Kinyoun returned to San Francisco from Canada to find himself blamed for the Coptic’s delayed docking and for alleged rough treatment of the passengers. He wrote to the surgeon general, saying that the unfounded charges were part of a plot to oust him. “I cannot be bribed, coerced or cajoled into a suppression [of the facts] regarding the plague.”9
By now, Kinyoun’s own health was compromised. “I have not been well since I came to San Francisco,” he acknowledged to his friends. “I had four break-downs in the last year.”10 His gut, always in turmoil, was seized with pains he ascribed to “chronic appendicitis.” Modern doctors might have labeled his malady as ulcers or spastic colon. By any name, there was little relief. In the days before acid blockers and antispasmodic drugs, the public relied on patent medicines laced with alcohol, coca, or morphine. Kinyoun simply suffered and blamed his agony on overwork and political pressure that the Coptic affair promised only to exacerbate.
When the Coptic next docked in San Francisco on December 14, once again loaded with exotic foodstuffs and live animals Kinyoun suspected were possible carriers of infection, he ordered extraordinary vigilance. He granted limited pratique, meaning only routine cargo could be unloaded, but seafood and produce needed special certificates. Dogs, cats, and monkeys required inspection.11
At the wharf, resentment flared as irate merchants sat idly awaiting their shipments. Around the customs house, it was whispered that California’s congressmen were lobbying for Kinyoun’s transfer “as far away from San Francisco as possible.”12
San Francisco’s Chamber of Commerce president, Charles Nelson, called Kinyoun “a menace to our trade and commerce.”13 On December 21, the Chinese Six Companies sued for release of their goods, charging that Kinyoun had again overreached his authority as quarantine officer.14
Now, barely six months free of litigation, Kinyoun was under renewed legal fire. Christmas on Angel Island was somber. Kinyoun took solace in his children’s hopes for the holiday. Alice, a pianist, craved music. Perry was obsessed with hunting and fishing. Conrad tickled Kinyoun by having picked up his father’s taste for technology and requesting that almost all his presents be machines. “It was real amusing,” Kinyoun wrote his friends, “in looking over the list which he gave me for Santa Claus.” Otherwise, the holiday held little cheer.15
As 1900 drew to a close, the newspapers ran rosy prophecies for San Francisco, now ranked as the nation’s eighth largest city, with a population of 342,000. “In San Francisco, the century goes out brilliantly,” wrote the Call’s publisher, John D. Spreckels. “All kinds of trade report a good movement at profitable prices. The export trade of the port was never better… the Orient keeps the ships and the shippers busy… there is a general feeling of confidence in… 1901.”16
Kinyoun took a gloomier view. “It appears to me that commercial interests of San Francisco are more dear to the inhabitants than the preservation of human life,” he wrote. “No sentiment has been expressed against a possible danger arising to the people, to their wives and children. These people seem perfectly indifferent whether or not bubonic plague exists in San Francisco, so long as they can sell their products and make large percentages on their investments.”17
The San Francisco Chronicle, in its year-end editorial, demanded the quarantine officer’s expulsion. Headlined THE DOOM OF KINYOUN, the column declared: “Kinyoun is to go…. The official acts of Kinyoun have been outrageous, and have fully warranted the public indignation…. It is grossly improper for his Federal superiors to say that such a man must not be removed ‘under fire.’ ”18
Kinyoun wrote a friend, “I am at war with everybody out here.”19
In Sacramento, Governor Henry T. Gage escalated his attacks. In his year-end address—a rhetorical volcano that spouted twenty thousand words and covered fifty-four sheets of foolscap—he took his plague conspiracy theory to new and gothic heights. Now instead of just spilling the germs, he insinuated, Kinyoun spread them intentionally.
“Could it have been possible,” said Gage, “that some dead body of a Chinaman had innocently or otherwise received a post-mortem inoculation in a lymphatic region by some one possessing the imported plague bacilli, and that honest people were thereby deluded?”20
Before, Kinyoun was a bumbling sorcerer’s apprentice. Now, he was a mad scientist spiking corpses with bubonic germs.
To defend the state from such demonic experiments, Gage proposed making it a felony to import plague bacteria, to make slides or cultures from it, or to inoculate animals with it. He also proposed making it a felony for newspapers to publish “any false report on the presence of bubonic plague.”21
Rallying around the governor, the legislature passed a joint resolution on January 23 asking President McKinley to remove Kinyoun from West Coast duty. Fearing exile was too mild a punishment, the bill’s author added that Kinyoun should be hanged.22
“I did not know that a man occupying such a high position as the Governor of a State, could stoop so low as to lend himself to one of the lowest forms of persecution,” Kinyoun wrote to his aunt and uncle. “His statements were more in keeping with what is found in the yellow-backed dime novels, than what has really occurred….”23
After eighteen months of toil and family sacrifice on Angel Island, Kinyoun was denounced as a fraud. He wired the surgeon general, asking to be avenged for the slander.24
But Kinyoun got a vote of no confidence from his boss. With federal-state relations in San Francisco frayed past repair, Wyman sent in a new man to manage the crisis. Joseph H. White was a veteran who had fought cholera in Hamburg and leprosy in Hawaii. The day after New Year’s, White set down his suitcase at the Occidental Hotel on Sutter Street and set to work.
Newspapers promoted the theory that White had come to reverse Kinyoun’s diagnosis. But soon after his arrival, Chung Wey Lung, a sixty-year-old merchant, died in his basement store at 720 Jackson Street.
Kinyoun took Joe White to view the unfortunate man, whom he referred to as a “low, dirty Chinese.”25 Desperate for White to believe him, he saw the dead man not as a patient, but as proof of his hypothesis.
The slides and cultures confirmed that Chung was the city’s twenty-third plague victim in ten months. In marking the number 23 on the Chinatown map in pink ink—the color code for the year 1901—the public health officers saw that all but two of Chinatown’s dozen square blocks were now touched by the outbreak.
Chung’s case was quickly followed by more deaths, both Chinese and white. Furious at the governor’s intransigence, the city health board president, J. M. Williamson, took his case to the mayor. “The Board of Health during the whole of this bitter controversy has promulgated nothing but the exact facts,” he said. “A lie is a lie whether it [be] uttered by the lips of medical sycophants hovering around the gubernatorial coattails, or whether it be traced by the point of an executive pen.”26
Confronting a hopeless impasse, Joseph White took a decisive step. He asked Surgeon General Wyman to send a panel of independent experts to determine once and for all whether plague existed in San Francisco. Meanwhile, White kept a discreet distance from the embattled Kinyoun.