The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic That Shaped Our Nation Read Online Free PDF

movement. When the floats passed, the ministers stood outside signing up new volunteers for their “Red Ribbon brigade.” All of this mattered little to the Ulks and their throngs who made their way to the Greenlaw Opera House on the corner of Union.
    The Romanesque Greenlaw had seen better days. The four-story opera house had been built with greatness in mind: a ballroom that could accommodate three hundred couples; an opera house with eight-foot-wide doors operated by pulleys and counterweights; an auditorium with fifty-foot ceilings. Its builders had visions of the country’s finest musicians, theater and modern lectures. But by 1878, it had become a nickel-and-dime hall whose main lectures were those of the temperance movement. Instead of violin concertos, patrons heard a man play his cornet imitations and listened to a sermon on the temperance cause. That year, Mardi Gras breathed a little life and sophistication back into the Greenlaw.
    The Greenlaw had been decorated like a childhood fairyland with evergreens, hundreds of imported flowers and caged canaries. A revolving pyramid, three tiers high, repeated the themes of the parade floats. The newspaper reported that “fans fluttered and diamonds flashed.” In fact, the only drawback to the evening seemed to be the number of ladies carrying stylish feather fans, which as they quivered, set off tufts of fleecy clouds all over the room. To the intoxicated revelers, it must have seemed like part of the magic.
     
 
The biggest attraction, the parade of the Memphi, was yet to come. By Tuesday morning, March 5, costumed people began lining the streets at 10:00 a.m. The costumes were beautiful as often as they were grotesque, and ladies carried horsewhips for their own protection. Again, it was a clear, sunny day, and by twilight, police on horseback marched through the city pushing back the crowds and reminding storekeepers to extinguish the lights inside. In a dark city filled with anticipation, the light show began. Rockets and fireworks exploded over the bluffs, spelling MEMPHI in the night sky. At the water’s edge, flat-bottom boats floated like vessels shuddering with candlelight. Street corners were lit by beacons of blues, reds, greens and golds from burning calcium lights.
    Bleachers lined the muddy thoroughfares of Main Street where Wilkerson’s apothecary, Harpman and Brother Cigars, and McLaughlin’s grocery stood. On every rooftop men dangled their legs over parapet walls and cornices. Women and men crowded in the windows above Barnaby Furnishings and McClelland Drugs, waving streamers. And hundreds of gas lamps, like globes glowing against the March sky, illuminated the streets.
    Long before the parade came into view, the trumpets could be heard. The smell of kerosene-laced smoke drifted from torches. The scent of manure was heavy in the air as 3,000 horsemen made their way through downtown, the horse hooves thumping against hard, packed mud. Fireworks ignited the nighttime sky, adding to the dizzying haze and tinderbox smell.
    As the first float came into view the cheers of the crowds turned to a roar. The floats were horse-drawn wagons carrying wooden stages, several stories high, draped in vibrant bunting, tapestries and ribbons. Coils of smoke rose from dampened torches to appear as though the floats hovered on clouds. Memphis prided itself on educating its people through the Mardi Gras celebration and float designs. This year, the Mardi Gras theme was the Myths of the Aryan People, which was a relatively modern idea grafting legends and lore of Asia with Europe. “From identity and language, we know that what now constitutes many and mighty nations there all descended from one common stock,” the Memphis Appeal wrote as way of explanation. Fifty years later, Adolf Hitler would usurp the term Aryan for his own definition of pure, Nordic descendants.
     
 
That night, Blue Danube and Golden Slippers could be heard through open windows as orchestras