The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [48]
The administration was furious. McKinley was in the midst of negotiations for peace with Spain, and the Round Robin letter, he argued, damaged his position. Why would Spain negotiate if they knew biding their time during yellow fever season would wipe out half of the U.S. Army in Cuba? But the Spanish undoubtedly had their own concerns to contend with; in the previous four years, 16,000 of their troops had been stricken by yellow jack. In the end, the Round Robin controversy was a moot point. Orders had already been placed, even before the publication of the letter, to return the troops to the U.S.
Troops were sent to Montauk Point, a cool, high ground, to wait out the yellow fever quarantine. In all, 20,000 soldiers would land at Montauk Point in the space of three weeks. Conditions at that camp and elsewhere were notoriously bad. Surgeon General Sternberg had warned the administration that disease would be devastating to the army; he had been right.
Bald, with a white walrus moustache, Sternberg was a lifelong army man: straight backed, square shouldered, stout, a look of purpose in his face. He was a product of Lutheran ideology and German descendents. He was described by some colleagues as stiff and even egotistical, but he had real ambition, and it had taken him far. After his service on the Havana Yellow Fever Commission in 1879, Sternberg had continued his work on yellow fever, searching for the pathogen in the blood that caused the fever. He had even put forth one theory that bacteria he discovered, called Bacillus X, were the culprits. By 1893, Sternberg had been named surgeon general, and he opened the Army Medical School in Washington, D.C. But that ambition had also led to some disappointments. As “America’s Bacteriologist,” Sternberg was a forward-thinking man who had made important discoveries, but not before the great successes of France’s Louis Pasteur and Germany’s Robert Koch. His place in medical history was in no way secure, and what he needed now was his own definitive discovery.
George Sternberg was in a tough position as the Spanish-American War escalated. The military was wary of medical officers, seeing them most often as obstacles, or even annoyances, during war. As the surgeon general, the medical officers beneath him often saw Sternberg as a part of beaurocratic machinery. An editorial in the New York Times accused Sternberg of lacking the nerve and force of character necessary for a wartime authority figure. Another New York Times writer remarked, “Surgeon General Sternberg is unfit for the position he holds and that to his inefficiency is chiefly due the complete breakdown of the medical department in this war.”
Nonetheless, Sternberg had advised against sending troops to Cuba during the wet season when yellow fever was predominant, and he went so far as to refuse sending nonimmune army medical officers into fever-ridden Cuba. Sternberg also published concerns for the unsanitary conditions of camps and rapid enlistment of nonimmune men. There were simply too many men crammed into too many camps to keep up any sort of acceptable hygiene.
One week after the first case at Siboney appeared, Dr. Vaughan was walking the grounds of the camp when he felt a severe pain in the small of his back—he could barely stand or walk, and he knew immediately what was happening. He limped back to his tent to write a letter to his wife. His guilt mounted as he put pen to paper and wrote that he had been ordered into the interior of Cuba for the next two weeks, and she would not hear from him. Surely the lie would be more comforting than no word at all, or worse, the truth. After that, Vaughan went to see the chief correspondent of the Associated Press, asking him not to mention his name or his condition in dispatches home. Then, Vaughan entered