by Black Death at the Golden Gate- The Race to Save America from the Bubonic Plague (retail) (epub)
As he watched the federal government’s attorney sputter, Kinyoun felt his last reserves of hope slip away. He sent a telegram to Wyman asking for permission to enact a little-used power that gave the Marine Hospital Service vast sway over interstate travel should Morrow rule against them. Kinyoun knew that, in theory, his agency could prevent entry into a state to anyone who did not carry a certificate of clean health signed by a federal health officer, though the agency had rarely executed that power and it had never been attempted on a scale so enormous. Instead of quarantining just those living in Chinatown, Kinyoun was proposing that the Marine Hospital Service block every person in the state, regardless of ethnicity, from leaving California. “Believe this is the only course now left open since executive of California has seen fit to make misleading statements to State Department concerning conditions here,” Kinyoun wrote.
When Wyman did not immediately reply, Kinyoun began laying the groundwork on his own. He had not forgiven Wyman for sending him to Angel Island, and he could not trust a man who refused to travel to San Francisco himself to show the strength to do what was necessary. With his last chance of preventing the disease from spreading eastward at hand, Kinyoun relied solely on the opinion that had always meant the most to him: his own. Unafraid of the repercussions, he ordered Marine Health Service officials to man posts at every railroad crossing along the state’s borders and told them to prepare to enact an almost total closure of California.
“A new word has been coined in the parlance of Western language, and that is ‘Kinyounism,’ ” he wrote in a defiant letter to a friend. “Kinyounism is meant to be that a man will carry out his orders irrespective of the wish of the local people; that he will tell the truth whether it is politic to do so or not; that he cannot be bribed, coerced, or jollied into suppressing the truth, particularly to his superiors. I suppose that the word ‘Kinyounism’ will remain for quite a number of years as one of the set phrases in describing this condition. I hope so at least.”
As expected, Judge Morrow declared the sixteen-day quarantine of Chinatown unconstitutional, ruling that the Board of Health had acted “with an evil eye and unequal hand” in drawing borders based primarily on race. Within hours, workers began dismantling the fences around Chinatown. Wagons full of fresh fruit and supplies entered the district for the first time in more than two weeks, ending a siege that had caused some residents to fear starvation.
As he watched the people of Chinatown move freely throughout the city, potentially spreading their germs onto trains and boats and sidewalks, Kinyoun determined that he had run out of options. Every person in the district must be considered a carrier of the disease, and there was nothing stopping any one of them from getting on an eastbound train and spreading death nationwide.
Nothing, except for him.
CHAPTER 7
OUST THE FAKER
At seven o’clock on the morning of June 16, 1900, Kinyoun ordered every railroad and steamship company in San Francisco to stop selling tickets to people heading out of state unless they could produce a certificate that verified their good health signed by himself or another Marine Hospital Service officer. Passengers bound for destinations outside California would from now on first need to head to the upper floor of the north wing of the Ferry Building, where Kinyoun had posted rows of clerks ready to perform cursory examinations that asked for little more than a traveler’s name, age and place of birth.
Kinyoun stood in his full uniform and watched as would-be passengers lined up for inspection, the morning sun glinting off the ceremonial sword dangling from his hip. Nearly all whisked through the process without delay. Kinyoun intervened only when several Chinese residents appeared in line, and requested certificates for travel. After going through a detailed health history with each person, Kinyoun rejected their applications on the basis that they had not received a Haffkine injection. Over the course of the day, no white passengers—the vast majority of whom were also unvaccinated—were denied the paperwork that allowed them to board trains and vessels headed out of the state.
Kinyoun posted agents at railroad crossings including Truckee—on the Nevada state line—Ashland, Oregon, and Blake and Yuma, in Arizona, to detain passengers from San Francisco who did not possess a signed health record. He planned to establish internment camps on the state line, with detainees living in tents he had requested as a loan from the War Department. Only after he was assured that travelers and their belongings were not infected with plague would they be allowed entry into neighboring states.
That afternoon, a Mrs. Peace, an elderly white woman from San Francisco on her way to Philadelphia, became one of the first train passengers removed, after an inspector at Truckee noticed her coughing and found that she did not have a signed health certificate. While the woman sat in detention, Kinyoun justified the policy by telling reporters that “The city and country have no protection against the plague which we know has caused at least twelve deaths among Chinese residents.”
Consumed with containing the disease, Kinyoun had given no thought to how his order would be received by politicians and the press in a state which already distrusted him. The unilateral move to essentially seal the state seemed to confirm the worst stereotypes of him as an out-of-touch, vengeful man who knew no limits to his authority. Governor Gage sent telegrams to every contact he had in Washington, demanding that the Marine Hospital Service rescind the order at once and the federal government pay for any economic damage the state suffered as a result of Kinyoun’s actions. William M. Cutter, a state senator, sent a personal message to President McKinley that read in part, “The indignation of the people of California is beyond expression. They protest in the strongest terms against this unjust and most unwarranted order and ask you at once direct its immediate revocation.” Republican members of the state’s congressional delegation, then in Philadelphia for the party’s national convention, walked out of the proceedings and traveled to Washington, where they insisted upon a White House conference with President McKinley to warn him that every minute he allowed Kinyoun’s quarantine to stand would increase the likelihood that he would lose the state in the upcoming presidential election. “Kinyoun should be mobbed, for his conduct is outrageous,” said Douglas S. Cone, a prominent farmer and member of the delegation, as he boarded a train to the nation’s capital. “There is no plague in California and no power on Earth could keep us still under these circumstances.”
The press, which had fallen into the habit of referring to Kinyoun as “Suspicious Kinyoun” at every reference, eviscerated him. Blockading the state “is not a power to be exercised by some little whippersnapper whom political pull have invested with official authority. The only question now is as to what the President will do with this creature, and how soon he will do it,” the Chronicle wrote in an editorial. The paper followed the next day with an essay that began, “If Dr. Kinyoun were the ablest physician and the most skillful bacteriologist in the world, instead of a person of no particular professional capacity, he would still be totally unfit for any official position involving responsibility, by reason of his self-sufficiency, imperiousness, lack of common sense, and pig-headed obstinacy.”
Kinyoun had no one to lean on as the city and state turned further against him. Frank L. Coombs, the U.S. District Attorney and a close confidant of Governor Gage, called him the morning he issued the quarantine with a warning. Kinyoun was clearly disobeying Judge Morrow’s injunction blocking the Marine Hospital Service from interfering in the state, he said, and should revoke his order immediately if he wished to avoid jail. Kinyoun refused to do so unless ordered to by either Wyman or the Secretary of the Treasury, neither of whom had made contact since he informed them of his intentions.
Hours later, Wong Wai, one of the merchants whom Kinyoun had stopped at the Ferry Building that morning, filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court accusing Kinyoun of violating Judge Morrow’s orders by specifically targeting Asians. Morrow demanded that Kinyoun appear before th
e court and answer to a charge of contempt. Expecting to be vindicated, Kinyoun wired Wyman to ask who the Service planned to tap to defend him—only to learn in a terse dispatch from Washington that it would be Coombs. The Surgeon General offered no words of support for Kinyoun as the world crashed down upon him, directing him only to “be guided by [Coombs’s] advice in all quarantine procedures.”
With no choice other than to rely upon a man he considered an enemy, Kinyoun appeared at Coombs’s office later that day. Before Kinyoun could ask how he planned to conduct his defense, Coombs told him that he would be lucky to receive just a six-month jail sentence. When Kinyoun interjected that he believed that he was fulfilling the responsibilities of his position, Coombs shouted him down, repeating that there was no legal ground for him to stand on and that he should plead guilty. Kinyoun left the meeting convinced “all the more that the District Attorney was playing a game in which it was his deliberate intention to make me the scapegoat and shoulder all the responsibility of the affair upon me,” he later wrote in a letter to a friend.
The next day, President McKinley met with members of California’s congressional delegation along with John D. Spreckels, the owner of the San Francisco Call, a Republican power broker whose sprawling empire in San Diego made him one of the wealthiest men in the state. In a short conference in the Oval Office, the President apologized for Kinyoun’s actions and promised that he would order the Marine Hospital Service to revoke them at once. Minutes later, Wyman sent a telegram to Kinyoun that said simply, “Withdraw all inspections until further orders.”
With that, Kinyoun’s last hope was gone. He was in all respects powerless, unable to take any measures to confront the disease he remained convinced would soon overtake the nation. The uniform he had worn for nearly all of his professional life felt like nothing more than a monument to his failures. At Angel Island, the few officers with whom he remained on friendly terms began to distance themselves from him, as if trying to avoid catching the illness of defeat.
His professional life in ruins, Kinyoun narrowed his objective to staying out of jail. He appeared in court before Judge Morrow and promised that he would in no way target the Chinese or interfere in the right of open travel. Morrow refused to drop the contempt charge and ordered Kinyoun back the following week for trial, a one-year sentence hanging over his head. With Coombs urging him to plead guilty, Kinyoun sent increasingly desperate telegrams to Wyman, begging for new representation. “Still believe district attorney wholly inimical to interests of Surgeon-General, Marine-Hospital Service and Surgeon Kinyoun because refusal to have my actions fully investigated by court in contempt proceedings. Must renew request yesterday [for] additional counsel, and most respectfully insist direct orders,” he wrote. After Wyman responded with a curt note that said he did not understand the reason why Coombs was insufficient, Kinyoun wrote another telegram begging for help. “I am convinced the decision of the court will be adverse. I therefore most respectfully demand full and adequate protection be accorded me by my Department. . . . If this is done I have no fear of the result. Being now placed in a position wherein I am deprived from protection of counsel I am forced to make this request.”
Wyman was unswayed, maintaining an icy remove that pushed Kinyoun further into despair. His reputation was shattered, his sense of purpose lost. Reading a wire from Wyman a few days later informing him that culture samples that he had taken from suspected plague patients and sent to Washington for inspection in the Service’s laboratory had been found to be genuine cases of plague was no balm for his bruised pride. The confirmation that he had been right all along was just one more insult, a little extra salt that made his wound sting all the more.
He had only to look at his children to see the toll that the year in California had taken on them. There was no school on Angel Island for them to attend, giving them no friends or distractions to serve as buffers from the stress that consumed his life. His oldest son, Conrad, could focus on little except the poor treatment of his father, making the boy seem prematurely aged. “He not only has old ways but old thoughts, and looks old in the bargain. Life to him is a very serious problem, and I often feel sorry for him,” Kinyoun confessed in a letter back home. One night at the dinner table, Conrad remarked out of the blue that “Judge Morrow don’t seem to know who my papa is; Judge Morrow thinks he’s the biggest man in the world, but right there he’s mistaken, he don’t know my papa like I do,” leaving Kinyoun heartbroken that the twelve-year-old felt he had to defend him.
By chance Kinyoun spotted Morrow on a ferry to Tiburon, a village on the northern edge of the bay, a few days before his trial was set to begin. He approached the judge and the two sat down near the stern as the boat cast off from the dock. Over the next forty minutes, Kinyoun detailed his experience of hunting plague in Chinatown, growing more animated as the ship picked up speed and fought against the wind of the open bay. “I am more and more convinced that the disease is behaving just exactly as it has in all other places after its introduction,” Kinyoun told him. Morrow listened intently, for the first time hearing evidence of the plague’s existence in the city that had been successfully excluded by attorneys for the Chinese Six Companies during previous trials. As the ferryboat approached shore, Morrow told Kinyoun that in the future he should meet with him personally on any legal questions before issuing orders, and promised to give him as much leeway to combat the disease as the law allowed.
In court days later, Kinyoun formally asked for clemency and pledged that he would not implement any further quarantine measures without the consent of Governor Gage. Morrow, in turn, ruled that there was insufficient evidence to hold Kinyoun in contempt of court for intentionally discriminating against the Chinese. Kinyoun exited the courtroom a free but chastened man, unsure of his purpose in a city and state that was open in its hatred of him. Even if he remained in his job, his ability to do anything to combat plague was severely constrained, leaving him feeling as if he was nothing more than an ornament. The disease was still there, lurking, and all Kinyoun could now do was watch.
With Kinyoun sidelined, San Francisco was once again free to believe that plague did not exist within its limits. The number of suspected cases reported to the city Board of Health plummeted, as if all the heat had gone out from a fire. No public updates on the disease were issued by city medical officials, further smothering the truth. Under pressure from the White House, the Marine Hospital Service stopped publishing Kinyoun’s detailed descriptions of plague victims and his estimates of how many additional patients likely had contracted the disease in Public Health Reports, its weekly dispatches that were read by every government health officer in the country.
Letters from concerned doctors across the country began arriving at Angel Island, asking Kinyoun for any new information. He felt a duty to answer every one, even as it drained what little energy he had left. Without him there to act as a counterbalance, physicians affiliated with the Chinese Six Companies—men he called “nothing more or less than vampires”—were free to attribute an increasing number of deaths to kidney disease, a practice Kinyoun believed was part of a conspiracy to hide plague victims. “I am almost at the point sometimes of stating that plague will exist in Chinatown until the district, now occupied by the Chinese, has been depopulated and destroyed,” Kinyoun wrote in a bitter letter that summer.
On August 11, William Murphy, a thirty-four-year-old teamster, died at City and County Hospital. The man had lived at 427 Dupont Street, just blocks outside Chinatown. He had been admitted to the hospital four days earlier complaining of a high fever and mysterious headache that would not go away. Doctors discovered a dark bubo on his right groin, an unmistakable sign of plague. From discussions with his relatives, they learned that Murphy had become addicted to morphine and was known to frequent Chinatown’s opium dens. The doctors on call when Murphy died ordered an autopsy. With several professors from the city’s medical schools looking on, the procedure revealed a body ravaged by a di
sease that authorities refused to admit was present in the city. Murphy’s lymph nodes were hard and swollen, as if marbles lay under his skin. The tips of his fingers and toes were black—a sign of tissue decay that gave the medieval plague epidemics the name of the Black Death. Most frightening, the man’s lungs were consumed by plague bacilli, indicating that the disease had progressed to the rare pneumonic stage, in which it could be spread by coughing alone.
Kinyoun felt no vindication as the disease claimed its first white victim. “This last case takes it out of the pale of Chinatown,” he wrote in a letter to a friend on the East Coast. “The true nature of the issue was not known until the post-mortem examination revealed its true condition. I have just about completed the examination of specimens obtained from this last case and have no hesitancy in saying that it is the most beautiful case of plague infection (if such things can be called beautiful) that I have encountered in this epidemic.”