The Barbary Plague
The Barbary Plague
Marilyn Chase
“San Francisco in 1900 was a Gold Rush boomtown settling into a gaudy middle age…. It had a pompous new skyline with skyscrapers nearly twenty stories tall, grand hotels, and Victorian mansions on Nob Hill…. The wharf bristled with masts and smokestacks from as many as a thousand sailing ships and steamers arriving each year…. But the harbor would not be safe for long. Across the Pacific came an unexpected import, bubonic plague. Sailing from China and Hawaii into the unbridged arms of the Golden Gate, it arrived aboard vessels bearing rich cargoes, hopeful immigrants, and infected vermin. The rats slipped out of their shadowy holds, scuttled down the rigging, and alighted on the wharf. Uphill they scurried, insinuating themselves into the heart of the city.”
The plague first sailed into San Francisco on the steamer Australia, on the day after New Year’s in 1900. Though the ship passed inspection, some of her stowaways—infected rats—escaped detection and made their way into the city’s sewer system. Two months later, the first human case of bubonic plague surfaced in Chinatown.
Initially in charge of the government’s response was Quarantine Officer Dr. Joseph Kinyoun. An intellectually astute but autocratic scientist, Kinyoun lacked the diplomatic skill to manage the public health crisis successfully. He correctly diagnosed the plague, but because of his quarantine efforts, he was branded an alarmist and a racist, and was forced from his post. When a second epidemic erupted five years later, the more self-possessed and charming Dr. Rupert Blue was placed in command. He won the trust of San Franciscans by shifting the government’s attack on the plague from the cool remove of the laboratory onto the streets, among the people it affected. Blue preached sanitation to contain the disease, but it was only when he focused his attack on the newly discovered source of the plague, infected rats and their fleas, that he finally eradicated it—truly one of the great, if little known, triumphs in American public health history.
With stunning narrative immediacy fortified by rich research, Marilyn Chase transports us to the city during the late Victorian age—a roiling melting pot of races and cultures that, nearly destroyed by an earthquake, was reborn, thanks in no small part to Rupert Blue and his motley band of pied pipers.
Marilyn Chase
THE BARBARY PLAGUE
The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco
For Randy, Jack, and Becca
Map
Prologue
SAN FRANCISCO IN 1900 was a Gold Rush boomtown settling into a gaudy middle age. Fifty years earlier, it had been a miners’ camp pitched upon sand dunes. Now it had a pompous new skyline with skyscrapers nearly twenty stories tall, grand hotels, and Victorian mansions on Nob Hill. Cable cars scaled its hills on chains that jingled like the necklace on a vaudeville soubrette. The city filled three opera houses with the zeal of the nouveaux riches. But underneath its ermine opera cape beat the heart of its rowdy past: the old Barbary Coast was still alive in the saloons and vaudevilles, bawdy houses and “French restaurants,” with dining downstairs and women upstairs.
Keening seagulls rode the cool currents of fog and sun, circling town with their rusty cries. At street level, the city (while eager to embrace electricity and motorcars) still lived on gaslight and horsepower. Horse-drawn buggies and streetcars rattled west from downtown, past churches, temples, and sandlots, toward Ocean Beach. The oblique slash of Market Street bisected the town, running from southwest to northeast, from Castro Street, past the dome of City Hall, past the Palace Hotel, past the Emporium and Golden Rule Bazaar department store, and finally ending at the water’s edge, where the Ferry Building’s clock tower was a traveler’s first view of the city.
The wharf bristled with masts and smokestacks from as many as a thousand sailing ships and steamers arriving each year. To guide their passage through the fog, lighthouses pulsed from every promontory. Decades before modern foghorns, each island in the bay—Angel Island, Alcatraz, and Yerba Buena—had its own sound signature from fog bells, ship’s whistles, sirens, or chimes. On foggy days, the bay must have sounded like an antique calliope, playing its strange music to guide ships’ captains through corridors of mist to a safe harbor.1
But the harbor would not be safe for long. Across the Pacific came an unexpected import, bubonic plague. Sailing from China and Hawaii into the unbridged arms of the Golden Gate, it arrived aboard vessels bearing rich cargoes, hopeful immigrants, and infected vermin. The rats slipped out of their shadowy holds, scuttled down the rigging, and alighted on the wharf. Uphill they scurried, insinuating themselves into the heart of the city.
Two doctors in federal uniform—Joseph Kinyoun and Rupert Blue—would each try in his own way to quell the pestilence. One doctor would try to subdue the outbreak from his laboratory at the quarantine station on Angel Island. The other doctor would work at street level, purging the infection from boardwalk to basement. The public health efforts of the day were handicapped by limited scientific knowledge and bedeviled by the twin demons of denial and discrimination. One man would fail, and the other would succeed to become the top physician in the land. Today, few people know their names. But their mission would foreshadow the challenges posed by epidemics for the century to come.
When plague hit, one doctor would later recall, “We were fighting in the dark.” The scientists were an unwelcome presence in the city by the Golden Gate. Turn-of-the-century San Francisco aspired to be not a plague zone, but the “Paris of the Pacific.” Its mayor, James Phelan, a proponent of the “City Beautiful” movement, sought to build its civic center into a Beaux Arts showplace. In industry, the city was proud to be the shipping power of the Pacific Coast and the western transit center for the U.S. military. As evidenced by the city’s motto, “Gold in peace, iron in war,” San Francisco’s fortunes were forged to metal, bright or dull. Its tycoons got rich by mining ore from the hills and building great banking houses in its financial district. Later, ironworks and shipbuilders kept the city afloat by supplying warships for the Spanish-American War in the Philippines.2
The Spirit of 1900, in a Chronicle newspaper artist’s rendering, depicted the goddess of progress operating a railroad, a telegraph, and a dynamo engine. San Franciscans embraced this ethic of progress, damming the Hetch Hetchy River and razing the Tahoe forest for power and building material—and drawing protests from the aging John Muir and his infant Sierra Club. From boardrooms to church pulpits, the city cheered the Spanish-American conflict as a boon to its economy. As the Union Iron Works and the Southern Pacific Railroad went, so went the city. Sons of the Gold Rush, San Franciscans styled themselves as a new breed of Argonauts, explorers and executors of manifest destiny.3
If the East had the Astors, Carnegies, and Mellons, San Francisco had the “Big Four” railroad barons—Hopkins, Huntington, Crocker, and Stanford—who clustered their palazzi on Nob Hill like Renaissance princes occupying a Tuscan hill town. Soon, other industrialists followed them, abandoning the south of Market Street for the fresher climes of Nob Hill and Pacific Heights, where their mansions mushroomed in a hodgepodge of architectural styles—Italian Renaissance, French baroque, Victorian, Edwardian, and Queen Anne—all elbowing one another for supremacy.
On sunny weekends, a caravan of horse buggies, landaus, calèches, and a few rattletrap automobiles faced into the wind, rambling west through Golden Gate Park, whose green carpet replaced the sand dunes and tamed the sandstorms that once scoured the city’s western fringes. Gliding through the canopy of manicured greenery, the day-trippers rolled on to the gingerbread castle of Cliff House, a wooden Victorian restaurant perched on a promontory overlooking the breakers of the Pacific Ocean and barking sea lions on Seal Rock. Their destination reached, the caravan turned and rolled
home, merry and windburned, ahead of the fog that blew in from the west. The weekly parade lasted all day.4
Strollers ambled on Market, Montgomery, or Kearny Street. Men wore broad-shouldered tweeds and bowlers. Ladies, corseted into breathless figure eights, swept past in day gowns of ecru, coral, and celestial blue from fine stores like the White House or the City of Paris. Picture hats resembling platters of meringue and Tuscan straw bonnets were all the rage, crowned with sprays of heliotrope, bunches of cherries, or egret feathers in a nest of net. Sailor-suited children, sated with peanuts and French caramels, trailed their parents home from the matinee.5
At home, supper waited. In those days, Kona coffee cost 20 cents a pound, ocean fish went for 12½ cents a pound, California figs were four pounds for a quarter. Sourdough bread, the Gold Rush staple, cost a dime for two loaves.
Theaters were packed, and there was a spectacle for every taste, from a staging of Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson to a piano recital by Paderewski. There was a French farce at the Alcazar Theatre. The dashing maestro Walter Damrosch conducted The Flying Dutchman at the opera house. Golden youth of the upper classes waltzed demurely at the Greenway balls and the La Jeunesse Cotillions. Showgirls and young swells danced the “buck and wing.”
Once the tycoons migrated to Nob Hill, the working class took over the sunny triangle south of Market Street, turning it from a fashionable neighborhood into a utilitarian zone of boardinghouses and flats. There, a good time was the penny vaudeville or, better yet, free amateur night at Kapp & Street’s Tamale Grotto and Refined Concert Hall, a Market Street establishment that advertised itself as “A Strictly First-Class Vaudeville Show.” In some ways, the town itself was a vaudeville show. But those abandoned by the boomtown often ended their misery with a searing gulp of carbolic acid or an open gaslight jet with the keyhole stuffed tight. For those who survived their misfortune, the last resort was the almshouse on the foggy, windward side of Twin Peaks.
Newcomers to the port of San Francisco sailed or steamed through the Golden Gate and waited while their vessel lay at anchor in the bay’s quarantine station off Angel Island. If you were Chinese, they probed your glands, peered into your throat, and bathed you with disinfectants. If you were white, the doctors spared you the antiseptic baptism. However, you still had to open your mouth for the doctors, and your luggage for the inspectors, before landing at the dock of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company.
The long, low, shedlike warehouse maintained separate reception rooms for the arrival of whites and Chinese. In one room, Victorian travelers disembarked and reunited with their families after a Hawaiian cruise. In another room, immigrants in their padded jackets and cloth shoes were received. Women in silken coats and tiny platformed sandals were claimed by their husbands. Fresh-cheeked country girls were delivered over to madams who dressed in black and wore rings of keys to their cribs in the flesh trade.6
Wagons carried them uphill to Chinatown. A dozen blocks in the heart of the city, Chinatown was a village of balconied brick-and-wooden tenements, incense-spiced temples, groceries hung with mahogany-glazed ducks, pyramids of onions and cabbage, and mounds of oranges and pale jade melons.
Sheltering as many as twenty thousand to thirty thousand Chinese, the neighborhood was a teeming outpost of the empire of China transplanted to the Barbary Coast. To the observer, it was visibly a bachelor society, a colony of mostly male laborers sporting American bowler hats atop their traditional queues. Most lived lean, solitary lives in rooming houses, for it was costly to bring families to San Francisco. Wives and children—usually those of wealthy merchants—were in the minority. Barred from attending school with whites, Chinese children were consigned to a segregated school that stopped at the sixth grade.
Whether denizens or California-born, Chinatown’s people relied on the powerful merchants of the Chinese Six Companies to speak for them. It was a consortium of district associations, composed of people who had come from various regions of China. Also known as the Chinese Benevolent Association, the group wore many hats: It was part philanthropic society, part informal diplomatic corps, and part Chamber of Commerce. It raised funds for the poor, fought bias, and mediated between Chinatown and the city’s white power structure. When turf wars broke out between the tongs—secret societies that controlled gambling and prostitution—the Chinese Six Companies played peacemaker. When Caucasian law discriminated against the Chinese, the Six Companies hired lawyers and went to court. A council of elders for the expatriate community, it helped its people navigate a turbulent white society while they lived, and return their bones to China when they died.
Chinatown’s main thoroughfare was Dupont Street, Do bahn gai in the local dialect. City fathers would later rename it Grant Avenue, but it remains Dupont Street among the old-timers to this day. To the west rose the hotels and mansions of Nob Hill. To the east stretched the financial district, the dockside shipping companies, and the gray silken mirror of the bay. To the south lay the smart shops, restaurants, and theaters—as well as the brothels—clustered near Union Square. To the north were the Barbary Coast saloons and the Latin Quarter, where Romance languages filled the air and bohemian artists met over rough red wine. Few of these enticements were open to Asians—especially poor Asian laborers.7
Victorian men in bowlers and women in prim shirtwaists came to Chinatown to gawk. Some sipped tea and bought curios. For a few coins, others hired a guide to lead them on a tour through the opium dens. They could watch as the smokers reclined on narrow bunks, cradling the paraphernalia of their bliss in a horn box. First they melted the tarry ball of poppy sap on a wire, and then they packed the bubbling, viscous paste into thimble-size stone pipes fitted with long, thin bamboo stems. Then they sipped the pungent fumes, refilling their pipes again and again, until they reached Xanadu, going slack and glassy-eyed at the vision. Some tourists recoiled at the sickly scent of burning poppy sap, while others likened it to roasting peanuts. There were other secret parlors, the guides confided, off-limits to tourists, where even white men and women partook of the pipe.8
Of course, Chinatown had no monopoly on vice. It’s said the storyteller Jack London and his friends democratically surveyed cribs of every color.9 Indeed, the epicenter of downtown vice was Morton Street, an alley just off Union Square, where the women were boldly displayed in the shop windows. Later the city would rechristen the passage Maiden Lane.
Chinatown was born, just as greater San Francisco had been, when the glint of gold drew the eyes of fortune seekers. During the 1850s, thousands of men fled their rural villages in the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong Province, whose capital city is Canton, or Guangzhou. They spent weeks at sea in a dark and vile steerage in order to reach the land they called Gamsaan—“Gold Mountain.” In the 1860s, the railroad bosses recruited still more Chinese to help them blast through the Sierras, lay the track, and pound the spikes of the transcontinental railroad. When those jobs were done, the Chinese left the mines and the rails to pick plums and cut asparagus, following the harvest seasons from the fields of California to as far north as the orchards of Washington and the fisheries of Alaska.
In town, the Chinese washed clothes, stitched shirts, cobbled shoes, and rolled cigars. At the Palace Hotel, they worked as cooks or donned livery as doormen, wielding scoops after the horses that clopped into the carriage entrance. They were butlers and chefs for the hostesses of the haut monde. As laborers, they were discreet, hardworking, and cheap. As small-business owners, they helped form a rising merchant class. Their industry was rewarded with plenty of work in the land of the Stars and Stripes, or, as they called America, “the flowery flag nation.” They became indispensable.
As long as times were good, the Chinese were accepted, but a late-nineteenth-century depression turned the tide. Formerly prized for their productivity, the Chinese now were cast as cunning and insidious job stealers. The incendiary white labor leader Dennis Kearney stirred up sandlot rallies that turned into riots under the war cry “The C
hinese must go.”10 Cobblers in the White Labor League stamped their shoes with a mark that guaranteed that no Chinese hand had worked the leather. By buying Caucasian products, consumers were told, “[y]ou will be helping the White shoemakers of this city and State to support themselves and their families.”11 Soon the scapegoating broadened. Chinese were blamed not only for stealing work from white men, but for corrupting the city’s youth with opium and prostitution and for spreading disease.12
Politicians moved to mollify these fears through passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, a law barring the entry of so-called coolie labor. The very word coolie—from the Indian Kulī—conjures up low-caste laborers or bearers of burdens for white masters. As the twentieth century dawned, colonial condescension still engendered hostility that often boiled over into acts of violence.
Strolling the boardwalks and cobblestone streets of San Francisco in 1900, one might see a Chinese man get his queue yanked hard or even chopped off. The long, jet pigtail was a sign of loyalty to the Manchu Dynasty, and a passport home if things became unbearable. Some say these clashes between East and West gave birth to the word hoodlum—after the cry of “Huddle ’em!” shouted by young white toughs accosting a Chinese victim. This might seem fanciful, but even if apocryphal, it holds a kernel of truth.13
On Sunday near the First Congregational Church, one might see what the writer Ambrose Bierce once witnessed: a gang of Sunday schoolers stoning a Chinese man walking on Dupont Street, until the processional hymn called them in to prayer.14
A Chinese laundryman who went into a white saloon to play dice was stuffed into his laundry basket, thrown outside, and robbed to buy drinks for the house. When he went to court seeking justice, a lawyer and judge mocked him. The newspapers portrayed the case as low comedy and the assault as a good-natured attempt to “subdue the Chink’s luck and sporty ways.”15