Race Betterment and Tropical Medicine in Imperial San Francisco

At six o'clock on the morning of February 20, 1915, San Francisco was engulfed by a cacophony of sounds. To signal the opening of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), the fire department rang its bells and whistles, automobilists honked their horns, policemen banged on trolley poles, and, just in case anyone was still asleep, the fife-and-drum corps paraded through the streets. A few hours later, under a bright sky, an entourage of politicians and merchants headed by Mayor James Rolph Jr. and Governor Hiram Johnson led a two-and-a-half-mile-long procession from Van Ness Avenue and Broadway to the marina. At the vanguard of this parade was a small cavalry, followed by six carriages of pioneers, "men that had seen the city grow from a few shacks at the edge of a cove that has long since disappeared." These dignitaries congregated at the Tower of Jewels, beneath a ceiling that depicted the heroic saga of the Panamanian isthmus, from the voyages of the Spanish conquistadors to the US Canal Commission. The president of the fair's board of directors, Charles C. Moore, along with a local rabbi and minister, welcomed the crowd and congratulated the city on its marvelous achievement. Unable to attend, President Woodrow Wilson sent Franklin K. Lane, the secretary of the Interior. Deeply impressed by what he saw, Lane intoned to the crowd, "The seas are now but a highway before the doors of the nations," and connected the benevolence of US imperialism to the unstoppable march of westward expansion: "The greatest adventure is before us, the gigantic adventure of an advancing democracy, strong, virile, and kindly, and in that advance we shall be true to the indestructible spirit of the American Pioneer." The fair did not officially commence, however, until President Wilson, three thousand miles away, pressed a golden key linked to an aerial tower in Tuckerton, New Jersey, whose radio waves sparked the top of the Tower of Jewels, tripped a galvanometer, and closed a relay, swinging open the doors of the Palace of Machinery, where a massive diesel engine started to rotate. Minutes later, Moore notified President Wilson via telegraph that the first world's fair to begin wirelessly was under way.

A grand extravaganza that had been envisioned before the devastating earthquake of 1906 and for which planning had begun in 1910, the PPIE was organized to commemorate the completion of the Panama Canal, a project directed by the United States and finished in 1914. Held near Fort Mason in San Francisco, the fair covered 635 acres, a substantial portion of which had been leased from the military. After passing through its turnstiles, visitors entered a vast "city of domes," filled with courts, palaces, towers, pavilions, and concessions, whose epic proportions and evocative style had been designed by architects such as Louis Christian Mullgardt and Bernard Maybeck. An event extolling the myriad technological advances that imbued the twentieth century with the promise of perfection, the PPIE unfolded, sometimes discordantly, as brutal trench warfare killed thousands in Europe. When the exposition closed ten months later, on December 4, with lavish festivities that included a concert by the Philippine Constabulary Band, the reading of a toast sent by President Wilson, the sounding of bugles, and evening fireworks, nearly nineteen million people had passed through the PPIE's turnstiles.

For the fair's coordinators and local elites, the staging of the PPIE in their westernmost city was no coincidence but rather the culmination of the inexorable and forward march of progress. As one of many promotional pamphlets declared, "California marks the limit of the geographical progress of civilization. For unnumbered centuries the course of empire has been steadily to the west." In keeping with the theme of the advancement of civilization, the PPIE prominently showcased recent developments in agriculture, manufacturing, science, technology, architecture, and the arts. One subject that received an enormous amount of time and space was health and disease, especially the areas of race betterment and tropical medicine. Indeed, the fair's official poster, the "Thirteenth Labor of Hercules," symbolized the intertwined significance of these two concerns and provided an iconography for the apotheosis of empire, race, and sanitary intervention that crowned San Francisco as the Jewel of the Pacific. The poster features a muscular man in his physical prime, seen from the back, as he forces apart Panama's Culebra Cut; the PPIE's iridescent lights shimmer at the Canal's vanishing point. If this figure embodied sheer masculine might, it was also a metaphor for the success of tropical medicine, which strove to rid the world's hot and humid regions of insect- and waterborne diseases in order to make them hospitable for Europeans and European Americans. With its veneration of the extraordinary white body, the poster reflected the racial hierarchies of Victorian anthropology and social Darwinism that had saturated international expositions since the late 1800s and helped ideologically to justify colonial ventures across the globe. The "Thirteenth Labor of Hercules" glorified sanitary engineering in the tropics at a time when the underlying tenets of race and disease were being reconfigured in light of new theories of human heredity and health.

The PPIE occurred at a transitory moment, as biology and medicine were becoming beholden to reductionism and new perspectives on disease identification and causation. Environmental explanations of human degeneracy and sickness, influenced by neo-Lamarckian doctrines of the inheritance of acquired traits and miasmatic principles of contagion, still dominated in some corners. They were being supplanted, however, by less flexible theories of germs and genes that demanded exact diagnoses and targeted solutions. On the one hand, for more than a decade, tropical medicine, which combined bacteriology, parasitology, and entomology, had concentrated on isolating and attempting to eradicate the etiologic agents of infections caused by microbes, helminthes, and protozoa, as well as intermediary disease vectors, such as mosquitoes, flies, and lice. On the other hand, biology and the incipient field of genetics were increasingly dependent on Mendelian theories of hereditary transmission and "upward causation" models of molecular interaction. Concomitantly, clinical medicine saw the enthroning of organ-based specialties and the beginnings of subspecialization. The PPIE took place in the midst of this trend toward reductionism, as more malleable conceptions of health and disease were buckling under the power of...