Every day, the newspapers carried bold warnings about the sleeping sickness.
New York's health commissioner encouraged citizens to wash their hands frequently, to clean homes daily, and to avoid large crowds, especially open-air markets, protests, and workers' rallies. Citizens needed to keep clear of buildings plastered with yellow quarantine posters.
For the time being, they advised people not to travel to Chinatown or 'foreign neighborhoods.' Some parents petitioned to have Chinese students barred from the classroom. Letters to the editor blamed the scourge on immigrants, jazz, loose morals, the flouting of Prohibition, bobbed hair, the automobile, and anarchists. Lawmakers argued about whether to add yet another brick in the ever-rising legislative wall of the Chinese Exclusion Act. They called for a return to traditional American morals and old-time religion. On the radio, Sarah Snow exhorted her followers to turn away from jazz babies and give themselves over to Jesus. Afterward, an announcer assured listeners 'Pears soap is the one to keep your family safe and healthy and free from exotic disease.'
In Chinatown, a large rock painted with a message - CHINESE GO HOME! - shattered the front window of Chong & Sons, Jewelers. An arsonist's fire gutted the Wing Sing restaurant overnight; Mr. Wing stood in the softly falling wisps of soot-flecked snow, his sober face backlit by the orange glow as he watched everything he'd built burn to the ground. Police broke up social meetings and even a banquet celebrating the birth of Yuen Hong's first son. The mayor refused to allow the Chinese New Year celebrations to go on out of fears for public health...fear was everywhere.
At a eugenics conference in the elegant ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, genteel men in genteel suits spoke of 'the mongrel problem - the ruin of the white race.' They pointed to drawings and diagrams that proved most disease could be traced to inferior breeding stock. They called this science. They called it fact. They called it patriotism.
People drank their coffee and nodded in agreement.
