In the past five years, Donald Trump has explicitly promoted the notion that foreigners carry contagion. In 2015 he proclaimed that Mexicans were to blame for “tremendous infectious disease … pouring across the border,” a charge he has repeated as president. Meanwhile, the deliberate cultivation of fears of infectious disease from China has a long, nasty history in the United States—one that even today’s bitter partisans should be willing to acknowledge.

Hawaii had been in turmoil through much of the 1890s, especially after 1893, when white immigrants from the United States overthrew the last Hawaiian monarch, Queen Lili‘uokalani. Her efforts to regain power failed, and the United States annexed the islands in 1898. The next year, in November, a ship outbound from Hong Kong made port in Honolulu. At least one passenger made his or her way to the city’s Chinatown. On December 12, the disease that unidentified traveler had carried announced itself in the death of a 22-year-old Chinese bookkeeper named You Chong, the first victim on American territory of what is now known as the third global pandemic of the bubonic plague. Four more Chinatown residents became sick and died soon after.

Local officials reacted swiftly and decisively. Chinatown was cordoned off, locking about 10,000 people in place, and the local board of health acted on its theory of the infection: The bubonic plague was caused by the dirt—the word used was “filth”—and packed conditions in which Honolulu’s Chinese residents lived.

If the muck the white authorities saw bred into the lives and habits of the Chinese really was the cauldron in which disease brewed, then the solution was obvious. As the historian Nayan Shah writes, the head of the board of health, Henry Cooper, ordered the creation of a literal firebreak between the supposed reservoir of disease in Chinatown and the rest of the city. On January 20, officials set what was supposed to be a controlled burn, a strategic disinfection. Just as the first fires ignited, the wind picked up, embers flipped to neighboring roofs, and within the day, all of Chinatown was in flames. The fire burned for more than two weeks; 45,000 people lost their homes.

A similar sequence of malign ignorance, combined with a depressingly contemporary money-motivated blindness would play out over the next few years as the disease moved on. The pandemic was already more than a century old when it reached Honolulu. It had started in China’s Yunnan province in the 1770s, but had remained a mostly local outbreak until the 1850s, when a combination of civil war and the globalization created as European powers extended their empires sped the disease on its way. The plague reached China’s coast in the 1870s, and from there, the ships that bore imperial trade carried the plague across the globe.