Meningitis at the Docks: Seattle Turns Its Fear on Filipino Steerage Passengers
In the spring of 1929, a deadly outbreak of spinal meningitis aboard transpacific liners arriving in Seattle sparked a quarantine fight — and the city's health commissioner, the City Council, and the Seattle Daily Times all pointed the blame at the Filipino passengers themselves.
For the last few weeks some Filipino steerage passengers on the ocean liners have been found to be suffering from spinal meningitis.
The first Filipino patients were discovered on board the S.S. President Lincoln when it docked at Seattle on February 25. Seven Filipinos among the steerage passengers were affected.
On March 11, when the President Madison arrived, the city health authorities took all of the 339 steerage passengers of that vessel to quarantine. Two Filipinos died on the way to Seattle, and two more after a few hours from their arrival in Seattle.
The President Pierce, which took the route to San Francisco via Honolulu, carried another great number of Filipinos among whom two died in Honolulu and three in San Francisco. Fourteen Filipino patients were landed in San Francisco from the President Pierce.
On March 23, 300 Filipinos from the steerage quarters of the Empress of Russia were quarantined at Victoria, B.C. Two of them died either from meningitis or pneumonia.
When the President Jackson arrived in Seattle on March 25, over 300 Filipinos were again brought to the quarantine station for observation. Two among them were suffering from spinal meningitis.
The situation is becoming serious and Seattle public opinion is alarmed at the frequency of these occurrences.
There has been a new row between the shipping concern and the city health officials over who should shoulder the responsibility and expenses for the treatment of the Filipino spinal meningitis sufferers.
On March 28, appropriation of $25,000 by the City Council to provide quarantine facilities for steerage passengers arriving here from Oriental ports virtually was assured. The ordinance will be accompanied by a health regulation ordered by Dr. J. T. Bailey, city health commissioner, ruling that all ships from Oriental ports must disembark their steerage passengers at this quarantine station before entering the harbor of Seattle.
The Seattle Daily Times on two different occasions editorially called the attention of the public to the menace of the Filipino passengers who are carrying the disease into Seattle. The editorial is printed elsewhere in this issue.
“Seattle should not, must not, assume or admit any such responsibility. This city has not invited, much less urged, the fortnightly influx of Filipinos which of late has been regularly attended by disease and death.”
A century later, the same pattern repeats: when disease arrives by ship or by plane, the people fleeing hardship are blamed for bringing it rather than treated as its first victims. Seattle's 1929 meningitis scare — and the Times editorial demanding the city refuse responsibility — reads as an early draft of every later fight over who belongs at the waterfront.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.