Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation

7. The Road to Henryton and the Ends of Progressivism

And then Rastus said, ‘‘Why, Sambo, good Gawd, you done covered the whole ground.’’ (Laughter and applause) —‘‘Address of Health Commissioner John D. Blake,’’ May 1916 π t h e r o a d t o h e n r y t o n a n d t h e e n d s o f p r o g r e ss i v i s m 170 The Road to Henryton T he punch line to Baltimore Health Commissioner John Blake’s opening joke was the apocryphal remark made when a white gentleman offered to pay Rastus and Sambo five dollars each if they could name the ‘‘two best things in life.’’ With little contemplation, Sambo started off, saying, ‘‘I think the best thing in the world is a nice, fat, juicy, prepared ‘possum, cooked nice and well done, with fine cornbread. That is the first best thing I can think of in this world, and the next best thing is a nice, juicy watermillion.’’ Evidently stumped for further answers, Rastus threw up his hands and declared, ‘‘Why, Sambo, good Gawd, you done covered the whole ground.’’ Commissioner Blake, likening himself to Rastus, was expressing his own speechlessness and faux chagrin at having been scheduled to speak after Lewellys Barker, an eminent physician, eugenics proponent, and Johns Hopkins University professor of medicine. Before a rapt audience composed largely of physicians, public health professionals, and other city and state civil servants, Barker had delivered an address on the tensions inherent in the coexistence of democratic government, technical specialization, and public virtue. ‘‘Democracy,’’ distrustful of a hierarchy of specialization and expertise , Barker lamented, ‘‘wishes to do everything itself,’’ even to the point of a ‘‘cult of incompetence.’’ Although democracy was a desirable form of government, ‘‘competence (technical, intellectual and moral)’’ must be allowed a place of importance, ‘‘even if, in doing so, the sovereignty of the people should be limited and the principle of equality should be somewhat abridged thereby.’’∞ What constituted rationally organized and efficient society and to what degree citizens should be left out of the planning process, of course, was a matter of debate. Not the least vocal dissenters were representatives of those groups against whom this logic was aimed. Referring to the tuberculosis problem only a year earlier, the president of the National Medical Association noted that even in this time of great progress, ‘‘few men realize what elements,’’ including security of health, ‘‘are essential to the real permanent growth of a great democratic government.’’≤ Had any blacks been present in Barker’s audience, they might have observed that his paean to progressive rationality eclipsed the fact that in 1916 the ‘‘whole ground’’ of public health had not been covered. In testament to the expertise and wisdom of Baltimore ’s technocrats, Barker had cited the city’s growing system of parks, sewerage system, urban and suburban development, and current plans for a clean drinking water supply, accomplishments that benefited some more than others. The city’s parks were in fact a technical feat, but because land The Road to Henryton 171 development had largely followed the dictates of the city’s business elite, they had been placed strategically and at public cost in places where they would be most available and attractive to the city’s whites. A modern sewerage system was a long time in the making, and that portion of the city’s population that by 1916 had begun to enjoy adequate drainage breathed a sigh of relief when it was finally accomplished. Yet hundreds of homes, particularly those in the alley districts, remained without indoor plumbing or connection to the system. White Baltimoreans could point to newly paved streets and to the state’s system of tuberculosis sanatoriums erected for their benefit. Meanwhile, streets and alleys laid with cobblestone in the early or mid–nineteenth century remained unpaved in the same poor black neighborhoods in which resided people who found themselves unable to avail themselves of many of the benefits of an expanding health care system. The more-than-ten-year campaign that culminated in the opening of Henryton State Sanatorium for Colored Consumptives in 1923 reflected health officials’ shifting of the ground on which control of black tuberculosis would be debated and their perception of the modest gains in tuberculosis control as failure. By 1910, Baltimore movement increasingly used the language of racial utilitarianism, turning...