The Mosquito

by Timothy C. Winegard

  In late July, the first case of yellow fever was reported. A sailor on board a ship that had made passage to Memphis from Cuba via New Orleans instigated the epidemic. “Many of those ships in 1878 came from Cuba, where the Ten Years’ War for independence was coming to an end and an epidemic of yellow fever had been raging since March,” reports Molly Caldwell Crosby in her nail-biting, finely crafted book The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic That Shaped Our History, charting the 1878 yellow fever epidemic that frayed the southern United States. “Refugees landed in New Orleans by the hundreds. . . . The harbor was filling with vessels bobbing in the water, the Yellow Jack flying high over their decks.” Within a month, the remaining dazed and confused residents of a traumatized Memphis were drowning in the feverish summer sweats of yellow fever. The city was paralyzed in a tomb of death, bereavement, and fear. The average daily mortality rate during the month of September was 200. The mosquito had literally sucked the life out of Memphis and turned it into a city of crypts and corpses. While America was keenly watching the protracted Cuban insurgency against Spanish rule with covetous commercial eyes, the yellow fever epidemic spread unchecked from Memphis, snaking across the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio River watersheds.

  By this time, Blackburn had traveled to Louisville to attend to its sick and dying victims of “Yellow Jack.” The 1878 epidemic thundered across the shuddering South until the chilly winds and first frosts of October killed the unknown mosquito assailant and put an end to more than five months of suffering. Blackburn resumed his political campaign, winning the election by a decisive 20% margin over his Republican opponent. He served as governor of Kentucky from 1879 to 1883 and continued to practice medicine until his death in 1887. His tombstone is emblazoned with the simple slogan THE GOOD SAMARITAN. As a tribute to “Dr. Black Vomit,” the Blackburn Correctional Complex, a minimum-security prison near Lexington, Kentucky, was unlocked for tenants in 1972 in his honor. Given his attempted biological terror campaign (including an indirect shot at Lincoln’s life), for which he was never brought to justice, in this case irony steals the last laugh.

  During the pandemic of 1878, of the 120,000 people infected, yellow fever harvested more than 20,000 souls: 1,100 in Vicksburg, 4,100 in New Orleans, and 5,500 in Memphis—a staggering 28% of those who stayed behind, or 12% of the original population. Imagine the pandemonium and mayhem in our current sociocultural climate if 165,000 people in metropolitan Memphis died from yellow fever or another choice disease over the next few months. The 1878 contagion, the worst yellow fever tragedy in American history, was also, thankfully, the last major outbreak of the disease. The virus rippled through the southern states periodically until the last minor epidemic imported from Cuba in 1905 claimed 500 people in New Orleans.

  The epidemics that gripped the battle-scarred and mosquito-bitten country in the 1870s were spawned by the rapid growth of trade and the expansion of markets not only in the United States, but also across South and Central America and the Caribbean. The viral 1878 epidemic, for instance, was traded from the lingering Spanish satellite of Cuba through New Orleans to Memphis. The United States looked on these few loitering Spanish colonies, the remnants of a once dominant empire, with lusting imperialistic eyes to propel its own wielding industry and mercantilist economic system into international waters. When the United States declared war on Spain in April 1898, “Why trade when you can invade?” entered the American playbook. America’s first target in this great game of global empire building was Cuba.

  During this maiden charge of American colonization in Cuba, the mosquito stood between the United States and mountains of money. Wealth is a powerful motivator, even when daring to joust with and taunt deadly Cuban mosquitoes. A few determined and resolute mosquito fighters commanded by Dr. Walter Reed escorted America’s first true flirtation with imperialism during the Spanish-American War. While American soldiers of the Fifth Army Corps set their gunsights on unseasoned Spanish defenders, Reed’s US Army Yellow Fever Commission trained their microscope crosshairs squarely on Cuban mosquitoes.

  Yellow Jack-in-the-Box: An 1873 cartoon from Leslie’s Weekly portrays the state of Florida in the clutches of a yellow fever Gollum-like demon escaping a crate labeled TRADE while Columbia, the personification of the United States of America, signals for help. Behind the trio, frightened Americans flee for their lives. As trade, most notably from the Caribbean, was regenerated and energized after the Civil War, yellow fever went on a serial killing spree across the United States during the 1870s. (Library of Congress)

  Predictably, as American infrastructure and trade blossomed after the Civil War, so, too, did mosquito-borne disease. Not only were mosquito-reared epidemics, including the 1878 infestation trafficked from Cuba, escalating in breadth and ferocity, she was also biting into the bank accounts of American traders and investors in the process. Prior to the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, she was killing both people and profit at peak rates.

  The mosquito carnage of 1878, for example, bit a distressing $200 million chunk out of the US economy. Congress candidly announced that “to no other great nation of the earth is yellow fever so calamitous as to the United States of America.” The mosquito swung through the South like a wrecking ball and smashed the economic levees, draining American finance and commercial buoyancy. Congress responded by creating the National Board of Health the following year to remedy these debilitating health and economic concerns. Little could be done, however, as the actual cause of mosquito-borne disease, including yellow fever, was still anonymous. Although it was hiding in plain sight, scientists and researchers were still searching in the dark for the world’s most wanted serial killer. Unable to infiltrate and breach the bases of mosquito-borne disease, the newly minted National Board of Health had no way of knowing that it was this same cherished and coveted commerce that sparked the mosquito’s postwar rampage. The southern scourge of yellow fever centered on skyrocketing American (and global) trade, its expanding and snaking transportation infrastructure, including a latticework of railways, and the last great spike of immigration to the United States.

  While the Civil War had churned up fallow fields, cotton plantations, which had stagnated during the war, were rebooted and enlarged with former slaves, now styled as sharecroppers. The military-industrial complex that had fueled the Union during the Civil War was refashioned and pumped out exportable manufactured goods. Increased global traffic once again descended on southern ports. For the mosquito, and her diseases of yellow fever, malaria, and dengue, the South was reopened for business. The postwar influx of immigrants added to the misery by importing their own brands of the disease. Endemic malaria, for example, which had been absent for decades, was reintroduced across New England.

  The Civil War had reinvigorated the mosquito, and while malaria continued its wreckage during the immediate peace, yellow fever was reenergized as well. “American progress was the virus’s other ally. A great influx of immigrants—Irish, German, eastern European—had been migrating south since the Civil War,” confirms Molly Caldwell Crosby. “They served as fuel for a fever fire, a fresh source of nonimmune blood for the virus. Transportation paved the way for these immigrants. Trains connected every corner of America for the first time—east to west, north to south.” By 1878, as the South was heaving and retching with yellow fever, more than 80,000 miles of railway track was operational in the US. At the turn of the century, 260,000 miles stretched across the country, reaching 410,000 miles only fifteen years later. This massive growth of railways and other infrastructure was built to propel swelling American economic portfolios into the global market.

  The railways also eased the frontier passage west for land-hungry settlers. In its own backyard, the United States continued its western economic drive of Manifest Destiny and the subjugation of indigenous peoples. The “Iron Horse” ferried increasing numbers of “sod-busting” pioneers, fortune-seeking miners, and
their bodyguard US Cavalry to the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, where they came face-to-face with proud and defiant indigenous peoples who were willing to fight to defend their homelands. Cavalrymen and paid assassins, such as William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, exterminated the bison, their livelihood, and battled, slaughtered, and forcefully removed the starving, straggling remnants to bleak reservations.

  Along the wagon trails and train tracks, malaria plodded west with the homesteaders and thrived on the new frontier, making frequent guest appearances in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiographical novel Little House on the Prairie depicting her childhood in 1870s Independence, Kansas. Roughly 10% of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry, for example, was suffering from malaria when they were routed by the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe, led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse in June 1876 at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. While this encounter may have been “Custer’s Last Stand,” in a sense, it was also the last stand of American indigenous autonomy. The Sioux won the battle, but with their massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, they lost the war, sealing the fate of indigenous peoples across the United States. This internal economic expansion of the United States at the expense of indigenous peoples generated a thirst for overseas ports and resources to feed domestic industry and foreign exports.

  Rapid escalation of commerce and trade was coupled to the collection of a sprawling American colonial checkerboard. This era of American expansion announced a permanent departure from President James Monroe’s 1823 isolationist doctrine.* American imperialism set off a sweeping chain of events, which continued through both world wars. During the century between the conclusion of the War of 1812 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the United States drastically expanded its territorial footprint, securing Florida, the remainder of the west beyond the Rocky Mountains, Alaska, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, eastern Samoa, the Philippines, and the Panama Canal.

  As the American economic tentacles of empire reached across the Caribbean, the Pacific Rim, and beyond, Europe took its last clumsy imperialistic steps in Africa and the East Indies. From the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, European nations generally licked their wounds, remained cordial, and peacefully carved up the rest of the unclaimed world. With the Western Hemisphere being gathered to and embraced by the American sphere of influence, European imperialism, with the aid of quinine, shifted away from the Americas to Africa. A great game of mercantile Monopoly and military Risk was simultaneously played out across the “dark continent,” periodically seeping into India, central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Far East.

  It was within these final moves of the last global imperial scramble that the mosquito was finally unmasked. The clandestine and murderous agent of filariasis, malaria, and yellow fever, among her other vehicles of assassination, would, at long last, be revealed. Like most scientific invention and technological innovation, exposing the mosquito as the cause of contagion was directly tied to capitalism in the British colonies of India and Hong Kong and the French outpost of Algeria, and to conflict with the American invasion of Cuba.

  Beginning in the 1870s, American entrepreneurs and capital poured into Cuba, and the island was slowly bought up by American corporations, progressively fraying its economic ties to Spain. As early as 1820, Thomas Jefferson contemplated that Cuba would be “the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States” and reasoned that America “ought, at the first opportunity, to take Cuba.” In fact, Spain had rejected offers from five US presidents—Polk, Pierce, Buchanan, Grant, and McKinley—to purchase the island. A similar commercial Americanization was also materializing on the independent Hawaiian Islands. Seeing as both Cuba and Hawaii were not territories of the United States, aggrieved American plantation owners were charged tariffs on their “foreign goods” at American ports. Despite these import duties, by 1877 the United States purchased a staggering 83% of Cuban exports (yellow fever was the one Cuban import that had no tariff).

  In the decades following the Civil War, the American industrial economy boomed. By 1900, the United States was the global leader in manufactured goods, which accounted for almost half of total American exports. While American natural resources were certainly richly abundant, and Canada outfitted its southern neighbor with most shortfalls, both countries lacked rubber, silk, a sizable sugar industry, and other tropical commodities. The swelling shipping fleets facilitating this relatively quick expansion of American trade also required coaling stations and naval protection. American capitalism needed mercantilist colonies. Uncle Sam’s lusting eyes wandered toward the volatile, wayward Spanish colony of Cuba, which had been consumed by insurrection against imperial rule since 1868.

  Cuba benefited directly from Toussaint Louverture’s successful mosquito-backed slave revolt in Haiti. The financial price, or punishment, for Haiti’s prized freedom in 1804 was the destruction of its plantations and its blacklisting as a global economic pariah. Filling this commercial pecuniary vacuum, Cuba quickly unseated and supplanted Haiti as the largest sugar producer in the world (half the global supply), while emerging as a main exporter of tobacco and coffee. As investments and wealth flooded the island, Havana with its majestic seafront promenade quickly blossomed into an ethnic melting pot, a playground for multinational elites, and a cosmopolitan mecca rivaling the glitz and glamour of New York. Although numerous revolts against the lingering Spanish rule occurred throughout the nineteenth century, they lacked cohesion and foreign support and were brutally suppressed by the Spanish and their Cuban-born political puppets.

  Beginning in 1868, however, protracted insurrection became a mainstay on the island, during which time a large segment of slaves, who accounted for roughly 40% of the population, secured freedom. Spain responded by pumping in hefty contingents of fresh, unseasoned troops. Unlike many other Caribbean islands, Cuba was home to a healthy diaspora of its colonizing Spanish peoples and their descendants, who made up the largest segment of the total 1.7 million population. Between 1865 and 1895, over 500,000 Spanish immigrants settled in Cuba. The high rate of new arrivals, sojourners of fortune, and Spanish soldiers to Cuba kept the notoriously lethal Cuban mosquitoes well stocked with virgin blood. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, virulent annual epidemics of yellow fever consumed the island, with a death toll reaching 60,000.

  When slavery was banned in 1886, the wealthy Spanish-Cuban elite saw their profits plummet. The rise of the global sugar beet industry, founded by Napoleon’s France after the loss of Haiti, as mentioned, also cut into sugar revenues. Floundering economically, Spain instituted taxation policies on Cuba similar to those enacted by the British on the American colonies prior to the revolution. Spain put the financial squeeze on Cuba, its last bastion of colonial commerce, by levying augmented taxes and withholding voting and legal privileges from the Spanish-Cuban population. Americans could certainly understand why the Cubans revolted against this tyrannical Spanish rule crowned with burdensome taxation, imposed without colonial consent or political representation. The Cuban plight was something Americans could rally around to serve their own imperialistic agenda. With both foreign and domestic support swelling, the Cuban “Sons of Liberty,” many brought up in the shadows and stories of Simon Bolivar’s struggles for freedom, slowly began to gather strength and numbers. In 1895, full-scale rebellion broke out in Cuba.

  Over the course of hostilities, roughly 230,000 Spanish soldiers led by General Valeriano “the Butcher” Weyler ruthlessly fought to suppress the insurgency. Rural peasants were rounded up for “reconcentration” and quartered in hastily built, overcrowded camps. Crops and livestock were confiscated or cleansed, and the countryside and villages were put to the torch. By 1896, over a third of Cuba’s entire population had been relocated to these concentration camps, with 150,000, nearly 10% of the island’s population, dying of disease. Of the 45,000 Spanish military deaths, over 90% were caused by disease,
primarily yellow fever and malaria. By January 1898, of the 110,000 remaining Spanish troops, 60% were incapacitated by mosquito-borne disease. As mutinous Cuban mosquitoes continued to devour Spanish troops with no tangible military results, opposition to the war intensified on the home front. “After having sent 200,000 men and having spilt so much blood,” decried the leader of the Spanish opposition party, “we are masters in the island only of the territory upon which our soldiers stand.” Unseasoned reinforcements sent directly from Spain were torn apart by the mosquito within weeks of landing. Spanish hospital admissions for mosquito-borne disease reached 900,000—multiple admissions per man.

  The architects of the revolution understood that yellow fever, malaria, and dengue were their formidable allies, praising “June, July and August” as their most distinguished generals, with September and October receiving honorable mention. For the seasoned Cubans, only 30% of their 4,000 military deaths were caused by these same diseases. According to J. R. McNeill, the revolutionary leaders “goaded the Spaniards into unpopular policies, courted foreign support—especially in the U.S.—and, most of all, used their mobility to avoid Spanish forces except when they found patrols in vulnerable situations. Thus they kept the rebellion alive, like Washington, Toussaint, and Bolivar before them, and emerged victorious because time and the ‘climate’ was on their side.”

  The American press, led by rival New York media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, used Weyler’s atrocities to mobilize validation for war against Spain (and sell newspapers), inflaming American public opinion toward intervention. President William McKinley accused the Spanish of waging a “war of extermination.” More importantly, American entrepreneurs, drooling at the thought of the annexation of Cuba, pleaded for conflict resolution. The war was increasingly bleeding their personal fortunes and diminishing profit while also draining the larger American economy by slashing plantation production, harrying shipping, and sheering away local labor.