Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [78]
Army medical officers and their admirers likened their work to that of Heracles in the Augean stables, “the cleanser of foul places and the enemy of evil beasts.” In all three of the territories, the Army and its medical staff took actions to sanitize the cities and towns where the Army located its garrisons. From the start, the measures blended police power and military force. “It is perfectly useless,” one Army surgeon observed, “for any health officer to attempt to check an epidemic unless he can rule with a rod of steel.” To clean up Santiago, Cuba, the U.S. military governor General Leonard Wood, himself a physician, named American businessman George M. Barbour as director of sanitation. “Major” Barbour’s sanitary corps impressed local residents into labor, cleaned up the slaughterhouses and markets, shot stray dogs, and horsewhipped inhabitants caught relieving themselves in the streets. Military surgeons still viewed sanitation as the first defense against disease. U.S. troops stumbled into the “dirty little town” of Siboney, Cuba, to find an outbreak of yellow fever. Under the direction of military surgeon Colonel Charles Greenleaf, the soldiers expelled the Spanish and Cuban refugees and conducted a “vigorous” cleanup campaign. Army doctors did not yet understand the role of mosquitoes in spreading yellow fever. When their sanitation measures failed to check the epidemic, the soldiers burned the town to the ground.46
From the beginning, Army medical officers claimed for their actions a precedent in the American legal tradition of police power, which allowed for broad governmental intrusions into the everyday lives of American citizens. As Lieutenant Colonel Hoff said of his experience in Puerto Rico, sanitation there “resolved itself down to its simplest form, ‘policing.’ ” How different were the Army’s actions really, these officers suggested, from the countless instances when American governments had walked over individual liberty and property rights in the name of the public welfare—whether by driving brothel-keepers and saloon-keepers from town or by regulating the operations of slaughterhouses, factories, and other noxious trades? But in the United States, the legitimacy of police regulations had always been closely tied to the sovereignty of the self-governing communities that enacted them. The very thinness of Hoff’s analogy suggests how far he and his peers were reaching for some foundation, other than military superiority, for their actions.47
Smallpox became epidemic in each of the three major theaters of the Spanish-American War during the fall of 1898. None of the epidemics involved the new “mild type” of the disease. All involved classic virulent smallpox (variola major), presumed to be all the more deadly because of its tropical origin. With thousands of U.S. troops, civilian personnel, and, increasingly, entrepreneurs and their employees settling into all three places, the Army surgeons were determined to bring the disease under control. Their first attempts were localized campaigns centered exclusively on protecting the troops, and those efforts revealed how entrenched in the thinking of the Army was the old idea of smallpox as a filth disease. In San Juan, Captain Davison reported, “From the class of people attacked it is believed that cleanliness of person, proper living and morals are at least equal to vaccination as a preventive of smallpox.” Smallpox became epidemic in the Holguin district of Cuba that November. Under Brigadier General Leonard Wood, the Second Volunteer infantry and its medical officers disinfected the towns, burning entire neighborhoods of thatched huts and vaccinating 30,000 residents. The Army also treated