Plague and Fire
Page 4
Under the Dole constitution, Hawaiians could participate in the affairs of the new republic if they renounced the monarchy. A few did so, and they cast their lots with the annexationists. According to the Hawaiian opposition, indigenous supporters of the new regime believed that the promise of prosperity and protection under the wing of the United States outweighed the perils of trying to retain an already doomed independence. Many other Hawaiians continued in their government jobs, which included police work, and continued to serve under the new republic in the Hawaii National Guard, even while remaining passively loyal to the old monarchy and uninvolved in the actual politics of the Dole administration. Still others remained deeply and openly resentful of what they continued to characterize as "the arrogant Republic of Hawaii, which hands the nation over for America to snatch."4
Though Chinese and Japanese residents together comprised more than half of Hawaii's total population by the time of the coup, they had already been denied citizenship under the constitution of 1887. The new Dole administration had no desire to involve Asians in its annexationist government either. In fact, the Dole administration could hardly have gotten off to a worse start in the eyes of Hawaii's Asians.
Within a month of seizing power, the postrevolutionary provisional government began publicly discussing two proposals that the Chinese population in particular found outrageous. One was a bill that would have prevented anyone brought into the islands as an agricultural laborer from ever changing occupations. An earlier version of that proposal had been debated and rebuffed by the Hawaiian government in 1889, but its largely American backers sensed a fresh opportunity under the new annexationist regime. The other would have required any Asian person who wanted to engage in trade or manufacture to acquire a license not required of whites. Moreover, such licenses would be available only to those Chinese who were already engaged in trade or manufacture; no new licensees would be permitted.'
Together, the proposals illuminated both the anti-Asian biases and the flagrant self-interests of the merchant-planter alliance that supported the coup. The same planters who wanted Hawaii to become a United States territory-the sooner the better-realized that they would no longer be free to import laborers from the Asian mainland once their goal was actually achieved; as an American possession, Hawaii would fall under the United States's infamous Chinese Exclusion Acts, which would effectively bar future immigration. Consequently, the planters were exploring ways to prevent Chinese workers who were already there from leaving the fields for jobs in towns and cities, as they had been doing in large numbers after their field contracts expired. Once in towns and cities, moreover, especially in Honolulu itself, the Chinese were vigorously building strong networks of diversified businesses and competing successfully with their English-speaking rivals in a host of trades as diverse as construction and accounting. By the r 88os, enterprising Chinese businessmen controlled more than a quarter of Honolulu's wholesale commerce and more than half its retail activity. As a result, some of the pro-American merchants had joined the planters in support of the Asians-in-agriculture policy, and then added the license idea as a way to handicap the competition'
Discussion of these proposals was met with instant outrage in the increasingly active and well-organized Chinese business community of Honolulu. Chinese leaders in the city quickly mustered a mass meeting of more than two thousand Chinese who vehemently and publicly protested further action on any such policies. Presiding at the meeting was Lau Chung, who controlled the powerful Wing Wo Tai Company. Aligned with Lau were the men who managed Honolulu's largest Chinese businesses: Ah Leong, a merchant and investment broker; Wong Chow, whose Yee Wo Chan Company was a leading importer of Asian goods; and the partners Hong Quon and Sing Chang, who controlled the financially strong Sing Chong investment company. These international businessmen had much to lose if the new government succeeded in crippling their activities.'
"By what right do our white-skinned brothers assume to lord it over us, and to say that we shall do business, and trade, and live and breathe, only by their consent?" demanded one of the speakers at the mass rally. Another hinted that such actions on the part of the whites might force the Chinese to find "a man of war" among themselves in the future. The audience called for unity and action. At the end of the rally, a delegation was chosen to convey a unanimous resolution of protest to the provisional government. In the volatile atmosphere of the immediate postcoup period, the Dole administration decided that discretion was the better part of valor and quietly backed off. But the fact that the new government had seriously entertained the two proposals at all planted poisonous seeds of enduring suspicion in the Chinese community from the very first months of Dole's provisional rule.'
Japanese residents in Hawaii, whose numbers were rising dramatically, took the occasion of the annexationist coup to demand access to citizenship in the new republic. This put the founders of the Dole republic on the horns of dilemma, especially since that demand had the strong and official support of Japan's rapidly modernizing and muscle-flexing home government. On the one hand, the annexationists did not want to share citizenship with any of Hawaii's Asians, including the Japanese, or worse, risk an Asian takeover of the islands by majority vote. On the other hand, because the annexationists initially planned to continue to import Japanese labor, they did not want to alienate the Japanese home government either. The annexationists solved their problem by dropping the explicit ban on Asian citizenship from the previous Hawaiian constitution and inserting an English-and-Hawaiian literacy test for citizenship into the new republican constitution. This solution allowed Japanese officials to claim they had forced the removal of discriminations based specifically on ethnicity, even though everyone realized that almost all Asians, including the Japanese, would continue to be excluded from the political process by almost absurdly rigid enforcement of the new literacy clause.
Rather than risk a referendum on the proposed constitution, the proAmerican oligarchy proclaimed its new republic at a mass rally of ratification, a rally well guarded by loyal troops. In an obvious nod toward the United States, Dole and his allies inaugurated their government on July 4, 1894, and proceeded to fill its various committees and offices with trusted friends and allies from the Annexation Club and the Committee of Safety. Among the new republic's officially constituted public agencies was a Board of Health, staffed with a mix of Western-trained physicians and prominent civilians, who reported to the attorney general. That agency was charged with protecting Hawaii from the world pandemic of bubonic plague.
After six months of uneasy rule, the Dole government in Honolulu faced an open attempt at counterrevolution in January 1895. The insurrection was loosely organized and haphazardly led by a small cadre of dissidents. Many of the insurgents had lost positions of influence or economic advantage when the monarchy had fallen. All of them resented the annexationists allied with Dole, who seemed bent upon delivering their homeland to the United States. The rebels were joined by a motley collection of other Dole opponents, including some Hawaiians loyal to Liliuokalani and a few disappointed office seekers from the republican camp. The purported royalists, who had earlier secreted weapons and whispered conspiratorial words of uprising, invaded Honolulu from Diamond Head. They hoped their armed resistance would serve as a leaven to foment popular unrest. Instead, the tiny and ineffective force was quickly driven into the hills above the city and eventually rounded up by muchstronger militia units organized by the Dole government. In the aftermath, Liliuokalani was compelled to sign a formal document of abdication.
Suppression of the embarrassingly inept effort at open rebellion made Dole's republic appear both stronger and more legitimate than it probably was, but did little to dampen distrust between the government and Honolulu's Asians. Some Chinese had helped provide supplies for the government's volunteers, but most were suspected of sympathizing with, and perhaps even directly aiding, the counterrevolutionaries. One of the chief rebel leaders, the half-Hawaiian royalist Robert
William Kalanihiapo Wilcox, had close ties by marriage to leading Hawaiian Chinese families. Oral traditions in Honolulu's Chinese community for the next fifty years sustained the belief that Chinese merchants had indeed helped underwrite the counterrevolution, annoyed as they were with the alliance between their American competitors and the Dole regime. Decades after the affair, some elderly Chinese even claimed to remember seeing the bodies of two suspected rebels lying in the streets of Chinatown, victims of a shoot-out with Dole militia. Whether those memories were literally accurate, they attested to the enduring antipathy of many Honolulu Chinese toward Dole's Republic of Hawaii.9
In March 1897, the Republican William McKinley was inaugurated as president of the United States. The change in the Washington administration encouraged Dole and the other leading annexationists to resume their original efforts to secure a formal takeover of Hawaii by the United States. The Hawaiian Republic's representatives in Washington developed close relations with key officials in the new administration, particularly naval officials; the Hawaiian legislature sent Dole himself to Washington to plead the annexationists' case. The indefatigably effective Lorrin Thurston articulated the case for American takeover in an influential publication entitled A Hand-book on the Annexation of Hawaii, which-among other things-convincingly rebutted Congressman Blount's earlier dismissal of the annexationists' coup as little more than a sugar planters' plot.10
Even with the support of the administration, however, those in favor of annexation could not command a two-thirds vote in the United States Senate. This was a serious impediment because annexation had been presented in the form of a treaty between the Republic of Hawaii, which had been recognized by the Cleveland administration, and the United States; and treaties required a two-thirds vote of the Senate for ratification. To circumvent that constitutional problem, annexationist forces maneuvered to have Hawaii taken over by joint resolution of both houses of Congress, as Texas had been in the i 84os. That would require the representatives as well as the senators to approve the takeover, but it could be achieved with simple majorities in the two chambers.
A majority in the House of Representatives approved the joint resolution on June 15, 1898, and a majority in the Senate followed suit three weeks later. Both votes were strongly influenced by the U.S. declaration of war on Spain just two months earlier. Since military conflict was already underway in the Philippines, secure possession of the Hawaiian archipelago seemed strategically prudent. When news of the joint resolution reached Honolulu, the Dole government publicly rejoiced at the curiously paradoxical triumph of having given away the independent autonomy of everyone in Hawaii, including themselves. From then on, Hawaii would be a possession of the United States. Only the fourth step of the annexationists' plan remained to be taken: the installation of a formal territorial government.
To the dismay of Dole and his associates, Congress did not immediately take that final step. Many Americans had grave doubts about affording the Hawaiian Islands-with their overwhelmingly nonwhite population and their two-thousand-mile distance from the rest of the nation-the same constitutional status that Americans had granted to contiguous North American territories acquired earlier in the century, a status that strongly implied the possibility of future statehood. Recognizing the strength of such doubts, hesitant politicians in Washington initially blocked all proposals to install a standard territorial regime. Instead, Congress settled into a prolonged debate over the legal status of the nation's newest possession, a debate that would continue into the summer of i9oo.11
Anticipating such a contingency, the joint resolution of annexation had stipulated that "the existing government" in Hawaii would continue to exercise "civil, judicial, and military powers," subject to the authority and direction of the president of the United States, "until Congress shall pro vide for the government of such islands." Moreover, "the municipal legislation of the Hawaiian Islands" would also "remain in force until the Congress of the United States shall otherwise determine."" In other words, the Dole administration would remain in place and continue to function under its own local laws until the territorial debate was resolved in Washington. Though President McKinley was ultimately responsible for the archipelago, even the United States naval forces at Pearl Harbor continued to deal with the preexisting Dole administration as if it was still an independent authority. As a result, when the world pandemic of bubonic plague finally appeared in Honolulu in the final months of 1899, the white minority Dole administration was going to have to deal with it, whether they wanted to or not.
hen the Nippon Maru dropped anchor in Honolulu harbor in June 1899, its captain told the Board-appointed physician who rowed out to inspect the ship that he had a dead body below decks. A Chinese passenger had died at sea a few days before, said the captain, and since he was scheduled to go next to San Francisco, he wanted to off-load the body in Honolulu so the victim's remains could be returned to China. Though the ship's own doctor had already certified the cause of death as uremia, a toxic blood poisoning, the Hawaiian government health inspector had his doubts. So before granting permission for anything or anyone to come ashore, the inspector asked his superiors on the Board of Health what to do.
Francis Day, one of the Board's three physicians, came down to the harbor to see for himself. Day boarded the vessel, carefully inspected the body, and took some tissue samples from the dead passenger. When he got back to his office, he gave some of the tissue samples to Dr. Luis Alvarez, a friend in private practice who had recently taken a course on basic bacteriological methods. Day then discussed his notes and observations with his medical colleagues on the Board of Health. On the basis of the telltale signs that Day reported, they all concluded that the Chinese passenger had almost certainly died of plague, not uremia. Consequently, Day clamped severe restrictions on the Nippon Maru. The ship would wait at Quarantine Island for seven days. No one could disembark and no cargo could be landed.'
Alvarez reported the next day that he was pretty certain he could see plague bacilli in the tissue samples Day had given him. But he could not be sure: this was his first solo effort at bacteriological sleuthing. Fortunately for everyone aboard the Nippon Maru, no additional cases appeared during the week they spent tethered to Quarantine Island. As a result, Day and his colleagues saw no reason to alarm the public. Instead, the doctors on the Board of Health quietly decided to let the ship depart for San Francisco, provided the captain agreed to carry a cautionary warning to that city's health inspectors. Only a few people in Honolulu were even aware of the passenger's death, and the city's newspapers continued to express confidence in the ability of Hawaii's medical defenses to hold the worldwide plague epidemic completely at bay.'
Although Hawaii's health inspectors paid close attention to people and goods, as evidenced in the Nippon Maru incident, they paid no particular attention to the possibility of rats escaping from incoming ships. Since those rodents and their fleas were not yet recognized as the principal purveyors of the plague, no one thought to worry about them. The Honolulu Board of Health would later require crews to put rat-blocking devices on the ropes they used to tie their vessels to the city's wharves. That requirement, however, was imposed only after plague was already rampant inside the city; and ironically, the precaution was ordered "not for our protection [ashore]," Board of Health president Wood later explained, "but for theirs," to protect the crews on ships from potentially plaguecarrying rats in Honolulu.;
Whether from the Nippon Maru or from another ship-some Chinese later suspected that plague had come in with foodstuffs aboard the steamship Manchuria-at least one plague-infected rat almost certainly entered Honolulu sometime between June and August of 1899. Through October and into November, the disease spread steadily among the city's rats, particularly those living close to the wharves, as infected rat fleas jumped from rodent to rodent. The residents of lower Chinatown noticed unusually large numbers of dead rats in the area just above the harbor. Rat fleas prefer to travel among rats, and
normally jump to humans only occasionally. But as more and more rats succumbed, desperate rat fleas began to turn to any available warm-blooded hosts, including humans.4
By late fall, rumors of a deadly new disease began to circulate inside the Chinese community. All of those struck down had lived in the lower part of Chinatown, adjacent to the harbor. Traditional Chinese healers were divided over what the new disease might be and how they should deal with it. They knew that bubonic plague had been stalking the globe for five years, and they recognized the ominous character of the cases breaking out around them, especially the fact that most of those suffering had badly swollen glands. But the traditional healers generally preferred to categorize the mysterious new malady either as some variation of the socalled seasonal sicknesses (shi zheng) they had long associated with old China or as the return of what elderly Chinese called the "giddy illness." To treat the new affliction, herbalists boiled indigo root (banlan gen, or Chinese woad), which patients drank as an antitoxin and applied as a warm compress on their swollen glands. As news of the disease spread throughout Chinatown, however, many nervous residents of the district quietly began to relocate, moving their possessions with them to other areas of the city.'
The residents of Chinatown had good reason to deal quietly with the new disease among them. Four years earlier, shortly after the current government had overthrown the Hawaiian monarchy and established itself as the Republic of Hawaii, a rash of sudden deaths had occurred on the edge of Chinatown. American physicians then serving on the new government's Board of Health tentatively diagnosed the fatal cases as cholera, but most Chinese healers and a few Westerners disagreed. Since identification of the distinctive comma-shaped cholera bacillus had been one of Koch's triumphs in the 18 8os, the Americans had a way to settle the dispute. But no one in Honolulu in 1895 knew enough about bacteriological analyses to conduct the necessary examinations locally, so they had to dispatch bacterial samples to laboratories in the United States for verification.