Plague and Fire: Battling Black Death and the 1900 Burning of Honolulu's Chinatown (review)

On "a soft and balmy morning" in January 1900, weeks after bubonic plague had broken out in Honolulu, three doctors in control of the local Board of Health gave orders that inadvertently led to the burning of that city's Chinatown. "Next to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941," writes Mohr, "the Chinatown fire remains not only the worst civic disaster in Hawaiian history, but one of the worst disasters ever initiated in the name of public health by American medical officers anywhere" (p. 5).

Plague and Fire joins a long list of works, several of them quite recent, which examine the first plague epidemics in the United States at the dawn of the twentieth century. (See my review of Marilyn Chase, The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco, J. Hist. Med. All. Sci., 2004, 59, 463–70). It is of interest not only as a disaster story well told but also because Mohr answers some enduring questions about this episode, makes possible informative comparisons with the San Francisco outbreak that soon followed, and raises concerns that bear on current events.

The late-nineteenth-century pandemic of bubonic plague that originated in southern China reached Hawaii in 1899—possibly in June, certainly in December. Sanford B. Dole's Hawaiian Republic, under American control and hoping for Territorial status, ceded total control of its response to its Board of Health. That this delegation of authority came from a state with dubious legitimacy made it no less extraordinary. With the Republic's attorney general merely a nominal chairman and the federal health authorities standing on the sideline, nearly dictatorial powers were handed to physicians Nathaniel Emerson, Francis Day, and Clifford Wood. Not knowing the transmission vector of pestis, but believing it to be "preeminently a disease of locality and place" (p. 197), they pursued a dual policy of quarantining Chinatown—where most but not all of the deaths occurred—and burning any structure where a plague death had been verified. One of these "controlled burns" by the Honolulu Fire Department, under orders from the board, escaped their control and burned a fifth of Honolulu and the homes of 5,000 people. Astoundingly, not a single life was lost to the fire.

One of the enduring questions is whether it was the board's purpose to burn Chinatown, thereby driving out the Asian inhabitants. Mohr's careful sifting of evidence leads him to conclude that it was simply an accident, a fire whipped out of control by a freakish change of wind. "The most damning charge against them, that the Chinatown fire of January 20, 1900, was an intentional act, can be laid to rest" (p. 197). Mohr leaves open the intriguing and very real possibility that the white Board of Health might have eventually succumbed to the intense pressure to do something drastic and dramatic—to move beyond the selective burnings to a wholesale incineration of a place that was seen as infected.

Mohr eschews postcolonial deconstructions of the motives of the principal actors, relying instead on a voluminous record of what they said and did, pointing out wherever the two diverged. To his great credit, he has tried to listen to all the voices that could tell this story—not just to the white voices that crowd the public record, but to those of the Chinese, Japanese, and Hawaiians most adversely affected.

Comparisons with San Francisco are striking, in that events generating relatively few deaths figure so importantly in the histories of both cities. Honolulu's Chinatown was quite ethnically diverse, as 1,000 of the evacuees were Japanese and another 1,000 were Hawaiian. The Japanese, represented by a vigorous consul, responded differently to the outbreak and to the board than did the Chinese and Hawaiians. The Honolulu Chinese were less hostile to the health authorities than were the Chinese in San Francisco. This was due in part...