James C. Mohr
James C. Mohr
For Elizabeth
Acknowledgments ix
Prologue i
I The World Plague Epidemic of the 1890s 7
2 The "Existing Government" of Hawaii 17
3 The Arrival of Pestis 29
4 The Government's Plague Fighters 41
5 Quarantine 55
6 December's Debates and "a Sad Christmas Present" 69
7 The Decision to Use Fire 83
8 Public Health Policy and the "Great Doctors' Meeting" 99
9 Fighting with Fire
10 The Burning of Chinatown 125
11 Detention Camps 143
12 The Triumvirate Struggles On 157
13 The Frustrations of Mopping Up 171
14 Aftermath
Notes 205
Index 231
his book had its origins over twenty years ago, when I was invited to lecture at the University of Hawaii. During my visit, I took a walk through the Chinatown district of Honolulu and happened to notice a modest sign on the front of a building. The sign informed passersby that none of the structures they were looking at were original because all of the original buildings in the area had been destroyed around i goo in a fire ordered by the Board of Health. Perhaps because I was working at the time on a history of medical jurisprudence in the United States during the nineteenth century, and especially since I was in Hawaii to lecture on the intersection of medical and social policies, the sign instantly piqued my curiosity. Was the information correct? If so, why had local health officers implemented such a dramatic policy, and how had they acquired the power to do so? How did the city respond, and what happened to the people affected? To answer those and related questions, I began to collect material about the event, even as I finished other projects.
The sign itself disappeared shortly after I saw it, but I will always be grateful to whoever put it up.1 It alerted me to an event I have found absolutely riveting for a host of reasons: it took place against the background of a worldwide epidemic of bubonic plague and involved physicians from different cultures caught in the middle of an unfinished revolution in public health practice; it took place in one of the most multicultural, multilingual, and multiethnic cities on the globe at the time and involved tense interracial dynamics; it took place in a context of political maneuvering that delivered the Kingdom of Hawaii to the United States and involved imperial visions that would put the archipelago on a path toward American statehood.
In my extended search for information about the Chinatown fire, I have benefited from the generous guidance of a great many people and the shared resources of a great many institutions. Historians simply cannot work without first-rate librarians and well-tended collections. In Honolulu, I am enormously indebted to Judith Kearney, Laura Gerwitz, and the staff of the Mamiya Medical Heritage Center and Historical Archive of the Hawaiian Medical Library. Their superb collection of physician files were invaluable for this research, and I am also grateful for their permission to use many of the physician portraits that appear in this book. I also want to thank Geoff White and the staff of the Hawaiian State Archives, where many of the key documents related to these events have been saved. The state archives likewise permitted the reproduction of illustrations.
Elsewhere in Honolulu, DeSoto Brown, Linda Laurence, and Judith Kearney (after she transferred there) were a pleasure to work with at the Bishop Museum Archives, as were Patty Lei and the staff of the Bishop Museum Library. James Ho of the Hawaiian Chinese Multicultural Museum provided wonderful insights and articles from his vast store of personal lore. Joan Hori, Susie Cheng, and the Special Collections staffs at Hamilton Library, University of Hawaii at Manoa, repeatedly helped me find materials and arranged special access where necessary. I would also like to acknowledge the help I received while using the collections of the Hawaiian State Library, the Hawaiian Historical Society, and the Hawaiian Mission Children's Society Library.
As in the past, working in the Historical Division of the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, proved both enjoyable and valuable. The staff of Archives II in Adelphi, Maryland, guided me through the papers of the United States Public Health Service, and John Parascan- dola, Historian of the Public Health Service, kindly offered access to records then stored in his office. Brooke Black at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, helped me with the Nathaniel B. Emerson Papers, and the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society Archives sent me material from the Francis L. Folsom Papers.
The more I learned about Honolulu's crisis of plague and fire, the more I wanted to find as many accounts as I could from people who experienced it. Moreover, I hoped to hear their stories as they were recorded for one another in their own languages, in memoirs and newspapers. Thanks to generous scholars who know Hawaiian, Chinese, and Japanese, I was able to do that. For translation from Hawaiian, I am greatly indebted to Richard Keao K. NeSmith. Then an instructor in Polynesian languages at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, NeSmith answered a plea for help from a scholar he had never met. Both his marvelous translations and the generosity of his academic spirit command my deepest admiration and respect. For translations from Chinese, I thank Yuhuan Li at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, and Jingzhu Wu at the University of Oregon. For translations from Japanese I thank Atsuko Fukunaga and Reiko Sawyer at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, and Eric Cunningham at the University of Oregon. My colleagues Arif Dirlik, Andrew Goble, Bryna Goodman, Jeff Hanes, and Ka-Che Yip were also wonderfully patient with many ad hoc questions related to Asian languages.
At the University of Oregon, I am fortunate to enjoy the outstanding services of the Knight Library, particularly the Interlibrary Loan division under Joanne Halgren and the Government Documents and Maps division under Tom Stave. Sheerin Shahinpoor was an outstanding research assistant. I also received the benefit of extremely useful feedback when I presented preliminary ideas and various portions of this material to several different groups. Among them were the International Congress for the History of Medicine, Tunis, 1998; the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, Honolulu, 1999 (where I particularly want to thank David Chappell and Charles McClain); the Policy History Conference, St. Louis, 2002 (where I particularly want to thank Daniel Fox); the New York Academy of Medicine, 2002 (where I particularly want to thank Gerald Oppenheimer, Edward Morman, and the Galdston Lecture committee); and the International Congress for the History of Medicine, Istanbul, 2002.
Guenter Risse, the leading expert on this same plague in San Francisco, has shared his knowledge generously and appeared on academic panels with me. William Rothstein read my early essays on this subject and offered insightful comments. Arif Dirlik and Jeff Ostler both read the entire manuscript, for which I am most appreciative. I was extremely fortunate to work with Susan Ferber at Oxford University Press. Her excellent suggestions and editorial skills have made this book far better than it would otherwise have been. I also want to extend special thanks to Robert E. McGlone at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, who had originally invited me to speak in Honolulu and has continued to help advance this project in countless ways over many years.
Finally, my most enduring and profound sources of support continue to spring-as they have for almost four decades-from my wife, Betty, to whom this book is dedicated.
aturday, January 20, 1900, began as a soft and balmy morning, the kind of day that made Honolulu seem idyllic to people who remembered January in Chicago or New England. Under clear skies, the air temperature was climbing slowly through the low dos. A light breeze wafted gently in from the ocean before turning up the steep slopes of the volcanic ridge, or pali, that rose behind the city. But three of the people out early that morning were n
ot in the streets to enjoy the benign weather, even though two of them had grown up in Chicago and the third had spent several years in New England. Nathaniel B. Emerson, Francis R. Day, and Clifford B. Wood were physicians, and together they ran the Republic of Hawaii's Board of Health. For more than a month they had been directing a largely unsuccessful battle against the first invasion of bubonic plague ever to reach the Hawaiian islands.
Each morning the three physicians fanned out to visit already ailing patients, examine anyone newly reported sick, and inspect for themselves any sites around the city reported to be dangerous or unhealthful. The doctors then convened every day in a drab government office across from Honolulu's ornate Iolani Palace to review overnight developments, discuss their general policies, listen to the ideas or complaints of others, make decisions about what to do or try next, and issue the appropriate orders. At 10:30 on this particular morning, the three doctors returned to their office, where they were joined by a civilian member of the Board of Health. Wood, who had taken over as Board president only two weeks before, formally called the group to order.
Although the civilian government of Hawaii had ceded absolute authority to the Board of Health during the plague emergency, the three physicians had so far been unable to halt the epidemic. They had imposed a military quarantine around the Chinatown district of Honolulu, where the bubonic plague had initially appeared and where all of the dead through mid January had contracted the disease; they had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Hawaiian treasury, mostly on clean-up efforts inside the quarantined zone; and for the last three weeks they had even been issuing orders to the fire department to burn buildings where plague victims had lived or worked. Regardless of what the doctors did, however, the epidemic was continuing to kill Chinatown residents at a steady rate of one or two every day. Even worse, the disease was spreading. A white woman in a prosperous neighborhood north of Chinatown had died just a few days earlier, and her death became front-page news in all of Honolulu's daily papers, including those published in Chinese, Japanese, and Hawaiian. The doctors feared the entire city was on the brink of a general panic.
To inhibit further spread of the disease in the week ahead, the three physicians began their meeting by passing an edict prohibiting all indoor assemblies throughout the city, including the following day's church services, until further notice. They next applied to the new plague site outside Chinatown the same policy they had already been implementing inside Chinatown: they ordered the fire department to add the home of the dead white woman to their ongoing list of buildings to burn. Shortly after 11:oo A.M., the Board members resumed a previously deferred discussion of other possible plague sites inside Chinatown. Earlier in the week they had ordered the burning of a cluster of shacks where two plague victims had been found dead. Those ramshackle wooden structures were located in what the doctors' quarantine map labeled as block 15, a compact rectangle that also housed Kaumakapili Church, one of Honolulu's most prominent and most revered landmarks. At that time the Board members had postponed a decision about burning several buildings between the church and the shacks until they could assess the situation for themselves. But now having completed their own inspections, and feeling ever-increasing pressure to show results, they decided to add those buildings as well to the fire department's list.
Even as the doctors were formally approving these new burn orders, Henry Howard, an eye, ear, nose, and throat physician who ran the city's public dispensary, burst unceremoniously and unexpectedly into the office. The startled Board members turned in surprise to see their friend in evident distress. "The steeple of the Kaumakapili Church has caught fire," Howard blurted out, "and the flames are threatening the whole of Chinatown."'
Wood abruptly suspended the meeting, and the three doctors headed immediately in the direction of the church, which was roughly ten blocks away. They found themselves moving through the streets with thousands of other Honolulu residents, drawn by a combination of curiosity and horror, toward a rising billow of sparks, embers, and dense black smoke at the upper end of Chinatown. While guards halted ordinary citizens at the Chinatown quarantine line along Nuuanu Street, Emerson, Day, and Wood rushed on into the plague district. There they found the magnificent twin steeples of Kaumakapili Church roaring with flames like a pair of giant candles and all of the buildings for three adjoining blocks, including those they had just finished condemning back at the office, fully engulfed and blazing uncontrollably. In the midst of the chaos that confronted them, the doctors tried to piece together what had happened.
Fire chief James Hunt had chosen that tranquil Saturday morning as a safe time to burn the condemned shacks in block 15 - In the chiefs mind, the light offshore breeze and balmy weather conditions minimized any danger of harming nearby Kaumakapili Church, which he certainly did not want to do. Indeed, he had ordered every member of his well-trained and professionally paid fire department to assist in this operation, and he had all four of his fire engines standing by at strategic spots near the church. After thorough consultation with his assistants and careful calculations of wind direction, the chief himself had ignited the shacks at 9:oo A.M.
By all accounts, the fire had begun exactly as planned. The flames moved slowly and predictably in the direction that Hunt had anticipated-away from the church-incinerating the condemned shacks in an orderly manner. After about an hour, however, the morning's light ocean breezes died down, and a far more powerful wind from the opposite direction suddenly began to plunge down off the pali. Within minutes, the strong downdrafts, like a giant invisible bellows, abruptly transformed what had been a wellcontrolled burn into something resembling an open blast furnace, complete with a roaring fountain of embers that rose hundreds of feet into the air. The shift in conditions took place so fast that the firefighters had no chance to extinguish the burning shacks. Instead, they concentrated their hoses on Kaumakapili Church, now downwind from the intensifying fire and directly in harm's way.
The point of no return came when a wind-blown ember ignited Kaumakapili's eastern steeple at a level higher than the fire department's strongest engine could propel water. The flames moved quickly down into the main sanctuary, where they ignited immense piles of clothing that had been collected in the church for fumigation and disinfection as part of the antiplague campaign. While the firefighters concentrated on saving the church, flames spread to nearby structures and were driven by the relentless pali winds across the street to the next block. Hundreds of flaming embers floated elsewhere through the upper end of Chinatown, lighting countless spot fires wherever they came to rest. Residents did their best to extinguish these fires, but some were inaccessible and many were far from water supplies. Even as the three physicians arrived, firefighters at the front of the church were forced to abandon their engine to the flames or die themselves. In desperation, they ordered the dynamiting of nearby buildings to create a fire break, but the windblown flames simply jumped over the gap.
For the next several hours, the three Board of Health physicians could do little but watch as the fire front roared through the core of Chinatown's closely packed two-story wooden buildings. Unable to check the flames with the limited equipment they had left, firemen concentrated instead on evacuating people ahead of the advancing conflagration. The intense heat melted iron machinery into molten puddles and baked the earth into ceramic ground covers beneath the flaming structures. A warehouse full of fireworks awaiting the Chinese New Year, just nine days away, exploded in destructive splendor. Stacked lumber near construction sites made spectacular pyres. The loudly hissing wall of flames, still driven by the strong pali winds, moved relentlessly down through the quarantined district all the way to the edge of Honolulu's main harbor, where waterborne firefighting equipment managed to keep it from turning east into the commercial center of the city. During the rest of the afternoon, the most densely built and densely populated section of Honolulu burned itself out. By evening the hollow facade of Kaumakapili Church loomed like a
medieval ruin over roughly thirty-eight acres of ashen desolation. The area looked as if nothing but the church had ever been there.
In addition to the physical destruction of almost one-fifth of the city's buildings, the great fire also stripped at least five thousand people-more than an eighth of the city's population-of their homes, their businesses, and all the personal possessions they were unable to carry. Roughly half the victims were Chinese; the rest were predominately Japanese and Hawaiian. Few of the refugees felt any loyalty to the government that had placed Emerson, Day, and Wood in charge of the public's health. On the contrary, many of them suspected that the day's fire was a white plot to ruin or even to exterminate them. Everything they had worked so hard to accumulate had been obliterated, and they realized they would now be completely at the mercy of the very authorities who had been ordering the fires in the first place. By the end of the day, many of the district's residents were clearly in shock as the enormity of what happened and the desperation of their own situations began to sink in. Somewhat miraculously, no one had been killed in the disaster. But the day's events had instantly disrupted thousands of lives to an extent no one could have imagined when they awoke that balmy morning.
To make matters worse, everyone inside the Chinatown district had already been under strict quarantine as part of the physicians' campaign to contain the epidemic. As the fire continued to expand, Honolulu citizens from outside the quarantined zone massed on the periphery of Chinatown. They were determined to prevent a general dispersal of the residents trapped inside the district, fearing they might carry the plague uncontrollably throughout the city. Consequently, all of the refugees would now have to be confined in detention camps to make sure they were not carrying the disease. In addition to the consequences of the great fire, after all, Honolulu still had an epidemic of bubonic plague on its hands.
Plague and Fire Page 1
