Report on San Francisco Chinatown Bubonic Plague, 1900-1904 and Rules for Chinese Laborers

    San Francisco Chinatown, from its beginnings in the early to mid-19th century, was a small area with unhealthy, filthy, and crowded conditions which received few sanitation services from the city government. Not surprisingly, it was at high risk for contagious and other diseases. 

    In 1900, a Chinese died of bubonic plague and in the next years, two more Chinese suffered the same fate. Chinese, already targets of racial antagonism became "medical scapegoats by the last quarter of the century. Chinatown was quarantined and there was talk of razing all the buildings and moving the Chinese to a different part of the city.

    The federal government became involved over the possibility that the plague might spread beyond San Francisco.  The first annual report on the nation's health status, the Surgeon General's Report, published in 1902,  focused on contagious diseases such as leprosy and bubonic plague that were often viewed as associated with the Chinese.

 

The listing of topics related to Chinese was covered at length as the modified Table of Contents shows.

Considerable space focused on the distinction between merchants and laborers since the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act allowed merchants, but not laborers, the right to enter the U.S. The document states in no uncertain terms that laundrymen were laborers, and not merchants.

Insofar as by 1902, the year of this report, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of Chinese who worked in laundries, several puzzles arise.  How did the Chinese become laundrymen if they were classified as laborers, ineligible for admission to the U.S.  Perhaps some were born here and could not be 'denied entry' for being laborers. Perhaps others were paper sons. As such, they were eligible to enter and work in laundries established before the 1882 law denying entry to laborers.

 

The document also devoted much detail to Certificates of Registration imposed by the Geary Act of 1892, describing the conditions for obtaining and presenting them when traveling out of the U.S.

Other topics included the prohibition of Chinese employed on ships to go on shore while their ships were docked in U.S. ports.

Laborers returning with documentation to reenter the U.S. could not bring their wives because of their laborer status.

The heights of laborers should be measured with their shoes removed.