Black Death at the Golden Gate
Page 8
While he hoped that the abundance of praise would have its intended effect, Wyman never lost sight of the fact that such a plan would require a sense of tact that Kinyoun lacked even on his best days. Without telling Kinyoun, Wyman sent direct telegrams to the Chinese consul general in San Francisco, pleading with him to “have the Chinese comply cheerfully with necessary measures” and to contact the Surgeon General’s office in Washington at once should matters get out of hand.
As he waited for the shipments of the Haffkine serum to arrive, Kinyoun met privately with Mayor Phelan, members of the Board of Health and the heads of the Merchants Association in a closed room at City Hall, and impressed upon them the danger that they all now faced. The men badgered Kinyoun with questions for nearly eight straight hours, determined to find inconsistencies in his assessment of the threat. Unable to do so, they eventually conceded and offered their support should Kinyoun insist on a prolonged closure of Chinatown, though it would mean sacrificing a lucrative summer’s worth of trade. Their main concern, however, was the “earnest desire that no newspaper or other publicity be made, for obvious reasons” until the plan was set in motion, an aide who accompanied Kinyoun to the meeting wrote in a private telegram to Wyman that night.
Though he now had support, Kinyoun saw only risks ahead. The city’s inaction after Wong Chut King’s death had allowed the plague to become entrenched in a small but densely populated portion of the city; any harsh measures that might scare those living in the plague zone into fleeing outside the district would potentially expand the grip of the disease further. A “great danger lies in fact of [an] exodus which [will] necessarily occur as soon as house to house inspection begins,” he cautioned Wyman. In response, Wyman reassigned Marine Health Service inspectors to guard train stations in Reno and at points along the Oregon border with orders to detain and question any Chinese passengers they encountered, forming a makeshift wall intended to pen the plague within California.
It soon became clear that residents might flee the neighborhood before Kinyoun had an opportunity to seal them in. In Hawaii, health officials had inoculated thousands of Chinese with the Haffkine serum without complaint. Yet coming at a time when distrust of compulsory smallpox vaccinations spurred Americans of all ethnicities to pull their children from public schools, most Chinese in San Francisco saw the Haffkine serum as ineffective at best and suspected that it was actually a plan to poison them. Tongs threatened to harm anyone who submitted to the vaccine, prompting Ng Poon Chew, the editor of the influential Chinese-language newspaper Chinese Western Daily, to publicly receive a dose in hopes of setting a positive example to others. A mob soon surrounded his building on Sacramento Street, forcing him to hide in Oakland for several days, and his newspaper immediately lost half of its subscribers. Days later, Ng came out of hiding and broke ranks with other powerful Chinese who supported the inoculation drive, declaring vaccination a form of modern torture.
It was a sentiment shared widely throughout the city, regardless of race. Doctors had never been trusted in San Francisco, and the idea of voluntarily receiving an injection of dead plague germs sounded suicidal at a time when diseases such as tuberculosis and typhoid fever routinely killed men and women in their prime. For all of his technical brilliance, Kinyoun still had much to learn about life outside the laboratory, and he failed to understand why he would need to go to Chinatown himself and explain how and why the serum could save lives. Once again unable to forge a human connection that would make his medical understanding truly useful, he could only watch as men with no scientific skill or understanding shaped public opinion against him. J. A. Boyle, a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner, submitted to a dose of the Haffkine serum to show its side effects. The resulting article described shooting pains in his neck and head, a partial paralysis of his arm, and a high fever that left him “drifting into stupor,” and solidified public opposition to the vaccine.
“Residents of San Francisco are being advised to resist by certain whites,” Kinyoun wrote in a telegram to Wyman in the following days. Refusing to bend, Kinyoun sent health inspectors with doses of the Haffkine serum door to door in Chinatown, a move which the Chinese saw as a provocation. Pamphlets written in Chinese appeared throughout the district, repeating the tongs’ warnings against submitting to the injections. More than seven hundred Chinatown residents joined in protests in front of the Chinese consulate building, angry at the escalation of a plan they saw as tantamount to murder and destroyed several windows before police ordered them to disperse.
At the request of Chinese officials, Kinyoun traveled to the consulate building the following day, where he found several high-ranking officers of the Chinese Six Companies waiting for him. It was the first time that Kinyoun had met with the men in person, whom he regarded with an odd mixture of admiration and bigotry. For all of his achievements in understanding the human body at a cellular level, he was never quite capable of ignoring the outer shell of race. The men of the Chinese Six Companies “rule with a rod of iron and are as autocratic as the Empress of China,” Kinyoun later wrote in a letter to a friend. “They are men of superior intelligence when compared to those of their race, possessing the shrewdness, coupled together with all the other disagreeable features of the Chinese character, which makes them an enemy not to be despised.”
If it continued, the vaccination campaign would lead to a full riot that might spill beyond Chinatown, officers of the Chinese Six Companies told Kinyoun, and implored him to call it off. With Wyman’s reminders to control his temper no doubt ringing in his head, Kinyoun replied that the choice whether to receive the serum remained voluntary. But if the plague scare was not dealt with now, there would likely be harsher measures coming in the future that he could not control, he warned. At that moment, aides burst into the room and announced that over a thousand Chinese residents had surrounded the consulate and were throwing rocks at its windows, inflamed by Kinyoun’s presence inside. Only after an escort of police officers arrived was Kinyoun able to escape and make his way back to Angel Island.
No one in Chinatown submitted to the Haffkine serum over the following three days, deflating what little hope Kinyoun still harbored. The discovery of another badly decomposed body and suspected plague case further unnerved him. Though he had no confirmation, he grew convinced that the worst of his fears were being realized. “Exodus has begun,” he wrote in a telegram to Wyman. Fearing what he perceived to be Kinyoun’s tendency to panic, Wyman immediately wired back. Keeping his tone neutral so as not to push Kinyoun over the edge, “Advise that you use tact and discretion in enforcing Haffkine inoculation of Chinese and be not too precipitate or harsh. End will be more certainly and easily gained . . . it is suggested here that it would materially influence the Chinese if some whites were vaccinated,” he counseled.
With no allies, no sense of diplomacy and no natural authority, Kinyoun found no white San Franciscans who would agree to serve as an example of the serum’s safety and had to call off his plans. Residents of the city, no matter their race, seemed to exhibit no fear of the disease, nor any sense of urgency that they were in its path. The apparent comfort with ignoring Kinyoun’s warnings dispelled the worries of tourists who had been hesitant to visit the city following the reports of plague. The city’s population continued to grow and its hotels remained full, filling its streets with people who had no idea of the danger they were in. “People here absolutely in [the] dark as to correct situation, on account of local papers refusing publishing any matter pertaining to epidemic,” Kinyoun wired Wyman. Seven days after the start of the drive that he had hoped would protect the city, he could count only 53 Chinese residents who submitted to the vaccination, and 764 San Franciscans overall. With no progress to show for it, an inoculation campaign that could have offered some measure of protection was abandoned, leaving San Francisco no safer than before.
As San Francisco refused to take steps to save itself from the disease, Wyman shifted his focus to preventing plagu
e from spreading across the nation. Bolstered by the Service’s federally mandated authority to take all steps necessary to prevent serious diseases from crossing state lines, he directed agents to inspect all trains and ships before they were permitted to leave California and detain any Chinese or Japanese passengers regardless of their health. It was in effect a racial quarantine, aimed at preventing all Asian residents of California—who were already suspect because of the color of their skin—from carrying plague eastward. Wyman submitted the proposal to President William McKinley on May 21, 1900, and received his approval the same day. Marine Hospital Service inspectors moved into position, slowing all interstate traffic leaving California until they could ensure that no Asians were on board.
Three days later, several powerful law firms in San Francisco joined in a lawsuit filed in the U.S. Circuit Court of Northern California. The plaintiff was a Chinese merchant by the name of Wong Wai, who demanded an injunction that would prevent any restraint of the free movement of Chinese residents at a time when the existence of plague had not been officially declared. Kinyoun, along with all members of the city’s Board of Health, was named as a defendant, though he did not attend the trial. His attention was diverted instead by an anonymous threat warning him that the Marine Hospital Service’s overnight patrol boats would soon be run down and destroyed by Chinese tongs.
As the court proceedings began, Kinyoun was holed up on Angel Island, sending urgent telegrams to the Secretary of the Navy requesting warships and patrols to prevent San Francisco’s Asian population from escaping across the bay under cover of night. After four days of hearings, Judge William Morrow released a decision that made Kinyoun’s requests moot. While laudatory in intent, the plague prevention measures “directed against the Asiatic or Mongolian race as a class, without regard to the previous condition, habits, exposure to disease, or residence of the individual” were clear violations of those people’s constitutional rights, Morrow wrote. He issued a restraining order preventing Kinyoun or any of his agents from interfering in any way with the Chinese residents of San Francisco. Kinyoun was despondent. “Under decision, believe situation to United States very grave,” he wired Wyman. “The decision is far-reaching, and practically nullifies all acts of Federal Government within state, as well as preventing cooperation, aid, and assistance . . . [it is] the most serious blow Service has received since assuming quarantine measures.”
Businessmen clad in dark suits and bowler hats crammed into a sweltering ballroom the following day, called there by the powerful state Board of Health for what it would only say was an urgent matter. In the center of the room sat representatives of the Southern Pacific Company, whose rails heading eastward remained the lifeblood of the state. No one wanted to be the first to speak, knowing that the future of the state hung on their words. Kinyoun stood to the side, waiting for his chance to make allies among the members of the board—the only doctors in the state whose regulatory authority rivaled his own.
Only after the room was full and the doors were shut did a state health official reveal the reason for the meeting: Texas and Louisiana were both considering a quarantine of all people and goods originating from California. If there was no definite way to show that the plague was contained, other states were sure to follow. It went unsaid that any such declaration could ruin California’s economy for a generation, leaving the Golden State unable to shed its association with disease. Dr. W. F. Blunt, the chief health officer of Texas, took the stage and said that he was especially unnerved by what he saw as the open mingling of Chinese and white residents on the streets of San Francisco, a situation that would only end in the spread of what he saw as an “Asiatic” disease to the white population. Perhaps, Blunt suggested, if the Chinese were segregated into one district, then he might consider keeping the borders of Texas open to California.
Judge Morrow’s ruling the day before had rendered the Marine Hospital Service powerless to implement such a plan. The only thing left, it seemed, was for the state Board of Health—unmentioned in the federal court’s decision—to impose a full and indefinite quarantine of Chinatown, cordoning everyone who lived inside regardless of their race. It would undeniably cause economic pain, yet that would be nothing compared with the permanent stigma that would come if other states refused free entry to anyone or anything connected with California.
Dr. D. D. Crowley, the acting president of the state Board of Health, called upon Kinyoun to address the meeting, introducing him as “second to none as a bacteriologist.” Kinyoun rose to the stage and agreed that quarantine appeared to be the sole option remaining. Plague was here, he warned the men before him, and they were the only people powerful enough to stop it. The room fell silent as the weight of Kinyoun’s words sank in.
“At the present time, Dr. Kinyoun, you are powerless,” said Dr. Crowley at last.
“I have no power except to talk,” Kinyoun replied, straining to keep the panic out of his voice.
CHAPTER 6
QUARANTINE
The morning quiet was punctured by the sound of a hundred policemen moving into position. They formed a perimeter around Chinatown, preventing any escape. Additional officers stepped forward carrying planks of wood, cement blocks and coils of barbed wire. As residents looked on, the men began building an eight-foot-high fence along the borders of the district. Barbed wire was bunched along the top and the approaches to the barrier, its sharp points glimmering like the thorns of overgrown bushes. By noon, more than ten thousand people were sealed within the new quarantine zone, unsure if they would ever again be free. All streetcar lines running through the district were stopped and all shipments of food across the line refused, once again marooning the Chinese in the city. Chinatown residents were now like “fish caught in a net,” in the words of the Chinese Western Daily.
Desperate, hungry and unable to reach their jobs outside the quarantine area, more than a thousand Chinese surrounded the headquarters of the Chinese Six Companies demanding action. While Chinese leaders filed injunctions in the local federal court and the Chinese minister in Washington lodged an official complaint with Secretary of State John Hay, ad hoc vigilance committees formed on the streets, aimed at punishing anyone cooperating with the Western physicians who seemed intent on setting Chinatown ablaze. The Chinese would “rather die than have our town burned,” one Chinese man told reporters.
A mob surrounded an undertaker by the name of Wing Tie as he led a horse carting three wooden coffins near the quarantine line, convinced that the sight of a man wheeling caskets would inflame the suspicions of health authorities who believed the Chinese were concealing illness. The mob hurled the empty coffins into the street and then pelted Wing Tie’s store with rocks, shattering its glass and sending the man into hiding. Rumors that health authorities were administering forced vaccinations brought hundreds of angry men into Portsmouth Square, where they clashed with police brandishing clubs. Unable to break through the quarantine lines, the bloodied crowd moved on toward Waverly Place, where they tore up cobblestones from the street and attacked the store of a man said to be secretly feeding information to Western doctors, leaving it in ruins.
As Chinatown edged closer to anarchy, Kinyoun prepared for what he now believed was the only way to ensure that the plague epidemic did not kill millions: removing every Asian resident from San Francisco and into temporary custody, by force if necessary. Identifying living patients carrying the disease within the quarantine zone was an “impossible task,” he telegrammed Wyman, given the lack of trust between the Chinese and city officials. “Inspectors have not found a sick person, nor can they discover the dead; these are found in undertaker’s shops, discovered by other persons,” he wrote.
More than a thousand Chinese and Japanese who lived outside the quarantine zone had fled to other parts of the state as soon as the wall went up, exacerbating Kinyoun’s fear that carriers of the disease were already on the move. After securing funding from the state Board of Health and approval from Wy
man and the Secretary of War in Washington, Kinyoun rented several warehouses on Mission Rock—a small, gravel-strewn island at the mouth of Mission Bay—for use as temporary barracks to house the city’s Asian population until Chinatown was disinfected and its buildings demolished. Should the warehouses not be large enough to hold the more than ten thousand residents of Chinatown, he sketched a layout for a tent city on the opposite end of Angel Island, far enough away that he would not have to worry about the disease spreading to the sprawling Marine Hospital Service station. He knew that military assistance would be required to force the Chinese into submission, but he believed it was the only way it might be possible to contain the disease.
While consumed in planning, Kinyoun received an unannounced visit from the president of the Chamber of Commerce, who requested a private meeting in his office at Angel Island. Once out of earshot of aides, the man offered what Kinyoun would later describe as “large and handsome presents” in exchange for declaring the city free of plague. Kinyoun refused the bribe on the spot. That the man felt comfortable offering him a payoff despite his central role in implementing the quarantine and a public reputation for prudishness only confirmed Kinyoun’s suspicions that other doctors in the city were regularly putting money before duty and knowingly attributing plague deaths to other illnesses. He had long disliked daily life in California, from the taste of the fish that his sons caught at the small pier outside their barrack at Angel Island to the way that a golden glimmer of opportunity seemed to blind its citizens to any morals that stood in their way. Now, for the first time, he realized that his distaste had devolved into disgust, and he hardened his resolve to protect the country from a place he believed was wicked to its core.