It’s late September 1924 and a group of migrant workers from Mexico are sitting in
a small neighborhood in downtown Los Angeles having a beer and listening to a tale that
is being told by a day laborer for the Los Angeles Railway.
His name is Jesus and he regales his buddies with the hilarious story of how he’d been
living with a terrible stench in his house, but he had no idea where it was coming from.
Jesus got to work, turning his house upside down, but he couldn’t find anything rotten.
Then he wondered, what about under the house.
He soon found the cause of the awful smell.
It was a rat…a dead, rotting rat.
He picked the thing up and threw it in the trash can.
One week later and people were no longer laughing…they were now crying at the death of Jesus and
his daughter.
Soon others in the neighborhood would drop like flies.
Jesus had started a plague.
His full name was Jesus Lajun and that neighborhood contained a vibrant community of people mostly
of Latino descent.
He lived at 700 Clara Street, which would later become known as “The Death House”,
but as you will see, it wasn’t the only death house on that street.
Worse things would happen a few doors down.
The neighbourhood was a bustling place back in the day, but as you all know, busy places
are not so great when a virus breaks out.
You see, Jesus had contracted the bubonic plague from that dead rat, and what happened
after was the last plague epidemic in the USA.
We’re guessing a lot of you are thinking…wait a minute, isn’t the bubonic plague that
thing from the Middle Ages that wiped out good chunks of Europe…wasn’t the plague
dead and buried centuries ago?
The answer is no…it’s still here…it’s been here all the time...it’s still in the
good ole USA right now, but there aren’t many cases these days.
In fact, if you look at the CDC’s website you can see that in 2018 there was just one
confirmed case of plague in the U.S.. 2015 was a bad year regarding the American
plague, because 16 people got it that year and 4 of them died.
One of the victims was just 16 years old.
This wasn’t called an outbreak because the cases happened in various states in the U.S.
over the entire year, so the 1924 plague was what we now call the last outbreak of this
pestilence.
Ok, before we get back to Jesus and the chaos he unknowingly caused, we think you need to
know just a little bit more about the plague.
Here’s a short plague 101 for you, just so you don’t get panicked when there’s
already a panic-demic going on right now.
Over 80 percent of plague victims come down with the bubonic form.
The other forms of plague are Septicemic plague and Pneumonic plague.
They relate to infections of the blood and of the lungs.
If you get the bubonic plague, you’ll feel like crap and get a fever and a headache and
you won’t have any energy.
You will then get little bumps on your body.
These are swollen lymph nodes and we call them buboes.
That’s kind of a cute word, fitting for a cartoon character of a cute puppy, but buboes
are nasty things and they hurt a lot.
The bubonic plague, as was discovered by millions of people hundreds of years ago, can be deadly.
The bad news is, it’s estimated that if it's left untreated it will kill 66% to 93%
of its victims.
The good news is these days we can treat it with antibiotics and the mortality rate now
for treated people is anywhere from one to 15 percent.
Ok, so, on the first day there was Jesus, and Jesus picked up a rat.
That rat had fleas, and Jesus was bitten by one of them.
That terrible flea was only doing what fleas do, and it certainly wasn’t aware that it
was carrying something called the Yersinia pestis bacteria.
It passed this ungodly bacteria to Jesus, and on the second day, Jesus spread the word
of his rat story to others and others later died.
On the sixth day, Jesus was a dead man.
So, within the rat community of this poor Los Angeles neighborhood there were fleas
carrying the plague, and you certainly didn’t want to get up close to one of them.
By the way, when animals transmit a disease to humans we call this “zoonosis”.
Jesus was what we called the “Index Patient”, which means he was the first reported case.
Soon after he found the stinky dead rat he developed a painful lump in his groin and
felt really unwell.
The problem is, that bacteria had spread to his lungs, and so Jesus was capable of spreading
the plague around through airborne droplets of the bacterium.
It then turned into the more deadly pneumonic plague, which is transmissible to humans.
His doctor didn’t believe he had the plague, and said instead he had some kind of venereal
disease and that was why he has swollen lymph nodes.
That was a deadly mistake that doctor made, because Jesus passed the pneumonic plague
to his daughter.
Her name was Francisca and she experienced respiratory problems and the doctors said
she had pneumonia, not the plague.
A week later and she was dead.
The cause of death was wrongly stated to have been double pneumonia, but any medical professional
should have had plague on their mind.
You see, in the year 1900 it’s thought that a ship that landed in San Francisco which
had come from China had a rat living on it.
The rat, or rats, disembarked at the city and then went scurrying around, all of them
carrying deadly fleas in their fur.
People later started dropping dead from what certainly looked like plague, but the city
didn’t close the port and tried to convince people there was no plague on U.S. soil.
A plague outbreak was very bad for business.
Most of the media did the same and wrote headlines like this one, “No Genuine Plague: Sensational
Stories Are Without Foundation.”
The headline was wrong, and from 1900 to 1908 there were 280 plague cases and 172 deaths
in San Francisco.
The city did a good job of exterminating the vermin, but those fleas had a habit of jumping
onto other animals.
Those animals, including those dear cuties the squirrels, travelled around a bit and
the plague eventually reached LA in 1924.
Shortly after Francisca died, a pregnant woman who’d been taking care of her also died
and she had the same symptoms.
Her name was Lucena Samarano and soon her entire family of eight would all be dead.
Her house, 742 Clara Street, was called “The Death House.”
Lucena’s cause of death was listed as “heart disease.”
Soon her husband became ill, and died...her friend got it, and died, and eventually all
her kids got it, and died.
In fact, a lot of folks who went near that house got very sick and died within days.
So really...heart disease...
Then a Catholic priest who had given last rights to some of the deceased came down with
the exact same symptoms.
And guess what, he did the talking at Lucena’s funeral service at 742 Clara Street, and as
you can imagine, in that small tight-knit community a lot of folks turned up to that
service.
The priest died, too.
These people had no idea what was going on and looked up to the heavens and asked God
for answers, when they should really have been looking under their floorboards.
The authorities should have known sooner, since one doctor that travelled to that poor
neighborhood, a place where people lived in absolute squalor, noticed that there were
a lot of very sick people.
Some of them could hardly breathe, and some were deathly ill.
A few people were taken to hospital but still the diagnosis was not plague, with different
doctors saying it must be meningitis, or influenza, or pneumonia, or even typhus.
Ok, so you’d think that people would have been shouting plague from the rooftops by
now, but it wasn’t until one month after Jesus kicked the bucket that a Los Angeles
County Hospital pathologist identified the disease and announced, “Hey guys, we’ve
got a plague outbreak going on here.”
That doctor, a guy named George Manor, stepped up and said this looks like plague.
With the help of a colleague, he looked through a microscope and what he saw was the deadly
Yersinia pestis bacteria.
"Beautiful but damned,” said Manor after seeing the true cause of deaths in that community.
Meanwhile, friends and relatives of the deceased kept dying, either in hospitals or in their
own homes.
People panicked…they isolated themselves.
The blame game came next, and quite a few not so intelligent people from outside the
neighborhood started saying things such as, “This is a Mexican disease.”
90 percent of those that died were indeed Mexican, but that didn’t mean it was a Mexican
disease.
They had just been the unfortunate folks who had no choice but to live in squalid houses
where there were lots of rats.
Quarantine then began and the neighborhood where the disease had started was sectioned
off and guarded by police and volunteers.
No one in, no one out, was the order given, in what they called, “The Mexican District.”
Around 1,800 to 2,500 people were confined to that district, and at the same time panic
ensued all over the USA, especially when people read headlines like this one which was published
in the New York Times, “Pneumonic Plague Takes Seven More Victims.”
“How has the ancient disease gotten here in the new world,” people screamed.
“The Black Death is on our doorstep,” others shouted.
LA, for many outsiders, was the picture-perfect, postcard paradise of the USA.
Health authorities soon started telling all people in the city to keep their homes clean.
An announcement was then given.
“Gatherings of all nature must now stop.”
Movie houses were empty and kids were kept away from school.
LA was in the grip of a great panic, and when trolley cars went near the damned neighborhoods
the conductors shouted, “No one gets on and no one gets off.”
The Los Angeles mayor, one George Cryer, called an emergency meeting.
Present were health officials, and also anyone with big business interests in the city.
The question was, should they shut the city down, and how much would that damage business.
Some emergency procedures were set in place, but there was no city shutdown.
Anyone suspected of having the plague had to be sent to a special part of the county
hospital.
Funeral directors were ordered not to embalm the bodies of Mexicans, or anyone else whose
death was of undetermined causes.
Soon five urban districts were cordoned off by rope and around them stood 400 quarantine
guards.
Some of those guys had fought in the First World War, so those were some tough dudes.
No one in, no one out, and another order, “No Shooting.”
Well, they did shoot any dogs, cats, or chickens that got too close to them.
Charities got together and delivered essential items to those in quarantine, and brave medical
workers visited the neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, rumors persisted in the U.S. that hundreds of Mexicans were dying in those sectioned
off neighborhoods.
The cleanup started, and it was fierce.
Houses were ripped apart; some entire shacks were burned to the ground.
Petroleum and Sulphur were sprayed in houses and lime and rat poison were scattered everywhere.
Within months, around 2,500 buildings had been completely destroyed, and yet, no compensation
at all was granted to the people who had been displaced from their home.
One LA resident later commented on what he saw from outside one of those neighborhoods.
He said, “It was an eerie sight to see the ‘sky high’ flames at night and the reflections
in the river, as well as the shadowy figures of firemen running around the quarantined
area.”
The neighborhoods in the “Macy Street District” and “Little Mexico,” with their ramshackle
dwellings were pretty much burned to the ground.
It was the best of times, and the worst of times, because some people were kind and helpful
to those quarantined people, but others were not so nice.
LA’s Chamber of Commerce chief actually implied that the problem was Mexicans and
how they lived.
Some people risked their lives going into those neighborhoods to help out.
Mexican bands turned up outside the quarantined areas and played music for the people inside.
At the same time, others used the disease to propagate xenophobia and racism against
Mexicans and other minorities, something that we often see in times of crises even today.
What happened next was the great rat extermination program.
The city spent a whopping $250,000 on finding and killing those flea carrying pests.
That amount is close to four million in today’s money.
It wasn’t only the Mexican neighborhoods that got the treatment, poor neighborhoods
consisting mostly of Russian, Chinese and Japanese immigrants were also part of the
program.
In fact, a neighborhood that was back then called Chinatown was also pretty much destroyed.
What's surprising, is that it was only when the occupants of those quarantined neighborhoods
saw this going on that they found out that rats were the problem and that they had been
dying of the plague.
They’d actually been kept in the dark as to what was happening.
In fact, the media had been told not to make a big issue of what was going one.
Certain media urged people not to join in the hysterical gossip about a plague killing
hundreds of people.
One LA official had a meeting and warned the attendees, “No disease known has such an
effect upon the business world as the plague."
Some journalists wrote that the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce had tried to play down
what happened because of the possibility of economic collapse and land values dropping.
Remember that the City of Angels back then was seen as the place to be, and if it became
the place of the plague people would leave and tourists would turn their backs on the
city.
The quarantine and rat extermination program worked, and in the end around 30 people lost
their lives to the plague.
The main problem was that it was turned into an ethnic disease and many people lost their
homes and got nothing back.
Now go watch this show, “What Made The Black Death (The Plague) so Deadly?” or this show,
“Why Spanish Flu Killed Over 50 Million People - Deadliest Plague in Modern History.”