Plague and Fire

by James C. Mohr

  While the principal policy makers faded from public view as individuals, their collective actions during the plague crisis have been the subject of assessment and disagreement for more than a hundred years. The most damning charge against them, that the Chinatown fire of January 20, 1900, was an intentional act, can be laid to rest. Though some people alleged a conspiracy at the time, and variations of their accusations have continued to serve social, economic, and political purposes ever since, eyewitnesses at the time testified from many different positions and in many different languages that the great fire itself was unintentional. Vice-Consul Gu, the United Chinese Society, the Tanshan Longii Xi Bao [Hawaiian Chinese News], and others writing in Chinese; editor Soga and others writing in Japanese; the Ke Aloha Aina and others writing in Hawaiian; and literally hundreds of English-language accounts, including accounts from inveterate critics of the Dole administration, all agreed. The surprise wind shifts on January 20 were unusual and could not have been predicted; the fire department tried heroically to contain the fire; and the authorities on all sides were stunned by what happened. When pressed for evidence to the contrary by two U.S. senators in 1903, even Robert Wilcox, the man who had led an armed insurrection against Dole's republic in 1895 and had gone to Washington in i9oi as spokesman for the Home Rule Party, admitted that charges of conscious intent were no more than hearsay and rumor."

  More difficult to assess was the decision to use fire in the first place. Even if they did not intend to destroy Chinatown in one great conflagration, Emerson, Day, and Wood were clearly prepared to burn the entire district piecemeal if plague kept occurring there. The three physicians believed from the outset, to repeat the words of their president, that "plague [was] preeminently a disease of locality and place." In the long run, they thought, "The place is much more dangerous than the person," so the place would have to be purged of pestis. Moreover, they were vehemently determined from the outset to make sure plague was not merely checked, but "entirely stamped out" in Honolulu, so the disease could not "recur again next year or any time." In that, they shared Lorrin Thurston's longstanding and often-repeated nightmare that went back at least as far as the leprosy controversies: the future prospects of everyone in the archipelago were "doomed" if Hawaii became "known as a plague spot." Consequently, according to their own explanation, "after careful consideration" and "free discussion in open meetings," the physicians "chose fire as the surest and most thorough and most expeditious" method of assuring their goal. Fire and only fire, they assured a subcommittee of U.S. senators in 1902, "would destroy the plague germs ."21

  For that decision the physicians on the Honolulu Board of Health were much admired by their contemporaries elsewhere around the world. Less than two weeks after the great fire, the San Francisco Board of Health, facing its own threat of plague, sent "a special representative" to Hawaii to assess firsthand the actions being taken by their Honolulu counterparts. That representative, Ichitaro Katsuki, was a Japanese-born physician who had graduated from the University of California Medical School and had practiced in San Francisco since 1896. Katsuki applauded the campaign being waged by the Board doctors in Honolulu, joined them in their bacteriological investigations, and worked actively with them in their laboratory searches for a plague serum. He especially admired "the coolness and intelligence which the [Honolulu Board of Health] has manifested." "Honolulu," he continued, "deserves the warm commendation and thanks of every community for its magnificent efforts in coping with the disease."24

  Unlike the emissary from their city's Board of Health, Chinese residents back in San Francisco itself drew entirely different conclusions. They were well informed about the events in Honolulu, and for them the Hawaiian Board's actions demonstrated the ways in which policies promulgated in the name of public health, especially when implemented without regard to larger contexts, could produce disastrous consequences. As a result, San Francisco's Chinese were on guard against the possibility of something like the Chinatown fire occurring in their city, with its long and violent history of anti-Asian activity. Just as the Chinese expected, an outbreak of plague in San Francisco's Chinatown in March i goo prompted members of both the San Francisco Board of Health and the California State Board of Health to cite what they regarded as the remarkable success of their counterparts in Honolulu and to begin calling for the burn ing of San Francisco's Chinatown. Led by the so-called Six Companies, the Chinese immediately countered by hiring top American law firms to defend their rights successfully in court under the Fourteenth Amendment. They also negotiated with the San Francisco Board of Health to implement alternative measures short of burning

  While the Chinese of San Francisco saw the plague crisis in Honolulu as reinforcing the need for caution and restraint, international public health officers almost universally shared Katsuki's point of view. All around the world during the first decade of the twentieth century, public health officers repeatedly hailed the impressive victory of the Honolulu Board of Health under tough and dangerous circumstances. The triumvirate's strong policy of removing survivors to safe ground and then burning the sites of infection left behind had worked: a major infestation of pestis was defeated, and no one was killed in the bacteria-destroying conflagrations, even the one that got out of hand. In particular, the fact that no one died of plague in any of the detention camps seemed powerful proof to international public health officers that the fundamental assumptions of the Honolulu physicians had been right all along."

  The sentiments of William J. Galbraith, chief surgeon to the Union Pacific Railroad, were typical of many others. "I consider the manner in which the plague trouble has been met in Honolulu," he stated, "as unique in the history of the world," and the "heroic measures" taken by the three "conscientious, up-to-date, and skillful physicians" will produce "immense benefits to future generations." Joseph J. Kinyoun, a pioneer public health officer who had headed the first bacteriological laboratory established by the Marine Hospital Service in 1887 (a laboratory that evolved into the National Institutes of Health) and who had fought the plague pandemic of the 189os from Hong Kong to San Francisco, strongly agreed with that opinion. Kinyoun believed that the Honolulu triumvirate had at last provided "civilized communities" everywhere with a successful formula for beating pestis, provided they had the wherewithal to apply it. He envied the "fortunate circumstances" that had allowed the three Honolulu doctors to act so boldly. Given the resistance he faced at his post in San Francisco to policies like those implemented in Honolulu, he feared that plague might never be eradicated from San Francisco.27

  Consequently, far from seeing the great Chinatown fire in Honolulu as a sobering reason to avoid site burning, plague fighters around the world often added fire to the weapons they used after i goo. In Kobe, Japan, in Igo1, Kitasato, who had been elevated to the post of director of the Imperial Japanese Institute for the Study of Infectious Diseases, implemented essentially the same fire policy that the Honolulu Board had used the previous year, though he was less generous about letting people return to former plague neighborhoods. International public health protocols adopted in Berlin in 1902 all but codified the Honolulu model for dealing with plague. Mexican public health physicians employed site burning when the pandemic reached Mazatlan in 1903. Both Russian and Chinese public health officers burned plague sites in Manchuria in i91o. At least through 1907, official guidelines of the U.S. Public Health Service still insisted that "buildings in which plague continues to manifest itself after [attempted disinfection] should be vacated and destroyed to prevent the spread of the disease. 1121

  Looking back in 1904, Kinyoun also believed that the Honolulu Board of Health had done better than any other health board in the world at overcoming the commercial greed of their local businessmen and the selfish defenses of local property holders. The Honolulu physicians' extraordinary emergency powers, in Kinyoun's view, had allowed them to act exclusively for the common good and place the long-term health of their city ahead of any short-term economic
considerations. Kinyoun knew personally just how hard that could be: in 1901 he had been removed from his duties as commander of the federal government's San Francisco Quarantine Station following open confrontations with San Francisco businessmen, both white and Chinese, over how to deal with the threat of plague in that city.w

  The nearly unanimous praise from public health officials around the world helps bring into focus one of the profound ironies of this tale: the policies that produced the great Chinatown fire in Honolulu were not aberrations; they resulted from good-faith efforts on the part of Emerson, Day, and Wood to implement what seemed to them to be the most progressive public health ideas of their time. While they surely acted withinand were influenced by-racist assumptions and territorial ambitions, the three physicians appear from the perspective of the early twenty-first century to have responded to the pandemic of the late nineteenth century first and foremost as medical professionals. On the one hand, that suggests the optimistic possibility that professional commitments, professional training, and professional ethics can-sometimes and to some extentbegin to mitigate the racial and imperial dynamics of their times; on the other hand, it makes clear that even what appear to be the best and most progressive of professional commitments are sometimes capable of producing unforeseen consequences of tragic proportions, especially in situations where the knowledge base upon which they rest is shaky and especially in situations where few checks of any other kind are in place. And that is one of the most sobering aspects of this entire incident.

  Consider the role of race in these policies. Certainly the Dole administration for which the Board physicians worked was an overtly racist regime, and certainly the fact that Honolulu's poorest slum was overwhelmingly inhabited by Asians and Hawaiians was related to the racist policies of that and preceding governments. Just as certainly, Emerson, Day, and Wood harbored many of the racist assumptions typical of their class and era. Wood, the Board president, later remarked to a congressional committee that the residents of Chinatown at the time of the plague crisis "wallowed in [filth] as only Asiatics can and live." But the triumvirate's actual policies seem to have been neither motivated primarily by race nor implemented in a consciously racist manner. They did not quarantine Honolulu's Chinese, Japanese, or Hawaiian populations in general; they quarantined that minority of the city's Chinese, Japanese, and Hawaiian residents who lived in the infected area from which they feared plague was most likely to spread. They did not burn only those buildings where nonwhites contracted plague; they burned all buildings associated with plague cases, including white homes and major businesses. As Carmichael reported to the surgeon general in Washington, "The sanitary fires were numerous, and the dwellings of Caucasians and Asiatics were treated alike when condemned as foci of infection. 1130

  Even more significantly, the Board consistently blocked the far more overtly racist desires of the Citizens' Sanitary Commission, of many white businessmen, and of the traditional physicians in their own medical community, all of whom were calling for the widespread incineration of any areas around the city that appeared to them to be less orderly and, in their minds, potentially less healthy than prim white neighborhoods. Instead, and against heavy pressure, the Board stuck to its policy that bacteriologically confirmed plague sites would be the only ones destroyed, and it refused to authorize preemptive strikes. Under the chaotic and genuinely frightening circumstances that prevailed in the face of bubonic plague, that commitment to policies they regarded as scientifically defensible took genuine political and personal courage. In this regard, the physicians on the Board were forces of professional logic and restraint in the face of irrational fears and prejudices. The irony, of course, lay in the accident of the great fire, which summarily accomplished in one day exactly the kind of outcome those who were willing to act on overtly racist propensities had been seeking.

  Though difficult to judge, imperial pressures on the three physicians may have influenced their actions more strongly than racial pressures. All of the principals involved in determining and executing the Board's policies from the beginning of the antiplague campaign had strongly favored the annexation of Hawaii to the United States, and all fervently hoped for the consummation of full territorial status. Since that status was still in doubt when the world plague epidemic hit Honolulu, the three physicians urgently wanted to avoid the impression that Hawaii was too plague ridden to merit a traditional territorial government. Put differently, they might not have moved so aggressively toward the rapid deployment of their most destructive weapon if Hawaii had not been under intense scrutiny by Congress but had instead already achieved American territorial status.

  Adding to the imperial pressures was the fear of looking like a government incapable of maintaining its own public health. Recently installed imperial powers tend to move aggressively against threats to public health, as the United States was doing in the Philippines (against cholera) and in Panama (against yellow fever) at roughly this same time and as China did (against avian flu) as recently as 1997, when that nation had just repossessed Hong Kong. Indeed, China's vigorous and self-consciously visible response to avian flu in Hong Kong stood in sharp contrast to that same government's initially defensive and almost clandestine handling of the SARS epidemic in its own heartland five years later. Consciously or unconsciously, such shows of medical force in recently acquired areas demonstrate the power of the new authorities and stake a claim to the sanction of beneficent rule.31

  The United States had just annexed Hawaii when the plague struck, and the Dole administration was still a shaky regime in search of legitimacy. As a result, the Board of Health was under heavy psychological pressure to act dramatically. Local critics of the Dole administration intuitively recognized those pressures and sarcastically noted that medical and governmental "coincidences are strange bedfellows: Cholera and revolution in 1895, and plague and territorial government in 1899-1 goo." Moreover, members of the Honolulu Board of Health were well aware that publications such as the Boston Herald, a newspaper opposed to territorial status for Hawaii, were complaining that the United States would be forced to send "a medical despot" out to restore the archipelago's public health, an accusation the Board's physicians wanted-perhaps too fervently-to refute. Still, by themselves, the territorial aspirations and imperial visions of the Dole administration cannot fully account for the triumvirate's behavior."

  In the end, the policies implemented by Emerson, Day, and Wood are probably best understood as the logical consequence of their professional commitment to a bacteriological understanding of disease, combined with incomplete bacteriological knowledge and an absence of bacteriological weapons with which to fight that disease. Fortunately, both a better understanding of the disease and alternative weapons for fighting it would develop shortly. As a consequence, site burning died out quite quickly as a major tactic against plague epidemics. Its last systematic use in the United States appears to have taken place in Los Angeles in 1924. When plague broke out in a Mexican section of the city, local health officials employed quarantine and destruction methods similar to those used in Honolulu in Igoo. But when the U.S. Public Health Service stepped in and assumed control of the situation in Los Angeles, that federal agency suspended the policy, declaring that the fires per se would have little practical effect.33

  With a century's hindsight, Honolulu's battle against bubonic plague appears to have been among the most incandescent events in what might be characterized as a brief and rather ironic "heroic age" of bacteriologically based public health. Fire was strong medicine, but it was the only medicine then available that was known with absolute certainty to kill pestis and hence purge a given area of what was thought to be entrenched disease. As an endorser of the Board's fire policy acknowledged on the day after the city's first burning, "This is heroic treatment, but it is a policy which gives assurance of victory which no other does." Embedded in and influenced by a context of intense racial and imperial pressures-and completely unrestrained by ordinary c
ivilian procedures-Emerson, Day, and Wood decided to prescribe that medicine.34

  In the final analysis, such distinctions-though useful in considering the sobering lessons of the Chinatown fire in the history of public healthprobably mattered little to the residents of Chinatown at the time. Thousands of people had lived for months in fear of contracting bubonic plague, wondered for weeks whether they would lose all of the material gains they worked so hard under such difficult circumstances to accumulate, staggered through a terrifying day of trauma as their neighborhoods burned around them, put up with incarceration in temporary camps, and then had to start over with long-delayed and unfair compensation for the sacrifices imposed upon them for the common good by a government that excluded their participation. For them, the battle against bubonic plague and the burning of Chinatown were devastating episodes they would never forget.

  ABBREVIATIONS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  i. I have made many inquiries about that sign over several years. While people sometimes remember seeing it, I have been unable to find anyone who knew exactly why it disappeared. People I talked to at the Hawaiian Chinese History Society, the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, and the United Chinese Society were unable to discover who put the sign up or why it came down. I once discussed the sign with the daughter of the honorable Hiram Fong, who in turn raised the question with her father. But they were likewise unable to find out what happened. James Ho, Chinatown's leading local historian and curator of the district's historical museum, surmised that the sign almost certainly fell victim to one of the major building renewal projects of the 198os, but even he could not recall who had erected it or why it was never replaced.