by Black Death at the Golden Gate- The Race to Save America from the Bubonic Plague (retail) (epub)
“It appears that the ‘commercial interests’ of San Francisco are more dear to the inhabitants than the preservation of human life,” he wrote in a long letter to a friend in Washington. “No sentiment has been expressed against a possible danger arising to the people, to their wives and children. These people seem perfectly indifferent, whether or not bubonic plague exists in San Francisco, so long as they can sell their products and make large percentages on their investments . . . It would be difficult to say what will be necessary to awaken this people to their responsibility as citizens of the United States, and to the fact that California is a part of the Union. The prevailing sentiment here is that California is still a republic; that the ‘Bear’ is above the Stars and Stripes; and that the ‘native son’ takes precedence over the citizen. The presence of the United States is tolerated simply for the sake of convenience, and for what material benefits that can derive therefrom. In the matter of pure patriotism I believe it exists here in less quantity and poorer quality, than can be found in any place in the United States.”
As the possibility of bloodshed bubbled higher in Chinatown, Kinyoun received a telegram from Wyman, a man he increasingly saw as too afraid to travel out west and put himself on the line. Such timidity on the part of a man who was supposed to be a leader gnawed at Kinyoun, inflaming his natural tendency to ignore anyone he did not respect. Still, he followed orders, not yet desperate enough to risk open insubordination. Wyman alerted Kinyoun to the fact that Dr. George F. Shrady, who had become one of the nation’s most prominent doctors after attending to President Ulysses S. Grant during his final hours, was then secretly en route to San Francisco. Once there, he would investigate the bubonic plague scare and write a series of articles confirming or denying the presence of the disease that would be published simultaneously in the New York Herald and the San Francisco Call. Kinyoun was to meet with Shrady as soon as he reached San Francisco and assist him in any way possible.
Though Kinyoun welcomed the idea of finally working with someone who respected his East Coast credentials, he knew that nothing with Shrady would be easy. He had met him once before, while serving on cholera duty in New York City, and came away unimpressed. The man was a famous windbag, more accustomed to delivering lectures in front of admiring audiences than working in a laboratory or treating patients. He had let his Civil War accolades and deep lineage, which included both grandfathers having taken up arms on the side of the colonies during the American Revolution, get to his head, and he now carried himself with a pomposity bordering on the ridiculous. Kinyoun suspected that Shrady would not even know what bubonic plague looked like under a microscope, yet sought him out as directed.
It took several days after Shrady arrived in the city for Kinyoun to gain admittance into what he would later sarcastically refer to as “the presence.” Shrady had transformed a suite in the Palace Hotel into a miniature version of the newsroom of the New York Herald, with news clerks stationed in front of typewriters on makeshift desks, and was preparing for his first tour of Chinatown the following day when Kinyoun arrived. Kinyoun listened as Shrady began a monologue about what he expected to see and how his readers would react. Kinyoun interrupted him to say that “until this time it had not been possible for anyone to have anything published in the San Francisco press that in any way reflected the true condition of affairs,” a condition that “practically meant the suppression of news,” he would later write. Shrady responded that he had the authority to publish whatever he wished and relaunched into his sermon, focusing this time on how readers would be thrilled to learn that he was in town.
The more the man talked, the more Kinyoun realized that Shrady’s plan was to say that no true cases of plague had been found before he arrived in the city and then discover infected patients himself, making him a national hero once more. His accolades assured, Shrady would then go on to call for the total and immediate destruction of Chinatown by fire and dynamite. Envisioning the riots that would ensue if Shrady’s plans were made known, Kinyoun “begged him by everything holy never to advocate such a thing as that at the present time, unless he had ten thousand troops at his back,” he later wrote in a letter to a friend. Shrady seemed uninterested in Kinyoun’s warnings and the meeting soon ended.
All of San Francisco waited over the following days for Shrady’s verdict. “The people of San Francisco have reason for the deepest congratulations. One of the most expert bacteriologists in the world and a physician famed for his ability is in the city at the instance of the New York Herald and the Call, to make a thorough and absolutely impartial investigation of the facts which have led to the sensational reports that bubonic plague is in this city,” the Call reported in a front-page spread. Shrady’s fame was so great that his dispatches in the Call were reprinted in part in competing papers, something unheard of at a time when editorial pages delighted in mocking their adversaries.
In his first article, Shrady detailed a daytime journey into Chinatown and to the Globe Hotel, where Wong Chut King, the first known victim of the disease, had lived. As he walked along the streets of the district accompanied by a police officer, Shrady grew unnerved by “a smothered firing of vengeance in the expression of almost every Chinaman you would meet. This was decidedly notable and made one feel most uncomfortable,” he wrote. Only after an officer subtly informed him that he carried a gun under his overcoat did Shrady begin to feel at ease. He descended into the subterranean passages beneath the Globe Hotel, holding three candles ahead of him to light the way along a path that was “twisted, uneven, low, dark, dirty and in every way forbidding, with smell intolerable.” He attempted to enter the apartments of the building’s residents, evidently in hopes of finding a living person carrying the disease, but was rebuffed at every turn. He made no attempt to understand why, finding fault in those in whom he saw only filth. The Chinese “seemed to have a superstitious idea that the white man is a natural enemy, even after death. Often when an inspection of a suspected house was attempted the doors would be locked because of the apparent stupidity of the occupants . . . In fact, it was quite a frequent occurrence during an active house to house inspection for the Chinese to take their sick over the roofs of their house and thus deceive the inspector,” he wrote.
Shrady failed to uncover any evidence of plague, a fact that the Call highlighted in a separate front-page article that ran along his first-person dispatch. Kinyoun, sensing an opportunity, brought a package containing cells from nine confirmed plague cases and his own microscope to the doctor’s hotel room the following day. With Shrady uncharacteristically quiet, Kinyoun detailed the case histories of each victim, and then gave Shrady a tutorial in how the disease presented itself in the body and how to identify it via microscope and grow it in a culture. The next morning, he asked Shrady to accompany him to the autopsy of a suspected plague case at a Chinatown morgue, certain that the doctor could not pass up an opportunity which would allow him to personally announce the discovery of a plague victim to the nation.
Spectators watching marching bands performing in a Decoration Day parade—the precursor of the modern Memorial Day—clogged the streets as the men made their way toward Chinatown and the quarantine line. Once inside the district, policemen protected them as they walked to 706 Pacific Street, where a body lay waiting in a coffin shop. Dozens of Chinese were standing outside the building and dozens more trailed the doctors in a quiet procession, all waiting to hear the results of the autopsy. Kinyoun and Shrady stepped inside the funeral home and found the body of Dang Hong, a forty-year-old man who had died after complaining of a venereal disease, lying under a dirty sheet. The body was in good condition and exhibited few obvious signs of plague. No buboes were present, and no swelling was evident in the lymph nodes in the groin or armpits. Nevertheless, Kinyoun took a sample of tissue from the inguinal gland, located near the pelvis, and prepared a slide. He and Shrady each took a turn examining it under a microscope, and agreed that it appeared to be plague. Kinyoun then took addit
ional tissue samples from the body for use in animal inoculations, which would confirm the diagnosis.
“It is with the greatest regret that this statement must be made, but the plain truth must be told,” Shrady wrote the following day in a front-page article. “This, as I understand it, is what the public has asked for. Now the time has come to face the issue calmly, deliberately and judiciously.” Plague was indeed in San Francisco, and the city must respond. He counseled the mayor to take no drastic actions, and its residents not to flee. There had yet to be a person with the disease found alive, he noted, and there were no signs of an epidemic that could reach beyond the quarantine line. And though the disease was now confirmed, that did not necessarily mean that all of San Francisco was in danger. Race, he declared, continued to matter more than plague cells. “The disease is not apt to spread rapidly at first,” he wrote. “We must remark also in this connection that it has a special predilection for the Asiatic race and exceptionally attacks the whites.”
Though Shrady’s series of articles was set to run for another three days, Kinyoun allowed himself to feel hope again. He did not share Shrady’s confidence that the disease would naturally confine itself to the city’s Asian population, but that was not what mattered at that moment. For the first time in months, a San Francisco paper had printed an article that openly acknowledged that plague was within the city. He quickly issued orders that he knew would have been blocked before Shrady’s confirmation of plague. He directed quarantine officers at Angel Island to refuse clean bills of health to outward-bound steamers, an implicit admission that San Francisco was an infected port, and sent letters to the members of the state Board of Health, directing them to prepare quarantine officers to once again patrol the state’s borders and prevent any Asians from leaving.
Kinyoun clung to his optimism even as Shrady seemed to back away from the truth of the plague’s existence in the city in his article the following morning. While Kinyoun worked to contain the disease, Shrady had participated in the autopsy of a child the day before. With no understanding that Chinese tradition held that the procedure could prevent a person’s ascension into the afterlife, he could only gaze with bewilderment when the boy’s father had to be restrained by police officers while doctors began the procedure. No plague bacilli were found in the child’s body, leaving Shrady to question whether the disease was truly entrenched in the city. “It might also be said that the plague is not here. Where is it?” he wrote, remarking once again upon the fact that no living person had been found carrying the disease.
The real issue, he held, was the fact that “Chinatown is so notoriously filthy that almost any superlative could fit such a condition.” Had the disease been found in New York City, it would have already been wiped out by its superior Board of Sanitation, he boasted. San Francisco was now in its infancy in terms of hygiene and public health, and it was unfair to judge it by diseases that would no doubt be expunged once a sustained cleanup was underway. The city “has never been waked before on sanitary questions as she is now, and there are earnest men here that are backing a movement for reform which may astonish everyone who is awaiting results,” he wrote. “So I think it is perfectly warranted on the part of all concerned, here and elsewhere, to say that the real situation is not by any means so bad as it might otherwise be.”
Kinyoun requested a meeting with Shrady to learn what was behind his sudden change in opinion, but was refused. He did not know that before the article ran, Shrady had spent hours in the company of Governor Henry Gage, a bombastic man who took personally any perceived slight against the state. A former sheep dealer who had opened a law practice in Los Angeles, Gage rose to prominence by representing the powerful Southern Pacific Railroad. His tenacity gained him favor with the company, which eventually helped guide him into the governor’s office. Now, as he walked the corridors of power in the state capital, he went to great lengths to remind everyone he encountered of his rough past. He sported an enormous walrus mustache and made it known that he stowed a Bowie knife in his ever-present cowboy boots. The measures had the intended effect, granting Gage a reputation for churlishness, but the energy he put into the effort left the lingering impression that it was all a show to distract from his inability to govern.
After his election, both Democrats and members of his own party accused Gage of being a pawn for the railroad, and the governor, unused to confrontations that he did not choose, could not recover. By the second year of his administration, he was widely disliked by voters and ostracized by fellow lawmakers. When he received a telegram from John Hay, the U.S. Secretary of State, inquiring into the persistent rumors of plague in San Francisco, he sensed both a danger to California’s economy and a welcome distraction from the questions over his fitness for office. His chief asset had always been his willingness to bully, flatter or lie to get his way, and he now turned those skills on a man unused to being treated with anything but deference.
Over dinner at the Cliff House, an elegant eight-story French chateau perched on the rocks above the Pacific Ocean, and later in the doctor’s suite at the Palace Hotel, Gage alternated between charming and challenging Shrady. Wasn’t it true, Gage asked, that all of the so-called plague bacilli that Shrady inspected had been furnished to him by either Kinyoun or the state Board of Health, and that he had never personally taken a sample of tissue that exhibited signs of the disease? How did he know that the plague tissue he was inspecting hadn’t been imported from India or Japan, or been reused from the same patient? And, if he truly believed that he would be exposed to plague upon coming to San Francisco, why hadn’t Shrady opted to receive a dose of the Haffkine serum himself? California’s fruit crop alone would be worth $25 million that year and would have to be thrown out if other states suspected that plague was within San Francisco, Gage said; wasn’t that an awful lot of money to sacrifice for something that Shrady couldn’t be sure of?
Shrady shrank under the questioning, unable to find the self-regard that was his constant companion. Within two days of dining with Gage, he repudiated his earlier statement that plague was present in San Francisco. He could no longer be sure that the plague bacilli he had inspected that week had come from a person who died in San Francisco, he wrote, subtly suggesting that Kinyoun and other doctors had conspired to trick him. His confidence in his own eyes gone, he now saw no reason why Chinatown should be quarantined and mocked the idea that plague could pose a danger to the city even if it were there. “It is like quarantining a 10,000 acre field to stop the spread of a little prairie fire in the middle,” Shrady wrote. As he prepared to board a train back to New York, Shrady told reporters that he had promised the governor that if there were no new genuine cases of plague by the time he reached the East Coast, then he would publicly recommend that the quarantine be lifted and that the health officials he had worked with be reassigned.
Though betrayed once more, Kinyoun felt only envy as Shrady’s train chugged out of view. It was Shrady, and not him, who was heading back to the East Coast with his reputation intact. Kinyoun, meanwhile, continued to shoulder the responsibility of saving millions of lives in a place that cared nothing for him. Given the rare opportunity to tell San Francisco the truth about the danger it faced, Shrady had instead “fallen into the hands of the Philistines,” Kinyoun complained in a bitter letter to a friend.
Gage was not finished. He had built his identity around the notion that he was an embodiment of the lost old ways of California, when white ranchers relied on their common sense and brawn to survive, and he resented the incursion of bespectacled doctors from a far coast who had the power to upend everything he had worked for in his life. He called an emergency meeting of the state Board of Health and spent the session upbraiding its members for not performing their own studies on alleged plague victims and relying instead on the opinions of untrustworthy federal health authorities such as Kinyoun. When a doctor challenged him on his medical knowledge, Gage grew furious. He vowed to prevent the state from spending an
additional dollar on maintaining the quarantine and to stop the state Board of Health from sharing any information about the cleanup campaign with other states. As further proof that he did not believe that plague posed any danger, he telegraphed his family in Los Angeles and ordered them to come to San Francisco at once.
The governor sent an official response to Secretary Hay in Washington in which he enclosed a fifteen-point letter signed by prominent figures including Levi Strauss and the president of Cooper Medical College that detailed what he called the “plague fake.” He pointed to Kinyoun as its chief conspirator. “The medical gentlemen and experts of the City Board of Health and the federal quarantine officer who have ventured the injurious opinions which have spread broadcast over the world the rumor of the existence of the dreadful plague in this great and healthful city of San Francisco have never seen a living case of plague,” he wrote. Privately he met with attorneys working for the Chinese Six Companies and offered lines of attack, as they prepared for a hearing before a federal judge to challenge the quarantine.
The proceedings took place before the same Judge Morrow who had halted the previous quarantine weeks before. The Chinese Six Companies presented witnesses who testified that the quarantine line had been obviously gerrymandered to exclude white-occupied buildings, leaving it a racially—rather than medically—segregated zone. Yet the thrust of its case turned instead to the inability of Kinyoun and other Marine Hospital Service doctors to identify a living person suffering from plague. “Dr. Kinyoun, surgeon of the Marine Hospital Service and Quarantine Office of the port of San Francisco, has injected himself into this case as they inject virus into a rat. Did he ever see the plague in Honolulu, Sydney, or India?” asked J. C. Campbell, an attorney for the Six Companies, in his opening statement. While Kinyoun proudly displayed an M.D. “that flourishes as a tail to [his] name, there is nothing to show this Court that [he is a] physician,” Campbell charged. A real doctor was someone who practiced with patients, not microscopes. Bacteriology was nothing but a sham, and the bacteriologists who practiced it were emasculated men who, Campbell suggested, could do no better than stay alone in a room with test tubes all day. “The best evidence that plague does not exist here is the fact that the beardless boys who have been playing with these so-called germs are still alive,” he said. “They have had injected rats and animals of all descriptions running around their laboratories and escaped uninjured . . . If there has been plague in San Francisco than the Almighty has wrought a miracle to save them for the fire they have tried so hard to kindle.”