The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [112]
A burgeoning river city once stood at one of the widest points of the Mississippi River. Andrew Jackson, James Winchester and John Overton named it Memphis after the ancient, wealthy city along the Nile. Memphis, Tennessee, was a city rich in land and promise, where trains linked it to the East and West and paddleboats tied it to the North and South. It was visited by presidents and royalty, and it held the most extravagant Mardi Gras parades ever seen. White marble buildings stood on the bluff above cotton-laden steamers, and a population of white and black, northern and southern, immigrant and native saw their future. It seemed bright and certain. That city no longer exists.
The heavy German and Irish immigrant populations are gone for the most part, and the city’s character has instead been shaped by the rural influence of freed slaves and farmers. Where mansions once stood along Beale Street, there is now a rough-edged, gospel-laced music known as blues. Barbecue, the food that originated in the fire pits outside slave quarters, is a culinary favorite. Many old buildings surrounding Court Square and downtown are today hollowed out with broken glass or restored as condominiums. The Gayoso Bayou now runs beneath the paved city streets.
And yet someone from 1878 would be surprised to find that many of the same contrasts remain: There is still racial strife, which reached its peak with the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. There is still a great divide between the wealthy and poor. There are undercurrents of political corruption. There is a strong religious influence, primarily Protestant. Paddleboats still bob at the edge of the Mississippi River, and Cotton Row stands along Front Street. The Pinch District is thriving, and the Peabody Hotel is still in operation. Court Square has been restored. The city is still a major hub with boats, trains and now, planes. And the defining characteristic of the city is still a steadfast, stubborn will to survive—one that started with the devastation of the 1878 yellow fever epidemic.
Memphis was one town, one place, where yellow fever took its greatest toll, nearly destroying the city and forever changing its future, but there were hundreds more over two centuries that suffered from the American plague. Shades of those epidemics changed populations, commerce, cities, politics, wars and ultimately history. Federal laws were born in its wake. It spawned racism and prejudice, but it also inspired sacrifice and martyrdom. It created a national hero in Walter Reed and a Nobel Prize winner in Max Theiler. It touched the lives of politicians like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Rutherford B. Hayes, William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. It influenced literature through the likes of Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, Stephen Crane and Mark Twain. And it took the lives of countless doctors, nurses, priests, nuns and ordinary civilians—most of their names have been forgotten. The American plague has been forgotten.
But in Memphis it still lives, quietly, in the bones beneath the branches of elms and in a lissome, lyre-marked mosquito that waits for the virus to find it once again.
Acknowledgments
Though I never had the honor of meeting any of the people in this story, I admire them above and beyond what could be expressed in the pages of this book. Whether the martyrs of Memphis or the martyrs of science, their courage, suffering and sacrifice are almost unmatched in today’s world.
As long as I live in Memphis, I will see the ghosts of this