Eugenic Nation

by Stern, Alexandra Minna

  The PPIE quickly became the medium for rebuilding a more magnificent San Francisco, which would rise like a phoenix from the ashes and prove that the city deserved to stand at the apex of an empire that straddled two oceans and controlled the world’s most heavily trafficked waterway. The PPIE managers were keenly aware that their success was contingent on portraying an image of San Francisco as ordered and virtuous. This entailed debunking San Francisco’s reputation as a sybaritic haven teeming with “flagrant houses of prostitution,” especially in the Barbary Coast and Tenderloin districts. Given the city’s history of lax enforcement of regulations on prostitution, alcohol consumption, and gambling, especially in comparison with Los Angeles, this was a tall order for PPIE organizers, who were under relentless pressure from antivice groups to “clean up” the city.26 In addition, it meant demonstrating that San Francisco was salubrious and free of disease. Having served as chairman of the executive committee of the Citizen’s Health Committee in 1908, Moore was well versed in the idioms and methods of disease control.27

  In 1907 bubonic plague had reappeared in San Francisco, taking the lives of several dozen white residents. In response, the mayor, worried about an impending quarantine against the city, had founded the Citizen’s Health Committee. Comprised of civic leaders and medical officers, this committee was charged with eradicating bubonic plague in San Francisco. The mayor and local officials were eager to reverse the negative attention the city had attracted in 1900, when a bungled quarantine had demonized Chinese immigrants by sealing off Chinatown and scapegoating its residents.28 Not only was this incident motivated by Sinophobia and racialist associations of the Chinese with contagion, it also revealed a profound lack of coordination between municipal, state, and federal health agencies.

  With firm resolution and guided by the latest medical findings about the etiology and epizootic transmission of plague, the Citizen’s Health Committee set out to kill each and every rat in the city, even if that meant house by house fumigation and the placing of poison and traps along every block.29 In contrast to the earlier outbreak, health officials knew that they would prevail only if citizens were disabused of the misconception that plague was solely an “Oriental disease” exclusive to Chinatown.30 Thus, the committee embarked on a massive educational campaign that strove to teach all San Franciscans about the essential roles of the rat and the flea in the spread of Yersinia pestis. Week after week, public health workers scoured every street, residence, shop, wharf, and factory in the city: “Wherever plague was found in rat or man, a horde of rat catchers descended on that place and trapped every rat for four blocks around to prevent the hunted animals from carrying the infection any farther.”31

  One year later, this offensive had succeeded. The fumbling between different agencies that had characterized the 1900 debacle had been replaced by a much more streamlined approach in which federal sanitary officers, affiliated with the U.S. Public Health Service, were in the lead, clearly vested with more clout than their municipal and state counterparts. Although anti-Asian sentiment was still pervasive, the fact that Chinatown accounted for only two cases attenuated the intensity of medicalized Sinophobia in San Francisco, at least with respect to plague.32 In addition, the success of the campaign underscored the increasing importance of the laboratory in the precise identification of bacilli. In this case, USPHS facilities located near the Presidio and on Angel Island received and tested a steady stream of dead rats, more than one million of which were killed from 1908 to 1909.

  To a great extent, this concerted antiplague effort functioned as a dress rehearsal for the PPIE and helped to elevate health and disease to the top of the exposition’s list of concerns. Many of the key players in the two ventures were the same. Moore, for example, presided over both undertakings, convincing local merchants and organizations to donate money, buy bonds, and pay special taxes to fund each of them.33 Furthermore, the USPHS officers who directed plague eradication—John Hurley, William Rucker, and, most important, the surgeon general, Rupert Blue—were the medical men contacted when sanitary arrangements for the fair began.34 Finally, just as the Citizen’s Health Committee’s activities were coming to a close, the author of its official report, Eradicating Plague from San Francisco, Frank Morton Todd, began to compile the hundreds of boxes of materials he would use to write five hefty tomes on the PPIE.35

  RACIALISM ON DISPLAY

  To tour the carefully ordered universe of the PPIE was to experience, on a reduced scale, the grandeur of Burnham’s “City Beautiful,” marked less, however, by the classical and Beaux Arts styles that the Chicago architect favored and more by a Mediterranean eclecticism that mixed Oriental, Moorish, Greek, and Spanish Revival forms. Seeking to convey the natural landscape of California, the painter James Guerin had decided on a pastel color scheme for the PPIE that mirrored “the hues of the sky and the bay, of the mountains, varying from deep green to tawny yellow, and of the morning and evening light.”36 Visitors remarked that this palette, when suffused by indirect lighting in the evening, lent the fairgrounds an ethereal luminosity.37

  Like the Columbian Exposition of 1893 and the St. Louis Exposition of 1904, the aim of the built environment of the PPIE was to embody allegorically the mythos of the American Century. In San Francisco, the terminus of the U.S. West and the springboard to the Pacific, this meant the presence of artifacts such as the “Fountain of Energy,” a strong male mounted on horseback with his arms spread out and crowned by figurines of “Fame” and “Valor.” Referred to by its creator as the “Victor of the Canal,” this sculpture symbolized “the vigor and daring of our mighty nation, which carried to a successful ending a gigantic task abandoned by another great republic.”38 Many other monuments, large and small, such as the “Adventurous Bowman,” “Energy,” and “Earth,” sought to portray the telos of universal progress that the United States had harnessed for the benefit of all humankind by constructing the canal across the Panamanian Isthmus. The trope of hemispheric harmony was also seen in murals such as “Atlantic and Pacific” and the “Gateway,” which pictured the two halves of the world meeting at the Panama Canal in a swirl of commerce and human communion.

  This tale, however, was one with clear-cut winners and losers. According to many sources, the most popular sculpture, “The End of the Trail” by James Earle Fraser, located in the Court of Flowers, showed an exhausted Indian hunched over a feeble horse—a pathetic figure who was all but defeated by westward expansion and European American settlement. Paired with “The End of the Trail” was the “American Pioneer,” housed in the opposite Court of Palms, which provided the inspiration for Secretary of the Interior Lane’s opening remarks. Seated astride a horse and alertly holding a rifle, the “American Pioneer” personified not the cowboy outlaw found in dime novels of the “Wild West” but a dignified man of reason who was “very typical of the white man and the victorious march of his civilization.”39 The broader cultural and geographical implications of these two faces of the “survival of the fittest” were reinforced by the juxtaposition of the “Nations of the East” and the “Nations of the West” in the Court of the Universe. The latter centered on a wholesome, fair-skinned, and sprightly prairie girl, called “Mother of Tomorrow,” poised in front of an oxen-drawn wagon, and flanked by white boys, a French American trapper, a totem-bearing Alaskan woman, and Americans of Latin, German, Italian, and English descent, as well as a “squaw with a papoose” and an “Indian chief on his pony.”40 Instead of a wagon, at the crux of the “Nations of the East” stood an ostentatiously ornamented elephant, ridden by an Arab prince who was accompanied by a mounted sheik, an Egyptian atop a camel, an Arab falconer with a bird, a Tibetan lama, a Muslim, and two black slaves.41 If the Nations of the East were associated with exoticism, servitude, idolatry, and the excesses of royalty, their Western counterparts personified enterprise, ingenuity, and inter-American solidarity. In the words of the exposition’s official chronicler, the Nations of the West statue “was rough and re
al, and it was also hopeful, buoyant, and progressive. . . . [T]his group expressed the thrusting heave of western ambition and progress.”42

  As was the case with earlier international expositions, the doctrines of racial and cultural difference expressed by the PPIE’s art and architecture also shaped the experiences and encounters of fairgoers. Broadly speaking, the PPIE was wracked by tensions between inclusion, in the name of international fellowship and trade, which its managers hoped to encourage, and exclusion, as dictated by hierarchies of race, ethnicity, and nation. In some ways, the PPIE broke with convention. For example, in contrast to previous fairs, the PPIE unreservedly welcomed white middle-class female reformers and did not relegate their participation to a separate women’s building. California’s elite women, having gained the vote in 1911, were exceedingly involved in the exposition. Under the leadership of Mrs. Phoebe Apperson Hearst and Mrs. Frederick G. Sanborn, two of the city’s most active reformers, the Woman’s Board partook in many aspects of the fair, hosting lectures, teas, and conferences.43 Partially owing to their insistence, the PPIE was the stage for vocal peace demonstrations that condemned war as wholesale “organized murder.”44 Throughout the entire fair, a sizable contingent of learned women asseverated that their maternal instincts and political conscience compelled them to struggle against U.S. entry into World War I, as well as for child welfare, national suffrage, and Progressive legislation.45

  Spaces comparable to that carved out by elite women were not similarly occupied by racial and ethnic minorities. In a city and state whose restrictive anti-Chinese ordinances and laws supplied templates for the federal Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), the drawing of boundaries by European Americans, whether against or around californianos, Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos, was integral to the fractious settlement and remaking of urban and rural California. Despite proclamations of universal belonging, the PPIE continued this legacy.46 African American visitors, for example, complained bitterly to fair managers about employment discrimination, and their request that black veterans of the Spanish-American War be hired alongside white guards fell on deaf ears.47 A lawyer writing on behalf of the Colored Non-Partisan Leagues of California was incensed that African American fairgoers were often barred from centrally located restaurants and were forced to “trudge, and starve while they trudge, mile after mile until they come to some ‘Jim Crow snack house’ or ‘chit’lin’ [chitterling] den.”48 On the surface, the PPIE managers responded that no color lines were being demarcated. However, an internal letter, in which a PPIE attorney told Moore that he was confident that “a few tactful words will quiet the fears of these ‘wards of the nation’ ” reveals the degree of condescension faced by black fairgoers.49 In addition to these criticisms, nearly a dozen Chinese groups, including the Chinese commissioner general, the owner of the Oriental Hotel, and the Chinese Six Companies, sent a flurry of letters to PPIE offices denouncing the “Underground Chinatown” concession, located on the “Joy Zone,” the fair’s entertainment area. They vociferously objected to what they perceived as a degrading caricature of their culture, represented by a subterranean opium den and an enslaved prostitute. Under pressure to maintain positive diplomatic relations with China in light of the broadened American economic mission in Asia, this concession was temporarily suppressed and eventually replaced with the only slightly less offensively named “Underground Slumming.”50 In short, celebrating the forging of an empire, shored up by doctrines of racial superiority, was incompatible with the rhetoric of universalism or internationalism. Ultimately, racialism was on display at the PPIE, whether through overt discrimination on the fairgrounds, through the fetishized display of “primitive” artifacts collected from the Navajo, Chippewa, and Ainus, or the maintenance of “native villages” that featured “live” Indians dancing or making handicrafts.51

  TROPICAL MEDICINE COMES HOME

  One of the most popular attractions in the Joy Zone was a model of the Panama Canal with motorized carts that transported people across a five-acre simulacrum of the isthmus. On their journey, phonographic records designed and tested by Thomas Edison broadcasted lectures describing the tremendous feat of building the canal. So impressed was Major F. C. Boggs, chief of the Washington Office of the Panama Canal, that he stated that within a half an hour this ride could “impart to anyone a more complete knowledge of the Canal than a visit of several days to the waterway itself.”52 Functioning as an interactive testament to the American possession of the Canal Zone, this concession implied that only the acumen and industry of U.S. engineers could have tamed an unruly region that had vanquished earlier attempts by the French. Pivotal to this story of the American mastery of the tropics was the sanitary regime instituted by Colonel William C. Gorgas, the medical chief of the Isthmian Canal Commission from 1904 to 1914.53 Like many officers who served in the Spanish-American War, Gorgas had spent much of the 1880s and 1890s in the West, in his case Texas and South Dakota, where he simultaneously pursued frontier medicine and territorial administration.

  Armed with knowledge of bacteriology and parasitology, health officers stationed in the Panama Canal Zone, affiliated with the U.S. military and the USPHS, sought to stamp out the pernicious ailments that had doomed the dream of a canal across the isthmus in the nineteenth century. Their achievements in the Canal Zone involved replicating the extensive campaigns against both insect- and water-borne diseases waged in Cuba and the Philippines during the Spanish-American War.54 It was in Havana, as Yellow Jack overpowered the American troops, that Gorgas inaugurated an effective system of epidemiological surveillance and mosquito eradication, reducing cases of yellow fever from fourteen hundred in 1900 to zero by the close of the following year.55 Gorgas relied—for a good while quite reluctantly—on the prescient observations of the Cuban physician Carlos Finlay, the research results of the U.S. Army physician Walter Reed, and the experiments of the British scientist Ronald Ross, which demonstrated that yellow fever was transmitted by the Aëdes aegypti (then called Stegomyia fasciata) mosquito and malaria by the Anopheles mosquito. To wit, he imposed a totalizing system that divided Havana into sanitary districts, each overseen by a medical team that kept a detailed inventory of file cards on the status of every house and water source as a potential breeding spot for mosquitoes.56 After this data was compiled, Gorgas’s brigades drained, oiled, or capped all wells, cisterns, and ponds, and fumigated homes, often burning bedding and clothing. This novel strategy worked. Within three months yellow fever and malaria had diminished markedly and nine months later had all but vanished.57

  The lessons learned in Havana informed Gorgas’s approach in Panama, a more extensive and challenging terrain. Once in the Canal Zone, Gorgas mounted a frontal assault on mosquitoes, which were numerous enough to thicken the air at night.58 His careful review of the procedures carried out by the French in the 1880s revealed that their dependence on miasmic principles of disease transmission via filth or “noxious gases” had cultivated an environment ripe for mosquito breeding. For example, at the French-built Ancon Hospital, crockery dishes filled with water were placed beside plants and flowers to ward off ants, thus creating a propitious home for mosquito larvae.59 The confluence of premature timing vis-à-vis the medical breakthroughs of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch and the French proclivity to view many tropical ailments as the result of moral and meteorological depravity flummoxed the French effort to reproduce the Suez Canal in Central America, resulting in the loss of an estimated twenty thousand lives.60 Two decades later, emboldened by his Havana campaign and eventually granted substantial financial resources, Gorgas implemented markedly different and efficacious techniques in Panama. He designated twenty-five sanitary districts, each assigned an inspector with a team of twenty to one hundred men.61 Dozens of sanitary workers initiated drainage projects, conducted house-to-house inspections and fumigation, constructed mosquito coverings and netting, applied kerosene, sulfur, and alcohol to kill mosquitoes and larvae, and cleared and lined ditches and wat
er channels. In 1906, during one month at the height of Gorgas’s antimosquito assault in Panama City, an average of forty-seven men worked long hours cleaning the streets and collecting garbage, while close to a dozen men captured rats and watered the ground to diminish the dust. The Stegomyia brigade inspected nearly ten thousand houses, identifying and destroying larvae in 1,785.62

  Many early twentieth-century commentators averred that the actual engineering and manual construction of the canal was viable only because American health officers had managed to turn Panama from a “pest-hole” and “ancient plague spot” into one of the “most healthful spots in the world.”63 As one source stated, “Colonel Gorgas realized that it was necessary to immediately revolutionize the sanitary conditions of the Canal Zone and that until this was done it would be impossible to proceed with the work with any degree of dispatch.”64 Beyond proving the unmatched scientific skills of the United States, this transformation affirmed that the tropics could be made habitable for whites, who no longer needed to fear heat and humidity, but rather insects and germs.65 In the words of a Boston physician, who spoke before the Massachusetts History Society in 1911 after touring the Canal Zone and interviewing Gorgas, Panama demonstrated that “the white man can live and work in any part of the tropics and maintain good health,” adding that “the settling of the tropics by the Caucasian will date from the completion of the Panama Canal.”66 Once seen as resulting from pestilential emanations, tropical diseases began to be understood as infections caused by tiny microbes that, with the appropriate laboratory and medical equipment, could be managed through a militarized brand of surveillance, record keeping, and coordinated extermination.