{"id":4903,"date":"2020-04-24T12:43:40","date_gmt":"2020-04-24T16:43:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.andrewlawler.com\/?p=4903"},"modified":"2024-12-21T12:07:54","modified_gmt":"2024-12-21T17:07:54","slug":"when-bubonic-plague-first-struck-america-officials-tried-to-cover-it-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.andrewlawler.com\/content\/when-bubonic-plague-first-struck-america-officials-tried-to-cover-it-up\/","title":{"rendered":"When bubonic plague first struck America, officials tried to cover it up"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1900, the dreaded Black Death showed up in California, setting off a two-year political firestorm.<\/h2>\n
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Rat dissections in the early twentieth century were key to tracking the spread of bubonic plague, since infected rodents were the primary carriers of the deadly bacteria.<\/p><\/div>\n

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On March 6, 1900, the body of a 41-year-old Chinese-American worker named Chick Gin was found in the basement of a hotel in San Francisco\u2019s Chinatown. While writing up the death certificate, a city doctor noticed strange nodules on the corpse. Tests at a municipal lab showed that the cause of death was the\u00a0dreaded bubonic plague<\/a>, the first case ever identified on American soil. The city\u2019s newly founded Board of Health immediately put Chinatown under a strict quarantine.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Over the next two years followed an extraordinary struggle between California officials who denied the existence of plague and federal scientists who fought to stop the growing epidemic. The resulting nationwide controversy drew in the president and nearly two dozen governors, and ultimately forced California\u2019s governor from office\u2014but not before a leading scientist was demonized and more than a hundred victims had died of the grisly disease.<\/p>\n

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\u201cApprehension that an epidemic might generate widespread furor, and cause severe economic consequences, encouraged the business interests to deny the truth,\u201d wrote the late Philip Kalisch, a University of Michigan historian who studied the event.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Black Death comes to America<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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What was called the\u00a0Black Death in medieval times<\/a>\u00a0was then raging across Asia. Millions had died, and U.S. public health officials had long feared that it could make its way across the Pacific to West Coast ports. The highly infectious disease,\u00a0typically carried by rodents<\/a>, was usually fatal.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But then, two days after Gin\u2019s body was found, the\u00a0San Francisco Chronicle<\/i>\u00a0published a front-page story with the headline, \u201cPlague Fake is Part of a Plot to Plunder.\u201d Local businessmen feared that news of a plague outbreak would ravage the economy, and they hotly disputed the claim by the city\u2019s Board of Health. Under their pressure, the city lifted the quarantine the next day. The newspaper celebrated the decision, complaining that it had caused \u201cvast injury to business.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Another local publication, the\u00a0Bulletin<\/i>, at the same time insisted that plague was, in any case, less dangerous than \u201cmeasles, mumps, or any of the common ills we know of.\u201d The newspaper added with alarm that news of the plague was diverting both tourists and cargo from the bustling port.<\/p>\n

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On March 11, a federal official named\u00a0Joseph Kinyoun<\/a>\u00a0confirmed that Gin had died of plague. Kinyoun led the port\u2019s Marine Health Service, the federal office responsible for dealing with disease threats that could enter through the nation\u2019s ports. A respected physician, he had helped found the U.S. Hygienic Laboratory that led to the National Institutes of Health.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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More deaths from plague followed. In May, Kinyoun warned the surgeon general that the outbreak was turning into an epidemic. \u201cI have to request the matter be brought to the attention of the President,\u201d the surgeon general wrote to his superior, the Secretary of the Treasury, on May 21. He asked that the president approve \u201csuch regulations as may be necessary to prevent the spread of this disease.\u201d (This is how some cities “flattened the curve” when the flu pandemic hit 18 years later.<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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President William McKinley agreed to the request that day. But the federal government was reluctant to take dramatic steps that might anger\u00a0California\u2019s Republican governor, Henry Gage<\/a>, and the state\u2019s powerful business community. Its actions were limited to re-imposing the quarantine on Chinatown while using armed patrols to halt movement of all Chinese into and out of the city.<\/p>\n

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San Francisco\u2019s supervisors continued to insist that there was no epidemic, only a few isolated cases that had been contained. And the Chinese community fought back against what its leaders saw as blatant discrimination. A court ordered the quarantine lifted on June 15, siding with a Chinese business association that claimed it was based on race rather than science. The judge also ruled that there was insufficient evidence to prove the plague\u2019s existence. Even the\u00a0Pacific Medical Journal<\/i>\u00a0denied there was an epidemic, claiming that the plague tests were faulty.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The stakes were high: Other nations were considering halting trade with California, and tourism was slumping. Newspapers like the\u00a0Chronicle<\/i>\u00a0continued to insist that claims of plague were part of a secret effort to undermine the city\u2019s economy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Kinyoun quickly became the prime target of the naysayers, despite his sterling credentials. He had studied with plague experts in Europe\u2014including one of the two men who discovered the bacillus that caused the disease\u2014and had been put in his position specifically to safeguard California from the expected arrival of plague. When he refused to accept bribes to falsify his data, he was mercilessly attacked in print as corrupt and incompetent, and even suspected of planting the bacillus on Gin\u2019s corpse.<\/p>\n

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Kinyoun continued to report to the surgeon general on the epidemic. In October, he noted three more individuals with plague. \u201cAll cases terminated fatally,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThe area of infection is gradually growing wider.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The following January, Governor Gage publicly castigated \u201cthe plague fakers\u201d and accused Kinyoun by name of giving a \u201cpost-mortem inoculation\u201d using \u201cimported plague bacilli.\u201d Such a crime, he added, was a felony with a punishment of life imprisonment. Kinyoun was later briefly arrested by state officials.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Other states get worried<\/b><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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A commission appointed that month by the Secretary of the Treasury to determine the truth about the plague prompted Gage to send an angry telegram to President McKinley insisting that the commission was an insult to the state of California. The president feared alienating Gage, so the treasury secretary responded that the panel\u2019s results would be kept secret. In exchange for this silence, Gage would conduct sanitary operations in Chinatown.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The panel found six new cases of plague, but the Marine Health Service was ordered by Washington not to mention plague. Kinyoun was ignominiously transferred to Detroit.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cDr. Kinyoun\u2019s offense was that he simply told the truth, and did not actively go to work to suppress it,\u201d concluded an editorial in the\u00a0Journal of the American Medical Association.<\/i>\u00a0Governor Gage continued to refuse to admit the existence of plague in his state, despite new cases reported to his office but which were not publicized.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The White House declined to put pressure on California, but other governors knew about the plague and feared the consequences of an epidemic sweeping the country. In January 1903, more than 20 state delegations met in Washington, D.C. to warn that they would quarantine California unless quick action was taken, and singled out Gage for criticism. He continued to blame Kinyoun and the federal government for creating a fake crisis.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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By then, however, Gage\u2019s obstruction had alienated even his own Republican Party. He was denied a second run at the governor\u2019s office. The new governor\u2014a medical doctor\u2014took more decisive steps, including a more thorough attack on the city\u2019s rat population. The last plague case in the epidemic was reported in early 1904. In the end, 121 cases were recorded, almost certainly a serious undercount, with only two surviving the illness.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Kinyoun\u2019s 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 \u201cthe forgotten forefather\u201d who helped birth the National Institutes of Health. One of the paper\u2019s co-authors was Anthony Fauci, now a leading member of President Trump\u2019s coronavirus task force.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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