in mid-December. “This is evidenced by his non-acceptance of the proffered, concrete Service aid.” Instead, he urged Cumming to dissociate the PHS from the state’s program, warning that unless the PHS took charge of the campaign there was a “grave” danger the disease could spread to other countries. This was the one thing that Cumming could not allow, as under the provisions of the 1922 International Sanitary Convention the United States had a duty to ensure that “adequate measures” were being taken to prevent the spread of plague to other jurisdictions, failure to do so running the risk that foreign governments would impose quarantines against American shipping. Adding to Cumming’s concern was the discovery of plague-infected rats in both New Orleans and Oakland. In the case of New Orleans, it was suspected the culprit had been the Atlanticos, a coal-steamer that had reached the Crescent City at the end of October after sailing from Oran, a notorious Algerian plague port that would be immortalized in Camus’s 1947 novel. On board was a stowaway with a swelling on his groin. The stowaway was hospitalized and the ship fumigated, but soon after, eight plague rats were found on the waterfront, prompting the Louisiana State Board of Health to request the PHS begin a rodent survey. In the case of Oakland, there was no evidence of foreign introduction of plague. Instead, the alarm was raised by the discovery on December 13 of a plague rat on a garbage dump close to the waterfront.