Black Death at the Golden Gate
Page 22
Whatever hesitancy remained in San Francisco to acknowledge the disease evaporated in the face of the national embarrassment of quarantine and the loss of the Great White Fleet. A lineup of the city’s most prominent businesses, including Wells Fargo, the Southern Pacific Railroad, and Levi Strauss & Co., joined together in the following weeks to raise half a million dollars to privately finance a sanitation campaign to complement Blue’s efforts. Soon an additional four hundred paid sanitary inspectors were roaming the streets, trapping and poisoning rats according to Blue’s directives. The newly christened Citizen’s Health Committee purchased more than $15,000 worth of rat traps and poison, in quantities so large that it bought cheese for use as bait in lots of three thousand pounds at a time. To further spur ordinary citizens to kill rats, it began offering bounties of twenty-five cents for every male and fifty cents for every female that was brought to one of its field offices, a ploy that turned gangs of boys across the city into amateur killing squads.
After years of battling the city’s apathy, Blue finally had its trust. “I started an agitation on plague to arouse the citizens to a sense of their danger,” he wrote in a letter to his mother in February, unable to conceal his pride at discovering that he had within him the qualities of a leader. “This agitation has grown out of my control. The people are aroused. I am making six speeches a day. My staff is doing the same. I have received calls for addresses all over the state. I am about worn out but must keep the iron hot and the people demand that I must lead them.”
Blue appeared in every meeting hall, business or pulpit that would have him, spreading the gospel of rat eradication. There must be a sudden famine of food available for rats, he told his audiences, which could largely be accomplished by simple actions such as keeping garbage cans covered. Only then would the animals, who were naturally clever enough to realize that they were unwanted, be desperate enough to take poison or venture out into the open. If you happened to come across a rat running in the street or near your office, it was your duty as a citizen to kill it, just as cowboys on the frontier considered it automatic to kill any coyote they encountered to protect their herds. The crowds grew larger, and Blue, tapping into a previously unknown eloquence, grew more passionate in his attempts to stir his listeners to action. In front of a crowd of more than a thousand freight handlers for the Southern Pacific, he thundered, “I intend to kill a rat or two myself tonight, and I want all of you to do the same. It is the noblest work you can do.”
Aiming to cover more ground, Blue told his deputy, Colby Rucker, to speak to as many groups as he could. Rucker revealed a hidden gift as an animated public speaker, happily barnstorming through dozens of speeches a day. Blessed with a performer’s gift for sizing up his audience, he tailored his speeches to focus on themes of humor or fear as the occasion warranted. In front of women’s clubs, he relied on his innate charm, telling crowds with a broad grin, “When you look in your garbage pails, ladies, think of me!” At other times, he attempted to scare his audience into compliance, telling one gathering of businessmen that “This city is in danger of a quarantine and I want you to understand that if a quarantine is placed on San Francisco, you people will imagine yourself in the worst corner of hell. The days following the disaster of April 1906 will seem like a holiday picture compared to the days to be spent in a city quarantined for bubonic plague.”
By March, Rucker’s voice gave out, and he spent a week whispering from the stage. “Dr. Rucker has been simply invaluable,” Blue wrote to his sister Kate. “I address audiences because I am compelled to; Rucker does it for the love of the thing. We call him ‘garbage can Rucker’ because that is his hobby.”
Newspapers began running articles describing the best ways to keep a home rat-free, finally breaking through the wall of misinformation that Blue had been previously unable to scale. Within weeks, Blue noticed signs of progress. The streets were cleaner; the herds of rats that had until recently swarmed over the city’s ruins had thinned. No new plague victims had been discovered, helping Blue keep the pressure from other states to institute a quarantine of San Francisco or all of California at bay.
Yet he knew that he must do more. Each day, he checked the infection rate among the hundreds of rats examined at the Rattery. Though it was not increasing, neither was it falling at the rate that he’d expected, making it impossible for him to silence the fear that all of his work would turn out to be nothing but show. He had already left San Francisco twice without fully eradicating the disease, and he could not face the idea of doing so again. Weekly newspaper reports on the progress of the Great White Fleet around the tip of South America and up the Pacific coast chased his thoughts, reminding him of a deadline that he could not miss.
He drew on what resources he had, including some that were newly acquired. The hours he spent talking with audiences and answering their questions about plague made San Francisco residents and officials more confident of his sincerity and more willing to help, elevating his social currency. Those bonds allowed him to do things that had remained out of reach for Kinyoun, who had rarely ventured beyond the confines of his Angel Island laboratory. Slowly, Blue shook San Francisco out of its habits, leaving a newer, more sanitary version in its place.
Change came in ways large and small. In the spring, Blue prodded the city health department to improve conditions at Butchertown, the name given to a den of slaughterhouses nestled next to the bay by Islais Creek, along the southeastern edge of the city. Hundreds of cattle each day were processed in low wooden buildings set on piers jutting over marshland, with the blood and remains of butchered animals falling between gaps in the floorboards to countless waiting rats below. Butchers considered the rodents a free scavenger service. Fat rats, some the size of small dogs, scurried beneath and through the slaughterhouses, in groups so large that they moved as if one squirming shadow. After inspectors flagged the problem, business owners invited reporters to watch as teams of men poured boiling water on dense herds of rats living under the slaughterhouses. The demonstration did nothing to convince the health board, and six slaughterhouses and several stables were condemned.
Soon, the rhythms of San Francisco subtly changed, as if it had fallen under the spell of a new conductor. Owners of backyard chicken coops were told to pour layers of concrete on their floors to keep out nesting rodents; fruit peddlers began receiving citations for tossing rotten wares into the street that had long been free meals for rats; yellow placards appeared on stores that failed sanitary inspections, warning customers to go elsewhere. In the Lobos Square refugee camp, hundreds of wooden shacks were rebuilt eighteen inches off the ground, allowing dogs and cats headroom beneath the floorboards to chase rats into their nests. The camp’s rat problem soon ended, and no cases of plague were identified among its residents. In order to prevent the possibility that infected dead rats would cross the bay, the city temporarily banned all manure shipments out of San Francisco until every stable installed metal rat-proof bins.
Houses that stood over ground-floor stables were condemned and razed throughout the city, removing one of the few remaining architectural relics of San Francisco’s earliest days. Garbage collectors who were found to deposit loads anywhere other than the crematory were punished by heavy fines, eliminating a persistent source of chaos and filth. Women’s clubs, meanwhile, prodded the school board to set rat traps in the city’s schools and disinfect every building over the Easter break, and paid for inspectors to canvass San Francisco’s candy stores and penny arcades and warn children then of the dangers of playing with rats. “It is the opinion of the sanitary officials that no such undertaking could ever be as successful again without the help this community received from its women,” noted Blue’s later report on the cleanup effort.
By the middle of the spring, San Francisco seemed more vibrant, as if the accumulated grime built up over its first half century had been wiped away to reveal color for the first time. The mayor hosted a feast for five hundred guests at tables set up in
the middle of Front Street between Washington and Jackson to celebrate the city’s progress. Heaping bowls of gleaming tropical fruit adorned long tables topped with white linens, their color chosen to underscore how little dirt remained on the streets. “There was a time when we were not awake to the need of vigilance in our civic life, but that has passed, in its wake has come a mighty awakening that bids fair to make the name of San Francisco renowned the world over,” Mayor Taylor told the gathering. Blue then gave a short address congratulating the merchants in the district for their part in the sanitation campaign before turning the crowd’s attention to Rucker. The women of the neighborhood “deserve all the credit, because they have made the men work,” he began, to a mixture of laughter and applause.
There had not been a human victim of plague discovered in months, yet Blue could not let himself relax even as he walked through a city that was the cleanest it had ever been. Scores of infected rats passed through his headquarters each day, meaning that whatever progress he had made could turn out to be nothing but a temporary lull. “I fear an outbreak by the advent of dry weather,” he wrote in a letter to his sister Kate that March. He knew that the city’s support could be fickle and if he did not eliminate the disease soon he might not have another chance. Failure, he wrote, would doom San Francisco to “have a plague scare every summer for the next twenty years.”
He was willing to try anything. Intent on proving his suspicions that rodents were migrating from one neighborhood to another, Blue gathered dozens of plague-free rats and dyed their fur. Crimson rats were released into one half of the city, while green rats were let go in another. His men then posted flyers around the city, urging citizens to report any sightings of brightly colored rodents. Blue knew that there was a warren of sewer lines and unused water pipes running under the city; perhaps, this ploy might enable him to gather enough information to sketch out their shape and pinpoint where to lay more traps.
In his desperation to track rats, Blue gave no thought to the press reaction. He was blindsided when the Chronicle gleefully mocked the program, eroding some of the goodwill he had built up over the last few weeks of success. “If you should see a tiny mouse, whose hide was salmon pink, would you not join the temperance band, and blame it on the drink? Fear not these harmless little things that scurry round and squeal; they’re all in Dr. Blue’s employ, and all of them are real,” the paper wrote in a front-page verse. Thanks to Blue’s efforts, “the rainbow rat will probably be the rat of the future, or some weird progeny will result from the union of rats of different colors,” it added.
Blue quietly shut down the experiment before gleaning anything of value from it. Yet his problems with the press were only beginning. In late April, Dr. Halstead Stansfield, who had until recently been Blue’s chief bacteriologist, walked into the fog-shrouded forest of eucalyptus trees on Mount Sutro, a nine-hundred-foot hill in the heart of the city, with a revolver in his pocket. Stansfield had resigned his post after the death of his wife and young son sent him into a deep depression, and in his months off of the force had sought comfort in alcohol, which only sent him spiraling further into despair. In a small clearing off of the main path, Stansfield shot himself in the head. His body was discovered two days later by two men out for an afternoon walk.
Those who had been frustrated in their efforts to undermine Blue and the changes he was implementing pounced upon Stansfield’s death, seeking to cast his suicide as evidence that federal health officers were not to be trusted. “The evidence was indisputable that Dr. Stansfield had been erratic for a long time and his melancholia was intensified by intemperance. Yet it is upon the scientific findings of this mentally unhinged specialist that Dr. Blue and his associate plague experts pronounced San Francisco as suffering from an epidemic,” wrote the Wasp, a weekly political magazine known for its hatred of the Chinese. The Chronicle, meanwhile, argued in the week following Stansfield’s death that the rat eradication campaign was meaningless. In an editorial likely demanded by de Young, it asserted that “There is no reason to believe that the health of this city will be materially affected one way or another by the slaughter of rats, for which the money is being extorted from us by the threat of quarantining the city . . . The doctors accuse the rats because they cannot find any other means of dissemination.”
In response, Blue issued a report showing that not only had there not been a case of bubonic plague discovered in the last ninety days, but that overall death rates in the city were declining. The paper then changed its approach, insisting instead that the city was too clean, and ran a series of articles mocking what it called “the sanitarians.”
Blue ignored the provocation, focusing instead on the imminent arrival of the Great White Fleet. Over the previous three weeks, the infection rate among rats examined at the Rattery had fallen to 1.2 percent. Although encouraging, that number proved that the danger had not yet passed. There were still thousands of infected rats running beneath the city’s streets, and all it would take was for one flea to jump onto a human’s skin for the panic to begin anew.
Everything in his training told Blue to keep the port closed rather than risk the infection spreading aboard a contingent of battleships that had become a symbol of the nation’s power. Yet as he looked across the city, he saw in its rebirth hope for his own life. San Francisco had buoyed him when his marriage to Juliette crumbled and given him a new sense of purpose. Though he would not admit it to others in the Service, he had begun to consider the possibility of living in the city permanently after the plague campaign was over.
Without consulting Wyman, Blue issued a clean bill of health for the port that allowed the festivities to go on as planned, and prayed that he would not regret it.
CHAPTER 16
ONE OF CALIFORNIA’S ADOPTED SONS
The wave of visitors streaming toward San Francisco was so great that railroads had to add special trains from Oregon, Utah, Nevada and Washington to meet the demand, each one packed with passengers intent on seeing with their own eyes what was being called the most powerful naval force ever assembled in the Pacific. In the week before its arrival, the number of daily riders on ferries crossing San Francisco Bay jumped by nearly half a million, assembling the raw material for what would later be called the largest gathering in the city’s history. On May 6, 1908, an estimated crowd of one million people crammed onto the hills of San Francisco, jostling and jumbling like ants as they tried to secure a view of the bay. As if answering a thousand unspoken prayers, the morning fog relented and burned away, leaving nothing but the shimmering dark water and the wide blue sky.
The first ships came into view through the Golden Gate shortly before noon. From a distance, they looked like moving firestacks shooting dark plumes of smoke into the sky. As the boats came closer, the massive guns of the city’s seaside forts roared in salute. Soon, a six-mile-long parade of blinding white warships stretched from the Golden Gate past the island of Alcatraz and looped back away from the city’s waterfront toward the open Pacific. Vessels from the Pacific Fleet joined in the procession, increasing the size of the armada to forty-six vessels. Spectators gave up trying to take them all in, overwhelmed by a collection that included more than a dozen battleships, several armored cruisers, three torpedo boats and a single hospital ship.
Before the fleet had left Virginia at the start of its round-the-world voyage, its commander, Rear Admiral Robley D. Evans, had told reporters, “We are ready at the drop of a hat for a feast, a frolic or a fight.” San Francisco, of all places, knew how to provide all three. A miles-long parade ran down Mission Street to mark the occasion, followed by a ball at the Fairmont Hotel that went on for two days. Each of the fifteen thousand sailors who disembarked were handed a cigar as soon as he stepped on shore, along with a pamphlet listing all of the city’s attractions. Not included among them were the bars and brothels of the former Barbary Coast, though most sailors needed no instructions on how to get there.
Those who sought tamer escapes he
aded toward the three-story Naval Club House, built by volunteers in the weeks ahead of the fleet’s arrival on an open lot two blocks from the waterfront. Rooms on the first two floors were stuffed with entertainments ranging from pool tables to free writing paper, yet its third floor was the main draw: 250 clean cots, with fresh pillows and sheets, where a sailor could stay the night for the price of twenty-five cents. Volunteers organized free tours of the city and Golden Gate Park in open-top convertibles, giving some sailors their first experience of riding in the still-novel invention of an automobile. Trains decorated with flowers from end to end ferried others on day trips to Stanford University, San Jose and Vallejo, where booming brass bands greeted them at every stop.
Never one for military pageantry, Blue kept a low profile during the fleet’s three-week-long stay in San Francisco. He remained huddled in the Fillmore Street laboratory, where he kept watch on the daily tallies of infected rats collected by his staff. Every night he went to sleep fearing a call that a sailor from the fleet had become infected with plague; every morning he told himself that he had only received an additional day’s reprieve and nothing more, starting the cycle of worry over anew. His fortieth birthday came and went without notice. He extracted himself from his lab rotation only to serve as best man at the wedding of his friend Captain Edmund Shortlidge, an assistant surgeon at an Army base in the city. Once the ceremony was over, he returned in his full dress uniform to his lab, not wanting to waste any more time.
It wasn’t until the Great White Fleet set sail for Seattle that Blue allowed himself to relax. No plague victims were discovered during the fleet’s stay or on any of its ships in the weeks following departure, leaving San Francisco’s celebration of its revival unblemished. He was once again free to concentrate on eradicating the disease without the fear that he had been complicit in spreading it to sailors who were bound for other ports around the world, accelerating the epidemic. His mind clear, he turned his focus from rats to their fleas, searching for a clue that would help him understand more about how the plague bacilli spread. He ordered his ratcatchers to bring back as many living rodents as they could. In the laboratory the writhing animals were doused in chloroform, killing them and any parasites still clinging to their bodies. Doctors then combed through their fur, extracting fleas. The insects were placed in glass jars and labeled with the date and district where they were captured.