by Black Death at the Golden Gate- The Race to Save America from the Bubonic Plague (retail) (epub)
In interviews with surviving residents of Clara Street, investigators learned that in the week before his death Jesús Lajun had laughed when describing the difficulty he had in removing the putrid body of a dead rat he had discovered underneath his house. The animal had long since been disposed of, but it gave health officials their first clue. It appeared that the strain of plague that by now was endemic among squirrels in Northern California had finally arrived in Los Angeles. City officials announced an eradication program targeting rats and squirrels, following the methods set down by Rupert Blue in San Francisco some twenty years before.
The only question was who would lead the cleanup. Just as in San Francisco nearly twenty-five years earlier, the city, state and Public Health Service had competing claims of jurisdiction, and each sought the glory—and funding—that would come with taking responsibility for eliminating the outbreak. After the state Board of Health refused to allow Public Health Service members to take part in the eradication effort, Surgeon General Cummings declared the port of Los Angeles plague-infected, forcing all departing vessels to fly a quarantine flag and await inspection at subsequent harbors. The head of the city’s Chamber of Commerce sent a letter to Washington calling the move “ridiculous” and an unnecessary threat to the state’s economy given that the outbreak of the disease occurred some twenty-two miles from the port.
In hopes of defusing the standoff, the director of the state Board of Health invited Cummings to travel to Los Angeles to see the conditions for himself. He quickly agreed. “I have always felt that if we could get together we could straighten out what appeared to be a rather awkward situation,” Cummings wrote. “My only purpose has been to assist the state in getting rid of this condition quickly.”
The tour accomplished little. Cummings returned to Washington still livid that the Service had not been formally asked to take over the rat eradication program, which, if done, would have prompted Congress to increase its annual appropriation. City and state legislators, meanwhile, tried to pass the responsibility of paying for the cleanup efforts to each other. After the City Council slashed sanitation funding in an attempt to force the state’s hand, Mayor George Cryer sent a formal letter to President Calvin Coolidge requesting that the Public Health Service take over. Though he was now finally in control over the cleanup campaign, Cummings felt pressure from the White House to quickly remedy the situation. Any misstep could escalate into a national embarrassment, undermining his tenure in office. Boxed in by politics, he was forced to turn to the one man he knew could accomplish the job.
For the last decade, Cummings had kept Rupert Blue far away from Washington and any high-profile roles in the Service so as not to feel threatened by the man he had displaced. At the time of the plague outbreak in Los Angeles, Blue had just returned from an international conference in Switzerland devoted to the growing narcotics trade and was preparing for a routine tour of medical facilities in the Midwest. Instead, his new orders in hand, he once again boarded a train for California, intent on completing the mission he had started as a young man.
He arrived in a place he barely recognized. Los Angeles was now the largest city in the state and growing larger, replacing San Francisco as the primary destination for newcomers. The greatest concentration of automobiles in the country glided along its maze of streets, across a geography that stretched from the ocean to mountains to the edge of the desert. The year before Blue arrived, Harry Chandler, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, erected thirteen letters, each thirty feet wide and forty-three feet tall, atop Mount Lee as a way to publicize his upscale real estate development high in the hills. When illuminated by light boxes situated below each letter, the Hollywoodland sign glowed across the Los Angeles basin each night, a beacon for hundreds who arrived by bus and train each day intent on becoming a star. Among them was a young cartoonist from Kansas City named Walt Disney, who had stepped off a train the summer before with forty dollars and a one-reel cartoon from his bankrupt company in a cardboard suitcase.
The city’s expanding industry of glamour was foreign to a man who had grown to fear the spotlight. Blue, now fifty-six and his muscular frame but a memory, still felt the scars of failure from the Spanish flu outbreak six years earlier. Though he had traveled around the globe and won accolades in the succeeding years, he could not shake the pain of doubt, regretting that he had not done more when he had the chance. The reemergence of plague gave him an opportunity to feel useful one more time, if only to remind himself of the good that he had been able to accomplish in the past.
Blue began implementing the same rodent control measures he had developed in San Francisco and New Orleans. Houses in the Clara Street neighborhood were stripped of their siding to prevent rats from building nests; garbage collection was increased, starving the animals of food; poison was applied liberally throughout the city and along the wharves. Blue sent teams of men into the rural expanses of Los Angeles County searching for squirrel holes, which they dynamited and poisoned. Property owners were ordered to spend what soon amounted to more than $2 million on retrofitting their buildings with concrete, razing the few remaining wooden structures which survived as relics of the city’s past.
Blue stayed in Los Angeles for several months, thrilled to feel a sense of purpose in his life again. The irony that his replacement as Surgeon General had been forced to turn to him in a time of crisis was not lost on him, though he did not voice it. He was too happy to once again be attacking the disease which had slipped through his fingers and reached the open expanses of Northern California. He considered his time in Los Angeles an act of retribution, and would not allow himself to rest until the danger from the disease had passed.
By the end of the year, health officers under his supervision had sliced open the bodies of 106,951 rats, finding 187 that tested positive for plague. An additional 16,094 squirrels passed through Blue’s laboratory, with nine of them infected by the disease. No new human victims were found, capping the city’s pain at Clara Street. Yet Blue remained wary, considering it only a matter of time before plague struck again. In his annual report, Surgeon General Cummings noted that the Service would have to remain ready to battle the disease. “I have no doubt that, under present conditions, this squirrel infection will continue for many years to come,” he wrote. “This reservoir of plague in the United States should ever be kept in mind, nor should our vigilance in maintaining squirrel-free zones around rat-infested cities in these infected counties be relaxed.”
Los Angeles would prove to be the last major outbreak of plague in the country. After helping eradicate the disease from the city, Blue continued his nomadic work in the Service on assignments designed by Cummings to keep him busy. His nephews often wrote him letters, gently suggesting that he retire from roaming the globe and settle down someplace warm like Florida. Ever tactful, Blue respectfully ignored their advice and continued on the only path of life he had ever known until 1932, when advancing heart disease forced him to retire from the Service at the age of sixty-four. He maintained a small room in a hotel in Washington, unable to the end to settle down into the familiar trappings of a home of his own. He died on April 12, 1948, one month shy of his eightieth birthday, at a hospital in Charleston. His body was taken home to Marion, where it was laid to rest in a grave next to his sisters Kate and Henriette.
Under a canopy of Spanish moss, his gravestone now rises above the South Carolina soil, the emblem of the Public Health Service etched into its face. The Service allowed him to fulfill every dream that he had had as a young boy playing in the nearby cotton fields, and even some that once seemed impossible. He had traveled the world in the service of others, advised the powerful and helped save the lives of hundreds, if not millions, of people. His career began in a quarantine station treating passengers who came aboard steamships, and by its end he was protecting travelers riding aboard jet planes. He rose to the highest peaks of his profession and, after politics robbed him of his status, rose again to become a hero
once more. Yet above the body of the man whose work saved millions of lives stands only a simple inscription: “His work for humanity took him to many lands but he came home to sleep his long last sleep.”
EPILOGUE
HOW CLOSE WE CAME
There are few reminders of the fight to save America from plague or how close it came to devastating the country. The men and women who played a role in confronting the disease scattered across the country, leaving the horror of what they had seen behind.
Joseph Kinyoun, the man whose presence was enough to cause riots in San Francisco, worked for several private companies after resigning from the Marine Hospital Service and eventually became a professor at George Washington University. He died in 1919, his reputation having never recovered. As part of its 125-year anniversary in 2012, the National Institutes of Health recognized him as its “forgotten forefather,” tracing its history back to the laboratory he founded on Staten Island. Governor Henry Gage, the man who essentially ran Kinyoun out of California, returned to private law practice when his party refused to renominate him for office and died in Los Angeles in August 1924, just two months before that city faced its own outbreak of the disease that he had refused to acknowledge. James D. Phelan, the mayor of San Francisco during the initial outbreak, went on to represent California in the U.S. Senate from 1915 to 1921, where he continued to advocate banning all immigration from Asia. In May 2017, the University of San Francisco removed his name from a student residence hall and renamed it in honor of Burl Toler, a graduate of the university who went on to become both the first African American official in a major American professional sports league and the first black secondary school principal in San Francisco history.
Colby Rucker, who served as Blue’s closest confidant in San Francisco and New Orleans, died in 1930 after an insect bite suffered on a golf course in Louisiana became infected. Victor Blue, Rupert’s imposingly successful older brother, retired from the Navy as a rear admiral in 1919 and died in 1928. The USS Blue, a destroyer, was dedicated by Kate Lilly Blue at the Norfolk Navy Yard in 1937. The ship became part of the Pacific Fleet and was in port at Pearl Harbor when Japanese planes launched a surprise attack on December 7, 1941. The ship made it safely out to sea with only four junior officers aboard and spent months protecting convoys between Hawaii and San Francisco before taking part in the Battle of Guadalcanal. The ship was torpedoed by a Japanese destroyer and sunk on August 23, 1942.
Angel Island, where Kinyoun was banished by a vengeful Surgeon General and made the first positive identification of plague in the United States, became an immigration center in 1910, and over the following three decades saw more than one million people pass through what is now called the “Ellis Island of the West.” It is now a popular state park, flush with mountain bikers and the scent of barbecues on weekends. The intersection of Jackson Street and Grant Avenue, where the body of the first victim of the plague was found in the Globe Hotel, now features a Citibank and competing discount clothing stores. It is still in the heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown, which remains the world’s most densely populated Chinatown outside Asia and one of the most popular tourist attractions in the city. Sadly, records of the lives of its plague survivors are hard to come by, leaving the full stories of those who experienced the terror of quarantine and prejudice untold.
In Los Angeles, the plague-infected homes along Clara Street were never rebuilt. The site of the city’s outbreak now falls under the shadow of the Twin Towers Correctional Facility, which was the world’s largest jail at the time of its construction and after a series of scandals now holds the county’s mentally ill prisoner population. A three-story brick building, the home of a bail bond company, stands at the approximate location of the Samarano home, across the street from a lone palm tree. Olvera Street and the surrounding neighborhood has been remade into a tourist attraction celebrating the city’s Mexican heritage. Our Lady Queen of Angels Catholic church, the pastoral home of Father Medrano Brualla, still stands overlooking Los Angeles Plaza, where a fleet of food trucks congregate every weekend.
Plague has never been fully eradicated from the country. The strain of the disease that first infected squirrels in the hills above Berkeley was carried by fleas deeper into the continent, eventually becoming entrenched in rodent populations throughout the West as a permanent reminder of how politics and circumstances conspired to prevent Blue from containing the plague when he had a chance. Two visitors to Yosemite National Park developed plague in the summer of 2015, while multiple patients developed the disease in Arizona and New Mexico in the summer of 2017.
An average of seven people in the United States now contract plague each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control, with a multiyear high of seventeen cases occurring in 2006. Patients whose conditions would have quickly proven fatal are now treated with antibiotics such as streptomycin that were unavailable in Blue’s time. The continued usage of such drugs worries some researchers, who fear that the plague bacterium may evolve to become drug-resistant, making the disease untreatable once more. In the meantime, the disease remains hidden along the wide open horizon of the West, where it waits to once again make a jump into the human population.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book began with an angry letter written by a homesick man.
Frederick Rindge, one of the main characters in my last book, was once one of the wealthiest people in California, and owned all the land that makes up what is now the city of Malibu. As part of maintaining a business empire that stretched from Los Angeles to Boston to South America, he regularly traveled north to San Francisco. In a letter to his wife, May, he wrote that he had heard rumors that plague was in the city, a place he called “the wickedest place I ever saw.”
I grew up in California, once lived in the Bay Area, and am the kind of person who stops to read historical markers, yet I had never heard of anyone contracting plague in California, much less dying from it. My research propelled me into an alternative history, in which a disease capable of killing millions not only arrived in San Francisco but stayed there for years, threatening the entire country.
I am deeply indebted to the many people who helped me turn that discovery into the book you are now holding.
I was fortunate to find several researchers with connections to the story who were kind enough to share their expertise with me. Dr. David Morens of the U.S. Public Health Service and Dr. Victoria Harden and Barbara Faye Hawkins, both of the National Institutes of Health, pointed me to documents and letters detailing the life of Joseph Kinyoun and patiently answered my questions about the history of bacteriology and public health. Dr. Guenter B. Risse, professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco, not only wrote the definitive history of the Chinatown plague but helped point me in the right direction for materials and responded to all my queries quickly. John Rees at the National Library of Medicine helped me track down several letters and research papers written by Kinyoun, as well as speeches made at his farewell party in Washington before he was exiled to the West Coast.
J. Michael Hughes trusted me with dozens of original copies of letters written by Rupert Blue, helping me get a deeper sense of his personality, as well as photographs of Blue throughout his lifetime.
The immensely talented team at W. W. Norton once again made publishing a book far easier than it should be. My wonderful editor, Jill Bialosky, championed the project from the get-go and helped me go deeper into the story. Allegra Huston, my brilliant copyeditor, saved me from several embarrassing mistakes. Special thanks also go to Bill Rusin, for his early enthusiasm, and Drew Weitman, who shepherded the manuscript along its way to publication, as well as Josie Freedman at ICM Partners.
My agents, Larry Weissman and Sascha Alper, helped shape this book from the beginning and remain two of the most generous people that I know.
Alan Yang, Jennifer Ablan, Lauren Young, Helen Coster, Matthew Craft, John and Carol Ordover, Tony and Maryanne Petrizio, Robert and
Gina Scott, and Ryan and Diane Randall all offered advice, guidance and support throughout this project.
And finally, infinite love and thanks go to Megan, Henry, and Isla Randall, without whom none of this would be possible.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sources are listed in the order in which they inform the text.
PROLOGUE: FIGHTING THE DEVIL WITH FIRE
Mohr, James. Plague and Fire: Battling Black Death and the 1900 Burning of Honolulu’s Chinatown. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Bonner, John. “Questions of the Day.” California Illustrated Magazine 5, 1893.
Li, Ling-Ai. Life is For a Long Time: A Chinese Hawaiian Memoir. New York: Hastings House, 1972.
Burlingame, Burl. “The City at War.” Honolulu Star–Bulletin, January 31, 2000.
Cantor, Norman. In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.
Kelly, John. The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time. New York: Harper Collins, 2005.
CHAPTER 1: ACROSS THE SEA
Letters of Joseph J. Kinyoun. History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD.
Kobe, George M. “Complimentary Dinner to Joseph J. Kinyoun, M.D., Ph.D., Given on the Occasion of His Departure for San Francisco, Cal., by the Members of the Medical Profession, Washington, D.C.” Reprinted in The Georgetown College Journal, June 1899.
Arena, Eva. “Taming Dreaded Diseases in the 1800s: Joseph Kinyoun, the Hygienic Laboratory, and the Origins of the NIH.” The NIH Catalyst. 20, no. 6 (November–December 2012).
