ing worse than dengue was
permitted to go on the records. Later a Marine Hospital Service surgeon
was sent by the government to investigate and report on the Texas
situation. He told the truth as he found it and became exceedingly
unpopular. Lynching was one of the mildest things they were going to do
to him in Texas. And all this time, while Texas was strenuously claiming
freedom from the yellow plague, her emissaries were discovering cases in
New Orleans that the local authorities there had somehow carelessly
overlooked. The game of quarantine, as played by the health authorities
of the far Southern States, and played for money stakes, if you please,
is not an edifying spectacle in twentieth century civilization.

_Newspapers, Politicians, and the Bubonic Plague_

But if it is bad in the South, it is worse in the West. To-day
California is paying for her sins of eight years ago in suppressing
honest reports of bubonic plague, when she should have been suppressing
the plague itself. That the dreaded Asiatic pest maintains its foothold
there is due to the cowardice and dishonesty of the clique then in
power, which constituted a scandal unparalleled in our history, a
scandal that, with the present growing enlightenment, can never be
repeated.

Early in 1900 the first case of the present bubonic plague onset
appeared in San Francisco's Chinatown. I say "present" because I believe
it has never wholly died out in the last eight years. A conference of
the managing editors of the newspapers, known as the "midnight
meeting," was held, at which it was decided that no news should be
printed admitting the plague. The _Chronicle_ started by announcing
under big headlines: "Plague Fake Part of Plot to Plunder." "There Is No
Bubonic Plague in San Francisco." This was "in the interest of
business." Meantime the Chinese, aided by local politicians, were hiding
their sick. Out of the first 100 cases, I believe only three were
discovered otherwise than by the finding of the dead bodies. Sick
Chinamen were shipped away; venal doctors diagnosed the pest as "chicken
cholera," "septemia hemorrhagica," "diphtheria" and other known and
unknown ailments.

In May, 1900, came the blow that all San Francisco had dreaded: Texas
and New Orleans quarantined against the city, and business languished.
At this time two men were in control of the plague situation: Dr.
Williamson of the City Board of Health and Dr. J. J. Kinyoun of the
Marine Hosp