The 1906 earthquake and a century of progress in understanding ...
The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906 - California State...
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The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906 How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself
A Review Essay By Kevin Starr
The Katrina catastrophe has reprised what has fortu
nately been an infrequent event in our national history:
the destruction?outside of wartime, as in the case
of Washington, D.C. (1812), Atlanta (1864), and Rich
mond (1865)?of an American city by natural disaster.
Such destruction happened to Chicago in 1871 by
fire; to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in 1889 by flood; to
Galveston, Texas, in 1900 by hurricane and flood; and
to downtown Baltimore, by fire, in 1904. And now,
once again, the destruction of a city through hurricane
and flood has happened to New Orleans and, to a lesser extent, to a number of other cities and towns
on the Gulf Coast.
At 5:12:05 on the morning of Wednesday, April 18,
1906, the Pacific and the North American plates sud
denly sprung over and past each other from nine to
twenty-one feet across the 270 miles of the San An
dreas Fault. Shockwaves sped across the terrain at
seven thousand miles per hour. The first shockwave
to hit San Francisco (8.3 on the Richter scale or 7.7
on the moment magnitude scale, it would later be
estimated) shook the city in two phases for forty-five
seconds. Within the hour, there would be seventeen
serious aftershocks. City Hall and numerous other un
reinforced brick buildings, together with many crowded
tenements south of Market Street, collapsed instantly.
Facades fell from homes, revealing the furniture with
in. Less sturdy homes crumpled completely.
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By Phi/ip L. Fradkin (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2005, 418 pp., $27.50)
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Crack in the Street Folsom Street, San Francisco California Historical Society, FN 26472
A.U California History volume 83 / number 3 / 2006
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Union Square from Post to Powell Streets Before Fire California Historical Society, TN 5850
In anticipation of the centenary of the destruction of
San Francisco in April 1906, the University of Califor
nia Press turned to environmental historian Philip L. Fradkin, who shared a Pulitzer Prize while on the
staff of the Los Angeles Times connected to the coverage
of the Los Angeles riots of April/May 1992. Not only
is Fradkin a respected environmental writer, with a
half-dozen books to his credit, he has also covered,
on the ground, a major social upheaval that was itself
a form of earthquake. Indeed, his current study of
the April 1906 San Francisco catastrophe derives its
central strength from Fradkin's depiction of the social
and political causes and results of this cataclysm. As
bad as the earthquake was a geological fact, Fradkin
argues, it was even more catastrophic in the social
and political behavior that followed: behavior that had
its dynamics in the very DNA code of San Francisco
in that era. Just as Katrina revealed the underlying dichotomies and dissonances of New Orleans, so too
did the earthquake of April 1906 disclose and exacer bate the social fault lines of San Francisco.
Five years ago, when I was serving as State Librarian
for California, the State Library made a three-year
grant to the Bancroft Library at the University of
Continued on p. 50
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General View of Burned Area from Ferry Tower From Stereocard: H. White Company California Historical Society, TN-5880
A.O California History volume 83 / number 3 / 2006
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Examiner Building and Lotta's Fountain California Historical Society, TN-5870
49
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California. The purpose of the grant was to locate
every possible primary source?first-hand accounts,
official reports, newspaper and magazine articles from the period, later memoirs, business reports,
whatever?and to digitize them so that they would be
available to the general public by the centennial of
the great catastrophe. Philip Fradkin, a widely pub lished historian and environmental writer, was chosen
to do this work. The archive he assembled of approx
imately ten thousand digital images and thirty-five
thousand pages of electronic text can now be accessed
online at http://bancroft. berkeley. edu/collections.
It is a triumph of archival entrepreneurialism. In
the course of gathering these documents across three busy years, Fradkin came up with?nearly one hundred years after the event?the true story
of how San Franciscans responded to the challenges
of April 1906. Fradkin's history follows the pioneer
ing efforts of former City Archivist Gladys Han sen and retired Fire Chief Emmet Condon in
their path-breaking Denial of Disaster: The Untold
Story and Photographs of the San Francisco Earthquake
and Fire of 1906, published in 1989 by Cameron and Company.
In their history of the earthquake, Hansen and Condon
demolished once and for all the notion that only three hundred to four hundred San Franciscans lost
their lives in the upheaval. The true figure, they proved through a reexamination of morgue, coroner, and other documents, was closer to three thousand
or more. The San Francisco establishment?fright ened that the city would never be rebuilt if it was
perceived as an intrinsically dangerous place?took
great pains to minimize the impact of the catas trophe. Hansen and Condon's thesis was a shocker. It has taken more than a decade, in fact, for their
conclusions finally to take hold of the popular account of the catastrophe.
Continued on p. 54
Majestic Theatre, 1281 Market Street California Historical Society, FN-28963
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VO California History volume 83 / number 3 / 2006
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Looking South on Third St. from Market St. Pillsbury Picture Co. California Historical Society, TN-5800
V2, California History volume 83 / number 3 / 2006
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Blowing up of the Phelan Building R. J. Waters ef Co. California Historical Society, TN-5810
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Philip Fradkin has some further challenging con
clusions for us to ponder. The myth holds that San
Franciscans fought the fire effectively, declared
martial law because they had to, shot only guilty
looters, and in general comported themselves with
efficiency and panache. Not true, Fradkin argues,
basing himself in a brand new array of primary doc
uments. The entire account of the events of April
1906, Fradkin argues, is more myth than reality.
First of all, there is no evidence whatsoever of whole
sale looting. Nor was it the Army that gave the order
that looters should be shot on sight. The order was
given by Mayor Eugene Schmitz almost spontaneously,
despite the absence of evidence that looting was a
problem. Many of Schmitz's advisors, in fact, were
shocked by the order. The order to shoot to kill looters
had more ominous origins, Fradkin suggests, although he cannot prove this point in its entirety. It
came, most likely, from Schmitz's paradigmatic dis
trust of certain sectors of the population: in particu
lar, minorities and visibly unassimilated immigrants.
With the exception of one oligarch shot by a trigger
happy soldier, those who were shot for looting?as
far as we can tell?were a relatively small number,
hovering around fifteen. This makes us wonder why
the order was given in the first place, unless, as is
suggested, it sprung from a deep sense of social anx
iety on the part of the city establishment represented
by Mayor Schmitz. This anxiety also motivated the
near folkloric accounts, totally untrue, of human
Continued on p. 57
JA. California History volume 83 / number 3 / 2006
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Above: Street Kitchen California Historical Society, FN 26857
Facing page: Looking Toward the Ferry, from the South Side of Market near Fremont Street California Historical Society. TN-5760
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Above: Residents of Chinatown Oscar Maurer: Photographer California Historical Society, FN 13248
Facing page: Grant Avenue from Market Street San Francisco, April 23, 1906 T.E. Hecht: Photographer California Historical Society, TN-5900
JO California History volume 83 / number 3 / 2006
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ghouls roaming the city biting earlobes to secure ear
rings from corpses or biting off fingers to secure rings.
Nor was martial law ever declared by General Funston
or anyone else. Although the city was flooded with soldiers and militia, and hence seemed to be under
martial law, Brigadier General Funston meticulously
pointed out a number of times that the mayor was in
charge of the city. Funston, operating on his own
authority, was making the Army available as a sup
plementary force to assist the police department. Still,
the mayor's shoot-to-kill order, the relative disarray of
the police department, the pervasiveness of uniformed
soldiers and militia, supplemented by specially sworn
in and heavily armed deputies, gave the impression
that the city was under martial law. The willingness
to accept that San Francisco was under martial law
was itself, like the shoot-to-kill order, a symptom of
great social anxiety: of a fear that San Francisco was too unstable to handle its own affairs.
San Francisco, Fradkin argues, was literally burnt to
the ground through ineptitude. First, the fire depart
ment was almost totally neutralized by burst water
Continued on p. 60
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Looking N.W.from Kohl Building Bushnell Foto Company California Historical Society, FN-24486
<8 California History volume 83 / number 3 / 2006
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Refugees Dining on Franklin Street near Fulton California Historical Society, GN-01404
59
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mains, although the Navy did manage to lay in hoses from the Embarcadero inland. When fire did break
out, moreover, the worst possible decisions seem to
have been made?to fight fire with fire, to dynamite
buildings in an effort to create a firebreak, or failing
that, to counter fires that would beat back the advanc
ing holocaust. For two days, San Franciscans seemed
determined to destroy their city. Dynamited build
ings merely provided convenient fuel for the fire to
advance. The black powder that was used to level
many buildings actually turned them into Roman
candles. Still, the more this technique failed, the more
it was employed. The Army even used artillery to
level some buildings. The photographs of the devas
tated city that we all know so well document not a
fire out of control, but two fires that were systemati
cally fed across two days by incendiary dynamiting or
the laying down of convenient channels across which the firestorms could advance.
Of interest as well: No one seemed to be in charge of
the dynamiting. The mayor authorized it, of course,
but he lost control of the process as soon as it began.
There was no coherent plan of action or ability to stop
the dynamiting when it was proving useless. Authority
to dynamite dispersed itself through the Army and
militia units, fire battalions, even civilian volunteers.
It seemed a kind of frenzy, as if San Franciscans were
trying to destroy their city, not save it. The Navy, as I
say, never bought the dynamiting strategy and saved
the Embarcadero. Certain residents of Russian Hill,
risking being shot by soldiers for not abandoning
their properties, never bought it and saved their houses.
How does Fradkin account for such confusion, for such a lack of coordination? Part of the answer is in
the very random nature of catastrophe itself. We can
not expect the San Francisco of 1906 to have on hand
an articulated and well-rehearsed emergency plan
when such a catastrophe as was unfolding had never
even been imagined, much less planned for. But it also must be faced that the San Francisco establish
ment that was forced to cope with this catastrophe
was deeply divided against itself.
On the one side were Mayor Eugene Schmitz and the supervisors of the recently triumphant Union
Labor Party, whose lobbyist, advisor, go-between, and
occasional bagman was San Francisco lawyer Abraham
Ruef. On the other side were the reforming progres
sives being led by former Mayor James Duval Phelan,
crusading Call editor Fremont Older, and activist
reformer Rudolph Spreckels, and their chief investi
gator and muscle-man William J. Burns. (This is the same Burns who later founded the Burns Detective
Agency.) Burns was a Secret Service man sent out by
President Theodore Roosevelt to investigate graft in San Francisco.
President Roosevelt himself must be seen as one of
the contending parties, both in terms of his covert
support of investigating graft and corruption in San
Francisco and his existing anger at the Schmitz ad
ministration and school board for its ongoing pro
gram to segregate Japanese students in the public
schools of the city, which highly upset the Japanese
government. In and among these contending forces
were many of the oligarchs and businessmen of the
city, who had to go along with City Hall if they wished
to do business. At the same time they accepted the
risks of providing Abe Ruef envelopes stuffed with cash to ensure favorable votes from the board of
supervisors, especially in the matter of streetcar fran
chises and other public utilities-related developments.
The San Francisco that had to cope with the earth
quake was in effect in a state of political civil war. Former mayor Phelan and his fellow reformers had
formed the Committee of ioo, which became a par
allel government in the city, especially after Roosevelt made the decision that federal funds would be chan
neled through it and not through the office of the
mayor. As Fradkin points out, here was a city that in
1851, 1856, and 1876 had been seized by vigilante
groups dominated by the respectable, bypassing elected government.
The graft trials that followed the catastrophe eventu
ally sent Abraham Ruef to San Quentin. They consti
tute the grand saga of political reform prior to the pro
00 California History volume 83 / number 3 / 2006
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gressive takeover of the state in 1910. Among other
things, the prosecutor was shot in court, his assai
lant was found dead in his cell under mysterious and
suspicious circumstances, and the police chief of San
Francisco met a watery end in the bay under equally
mysterious conditions. In the course of the trials, half of the San Francisco establishment turned on
the other half (Fremont Older found it advisable to
resign from the Bohemian Club), revealing a network
of corporate bribery for which, crusading editor Fre
mont Older complained, only Ruef seemed willing to
take the rap. Of more than 350 indictments handed
up, only Ruef was convicted. Affronted by Ruef's solo conviction?while his bribers sank into their leather
chairs in their clubs, cigars in hand, whiskeys at the
ready?Older reversed course and successfully cam
paigned for the early parole of the onetime boss.
To accept Fradkin's conclusions that much of what we
believe about the earthquake is myth does not mean
that we have to abandon in its entirety our collective
tradition that the majority of ordinary San Franciscans
acted with courage, generosity, and panache; and
Fradkin documents such good behavior as well. As
we anticipate at some future time (and it will come!), let us resolve that we will learn from our mistakes as
well as be inspired by our good behavior during those
terrible days one hundred years ago when a great city was reduced to rubble and ashes, and human nature revealed its best and worst.
The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906: How San
Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself reviewed by Kevin
Starr, University Professor and Professor of History,
University of Southern California, and State Librarian Emeritus.
|Ji^^^^^BiESi^W_illiffl^ fes<rp(e> MBBBWBBiilBliwg. '^_^t_^__SSS-_iy^""'* %i mi mb iking ^^B_^_IHP_pHHHH_H_P_|^Ki ||i^K_Mi_tf_^_L_ft_^_^_^_^_B_lllll^^ |I>nsstown ^Ml V^^ALIrORNIAI^B
California Historical Society Bookstore Wed-Sat, N 0011-4:30 ." . Bookstore: 415 357-1860 or www.californiahistoricalsociety.org
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