Unlike his predecessors, Mayor Edward Taylor wasted no time in alerting the president and asking for help. He telegraphed Theodore Roosevelt, requesting that the Public Health and Marine Hospital Service send officers to the city’s aid, pledging his cooperation and city funds to help them stop the outbreak.
President Roosevelt was savoring the end of summer at his estate on Oyster Bay, Long Island, when he got the telegram. On September 5, he wired Surgeon General Walter Wyman, ordering him to take action at once.6
The surgeon general telegraphed Mayor Taylor that he was putting his most experienced man in charge. “Passed Assistant Surgeon Blue,” he said, “will leave Washington tomorrow for San Francisco.”7
As Blue prepared to leave Virginia for San Francisco, Colby Rucker, the ablest of his junior officers and one of his closest friends, begged Blue to take him to San Francisco to join in the epidemic campaign. In a few days, Rucker received his orders, too, and set out for the Golden Gate with Annette and their young son.8
The public health service already had several men on the ground in San Francisco, preparing for their arrival. Among them was thirty-two-year-old bacteriologist Halstead Stansfield. Stansfield was a widower who had buried his wife and baby daughter the year before. Uncontrolled grief had deepened into melancholy, and he often drank himself numb. But still he roused himself to canvas the city for a plague laboratory and make it ready for the campaign.
As Blue’s train clattered across the continent, past the Mississippi River, the Rockies, the Great Salt Lake, and the Sierras, the plague toll grew at a steady pace. Each day of his journey, it claimed a different life in a different part of town: from a hotel clerk on Hyde Street to an unemployed man on Harrison in the area south of Market Street.
Plague was a different beast in 1907 from what it was in 1900. This time its attack was different. In 1900, it had focused on one small neighborhood. Now there were widespread multiple outbreaks, with cases cropping up all over town, from the waterfront in the northeast to the County Hospital in the southwest. In 1900, the plague seemed to target the Chinese. In 1907, it attacked San Franciscans of many races. Still, old myths died hard, said a local historian, Frank Morton Todd. “It was curious how hard these ideas were to dispel, even in the face of the evidence furnished by white men’s funerals.”9
The disease’s old target, Chinatown, seemed to be spared the onslaught—with one notable exception: the sixty-three-year-old president of the Chinese Six Companies. Chin Mon Way, a native of China, died suddenly, leaving his wife a widow and his trade organization leaderless. Word of his death touched off panic among the people who remembered the outbreak in 1900. They consulted the Chinese newspapers to ask if the epidemic had returned to their corner of the city. The Chinatown daily, Chung Sai Yat Po, reported Chin’s death but treated the plague diagnosis with skepticism. The deaths this time are concentrated among the Caucasians, the paper said. The Chinese were urged to remain calm.10
The following day, on September 12, Blue arrived in San Francisco just as plague took another life, that of a twenty-two-year-old Greek laborer on Green Street. By the time he reported for duty, the toll stood at twenty-five cases, thirteen deaths.
Blue saw a San Francisco still crippled but gamely limping back to life. Freshly sawn timber frames stood over the razed ruins. Stores hung impromptu banners over temporary headquarters. He felt the resolute buoyancy of the citizenry. But he also saw a city ripe for epidemic: Forty thousand earthquake refugees camped in sordid shacks, two-thirds of the city lacked sewerage, and many streets lay buckled and impassable.
In Union Square, charred shells of hotels ringed the bronze Victory statue, who still held her wreath and trident aloft as she had when Roosevelt dedicated her in 1903. Under her lithe figure, more nymph than battle goddess, Blue put down his suitcase at “the Little St. Francis,” a makeshift wooden hostelry with space for one hundred guests. The main Hotel St. Francis, despite its “fireproof” label, had been completely gutted by flames.11
Stansfield greeted Blue with bad news. Nobody wanted to rent space for the public health service headquarters and plague laboratory. Landlords were squeamish about a band of scientists sharing their tenancy with the germs of a deadly epidemic. Downtown remained shattered. The business center had migrated west of Van Ness to Fillmore Street. Office space—where it existed at all—was scarce. Moreover, the traveling lab gear that had been shipped express to San Francisco had been lost in transit.
Blue met the city health board at its temporary headquarters on O’Farrell and Scott Streets. He listened in silence as the board fretted that the mayor’s call for help would trigger a renewed quarantine. Bled by reconstruction costs, the city couldn’t afford another fiscal blow. Blue helped them draft a message to inform and to calm the citizens:
To the People of San Francisco:
Rumors of an alarming nature having reached the board of health in regard to bubonic plague, the president of the board, by its authority, hereby declares that there exists at present in San Francisco nothing that need cause any alarm, much less the quarantining of the city, and that there is at present no intention to make such quarantine.
So far there have been detected but 25 verified cases of the disease since the 27th day of May last. Every precaution is being taken by the federal authorities, in co-operation with the state and city boards of health to stamp out such of the disease as is here. It is well to bear in mind that the bubonic plague seldom becomes epidemic except in the tropics.12
The statement’s plague count was true. But its breezy tone concealed wishful thinking. Rupert Blue’s report to Surgeon General Wyman paints a picture at odds with his calming words to the citizens.
“Rats abound in large numbers in the whole city, particularly in the burned district, where conditions for their maintenance are ideal. The ruins and piles of building material, and the broken and choked sewers form excellent nesting places, while the warehouses and uncollected garbage furnish an unlimited food supply. In addition, the houses for the most part are unprotected against the ingress of rats and other vermin,” he wrote.
“The section in which the foci are most numerous contain the refugee camps which are built up in many places of shacks, and flea-infested cottages. The camps which are under the direction of the Relief Committee are in good sanitary condition, but they are in close proximity to the warehouses and broken sewers, which harbor large numbers of rats…. There are still many pit latrines in use…. The city is very dusty….
“The widespread area of the disease indicates that the campaign will be a long and expensive one, and the available City fund will be rapidly expended.”13
THE BOARD OF SUPERVISORS DUG deep and appropriated $25,000 from the dwindling city treasury to pay the plague expenses for September and pledged $20,000 a month after that. Blue said the public health service would place twelve medical men, and the city agreed to employ thirty-six sanitary inspectors. This was the seed of the corps.
After canvassing the city, the federal plague laboratory finally found a home in a two-story Victorian house at 401 Fillmore near Haight Street, rented from Mrs. M. M. Fitzgerald for $80 a month. Set on a ridge of middle-class frame houses, the plague laboratory hung out a sign and began hiring a motley crew of rat catchers and sanitary engineers. Jobless men flocked to apply. Under a plan devised by Japanese plague pioneer Kitasato, the city was divided into twelve plague districts, each under the direction of a public health service doctor to oversee the raw recruits.