Plague and Fire: Battling Black Death and the 1900 Burning of Honolulu's Chinatown [Hardcover]

When the plague came to Kahului on Maui in 1900, the little port village was burned down without fuss, and the sickness was ended.

It was very different in Honolulu on the more populous (though still small) island of Oahu, where the disease arrived somewhat earlier. In "Plague and Fire," University of Oregon historian James Mohr has done a masterly job of sorting out a complicated situation.

The world was -- again -- in the grip of a pandemic in the late 1890s, and the disease hit Hawaii just in the middle of two extraordinary changes, one political, one scientific.

Hawaii had been annexed by the United States, although its Territorial government was not yet organized and the Republic government was still running things.

And scientific doctors were finally about to understand plague. The bacillus had been discovered five years earlier, though the vector, rat fleas, was not proven until around 1905.

People reacted to the outbreak of plague, as they always had, with fear, compassion and opportunism.

Three physicians, Nathaniel Emerson, Francis Day and Clifford Wood, were in a position to react as no one ever had before in the centuries of the Black Death. They were the effective members of the Honolulu Board of Health, and as adherents of the new bacteriological approach to epidemic disease, they felt confident they could eradicate the disease, not merely ameliorate its effects.

It was a brave opinion, as equally modern doctors were failing to do that in places like Hong Kong. Emerson, Day and Wood, however, were given dictatorial powers, and Hawaii's scientifically-minded president, Sanford Dole, insulated them, as much as possible, from political pressures.

For half a year, the doctors ran Honolulu, spending most of the money in the treasury, restricting civil liberties and destroying property.

Though Mohr does not say so, it probably was Honolulu's cosmopolitan conflicts that made success possible.

In Bombay or Hong Kong, scientific medicos were opposed by unified, antiscientific cultures.

In Honolulu, the up-to-date haole (white) doctors were supported by the Japanese doctors, also Western-trained. Emerson, Day and Wood were opposed by most Chinese doctors and by the older, unscientific generation of American and European physicians.

The plague started in Chinatown, a slum housing around 5,000 people, not all Chinese.

Public health measures had to take account of cultural differences. Chinese objected to cremating plague victims as a public health measure, Japanese did not, for example.

The residents of Chinatown had a well-founded suspicion of the motives of the white elites. There were plenty in each community who saw the plague as a commercial opportunity.

The burning of most of Chinatown was not the board's policy, which was to burn individual buildings where plague occurred.

As Mohr says, they might eventually have burned Chinatown lot by lot, but it was a fluke of weather that burned most of it in one day.

Though partly mistaken in its medical theory, the approach had the virtue of working. Deaths were limited to a few score.

Mohr has mined a large store of contemporary documents and, just as informative, the oral tradition of Chinatown that has been diligently recorded by a handful of local historians.

"Plague and Fire" reveals, in its intricacies, a great deal about what Hawaii was like as it entered its modern era; and something about how we came to behave as we do today.

On a single day in 1900, over 5,000 Honolulu residents--nearly all of them living in the Chinatown section--lost their homes and belongings in a fire that swept through the district and destroyed a number of landmarks (including the venerated Kaumakapili Church). Although health officials set the fire, they had meant to contain it to a small set of hovels that had been home to a recent victim of a plague epidemic. The winds shifted and the church steeple caught fire, acting as a torch and sprinkling embers throughout the entire neighborhood. Miraculously, not a single person died in the fire.

Following the debacle, the newly homeless residents were placed in quarantine camps for several weeks, until fears of plague had abated. For decades after, the Chinatown Fire entered Honolulu lore, and some residents never shed the belief that the conflagration had been deliberately set. And not without reason: many local leaders and white-run newspaper editorial boards had been urging that the entire neighborhood be leveled and burned to stem the fearful spread of plague. (In addition, despite native resistance, the white community was working to make the recently annexed Hawaii a territory of the United States.) Although James Mohr's valuable, readable, and well-researched book examines the racial, class, and imperial politics that fueled the debate over what to do about the plague epidemic, he ultimately exonerates the motives of the health authorities for setting the fire.

But he has a larger purpose than showing that the fire was merely a well-intended public policy gone awry. He describes how officials responded to the medical emergency of the plague and, more specifically, he details the unprecedented powers granted to a trio of doctors appointed to respond to the crisis. The doctors were given complete authority over police and governance functions, as well as the treasury, until four weeks after the last confirmed case of plague. From this narrative emerge three heroes: Nathaniel Emerson, Francis Day, and Clifford Wood, all graduates of American medical schools who had emigrated to Hawaii, who had served extensively as public health officers, who had little previous political experience, and who ruined their own health and nearly destroyed their careers by accepting the assignment.

Because of the efforts of this trio, Honolulu's Plague of 1900 was far less severe than it might have been otherwise. Mohr does not claim that their methods were perfect or that their motives were uninfluenced by prejudice; instead he concludes that, given their limited medical knowledge (particularly concerning how plague infection was communicated), their policies were remarkably humanitarian and effective. Furthermore, they stubbornly resisted the "racist desires of the Citizens' Sanitary Commission, of many white businessmen, and of the traditional physicians in their own medical community," and, under extraordinary strain, implemented measures that were, for their time, sensitive both to the needs of the poor who lived in the affected neighborhood and, later, to the well-being of the homeless who were placed in the quarantine camps. While stopping short of suggesting that emergency powers during health catastrophes might be surrendered to medical authorities, Mohr certainly makes the case that selfless, politically neutral professionals might be capable of responsible and responsive governance during times of crisis, particularly when such powers are granted with clearly defined limits.

The Boston Globe gave it a rave review (Nov. 18, 2004) and it's well deserved. Recommended reading for anyone interested in U.S. history, medicine, public health, or legal history. Travelling to Hawaii? Take this along and see a very different side of paradise!