He was given three weeks to pack up his family and get to Detroit. No thanks, no acknowledgment of service under difficult conditions—nothing was offered to soften the blow. It was just the blunt, militarystyle transfer favored by Dr. Wyman and the U.S. Marine Hospital Service.
Kinyoun reeled. “The orders were simply without… any explanation,” he wrote to his relatives in the East. “I have been made the scapegoat.”17
Wyman wanted the quarantine officer to make a quick and quiet departure, but retreat was not in Kinyoun’s repertoire. Against Wyman’s wishes, Kinyoun went on the offensive, making speeches at state and county medical societies about plague. He took the advantage on such occasions to take some parting shots at his enemies.
Aiming at the San Francisco doctors who wrote false death certificates, Kinyoun mocked their misdiagnosis of plague as chicken cholera. He joked that they’d actually discovered a new disease, which Kinyoun called “cholera du Chink.” From his once high-minded defense of bacteriology, he had sunk to low puns and crude racial slurs.18
San Francisco bade a bizarre farewell to Kinyoun. On the eve of his departure from San Francisco, police came to Angel Island to arrest him for attempted murder. The charge dated from an incident five months earlier in the cold waters off Angel Island. Back in November 1900, a deaf-mute fisherman was mistaken for an escapee from military detention and fired upon by soldiers. Kinyoun claimed he had rowed out to save the man, not to assault him. But now he was accused of pulling the trigger.
“I did not fire the shots,” he protested. “It is an outrage to arrest me.” Since he was a federal employee, Kinyoun refused to be taken into custody by anyone but a U.S. marshal. Eventually the court dropped the charges.19
As he packed up his family for Detroit, Kinyoun suffered recurrent bouts of paralyzing stomach pain. Gut roiling, he asked for emergency sick leave to treat his “appendicitis.” Once the pain subsided, he planned a research trip to Asia to study plague, unable to let go of his obsession with the disease that had been his downfall.
But Kinyoun’s tenure as a federal public health officer was running out. He was exhausted. He couldn’t help but feel that Wyman, by failing to defend his diagnosis, had devalued his contributions to bacteriology. After his research trip to Asia, he would serve out a brief time in the Marine Hospital Service. But in his heart, he had already resigned.
Bitter in professional exile, Kinyoun wrote long, rambling letters blaming the press, the politicians, and the surgeon general, who—beginning with Kinyoun’s transfer to San Francisco—sought “to simply relegate [him] to oblivion.”20
When a friend suggested that he write his life story, Kinyoun ruefully proposed a title—Les Misérables en Quarantaine.21
New Blood
FOUR MONTHS IN SAN FRANCISCO were enough to break the spirit. Hamstrung by his government’s gag order, Joseph White felt helpless to cure the plague in Chinatown. The place seemed an impenetrable puzzle, hiding the quick and the dead. “You cannot imagine the conditions. I cannot write them,” he wrote the surgeon general. “It would take Charles Dickens to do it.” White pleaded for reinforcements.
“The difficulties here are so great that never before in our history has there been a greater need for tactful and forceful officers,” he wrote, “and mediocrity is I think clean out of place.”
White proposed a candidate for the job, but Surgeon General Wyman had another man in mind: thirty-three-year-old Rupert Blue, who was at that moment stationed in Milwaukee, caring for sick boatmen on Lake Michigan. White had never met Blue, but he’d heard through the service grapevine that Blue was lazy and lacked the subtlety to negotiate with the Chinese.
This job takes tact, White continued. “I learn that Blue has none and is inert beside[s],” he added. “I don’t know Blue and have not a reason under Heaven to dislike him, so there is nothing personal in this matter at all, but I am fully persuaded that he cannot take the lead in this matter now or in the future.”1
Ignoring White’s doubts about his candidate, Wyman shipped Blue his orders to leave the Milwaukee station and proceed at once to San Francisco.
While Blue was en route, pressure was building from outside the state for action. Texas health chief W. F. Blunt demanded a copy of the plague commission’s report. Colorado health chief G. E. Tyler declared, “Concealment of contagious diseases is an unpardonable sin in public health work.”2 Newspapers in New York City and Washington State were beginning to sound alarms about California’s cover-up.
Suddenly the gag order was violated. The Sacramento Bee and a western medical journal, the Occidental Medical Times, obtained bootleg copies of the plague commission’s study from anonymous sources and rushed it into print. Surgeon General Wyman swiftly moved to eclipse the bootleg version by publishing the official special plague commission findings in the U.S. Public Health reports. At last, the word was out nationwide.3
Joe White, relieved to be rid of secrecy, denied he was the source of the leak and added that he didn’t think Kinyoun was, either. Few but the experts on the panel and the surgeon general were privy to the report. The source of the leak was never identified.
Rupert Blue arrived in San Francisco for duty just as the city launched a frenzied beautification project in anticipation of the visit of President William McKinley. On an embankment in front of the Victorian flower conservatory in Golden Gate Park, gardeners planted a tapestry of poppies and pansies spelling out “California’s Welcome to Our President,” flanked by an American eagle and a California grizzly bear. Miles of bunting and millions of red-white-and-blue flags decked the parade route. Market Street was strung with electric bulbs and Chinese lanterns that shed a patriotic radiance, Asian-Pacific style.
The moment he got off the train, Blue inhaled the brine-scented fog, with undercurrents of beer and sewage he remembered from his first visit as a young assistant surgeon on quarantine duty in 1895. The city now had a few more electric lights and motorcars, but its raffish spirit was intact.
Indeed, San Franciscans were intoxicated with speed in the new century. The traditional Sunday carriage caravans through Golden Gate Park were now joined by two dozen rattletrap horseless carriages, tearing through town at fifteen miles an hour. But neither time nor technology had tamed the Barbary Coast, Blue found as he stepped off the train and into a tug-of-war over a corpse.
The corpse was that of a man named Mark Quan Wing. The Chinatown resident had been suffering from tuberculosis—on that, everyone agreed. But the knot of swollen glands under his armpit looked like bubonic plague. Could the two infections coexist? Joseph White demanded a test. Governor Gage’s state health board ridiculed him. “It seems to make no difference then if a Chinaman died with consumption,” huffed a doctor working for the state. “He has got to have buboe and clap, gallstones, appendicitis and everything else just to satisfy some people.”4
“It is an ugly state of affairs,” Joseph White brooded. The state earmarked $25,000 of its $100,000 plague fund for cleaning Chinatown. But so far the state doctors’ main job seemed to be disputing a plague diagnosis.
There was one bright spot, White reported. “Blue is coming out much stronger… than I had thought possible,” he wrote to Washington. “He has done some very good things through self-control and apparently imperturbable good nature.”5
In the midst of the wrangling, he remained unbruised. He didn’t engage the state board and the Chinese head-on. With a genial smile beneath his signature mustache, Blue gave all sides the impression that he saw their respective points. Joseph White had to admit that the unflattering gossip about Blue had been wrong.