Black Death at the Golden Gate
Page 17
CHAPTER 12
THE UNPLEASANT PAST
He was starting over yet again. As Blue packed up his home in Milwaukee, he intended to make a clean break this time. He cleared out every keepsake that reminded him of his life with Juliette, and sent boxes of books and clothing to his family in South Carolina with instructions to distribute them however they wished. Four months before his thirty-fifth birthday, an age by which most of his peers had families to support, Blue whittled his possessions down to what he could carry. After a year of wallowing in his pain, he was determined to leave it behind. Ahead of him was a new assignment, and with it the opportunity for redemption.
“I leave tomorrow for San Francisco,” he wrote in a short letter to his sister Kate on January 31, 1903.
He reached the city a week later and checked into a small room at the Occidental Hotel. In the fourteen months that he had been away, plague had claimed another forty-one victims that federal doctors knew about, and countless others had likely vanished. The presence of the disease was no longer a local matter but an international scandal. British Columbia and Ecuador were now refusing all vessels from the state of California, and Texas, Louisiana and Maryland threatened to enact their own quarantines in retaliation for the city’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge the crisis. Yet in the state itself, nothing seemed to have changed. Though he was a doctor by training, Governor Pardee rebuffed pressure from Wyman to issue a public statement admitting the existence of plague, a measure that would placate other states and give federal doctors more power. The newly sworn-in governor had narrowly defeated his opponent in the November election, and saw no reason to make enemies immediately in the state’s largest city. All he would offer was a statement that he wished to work in “complete harmony” with federal officials, a declaration that no one outside California took seriously.
But Blue saw reasons for hope. If federal doctors could eliminate the source of the infection, they still had a shot at saving lives. And, for the first time in more than a year, politicians were willing to fund them. With the threat of a national quarantine becoming more real by the day, the city and state agreed to split the cost of cleaning up Chinatown, aiming to finally clear the district of its contamination.
Blue moved back into his old office at the edge of Chinatown and took charge of the largest sanitation campaign in San Francisco’s history. Over the following weeks, he sent horse-drawn wagons carrying barrels of disinfectant up and down the district’s cobblestone streets, spreading more than twenty-six thousand pounds of white lime powder that when picked up by the wind blowing off the bay looked like falling snow. State health officials wearing black bowler hats soaked the cellar of every building in Chinatown with carbolic acid and washed down the walls and floors with a solution of mercury bichloride and lye, leaving the neighborhood smelling like rotten eggs. Workers laid asphalt along Dupont Street, Chinatown’s main thoroughfare, in order to allow the city’s first street sweepers to motor down it three times a week.
After three years of failure, Blue knew that he had to do more than stage a short-lived cleanup. He sent inspectors, accompanied by interpreters, into each building, to record the number of apartments it contained and the health status of their occupants, providing federal doctors with the first accurate census of Chinatown and a rudimentary way to keep track of potential cases of plague. Officials took special note of subterranean passageways between adjoining structures, leaving some residents to suspect that it was the prelude to another quarantine. Though few denied the federal officials entry to their homes, all refused to give information about their neighbors. After years of abuse and distrust, the “Chinese race with few exceptions remained secretive and superstitious,” Blue reported in a letter to Wyman.
Unlike Kinyoun, whose insistence upon total compliance from Chinatown’s residents led him to escalate into ever more draconian responses, Blue remained measured. He had worked in the district long enough to accept that some of the hostility toward health officials was valid and that provoking further confrontation would only come back to harm him. Instead, he drew on his past. As a student, he had never been one to solve problems through a rigid adherence to formula, instead relying on a trial-and-error process that forced him to look for approaches that he might have missed. He accepted that a new situation was at hand. For three long years, federal doctors had demanded sanitation measures that had thus far proved ineffective at eradicating the disease. Perhaps, Blue thought, the problem wasn’t the habits of the people in the district, as Kinyoun and Joseph White suspected. Perhaps it was something else.
Drawing on a suspicion he had first felt when confronted with the death of Marguerite Saggau in the Hotel Europa, Blue turned his attention to rodents, determined to discover whether the throngs of flea-infested rats that swarmed through the district—rather than simply filth or the foreign habits of the Chinese—were the true reason that the disease persisted. While Blue knew of Simond’s work in proving the part that rats and their fleas play in spreading plague, no city had yet tried to act on it. He ordered his men to install hundreds of traps in Chinatown’s sewers baited with arsenic-laden cheese. Autopsies were performed on the bodies of more than three hundred rats. None of the rats showed signs of plague in their lungs or buboes along their glands. Yet Blue was not deterred. His willingness to try new ideas—even when those notions clashed with the entrenched beliefs of his superiors in the Marine Hospital Service—had long been his greatest skill, and he leaned heavily on that openness at the time of his greatest need.
It was the first time in American history that a federal health officer had focused on killing rats as a way to combat a crisis. Cities across the country were becoming more sanitary, though rat eradication was often considered a side effect of those efforts rather than the intent. With telegraphs and automobiles heralding in a new, modern era, public health officers saw an opportunity to refashion the daily lives of Americans, a process that historians would later dub the Great Sanitary Awakening. Health officials pressed for legislation that ranged from mandating the truthful labeling of drugs to regulating the number of occupants allowed in urban apartments to requiring the pasteurization of milk and cheese in order to reduce the number of deaths from tainted food. The greatest energy was directed at urban tenement districts such as Manhattan’s Lower East Side and San Francisco’s Chinatown, with social reformers calling for measures such as adequate ventilation in buildings and regular trash pickup on the streets. Through a combination of small measures, public health officials cut down on the number of preventable deaths from germs and other agents of filth, allowing Americans to live and thrive on a scale that was unimaginable a generation before.
“Under more perfect sanitary environments we live longer, we live better; our energies, physical and mental, are stronger, and better fit us for entering upon a higher plane of living,” Wyman once said in a speech that laid out the philosophy of the Marine Hospital Service to create what he called “slum-less” cities. “There is better opportunity for greater culture and refinement, greater familiarity with the higher laws of life, greater ability to comprehend our spiritual being and wrest from the unknown those higher principles of existence towards which we are now groping with unexplained instinct.”
Blue directed the sanitation effort toward the specific goal of eliminating disease, largely by targeting the environments that allowed rats to multiply. He instituted new rules that focused more on the lives of rats than on the human residents of Chinatown. Dilapidated balconies, rotting planks of wood, and makeshift additions to buildings were torn down throughout the district in order to eliminate places for rodents to nest. Soon sunshine began filtering down into the district’s narrow alleyways, eliminating the persistent smell of musk. The additional natural light proved to have unexpected benefits. Not only was sunlight a deterrent to rats, which have an innate fear of bright light, but, as researchers were just then learning, the plague bacterium can be killed by ultraviolet light alone.
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br /> There were some complaints about the destruction of buildings that in some cases had stood for more than a decade, yet the anger never exploded into a riot. Aware of calls among business leaders in San Francisco to raze all of Chinatown and build a park in its place, many residents assisted in the process of tearing down ramshackle buildings, hoping that cooperation would allow the neighborhood to survive. “Unless we clean the streets of Chinatown and deny Caucasian men all their excuses, Chinatown’s relocation is inevitable,” the Chinese Western Daily warned.
Health officials discovered the first new plague victim six weeks after Blue arrived, underscoring the reality that a simple cleanup would not be enough to ensure the city’s survival. The body of A. I. Minegishi, a twenty-one-year-old Japanese woman, was found at 520 Dupont Street. An autopsy uncovered black splotches throughout her left groin, though no buboes. Tissue samples, however, revealed extensive plague bacilli, making her the first victim identified by federal health officials in three months. Blue grew convinced that more were surely to come. The dry summer months lay ahead, a time of year when rats were known to leave their nests in search of new sources of food and new mates. He redoubled his efforts, praying that he could eliminate as many rodents as possible before the breeding season.
He instituted a policy that he called “building out” plague, which for the first time required landlords to take responsibility for the ways in which their properties contributed to the spread of disease. Blue directed his attention first to rat-infested cellars along Fish Alley and the blocks surrounding the Jackson Street Theater. Landlords were ordered to pour a layer of concrete on their cellars or ground floors, which often sat on nothing but packed earth and offered a warm, dry place for rodents to build nests. Superstitious workmen burned the first foot of soil beneath each building, influenced by rumors prevalent since the medieval era that the plague infected the ground itself. Blue ordered broken drains fixed, cesspools filled in and any holes in a building’s walls patched. Property owners who did not immediately comply were warned that the city would happily demolish the structure instead.
Nearly two hundred wooden buildings in the district were destroyed, with modern brick and concrete structures rising in their place. Stacks of discarded wood lay on the streets, remnants of the razed buildings. Blue barely noticed as the lumber slowly disappeared, claimed by scavengers for firewood. After three years of defeat, he was finally seeing progress.
Pietro Spadafora, a thirty-five-year-old Italian man who worked at the Southern Pacific railyards, was among those who often returned home with bundles of wood he had lugged back from Chinatown. Each morning he crossed the district on the way from his building at 19 Jasper Place in the Latin Quarter—a neighborhood home to a mix of Italian, Portuguese, French and Mexican immigrants now known as North Beach—to his job south of Market Street. Each evening he made his way back along the same path, picking up inexpensive fruit and vegetables from Chinese merchants. Like countless other Italian immigrants in San Francisco, Spadafora made enough money to keep his family alive, though just barely. Items discarded in the street were often given a second life in the Spadafora household, freeing up money to be used for another necessity.
One night Spadafora opened the door with planks of wood he’d found in Chinatown tucked under his arm. He laid them in a corner and sat down to dinner with his wife, mother and two small children. A few days later he developed a high fever and collapsed. An ambulance carted him to the Southern Pacific Railroad Hospital on Mission Street, where doctors were shocked to discover a swollen dark bubo in his right groin. He was put in isolation and given an injection of the anti-plague serum, though doctors held little hope that it would save him. He died the following day and an autopsy confirmed the presence of plague, making him the ninety-seventh known victim of the outbreak. Alarmed at the discovery of a plague victim outside Chinatown, health authorities raced to the dead man’s home on Jasper Street, where they discovered his sixty-year-old mother, Pietra, near death. She died the following day, and an autopsy confirmed that she was the ninety-eighth victim of the disease.
Blue questioned how plague had made its way from Chinatown to the Spadafora household. He could only conclude that the discarded wood must have been swarming with plague-infested fleas, which bit both Pietro and his mother. Fearing that other scavengers would spread the disease, Blue ordered that all debris from demolished buildings in Chinatown be disinfected with a coating of powdered lime, rendering it useless as firewood. He then instituted daily health inspections of the Latin Quarter, determined to find any other victims before the disease claimed another neighborhood of the city.
It was through his continued focus on fleas that Blue left the racist philosophies of Kinyoun and other Marine Hospital Service officials fully behind. Kinyoun, for all of his laboratory brilliance, never let go of his racial bigotry and remained convinced until the end that the Chinese were an enemy that should be feared and distrusted. Blue, never the best student or a natural leader, proved more willing to trust what he saw before him and follow it wherever it led. The sudden deaths of an otherwise healthy Italian man and his mother proved that a conception of the plague as a racial disease was foolhardy and that skin color was no protection against a bacterium that seemed hungry to kill.
While careful to avoid the attention of newspapers and cause a citywide panic, Blue began concentrating more of his efforts on the Latin Quarter. He sent health inspectors into apartment buildings where no Asian resident had ever lived and demanded the same rat-proofing measures be put in place as in Chinatown. Concrete was poured along the floors of basements, while drains and debris were cleared and closed off, eliminating potential homes for rats. Blue hired additional men to serve as rat-trappers, laying poisoned traps throughout Chinatown and the Latin Quarter.
The Chinatown laboratory became a makeshift poison factory, where federal doctors brewed batch after batch of what was known as the Danysz virus. Named after its discover, a Polish researcher named Jean Danysz, the active ingredient was a strain of salmonella found to be lethal in mice and rats but harmless to humans and most other animals. Rats able to survive initial exposure to the virus soon develop immunity, however, making it a powerful but short-lived weapon. Blue’s assistants became ever more adept at killing rats, slowly discovering what foods the rodents would take and how to avoid scaring them off. They soon learned that the Danysz virus was a fast-acting poison, often killing rats within a few steps of the feeding site. Aiming to use rats’ scavenging methods against them, Blue’s men also laced meat and fish with slower poisons such as arsenic, hoping that an animal would bring the tainted food back to its nest and infect others as well.
In order to expand his reach, Blue began offering a bounty of ten cents for every rat, living or dead, that was brought to the Chinatown laboratory. Each one was nailed to a roof shingle and autopsied before being tossed into a metal garbage can and incinerated. Governor Pardee, encouraged by the response, announced that the state would match the bounty. In his weekly dispatches to Wyman, Blue now included the number of rats inspected in his laboratory and how many had tested positive for plague. As the number of dead rats grew higher, he felt the first hints of progress, knowing that every rodent he eliminated from the city’s streets was one less host for infected fleas.
No new human victims of plague were identified by federal doctors until August 10, when Charles Bock, a thirty-three-year-old blacksmith, died at the German Hospital on Noe and 14th Street. Bock had lived in the tiny village of Pacheco, located about thirty miles east of the city in the rolling hills of Contra Costa County. He had complained of a high fever that no medicine was able to dent, eventually prompting his brother to bring him to San Francisco to seek care. By the time he was admitted to the hospital, Bock had fallen into a semi-conscious state. He struggled to describe his pain to doctors, getting only so far as to report a feeling of dullness in his lungs. He died later that day, and an autopsy revealed a body consumed by the disease
. Plague bacteria were found in the muscles of both his arms, his chest, abdomen, lungs, liver and spleen. Further tests showed that at the time of his death he was suffering from bubonic plague that had morphed into the highly contagious pneumonic form, making him one of the greatest threats to the city that federal doctors had encountered since the outbreak began nearly four years earlier.
His brother told federal doctors that Bock had not set foot in San Francisco since the Fourth of July, which meant that he must have been infected elsewhere. Health officials fanned out from Bock’s farm in the village of Pacheco, searching for other victims. They found nothing, leaving Blue mystified. Then, on September 13, a thirty-one-year-old Canadian bridge builder named E. T. Slater died at the Southern Pacific Hospital on Mission Street. Slater, who had lived in the Contra Costa County hamlet of Danville, was admitted with a high fever and an examination revealed a dark bubo in his armpit. After his death, an autopsy confirmed that he too was a victim of plague, making him the 102nd death overall. Investigators learned Slater had last been in San Francisco in mid-August. He had only traveled as far as the plaza outside of the Ferry Building before returning to Oakland, leaving scant opportunity for him to have contracted the disease from a flea in the city.
Though the disease was still not contained in Chinatown, Blue turned his attention toward the rural expanse of the East Bay. Hearing rumors of a massive die-off of squirrels on several farms in Contra Costa County, he traveled out to the area intent on finding evidence for himself. Laboratory studies had demonstrated that, like rats, squirrels can become infected with the disease through the bites of contaminated fleas, though no scientist at the time had found a naturally occurring case of plague in North America. He made his way on horseback along dirt roads until he reached the small ranches where the two recent plague victims had lived. The terrain—rolling fields of green crops, where the only sounds came from farm animals—felt a world away from the claustrophobic squalor of Chinatown.