A Crack in the Edge of the World (29 page)

the people of the many races of the Hindoo land; Russians with furs and sables; a stray, turbaned, stately Turk or two, and occasionally a half-naked shivering Indian; multitudes of the Spanish race from every country of the Americas, partly pure, partly crossed with red blood—Chileans, Peruvians and Mexicans, all with their different shades of the same swarthy complexion, black-eyed and well-featured, proud of their beards and moustaches, their grease, dirt and eternal gaudy serapes or darker cloaks.

There was little by way of tactful correctness about the authors of the
Annals
: The Spaniards in town were “dignified, polite and pompous,” there were “fat, conceited and comfortable” Englishmen, and in large number there were Germans, Italians and Frenchmen who were known for being “gay, easy-principled, philosophical … their faces covered with hair, and with strange habiliments on their person, among whom might be particularly remarked a number of thick-lipped, hook-nosed, ox-eyed, cunning, oily Jews.” (One of those Jewish immigrants—a twenty-one-year-old German named Levi Strauss, with no known facial peculiarities—went on to invent and give to the world Levi's, an invention that was born of the sartorial demands—cheapness and durability—of the Gold Rush.)

The Chinese, however, were different, and, in the eyes of most of the Yankee San Franciscans of the time, they were infinitely the worse for being so. They were worse, remarked the
Annals
, because, unlike settlers from other races, they lacked qualities that could be “materially modified, and closely assimilated to those of the civilizing and dominant race. They were aloof, infuriatingly haughty, separate, stoically indifferent. They were regarded by the other San Franciscans as so strange and unsettlingly peculiar that they could never hope to become part of the social continuum of the town. They were outsiders from the very start.

That start came early on in the city's history, when, in 1848, two men and a woman arrived in the Bay from Canton on board the Pacific brig
Eagle
, and immediately made their way the hundred miles east to the goldfields. They promptly sent back word of inestimable riches, and before long the waters teemed with vessels churning through the Golden Gate to what they at first called
Jinshan
—“Gold Mountain”—bringing in scores and then hundreds of families from the coastal ports of south China, from every southern settlement between Shanghai and Hainan Island. Soon, in addition to the countless hundreds of Chinese who went out to the Sierra,
*
there were those who came and settled in the city itself. There were 800 listed as being there in 1850, 3,000 in 1851, and 10,000 the year after. The Taiping Rebellion was taking place in China: Thousands were dying, and millions were fleeing. Many went to this rich and secure American city where they could create for themselves a sanctuary, a place within Jinshan they would call
Tangrenbu
—the “Port of the Tang People.”

At first they settled where they could—some making for themselves a pretty little fishing village at the mouth of Mission Creek—but eventually, as working-class Chinese are wont to do, they clustered together for companionship and succor. Their chosen home was eight or nine central city blocks, surrounded on one side by the plaza and its businessmen, and on the other by Nob Hill and its more patrician householders. This made them ideally positioned to trade with, and provide services for, both the merchants downtown and their families up in their mansions.

In the 1870s there were said to be 45,000 Chinese crammed into their tiny oasis, or laager, or ghetto. A writer named B. E. Lloyd wrote that

the side-walks are monopolized by them, with their little tables of fruits, nuts and cigars. The cobbler, tinner, chair-mender and jack-of-all-trades claim, by squatter right, a seat upon a box or a door-sill, where to ply their trades; the alleys, lanes and by-ways give forth dense clouds of smoke from the open fires, where cooking is performed, and the house-tops are white with drying garments, fluttering from the network of clothes-lines that are placed thereupon by enterprising laundrymen. Even across narrow streets lines are thrown upon which are placed to dry all manner of wearing apparel.

In 1857 a small newspaper known as the
Butte Record
of Oroville, California, became the first publication to recognize this crammed urban creation for what it was—a mention now cited by the
OED
as the earliest appearance of the word. This, the first in the world, was
Chinatown
.

The fact that the Chinese kept to themselves and made little effort to speak the language or to fit in with the cultural niceties of the majority, caused them to be regarded much as Jews were in other cities: first suspect, then loathed, then feared—and finally, and for all too long in San Francisco's history, ruthlessly and cruelly discriminated against.

It began with relative innocence, with casual references in the local newspapers to the settlements crammed with “natives of the Celestial Empire, and subjects of the uncle to the moon, with their long plaited queues or tails, very wide pantaloons bagging behind, and curiously formed head coverings.”

Before long, though, some of the Yankee residents were complaining. Permit the Chinese to rent, said one, and before long they will “make the building uninhabitable for decent white folk.… They will divide the rooms into numerous diminutive compartments by unsightly partitions, and the smoke and rank odor from their open fires
and opium pipes discolors the ceilings and walls and renders the whole building offensive.”

It got worse. “The manners and habits of the Chinese are very repugnant to Americans in California,” remarked the
Annals
, a magisterial book that often appears to be presciently attuned to the majority view. “Of different language, blood, religion and character, inferior in both mental and bodily characters, the Chinaman is looked upon by some as only a little superior to the negro … his person does not smell sweetly, his color is unusual, his penuriousness is extreme; his lying, knavery and natural cowardice are proverbial.”

From remarks like this it was a few short steps to active discrimination. As early as 1852 one governor of California asked the legislature to ban the immigration of “coolies,” but his proposal was ignored. Then began an insidious campaign against them. Three years after the failed ban, a law was passed prohibiting the testimony of any Chinese in a court case that involved white people. Race-based covenants were written into property deeds, forbidding the sale of houses outside Chinatown to Chinese, and effectively keeping the Chinese mired eternally in their nine-block encampment. Chinese patients were briefly stopped from using the San Francisco County Hospital. Taxes were imposed selectively against the Chinese by targeting laundrymen, fishermen, and vegetable hawkers, an ordinance was passed banning the use of bamboo laundry poles, and an order was promulgated insisting that no man in prison could wear his hair more than an inch long—which meant that the Manchu queue, the pigtail by which most Chinese men displayed their allegiance to the faraway Celestial Throne, became illegal, and prisoners were compelled to cut them off.

The Chinese fought back. The Chinese Six Companies was a group of locally raised benevolent societies that helped the poor and the homeless, tried to mediate in the endless wars among the Chinese tongs, and attempted to neutralize the violent thugs called
highbinders
who did their dirty work for them. They endeavored to have the discrimination ordinances struck down, and hired lawyers to battle the city in the courts. But in the end even their cleverness and acumen could not overcome the immense prejudice of the Yankee residents.

All manner of new regulations were brought in. The wearing or sporting of the queue was officially banned in 1876, for instance; and after dreadful anti-Chinese riots in the city in 1877 (with fires deliberately set in Chinatown, and young hoodlums, as christened here, cutting the firemen's hoses with razors to keep the fires burning), and under pressure from anti-Chinese labor unions claimed that the “yellow peril” was now endangering American jobs, the U.S. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which forbade the immigration of coolie labor and prevented existing residents from bringing in their families. Shameful as this law, which had its origins in San Francisco,
seems today, it actually remained on America's statute books until 1943.

(One might well say that San Francisco's Chinatown had the last laugh, however rudely its inhabitants were treated. Sun Yat-sen stayed there for a while, and it is believed by many locals that he wrote the outline for postrevolutionary China's constitution there. Regardless of whether there is any truth in this, he most certainly received word of the long-awaited overthrow of the Manchus when reading a newspaper on an eastbound express train near Denver. He was riding on rails linked to those laid down by his fellow countrymen, whose growing wealth, cosmopolitanism, and confidence, in part built by their Gold Rush experience, had hurried the revolution that would begin China's long and steady climb to the vast power it commands today. Hardly comforting at the time, but a sweet irony that some might now appreciate.)

THIS UNATTRACTIVE
gallimaufry of attitudes and morals that made up pre-earthquake San Francisco was presided over, most appropriately, by a city government that was as corrupt as it was incompetent.

The city boss at the close of the century was a dapper little crook of lawyer named Abraham Ruef, essentially the local point man for the all-powerful Southern Pacific Railroad, which wielded immense influence over not just the city but all of California. Ruef handpicked as mayor a handsome, courtly, black-bearded Irish-German violinist, president of the city's musicians' union, named Eugene Schmitz.

Mayor Schmitz had many foes but was generally popular, and, though suspected of graft, never had any charges pinned on him. He was re-elected in 1905 to a third term, and it was later universally acknowledged that he rose amply to the occasion that was later provided for him by the earthquake—something that came as a complete surprise to his critics, and probably even to the mayor himself.

It was widely recognized that the degree of corruption in Edwardian San Francisco was remarkable, even by comparison with the relentless
thievery of the Tammany Hall machine back in New York. Here, out in a corner of the country that could well live up to being called the Wild West, was a city where “French restaurant” often meant specifically a two-story building where meals were sold on the first floor and girls on the second. The entire operation was neatly licensed, with the liquor license fees going to the city; these were collected by officials so eager for graft that they invariably took bribes from both sides in any dispute. The city fathers were said by Abe Ruef to have been so bent and hungry for graft money that they would eat the gold paint off the City Hall walls. Ruef's own men took a handsome cut—“oiling the skids,” they called it—for the provision of almost any service the city might offer. The city fathers also turned a blind eye to the Barbary Coast's legendary “cowyards,” assembly-line brothels that provided sexual services on a titanic scale. The Hotel Nymphomania, for example, offered 150 cubicles on each of its three floors.

The water company, the gaslight providers, the local railways, and even the big transcontinental railroad companies all found it more convenient to see that city officials were kept happy, fat, and replete than to worry too much about the niceties of democratic needs and popular demands. Ruef himself was paid monthly retainers of up to $400 in unreceipted cash by all the corporations wishing to do business with the city.

Just before the earthquake hit, an inquiry into all this alleged extortion and venality was getting under way. One of the local newspaper editors, Fremont Older of the
Bulletin
, had gone to Washington in high dudgeon. He had petitioned President Roosevelt (this was back in the days when American presidents made themselves available to assist those in want), requesting that he help clean up the city. William Burns of the Secret Service—the founder of the famous Burns Agency and later a founder of the FBI—agreed to help, as did Rudolph Spreckels, son of the city's wealthy sugar baron Claus Spreckels. The city bosses heard the unsettling news of a possible inquiry on the morning of April 17; they also heard that the
Bulletin
was about to run an exposé. Given that they knew the Spreckels family was involved, they must have realized
that this had be taken seriously. The quake would provide them with only a brief delay.

NO MATTER THAT THE
city had great and glittering hotels, with the St. Francis just opened and the Fairmont just about to. No matter that one could dine in restaurants—Marchand's, Tait's, the Poodle Dog, Zinkand's, as well as all the French ones, where the food was said to be every bit as good as the sex—that, according to their proprietors, could rival those of Paris and New York; that a four-story amassment of well-built stores and restaurants on Montgomery Street known as the Monkey Block,
*
once the tallest structure west of the Mississippi, had an array of cafés and clubs that attracted writers like Robert Louis Stevenson, Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Bret Harte, and the then–Samuel Clemens, scribbler of bawdy doggerel; that there were ten-story steel-framed skyscrapers
^†
and grand municipal buildings with churchly domes and acres of gold foil; that there were three working opera houses and orchestras in abundance and stores filled with the finest goods imaginable. No matter that the brand-new City Hall had taken twenty-six years to build, had cost $6 million, and was by far the biggest building west of Chicago and the grandest civic structure west of the Mississippi. No matter that the celebrated Big Four railroad bosses—Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker—maintained immense palaces at the top of Nob Hill, that one of the Comstock Lode bonanza barons, James Flood, did the same, and that scores of lesser millionaires had similar ambitions. No matter that Adolph Sutro had constructed a complex of swimming
pools at the Land's End side of the Golden Gate that could accommodate 25,000 visitors a day. No matter that a citizen named Joshua Abraham Norton declared himself Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico in 1860, issued money, was followed by two stray dogs called Bummer and Lazarus, was known widely as the Mad Hatter, gave himself a uniform with epaulets and a sword, fined people $25 if he heard them calling the city “Frisco,” had a funeral that was attended by thousands and a headstone that proclaimed his imperial standing. No matter that luxury and decadent pleasure seeking was now the hallmark of the place, and that unimaginable wealth and sordid poverty and exclusion existed cheek by jowl in a more demonstrable way than anywhere else in America. No matter that one notably excessive writer named Will Irwin declared it to be “the gayest, most light-hearted, most pleasure-loving city on the western continent … a city of romance and the gateway to adventure.”