Plague and Fire

by James C. Mohr

  By carrying out their duties in a heavy-handed fashion, Citizens' Sanitary Commission inspectors provoked ill will throughout the city, particularly among nonwhites. The Hawaiian-language press reported a procession of Hawaiians being "taken like prisoners" from condemned sites to the Kakaako camp by armed agents of the Citizens' Sanitary Commission. "There were also Japanese, Chinese, Gilbertese, Indians and others in the procession." Some had "tears streaming down their faces ... as they reflected on the homes which were about to be destroyed by fire by the government." When they turned "their sad eyes and faces" toward a crowd of spectators, they saw "white men and women ... taunting those being led off by the government guards." Hawaiians found such "reprehensible acts ... sad and pitiful." "Those whose homes were taken and burned are like prisoners of war" in the hands of the Citizens' Sanitary Commission, concluded Ke Aloha Aina, when they should be treated instead as innocent refugees from the war against plague. "It is a ridiculous situation.""

  Since they were supposed to monitor the ongoing health of every person residing in their assigned district, Citizens' Sanitary Commission inspectors had the right to enter homes and examine individuals twice a day. People being inspected complained of petty theft, insensitivity, invasions of privacy, and racial harassment. On his first day of service, one of the inspectors was indicted for attempted rape after he entered the home of "a respectable young white woman, demanded to `inspect' the premises, and when in a room alone with her, assaulted her and tore her clothes." In his own defense, he claimed to have been too drunk to remember what he had done. No wonder that the Chinese protested loudly that many other inspectors had "little respect for Chinese womanhood." At one point, Citizens' Sanitary Commission agents had to be publicly reminded that "harsh treatment of women of whatever nationality will not be countenanced by any intelligent citizen."13

  Hawaiians reported similar indignities inflicted by agents of the Citizens' Sanitary Commission. Everyone evacuated from a plague site was sent to a disinfection station prior to relocation in a quarantine camp. At the station, people had to surrender their personal effects, including jewelry and money, then strip for a mandatory medical inspection and a disinfecting shower. After that they were provided with fumigated clothing issued by the government. Sometimes as many as 250 people would be processed in this manner in a single morning.14 Hawaiians resented the fact that white guards not only commandeered their valuables, which were not returned, but also "stay[ed] and watch[ed] the private parts of women" during the process. "And what's worse," reported Ke Aloha Aina, "is that some of the women are experiencing menstruation at the time, and are not able to shield or protect themselves from the orders of the guards, with their spectacles examining the private parts of these people. The wife of the president of the Board of Health would be treated better had she been among these Hawaiian women who are subjected to abuse. What are his policies regarding these lustful inspectors? We imagine that he would quickly order a halt if such things were happening to his wife. Can he not just as quickly put an end to the glaring of the inspectors at the privates of men and women and the seizure of their belongings?""

  Economic hardships followed closely behind personal indignities as sources of distress. Chinese and Japanese merchants inside Chinatown resented the seizure of suspect goods by Citizens' Sanitary Commission agents, particularly since individual inspectors had considerable discretion in what they decided to categorize as potentially suspect. In theory, owners would get their confiscated goods back after a period of warehouse storage and fumigation, but in practice all perishable items were effectively lost and durable merchandise was often damaged. And in the meantime, the merchants had nothing to sell. To make matters worse, "certain irresponsible people employed as guards and carriers" were blamed for the "plundering of goods" in storage. Both Chinese and Japanese businessmen suspected that their white competitors were taking advantage of these circumstances and happily pushing their friends on the Citizens' Sanitary Commission to implement the Board's ostensibly medical policies in ways that hurt Asian merchants.16

  Japanese consul Saito Miki complained repeatedly to Emerson, Day, and Wood about other alleged abuses as well. According to reports reaching Saito, some of the Japanese commercial goods that were seized for storage or fumigation had not been disinfected at all, but simply hauled to a central spot, where they lay outside on the ground, unattended and vulnerable to rain and theft. And like the Hawaiians, Saito protested the behavior of Citizens' Sanitary Commission volunteers who administered the mandatory disinfecting stations. "At the time of disinfection, the Japanese are said to be rather ill treated by the guards and officials connected with the quarantine," Saito protested. "For example, they say that men and women were all put into one line, entirely naked, and thus fumigated. Then they were driven along the street by the guards who had a stick in their hands as though they were driving sheep. The Japanese, even the lowest class, are not accustomed to this kind of treatment, and they can not endure it." Saito urged the doctors to intervene personally."

  Japanese men receiving disinfection baths. Hawaii State Archives

  In his reply, Wood denied the intentional destruction of any Japanese goods and denied "there been any ill treatment of the Japanese of any kind." On the basis of reports reaching him from physicians on the scene, Wood asserted that it was "utterly untrue that men and women have been put in one line naked at the time of disinfection. The men and women have been entirely separated at the time of giving the disinfecting baths." But he did concede that "some trouble has been made by a few Japanese men, keepers of, or residents at, the bagnios [brothels] of Pauahi Street. The respectable class of Japanese, however, have worked with the agents of the Board in the utmost harmony." President Wood and his two colleagues on the Board fully realized that the agents acting in their name were a mixed lot, some of whom no doubt thoroughly enjoyed playing the role of petty tyrant. To avoid future embarrassment, the three physicians quietly began hiring matrons to attend female refugees in the camps.18

  The Board continued to meet every morning and almost every afternoon, seven days a week. Every day brought news of another death inside Chinatown; up to five people died on bad days. Hoffman, the Board's bacteriologist, performed autopsies virtually around the clock, and the city's refurbished crematorium was in nearly continuous use. Most of the victims were Chinese and Japanese; a few were Hawaiian. Some people in the city became convinced that pestis lived mainly in Asian foodstuffs, or could at least survive in Asian food and be spread when eaten. After all, with the exception of Ethel Johnson, people who ate Western foods were still unaffected by the epidemic, while those who died had eaten mostly Asian foods. And the papers all noted that Ethel had been eating Chinese candy she bought at an Asian market shortly before she came down with plague. So the Board had to spend a great deal of time debating whether or not to fumigate, destroy, or ban foods imported from Asia. The Board's first order of business, however, remained the ongoing condemnation of specific plague sites, as reported by Citizens' Sanitary Commission inspectors, confirmed by the Board's authorized physicians, and formally voted by Emerson, Day, and Wood persona Ily.9

  The fire department spent almost every day executing the Board's orders, usually running one or two days behind the formal condemnations. As a practical matter, burning specific sets of buildings, even burning separate blocks, was a difficult and dangerous task. The overwhelming majority of structures in Chinatown were wood, most were packed densely together, and many were quite flimsily constructed. Every fire had the potential to spread beyond its intended target, as accidental fires had regularly done in previous years, sometimes with disastrous results. The worst of those accidental conflagrations had occurred in 1886, when a runaway kitchen fire in a Chinese boardinghouse destroyed most of Chinatown below Beretania Street and triggered mob violence by Hawaiians against Chinese, whom the Hawaiians of the district blamed for their losses.20

  To minimize the danger of fires spreading, the fire
department calculated wind speed and direction, then ignited buildings only under specific conditions and always from particular angles. Once the fire was underway, the firefighters stood by with their hoses playing on nearby structures to prevent them from catching fire, and they dampened their target fires to keep them from burning too furiously to be safely contained. Embers lifted by updrafts were chased down and extinguished. "On all the surrounding buildings ... groups of Japanese and Chinese armed with brooms and shovels" typically gathered to help the fire department "prevent burning sparks from setting fire to their habitations."?'

  Honolulu had long been proud of its fire department. In advance of most cities its size, Honolulu had engaged full-time professional firefighters to staff the city's fire stations, including the so-called chemical engine station located near the center of Chinatown. As the station name implied, the Honolulu fire department kept up with the latest fire-fighting technology, in this case a large four-wheeled version of the soda-and-acid fire extinguishers that remained common throughout the United States into the late twentieth century. The city fathers had also invested in a brand-new steam pumper, dubbed Engine No. i by the men, that arrived in the islands only a few months before the plague. Trained volunteers, some of whom had organized themselves as ethnic associations, assisted the paid professionals when needed.

  For their burning of plague sites, the firefighters received consistently high marks from the Board of Health, the city's newspapers, and outside observers. Many stories appeared under headlines like "Good Work of Firemen," and many editorials praised the ongoing efforts of the department. Chinese, Japanese, and Hawaiian spectators regularly applauded the skill with which the controlled burns were accomplished. When firemen successfully burned a meeting hall on Pauahi Street without even marring the brand-new Chinese-owned wood-frame lodging house right next to it, they received special commendations from residents of the neighborhood. Cooper quipped that the city's firefighters had become so good at this work that "they could go into a house and burn out one room without harming the remainder of the building. 1122

  The fire chief of San Jose, California, who happened to be vacationing in Honolulu when the plague crisis struck, also had high praise for the ability of Chief James Hunt and his men in Honolulu to control the fires they set, especially under such difficult conditions. "It is a more trying test of Chief Hunt and his men to handle a deliberate destruction of property, than to simply drown out the ordinary fire," the visitor observed. He lauded Hunt for using the methods of "the best fire departments in the great cities." Ironically, the only hint of criticism directed at the fire department during the early weeks of January was an editorial urging Hunt's men not to douse their fires too quickly, lest a few plague bacteria somehow survive."

  Despite effective implementation of the fire policy, the epidemic continued to produce daily deaths inside the quarantined zone. More ominously, the plague soon showed disturbing signs of breaking through the quarantine lines. On January io, plague struck a national guardsman named Kauehoa, who had been patrolling the perimeter of the quarantined district, and Kauohi, one of the Board's temporary employees, who had been operating an excavating machine inside Chinatown to clean privies and remove garbage. Both men were Hawaiian and both regularly returned each night to their homes outside the quarantined district. Both men died three days later. Two more Hawaiians living in different districts-and lacking any apparent contact with the quarantined zone-died the following day, as did a Chinese man inside the zone. The evident spread of the epidemic dismayed Emerson, Day, and Wood, who promptly ordered the four Hawaiian death sites to be burned, the first such burnings outside Chinatown.14

  On January 14, Honolulu's white residents opened their morning newspapers to the dreaded news that one of their own, forty-six-year-old Sarah Boardman, had apparently come down with plague. Boardman and her husband George, a high-ranking civil servant, lived with their niece in a comfortable suburban home in the Nuuanu Valley. Their personal doctor, a homeopath named George Augur, had called the Board of Health office seeking help with a grave case, and when Day and Wood took a carriage out to examine the case for themselves, they had almost immediately diagnosed Boardman as suffering from plaque. They also learned that she had probably contracted plague at Jordan's dry goods store on Fort Street, where she was the art director. Jordan's had recently experienced an infestation of rats, and the two physicians assumed that the rats must somehow have carried the disease to a commercial section of Honolulu otherwise regarded as clean and prosperous. Two nurses were keeping watch over Sarah Boardman, but the physicians were not optimistic.''

  President Wood immediately declared the Boardman house to be a plague site, notwithstanding its location in what the press called "one of the best residence sections" of Honolulu. Wood then ordered armed agents to remove the other members of the household to a guarded detention site. A veterinarian was summoned to chloroform the couple's eight prize pugs on the grounds that those valuable show dogs might also carry the bacteria. Pickets patrolled the house where Boardman lay critically ill, and Wood imposed a general quarantine across the lower section of the wealthy Nuuanu Valley.26

  "The community was shocked beyond measure," reported the Commercial Advertiser. "The announcement of plague symptoms developing in Mrs. Boardman caused a feeling of apprehension to spread over the city." Unfounded rumors of additional cases "threw the city into a fever of excitement." Previously silent white citizens from Honolulu's upscale neighborhoods now began to speak out. E. F. Bishop, for example, appeared personally before the Board as the delegated representative of the Nuuanu Valley's residents. Those prominent and prosperous citizens strongly objected to the relocation of Boardman's family to a guarded detention center, and they vigorously protested the general quarantine imposed on their own neighborhood. But the Board held its ground.''

  For two days, the daily papers anxiously kept track of Sarah Boardman's status in detailed front-page stories, and couriers kept Emerson, Day, and Wood informed of every development. She experienced a typically forceful first onslaught, accompanied by high fever and bodily pain, then slipped into semiconsciousness. The following day she seemed to improve, her fever receded, and her attendants experienced the cruel hope of recovery so characteristic of bubonic plague. But while Wood was presiding over the regular afternoon meeting with his colleagues on January 16, a courier entered the room and slipped a note from Augur under his hand. Wood stopped in midsentence, read the note, and grimaced. His expression "caused the remainder of the Board to fear the worst," and Wood somberly announced that Boardman had died ten minutes earlier. The assembled group then condemned her home to be burned as a plague site.

  Sarah Boardman's death shocked the white community. Many whites had been wishfully maintaining their supposed immunity to plague, and some had been maintaining an almost blase attitude toward the epidemic. Now, according to the press, they "finally came to the belief that steps should be taken by them to assist the Board of Health." In private session with President Dole and the Council of State, a discouraged Wood candidly reported the Board's failure to contain the epidemic within the boundaries of Chinatown and confessed his frustration at not knowing exactly how the quarantine lines had been breached. Boardman's case, he feared, promised to be merely the first of many more among Honolulu's EuroAmericans, and the Board's three physicians were bracing for a possible "panic"-his word-among the city's whites. "Then what is to be done?" Wood wondered aloud to the president.Z"

  Through all of this, Emerson, Day, and Wood had been continuing to implement their fire policy with daily burnings wherever plague cases were confirmed. Prior to the demise of the four Hawaiians and Sarah Boardman, all of January's deaths had occurred in Chinatown, so all previous burnings had taken place there as well. The fire department had conducted its largest burning yet on January 12, when it successfully incinerated an entire medium-sized block on the eastern edge of Chinatown immediately adjacent to the rest of the city. The follo
wing day the firemen burned an area known as Union Square. On both occasions, "the streets were filled with people of all races to watch the fires lit by the government." Commercial photographers recorded the events in black-and-white images, which they reproduced overnight and sold to the public the next day, despite criticism that the circulation of such pictures in the United States could damage business and discourage tourism. But the death of Sarah Boardman galvanized a fresh round of rhetoric urging the peremptory eradication of the entire Chinatown district.29

  Editorial after editorial in the white press implored the Board to abandon its site-by-site policy and stamp out the principal locus of plague in its entirety, before the epidemic had a chance to spread still farther afield. Boardman's case "caused widespread consternation" and reminded Americans that "the plague does not always respect the white skin." The rat that passed the disease to Boardman was almost certainly "a Chinatown refugee," and the rest of the city should no longer tolerate that font of death. The time had come to stop "dilly-dallying" and stop "respecting the property of this or that owner or estate in Chinatown." The message was clear and repeated daily: the "active manufactory of the bubonic plague" in our city is Chinatown, and "we shall have millions of deadly germs [if that district] ... is not purified by fire." Emerson, Day, and Wood were admonished to "Abolish the plague spot, gentlemen of the Board of Health. ... The rotting spot must be burned out.""

  The three physicians responded to the cresting wave of panic and pressure by promulgating stronger building and sanitary codes, closing all schools and places of public amusement throughout the city, and augmenting the Citizens' Sanitary Commission. In a public meeting attended by "about a hundred citizens," Wood authorized the commission to move beyond daily observations and to conduct a thorough census of all persons in the city, making a list of all illnesses, right down to sore throats. The Board physicians further curtailed public transportation and forbade all changes of residence throughout the city without their permission.