The City’s Panic Over a Smallpox Outbreak
When an infectious disease arrived on the Seattle waterfront in 1876, the City Council and local editors turned to extreme rhetoric, calling for the forced removal of the city's vulnerable populations.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Night before last, the City Council ordered that the Mayor, Dr. Weed, make arrangements for the care and maintenance of certain persons now held in quarantine, and adjourned after the transaction of other business. We are informed they will meet again this morning to adopt an ordinance relative to preventing the spread of the contagious disease introduced into this city by the Victoria steamboat. This is well, even at as late an hour as three or four days have already elapsed since it was known that that loathsome disease was in our midst. It is to be hoped that the Council will not only do something in the way of protecting our citizens from infection from the habitues of the dens of those degraded specimens of humanity, but also adopt such stringent measures as will lead to the expulsion of all those breeders of pestilence from our midst. If they fail to do so, our citizens should at once, and regardless of our authorities so-called, take the matter in their own hands and adopt that vigorous course in the premises which is needed.
“It is to be hoped that the Council will not only do something in the way of protecting our citizens from infection... but also adopt such stringent measures as will lead to the expulsion of all those breeders of pestilence from our midst.”
In 1876, Seattle’s civic response to a health crisis was to leverage panic into exclusionary state violence, targeting marginalized communities under the guise of public safety. Today, the tension between municipal public health authority and the treatment of the city's most vulnerable inhabitants remains a flashpoint for Seattle politics.
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