THE PIED PIPER
1. San Francisco Call, January 5, 1908, as cited in Guenter B. Risse, “ ‘A Long Pull, a Strong Pull, and All Together’: San Francisco and Bubonic Plague, 1907–1908,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 66 (Spring 1992): 274.
2. Frank Morton Todd, Eradicating Plague from San Francisco: A Report of the Citizens’ Health Committee and an Account of Its Work (San Francisco: C. A. Murdock & Co., 1909), p. 9.
3. Ibid., p. 183.
4. “Buffalo Bill in a Moment of Confidence,” Wasp 60, no. 17 (October 24, 1908): 7.
5. “Clean Bill of Health Given San Francisco: Surgeon General Wyman Reports Pacific States Free from Plague,” San Francisco Call, November 27, 1908, p. 3, col. 4. (Actually, the headline was misleading, for the city was clean, but plague was migrating east into the countryside.)
6. Rupert Blue, Letter to Kate Lilly Blue, January 20, 1909. Collection of J. Michael Hughes.
7. Details of the fete, covered like a White House dinner, drawn from “Brilliant Banquet in Dr. Blue’s Honor,” San Francisco Call, April 1, 1909, p. 3, col. 1. See also “Homage Paid to Dr. Blue at Big Banquet,” San Francisco Examiner, April 1, 1909, p. 3, col. 1.
8. Rupert Blue, Letter to General Walter Wyman, February 17, 1909, National Archives and Records Administration, Records Group 90, Central File 1897–1923, Box 620, Folder 5608, File 1 of 3.
9. William Colby Rucker, “Under the Yellow Flag: Reminiscences of a Sanitarian,” unpublished autobiography, courtesy of his grandson Colby Buxton Rucker, p. 130 (inserts numbered 2–5).
10. W. C. Rucker, Letter to Surgeon Rupert Blue, August 12, 1909, NARA, Records Group 90, Central File 1897–1923, Box 626, Folder: Rucker.
11. Rucker, “Under the Yellow Flag,” p. 129. Discussing his desperate attempts to guard his son from his wife’s tuberculosis by taking him on the road, Rucker wrote: “I thought it better to expose him to this fatigue than to run the chance of picking up his mother’s infection. It was a hard summer physically, but mentally it was undiluted anguish. There were periods of [Annette’s] improvement followed by greater retrogressions.”
12. Rupert Blue, Letter to Surgeon General Wyman, with map of squirrel plague signed “WCR,” November 8, 1909, NARA, Records Group 90, Central File 1897–1923, Box 637, Folder: 1899–1909, Surgeon General.
13. Rucker “Under the Yellow Flag,” p. 130.
14. Ibid., p. 157. Rucker’s tireless campaigning for Blue is also recounted in Bess Furman, A Profile of the United States Public Health Service, 1798–1948 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1973), p. 283. There’s a cryptic note in her notebooks, on file at the National Library of Medicine, suggesting that Rucker even lobbied on the golf green with President Taft.
15. “Dr. Blue Assured of Wyman’s Job,” San Francisco Call, January 5, 1912.
16. Rupert Blue, Letter to Miss Kate Blue, December 20, 1911. Collection of J. Michael Hughes.
17. Furman, A Profile of the United States Public Health Service, p. 283.
18. Rupert Blue, Letter to the Attorney General, August 27, 1912, Papers of William Howard Taft, Letters, U.S. Library of Congress, Sect. 6(20), Reel 357.
19. Rupert Blue, Letter to Sallie Blue John, December 31, 1912. Collection of J. Michael Hughes.
20. “Health of Public Is Public Utility,” Washington Star, December 11, 1913, p. 16, col. 1.
21. Ronald L. Numbers, Almost Persuaded: American Physicians and Compulsory Health Insurance, 1912–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 52–63.
22. Rupert Blue, Letter to Henriet Blue, August 25, 1914. Collection of J. Michael Hughes.
23. Ralph Chester Williams, The United States Public Health Service, 1798–1950 (Washington, D.C.: Commissioned Officers Association of the United States Public Health Service, 1951), p. 548.
24. Rupert Blue, Letter to Joseph P. Tumulty, Secretary to the President, February 26, 1919, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, U.S. Library of Congress, Sect. 4, No. 80, Reel 200.
25. Furman, A Profile of the United States Public Health Service, pp. 332–335. Furman further suggests that the official charged with appointing Blue’s replacement, Treasury Secretary Carter Glass, was himself aspiring to fill a vacant U.S. Senate seat from Virginia and so was influenced in his choice of Cumming, a Virginian, to succeed Blue. Glass subsequently got the Senate appointment.
26. Rupert Blue, Letter to Kate Lilly Blue, June 12, 1923. Collection of J. Michael Hughes.
27. Rucker Diary, March 28, 1924.
28. Colby Buxton Rucker, personal communication.
29. John Stuart Blue, Letter to Kate Lilly Blue, November 6, 1942, Blue Family Papers, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, S.C.
30. Personnel Files of Rupert Blue, on file in Rockville, Md., obtained through assistance of Dr. John Parascandola, historian of the U.S. Public Health Service, and through the filing of a Freedom of Information Act request. See also obituary in The Washington Post, “Lillian Latour, 94, Widow of Envoy,” June 13, 1977, p. C6. Special thanks to Mary C. Kartman for additional research on Mme. Latour.
31. “Dr. Rupert Blue Laid to Rest,” Marion Star, editorial page, April 19, 1948.
EPILOGUE
1. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, American National Biography, vol. 12 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
2. Guenter Risse, “ ‘A Long Pull, a Strong Pull, and All Together’: San Francisco and Bubonic Plague, 1907–1908,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 66 (Spring 1992): 284–285.
3. Ibid., p. 278. Risse notes that Blue was a “superb politician” with superior PR sense who “spoke softly while brandishing a powerful stick.” But when asked in a 2000 interview how Blue, a southerner born and bred, had managed to finesse the racial politics of San Francisco, Elizabeth McIntyre, one of the Marion, South Carolina, senior social observers and a friend of the Blue family, took a different view. “Why,” Miss McIntyre replied sweetly, “he had a southern mother.”
4. David T. Dennis, Kenneth L. Gage, et al., Plague Manuaclass="underline" Epidemiology, Distribution, Surveillance and Control (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1999), p. 15. Global case and death reports from 1954 to 1997, and countries with annual plague cases are from the WHO Web site, at www.who.org.
5. Kenneth L. Gage, David T. Dennis, et al., “Cases of Cat-Associated Plague in the Western U.S., 1977–1998,” Clinical Infectious Diseases 30, no. 6 (June 2000): 893–900.
6. Matt Mygatt, “Woman Contracts Plague After Finding ‘Wobbly Mice,’ ” Associated Press Newswires, January 26, 2000.
7. Kenneth Gage, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Fort Collins, Colo., interview with the author, August 24, 2000, by telephone.
8. Interview with bioweapons expert William C. Patrick, former chief of product division, U.S. Army, Fort Detrick, MD, on August 29, 2002.
9. Charles T. Gregg, Plague: An Ancient Disease in the Twentieth Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985), pp. 211–213. See also R. W. Burmeister et al., “Laboratory-Acquired Pneumonic Plague,” Annals of Internal Medicine 56, no. 5 (May 1962): 789–800. See also personal communication, Phil Luton, Centre for Applied Microbiology and Research, U.K. Department of Health. Note that the American death occurred while the United States was still actively studying biological weapons, but the British death occurred after the United Kingdom had abandoned its offensive chemical and biological weapons program.