Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [37]
But the men who had controlled the Middlesboro epidemic for the past two weeks had already caught the night train out of town. The Bell County Board of Health was back in charge—without any funds. A. T. McCormack and his men had barely left town before Judge Neal announced, again, that the county would not appropriate a dime.56
The same message arrived soon from Frankfort, as the governor and Kentucky lawmakers abdicated responsibility for the Middlesboro debacle. After receiving the Citizens’ Committee’s telegram on March 14, Governor Bradley had wired his fellow Republican, Representative Colson, to intercede with the surgeon general. His confusion about the legal authority of the federal government in such a situation was evidently total. “Act of Congress not in library,” Governor Bradley said. “I do not know what the law allows. Am told Surgeon-General of the United States may be appealed to take charge immediately. If such can be done, request him in my name to take charge.” The next day, Bradley appealed to the state legislature for an emergency appropriation, but the lawmakers adjourned without granting his request.57
Meanwhile, Mayor Fitzpatrick wired Surgeon General Wyman with a direct appeal. The mayor framed the Middlesboro situation as a relief crisis. “Middlesboro has 3,500 people dependent for support on wages of working people,” Fitzpatrick said. “People poor; business suspended; request for immediate assistance.” The mayor’s language was telling. He appealed not in the name of the city government, which he headed, but in the name of the deserving wage earners of Middlesboro and their families. He was trying, belatedly, to craft a narrative about a blameless community deserving of federal aid. Significantly, he left race out of his story.58
For Walter Wyman, the request from Governor Bradley was enough. On March 16, Wyman wired J. M. Mathews and told him the Marine-Hospital Service was prepared to “furnish medical officers, attendants, guards, inspectors, and attend to vaccination and disinfection.” The local authorities would still be expected to “care for poor not sick” and to furnish the pesthouse with food “so far as possible.” Wyman did not want to open up a massive federal relief effort in Middlesboro. It was J. N. McCormack who wired back to accept Wyman’s offer, so long as the Service intended to “aid and co-operate under our regulations.” Wyman agreed to this face-saving language. But he added a condition of his own: “All expenditures . . . must be supervised and accounted for by our own officer.” A reasonable condition, to be sure. But also a brisk slap in the Kentuckian’s face.59
All of these niceties did not disguise the new political reality in Middlesboro. As the Lexington Morning Herald reported, “Uncle Sam is in charge of small-pox now.”60
There was one recent precedent for a federal takeover of a local small-pox epidemic. On January 8, 1898, two months prior to Wertenbaker’s arrival in Middlesboro, another Marine-Hospital Service surgeon named George M. Magruder had taken control of the smallpox epidemic in Birmingham and Jefferson County, Alabama. This was the same epidemic the miner named Scott thought he had left behind as he made his way north to the Mingo Mines. Built on a swampy valley floor, the manufacturing and mining boomtown with its highly transient population was a public health disaster waiting to happen—and never waiting very long. The area had weathered one epidemic after another since its founding in 1871, including serious bouts of Asian cholera in 1873 and typhoid in 1881. Alabama laws, enacted during the 1870s, established a state board of health and authorized the creation of county health departments. But at the moment smallpox broke out, not a single full-time county health organization existed in the entire state.61
Smallpox had been raging since July 1897 in Jefferson County, an area of a thousand square miles and 110,000 people. Half