1900–1904 San Francisco plague

The third pandemic of the plague started in 1855 in China and eventually killed about 15 million people, mainly in India. In 1894, the plague hit Hong Kong, a major trade port between China and the US. US officials were worried that others would get infections from cargo carried by ships that would cross the Pacific Ocean. For these reasons, all ships were rigorously inspected. At that time, however, it was not widely known that rats could carry plague, and that fleas on those rats could transmit the disease to humans. Ships arriving in US ports were declared clean after inspection of the passengers showed no signs of disease. Health officials conducted no tests on rats or fleas. Despite important advances in the 1890s in the fight against bubonic plague, many of the world's doctors did not immediately change their ineffective and outdated methods. In November 1898, the US Marine Hospital Service (MHS) chief surgeon, James M. Gassaway, felt obliged to refute rumors of plague in San Francisco. Supported by the city's health officer, Gassaway said that some Chinese residents had died of pneumonia or lung edema, and it was not bubonic plague. burned down in an effort to control bubonic plague. In the newly formed US Territory of Hawaii, the city of Honolulu fell victim to the plague in December 1899. Residents of Honolulu were reporting cases of fever and swollen lymph glands forming buboes, with severe internal organ damage – quickly leading to death. Not knowing precisely how to control the spread of the disease, city health officials decided to burn infected houses. On January 20, 1900, changing winds fanned the flames out of control, and nearly all of Chinatown burned——leaving 6,000 without homes. The extensive maritime operations of the port of San Francisco caused concern among medical men such as Joseph J. Kinyoun, the chief quarantine officer of the MHS in San Francisco, about the infection spreading to California. A Japanese ship, the S.S. Nippon Maru, arriving in San Francisco Bay in June 1899, had two plague deaths at sea, and there were two more cases of stowaways found dead in the bay, with postmortem cultures proving they had the plague. In New York in November 1899, the British ship J.W. Taylor brought three cases of plague from Brazil, but the cases were confined to the ship. Many entrepreneurs and sailing men felt that this was bad for business, and unfair to ships that were free of plague. City promoters were confident that plague could not take hold, and they were unhappy with what they saw as Kinyoun's high-handed abuse of authority. On February 4, 1900, the Sunday magazine supplement of the San Francisco Examiner carried an article titled "Why San Francisco Is Plague-Proof". Certain American experts held the mistaken belief that a rice-based diet left Asians with a lower resistance to plague, and that a diet of meat kept Europeans free from this disease. ==Infection==

called Chinese-Americans "a constant menace to the public health." In January 1900, the four-masted steamship S.S. Australia laid anchor in the Port of San Francisco. The ship sailed between Honolulu and San Francisco regularly, and its passengers and crew were declared clean. Cargo from Honolulu, unloaded at a dock near the outfall of Chinatown's sewers, may have allowed rats carrying the plague to leave the ship and transmit the infection. However, it is difficult to trace the infection to a single vessel. Wherever it came from, the disease was soon established in the cramped Chinese ghetto neighborhood; a sudden increase in dead rats was observed as local rats became infected. Rumors of the plague's presence abounded in the city, quickly gaining the notice of authorities from MHS stationed on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, including Chief Kinyoun. A Chinese American named Chick Gin, Wing Chung Ging or Wong Chut King became the first official plague victim in California. The 41-year-old man, born in China and a San Francisco resident for 16 years, was a bachelor living in the basement of the Globe Hotel in Chinatown, at the intersection of the streets now called Grant and Jackson. The Globe Hotel was built in 1857, with the appearance of an Italian palazzo. However, by the mid-1870s it was a squalid tenement crowded with Chinese residents. Just outside, Jackson Street was the Chinese red-light district, where unmarried men could visit "hundred-men's-wives". Late at night, Kellogg ran the suspicious samples of lymph fluid to Angel Island to be tested on animals in Kinyoun's better-equipped laboratory – an operation that would take at least four days. Meanwhile, Wilson and O'Brien called upon the city's Board of Health and insisted that Chinatown be quarantined immediately. When dawn came on March 7, 1900, Chinatown was circled by rope and surrounded by policemen preventing egress or access to anyone but Whites. The 12-block area was bordered by four streets: Broadway, Kearney, California and Stockton. Approximately 25,000–35,000 residents were unable to leave. Chinese Consul General Ho Yow felt that the quarantine was likely based on false assumptions and that it was entirely unfair to Chinese people and would seek an injunction to lift the quarantine. San Francisco mayor James D. Phelan was in favor of keeping the Chinese-speaking residents separated from the Anglo-Americans – claiming that Chinese Americans were unclean, filthy, and "a constant menace to the public health." On March 11, Kinyoun's lab presented its results. Two guinea pigs and one rat died after being exposed to samples from the first victim, proving the plague was indeed in Chinatown. Without restoring the quarantine, the Board of Health inspected every building in Chinatown, and labored to disinfect the neighborhood. Property was taken and burned if it was suspected of harboring filth. Using physical violence, policemen enforced compliance with the Board of Health's directives. Angry and worried Chinese communities reacted by hiding those that were sick. On March 13, another lab animal, a monkey that was exposed to the plague, died. All of the dead animals tested positive for the plague bacteria. U.S. Surgeon General Walter Wyman informed the San Francisco doctors at the end of March 1900 that his laboratory confirmed the fact that fleas can carry the plague and transmit it to a new host. ==Denial and suppression by governor==

denied there was a plague. Allied with powerful railroad and city business interests, California governor Henry Gage publicly denied the existence of any pestilent outbreak in San Francisco, fearing that any word of the bubonic plague's presence would deeply damage the city's and state's economy. Supportive newspapers, such as the Call, the Chronicle and the Bulletin, echoed Gage's denials, beginning what was to become an intense defamation campaign against quarantine officer Kinyoun. In response to the state's denial, Wyman recommended to federal Treasury Secretary Lyman J. Gage that he intervene. Secretary Gage agreed, creating a three-man commission of investigators who were respected medical scholars, experienced with identifying and treating the plague in China or India. The commission examined six San Francisco cases and conclusively determined that bubonic plague was present. As with the findings of Kinyoun, the Treasury commission's findings were again immediately denounced by Governor Gage. The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, also known as the Six Companies, filed suit on behalf of Wong Wai, a merchant who took a stance against what he perceived as a violation of his personal liberty. Not quite a class action suit, the arguments included similar wording such as complaints that all residents of Chinatown were being denied "equal protection under the law", part of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US constitution. Federal judge William W. Morrow ruled uncharacteristically in favor of the Chinese, largely because the defense by the State of California was unable to prove that Chinese Americans were more susceptible to plague than Anglo Americans. The decision set a precedent for greater limits placed on public health authorities seeking to isolate diseased populations. Between 1901 and 1902, the plague outbreak continued to worsen. In a 1901 address to both houses of the California State Legislature, Gage accused federal authorities, particularly Kinyoun, of injecting plague bacteria into cadavers, falsifying evidence. In response to what he said to be massive scaremongering by the MHS, Gage pushed a censorship bill to gag any media reports of plague infection. The bill failed in the California State Legislature, yet laws to gag reports amongst the medical community succeeded in passage and were signed into law by the governor. In addition, $100,000 was allocated to a public campaign led by Gage to deny the plague's existence. Despite the secret agreement allowing for Kinyoun's removal, Gage went back on his promise of assisting federal authorities and continued to obstruct their efforts for study and quarantine. A report issued by the State Board of Health on September 16, 1901, bolstered Gage's claims, denying the plague's outbreak. == Racism and discrimination lawsuit ==

Widespread racism toward Chinese immigrants was socially accepted during the initial time of the Chinatown plague in the early 1900s. Standard social rights and privileges were often denied to the Chinese people, as shown in the way landlords would refuse to maintain their own property when renting to Chinese immigrants. The living conditions in the Chinatown community reflected the social norms and racial inequalities during that time for Chinese immigrants. Housing for the majority of Chinatown Chinese immigrants was not fit nor adequate for human living, but with scarce housing options and landlords unwilling to provide equal and fair housing, Chinese immigrants were left little option other than to live with such housing disparities. The extended quarantine of Chinatown was motivated more by racist images of Chinese Americans as carriers of disease than by actual evidence of the presence of Bubonic plague. San Francisco's quarantine measures were explicitly discriminatory and segregatory, allowing European Americans to leave the affected area, but Chinese and Japanese Americans required a health certificate to leave the city. Residents were initially angered as those with jobs outside of San Francisco were prevented from working. Few Chinese agreed to take the inoculation, especially after press reports on May 22, 1900, that people who did agree were experiencing severe pain from the untested vaccine. On May 24, 1900, with the help of Chinese Six Companies, they hired the law firm of Reddy, Campbell, and Metson. Defendants included Joseph J. Kinyoun and all of the members of the San Francisco Board of Health. The Chinese wanted the courts to issue a provisional injunction to enforce what they argued was their constitutional right to travel outside of San Francisco. On July 3, 1900, Judge William W. Morrow ruled that the defendants were violating the plaintiffs' Fourteenth Amendment rights. The ruling required that the same restrictions, if any, be applied to everyone no matter their ethnic group. The defendants did not have enough evidence to prove that the Chinese were transmitting the plague. Morrow agreed with the argument that if they were, the city would not have permitted them to roam the streets of San Francisco. The Board then "attempted to sidestep the decision by instituting a quarantine order that avoided mention of race, but which was precisely drafted so as to encompass all of the Chinatown area of San Francisco while excluding white-owned businesses on the periphery of that area"; this effort was also struck down, with the court noting that the boundaries of the quarantine corresponded with the ethnicity of building occupants rather than the presence of the disease. ==Detailed history==

1900 Upon the death of Wong Chut King, the San Francisco Health Board took immediate action to prevent the spread of plague: Chinatown was quarantined. Health officials, in order to prevent the propagation of the disease, made the decision of placing Chinatown under quarantine, without any notice to the residents – targeting Chinese residents only. White Americans that were walking the streets of Chinatown were allowed to leave; everybody else was forced to stay. The official inspection and disinfection of Chinatown finally began, thanks to the monetary contributions of the supervisors of the volunteer physicians, policemen, and inspectors that participated in the actual disinfection campaign. The sanitizing of Chinatown began to show results as the death toll slowly dropped throughout the month of March and the beginning of April. Governor Gage refused to support the diagnoses that were verified by the competent Pasteurians in San Francisco. Kinyoun was starting to express his frustration and suggested that independent outside experts confirm that the plague was present. White agreed and passed this information to the surgeon general. Kinyoun desired that his reputation be restored and that his findings were valid so that he could continue to investigate plague cases. On January 26, Flexner, Novy, and Barker arrived in San Francisco. The three scientists were appointed to an official commission to prove if the plague existed. As the 1902 general elections approached, members of the Southern Pacific board and the "Railroad Republican" faction increasingly saw Gage as an embarrassment to state Republicans. Gage's public denials of the plague outbreak were to protect the state's economy and the business interests of his political allies. In his final speech, to the California State Legislature, in early January 1903, Gage continued to deny the outbreak. He blamed the federal government, in particular, Kinyoun, the MHS, and the San Francisco Board of Health for damaging the state's economy. ==See also==