Text/Li Guangdou
In the past struggles against the plague, the United States has accumulated rich experience, reflecting the responsibility of human empathy; but the United States also has a black history in the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases, and the plague outbreak in San Francisco in 1900 triggered a wave of Chinese exclusion throughout the United States. The Plague of San Francisco at the time eventually infected 280 people, 172 of whom died, the first plague to be confirmed in the United States in the history of infectious diseases in the United States.
The Black Death: A European Nightmare
The Black Death is a common name for plague, is a "fierce" infectious disease caused by plague bacillus, infected with plague patients, will be due to severe breathing difficulties and lack of oxygen, resulting in skin bleeding necrosis, and because the patient's skin will also appear purple-black, so people also call it "Black Death". In the United States at the beginning of the 20th century, the main immigrants came from Europe, and for the Black Death, they all had a memory fear derived from bone marrow and ethnic and cultural genes.
There have been three plague outbreaks in human history:
The first was in the 6th century BC (520-565), when the plague first appeared on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, when it broke out in Constantinople, the most populous city in the world, and with the widespread spread of many caravans and fleets from Asia, Africa and Europe, it is estimated that it will eventually take hundreds of millions of lives in Eurasia.
The second world plague pandemic had a greater impact on the course of european civilization as a whole. Between 1347 and 1353, the Great Plague of the Black Death swept across Europe, claiming 1/3 of Europe's total population and the lives of up to 25 million Europeans. The plague caused great social, economic and political changes in Europe. The Great Plague caused a great famine and thieves, and the prestige of the Catholic Church was hit very hard, which brought opportunities for the renaissance in the future.
The third plague pandemic first broke out in Yunnan, China, in 1855. As the scope of human global economic activity expanded, the plague became a global epidemic. It spread so fast and spread far beyond the previous two pandemics that it affected more than sixty countries in Asia, Europe, the Americas and Africa, killing more than 10 million people.
When it comes to the Black Death, Europeans and European immigrants in the United States, whether rich or poor, men, women and children, will have a tragic memory inheritance scene in their minds.
SAN FRANCISCO: The plague is here again
Today's San Francisco is one of the most distinctive cities in the United States, known as the Gateway to the United States in the Pacific, also known as "San Francisco" or "San Francisco"; in the mid-119th century, San Francisco rose due to the gold rush in the western United States, and there were about 300,000 Chinese immigrants in the United States, of which a considerable proportion settled here. The Chinese affectionately refer to this place of hope as the "Golden Mountain". Later, there was a new gold mine near Melbourne, Australia, so the Chinese began to call the original "Golden Mountain" "San Francisco".
In December 1899, two cases of lymphatic bubonic plague were detected in Honolulu, across the sea from San Francisco, in Chinatown, where health authorities put more than 4,500 Local Chinese in quarantine camps and even burned the patients' houses to the ground in the name of "disinfection." The flower of evil that accompanies the plague quietly opens in people's hearts.
In March 1900, a Chinese lumber merchant named Huang Chujing on San Francisco's Chinatown became the first patient to die of the Black Death.
According to the San Francisco Health Authority, the outbreak in San Francisco came from an American merchant ship called the Australia, which departed Honolulu on January 2 filled with sugar, and rats carrying plague germs also boarded the ship and arrived in San Francisco port four days later. Although the Australian was sterilized by fumigation like all incoming ships, garbage floating near the dock where the ship was moored facilitated the rats' escape to Chinatown. In March, quite a few rat carcasses appeared in Chinatown.
From initial concealment to subsequent overreaction:
Chase, a medical writer for the Wall Street Journal, wrote in his book Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco: "The rats infected with the plague sneaked onto a boat in Honolulu, and when they got to San Francisco, they climbed off the boat and ran all the way to Chinatown. There, the Black Death began infecting some of San Francisco's Chinese residents. Officials in San Francisco were reluctant at the time to admit that the deadly epidemic had spread there. The elders of the city tried their best to cover it up. Newspapers also have a secret agreement to remain silent. As we have seen throughout history, the existence of an epidemic has hurt trade and tourism. The economic damage is quite severe. ”
Amid the stamina and delay, the outbreak in San Francisco has finally broken out!
The plague is so terrible, then find someone to carry the black pot
"The symptoms of this disease are severe fever and cold shivers, the patient feels a headache and lies dying in bed, unable to move. Severe pain spread to the back and limbs. Red lumps appear in the armpits and groin, which can be very painful when touched. A large number of bleeding spots appear under the skin, and finally a black blood stasis is formed. The patient was delirious, moaning incessantly, rolling around irritably, scratching the sheets repeatedly. Their mania is only slightly relieved when they fall into shock, and only death will finally stop it all. ”
In the historical process of human civilization, whenever the great plague comes, the goodness and brilliance of human nature can always be revealed, but coldness, evil and cruelty are always everywhere. During the Black Death in the Middle Ages, Europe saw wave after wave of persecution of Jews on the grounds that Jews were circulating and poisoning. In Mainz, 12,000 Jews were burned alive as spreaders of the plague, and 16,000 Jews were killed in strasbourg.
The year 1900 was a dark time when Chinese exclusion discrimination in the United States was at its peak. Faced with the fear of the Black Death, the city of San Francisco was in a state of panic. At that time, many white people saw that Chinese immigrants were completely outliers, and there were even rumors that Chinese people loved to eat rats, and that eating sick rats would not die, but would only infect white people.
Discrimination against the Chinese intensified in the name of the plague, eventually evolving into a wave of racial discrimination and Chinese exclusion on a large scale.
After the death of Huang Chujing, a Chinese timber merchant on Chinatown, San Francisco health officials quarantined Chinatown overnight without waiting for a diagnosis to come out, and pushed the charge to all Chinese residents one-size-fits-all. San Francisco health authorities have neither isolated Huang Chujing's houses, nor have they screened anyone who has had contact with him, nor have they even imposed restrictions on white commerce and external traffic in Chinatown. Later, the local authorities further proposed the establishment of a supervised shantytown on Mission Rock Island to forcibly relocate the Chinese there. What's more, because Chinatown is located in the center of San Francisco, some unscrupulous real estate developers have even clamored for encouragement, using the plague as an excuse to drive away the Chinese, seize the land, and make a fortune. According to official statistics, from March 1900 to the end of the year, 22 deaths were confirmed and reported as lymphadenopathy. In 1901, 30 cases were confirmed, 41 in 1902, 17 in 1903, and only 9 in 1904. But from time to time, paranoid and arrogant San Francisco health authorities launched rough and simple campaigns to enforce the law, disinfecting or destroying chinese-lived houses, forcibly vaccinated the living, and forcibly performed autopsies on the dead.
The plague-plagued discrimination that eventually led to the burning of Honolulu's Chinatown was burned down in February 1900, and in March, San Francisco's Chinatown began to suffer from sieges and purges.
The Chinese Exclusion Act in U.S. History
In 1900, there were only 13,954 Chinese in Chinatown, half as many as 10 years ago. Only one-tenth of them are "naturalized" Chinese citizens. The decline in the Chinese population is the result of strict Chinese exclusion in the United States. In 1879, the California Constitution called the Chinese "undesirable." At that time, the law prohibited the use of picks, firecrackers, gongs, and foreigners from buying property. In 1882, the U.S. federal government passed the unprecedented Chinese Exclusion Act, which explicitly prohibited the entry of Chinese workers and their dependents, and Chinese immigrants were not eligible for naturalization as citizens, which was the first immigration discrimination act against specific ethnic groups passed in the United States.
In 1892, the United States implemented the Geary Act, which barred Chinese workers from entering the country for a decade. These bills not only extend the period of Exclusion of Chinese, but also strictly enforce their content. The Act was not repealed until 1943.
On June 18, 2012, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a unanimous vote, and the United States formally apologized in the form of legislation for the Chinese Exclusion Act passed in 1882.
(Some of the pictures are from the Internet, the copyright belongs to the original author)