As Colby Rucker remembered it, “The silence was broken only by the busy click of business men’s brains and in a moment all were busily scrambling for a seat on the sanitary bandwagon.”17 All at once, the business leaders had a goal and a deadline. They had three months to spruce up for the fleet or face cancellation of the most magnificent military pageant in city history. They hurled themselves into a frenzy of civic hygiene. They began to organize all the city’s trades to hold meetings for their members. Corporate angels and individual donors heeded the call for funds to support the Citizens’ Health Committee—including some donors who had been reluctant to recognize plague in the earlier outbreak. The city’s commercial elite climbed aboard: Levi Strauss & Co., Southern Pacific Railroad, Wells Fargo & Co., Ghirardelli & Co., and the St. Francis and Fairmont Hotels. From utilities to railroads, banks to brewers, jeans makers to chocolatiers, they resolved to raise half a million dollars.18
Blue’s next target was Butchertown. Every steak and chop, ham and sausage, came from the cattle yards, hog pens, and slaughterhouses set on the bay shore near Islais Creek channel. Butchertown was set far from the city center, so diners couldn’t hear the bawling of doomed cattle or see the swill trough that produced their Sunday roast.
Butchertown’s waterfront setting had long saved slaughterhouses the trouble and expense of incineration and scavenger services. Garbage was simply dumped at the water’s edge and borne away by the tides. The cluster of wood warehouses and shacks stood on piers over the mud flats. As the tide rose, the bay rushed in under the shacks to sweep away the offal. At low tide, it was a groaning board; at high tide, it was a floating banquet for rats who swam up to dine.
“I’ll never forget rowing down Islais Creek, and seeking the great, big, fat rats coming down at low tide to feed to the beach… millions of them,” said one eyewitness, University of California physician Robert Langley Porter.19
Blue went to inspect Butchertown, his boots clumping along boardwalks rusty with oxidized blood. He sent men to document the innumerable sanitary violations. They didn’t know where to start. Vats of viscera, barrels of intestines, stood waiting to be turned into sausage casings. Carcasses were dragged across soggy planks before being carved up and dressed for sale. Through gaps in the killing room floors, scraps fell to the marshland below. The rats fought fiercely over the spoils.
Blue was a plantation lad, reared in the country, steeped in the rural realities of farm life, so he was not squeamish. But what he saw in Butchertown was so foul that he judged his report unfit for public print—unless the butchers refused to cooperate. In that case, he would release the unsavory details to the newspapers, to be read by San Francisco shoppers and diners. Blue promised to withhold his exposé from the public only if the butchers cleaned house.
The city board of health launched hearings on Butchertown and its pork annex, Hogtown.20 Some of the butchers tried to placate the federal doctors by staging a theatrical cleanup. Before a crowd of invited reporters, the butchers unleashed a gang of boys to beat on their wooden walls with sticks, driving gray herds of rats out into the open, where men poured boiling water on the animals. It was a grotesque show.
J. Nonnenman protested that his eponymous slaughterhouse was as clean as any and the victim of a city scheme to drive him out of business. Another competitor tried humor: His rats were the healthiest in the world, he said. The butchers’ defense failed. Six slaughterhouses, several slovenly stables, and an incinerator were all condemned.21
Hearst’s Examiner broke unwelcome news: Two percent of rats were now infected—clearly in the danger zone. “If the human population of the city were infected in the same proportion,” the paper said, “there would today be 8,000 cases in San Francisco.” It chided tight businessmen who groused about giving a few hundred or a thousand dollars to the plague campaign. The alternative, one month of quarantine, would cost over $20 million. “It’s a question of our pockets, and perhaps our lives,” the paper said.22
From the meat markets, Blue turned to the task of cleaning rats from the city’s five thousand stables and countless chicken yards. In the early 1900s, San Franciscan householders insisted on their right to raise eggs at home and stable their own steeds. But the coops and stables provided nests of hay and spilled grain for rats, so Blue ordered them destroyed or rebuilt in rat-proof concrete.
Next, greengrocers along Front Street came under scrutiny. Fruit sellers and vegetable dealers were complacent about tossing banana peels, rotten apples, and wilted produce in the street. The produce district, as a consequence, was second only to Butchertown as a rodent restaurant. One of the city’s largest markets yielded nine infected plague rats. When word got out about the discovery, women threatened to boycott the offending stores. Activists circulated “Don’t patronize” lists of the worst offenders.
Women’s clubs, enlisted by the Citizens’ Health Committee, urged their members to reform their shopping, cooking, and cleaning habits. Patronize pristine food stores only, they argued, and boycott butchers and grocers whose premises are rat havens. Yellow placards were nailed on facades that failed inspection—followed by court summonses if the scofflaws didn’t clean up.23
At the California Club on Clay Street, maidens and matrons in shirtwaists and smart hats listened as Colby Rucker gave a passionate sermon on the new religion of urban hygiene. Poison, trap, and starve them out was the new gospel. The federal plague officers won a host of female converts; the newspapers reveled in stories about the fair warriors in the plague fight.
“When you look in your garbage pails, ladies, think of me!” Colby Rucker said, deadpan.24 Muffled laughter erupted. Rucker’s speech took the starch out of science. He didn’t mind being their poster boy for garbage. Let them laugh, as long as they made their homes plague-free.
Blue was more grateful for Colby’s verbal panache than he ever could express to his face. “Dr. Rucker has been simply invaluable,” he wrote in a letter to Kate on March 11, 1908. “I address audiences because I am compelled to; Rucker does it for the love of the thing. We call him ‘garbage can Rucker’ because that is his hobby.”25
Rucker’s antic speeches, a great favorite with the women’s clubs, hid a tragic irony. While he was lecturing ladies on how to protect their families’ health, his own wife, Annette, was losing hers. She was racked by bouts of coughing—asthma, he thought. He hired buggies to drive her to Ocean Beach so she could fill her lungs with healing drafts of sea air. It helped a little, but her doctor remained worried.
Though public oratory was still a new taste in his mouth, Blue endeavored to remake himself into an ardent preacher for public health. At a noontime meeting of two thousand Southern Pacific freight handlers in the basement of the Flood Building, Rupert Blue led a revival meeting on vermin.
“I intend to kill a rat or two myself tonight, and I want all of you to do the same. It is the noblest work you can do,” he exhorted the men in a South Carolinian’s best imitation of Teddy Roosevelt.26 The rough and callused congregation grumbled skeptically at this doughty, drawling doctor. With his pomaded black hair, center part, and waxed mustache, he looked like a dandy in fatigues. But the railroad workers got the religion, especially after the city board of health boosted the bounty on rats from 10 cents to 25 cents for a male rat and 50 cents for a breeding female.