A Paradise Built in Hell (49 page)

The great disaster scholars Kathleen Tierney, Lee Clarke, and Enrico Quarantelli were generous with their time and knowledge, and this project owes a huge debt—as does, I think, this society—to their achievements in this field. Two years running I attended the University of Colorado’s Natural Hazards Center annual disaster studies conference and benefited greatly from the presentations and conversation. In each of the places I visited and wrote about, I again received generosity and a plethora of ideas. Bob Bean, in Halifax, inspired me to investigate disasters more deeply after my 2003 visit there and let me question him further later on.

In San Francisco, a project on the 1906 earthquake with my friends Mark Klett, Michael Lundgren, and Philip Fradkin got me going, and as usual I relied on the San Francisco Public Library and Bancroft and the other libraries at UC, Berkeley and remain grateful to those institutions and their librarians.

My friend Nate Miller dropped everything to accompany me to Mexico City at the last minute and was a huge help; my dear friend Guillermo Gomez-Peña’s ancestral home in the city served as our base, and Laura Carlsen, Marco Ramirez, Gustavo Esteva, John Holloway, Marisol Hernandez, Alejandro Miranda, John Ross, Jose Luis Paredo Pacho, and others were generous with their time, ideas, and memories. Guillermo was the first to tell me how profound a political upheaval the earthquake had been—he himself had participated in the relief activities—and Iain Boal sent along valuable readings on the subject early on.

In New York, the Columbia University Oral History Office’s fantastic 9/11 interviews were a major source for the section on 9/11, and Tobin James Mueller and Pat Enkyu O’Hara kindly made time to talk to me, as did, back in California, Jordan Schuster, Michael Noble, and Astra Taylor.

On my first visit to New Orleans after Katrina, Jennifer Whitney and Jordan Flaherty were generous with their time and local knowledge, as was the sociologist Emmanuel David; on my second visit I crossed paths with Christian Roselund, who was also a big help; Rebecca Snedeker became a great friend and good guide who supplied important resources, encouragement, insight, and inspiration. So many people were generous with time and conversation at a difficult time for their city, including Malik Rahim; Linda Jackson, of NENA; Pam Dashiell and Sharon Lambertson, of the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association; Brian Den zer; Darryl Malek-Wiley, of the Sierra Club; Aislyn Colgan, formerly of the Common Ground Clinic; Brian from Habitat for Humanity; Emily Posner from Common Ground; Felipe Chavez; Kate Foyle; Mark Weiner from Emergency Communities; my fellow San Franciscans Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky; and Clara Bartholemew, whom I interviewed for Abe Louise Young’s Austin-based Alive in Truth oral history project in November 2005, and Abe herself, who also became a friend.

Katrina vanden Heuvel, at
The Nation
, listened to me when no one else did about the unreported murders of the hurricane, and Adam Clay Thompson took up the story of the murders and nailed down all the facts and details with brilliant detective work over the next year.
The Nation
sustained a long lawsuit to access the coroner’s records that should’ve been public but weren’t, and the world owes them a debt for doing everything in their power to get the truth out and see justice done. Working with A.C. was a joy.

Donnell Herrington, the young man nearly killed by racist vigilantes in the aftermath of Katrina, spent three days with Adam and me three years later. My gratitude for his trust that we would do his story justice and my admiration for his gifts as a storyteller and his strength as a survivor in the face of horror are boundless. Time spent with him was an honor.

Thi, the monk in charge of the Vietnamese Buddhist temple in Biloxi; Dr. Don LaGrone; the Buddhist community of Biloxi; and Carmen Mauk of Burners Without Borders were likewise generous with their time and stories. So was Gioconda Belli during a wonderful afternoon at her house in Santa Monica.

Some of the second draft of this book was completed while I was a senior Mellon scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, and thanks go to them for support to focus on the work—and for giving me the opportunity to travel to New Orleans one more time.

I’ve now been working with my editor, Paul Slovak, at Viking, for a dozen years and with my agent, Bonnie Nadell, longer—more reasons to be grateful.

 

Rebecca Solnit
September 2008, San Francisco/New Orleans/Montreal

4
The man in charge:
The man who had so much to say about the hurricane was Bob Bean, of Nova Scotia School of Art and Design.

13 Mrs. Anna Amelia Holshouser:
In “The Great Fire of 1906” series on the disaster,
Argonaut,
May 14, 1927.

14 There they spread an old quilt:
Many of these shacks and camp kitchens can be seen in photographs at the San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection of the San Francisco Public Library and at the Bancroft Library’s online site,
http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/collections/earthquakeandfire/index2.html/
.

15 “when the tents of the refugees”:
Edwin Emerson, in Malcolm E. Barker, ed.,
Three Fearful Days: San Francisco Memoirs of the 1906 Earthquake and Fire
(San Francisco: Londonborn Publications, 1998), 301.

16 “in cordial appreciation of her prompt”:
Argonaut
, May 21, 1927.

18 “A map of the world”:
Oscar Wilde (quoting from Wilde’s “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”), in Robert V. Hine,
California’s Utopian Colonies
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 8.

19 “Stalinists and their ilk”:
David Graeber,
Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology
(Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004), 11.

21 “The number of weather-related disasters has quadrupled over the past”:
“Climate Alarm, 2007”:
Oxfam Briefing Paper 108
.

24 Mary Austen:
“The Temblor,” in David Starr Jordan, ed.,
The California Earthquake of 1906
(San Francisco: A. M. Robertson, 1907), 355.

24 H. C. Schmitt:
Argonaut,
May 8, 1926.

25 Thomas A. Burns:
Argonaut,
May 29, 1926.

26 Maurice Behan:
Argonaut,
June 19 and 26, 1926.

26 A man from the business department:
Bulletin,
May 25, 1906.

27 The plumbers union:
Information at
http://www.sfmuseum.org/1906.2/plumbers.html/
.

27 Charles Reddy:
Argonaut,
July 31, 1926.

28 William G. Harvey:
Argonaut,
March 5, 1927.

29 “The best thing about the earthquake”:
Eric Temple Bell, in Barker,
Three Fearful Days
, 143.

30 “Remarkable as it may seem,”
Jack London, in ibid., 134-35.

30 Charles B. Sedgewick:
In ibid., 209.

30 “Owing to the fact that every bank”:
Argonaut,
April 21, 1906.

31 “a stock of face creams and soap and dresses”:
Pauline Jacobson, “How It Feels to Be a Refugee and Have Nothing, By Someone Who Is One of Them,”
Bulletin,
April 29, 1906.

33 “Modish young women”:
Bulletin,
April 30, 1906.

34 “Without warrant of law and without being requested”:
Frederick Funston, letter to the editor,
Argonaut,
July 7, 1906.

34 General Sheridan:
In Dennis Smith,
San Francisco Is Burning: The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fires
(New York: Viking, 2005), 90.

35 as many as five hundred citizens were killed by the occupying forces:
Ibid., 157: “A miner, Oliver Posey, testified in a deposition that ‘instant death to scores was the fate for vandalism; the soldiers executed summary justice.’ Like all statistical evidence for the four days of fire, the number of civilians executed by soldiers varies widely from account to account. Funston himself admits in his narrative to three, and there are accounts that claim as many as five hundred were killed. Based on eyewitness testimonies collected with extraordinary care by the director of the San Francisco virtual museum, Gladys Hansen, the total number of people shot down by the military is estimated to be at least five hundred—one-sixth of the three thousand victims the virtual museum cites as having perished in the earthquake and fire. Any educated analysis of the period would suggest that the actual tally is much closer to Ms. Hansen’s figure than to General Funston’s.” But he cautions, “If as many as five hundred people were shot by soldiers, it can be assumed that there would be many more firsthand accounts of these shootings than actually exist.” The lower estimate is from Philip Fradkin,
The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 140: “One researcher placed the number at 490. I doubt if the number exceeded 50 or 75 such murders, which was no small amount.”

35 “unlicked mob”:
Argonaut,
March 19, 1927.

36 “The Federal Troops . . . have been authorized by me to KILL”:
Widely cited and reproduced; a copy of the broadside may be seen at
http://www.sfmuseum.org/1906.2/killproc.html/
.

37 “What Funston unwittingly set into motion”:
Fradkin,
The Great Earthquake
, 63.

37 “About noon the university announced”:
Quoted in Stuart H. Ingram, “Impressions from Berkeley,”
California Geology,
April 2006.

37 “I have no doubt, and have heard the same opinion expressed”:
Funston, quoted in Gladys Hansen and Emmet Condon,
Denial of Disaster
(San Francisco: Cameron and Co., 1989), 47.

38 “The prompt appearance of our troops was all that saved the city”:
William Stephenson, letter to the Bowdoin College class of 1877, in Bancroft online earthquake archive,
http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=hb6z09p1nj&brand=eqf&doc.view=entire_text/
.

38 “I was waited upon at my headquarters”:
Charles Morris, in Hansen and Condon,
Denial of Disaster
, 76.

39 A banker . . . witnessed soldiers:
In Hansen and Condon,
Denial of Disaster
, 71.

39 Volunteers . . . broke the windows of drugstores:
Ibid., 57.

39 James B. Stetson and his son:
“We took with us Miss Sarah Fry, a Salvation Army woman, who was energetic and enthusiastic. When we arrived at a drugstore under the St. Nicholas she jumped out, and, finding the door locked, seized a chair and raising it above her head smashed the glass doors in and helped herself to hot-water bags, bandages, and everything which would be useful in an emergency hospital.” In “San Francisco During the Eventful Days of April, 1906,” James B. Stetson, at
http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=hb4p3007dw&brand=eqf&doc.view=entire_text/
.

39 Another man was seen picking over the rubble of a ruin:
Hansen and Condon,
Denial of Disaster
, 162.

39 The police invited Mormon elders to take supplies:
Fradkin,
The Great Earthquake
, 141.

39 A grocer who charged extortionate prices had his goods expropriated:
Bulletin,
April 21, 1906.

39 A National Guardsman yelled at an African American man:
Fradkin,
The Great Earthquake
, 142.

40 The cashier of a bank was shot as a looter:
Hansen and Condon,
Denial of Disaster
, 161.

40 General Funston later wrote, “Market Street was full of excited, anxious people”:
In Frederick Funston, “How the Army Worked to Save San Francisco: Personal Narrative of the Acute and Active Commanding Officer of the Troops at the Presidio,”
Cosmopolitan,
July 1906,
http://www.sfmuseum.org/1906/cosmo.html/
.

40 A drunken soldier had pushed his way into a tent:
Letter in “Selection from the Hooker Family Papers,” Bancroft Library Presents the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire,
http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=hb7m3nb5f1&brand=eqf&doc.view=entire_text/
.

40 Mary Doyle wrote a cousin on a scrap of brown-paper bag, “A large number of men and even women”:
Smith,
San Francisco Is Burning
, 160.

40 An officer’s daughter wrote a friend, “A good many awful men are loose”:
Hansen and Condon,
Denial of Disaster
, 160.

40 “I saw one soldier”:
Henry Fitchner,
Argonaut
, March 26, 1927.

40 “The terrible days of the earthquake and fire,” General Greeley reported on May 17:
In Hansen and Condon,
Denial of Disaster,
98.

42 Frank Hittell:
In Barker,
Three Fearful Days
, 247.

42 Jerome Barker Landfield lived at the north end of the city, and he wrote afterward, “Water was lacking, but the proprietress”:
in “Operation Kaleidescope: A Melange of Personal Recollections,”
http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=hb2c6004p0&brand=eqf&doc.view=entire_text/
. He also writes, “Not far away I saw Mayor Schmitz, surrounded by a group of prominent citizens and officials. The greatness of the disaster seemed to have unnerved them. I went up to Schmitz and begged him to stop the dynamiting. I told him that we had the fire under control and stopped at Greenwich Street, and that further dynamiting would imperil the rest of Russian Hill, which was now safe. But he would not listen.”

42 A miller reported that ten of the Globe Grain and Milling Company’s:
Argonaut,
March 26, 1927.