the great earthquake and firestorms of 1906 - california state...

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


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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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


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


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

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