“The joy in the other fellow.”
The same page of the Bulletin (which showed sketches of embracing the scavenger man and walking with the Chinese cook) has an update on Paris fashions below Jacobson’s big spread and a few small items typical for the postdisaster phase: a request to return milk cans to dairymen so they can keep supplying milk, and a note on the Women’s Relief Corps of Oakland and the charitable programs of the Improved Order of Red Men, a fraternal organization. Tens of thousands of warehoused army boots from the Spanish-American War were issued to the citizens of San Francisco, some of whom had fled the earthquake and fire in little more than their nightshirts and nightgowns, so it is hard to say who was the beneficiary of the fashion advice about hats and the news that “sleeves are shorter than in winter.” A day later, the Bulletin revised this fashion advice: “Modish young women whose plain shirtwaists never cost less than twenty dollars in the ancient time that ended on the morning of April 18, have discovered that the blue army shirt, distributed free at the supply stations, when pleated to reduce the girth and improve the lines, makes a warm and not unbecoming waist [blouse]. It can be worn a week and any child can wash it.” An article below this one was titled, “San Francisco Greater in Poverty Than Prosperity,” and a brief report below that mentioned the arrest of two men for trying to break into a safe.
The day before the quake, the Bulletin’s lead stories had been about chasms between races and classes. The biggest headlines were for the sixteen-year-old boy who had been kidnapped by a ship’s crew, part of the semislave labor of the seas that persisted into the twentieth century. A race war seemed near in Missouri after a grand jury investigated a white mob of lynchers. Two thousand Japanese immigrants were denounced for violating labor law to work in the Alaska canneries. Other stories from around the nation in the weeks after the earthquake were about union power, about the reformist impact of Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, exposing the foul Chicago meatpacking industry, and the case for breaking up Standard Oil’s monopoly. The society was made of schisms at that moment. It’s this pervasive atmosphere of conflict that made Jacobson’s “millennial good fellowship” so remarkable.
GENERAL FUNSTON’S FEAR
Shoot to Kill
Brigadier General Frederick Funston, the commanding officer at the Presidio military base on San Francisco’s northern edge, perceived his job as saving the city from the people, rather than saving the people from the material city of cracked and crumbling buildings, fallen power lines, and towering flames. And so what Pauline Jacobson saw as a “millennial good fellowship,” Funston and others in power saw as a mob to be repressed and a flock to be herded. “Without warrant of law and without being requested to do so,” Funston wrote in his own defense a few months later, “I marched the troops into the city, merely to aid the municipal authorities and not to supercede them.” It is true that he had the cooperation of the mayor at the outset, though conflicts over authority arose during the three days of the conflagration and the weeks of military occupation. Most citizens and many soldiers believed that martial law had been declared and the army was legitimately in command of the city, though only Congress could then authorize martial law, and it had done no such thing. (In 2007, federal law was changed to allow the president to send in army troops to occupy American cities, a huge setback for domestic liberty.) The belief that martial law was in effect was later used as a defense by soldiers and militiamen who acted as though it was by shooting down citizens and forcing them at gunpoint out of their homes and into conscripted labor. General Sheridan, the Civil War hero, had ordered his troops into Chicago after the Great Fire there in 1871, but was immediately rebuked by the governor and forced to withdraw them.
No disaster is truly natural. In earthquakes, trees fall, rarely, the earth fissures in the great ones, but barring tsunamis, the natural world survives well. The earthquake could be called nature’s contribution to the destruction of San Francisco’s structures and infrastructure, if you left aside the question of why after the big earthquake of 1868 the city didn’t develop better building codes and the fact that architecture itself, and anyone trapped within, is the principal victim of earthquakes. In the hours after the quake came man’s contribution. The city would be taken over by a hostile army, its citizens treated as enemies, and much of what had survived would be burned down, wantonly if inadvertently, by soldiers who in the course of thinking they must take control sent things spiraling out of control and up in flames. In treating the citizens as enemies, the occupying armies drove residents and volunteers away from scenes where fire could be prevented. In many parts of the city only those who eluded the authorities by diplomacy, stealth, or countering invocation of authority were able to fight the blaze. Those who did saved many homes and work sites. There are no reliable figures on mortality in the earthquake, but the best estimates are that about three thousand died, mostly from the earthquake itself. One historian suspects that as many as five hundred citizens were killed by the occupying forces; another estimates fifty to seventy-five.
The fires and booming explosions raged for three days. It sounded like war. When they were done, half the city was ash and rubble, more than twenty-eight thousand buildings had been destroyed, and more than half the population of four hundred thousand was homeless. Mansions burned down atop Nob Hill; the slum district south of Market Street was nearly erased. The disaster provoked, as most do, a mixed reaction: generosity and solidarity among most of the citizens, and hostility from those who feared that public and sought to control it, in the belief that an unsubjugated citizenry was—in the words of Funston—“an unlicked mob.” For all the picturesqueness of men in bowler hats and women in long skirts fleeing a disaster more than a century ago, the San Francisco earthquake has, in all its essentials, the same ingredients as most contemporary disasters, the same social solidarities and schisms, the same generous and destructive characters. It certainly prefigures the clashes of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. What makes the small utopias like the Mizpah Café all the more remarkable is that they took place in the context of devastation and of conflict—the response of one social sector, just as those welcoming kitchens were the response of another.
Funston was only the second-in-command at the Presidio. Even the absent commanding officer, General Greeley, would be disturbed by how Funston had handled the crisis. Short, hard-drinking, belligerent, sandy-haired, apparently full of boundless confidence, Funston was a man of decisive action who often decided unwisely. A brave soldier, he had been decorated and promoted for actions in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War, a few years before the earthquake. He had also been reviled and investigated for shooting prisoners without trials and using underhanded methods to capture an enemy leader’s camp. Upon his return from the war, he was dressed down by President Theo dore Roosevelt himself for too aggressive a public attack on an antiwar senator. Shortly after the 1906 earthquake, Funston was sent to quell the labor unrest in Goldfield, Nevada, led by the anarchist union the International Workers of the World. He was a hothead who served power and privilege unquestioningly, and he may have served his country best by dropping dead on the eve of his appointment as commander of the U.S. forces in the First World War. The extreme measures he took in the 1906 earthquake are partly signs of his own disposition and worldview, but they were widely supported by the businessmen and politicians in the crisis, and similar reactions have been taken in other disasters into the present.
San Francisco’s mayor, Eugene Schmitz, was a handsome populist who had risen from a working-class background to become first an orchestra conductor and then a surprise successful candidate for mayor in 1901 on the Union Labor ticket. But he responded similarly to Funston, infamously issuing a proclamation that day which read: “The Federal Troops, the members of the Regular Police Force, and all Special Police Officers have been authorized by me to KILL any and all persons found engaged in Looting or in the Commission of Any Other Crime.” Copies were quickly p
rinted up and plastered around the city. Like Funston, Schmitz was protecting the city from the people that day and in the days afterward (though he was more sympathetic in other respects: the morning of the quake, he freed all the prisoners from the city jail, except those charged with serious felonies, and sent them off with a scolding). The death penalty is an extreme measure for theft, to say the least, and that theft was the primary crime the poster addressed is indicative. Many would not consider property crimes significant when lives are at stake—and the term looting conflates the emergency requisitioning of supplies in a crisis without a cash economy with opportunistic stealing. Disaster scholars now call this fear-driven overreaction elite panic.
In the hours and days after the earthquake, more than seventeen thousand army troops were joined by members of the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Marines, the California National Guard, and military cadets from the University of California, Berkeley. In his magisterial history of the quake, Philip Fradkin comments, “What Funston unwittingly set into motion was the gathering on the city streets of the largest peacetime military presence in this country’s history.” One of the cadets from the University of California, sophomore Stuart Ingram, remembered long afterward, “About noon the university announced that college work for the rest of the term was abandoned, all students graduated or promoted without the usual examinations. With the announcement the whole town took on a kind of holiday air of gaiety. As news continued to get worse the air of gaiety faded. San Francisco was hard hit, more fires started, and uneasiness began to arise that total demoralization was close and the danger of riots would require National Guard troops.”
Total demoralization doesn’t describe the mood of the city, and there was no evidence that riots were likely, but the city got the National Guard troops anyway (and the governor kept them there even after the mayor requested their removal). The military and National Guard were deployed to prevent things that often existed largely in their imagination. Funston wrote, “I have no doubt, and have heard the same opinion expressed by scores of citizens, that had it not been for the prompt arrival of the large force of Regular Troops, who are acting under orders to shoot all looters, the saloons would have been broken into, and then the crowd, becoming turbulent, would have begun sacking the banks and jewelry stores.” The same claim has been made in many other situations—that the reason there was no malicious or mob behavior was police or military action. Logically, the argument is akin to the one that the amulet you wear wards off the evil eye; that something has not happened is not always evidence that it was prevented by the measures taken. Major William Stephenson of the U.S. Army wrote to his college classmates in Maine, “The prompt appearance of our troops was all that saved the city from the terror of a mob, plundering first the saloons, of which there were thirty-four hundred, and then the stores and mansions.”
Colonel Charles Morris, who was in command of the western side of the city, said, “I was waited upon at my headquarters on Broadway by a committee of highly respected citizens of the district, who stated they had learned on good authority that the poor who had been burned out, felt that the rich had not suffered losses as had the poor, and were therefore determined to invade the Western Addition and lay it waste by incendiarism and attendant acts of spoil, looting, and violence. I completely reassured this committee by informing them of the precautionary measures, particularly as regarded the destruction of liquor, adopted to safeguard the lives and property of the people residing in my district.” Morris, like much of the occupying army, may not have known the city very well. The fires had ravaged many mansions, luxury hotels, and the central business district almost as soon as it burned the poor neighborhoods nearby. Other working-class districts—Telegraph Hill, Potrero Hill, and the Mission District—came through with earthquake damage but little fire damage.
The authorities’ fear was not precipitated by anything the public did in those days, but by earlier anxieties in that era of upheaval. They believed uncontrolled crowds routinely degenerated into mobs, and they doubted the legitimacy of the system they dominated, since they expected mobs to tear it apart given the least opportunity. San Francisco had a lively working class, a strong labor movement, and a history of dramatic public actions, from parades to real mob activities such as the anti-Chinese riots of 1877. But there is no evidence of civil unrest in the period of the 1906 earthquake. The mayor had ordered all saloons closed to preserve the public peace, but soldiers and marines took the orders too literally, and with an order given by Colonel Morris to justify them, began breaking into closed saloons and grocery stores on the west side of town and destroying the whole stock of alcohol. The rampage frightened the citizens. You could argue that the army sent to prevent mobs became a mob.
Opportunistic theft began with the cigar stealers Officer Schmitt thwarted early in the morning on April 18. There isn’t evidence that it constituted a major problem. Far, far more property, including homes, warehouses, and workplaces and all their contents, was lost in the fires for which those in command bore partial responsibility. And some of the thieves were soldiers. A banker who stayed in the old Montgomery Building downtown, which survived the flames, witnessed the soldiers who were supposed to be guarding it “going in and out at all times except when the officers were coming to pass the word along to post the guard—then they would skip out like rats from a trap—I don’t think that the officers ever saw them. . . . I saw the soldiers carrying out cigar boxes loaded under their arms, ten or twenty boxes, as much as they could carry.” A navy man saw two drunken sailors trying to rob a jewelry store and was nearly shot by one of them when he intervened.
Others were engaged in what might better be called “requisitioning”—the obtaining of necessary goods by taking them where they could be found. One improvised emergency hospital was supplied with mattresses and bedding that volunteers took out of abandoned hotels. Volunteers, including some from the Salvation Army, broke the windows of drugstores on Market Street to get medical supplies. Among those participating in such ethical pillaging were cable car company president James B. Stetson and his son Harry, an attorney. Another man was seen picking over the rubble of a ruin, and the discoverer fired a warning shot. The man ran, and a soldier shot him dead. He had been trying to free someone trapped in that rubble.
The police invited Mormon elders to take supplies from a grocery store about to be destroyed by fire. On their second trip to bring food to their camp in Jefferson Square, a soldier ordered everyone out and then shot and killed the man standing behind them. They had returned to the wrong store, and the penalty for the mistake was death. A woman told a cadet that a grocer invited the crowd to help themselves before the fire got his store, and a soldier bayonetted one of the invitees who was leaving laden with groceries. A grocer who charged extortionate prices had his goods expropriated by soldiers and “a dozen rifle barrels were leveled at the grocer’s head”—perhaps slightly more just, but not much less violent a response. A National Guardsman yelled at an African American man stooping over something on the ground to “get out but he paid no attention to me, so I up and fired at him. I missed of course, but the shot must have scared him and he started to run. I was just getting ready to shoot again, when a shot was fired from across the street and the fellow toppled over. . . . An officer came along and ordered us to throw the body into the still burning ruins, so in it went.” On April 21, the Bulletin reported that soldiers shot four men breaking into a safe; another story on the same page stated that twenty men on the waterfront were executed for refusing to help with the firefighting effort. The cashier of a bank was shot as a looter while he was trying to open his company’s vault two days after the quake. Many of the executed were incinerated in the fires or dumped in the bay. Their numbers will never be known.
General Funston later wrote, “Market Street was full of excited, anxious people watching the progress of the various fires now being merged into one great conflagration. A few moments before seven o’clock there arrived the
first detachment of regular troops, the men of the Engineer Corps at Fort Mason. Their presence had an instantly reassuring effect on all awe-inspired persons.” And the non-awe-inspired? In a long letter about life in one of San Francisco’s refugee camps, an upper-class woman wrote, “A drunken soldier had pushed his way into a tent full of sleeping women and threatened to shoot them. Hardly a day passed that all camping there were not roughly ordered to leave the ground by some uniformed person who strode shouting over the sands. On the first of these occasions after our arrival, there being only two or three women of us present, we were much distressed.” Mary Doyle wrote a cousin on a scrap of brown-paper bag, “A large number of men and even women have been shot down for disobeying orders of soldiers.” An officer’s daughter wrote a friend, “A good many awful men are loose in the city, but the soldiers shoot everyone disobeying in the slightest, no explanations asked or given.” Henry Fitchner, a nurse, reported, “I saw one soldier on O’Farrell Street, between Van Ness Avenue and Franklin Street, beat with the butt of his gun a woman—apparently a servant girl—who wanted to get a bundle of clothing that she had left on the sidewalk in that block.”
“The terrible days of the earthquake and fire,” General Greeley reported on May 17, “were neither accompanied nor followed by rioting, disorder, drunkenness (save in a very few cases), nor by crime. The orderly and law-abiding conduct of the people rendered the maintenance of order a comparatively easy task.” Not all authorities were terrified of the people they were supposed to serve—but Greeley had been away during the earthquake, and it is impossible to know what his first response would have been.
A Paradise Built in Hell Page 5