The San Francisco Plague

The San Francisco Plague was one of the most troubling cases of the plague ever to affect the

United States, but what was it that prompted medical officials to act so air-headedly?

Welcome to today's video, where we'll be taking a look at the San Francisco Plague and all the

trouble it brought for the Californian population while it lasted. Don't forget to subscribe to our

channel and turn notifications on more videos like this one. We hope you enjoyed it, and we'll

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Also known as the Black Death, the Bubonic plague ravaged Europe and Asia for many centuries

until, in the twentieth century, it came to America somehow.

The events that unfolded in San Francisco from 1899 to 1901—still being researched and written

about more than a century later—represent one of the most infamous chapters in U.S. public

health history. Similar to how the covid-19 pandemic spread by innocent travelers who had no

idea that they were infected while they were, in the Summer of 1899, a ship sailing from Hong

Kong to San Francisco had two bubonic cases on board.

After a farewell dinner put on by Washington’s medical elite, Joseph James Kinyun arrived in

San Francisco to learn that this this same plague ship was bound from Honolulu. Although

Kinyoun found no plague on board, two similar scares followed within the next few weeks. The

second of these prompted California and the federal government to take action fast. Kinyoun

eventually learned that the plague had broken out in Honolulu, making it also inevitable that

infected ships would soon arrive in San Francisco.

Apparently, no passengers were ill when the ship reached San Francisco, but it was to be

quarantined on Angel Island. Once the boat was searched, 11 stowaways were found. Strangely

enough, two of those were missing the next day. Some bodies were found in the Bay and an

autopsy showed that they were infected by plague bacilli.

Bad news for the public, who was morbidly scared of the possible outcome knowing how a big

part of the Eurasian population had been wiped out by the merciless black death.

However, there wasn't any immediate outbreak of the disease until nine months had passed.

In the meantime, Kinyoun had to handle two smallpox epidemics in U.S. Army troops returned

from Manila, suffer four recurrent episodes of appendicitis, and also inspect hundreds of the

incoming Asian immigrants for their diseases and deformities, even making a difficult decision

about one potential Japanese immigrant with a severe hand deformity. Kinyoun overlooked the

man's otherwise excludable condition and authorized his immigration. The man in question,

Hideyo Noguchi, not only became Kinyoun's friend and an acclaimed microbiologist, but

could've even won the Nobel Prize had he not died early due to his research elucidating cases of

syphilis.

In 1894, two research physicians had identified the bacillus that caused the bubonic plague, but

little was known about the transmission, treatment, or prevention methods. It was even labeled a

racial disease that people of European ancestry were immune to, because European expatriates in

colonial India and Hong Kong rarely caught diseases that ravaged the deprived, crowded

communities outside their compounds.

People in different parts of the world were credited with the discovery, depending on which

journals they had read. Scientists theorized that the germ infected humans through food or open
wounds. However, despite not having enough, information on the plague to know how exactly

people got infected, health officials didn’t stop there until they found more information regarding

possible cases.

On March 6, 1900, a city health officer autopsied a deceased Chinese man, finding organisms in

the body that heavily resembled the plague. Things got so tense that they even began running

carbolic acid through Chinatown sewers, which ironically, actually spread the disease faster

because it flushed out rats that inhabited the sewers. In San Francisco, however, political issues

had gone against scientific efforts. Anti-Chinese feeling prompted the authorities to quarantine

Chinatown first, and though they objected, the business community did the same.

One of the few public health officials capable to provide with a diagnosis for the plague had

arrived in San Francisco not long beforehand. His name was Joseph Kinyoun, a veteran of the

federal Marine Hospital Service in Washington D.C.

Kinyoun's tests on samples confirmed the plague's presence, though political and popular

pressure had already prompted the local Board of Health to lift the quarantine. From that point

on, Kinyoun was warring with more than the bacillus:

medical authorities, politicians, the press, and the quarantine-averse public resisted his efforts.

Kinyoun was hampered, too, by intellectual arrogance.

The hostility to science and its measures also prompted quite a lot of trouble. For example,

Louisiana and Texas had threatened a state border closure, while California governor Henry

Gage was concerned that other states would suspect a problem with his state's annual $25 million

fruit harvest, disparaging a plague fake in a letter to US secretary of state John Hay and issued

threats to anyone publishing on it.

When dawn came on March 7, 1900, Chinatown was circled by rope and surrounded by

policemen preventing egress or access to anyone but Whites. The 12-block area was surrounded

by four streets: Broadway, Kearney, California and Stockton.

The widespread racism expressed towards Chinese immigrants did not help matters at the time of

the Chinatown plague, with standard social rights and privileges being mostly denied to the

Chinese people. Even landlords would refuse to maintain their own property when renting to

Chinese immigrants. Most of the Chinatown community's living conditions reflected the social

norms and racial inequalities during that time for Chinese people. Things got so heated up that

discrimination for the Chinese Americans prompted two acts to be published: the quarantine of

San Francisco's Chinatown, and the permanent extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Chinese immigrants were seen as disease carriers without them even having actual evidence of

Bubonic plague.

Because San Francisco's measures were discriminatory and segregatory, allowing European

americans to leave the affected area due to their perceived immunity but prompting Chinese and

Japanese americans to possess a health certificate to leave the city, wide misinformation and

mass hysteria were commonplace during the time.

And that's not even speaking of the widespread dissent among those who had jobs outside of San

Francisco, as they were prevented from working. Few Chinese agreed to take the inoculation,

especially after press reports on May 22, 1900, that people who did agree were experiencing

severe pain from the untested vaccine. On May 24, 1900 with the help of Chinese Six

Companies, they hired the law firm of Reddy, Campbell, and Metson. Defendants included

Joseph J. Kinyoun and all of the members of the San Francisco Board of Health. The Chinese

wanted the courts to issue a provisional injunction to enforce what they argued was their

constitutional right to travel outside of San Francisco.

The plague outbreak continued to worsen between 1901 and 1902, with a 1901 address to both

houses of the California State Legislature, and Gage accusing federal authorities, particularly

Kinyoun, of injecting plague bacteria in to cadavers, falsifying evidence of their infection.

For many upper and middle-class white San Franciscans, the first sign something was wrong in

Chinatown on March 7, 1900, were their empty kitchens.

Kinyoun infected a few guinea pigs and a monkey. A few days after the Call definitively

declared it a "plague scare," all the animals died.

San Francisco Mayor James Phelan ordered 100 doctors to make a sweep of Chinatown,

knocking on every door and identifying every possible plague case. It sent terror through the

Chinese community, which was fearful of what'd would happen if a plague victim was found in

their homes. Given that just a couple months, 4,000 homes were burned to the ground in

Honolulu's Chinatown during a plague outbreak.

In April 1901, Texas's governor declared he would cut off all trade with California if they didn't

prove they'd handled their obvious plague epidemic. We have "little confidence in the California
authorities," he said. In the absence of proof, he considered the state's silence on the matter to be

evidence enough that things were bad in San Francisco.

Kinyoun was eventually denied vindication after his defamation campaign and was promptly

sent to Michigan to be replaced by Rupert Blue.

The state governments of Colorado, Texas and Louisiana imposed quarantines of California by

1902. As the 1902 general elections approached, members of the Southern Pacific Board and the

Railroad Republican faction saw Gage as an embarrassment to state Republicans because of his

haphazard and hare-brained measures to deny the plague outbreak to protect the state's economy,

which were quickly proven incorrect by federal agencies and newspapers. In his place, former

Mayor of Oakland George Pardee, a German-trained medical physician, received the nomination.

Pardee's nomination was largely a compromise between the Railroad Republican factions. Even

in his final speech, Gage continued to deny the outbreak.

Railroad barons were very irritated at this situation, demanding state officials to do something

about it. This prompted California to clean up Chinatown. Unsafe and unsanitary buildings were

also demolished and rebuilt, rats were killed, rotting floors were replaced and the epidemic was

temporarily halted. However, when the plague cropped back up in 1907, it was found among

some white residents both in Oakland and San Francisco, with officials jumping into action

immediately and spending $2 million to trap and kill rats, just over $55 million today.

The second wave happened because, in 1906, an earthquake of record proportions devastated

San Francisco. The ruin of the city's buildings made not just people, but rats, homeless. The

subsequent year or two of living in refugee camps while rebuilding was highly conducive to rat

and flea infestations. In 1907, cases of plague were reported. But with hindsight on the last
epidemic and new knowledge from research, officials launched a new kind of campaign. They

offered a bounty on rats. A similar rat-catching campaign had been used successfully to fight

plague in New Orleans. It worked as well in San Francisco, and though this second epidemic was

stronger than the first, it was brought to halt in 1909.

It wasn't until November 1908 when San Francisco was finally declared plague-free, prompting

Blue to become surgeon-general. However, the disease had somehow crossed into the wild

squirrel population, prompting an average of seven people a year, most of them hikers, to

become infected in the United States and treated with antibiotics.

Sadly, Dr. Kinyoun’s career never recovered. But his earlier accomplishments in bringing first-

class research to the health sciences field were not forgotten. In a 2012 paper, two researchers

praised a man they called “the forgotten forefather” who helped birth the National Institutes of

Health. His only apparent 'mistake' was being honest about the plague's reality with good

intentions at heart, and not attempting to suppress it for political or economical gain. Even with

new plague cases appearing in the state, Governor Gage refused to admit the existence of plague.

So, what are your thoughts on all the trouble caused by the San Francisco Plague? Let us know

in the comments below!

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