Year of the Rat: Acton Gold Miner vs. San Francisco's Bubonic Plague.

There is no invisible bug that's mysteriously killing people in San Francisco. It's a "fake plague." If anyone is dying mysteriously, it's only Chinese immigrants. Certainly the white population is immune. The only way the plague could get here is if the stubborn East Coast scientist with his fancy microscopes brought it from his laboratory and planted it on cadavers to spread it intentionally. Any newspaper that reports otherwise should be severely punished under the law.

Henry Tifft Gage, California governor 1899-1903. Click for more.

So said Henry Tifft Gage, the owner of the Red Rover, New York, Puritan and other gold mines in Acton who became governor of California in 1899. The state Legislature backed him up by criminalizing "fake plague" news in 1901.

Today, some researchers credit Gage's decision to put San Francisco's reputation and business interests ahead of public health, and his success at thwarting federal intervention efforts, for the fact that the bubonic plague still exists in America, where it hadn't previously been known. Today's version, although rare — roughly 7 confirmed U.S. cases per year — is believed to be the same strain.^[1]

With a century's hindsight, we know the newspapers were correct to report the findings of the stubborn scientist from the Marine Hospital Service, Joseph James "Joe" Kinyoun (1860-1919), whose one-man, one-room laboratory on Staten Island in 1887 would morph into the federal government's National Institutes of Health in 1912.

"Kinyoun had predicted plague's eventual arrival in the United States as early as 1895 and had begun a plague research program in 1896," according to a publication^[2] coauthored in 2012 by Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., director since 1984 of NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

In 1899, Kinyoun's boss, Surgeon General Walter Wyman, sent him to the quarantine station of Angel Island in the port city of San Francisco — although it was at least partially to get him as far away as possible, as the two men didn't get along. Kinyoun arrived just in time to hear rumors that a "plague ship" was en route from Honolulu.

The rumors proved false, but they weren't without merit. In December 1899, the plague arrived in Honolulu, presumably on rat-infested Chinese merchant ships. (Hawaii had become a U.S. territory the previous year.) The 10,000 residents of Honolulu's Chinatown were sealed off. When a white teenager contracted the disease and ultimately died, local authorities started burning down apartment buildings that housed the city's Chinese, Japanese and ethnic Hawaiian residents — the same way Londoners had eradicated the plague in 1666 in what turned into the Great Fire of London. (Oops.) Then as now, it seemed to work.^[3]

Men cook meals in San Francisco's Chinatown during quarantine, as shown to the American public in Harper's Weekly, June 2, 1900. Click to enlarge.

Meanwhile in San Francisco, Kinyoun began quarantining arriving ships from the four known "plague ports" of Honolulu, Sydney, Hong Kong, and Kobe, Japan. But then, on March 6, 1900, a 41-year-old lumber salesman named Wong Chut King died a gruesome death from disease. His body lay in an undertaker's shop at 814 Clay Street in the Chinatown section, and the police needed to establish cause of death. Kinyoun, with his fancy microscopes, confirmed it as the first U.S. death from the bubonic plague.

It touched off a political war.

On May 15, with 11 confirmed cases among the Chinese population and many more suspected to be in hiding, Kinyoun declared it an epidemic.

Even as the number of cases mounted, when Kinyoun linked the disease to rats, he was lampooned by most San Francisco newspapers, which were allied with Henry Gage. (Both Gage and the city of San Francisco were allies of the railroads, which were major players in California politics.) William Randolph Hearst's Examiner was the outlier, calling the plague a plague.

"Plague epidemiology was poorly understood ... although an association with rats was known and flea transmission postulated".^[5] Kinyoun's own boss, Wyman, didn't believe the rat hypothesis; he thought urine and feces were the principal vectors.

Defensive Measures Thwarted. Dr. Joseph James Kinyoun. Click to enlarge. Kinyoun supported the San Francisco Board of Health's decision to clean up Chinatown "through trash removal, rodenticidal fumigation of sewers and houses with sulfur dioxide," but when he wanted to inoculate people and perform health screenings of anyone leaving California by sea or rail, Gage, and residents of Chinatown who thought the government was trying to poison them with germ-filled needles, balked. Gage sued the federal government. Wyman, who had instructed Kinyoun to proceed with his work and ignore local officials when he sent him to San Francisco, did so with the knowledge that President William McKinley had authorized the use of the interstate quarantine measures that Congress created in 1893. Now, in challenging federal health authorities, Gage and the Chinese community and business leaders banded together to make it an issue of states' rights and minority civil rights against public health police powers. "This was the first time that the authority of microbiology in public decision making had been put on national trial."[6] Gage and his cronies appealed to the U.S. Secretary of State (under whose jurisdiction Chinese immigrants fell) and the Secretary of the Treasury. The government sent a panel of scientists to study Kinyoun's findings.

But in the public sphere, Gage's politicking fell on receptive ears. "The President of the United States has declared that after thorough investigation and a consideration of complete reports from California, he is convinced that there is no plague in the state and never has been," the San Francisco Call reported in June 1900. McKinley lifted Kinyoun's quarantine.^[7]

Drenched in sweat, Kinyoun cowers before Circuit Court Judge William W. Morrow with a guinea pig, rat and monkey — animals Kinyoun used for plague isolation, which had become cartoon shorthand for the alleged plague faker. Click to enlarge.

That same day, Kinyoun stood before a federal magistrate in San Francisco on a contempt charge for allegedly failing to comply with an injunction barring his health-certificate requirement for travelers. Kinyoun said he was no longer requiring them but failed to tell the Southern Pacific Railroad.

Kinyoun was eventually acquitted, and the judge, William W. Morrow, later asked him to rat-proof his house with a new rodenticide.^[8]

Seven months had gone by without any significant disease prevention measures in place when Gage, in his January 1901 State of the State address, told Sacramento lawmakers how he arrived at the inescapable conclusion that there was not now and never had been an incidence of bubonic plague in San Francisco^[9]:

Gage — gold miner, corporate lawyer, politician by profession and experience — then shares his first-hand knowledge of infectious diseases:

Certain to delight the Chronicle and perplex the Examiner, Gage calls on the Legislature to muzzle the Fourth Estate in the name of commerce:

Behind the scenes, the scientists who'd been sent by Washington confirmed what Kinyoun had known all along: It was the plague. Gage and company "suppressed the report for several months. [The Treasury secretary] countered with a threat to deprive California of revenue by closing Army headquarters there and diverting San Francisco-bound Philippine transports to Puget Sound if it did not act upon the [findings]"^[10].

In the end, Gage allowed federal health authorities to take over quarantine and plague control, but only if the government agreed to remove Kinyoun from his post — which it did.

Kinyoun's successor, Rupert Blue, had to deal with the same forces that exiled Kinyoun. The surgeon general, Wyman, still thinking "filth" was the principal vector, ordered a general cleanup.

It certainly helped, if only to frustrate the rats. Blue moved his lab to Chinatown and orchestrated a citywide cleanup in 1903 that involved tearing down shacks, soaking cellars with carbolic acid, laying asphalt sidewalks and trapping rats.

Henry Gage wasn't even nominated for reelection by his party that year. But not because of his fumbling of the bubonic plague epidemic in San Francisco. That was rather well received by the public. Instead, it had to do with his reluctance to confront labor organizers in San Francisco and his continued support of the railroads, which were growing increasingly unpopular as they extorted tolls in the form of cash and land from cities in exchange for new roads and depots.^[11]

Meanwhile, Blue's efforts were paying off. By early 1905, the problem seemed to have gone away. But then the city was flattened in 1906, and a second wave hit. Blue was exterminating up to 13,000 rats a week in 1907. He found that 1.5 percent of them were infected; 2 percent was the threshold for declaring a pandemic.^[12]

A century later, if it's odd to think the public and other political leaders would take the word of an Acton gold miner and lawyer over the federal government's infectious disease specialists, then, besides simply not wanting it to be true: One, infectious diseases were not well understood, especially by the lay public. Two, the epicenter of the problem was in Chinatown, which had little political leverage. Three, by the numbers, there were relatively few confirmed deaths. In eight years, there were 280 confirmed cases and 172 confirmed deaths, of which 65 came in the second wave, after the earthquake.

Why didn't the bubonic plague inflict mass death in San Francisco as it had in Asia? Dumb luck. According to author David K. Randall, it was the type of flea. San Francisco's most common flea was a European species, Ceratophyllus fasciatus, which injects less bacteria from its gut than the common Asian flea, Pulex cheposis. Randall writes^[13]: "The slow spread of the disease — a phenomenon that led the city to doubt Kinyoun's warnings and call the epidemic a fake ploy by corrupt health officials — had hinged on the stomach of a flea, a lucky quirk that spared an untold number of lives."

And yes, 1900 was the Chinese Year of the Rat.