Black Death at the Golden Gate
Page 21
He had little time to think. In the Mission District, two young boys playing in an unused cellar discovered the corpse of a rat. Emulating their father, who was an undertaker, they performed a mock funeral service before picking up the animal and putting it into a shoebox as a casket. They dug a hole with their hands and buried the rat, completing the ritual. They then ran back to their home at 2888 Mission Street, unaware that their clothes were crawling with infected fleas.
A few days later, their thirty-seven-year-old father, Otis Bowers, fell ill with a high fever and debilitating fatigue. When he discovered a swollen lump on his right thigh his wife, Margaret, called a doctor, but it was too late. Otis lay dead within the hour. Two days later, doctors were again summoned to the house, where they found Margaret near death. They rushed her to the nearest hospital, where she was administered immense doses of the anti-plague serum. The medicine did not stop the disease, and she succumbed to what was later identified as pneumonic plague. Only then did the young Bowers boys think to tell federal doctors of their discovery in the cellar. Health inspectors dug up the rat they had buried and brought it to the Rattery at 401 Fillmore Street. An autopsy revealed internal organs bursting with plague.
The second-wave death toll reached sixty-five by December. Blue’s men were catching and killing more than thirteen thousand rats a week, yet that seemed to barely dull the ferocity of the disease. Though few national newspapers had yet to report on the outbreak, Blue sensed that the window of time in which he could operate without bringing in unwanted attention was closing. Norway had declared a quarantine on goods or visitors arriving via San Francisco, and Blue feared that other states and countries would soon follow. His only hope was to double down on his campaign against the city’s rodents, elevating rat-killing from an urban chore into something approaching a science. “Rats are extremely wary animals and enough cannot be caught by inexperienced men to greatly reduce their numbers,” he later wrote. “It therefore becomes necessary to place intelligent men at this task and train them carefully in their duties. A man can no more be made into a rat-catcher by giving him a rat trap than he can become a soldier by being provided with a rifle.”
Blue knew that even with dozens more paid ratcatchers San Francisco would not stand a chance against the disease. To eradicate plague, he would need the help of the city’s residents. He directed his second in command, Colby Rucker, to write a primer called “How to Catch Rats” which drew from what Blue and his team had learned. The essay was circulated throughout the city, effectively deputizing each resident of San Francisco into Blue’s corps.
“It is first to be remembered that the rat is a very wise animal and that the whole operation of trapping him is a test of wits between man and the rat,” it began. Catching a rat required playing to the animal’s natural curiosity and need for variety. Rodents living in slaughterhouses were easily enticed into traps by vegetables, while those which had made their nests near produce stands seemed to crave meat. Regardless of their immediate preferences, all rats appeared to be drawn to traps that included some mixture of fish heads, raw meat, cheese, fresh liver, fried bacon, pine nuts or carrots, Rucker wrote. The job was not finished once a rodent entered the trap, he added. When caught, a female rat should be left where it lay, as its cries would often attract nearby males and any of its offspring into the same lure. Finally, he wrote, do not kill rats where they were caught, as their squealing and the smell of their blood was known to frighten other rats away.
Writing circulars would only go so far, of course. The ethos of doing as one pleased in one’s private life was as much a part of San Francisco as the fog and the hills, and the city had never before come together in a collective effort that required its residents to change their behavior. Even in the aftermath of the earthquake and fire, it was an accepted fact among its citizens that the city’s resurrection was achieved mainly through individuals looking after their own interests, with the Army and government assistance programs only making it possible for the private market to operate. Not only that, but Blue knew that even with the rising death toll from the disease he faced a problem of scale. Coming on the heels of the near destruction of the city, an urgent call to clean up trash and trap rats in order to stop illness from spreading seemed pitifully small by comparison.
To fully get the public’s help in killing rats, Blue would need the press. All of the city’s newspapers had responded favorably to the ratcatching campaign, with the exception of its largest and most powerful publication, the Chronicle. Intent on getting the paper on his side, he requested a meeting with the paper’s publisher and co-founder, Michael Henry de Young, a man who personified the city’s freewheeling boomtown era that Blue’s methodical approach to sanitation sought to end.
At the age of fifty-eight, de Young was a year older than the state of California itself. He had started what became the Chronicle with his older brother Charles at the age of sixteen after taking out a twenty-dollar loan from their landlord. As it grew, the paper helped shape the city as it transformed from frontier to metropolis, though the de Youngs could never quite leave the lawless past behind. In 1879, Charles shot and injured a mayoral candidate by the name of Issac Smith Kalloch because he suspected that the man was spreading rumors that de Young had grown up in a brothel. Kalloch recovered and went on to win the race. The following year, his son, seeking revenge, snuck into the Chronicle building and fired five shots at Charles from close range, killing him instantly. His one errant shot smashed through the window of Michael’s office and cut a hole in the wall above his head. Five years later, Adolph Spreckels, one of the four sons of rival newspaper publisher Claus Spreckels, followed Michael de Young into the Chronicle building seeking revenge after de Young had accused his father of manipulating stock prices. Spreckels called out de Young’s name and then fired at him with a pistol, hitting him in the left shoulder. He fired two more shots, one of which hit de Young in the arm and the other which lodged in a package of books that he had held up as a shield. Spreckels later pleaded not guilty to the crime by reason of temporary insanity and was acquitted after a six-week trial, with de Young’s unpopularity widely suspected to be the chief reason for the court’s leniency.
The experience only hardened Michael, who went by the professional name M. H. By the turn of the twentieth century, the power he had accumulated as the owner of the largest paper in the largest city on the Pacific made him one of the state’s most important power brokers, and he was unafraid of using his resources to further his aims. The year before the plague reemerged, the Chronicle had put its weight behind a local measure that forced Japanese students to attend segregated public schools, with its editorial page calling all Japanese immigrants who reached California “human waste material.” The policy turned San Francisco into a national embarrassment, with a writer from Harper’s calling it “probably the worst city for a boy to grow up in that there was in the United States,” though the city did find support from Southern Democrats who feared federal intervention into their own segregated schools. Japan, which was emerging as a powerful force in the Pacific, lodged an official complaint with the U.S. State Department over the school ban. Threats of war receded only after President Roosevelt stood before Congress and called the attempt at segregation a “wicked absurdity” and San Francisco’s leaders “infernal fools.” When San Francisco still refused to allow Japanese students to attend schools with white classmates, Roosevelt brokered what was known as The Gentlemen’s Agreement, under which Japan would issue passports only to those going to Hawaii, and the San Francisco school board rescinded its policy.
With the humiliation of federal intervention in city matters still burning, de Young was outwardly dismissive of anything connected to Washington, much less a thin federal health officer who was once again raising the issue of plague. When Blue arrived, de Young coldly motioned for him to enter and sat facing him in a stiff-backed chair at the foot of an enormous fireplace, its redwood mantel decorated with carved vine
s.
Blue, by then adept at massaging the egos of powerful men, began the conversation by asking for de Young’s help in preventing a tragedy. By printing the truth of the reemergence of plague in the city and the role of rats in spreading it, the paper could save the lives of its readers and make de Young a hero, he said, hoping to appeal to the man’s vanity. While Blue talked, de Young remained impassive, finally saying that he would not commit to anything. The conversation clearly over, Blue thanked him for his time and left the building, gripped in the hot panic of failure, not knowing whether his overture had worsened the situation. De Young was “a strange, stubborn man and may turn his guns on us with greater effect than ever,” he warned in a letter to Wyman.
He had no way of knowing whether he was making progress and yearned for some tangible evidence of victory. As the final days of 1907 ticked away, Blue could see only failure. Federal doctors had confirmed the deaths of seventy-three plague victims since August, and there was no sign that the disease was abating. Blue worked punishing hours in the laboratory at 401 Fillmore Street, often emerging not knowing whether it was morning or evening, a confusion only worsened as he stumbled through chilly clouds of fog that seemed to leach even the memory of warmth from his body. He drove his corps of ratcatchers to work longer and faster, and prayed that by the conclusion of each week he would have something to show for all of his work. With the push to trap and dissect as many rats as possible overwhelming his small staff, he had all but given up searching for the root cause of the epidemic and focused only on its effects. He continued to harbor a suspicion that squirrels in the East Bay had become a reservoir for infected fleas, but he had neither the time nor the men to act upon it.
All his attention was directed toward one number: 2 percent. Doctors treating an outbreak of plague in Manila had discovered that a roughly one-percent infection rate among the rat population resulted in approximately sixty human cases per month, a sizable but not overwhelming number. If the infection rate among rats rose above 2 percent, the disease exploded into the human population, leaving a trail of dead behind. Already, Blue had noted that 1.5 percent of the thousands of rats that passed through the Rattery each day were infected by plague, a rate that had tripled since his men had begun their collections three months earlier. As the infection rate edged closer and closer to its tipping point, Blue knew that he must start preparing to place the city under quarantine or risk watching plague consume the nation.
It was the last thing he wanted to do. Sealing off the city from the outside world so quickly after its tragedy would likely mean its death. When asked by one of his men whether quarantining the city would spur additional public support for the rat-killing program, Blue cut him off. “My friend, have you ever been in a quarantined city?” he asked. When the man replied that he had not, Blue responded, “Then you cannot realize what you are asking me to do. To place such a curse upon San Francisco would be worse than a hundred fires and earthquakes and I love this city too well to do her such a frightful hurt.”
Time was working against him. The weather would grow warmer in just a few months, prompting rats to become bolder in their search for food and increase the likelihood of human contact. “Conditions are not improving as rapidly as I would like them to,” Blue confessed in a telegram to Wyman. “There can be no doubt that the city is infected from one end to the other.” If his men did not significantly reduce the numbers of rats before the spring, he warned, the city would be left staring at “an outbreak of unprecedented proportions.”
CHAPTER 15
THE WORST CORNER OF HELL
Spring was four months away. As the weather grew warmer, fleas would start their breeding season and lay up to fifty eggs per day, creating millions more potential carriers of plague swarming through the city in search of a host. The thought kept Blue up at night. Every rat that survived past winter could not only undo all the work that his men had accomplished thus far, but end the lives of thousands more victims. “The work and the campaign have become so exacting that I scarcely have time to eat and sleep properly,” Blue wrote to a colleague in Washington.
With his window of opportunity closing, Blue grasped for other ways to break the city out of its complacency. He asked Dr. George Evans, the president of the California State Medical Society, to organize a summit of the most prominent citizens in San Francisco, hoping that by speaking directly to those with power he could bypass the influence of the Chronicle. Evans sent out six hundred invitations; sixty people showed up. Blue, by now inured to the city’s apathy in the face of danger, spoke in a dispassionate tone as he relayed how death was likely to spread in the coming months on a scale the city had never before seen. The rat remained the city’s greatest threat and it would soon start multiplying, leaving no home, business or park safe when all it took was a bite from a nearly invisible flea to send a person to their grave, he said. He then presented a map showing the locations of victims of plague since the outbreak began in August, alongside the places where infected rats had been captured. The map was speckled from end to end, as if hit by a paintbrush dripping in red ink. Markers signifying a victim were found in every neighborhood, proving that skin color or social class offered no immunity.
The only sanitary part of the city was Chinatown, he told the men before him, and nothing would stop the disease unless the public changed its behavior to make the city less hospitable to rats and their fleas. The attendees, many of them physicians, passed a resolution calling on Mayor Taylor to appoint a committee that would galvanize public support for the rat eradication campaign. A second meeting, open to the general public, was planned for January 28, just ten days away. Blue held on to a faint hope that the common men and women of San Francisco would prove more willing to confront the disease when presented directly with the truth of the danger they were in, though he steeled himself for one more disappointment in a city that only seemed to offer them.
More than three hundred people squeezed into a ballroom in the Merchant Exchange Building, a fifteen-story granite Beaux-Arts skyscraper that had been completed two years before the earthquake and now, with its minimal damage and quick repairs, was widely considered a symbol of the city’s rebirth. Spurred by the mayor’s call for cooperation, nearly every commercial association in town had asked its members to attend, packing the room until it was close to overflowing. Blue, clad in his khaki dress uniform with a ceremonial gold sword hanging from his hip, watched from the side of the stage as the audience, already the largest he had ever addressed in his life, continued to grow. Reserved and amiable by default, his natural inclination was to blend in with a crowd, not to rustle it into action. Yet as he took the stage, he knew that this was his best and last chance to get the people of the city on his side.
He spoke in a soft monotone as he relayed the facts of the epidemic to the men and women sitting before him, many of whom had never seen a truthful word of it mentioned in one of the city’s newspapers. More than seventy-five people, nearly all of them white, had died from plague in a span of four months, proving that the disease knew no racial lines, he said. If the city did not kill enough rats, there would be no telling how many more deaths were to come. As it stood, 1.5 percent of all rats that his corps of men caught each week were infected with plague. There was a strong chance that the number would increase during the warmer months, edging the city ever closer to the 2 percent tipping point, where there would be no choice but to implement a citywide quarantine to protect the rest of the country. The Health Department was already overwhelmed by the demands of rebuilding the city; combatting the plague would prove impossible if the residents of San Francisco did not play their part. “Unless we obtain the support of the people, the task is hopeless,” Blue told his audience.
The room was silent. Not knowing whether he had made any allies, Blue soldiered on, his voice, with its melodic Southern drawl, never revealing the full extent of his desperation. He turned his attention to the scheduled arrival in four months of the Great
White Fleet, an armada of sixteen steel steam-powered U.S. Navy battleships—all painted white—that was then in the middle of a circumnavigation of the globe with fourteen thousand sailors aboard. The fleet, intended by President Theodore Roosevelt to peaceably demonstrate America’s growing military and economic power to the rest of the world, had departed Virginia in December and was scheduled to arrive in San Francisco in May. The city expected that the fleet’s arrival through the Golden Gate would lead to newspaper articles from one coast to the other spotlighting San Francisco’s resurrection after the earthquake and fire, finally allowing it to put the disaster behind it. The longest parade in the city’s history was being planned by former mayor James Phelan to mark the occasion, with over three thousand soldiers and dozens of floats honoring pioneers from the Gold Rush, while railroads and hotels announced that they expected record crowds.
“The first thing the admiral of the fleet will ask when he reaches this port will be ‘What are the health conditions?’ If it is not safe for the fleet to come into this port it may create trouble for us,” Blue warned the men and women before him, carefully positioning himself on the city’s side. Left unsaid was that if it was not safe for the fleet to land in San Francisco, it would continue up the coast for an extended stay in Seattle, raising the chances that the Navy would transfer its Pacific operations to that port. The threat sent a ripple through the audience. Governor James Gillett, whose election the year before with the help of the Southern Pacific led to rumors that he remained in the railroad’s pockets, rose to address the crowd. “Now is the time for the people of this city to do what they can to avert the danger of a quarantine,” he said. “The plague exists . . . we now have the plague at a point where we can control it. We must not wait until it controls us.”