“Conditions are not improving as rapidly as I would like them to…. There can be no doubt that the city is infected from one end to the other,” he said. He felt his campaign was at a crossroads: Rid the city of rats by winter’s end or face “an outbreak of unprecedented proportions.”13
But despite the months of strenuous rat work, eradication seemed as far off as ever. In the war room of his headquarters on Fillmore Street, Rupert Blue paged through medical journals for clues to the plague’s next move. In Manila, when just 2 percent of rats became infected, it ignited an explosive epidemic among the populace. Among San Francisco’s rats, his tests showed that the infection rate was 1.5 percent and rising.
His mission was to exterminate all the rats before the infection rate in San Francisco reached this trigger point. He seized worksheets for the week ended January 11, 1908, and ticked off the figures: 352,000 bits of poisoned bait placed, and thousands of rats collected from traps and the bounty program. He was disheartened to see that the rats’ infection rate had tripled since the fall.
They would have to work harder. Spring was coming on fast. They had little time before new litters of baby rats and hungry hatchling fleas would emerge, ensuring that plague would bloom again.
The logjam in the lab was intolerable, Blue decided. It was moving too slowly; they were testing just one-third of the burgeoning daily rat catch. It was simple: Stansfield must speed up.
Pushing past the glass doors, Blue entered the lab in search of his bacteriologist. There amid the vials and flasks, bathed in the yeasty smell of his bacteria broth, sat Halstead Stansfield. Blue found it hard to choke back his impatience. The lab was falling behind; it needed to run more tests. “I need a trained assistant,” Stansfield replied wearily. Blue replied he’d already asked the surgeon general; the request had been vetoed on budgetary grounds.
Instead of soldiering on, Stansfield was giving up and giving in to his demons. Chronically melancholy, soured by hangover, he’d erupt in a rage when his fellow officers tried to buck him up. Stansfield was still grieving over the deaths of his wife and child. Blue was sorry for his loss, but he had an epidemic to fight.
As if work weren’t troubled enough, an unforeseen accident almost derailed the rat eradication campaign. It was bound to happen in a town as studded with rat bait as a panettone is with raisins. Three children at play spied what looked like a picnic in a French wire basket. Morsels of bread and cheese were buttered with a puree they did not recognize. The children bit into the purloined snack and instantly regretted it.
It was laced with Stearns’ Electric Rat and Roach Paste, containing phosphorous poison, which burns the mucous membranes and leaves a searing trail down one’s throat and stomach. Though wretchedly sick, the children survived. Had they died, the campaign might have died with them.
Blue ordered a ban on phosphorous poison. It was simply too dangerous to use in a densely populated city. The campaign would switch to Danysz virus, the germ that was fatal to rodents but harmless to people. Blue instructed the laboratory at 401 Fillmore to brew up extra-strength batches of the stuff at once.
Once again, Stansfield balked. He now spent days at a time away from his lodgings at the Majestic Hotel. Drowning his grief in alcohol, he was deaf to the pleas of his fellow officers. The lab work languished. Blue had no choice but to ask that Washington replace Stansfield. “I have no hope of a change in him. I have exhausted patience in reasoning with him,” Blue wrote to Assistant Surgeon General Glennan. “The work and the campaign have become so exacting that I scarcely have time to eat and sleep properly, I simply cannot have a controversy with an officer at this time.”14
But Colby Rucker was performing admirably as Blue’s right-hand man. Installed in a modest residential hotel with his wife, Annette, and young son, Colby, he played dominoes and entertained his family with a player piano at night. By day, he and Blue each gave half a dozen speeches to trade and civic groups, schools and clubs. Slowly, the two began to win popular support.
But Blue needed more than public approval. He also needed muscle and money from the city’s business elite. So he urged the state medical society to invite six hundred of the city’s civic, commercial, and professional leaders to a summit on the health crisis. A mass meeting planned for January 18 would galvanize the public, Blue was certain. But when the day came, it was a huge letdown.
Only sixty people showed up. The handful of physicians and public-spirited laymen looked lost in the vast hall. Despite the meager showing, those who attended resolved to grab the public by the lapels and draft civilians as active-duty soldiers in the war on rats. Mayor Taylor appointed a citizens’ committee of twenty-five, led by Bank of California president Homer S. King and Chamber of Commerce president C. C. Moore. They formed the core of the Citizens’ Health Committee, San Francisco’s first grassroots army dedicated to fighting plague. The committee cranked out thousands of handbills. It issued a civic call to arms—summoning every profession, trade, church, temple, lodge, and ladies’ club to rally for San Francisco’s survival.
On January 28, hundreds of men in bowlers and fedoras came by buggy, cable car, and automobile to the granite-pillared Merchants’ Exchange. The steel-framed neoclassical tower, designed by Willis Polk and Daniel Burnham, architect of New York City’s Flatiron Building, had weathered the 1906 earthquake to become a symbol of survival. Its fifteenth floor held a cavernous mahogany ballroom and a curved bar as big as a whale where deal makers drank. On the exchange floor, Blue in uniform was flanked by Governor Gillett and Mayor Taylor.
No new human plague cases had developed in the last three weeks, Blue told them. But it was just a winter intermission. Rat infection levels had tripled since the fall. Without total eradication, the warm weather would rekindle the epidemic. If it flared as it did in the Orient, San Francisco would face massive mortality, quarantine, and economic ruin.
“Unless we obtain the support of the people,” Blue said, “the task is hopeless.” An optimist by nature, Blue had never uttered this word in public. Hopeless. He saw the effect on his listeners’ faces; he was not displeased.15
There was another incentive, too. President Theodore Roosevelt was sending the Great White Fleet west, and it was due to arrive in San Francisco the first week in May. The flotilla of sixteen gleaming white-and-gold battleships of the Atlantic Fleet, with sixteen thousand sailors aboard, was circumnavigating the globe in a display of national pride and military might. The fleet gave San Francisco a chance to revel in patriotism and advertise its strategic advantages as a commercial and military port. It would show the world that, after earthquake and fire, the city of iron and gold was back. Its visit would boost business and real estate values. Even now, reception committees were wiring huge “Welcome” signs with strands of sparkling lights to gleam from every hilltop down to the bay. The pulses of hotel keepers, restaurateurs, and saloon owners quickened at the thought of so many visitors.
But to this city aquiver with anticipation, Blue delivered a sober warning: Admiral Robley D. Evans, commanding officer of the Atlantic Fleet, would ask about health conditions before landing. If the city couldn’t guarantee it was plague-free, there would be trouble.16 The fleet would be diverted to Seattle.
“Gentlemen, Admiral Evans is now en voyage to San Francisco with the fleet,” he said. “When his ship anchors, the first thing he will do will be to send his senior medical officer to me to ask if it will be safe to land his officers and men. I very much hope that I can give you a clean bill of health so that he will not have to go up to Seattle without accepting the wonderful hospitality which you are preparing for him.”