Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [34]
Secretary McCormack underestimated the political acumen of the local officials. Shortly after receiving his telegram, Mayor Fitzpatrick, a lawyer and businessman connected to local mining interests, sent a telegram of his own. He wired Middlesboro’s congressional representative in Washington, a favorite son of Yellow Creek Valley named David Grant Colson. A Republican, Colson had served as mayor of Middlesboro for four years before taking his seat in Congress. He understood the situation there better than anyone else in Washington. Fitzpatrick wrote: “County refuses aid; city has no funds. Can Federal aid be had?”
It was a good question. The United States in 1898 had no federal welfare state as such. But since 1790, Congress had on roughly one hundred occasions used its spending powers under the Constitution’s “general welfare” clause to appropriate relief for the hapless victims of wars, floods, fires, famines, cyclones, grasshopper invasions, and other disasters. Yellow fever epidemics and Mississippi floods had aroused Congress to send aid to southern communities on more than one occasion since the Civil War. But long-standing practice dictated that such appropriations be reserved for cases in which blameless people had been overwhelmed by circumstances beyond their control. The Middlesboro smallpox epidemic did not meet that test. The misguided parsimony of public officials, rather than an act of God or some other uncontrollable force, had caused the “disaster” in the mountain city. And how would Congress have responded to the Middlesboro leaders’ racial theory of the epidemic? Were African Americans a force beyond their control? Was this “African” epidemic an act of God? Congress never had an opportunity to ponder such questions. Rather than make the hard case for congressional relief, Colson contacted Walter Wyman.44
Colson may have been aware that Wyman’s federal health bureau, the U.S. Marine-Hospital Service, had for the past two months been working with local authorities in Birmingham, Alabama, to control a smallpox epidemic there. In his message to the surgeon general, the congressman narrated the Middlesboro epidemic as an emergency. “The situation is a very grave one,” he wrote. “Neither the municipal, county or state authorities are able to control the epidemic.” But Colson astutely crafted his case for Marine-Hospital Service intervention in the political language of federalism. “All Southwest Kentucky, East Tennessee, and Southwest Virginia are involved, or liable to be.” Middlesboro’s location on the border made an uncontrolled epidemic there a danger to other states. This fact alone made direct federal intervention plausible. For good measure, Colson enclosed a note from Rep. Walter P. Brownlow, a fellow Republican whose district lay in northeastern Tennessee, just across the border from Middlesboro. “I fully concur in the above,” Brownlow said. “Smallpox is spreading in my district. I ask for immediate action.”45
Passed Assistant Surgeon C. P. Wertenbaker was working at his station in Wilmington, North Carolina, later that day when the telegram came in. “Proceed to Middlesboro, Ky,” Wyman ordered. “Report on situation there and neighborhood with recommendations.” The surgeon general added a word of caution to his officer before he embarked upon his five-hundredmile journey from the Carolina coast to the heart of Appalachia: “Local authorities should meet expenses, [federal] government expenditures are interstate only.” Wertenbaker caught the next train west.46
It was dark by the time the surgeon reached the mountain city, the high wooded ridge of Cumberland Mountain a presence more felt than seen in the cool March night. A clock had only just tolled eight, but the broad streets