Black Death at the Golden Gate
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Doctors on the city’s Board of Health, meanwhile, were more focused on politics than fighting disease. Eugene Schmitz, a thirty-seven-year-old violinist whose flowing black beard and good looks prompted the press to call him “Handsome Gene,” had launched a campaign as a third-party candidate for mayor. Behind his unlikely entry into the race stood Abe Ruef, a lawyer who had once studied classical languages at Berkeley before rising to the head of the upstart Union Labor Party. Together, Schmitz and Ruef ran on a racist platform that promised to purge the city of its Chinese population and increase the power of labor unions. The message resonated with the white working class of San Francisco following a year of citywide strikes in which the outgoing mayor, James Phelan, provided police protection to workers who crossed picket lines. Schmitz soon edged out his better-funded challengers. Though he had no governing experience, the new mayor leaned heavily on Ruef, who was widely considered the true mayor of the city. Together they began installing the most corrupt administration yet seen in the city, requiring bribes and kickbacks at nearly every level of government.
Schmitz diverted attention by rekindling anger at the plague campaign. In his inaugural address in January of 1902, the mayor singled out the city’s Board of Health as one of the evils threatening the livelihood of working men in San Francisco and promised to hold its members responsible for “foisting upon the world sensational and ill-founded reports about the existence of bubonic plague in our midst.” Two months later, he announced that he was removing four members of the board, including its lone bacteriologist, and maintained that he was “unalterably convinced” that plague “had never existed in the city.” When a judge ruled that Schmitz did not have the power to fire board members until their terms expired at the end of the year, the mayor retaliated by slashing its funding so far that it could do little more than issue death certificates. His lone appointment to the board—a physician who also happened to be a significant campaign contributor—never showed up for meetings and instead spent a year traveling through Europe on the city’s payroll, ostensibly to study the spread of infectious diseases there.
With all sanitary campaigns in the city suspended, there was nothing to prevent plague from spreading at will. The arrival of warm spring weather brought a surge of new cases. On May 25, the body of Chin Kee, a twenty-year-old bill collector who worked at the Horn Hong Newspaper Company, was found at his home at 811 Jackson Street. Tissue samples collected by federal doctors from a bubo in his armpit tested positive for plague. Four days later, Hong Quai, Chin’s four-year-old nephew, died while being hidden from federal doctors in a coffin shop at 742 Pacific Street. Animals inoculated with tissue from the young boy’s body soon died from plague, confirming the disease.
Four more bodies infected with plague were found in July, including two on the same block of Jackson Street, bringing the total number of cases confirmed by federal doctors since the start of the outbreak to sixty-one. The bodies of another nine victims were found in August, straining the ability of the bare-bones federal staff in the Chinatown morgue to keep up. Mark White, the doctor who had taken over from Blue, wired Wyman in Washington asking for an extra twenty-five dollars per month in his budget to spend on the supplies necessary to confirm each case of the disease. Wyman denied the request, hoping that the upswing would go away on its own.
The pace of death only quickened. On September 9, Chin Mong Yung Shee, a thirty-three-year-old woman, died in a small apartment at 40 Fish Alley after suffering from a high fever. An autopsy by federal doctors revealed a bubo on the right side of her neck. Interviews with men living in the alley revealed that two days earlier, a seventeen-year-old boy who lived with Chin Mong had also run a high fever, prompting his relatives to remove him from the apartment to avoid detection. He was taken across the bay to Oakland where he died three days later. No federal doctors were on hand to examine his body and no official cause of death was recorded.
Federal doctors only knew of the case—and the other twenty deaths from plague that had been confirmed so far that year—due to Wong Chung. Driven by his sense of purpose, the interpreter remained on the Marine Hospital Service payroll despite Blue’s decision to transfer back to Milwaukee. He was among the few in San Francisco comfortable moving between the parallel worlds of Chinatown and the larger city and felt it his duty to save Chinese lives, even if that meant inviting in white doctors whose motives might not be always aligned with his own.
Still, the job took its toll. As he walked through the narrow alleyways of Chinatown probing for word of more victims, Wong struggled to keep at bay the inherent tensions in his life. By exposing the disease, he was increasing the likelihood that doctors would eventually find a way to end the epidemic. Yet he could not forget the fact that as a Chinese man he shared in the risk that each new victim he uncovered could be the one that finally prompted politicians to make good on their threats and burn the district to the ground. Though his identity pulled him in two directions, Wong knew that he was all that stood between plague and its future victims, and he was unwilling to allow the disease to kill in silence.
His work made him a marked man within his community. Not only was he working with untrusted white doctors, he served as a walking reminder that outsiders considered the district unfit for Chinese occupation and the Chinese an unwelcome part of American life. In April of 1902, to the cheers of white labor unions, President Theodore Roosevelt signed a bill that permanently banned Chinese immigration into the country. Those who were already in America were required to obtain a certificate of residency, and any Chinese immigrant found without the required papers was subject to immediate deportation. With no legal path for new arrivals into the district, San Francisco’s business elite renewed its calls to relocate Chinatown from its central location. “The Chinese question is settled now. The labor elements have had their way, and Congress has renewed the Exclusion Act. There is no longer any use in keeping Chinatown as a sort of red herring to trail under the noses of visiting Congressmen” and frighten them into voting to ban Chinese immigration, wrote the influential San Francisco News Letter after more than 150 businessmen signed a petition calling on the mayor to resettle the Chinese in another part of the city. “The Chinese now have one of the best parts of town, and they have forfeited their right to it by their habits of life.”
In the face of rising bigotry, the Chinese turned even more insular, seeking safety by having as few contacts with white San Francisco as possible. “We can save ourselves if we realize that we are all in the same boat and will sink or sail together,” argued the Chinese Western Daily in an editorial. “Ruin will await if we behave like fish that swim blindly into the boiling pot.” Chinese tongs openly patrolled the streets of the district, threatening anyone whose actions brought unnecessary outside attention. With his work with the federal plague doctors well known in Chinatown, Wong’s friends urged him to stop feeding information to the Marine Hospital Service if he valued his own safety. He refused their pleas and continued to alert the men at the Chinatown morgue to the location of potential victims.
Wong could not remain safe for long. In early October, he received an invitation to attend a special meeting of the Chinese Six Companies, its exact purpose unspecified. He arrived at the organization’s headquarters and entered the building just after sundown. As he sat listening to the proceedings, unsure of his purpose there, several gangsters rose from their seats and lunged at him. He fought off the attackers and ran for the door, not knowing who else in the room considered him an enemy. Only after the president of the Chinese Six Companies, for whom he had once worked as a secretary, took him under his arm did Wong believe that he would escape the building with his life. He watched as the men who had tried to kill him fled, confirming his suspicions that the only thing uniting the Chinese tongs and the white men in power was their willingness to do anything to suppress the truth of plague in the district.
The attempt on Wong’s life prompted Secretary of State John M. Hay to warn t
he Chinese foreign minister in Washington that any attack on Chinese residents working for the federal government would be met by a decisive response. Undaunted by the attempt on his life, Wong continued his search for victims. He soon alerted federal doctors to the plague-infested body of Hoo Hing Bong, a forty-seven-year-old man who lived at 743 Clay Street. He was the eighteenth recorded victim of the disease in a span of two months, though the true number of fatalities was likely many times higher.
All the cases were found within a few blocks of one another in the northern half of Chinatown, suggesting that the disease was gathering strength. It was only a matter of time before it would begin spilling outward. As fall approached, federal doctors could only wonder if at last their nightmares had become real.
Wyman could no longer ignore the escalation of the disease, which was becoming a source of national embarrassment for the Marine Hospital Service. Federal doctors in San Francisco had battled the disease for three years and yet it only seemed to tighten its grasp. He ordered Arthur Glennan, a Marine Hospital surgeon then in charge of the quarantine station in Cuba, to report to California and inspect every city in the state with a significant Chinese population for the presence of plague, a group that included Fresno, Oakland, Berkeley, Stockton, San Diego, and Los Angeles. Before that, however, Wyman told Glennan to meet with Governor Gage, if for no other reason than to prevent another state challenge to his agency’s federal authority.
Glennan arrived in mid-October and traveled to the Los Angeles suburb of Downey, where Governor Gage lived on a sprawling citrus ranch. Though he was still nominally in charge of the state, he was effectively without power after a series of embarrassing scandals—none of them related to plague—led Republicans to nominate another candidate in his place in the upcoming election. Gage had retreated to the citrus groves of Southern California to wait out the final months of his term and watched with growing resentment as an Oakland physician, George Pardee, secured the nomination that he considered his right.
Shunned by both Republicans and Democrats in the state, the governor welcomed the federal officer into his home and warmed to him once he offered a letter of introduction from Wyman. Yet he could not hide his anger once Glennan told him that California was once again facing a threat that Texas would quarantine all people and goods from the state on account of the persistent rumors of bubonic plague in San Francisco. “That god-damned plague again!” Gage bellowed. Not wanting to incite Gage further, Glennan said that the Surgeon General intended to address any cases found outside San Francisco as quietly as possible. The governor insisted that all of the supposed cases of plague were merely a form of syphilis, yet agreed to let Glennan conduct his tour of the state without obstacle. “I’ll cooperate with Surgeon General Wyman and with you but damn the others,” he told him. “Kinyoun would have been mobbed and hanged in San Francisco if I had not prevented it. And now, I am sorry that I did.” As Glennan prepared to leave, Gage promised that he would “fix” newspapers in the state to avoid unwanted publicity. “This is the best that can be done at present,” Glennan wrote in a telegram to Washington later that afternoon.
Two weeks later, state and local health boards from across the nation gathered for an annual meeting in New Haven, Connecticut. Though it was not on the agenda, San Francisco soon became the focus. City and state officials continued to deny the existence of the plague, while the Marine Hospital Service and national newspapers published details of the deaths of its victims. With officers from the Marine Hospital Service observing, the convention passed a resolution condemning California as a “disgrace” for its failure to readily share facts about an outbreak that was a “matter of grave national concern.” A few health officials went further, arguing for a full quarantine of the state. Though the matter did not come to a vote, implicit in it was the charge that the Marine Hospital Service was not doing enough to protect the country from plague.
When confronted by health officials who lived outside California, Wyman downplayed the extent of the disease, aiming to spare the agency he considered an extension of himself from criticism. Pardee’s victory in the gubernatorial race gave Wyman hope that with a physician in the governor’s office he would have a closer ally in the state, allowing the Marine Hospital Service to do its work without harassment. Until he forged a relationship with the new governor, however, the Surgeon General continued to deflect any inquiries as to the true strength of the disease in the city. “The infection appears to be limited to Chinatown in San Francisco and to be restricted even within the limits of that locality to a very small area,” Wyman wrote in a letter to Edmond Souchon, the president of Louisiana’s state Board of Health, who was also one of the most prominent physicians in the South. “I was informed by the president of the City Board of Health, Dr. Williamson, that in his opinion there was very little of it.”
Souchon had no way of knowing that federal doctors at the time were then examining the body of Deong Yuen Yum, a thirty-eight-year-old man who resided at 726 Pacific Street. An autopsy revealed plague bacilli in the lungs, abdomen and groin. The man’s death made him the fortieth victim of the plague that year. Far from being contained, the disease was now accelerating its pace, bringing the city closer and closer to the widespread epidemic that had devastated Hong Kong. California, meanwhile, was no nearer to admitting the scale of the danger it faced. Gage, in his final message to the state legislature, once again blamed Kinyoun for sending what he called misleading reports about the disease, and cautioned the men standing before him that it was their duty to guard against any encroachment from the federal government.
Wyman sensed that he could not stall much longer. In mid-January, the health boards of eleven states met to address the issue of plague in California. The proceedings began with officials berating California’s representative and shouting down his assurances that the incoming governor would implement all measures required to eradicate the disease, leaving him to later fume that he “was never treated with such discourtesy in my life.” State health officials then turned their focus onto Wyman himself, peppering him with questions about the extent of the disease. Wyman would only allow that there was “not much” plague in the city, leaving conference members unimpressed. A resolution was soon passed affirming that “the presence of plague in California was established beyond debate” and condemned Governor Gage and his state health board for obstruction. Given that the disease was entrenched in the city, the conference passed a second resolution asking the Secretary of War to relocate all troop transports from San Francisco to Seattle. If implemented, the measure would hollow out the economy of both San Francisco and the state. Its status as the most important port on the Pacific would crumble as national rail traffic shifted north, draining the power of the railroad barons who still effectively ran California.
The twin resolutions had little immediate effect. Newspapers in San Francisco called the measures “silly” and continued to downplay the idea that bacteriology was a valid branch of science. Instead, the city took the opportunity to congratulate itself. Thanks to “the persistent effort on the part of sober-minded San Franciscans [who] refute the baseless allegations of the men who attempt to make the world believe that it is necessary to use microscopes to discover an epidemic . . . this community has never for a moment been panic-stricken, as it might easily have become had the alarmist stories gone unchallenged,” the Chronicle wrote in an editorial. Nor was the city’s confidence that it could continue to deny the epidemic dented when health officials in Mazatlán, Mexico, blamed an outbreak of plague in that coastal city on a passenger arriving on a steamship from San Francisco. The Mexican government instituted a countrywide quarantine on goods and people coming from San Francisco, yet the city refused to believe it was true. Plague was somehow “an infectious disease which remains absolutely non-infectious in San Francisco but is capable, at the same time, of infecting persons down in Mazatlan,” one prominent doctor joked to reporters.
Wyman, however, knew that h
is time was up. “It is absolutely necessary that confidence on the part of the health officers toward California authorities should be restored, and I am convinced that this cannot be done unless the governor in some manner acknowledges the presence of plague in Chinatown,” he wrote in an urgent telegram to Glennan. “The situation is now entirely changed, and absolute frankness on the part of authorities of city and State is necessary to prevent pronounced hostile action, particularly when the conference of all the states meets in April.” He sent another telegram to Glennan a few days later, suggesting that they bring back the only man who had seemed to make any real progress in the fight against the disease.
“Unless you wire me not needed will send Blue,” Wyman wrote.
Glennan replied immediately: “Please send Blue as soon as possible.”