The federal government also agreed to assume the knotty problem of adjudicating fire claims and paying reparations to people who lost property in the battle to rid the newest American territory of bubonic plague. Since the crisis had occurred during a period of ad hoc government, and since the revenues of the defunct Republic of Hawaii would revert to the new territory anyway, the federal government saw no alternative to providing the money from Washington. The McKinley administration justified the funds on the grounds that the need for "thorough and immediate measures" had been imperative, and the Honolulu Board of Health had properly employed "the usual and approved methods, by fire and otherwise, to stamp out the plague." Although the national government would ordinarily consider any reparations to be the responsibility of the jurisdiction that undertook the destructive actions, Congress decided that the "special and exceptional facts" associated with the transitional government in Hawaii were not likely to recur, and hence that the national government was not setting a precedent for future bailouts, foreign or domestic.;
In conjunction with the claims, Congress held hearings about the plague crisis and eventually created a special claims commission. The work of that claims commission was uneven, to say the least. Pending before the commissioners were approximately 6,750 claims totaling almost $3.2 million in requested reparations. At first, the commission began paying the claims approximately at face value. But the commissioners soon began to realize that many of the requests before them were either inflated in various ways or outright frauds, and-at the rate they were initially payingthe money allotted by Congress for this purpose would be gone before all the claims could be considered. Consequently, the commission put the process on hold, then eventually decided to apply what amounted to acrossthe-board reductions to the vast majority of the remaining claims. In the end, the commissioners awarded slightly under $'5 million, or somewhat less than half of what people said they actually lost.'
Those involved in the claims process found it tremendously frustrating. The paperwork was difficult and all forms had to be filed in English or Hawaiian, so most claimants were forced to hire lawyers. The proceedings themselves were tedious and time-consuming. The commissioners challenged people to remember specific details-exact prices to the penny, for example-that they could not always recall with crystal accuracy, yet the same commissioners refused to admit into evidence such tangible items as charred bundles of paper money with their denominations still barely legible. Even when their claims were partly successful, most claimants did not receive a cent from the U.S. government until 1903, long after they had been forced to start over on their own.'
Under Consul Saito, Japanese residents who lost property to the plague fires organized the Japanese Victims Representation Committee to act as a central clearinghouse and advocacy group. The Victims Committee worked to minimize the degree of inflation in Japanese claims, an effort that produced hard feelings within the community. At the local level, Saito toiled tirelessly for his constituents and eventually convinced the Japanese government in Tokyo to press the United States government in Washington on behalf of their countrymen in Hawaii. Even the Chinese admired Saito's energy, and-probably as a veiled criticism of their own consul-they praised Saito's wholehearted commitment to all of the Japanese in Honolulu. Moreover, the Japanese had largely supported the triumvirate's approach to fighting the plague and had accepted life in the quarantine camps with remarkable grace.6
In the final reckoning, however, the Japanese as a group received just slightly more than half the total face value of the claims they submitted. Though this turned out to be a higher percentage than any other group of claimants received, thousands of Japanese people who had been forced to sacrifice for the common good of the entire city found themselves having to start over with little or nothing in the wake of the plague crisis.
Among Chinese, the claims process left bitter and long-lasting animosities. Many of the claims paid at face value early in the process had been from Chinese businessmen allied with Consul Yang, and even Chinese sources conceded that the commissioners were right to suspect that some of those claims had been fraudulently inflated. The United Chinese Society tried to improve the situation by establishing their own claims-clearing office, and by urging people to base their requests strictly "on the truth" because falsehoods and errors would delay the process for everyone. "Every society member," they admonished, "has the duty to evaluate [claims] based on justice and reality." When the society's officers felt a claim was fraudulent, they returned it and told the victim to pursue reparations on his own without the support of the society.'
But the federal claims commission could not make legal distinctions between claims reviewed by the United Chinese Society and inflated claims submitted independently. As a practical matter, the commissioners continued to apply their de facto discount to all of them. Consequently, many claimants who tried to cooperate with the United Chinese Society came away feeling cheated not only by the United States government, which arbitrarily reduced their losses, but also by duplicitous fellow Chinese who submitted inflated claims and who in many cases were also their political opponents. Kong Tai Heong believed that some of the hatred directed in later years at her and her husband, Li Khai Fai, stemmed not from the plague crisis per se but from efforts by others in the Chinese community to channel resentment away from themselves. Some Chinese, she told her daughter, had actually been "happy that there had been a fire. But they tried to hide their happiness by piling blame on father [for reporting plague cases in the first place], hoping this would help hide the fat gains they had made from the parched bones of those who had lost their goods in the fire.""
Most Chinese, like most Japanese, received some recompense, but far less than they deserved. Chung Kun Ai, for example, received enough money for the loss of City Mill to repay his company's debts, but the commissioners awarded him only a small portion of the value of his personal property. He thus found himself back in the position he had been in before launching City Mill, rather than in the position he had achieved as director of a multinational business. Many other Chinese, forced to start over with nothing, fared far worse.9
A committee of five Chinese claimants in December 1902 reminded the American government that on the day of the great fire the people of Chinatown had accepted assurances that they would be compensated for their losses. But two years had passed, and many of the former refugees were still "forced to live upon public and private charity." According to the committee, "many of the sufferers became despondent and were led to take their own lives; others worried over their losses so much, wondering whether they would ever regain their former standing in the community which years of unremitting toil had established, that it brought on sickness and death, leaving their wives and children in helpless circumstances; and still others were driven to insanity.""
Looking back from the 192os, an anonymous Chinese writer who was otherwise pro-American nonetheless reminded his readers-in a comprehensive survey of the Chinese in Hawaii-that rebuilding a business "was not an easy task, and Chinese businesses suffered irreparable losses [during the plague crisis].... It was not easy to rally one's forces after a defeat." A full seventy years after the great fire, the historian Tin-Yuke Char observed, "Even today, when one talks with members of the older genera tion whose families lost their belongings and went through quarantine and fumigation, one learns that it was an emotionally scarring experience for people who found it difficult to hold the authorities blameless." In the early years of the twenty-first century, Honolulu's most prominent local historian still characterized the fire of 19oo as "the holocaust of Honolulu Chinatown" and alleged the secret murder of Chinese residents in the guise of fighting plague. In that view, the entire process looked like a deliberate act of racist revenge, planned far in advance by Lorrin Thurston in retaliation against the Chinese merchants who helped Robert Wilcox try to unseat the annexationists in 1895."
It would be wrong, however, to see relations between the
races in Honolulu as completely adversarial after the plague crisis. Even though the burned-out blocks of Chinatown represented prime real estate in a superb commercial location-potentially more valuable than ever with its shabby structures completely removed-the territorial government resisted intense pressures from white developers to resettle Chinatown residents elsewhere in the city and turn the burned-out blocks over to white businesses. Instead, the city installed modern water systems and sanitary sewers at public expense, while prior owners and residents rebuilt-usually with brick and stone this time-and returned. Unfortunately, that process also bred confusion, litigation, and hard bargains, because the city had to realign some of Chinatown's preexisting streets to accommodate the sanitary improvements. For every shift, even if only a few feet, lot lines had to be redrawn to preserve street-front access-a complicated process that led to extended haggling.
Partly as a result of the remapping, partly because new sanitary laws and tenement regulations forced the district to be rebuilt less densely than it had formerly been, and partly to escape a place that had brought them so much misery, many Asians moved away from the Chinatown district to other areas of Honolulu during the first decade of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, many Asian businesses were able to relocate essentially where they had been before the plague fires, including perhaps most symbolically the Wing Wo Tai company, where the death of bookkeeper You Chong had signaled arrival of the world epidemic. Renovated again in 1979, the Wing Wo Tai building still stands on Nuuanu Street today. Kaumakapili's twin spires have been replaced by a soaring pair of luxury high-rise apartments-secular twin spires in their own right-and the Nimitz Highway cuts through an area where Chinese produce markets did business in 1899. But the core of the area destroyed in the great fire of i goo remains "Chinatown" to the present time-and continues to house a variety of ethnic, racial, and linguistic groups, including a growing number of Vietnamese businesses."
Soga Yasutaro, the junior editor who saved Hawaii Shimpo's printing press and escaped from the Kalihi detention camp, noted two other positive legacies of the plague and fire crisis. One was the willingness of Honolulu's Chinese and Japanese leaders to cooperate for mutually desirable goals. From their joint reparations protest and the Asian mass meeting emerged the Japanese-Chinese Federation. Soga acknowledged that relations between the two groups did not change overnight-he lightheartedly joked that the grandly named federation sometimes consisted of him and a Chinese friend out drinking, and he noted that the federation had trouble getting its members to pay dues. But he also rightly recognized that the organization provided a forum during the first decades of the twentieth century that led to higher levels of Asian cooperation under the new territorial government than had existed under the republic.
The other positive result that Soga recalled was the inadvertent "cleaning up of Honolulu's downtown Japanese underworld." "Prostitutes and gangsters," he believed, "feared that the authorities would extend their post-fire consolidation and disposal to them as well, and they decided to scatter to the four winds." Whether that was altogether the case is hard to judge, but the transitional government did make a concerted effort in May to prevent the reestablishment of Japanese brothels. Later police figures also suggested that Japanese criminal activity declined in Honolulu and rose on Maui, which was where Soga thought many of the city's least savory Japanese residents had fled.13
Soga himself remained in the newspaper business in Honolulu, where he took over the Yamato Shimbun in 1905, renamed it the Nippu Jai, and turned it into the most widely read Japanese paper in the islands. After backing the strikers in a famous plantation labor dispute in 1909, Soga served four months in jail for conspiracy before returning home to a hero's welcome. He lived long enough to be summarily arrested the night Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and be interned for a third time by Americans at various World War II relocation camps in Hawaii and on the mainland. Again welcomed back to Honolulu when the war was over, he continued on as one of the revered fathers of Japanese-American journalism until his death in 1957.14
At least some degree of business cooperation between whites and Asians survived the economic devastation of the fires. Chung Kun Ai, who initially assumed that the fire had finished him as an entrepreneur, was able to reestablish City Mill because white companies agreed to advance him materials at cost and consciously decided not to press him for regular payments, even though they could have foreclosed on his assets. The white law firm that renegotiated City Mill's contracts and handled Chung's claims before the commission charged less than a quarter of what its fees had been prior to the fire. As Chung put it plainly, "They [the white businesses and law firms] chose not to profit from City Mill's disaster."
Such relations may not have been the norm. Most of the prestigious white law firms representing Asian claimants before the claims commission charged 6.5 percent of whatever they recovered. Though treated well himself, Chung heard about a lawyer "who swallowed up every cent he could from [other] poor fire-sufferers." Chung's earlier conversion to Christianity almost certainly helped him establish trust with white businessmen, as Christianity had done for Vice-Consul Gu as well. Nonetheless, such acts of good will did take place, and Chung Kun Ai went on to become a leading business figure in Honolulu. He eventually established a charitable foundation of his own to help others as he had been helped, and he continued to expand City Mill, which today is run by his grandson and employs some 450 people.''
Many of the relief societies established during the plague crisis remained intact and continued to contribute to the welfare of Honolulu. The Japanese Aid Society built a Japanese hospital in the wake of the plague crisis, as the Chinese had done in the wake of the cholera crisis. Within six months of the great fire, enough money had been raised to build a thirty-eightbed facility in the Kapalama district. Mori Iga, one of the physicians who had worked closely and cooperatively with Emerson, Day, and Wood through the plague period, served as the hospital's first director. Following several stages of expansion, a number of relocations, and a new name, that small Japanese Charity Hospital eventually emerged as Honolulu's modern Kuakini Hospital and Health System, now open to all Honolulu residents. 16
Emerson, Day, and Wood, the three physicians whose five months of absolute rule had been among the most eventful in Hawaii's history, returned to their private lives and all but disappeared from public view. As soon as the plague crisis was over, Day took his wife on a trip around the world that lasted more than two years. For Day, the trip was partly a journey of relief and reward after five months of battling pestis night and day, and partly a great adventure while he could still enjoy traveling. When the couple returned to Honolulu, Day rejoined the medical partnership he had formed in 1899 with his boyhood pal Wood and resumed his practice from their mutual offices on Beretania Street. But Day-the doctor who had left Chicago for his health in i 886-was never again robust after the plague crisis. He died in 1906 at the age of 46."
Emerson, the aging "mission boy" and veteran public health officer, resumed his medical practice in Honolulu, but spent increasing amounts of his time on literary, historical, and linguistic pursuits. Ever purposeful and fit, he also swam every morning in the ocean. Though he declined any additional government appointments, he served as president of several civic, social, and professional organizations, including the Hawaiian Historical Society. Emerson's translation of David Malo's master work on Hawaiian mythology and folklore was published by the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology in i 909, and Emerson's own magnum opus on Hawaiian culturethe product of seven years of research-appeared in 1915, the same year he died in Honolulu at the age of 76.18
Wood remained the most prominent of the three in the medical profession. When the Dole administration's Board of Health was replaced by the new United States Territorial Board of Health, Wood was appointed to serve on it. In 1904, he and his wife toured the major hospitals of Europe. Shortly after his return to Honolulu, he helped open Kauikeolani Children's Hospital. Following the dea
th of his friend and partner Day, Wood remained in active practice by himself and served at various times as an officer and principal promoter for Queen's Hospital, as a champion of the Red Cross, as a member and president of the revamped Hawaiian Territorial Medical Association, and as chairman of the Territorial Board of Medical Examiners. He died in Honolulu in 1939 at the age of 79.'9
Hoffman, the city bacteriologist who bravely performed more than two hundred autopsies during the plague crisis and tried unsuccessfully to develop an antidote to the disease, took the bride he had married in the midst of the emergency on a trip back to Berlin in 1901 to see his homeland and meet his family. The couple returned to Honolulu and lived there until 1910, when they left to resettle permanently in Chicago, where his wife had been raised. To secure an American practice, Hoffman decided to pursue another medical degree. He chose Rush Medical College, where his Honolulu friends Day and Wood had both studied. Hoffman then practiced pediatrics in Chicago, where for many years he was on the staff of Children's Memorial and Presbyterian Hospital. He died in 1945 at the age of 72.20
Carmichael, the U.S. Marine Hospital Service physician who had worked so closely with Emerson, Day, and Wood, remained in that federal agency, which would soon enlarge its purview and change its name to the U.S. Public Health Service. In April 1901 he was transferred to San Francisco to help that city cope with the same pandemic of bubonic plague he had just been battling in Honolulu. But the San Francisco assignment went badly from the outset. Carmichael's marriage, which had come unglued in Honolulu, ended completely when his wife-claiming physical abuse-sued him for divorce only months after arriving on the mainland. As a federal medical officer, he found himself involved in nasty political confrontations with state and local officials. Carmichael had been on the fast track when he arrived in Honolulu a year ahead of the plague, but the ugly infighting in San Francisco derailed his career. The Public Health Service all but exiled him in 1902 to a permanent station on the island of Martha's Vineyard, where he lived the rest of his life. A rather lonely and tragic figure thereafter, Carmichael remained single until the age of 72, when he married for the third time. He died in 1929 at the age of 77."
Plague and Fire Page 24
