Plague and Fire

by James C. Mohr

  The Hawaiian Gazette had initially criticized Emerson, Day, and Wood for implementing policies that might end up "destroying thousands of dollars worth of property, breaking up hundreds of houses, and changing a prosperous section of the city into a smoking ruin." But now that the city's Medical Society had endorsed the complete incineration of Chinatown as "absolutely necessary if the plague is to be stamped out, .. . `the greatest good to the greatest number' is the rule that must govern." The following day, the Honolulu Chamber of Commerce, which had previously taken no formal stand on the fire policy, joined those howling for the preemptive burning of the quarantined district. In the chamber's view, the Chinatown slum, now certified by doctors as a dangerous affront to Honolulu's health, had to go.18

  Representatives of Chinatown's large landowners and the district's residents themselves tried to counter the consensus emerging from white commercial interests and white medical professionals in favor of completely destroying the quarantined district. John F. Colburn, the outspoken counsel for several Chinatown property owners, drafted a public letter claiming that he and others like him had no particular quarrel with the Medical Society's sanitary recommendations, but strenuously opposed "that part of the resolutions adopted by the physicians at their meeting the other evening, which refers to the destruction of the buildings by fire in the infected districts, and the ground upon which such buildings stood to remain vacant for at least one year." Property owners were beginning to realize that they stood to lose not only their existing structures but also an additional year of income before being allowed to rebuild."

  Chinese vice-consul Gu Kim Fui, himself one of the city's leading merchants, arranged an interview with the Commercial Advertiser to urge caution. The Chinese merchants whom he represented hoped that the Board would hold to its stated policy of burning only those buildings where plague had been confirmed, not the entire Chinatown district. He also hoped that the value of condemned goods and buildings could be agreed upon and paid in advance. Provided that could be arranged, he had no objection to letting confirmed plague sites lay fallow for up to three years after burning. According to the Advertiser, "Mr. Goo [sic] Kim hastened to add that his remarks must not be construed as a complaint. Whatever the decision of the authorities may be, the Chinese will abide by it.... [T]hey fully realize that a half-hearted action will only prolong the strife and increase the loss to them in trade."20

  Gu thus struck a balance between the militant opposition of many people inside Chinatown to the fire policy and the commercial interests of Chinese businessmen, which were not markedly different from those of American businessmen. Two days later, Consul Yang took a similar position. He no longer protested the use of fire at confirmed plague sites; he protested the hardships that the policy was imposing on the Chinese merchants affected by it. Clearly, both men had decided to accept the Board's targeted burns as better than complete destruction, and both men wanted to appear as cooperative as possible as they defended their interests."

  To increase pressure on Emerson, Day, and Wood, the Medical Society took the resolutions from their "great doctors' meeting" over the heads of the Board members and directly to President Dole. The press reported the doctors "unite[d] upon the most drastic proposal" to raze Chinatown completely, and the city's white newspapers strongly backed the Medical Society. Indeed, in their presentation to the council, the Medical Society delegation proposed not only burning the entire Chinatown district, treating the ground there with disinfecting chemicals, and allowing the area to lie exposed for a year to "sunlight and air," but also relocating the displaced population of the district to permanent settlements on higher ground elsewhere in the city. Toward that end, some of the physicians urged Dole to appropriate money expressly for the construction of new homes and businesses where Chinatown refugees could live permanently after their quarantine periods expired, rather than wasting funds on temporary resettlement camps.22

  Among Dole's councilors, the Medical Society's presentation provoked a lively debate that mirrored similar discussions taking place throughout the city. In the minds of some, like the businessman Cecil Brown and the land developer W. C. Achi, financial issues were uppermost. They were nervous about opening the public treasury to any and all expenses involved in resettling the people and the businesses of Chinatown, either elsewhere in the city or in Chinatown. In the minds of others, like the wealthy patrician Peter Cushman Jones, humanitarian issues were uppermost. He claimed that everyone he talked to-from the members of his club to folks "down in the town"-agreed that the government had an obligation to help any victims from Chinatown. "We will not stand by," he was quoted as saying, "and see these people starving to death; we will go down in our pockets first." For still others, legal issues were uppermost. Was it right that an entire section of the city be obliterated on the orders of three physicians acting under emergency powers? In the end, Dole asked Attorney General Cooper to reiterate his official ruling that the Board of Health alone was absolutely in charge under the circumstances, and again refused to intervene.

  For their part, Emerson, Day, and Wood continued to stand by the policy they had articulated and implemented on New Year's Eve. Through the first two weeks of January, the three physicians continued to condemn only those buildings where plague cases had been confirmed. Aware that many people in Honolulu favored more aggressive actions, Day conceded "that in the case of buildings which may or may not be considered dangerous to the public health the benefit of any doubt should go to the people." Privately, new Board president Wood told Dole that the complete destruction of Chinatown appeared likely in the long run, since plague deaths were continuing to occur at the rate of about one a day throughout the Chinatown district, and the Board did not expect the epidemic to abate anytime soon.23

  Publicly, the three physicians also expanded the working definition of a plague site by adopting the practice of condemning all of the buildings in "close proximity to a place where a case of plague has occurred." Board members were uneasy about that expansion and "deemed it advisable to secure legal advic[e]" before making it. Yet once in effect, the expanded definition increased the probability that most of the Chinatown district would eventually be burned. Watching the number of displaced residents rise exponentially with the growing size of plague sites, Emerson, Day, and Wood on January 12 advised their ad hoc committee on detention camps "to go ahead and erect sufficient buildings to hold, at least, five thousand people from the infected places in the City of Honolulu." Though no public announcements were made, the hiring of almost three hundred carpenters detonated an explosion of rumors.24

  Nonetheless, the Board's physicians remained committed to their original fire policy. As bacteriological believers, their goal was the destruction of a specific bacterial enemy. Though they were inclined to believe that pestis bacteria might establish themselves more easily in unsanitary areas than in sanitary areas, they also recognized that not all unsanitary areas harbored plague and that pestis, like many other types of bacteria, might well be capable of sustaining themselves in perfectly sanitary environments, such as in foodstuffs. Since Board members considered fire to be the only tool at their disposal that was absolutely certain to destroy the enemy, they had resolved to burn the enemy out. But unlike the sanitationists around them, they aimed to burn only the enemy, not every place they thought the enemy might be likely to attack.

  Consequently, through the third week of January the Board of Health continued to spare buildings that offered some promise of alternative disinfection by fumigation or other means, as they did on January io, when they exempted the Yee Wo building on Smith Street from an order to burn the other structures in that block. They also responded favorably to a request from several Chinese merchants that two Chinese representatives join the Board's team of property assessors. And even if they wanted to begin burning more aggressively, Emerson, Day, and Wood realized that first relocation camps had to be constructed and then systematic property appraisals had to be carried out;
both of which took time. Finally, since they were the government of the Hawaiian Islands, the three physicians could not irresponsibly create unmanageable situations: they had to maintain public safety and public order."s

  Thus while a majority of the Medical Society's members, most English-language newspapers, and the city's white businessmen all urged a scorched-earth campaign in Chinatown, the ruling triumvirate of Emerson, Day, and Wood remained committed to a search-and-destroy mission, with Hoffman's microscope the means of detection and controlled burns the means of eradication.

  ith plague deaths a daily occurrence in Honolulu through the first three weeks of January, the physicians on the Board of Health tried to keep their focus on Oahu. But because their emergency oversight included the entire Hawaiian archipelago, they also had to monitor events on the other islands, a task that brought them into direct conflict with panicky local officials. On Maui, Kauai, and Hawaii, residents unilaterally refused to recognize the Board's authority. Rather than take instructions from Honolulu, they preferred to isolate themselves and deal with any plague crises that might occur on their own. Officials on Kauai were resolutely turning all vessels away at gunpoint, whether cleared by health inspectors at Honolulu or not. The sheriff of Hawaii County, though technically under the command of the Board of Health in Honolulu, refused to allow a medical officer sent by Wood to come ashore at Hilo. When the rebuffed medical officer returned to Honolulu with that news, Emerson, Day, and Wood officially stripped the sheriff of all authority but still had to negotiate a settlement with Hilo's local citizens, who clearly agreed with their sheriffs position.'

  Shipping agents and labor bosses lobbied constantly for exceptions to the embargoes placed on the movement of goods and people from island to island within the archipelago. Particularly irate were many of the white American sugar planters on the outer islands, whose regular supply of labor had been interrupted indefinitely by the Board's travel rules. Since the vast majority of the plantation laborers being imported to Hawaii at this point were Japanese, and since many of the Japanese in Honolulu were awaiting jobs on the outer islands, where they would be not just clear of the epidemic but finally earning some money, the sugar barons and their lawyers joined Japanese labor contractors in a campaign of complaints to the Dole administration about the Board's absolute ban on Asian travel. The planters were, to say the least, rather ironic champions of Asian rights, yet another example of the complicated dynamics and strange bedfellows produced by the plague crisis.2

  The three physicians found themselves besieged with a host of peripheral problems in Honolulu as well. Residents complained that garbage scow operators were not carrying potentially contaminated materials as far out to sea as the triumvirate had ordered. To catch the operators in the act, sixty-year-old Emerson rowed secretly out to the end of the harbor early one Sunday morning with a Hawaiian assistant, and the two of them witnessed the "discharging of garbage and refuse not more than 1/3 of a mile from the mouth of the channel." That scow operator was fired, but his successors did not do much better. Drifting debris and unpleasant odors became regular features along the city's waterfront, an unintended consequence of the cleanup programs underway in Chinatown.'

  The collection and fumigation of personal possessions and commercial merchandise from contaminated areas consumed large amounts of time and money, since almost every detail of the process was regularly challenged by some party with a vested interest, many of whom retained the city's most influential law firms to back them up. Records had to be kept, buildings had to be commandeered as fumigation stations, and agents had to be paid to do the actual work. Those opposed to confiscation and fumigation circulated false rumors that owners would be billed for the service.4

  As the number of deaths continued at a steady rate of roughly two a day, so did the number of additional plague sites that had to be burned. With each day's burnings, more people were rendered homeless and had to be relocated, accommodated, and temporarily incarcerated in the city's burgeoning quarantine camps. Upon arrival at the camps, the detainees were disinfected in special showers. Because they had been directly exposed to plague, they were forced to remain in the camps for three weeks, where they were closely observed every day for symptoms. Acceptable living quarters had to be built, sometimes by contractors and sometimes by residents, and this necessitated procurement of large amounts of lum her and hardware. Fresh water had to be located, then piped in and pumped to appropriate outlets. Such basic items as clothing, blankets, and furniture had to be provided, since all of the detainees' own possessions had been taken for fumigation and storage or already destroyed if they were deemed impossible to disinfect. And, of course, everyone had to be fed.'

  Although the camps offered sanctuary for displaced persons at a safe remove from known plague sites, where the government provided essential services at public expense, the camps were neither voluntary nor altogether beneficent. Some of the camp directors tried hard to make the situations tolerable, and some Chinese and Japanese camp occupants wrote testimonials praising the efforts of individual camp administrators and expressing gratitude for the treatment they received. But people in the camps had been forced to surrender their possessions, give up their livelihoods, and accept the destruction of their dwelling places as the result of governmental policies in which they had no say whatsoever. Armed guards made sure they remained in the camps for the period of their quarantines. By the middle of January, the number of people confined in the Honolulu quarantine camps rose to over a thousand.'

  In place of the ad hoc associations that had sprung up during the first quarantine, ethnic and religious groups from outside Chinatown now organized formal aid societies to help people who were displaced, interned, and later relocated as a result of the fires. These new organizations generally limited their assistance to their own kind. The Chinese Aid Society attended only to Chinese homeless; the Japanese Aid Society only tojapa- nese homeless; and the Hawaiian Aid Society only to Hawaiian homeless. The charter of the Japanese Society, for example, stated its purpose as helping to compensate for "damages sustained by fellow-countrymen in consequence of the sanitary fires." Church organizations likewise focused their attention principally on fellow religionists.'

  Preexisting aid societies also came forward to help. Activities of the Ahahui Kikua Manawalea Hawaii [Hawaiian Relief Services Association] were typical. Originally founded during the cholera crisis to aid Hawaiians, this organization was popularly known as the Mothers' Relief Society, since it was headed by a team of Hawaiian and white women. On behalf of Hawaiians relocated to camps, the society organized clothing drives, inspected facilities, lobbied the Hawaiian aristocracy to provide supplemental resources for Hawaiians, and met directly with Board president Wood whenever they saw things that needed correcting.'

  The various aid societies proved remarkably effective and well supported, primarily because most of the people living outside the quarantined district were more affluent-and hence in a better position to help others-than their ethnic counterparts inside Chinatown. Praise was universal for the work of the societies, which also arranged temporary school classes for interned children. Emerson, Day, and Wood strongly encouraged the work of the aid societies, met frequently with their representatives, almost invariably agreed to implement their suggestions, and afforded them a sort of semiofficial status.9

  To help implement their policies elsewhere around Honolulu, the beleaguered physicians on the Board of Health somewhat reluctantly reactivated and expanded their previously authorized Citizens' Sanitary Commission. Behind that action lay the decision to resume twice-daily inspections of the entire city, not just of Chinatown. Emerson, Day, and Wood did not want a single plague case to escape notice, and they needed a constant flow of detailed information in order to react quickly wherever the bacilli struck. And despite some misgivings, the three physicians saw no realistic way to accomplish such extensive surveillance without a large volunteer force loyal to the government. Their principal
misgiving stemmed from their realization that most members of their December medical posse had now become enthusiastic backers of the aggressive agenda advocated by the Medical Society, the English-language press, and the Chamber of Commerce, rather than the Board's own more selective approach. "As the Sanitary Commission expresses it," reported the Gazette, "`when in doubt, burn the house."70

  As expected, the Board's lay inspectors pressed steadily for the destruction of all sites they deemed unclean, whether diseased or not. Surely it was no accident that most of the sites they brought to the attention of the Board were inhabited by Asians. J. P. Cooke of the Planters and Merchants Committee, which was closely allied with the Citizens' Sanitary Commission, warned Board president Wood that many Chinese and Japanese originally from Chinatown had relocated around the city between the two quarantine periods and were now overcrowding Asian enclaves all over Honolulu. If nothing was done to eliminate such situations, each of those areas had the potential to become "a menace to public health, in fact a minanature [sic] of Chinatown." Cooke had this information, he said, as the result "of good inspecting on the part of the Agents of the Board of Health." But the Board continued to insist upon bacteriological evidence of plague before ordering sanitary fires."

  Tension escalated to the point where the frustrated directors of the Citizens' Sanitary Commission, whose members now included the formidable Lorrin Thurston, went directly to President Dole and the Council of State as the Medical Society had done before them-in an effort to force the Board into more wholesale condemnations. Though all of the directors of the Citizens' Sanitary Commission were close personal friends and staunch political allies of the president, Dole again refused to intervene. The Board of Health's absolute authority remained intact, but relations became awkward, defensive, and at times downright confrontational between the Board's three physicians and the lay inspectors acting in their name.