A Paradise Built in Hell (6 page)

No one had a better time of it than the journalist who published a piece in her San Francisco newspaper, the
Bulletin
, eleven days after the quake, titled “How It Feels to Be a Refugee and Have Nothing in the World, by Pauline Jacobson, Who Is One of Them.” Jacobson, an observant Jew and playful writer who had studied philosophy at the University of California, plunges straight into the reasons for that joy that hovers around the other accounts. She had lost everything in the earthquake (except, unlike the majority of her fellow citizens, her job), gone over to Oakland to buy “a stock of face creams and soap and dresses,” and then decided against the purchases. Had she bought the goods, she explained, she would have had to buy a trunk to put them in, to buy a trunk would entail hiring someone to carry it, and that “meant a return to at least a partial degree of the old permanency.” That permanency for her included class divides, becoming an employer, owning something while others owned nothing. “And I slipped my money back in my purse. All too soon would return the halo encircling exclusiveness. All too short would be this reign of inclusiveness. There was plenty of time for petty possessions, plenty of time for the supercilious snubbing of the man or woman not clad according to the canons of the fashionable dressmaker or tailor. In the meantime how nice to feel that no one would take it sadly amiss were you to embrace the scavenger man in an excess of joy at seeing him among the living, or to walk the main street with the Chinese cook. Have you noticed with your merest acquaintance of ten days back how you wring his hand when you encounter him these days, how you hang onto it like grim death as if he were some dearly beloved relative you are afraid the bowels of the earth will swallow up again? It is like a glad gay good holiday—all this reunioning.”

For those who had been maimed or lost family members, the earthquake was not so positive—though Jacobson describes being shaken and disturbed, as well as feeling fond of even the merest acquaintance. The truly destitute had no such ready opportunity to choose or reject expanding their possessions or hiring an expressman to carry them. It’s also hard to say how happy the scavenger man was to be embraced or the Chinese cook to promenade with a white newspaperwoman. The joys of disaster are not ubiquitous. But they are often widespread, and they are profound, and they may well have been embraced by these working men. And Jacobson gets at something essential when she talks about walking through the ruins at dusk when a man asked, “May I walk with you? It’s lonesome walking alone.” She says, “We smiled and nodded and took him in as if we had known him all our lives,” a bold welcome in those days of strict boundaries for women. When a soldier said that “ladies” could walk on the sidewalk but men must stick to the street, Jacobson and her friends chose to walk through the burned bricks and fallen telegraph wires in the middle of the street with their newfound acquaintance. “Everbody talks to everybody else,” a young woman wrote a friend. “I’ve added hundreds to my acquaintance without introductions.” Women who had been bound by Victorian conventions about whom they might speak to or know felt liberated by the lifting of all those rules, as do people in most disasters when the boundaries fall away, and every stranger can be spoken to and all share the experience. This was behind the joy that shone out of my guide’s face in Halifax, of many of the tales of San Francisco in 1989 and of other disasters I heard directly from glowing people.

Jacobson believed that something in that joy was lasting. She concludes, “Most of us since then have run the whole gamut of human emotions from glad to sad and back again, but underneath it all a new note is struck, a quiet bubbling joy is felt. It is that note that makes all our loss worth the while. It is the note of a millennial good fellowship. . . . In all the grand exodus . . . everybody was your friend and you in turn everybody’s friend. The individual, the isolated self was dead. The social self was regnant. Never even when the four walls of one’s own room in a new city shall close around us again shall we sense the old lonesomeness shutting us off from our neighbors. Never again shall we feel singled out by fate for the hardships and ill luck that’s going. And that is the sweetness and the gladness of the earthquake and the fire. Not of bravery, nor of strength, nor of a new city, but of a new inclusiveness.

“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.

B
rigadier 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 printed 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.”