The Great Fire
Early historians chose to emphasize the fire over the earthquake, and in the decades afterward, 1906 was remembered for “the Great Fire.” Some recent historians charge that this was a cover-up, geared toward reassuring investors that San Francisco was not a peculiarly disaster-prone place, since fires, unlike earthquakes, can happen anywhere. It may also be that the public remembered the three days and nights of fiery inferno better than the one minute of earthquake at dawn, and while there is no struggle against a quake once it has begun, the fire was fought fiercely—if ineptly on many counts. Flames destroyed much of the evidence of earthquake damage too. San Francisco’s fire chief, Dennis Sullivan, was fatally injured in the earthquake, and so the city lost at the inception of the disaster the person who might have directed subsequent efforts wisely. The earthquake broke many water mains, so fighting the fires became far harder than it could have been. Sullivan had long worried about a major fire and thought about how to fight it. In his absence, the firefighters were joined by the army, and the latter tried reckless experiments in using explosives to make firebreaks. Their mistakes were many.
One was the use of black powder, or gunpowder, in place of dynamite. The latter simply blows things up; the former tends to also ignite them. Thus many buildings were turning into burning, flying brands that spread the fire farther or started new conflagrations entirely. Another was setting the firebreaks too close to the existing flames, thereby simply breaking buildings up into more flammable debris. A third was setting explosives to buildings that contained chemicals, alcohol, and other highly flammable substances. A fourth was setting explosions that restarted or started fires in areas that were previously secure. And a fifth was keeping away from the flames the public who might have supplied the power to fight the fire by hand.
Many of the most successful firefighting efforts were by groups of citizens armed with buckets of water, with shovels, with wet gunnysacks, with whatever came to hand—and often by smothering sparks on roofs, fires could be prevented from becoming overwhelming conflagrations, when people were allowed onto those roofs. Another important firefighting tactic was summoning the political clout to turn back the dynamiters and break through the military lines. It was a struggle between the reckless technological tactics of the occupying forces, convinced that their strategy of destruction could save structures and neighborhoods elsewhere, and the citizens committed to saving as much as possible through hands-on methods. Former fireman Dennis Smith reports in his San Francisco Is Burning that by the second day the National Guard allowed citizens to fight fires, but the army persisted in evacuating, or evicting, them. Historian Frank Hittell writes of fighting fire himself with professional firemen who asked where the rest of the volunteers were. They were being kept back by soldiers, so the two uniformed groups were in open conflict. Hittell was struck by soldiers when he volunteered again.
Jerome Barker Landfield lived at the north end of the city, and he wrote afterward, “Water was lacking, but the proprietress of a little grocery at Larkin and Greenwich Streets gave me two barrels of vinegar. This proved to be a godsend. A score of volunteers armed with blankets soaked in vinegar, extinguished flaming cinders on neighboring roofs, and we held Greenwich Street safe from Larkin to Van Ness. Two agile schoolboys with pails and cups climbed to the roof of the Robert Louis Stevenson house at Chestnut and Hyde and saved the mansion by putting out sparks as they fell. By eleven o’clock Friday morning we believed that the rest of our district was out of danger.” Then the military blew up a nearby patent-medicine company, whose thousands of gallons of alcohol went up in flames, threatening to destroy what they had just saved. Landfield saw the mayor but was unable to convince him to stop the dynamiting. Fortunately Abe Ruef, the political boss who had put Schmitz in power and organized the network of bribes that enriched both men, came by in his automobile, listened to Landfield, and put an end to it.
The big post office still standing today at Seventh and Mission streets was saved because ten employees refused direct orders to evacuate and put out the flames with wet mail sacks. The U.S. Mint downtown was also saved by its own employees. Blazes started by dynamite raced ahead of the fire into the district southeast of downtown, but huge crowds fought them. A hundred men at a time pulled houses down by ropes and removed the dismantled structures from reach of the flames. A miller reported that ten of the Globe Grain and Milling Company’s employees were prepared to save the mill, and could have, in his opinion, but were driven away at gunpoint. Losses totaled $220,000. The Mission District was saved by sheer manpower, and the crucial battle was near the kitchen operated by Officer Schmitt’s family at Dolores Park. A volunteer named Edwards worked for twenty-four hours without stopping, and when the fire was out, his shoes had burned through and the soles of his feet had been so badly scorched he could no longer walk. A mail carrier named Roland M. Roche credited the men and boys of the neighborhood with saving it, fighting fire by hand, carrying milk cans of water from a laundry to the fire: “This improvised bucket brigade, working in the face of almost insufferable heat, saved their own valley from imminent destruction, and thus probably saved the greater part of San Francisco that survived the fire.”
Another angry citizen summed up the fire history of 1906 San Francisco: “The stories have but one beginning and one end. They begin with the criminal idiocy of the military; they end with the surmounting heroism of the citizen.” He was the writer Henry Anderson Lafler, and his long attack on Funston and the military attack on San Francisco was never published. In it he summed up the aftermath of the earthquake thus: “During those unforgettable days the city of San Francisco was even as, a city captured in war, the possession of an alien foe. We were strangers on our own streets; driven from our own houses; gray-haired men, our foremost citizens, the sport of the whims of young boys, whose knowledge of the city was confined to its dance halls, its brothels, and saloons. Were we children—we, the citizens of San Francisco—that we should have thus been suddenly gripped by the throat by a stupid soldiery, and held fast till all our city burned?”
Utopia Besieged
Lafler calls it a war, and two worldviews and two responses were at war in the earthquake. It is true that most of the citizenry had little responsibility beyond their own survival and their own property. But they reached out to each other, improvising public kitchens and large camps and fighting fires by hand. The city government and military were responsible for preserving a larger-scale version of the city, for fighting the fire, and for preserving the peace. And they accomplished much, from the navy’s successful efforts to fight the fire on the waterfront to the city’s Committee for Housing the Homeless’s building of temporary shelter for seventy-five hundred people in the parks. There’s no question about why these powers succeeded in doing what they were supposed to do. The question is about why they chose, for the most part, to regard the public as an enemy and to presume that they needed to control them. The fires undermine the case that the people in power were working in the city’s best interest, and so does the apparent murder of dozens to hundreds of citizens by soldiers, National Guardsmen, and vigilantes. But the evidence is much more extensive than that.
Take, for example, the Committee of Fifty that Mayor Schmitz appointed. Its name was drawn from the old Committee of Thirteen, or Committee of Vigilance, that had in the 1850s taken over San Francisco and run it to serve the members’ business interests. The Committee of Fifty served for months afterward as an unelected government. It included many commonsensical appointments—a subcommittee on Restoration of Light and Telephone, and another on Roofing the Homeless. But before the quake was a week old, Schmitz had also appointed his backer, Abe Ruef, his enemy, James Phelan, and others to the subcommittee on the Permanent Relocation of Chinatown. The plan was nothing more than a real-estate grab fueled by racism. The Chinese occupied one of the most desirable sections of the city, and pushing them to the city’s southern border or beyond would free up the land
for real-estate interests.
Modern histories of the earthquake tend to broaden this particular group’s self-interested animosity to a blanket racism. The actual record on non-Chinese reactions to the Chinese population of San Francisco is more complicated. There were racists, and there were allies. Hugh Kwong Liang was fourteen or fifteen when the earthquake struck, and he was already leading a difficult, isolated life. His mother and younger siblings had returned to China to escape the anti-Chinese sentiment in the city, and he had stayed behind to help his father, who died before the quake. He was entrusted to the care of a cousin, who after the quake took all the money from Liang’s father’s store and left him to his own devices. The boy dragged his father’s trunk to safety, joined the crowd in the Presidio, met another abandoned Chinese boy of sixteen, and concentrated on keeping sparks from setting their army tent on fire. The other boy left him that night to find his own family, and the trunk was stolen.
Alone again, the despondent Liang headed for the waterfront to drown himself. When he arrived, he decided instead to stow away on a ship and leave the burning city behind. “To my surprise,” he recounted to his nieces and grandnieces many decades later, “the captain and men were all very sympathetic and told me that everything would be all right.” They fed him, took up a collection, gave him the proceeds, and set him down in Napa, where he soon found his way to another branch of the Liang family that embraced him warmly. He began a new life, better off than he had been before the earthquake. Disaster’s upsetting of the status quo causes some to plummet, others to rise or find new niches and allies. Liang passed through all phases on his journey.
The other accounts are mixed too. Many Chinese men worked as live-in cooks and household servants, and their lives remained intertwined with their employers’ after the earthquake, at least through the evacuation. One policeman told of helping an elderly Chinese woman, giving her looted food and drink and leading her to the safety of other Chinese Americans in flight. One of the photographs of refugees in Golden Gate Park shows two Asian men standing among the white throng, part of the crowd waiting for food. On the other hand, many white people were seen picking through the ashes of Chinatown for loot or “souvenirs”—but soon afterward indignant citizens broke the Chinese porcelain one looter offered for sale on a ferryboat to Oakland. When it came to relocating Chinatown, some businessmen pointed out the economic role Chinatown played in the city, and the government of China weighed in, and with that Chinatown was saved. In the aftermath of the earthquake, the city fathers obsessed so much about excluding the Japanese from the public school system that they provoked an international incident with Japan. Racism was a potent force, but not ubiquitous, as this relief committee report makes clear: “The Japanese asked for very little relief, in part because many had difficulty in speaking English, but more generally because all were aware of the anti-Japanese feeling of a small but aggressive part of the community; this in spite of the fact that Japan contributed directly to the local [relief] committee and through the American National Red Cross nearly a quarter of a million dollars.”
The self-interest of the business community played out elsewhere as well. Phelan and Adolph Spreckels were competing to take over the streetcar lines in San Francisco, and the latter man—one of the wealthiest in San Francisco—tried to shut down a rival who was running streetcars for free immediately after the quake. Safety precautions were cited, but the assistant director of the United Railroads recalled, “Prior to the earthquake, Mr. Spreckels was directing a fight against the United Railroads, and on the day before the earthquake, Tuesday, April 17, a rival system of his own had been incorporated.” The mayor gave the company the go-ahead, Spreckels stopped them again, and finally General Greeley—who had been away during the quake—intervened, and the cars resumed running on April 27. There are worse stories, like that of a waterfront man pressured by his banker to obtain dynamite—so the embezzling banker could blow up the bank and its crooked books. Ruef attempted to reduce wages by arguing that in the crisis “there is pressing need for mutual concession,” so unskilled workmen should accept $2.50 for a nine-hour day rather than $8.00, as it had been before. What made the concession mutual was not specified. By summer, the unions were striking for better wages and the newspapers were deploring them. The United Railroads strike was particularly long and bitter.
Employer-employee relations were turbulent all through this period. A story by the Argonaut, which served the elite of San Francisco, complained in July of “the extreme scarcity of house servants, although there are many thousands of people out of employment. The Relief Committee frequently receives communications asking where all the female servants have gone. According to General Greeley, it seems the relief camps are full of idle domestics.” The general remarked, “The sooner this feeding of able-bodied men and women is stopped, the better it will be for the city.” The Argonaut admitted the following week that there were few “drones” in the camps, though only six of one thousand women accepted employment when it was offered to them. The Bulletin had run a more sympathetic piece, “The Dignity of Labor,” in late May, which itemized some of the callous treatment meted out to women servants during the earthquake and reported that with the dearth of servants “mistresses who have been the severest of taskmasters . . . have been forced into the position of the scorned menials, and a strange world opens before their startled eyes.” The journalist Jane Carr saw the disaster as a great leveler and liberator, though not everyone was eager to be leveled or happy others had been freed from drudgery.
The immediate aftermath of the disaster, in which everything was topsy-turvy, money was scarce to irrelevant, citizens improvised their own care, and much was given away rapidly, yielded to more institutional management of the disaster, which was often effective but seldom joyous. The informal citizen-run kitchens were replaced in many parts of the city by soup kitchens, which required people to show tickets. The authorities had a great fear that people would eat twice or collect extra supplies, and the system was meant to prevent people from getting too much. “Pauperization,” the transformation of independent citizens into dependents, was another great concern of the time and an argument against all but the most unattractive forms of relief and assistance. The Argonaut reported, “The great majority of refugees who had established their own cooking arrangements, and preferred cooking in their own way the meat and other supplies that they drew from the relief stations, greatly resented the new regime. Nevertheless, it was put in force, and the immediate result of its adoption was an extraordinary decline in the number of refugees applying for relief. The method was so unattractive—many people called it revolting—and the system so extraordinarily unpopular that people preferred the hardships of hunger.”
Only in the Mission District did citizens successfully resist the insti tutionalization of their eating sites and systems. The Argonaut reports that about two-thirds of the remaining population of San Francisco got their meals in that neighborhood, so the resistance mattered. The difference between citizens feeding themselves and each other and being given food according to a system involving tickets and outside administrators is the difference between independence and dependence, between mutual aid and charity. The providers and the needy had become two different groups, and there was no joy or solidarity in being handed food by people who required you to prove your right to it first.
After Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, I heard the infamous former Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director Michael Brown tell a group of disaster experts that business was the best leader of recovery because business had the best interests of the community at heart—a curious statement, to say the least. What all these stories add up to is a picture of men in power who provided some relief and got the city going again but also reinstated the old injustices and discriminations. They acted in their own self-interest as often or more often than in the public interest and sometimes viewed the public as an enemy to be conquered, controlled,
and contained. The brief solidarity and harmony ended in part because the business community pitted its interests against those of the majority.
The destruction of the city by the soldiers’ unskilled use of explosives and prevention of hands-on firefighting is equally serious, and the murders are more serious, far more so than the looting they were supposed to prevent (or the looting that the soldiers also carried out). And the attempt to grab Chinatown was opportunistic plunder on a grand scale. It would be a mistake to portray these men in power as wholly bad. The army supplied tents and worked to make the camps sanitary, during a time of real threat of typhus and cholera—the old diseases of dense population and bad sewage systems. The city fathers worked tirelessly to bring back the city of ordinary institutions as it had existed before the earthquake. But they served themselves first. There’s a philosophical problem at the root of this foul behavior by those in power, particularly when contrasted with that of so many of the ordinary people. The best person to address it is the philosopher who wandered inquiringly through the ruins the day of the earthquake.
WILLIAM JAMES’S MORAL EQUIVALENTS
“What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true?” asked William James in his second lecture on pragmatism, the philosophical approach he and a few other American philosophers developed at the turn of the twentieth century. The question is an important one to bring to bear on disaster response. If the military notion that San Franciscans were a mob on the brink of mayhem were true, the right response to disaster was authoritarian, armed, and aggressive. If the main psychosocial consequence of disaster was a “millennial good fellowship,” then a very different and much milder response was appropriate, the response that Officer Schmitt, Mrs. Holshouser, and others offer. At stake in disaster is the question of human nature.
A Paradise Built in Hell Page 6