Isaac Mayer Wise’s Op-Eds on the Yellow Fever Epidemics of the 1870s
Reflecting on the lingering legacies that remain after a devastating epidemic fin, Albert Camus concluded that “all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories.”[1] Camus’s observation rings true for those who are living through the global pandemic of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Since its onset, historians have taken note of an upsurge of interest in the history of public health crises.[2] People want to learn more about how our forebears navigated the challenging circumstances of prior fearsome epidemics and calamitous natural disasters that wreaked havoc on their communities and lives. The instinct that compels us to turn to the past when we confront existential challenges like COVID-19 is rooted in the comfort we take in reminding ourselves that our woes are not utterly new and unique. Indeed, previous generations confronted formidable adversities not entirely dissimilar from those we currently face. Therefore, we look to the past in order to gain perspective.
Over the course of human history, infectious diseases have caused more death and suffering than any other type of illness. The ravages of diseases such as from cholera and smallpox to tuberculosis and polio to HIV/AIDs and Ebola, over the course of American history alone, powerfully illustrates this fact. From the dawn of the American Republic through the early 20th century, yellow fever was one of the nation’s most dreaded and intractable epidemics. The “Yellow Plague” afflicted the port cities of the northeast during the early national period. Southern port cities suffered from similar outbreaks during the antebellum period and, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the dreaded disease invaded numerous communities across the Mississippi Basin. The Jews who lived in the regions stricken by this awful disease suffered bitterly along with their fellow citizens, and historians have documented how American Jews responded to the devastating consequences of these various outbreaks.[3]
During the 1870s, yellow fever epidemics afflicted many southern cities, including Memphis, New Orleans, Vicksburg, Shreveport, Savannah, and others. The nation’s newspapers spread news of the terrible sufferings the stricken communities endured. The American Jewish press similarly kept readers abreast of the calamitous circumstances that befell their co-religionists in communities that had become the epicenter this deadly disease.[4]
Yet the press provided the public with much more than reportage. In the nineteenth century, newspaper editors, columnists, and correspondents—the century’s mass media—also played a central role in shaping public opinion, much as they do today.[5] Isaac Mayer Wise (1819-1900), the famous American rabbi who established the institutions of American Reform Judaism, also founded The American Israelite (1854-present) for which he served as editor and publisher. As the writer of weekly columns and editorials which were read across the nation—by Jews and, to some degree, the general American audience as well—Wise was one of his time’s most important Jewish journalists and opinion makers.[6]
The American Israelite provided its readers with reports on how various Jewish communities were dealing with the periodic outbreaks of yellow fever. And Wise regularly expressed his own distinctive views on various subjects. He oftentimes even exhorted his readers with preachments and homiletical devices meant to influence public response to current events. In the 1870s, Wise’s American Israelite paid especially close attention to the devastating yellow fever epidemics that afflicted numerous communities in the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee, where many of his Jewish subscribers lived. He evinced a keen interest in the terrible yellow fever outbreaks that occurred in Memphis in 1873 and again in 1878, and discussed the topic in a number of editorials that appeared in the fall of 1878.
Wise’s interest in the Memphis yellow fever outbreak that year may have been especially keen for personal reasons. First, one of Wise’s sons, Julius, was living in Memphis when the 1878 epidemic broke out. Julius, Wise’s second-oldest son, earned his medical degree at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1872, where he studied epidemiology. Upon graduating, Julius returned to Cincinnati to begin his practice of medicine before accepting an invitation to become a member of the faculty of Memphis Hospital Medical College in 1875. When the 1878 outbreak of yellow fever ravaged Memphis, the young doctor with expertise in epidemiology became a frontline soldier in the city’s fight against a particularly vicious occurrence.[7]
The elder Wise’s numerous editorials on the yellow fever epidemic of 1878 in Memphis were informed by firsthand information he received from his son. Yet, Wise’s impassioned interest may also be linked to several transformational experiences he had in 1873, when he received a personal and detailed account of the terrible sufferings caused by an outbreak that was “announced officially” in September of that year. According to the Memphis Public Ledger, “No class of [Memphis’s] population suffered more than the Israelites in proportion to numbers, and none worked better at home and abroad [to be helpful] . . .. They not only stood by each other, but they made common cause with the whole community.”[8]
Wise had received hair-raising written descriptions of the turmoil and sufferings that unfolded in the fall of 1873 from his B’nai Brith brothers, Asher Weinstock of Shreveport, and A.E. (Abraham E.) Frankland (1831-1895) and Rabbi Max Samfield (1844-1915) of Memphis.[9] The distressing reports he received provoked an emotional outpouring from Wise in the pages of the Israelite:
Poor Shreveport! Woe-stricken Memphis! How afflicted, how lamentable are you! . . . dearly beloved have been laid low, and the very air is ripe with lamentation. Two of our most excellent congregations in the Southwest have been depopulated and darkened with affliction and misery. . . . Let us weep a tear with Shreveport and Memphis and send them our brotherly condolences.[10]
“Wise and Lowenstine immediately embarked on an emergency fund-raising campaign which began with an appeal to the members of Wise’s synagogue, B’nai Yeshurun. According to Wise, his congregants not only donated generous sums, but influential congregants arranged for their rabbi and his Memphian guest to meet with the mayor of Cincinnati and, also, to address the Cincinnati City Council to solicit funds for the emergency. The City Council voted to contribute $15,000 to the cause.”
In addition to these written communications, Wise also received a gruesome report from Henry Lowenstine, who traveled to Cincinnati in late October of 1873 to solicit financial support for his community. Emil Kahn, a Cincinnati lawyer and an active member of Cincinnati’s B’nai Brith and Masonic lodges, introduced Lowenstine to Wise, giving Lowenstein the opportunity to provide Wise with “a graphic account [of] the ravages of the yellow fever.” Lowenstine’s report moved Wise so profoundly that he immediately resolved to do whatever he could “to alleviate the sufferings so vividly depicted. . .”[11] Wise and Lowenstine immediately embarked on an emergency fund-raising campaign which began with an appeal to the members of Wise’s synagogue, B’nai Yeshurun. According to Wise, his congregants not only donated generous sums, but influential congregants arranged for their rabbi and his Memphian guest to meet with the mayor of Cincinnati and, also, to address the Cincinnati City Council to solicit funds for the emergency. The City Council voted to contribute $15,000 to the cause.[12] With this generous gift in hand, Wise and Lowenstine decided to travel to a half dozen nearby cities in the hope of replicating the success they had in Cincinnati. The whirlwind journey, completed in a week’s time, took the duo to Newport and Covington, Kentucky, Indianapolis, Cleveland, and Detroit. Although they had planned to visit Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and Wheeling, their fund-raising efforts were so unexpectedly successful that, according to Wise, the mayor of Memphis informed them by telegraph that “no more aid was required.”[13]
“The fact that the Jewish community and the general community exhibited a spirit of mutual concern reinforced Wise’s conviction that the people of America overwhelmingly viewed their Jewish neighbors as friends and fellow citizens. ‘We have learned a good lesson,’ Wise concluded, ‘one which teaches us to respect and love our fellow-citizens.”
Wise’s 1873 fund-raising successes for the stricken citizens of Memphis left him inspired and hopeful. “Notwithstanding our imperfections and shortcomings,” Wise effused, “we are humanized, our impulses are youthful and generous, our hearts are with the suffering, and our hands open to render aid and support. This is an extremely pleasing lesson to us.” The fact that the Jewish community and the general community exhibited a spirit of mutual concern reinforced Wise’s conviction that the people of America overwhelmingly viewed their Jewish neighbors as friends and fellow citizens. “We have learned a good lesson,” Wise concluded, “one which teaches us to respect and love our fellow-citizens.”[14]
Five years later, when yellow fever broke out again in Memphis, Wise immediately reported on the return of the “Yellow Plague” just as the scourge began its outbreak in August of 1878. “The yellow fever,” he wrote, “is again upon our southern shores, claiming its victims, terrifying thousands of people, and interfering disastrously with the prosperity of communities and individuals.” Wise explained that the blight seemed to have come from nearby communities with similar climate, but medical experts did not understand how the disease was “conveyed to others and propagated.” Wise’s political and rabbinical instincts amalgamated as he tried to rouse the public to action. Rabbi Wise’s words, written more than 140 years ago, seem pathetically relevant to our contemporary encounter with COVID-19:
We have had of late investigation committees at an expense of millions of dollars to discover the causes of fraud and embezzlement in the affairs of the government; why do we not form a committee to investigate the causes of epidemics? Why do not the medical faculties of the country take this matter in hand and present to Congress united action on this important subject? When the evil has come upon the community the cry of horror and helplessness resounds; once passed, it dies out of man’s memory. While it rages, the men of charity are hard at work; when it leaves, the dead are buried, the survivors mourn, and everybody else goes to his business. Such is the frivolity of man. The medical faculties, however, together with all earnest philanthropists and scientists, ought not to rest there where the vulgar mind stops. They must not despair in progressive science and say, what has remained unknown to date is unknowable, for this, as the history of science proves, is the language of conservative cowards.
Remarkably, Wise concluded his exhortation by urging medical professionals to compel the Federal government to establish “a commission of investigation into the causes of epidemics, and of yellow fever especially.” He apprehended the need for concerted leadership by the Federal government nearly 70 years before the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (the predecessor of Health and Human Services) and the Center for Disease Control came into being.[15]
Little did Wise know, when he wrote those impassioned words in his op-ed, that the yellow fever epidemic in Memphis would soon carry away one of his own young rabbinical students, Moses Hahn (1862-1878). This memory of this unfortunate youth, whose “future in life was so promising,” has escaped historians altogether.[16]
On September 2, 1878 Wise inaugurated the College’s fourth academic year. He began his annual address to the student body by delivering the sad news that their classmate, Moses Hahn – “a lad of great promise and noble nature” – had been “summon[ed] from this to a higher life.” A solemn Wise reminded his students that their fallen comrade would forever dwell in the “metivtah d’rakiah” (God’s “Heavenly Academy”), and therefore would remain forever as one of them, one of the “Atzilei B’nai Yisrael” (Israel’s nobility). Quoting Psalms, Wise assured his young charges that because Hahn was a pious young man, he was “precious in God’s sight.” Finally, he instructed them to recall their fellow student, rise, and join him in a recitation of the Kaddish (Mourner’s) Prayer.[17]
In addition to losing one of his students, Wise’s feelings concerning the epidemic must have intensified when he learned, at this very same time, that his son, Julius, had contracted the disease while delivering medical treatment to suffering Memphians. Julius eventually recovered from the illness and returned to his medical practice and also volunteered his services to the Howard Association, a benevolent organization which enlisted the help of physicians and nurses who were willing to work longer hours to do what they could to ameliorate the suffering of thousands who contracted the disease. Julius’s older brother, Leo Wise (1849-1933), later recalled that Rabbi Wise raised funds in Cincinnati to support the work of the Howard Association in Memphis.[18]
In one of his first editorials on the epidemic in Memphis, Wise told his readers that they could protect themselves from the dreaded disease by attending to cleanliness and, also, by behaving honestly. “Cleanliness and honesty are the two foundation stones upon which the health and prosperity of society rest,” Wise wrote. “All the misery that humanity had to encounter could be distinctly traced to the disregard of those fundamental principles.” Even though Wise had no idea that mosquitos were to blame for transmitting the infection, he instinctively urged “every head of the family, . . . every teacher and pulpit orator throughout the land” to instruct their charges to guard against unsanitary conditions. “How important that the council of every town should see to it that the dwellings of the poor are kept clean, that the streets, alleys and by-ways are in good sanitary condition, that the sewers are unobstructed and the supply of water abundant, and that honesty prevails in all the public departments.”[19]
Shortly after the epidemic began, Wise called on state governments, “both general and local,” to find the cause of the plague and help the public to eradicate it— “cost what it may.” This task was the nation’s “first duty.” Employing language that has been repeated used in the fight against COVID-19, Wise declared: “An invading army is not as destructive as an invading epidemic. There must be means to overcome this foe, and they ought to be discovered and applied at once.”[20]
The failure of corrupt state governments to meet the challenge enraged Wise. In a series of scathing editorials on the yellow fever epidemic, Wise railed against useless and dishonest government officials who were seemingly incapable of helping their suffering constituents:
Nothing could prove more conclusively the worthlessness of our State Governments than the present epidemic does. Here is a public calamity, numerous people are helpless, large numbers of them die, the sick and the convalescent and those depending on their labor for a living cry for help, and no State Government, no Governor and no other high official or legislature are heard from, no provisions to alleviate suffering are made or making, it is nobody’s business to do anything.[21]
Wise bitterly criticized self-serving governmental leaders in states severely afflicted by the “Yellow Plague”—Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee as “worthless” and “despicable,” as “leeches” rather than “leaders of the people.” Nothing would change in America until these officials were “swept away” and the governments they led “radically reformed in the name of humanity and progressive civilization.” There were too many “machine politicians” in the southern states, and they took primary interest in preening themselves. “Oust them as fast as you can,” the rabbi urged, “and let us have men who feel other people’s woes, . . .”[22]
Wise heaped special scorn on the Governor of Mississippi, John Marshall Stone (1830 – 1900), for issuing a proclamation that urged “all Christian people throughout the state to repair to their respective places of worship and offer up their united petitions in prayer to God that He will withdraw . . . this terrible affliction . . . .” Wise compared the Governor’s proclamation to the writings of “demi-ecclesiastical fanatics of by-gone ages.” Instead of lifting a hand to alleviate the terrible suffering, the Governor advised his people to pray to the Almighty One. “It is a disgrace [and] an outrage on common sense,” Wise thundered. “The dead will be buried, the sick may die and the surviving may starve . . . “ but “the chief politician of Mississippi” thinks that “prayer will do it, i.e., the prayer of Christians, of course, as other people are mere trash after all.”[23]
Of all Wise’s efforts to influence public opinion during the yellow fever epidemic, it was the theme of charitable giving that concerned him most. Those who had been laid low by the plague needed funds for a wide array of needs, and Wise’s editorials repeatedly admonished the fortunate to give generously. It is a “special duty for us to perform,” Wise wrote. “The calamity brought by the yellow fever on those cities and towns visited by the horrid pestilence is heart piercing,” he continued, but these difficult circumstances offer people an opportunity to be a blessing to others. The epidemic “has made heroes of many and opened the avenues of charity among others . . ..”[24]
“Like those who lived through the yellow fever epidemics of the nineteenth century, we, too, are experiencing historic levels of suffering and death. A century of progress has not eradicated the fecklessness of governmental inaction and the stain of political self-centeredness.”
The parallels between the concerns expressed in Wise’s editorials on the “Yellow Plague” of 1878 and our own contemporary circumstances are arrestingly apparent. Like those who lived through the yellow fever epidemics of the nineteenth century, we, too, are experiencing historic levels of suffering and death. A century of progress has not eradicated the fecklessness of governmental inaction and the stain of political self-centeredness. We, too, live among individuals who doubt the usefulness of science and argue that in the end we must depend on the benevolence of God to determine who will live and who will die.
When future historians reconstruct the story of the Covid-19 pandemic, those who are remembered will be the individuals who rejected superstition, ignorance, and self-regard, and displayed courage, compassion, and commitment in an effort to improve the human condition. As Camus wrote in The Plague—“to state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.”[25]
In reflecting back on the yellow fever epidemic of 1878, it is clear Isaac M. Wise arrived at the very same conclusion:
Many an aching breast today bemoans the loss of what was nearest and dearest; many a heart that beat high and brave is stilled forever; many a bright eye has become glazed and dull; hands that never tired of doing good are idly folded; feet that were swift on errands of charity will move no more; souls, whose every impulse was great and generous, have returned to their Maker . . . But still above all the misery, above all the desolation, there loomed forth the rainbow of promise in the gloomy sky, the tangible evidence of the innate nobility of man. Men, not one, not a hundred, but thousands, were found who gave willing service to the cause of humanity, who at the risk of almost certain death gave proof of their allegiance to their kind. . .
Today, Wise’s op-ed counsel merits attention as we face our own inscrutable future: “[May we] all feel that the year has not passed in vain, that we have during its passage given some service to Israel, to our country, to humanity, [and] to our God.”[26]
[1] Albert Camus, The Plague (New York: Vintage International, 1991): 291.
[2] Taking note of this interest, the American Social History Project “compiled a list of resources to assist students, teachers, and the general public in understanding past epidemics and connect this knowledge to the present situation. See “Epidemics in U.S. History” on the American Social History Project Website, sponsored by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York: https://ashp.cuny.edu/epidemics-us-history.
[3] For a comprehensive historical analysis of epidemics over the course of history, see Frank M. Snowden, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019). On yellow fever, see Molly Caldwell Crosby, The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic That Shaped Our History (New York: Berkley Books, 2006). On yellow fever in the American South, see Margaret Humphreys. Yellow Fever and the South. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992); and John H. Ellis, Yellow Fever and Public Health in the New South (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1992).
[4] On Memphis, see Alan M. Kraut, “A.E. Frankland’s History of the 1873 Yellow Fever Epidemic in Memphis, Tennessee” in The American Jewish Archives Journal 59 (2007): 89-98. On Grenada, see Leo Turitz and Evelyn Turitz, Jews in Early Mississippi. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995): 75. On New Orleans, see Julian B. Feibelman, “A Social and Economic Study of the New Orleans Jewish Community.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1941, p. 83ff. On Savannah, see Saul Jacob Rubin, Third to None: The Saga of Savannah Jewry, 1733-1983, (Savannah, Ga.: Mickve Israel, 1983).
[5] For a seminal study on the influence of the press on public opinion, see George A. Lundberg, “The Newspaper and Public Opinion” in Social Forces Vol. 4, No. 4 (Jun., 1926): 709-715. See also, Robert Y. Shapiro and Lawrence R. Jacobs. The Oxford Handbook of American Public Opinion and the Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
[6] The first issue of The Israelite appeared on July 15, 1854. The paper was renamed The American Israelite beginning with the issue of July 3, 1874. On Isaac Mayer Wise, see Sefton D. Temkin, Isaac Mayer Wise, Shaping American Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
[7] On Julius Wise (1851-1902) see American Israelite, 24 April 1902, 4. See also, Chicago Daily Tribune, 20 April 1902; and New York Times, 20 April 1902.
[8] Memphis Daily Ledger, 13 1873.
[9] On Frankland, see Kraut, supra. See also A.E. Frankland, “Kronikals of the Times – Memphis, 1862” ed. Maxwell Whitefield in American Jewish Archives 9 (October 1957): 83-125. On Samfield, see Central Conference of American Rabbis Yearbook, Vol. 26 (1916): 211-212. See also, Judy G. Ringel, Children of Israel: The Story of Temple Israel, Memphis, Tennessee, 1854-2004 (Memphis, TN: Temple Israel, 2004): 17-23. Shreveport resident Ascher Isar Weinstock (1811-1885) owned a dry goods business.
[10] Israelite, 17 October 1873.
[11] The Israelite, 7 November 1873, p. 4. Memphian Henry M. Lowenstine (1843-1890) was also in the dry goods business. On Emil (Emile) Kahn (1846-1918), see Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, Cincinnati, Ohio, 25 February 1918, Page 3.
[12] $15,000 in 1873 would be the equivalent of nearly $300,000 in today’s money.
[13] The Israelite, 7 November 1873, p. 4. It is amusing that Wise never passed up an opportunity to tweak the nose of the New Yorkers. In boasting about the generosity of Cincinnati’s City Council, Wise remarked: “We knew that New York would be obliged to do something similar, and we were not mistaken, as that city followed with an appropriation of $50,000 for the same purpose.”
[14] Ibid. The secular press in Memphis also reported on the Wise-Lowenstine fundraising initiative, praising the Jews of Memphis and the “eminent” Cincinnati rabbi, Dr. Isaac M. Wise. See Memphis Daily Ledger, 13 1873.
[15] American Israelite, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2 August 1878, p. 4.
[16] For quotation, see p. 613 of the Proceedings of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, Vol 1 (1873-1879). See, <https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015062293124&view=1up&seq=641&q1=Moses%20Hahn>.
[17] For a description of the convocation and Wise’s address to the student body, see American Israelite, 6 September 1878, p. 4. Wise’s Hebrew quotations are from Exodus 24:11, Midrash Tehillim 78:12, and Psalms 116:15.
[18] On Julius Wise’s participation in the Howard Association, see American Israelite, 24 April 1902, p. 4. According to one source, volunteer physicians and nurses were assigned to a district in the city wherein they assumed responsibility for taking daily rounds at dawn. The Howard Association is often referred to as a precursor to the American Red Cross. For more on the Memphis chapter, see Anne Marie Falsone, “The Memphis Howard Association: A Study in the Growth of Social Awareness” (M.A. thesis, Memphis State University, 1968).
[19] American Israelite, 30 August 1878, p. 4.
[20] American Israelite, 12 September 1879, p. 4.
[21] Ibid.
[22] American Israelite, 13 September 1878, p. 4.
[23] American Israelite, 20 September 1878, p. 4.
[24] American Israelite, 12 September 1879, p. 4; American Israelite, 27 September 1878, p. 4.
[25] Camus, The Plague, p. 308.
[26] American Israelite, 3 January 1879, p. 4.
