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There's new evidence that San Francisco's political civil war caused a human-made catastrphe as damaging as the earthquake itself. By Kevin Starr THE KATRINA CATASTROPHE has reprised what has fortunately been an infrequent event in our national history: the destruction of an American city by natural disaster. Such destruction happened to Johnstown, Penn-sylvania, in 1889 by flood; to Galveston, Texas, in 1900 by hurricane and flood; to downtown Baltimore by fire in 1904; and to Anchorage in 1964 by earthquake. In April 1906, through earthquake and fire, it happened in spades to San Francisco. At 5:12 on the morning of Wednesday, April 18, 1906, the Pacific and the North American plates suddenly lurched past each other, moving as much as 21 feet along the 270 miles of the San Andreas Fault. Shock waves sped across the terrain at 7,000 miles per hour. The first shock wave hit San Francisco with a magnitude of 7.7 to 7.9, according to later estimates, and shook the city in two phases for 45 seconds. Within the hour, there would be 17 serious aftershocks. City Hall and numerous other unreinforced masonry buildings, together with many crowded tenements south of Market Street, collapsed instantly. Facades fell from homes, revealing the furniture within. Fire Chief Dennis Sullivan was pinned beneath debris and scalded by escaping steam in his home on Bush Street, and died four days later. Innumerable water mains were broken, impeding fire fighting on the first day of the disaster. Then came a second wave of fires, originating most likely from an overturned cooking stove, which compounded the growing conflagration. Regular Army troops under the command of Brigadier General Frederick Funston assumed control of the city, despite the lack of any clear legal mandate to do so. In anticipation of the centenary of the destruction of San Francisco, three noted writers have re-examined the San Francisco catastrophe: Philip Fradkin, who shared a Pulitzer Prize while on the staff of the Los Angeles Times; former New York City firefighter Dennis Smith, an acknowledged expert in firefighting techniques and catastrophe management; and Simon Winchester, an Oxford-trained geologist, biographer, and highly respected cultural critic. Fradkin and Smith offer disturbing revisionist investigations as to the reality of San Francisco’s response to earth-quake and fire, while Winchester gives persuasive evidence that an equally powerful earthquake is due to hit the Bay Area by the middle of this century. What followed in the three days after the earthquake has, until the publication of these studies, remained obscure in detail and highly mythologized. Who authorized the Army to assume control? Was it Mayor Eugene Schmitz, or did he merely bend to the inevitable? Who did the Army shoot as looters? Was it necessary to dynamite so many downtown buildings to halt the fire? Then there is the question of casualties. The official figure always hovered around the mid-300s, yet the photographs of the city in the aftermath of the two great fires that followed the earthquake evoke images of the bombed-out cities of Berlin, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki in their total devastation. In 1989 Cameron & Company published a pioneering study, Denial of Disaster, by San Francisco city archivist Gladys Hansen and retired fire chief Emmet Condon, that through a meticulous examination of primary documents upped the casualty figure to something surpassing 3,000. That figure had been squelched and kept secret by an establishment eager to rebuild the city and that wanted to disconnect it from its reputation as a dangerous place. Did the denial of these casualty figures suggest other denials as well? Former firefighter Dennis Smith sees the second-greatest catastrophe, after the earthquake itself, as the loss of Chief Dennis Sullivan. Had Sullivan survived, Smith argues, San Francisco would have confronted the fires (some 60 in all) under the unified and highly competent command of its first-rate fire chief. As it was, the regular Army and the National Guard assumed responsibility for the fire fighting, with disastrous results. As the grandson of a San Francisco fireman on active duty at the time, I, along with so many others, was more than willing to believe that the two great fires destroyed the northeastern quadrant of the city despite the heroic efforts of the fire department. Not so! As Smith and Fradkin clearly demonstrate, San Francisco was literally burnt to the ground through ineptitude. First of all, the fire department was almost totally neutralized by burst water mains, although the Navy—under the steady command of Lieutenant Frederick Freeman, the true firefighting hero of the three-day ordeal—did manage to lay hoses inland from the Embarcadero. When fire broke out, the worst possible decision was made: to fight fire with fire, to dynamite buildings to create a firebreak or, failing that, to create counter fires that would beat back the advancing holocaust. Smith places primary responsibility for this dynamiting on General Funston, who had no background whatsoever in fire fighting but who, in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, had assumed de facto control of the city. He ordered regular troops with fixed bayonets into the city, despite the fact that only the president of the United States was authorized to do so, and only under precisely defined circumstances. For two days, the Army and a reluctant but bullied fire department seemed determined to destroy San Francisco. Dynamited buildings merely provided fuel for the fire to advance. The black powder 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 certain buildings. Worse, one of the gentlemen in charge of the dyna-miting and artillery appeared to be heavily under the influence of alcohol as he banged away at buildings that otherwise could have been saved. The photographs of the devastated city that we all know so well document not a fire out of control, but two fires that were systematically fed for two days by incendiary dynamiting or the laying down of convenient channels across which the firestorms could advance. No one seemed to be in charge of this process. The mayor authorized it but lost control of the process as soon as it began. Authority to dynamite dispersed itself through Army and militia units, fire battalions, and even civilian volunteers who fell into a kind of frenzy—as if they were trying to destroy their city, not save it. Fortunately, the Navy never bought into the strategy and saved the Embarcadero. Certain residents of Russian Hill, risking being shot by soldiers for not abandoning their properties, never bought into it and saved their houses. Although Funston sent his troops into the city from the Presidio, it was Mayor Schmitz who issued the absolutely horrific order that any and all looters would be shot on sight, despite the fact that there was no evidence whatsoever of wholesale looting, or even a looting problem, in the hours following the earthquake. Fradkin writes that many of Schmitz’s advisors were initially shocked by the order, which likely resulted from Schmitz’s distrust of certain sectors of the population—minorities and visibly unassimilated immigrants in particular—although one trigger-happy special deputy did shoot an oligarch. Fradkin puts the total number shot at only around 15 and suggests the order sprang from the city establishment’s deep sense of social anxiety. That same anxiety, he says, motivated the untrue but widely heard accounts of human ghouls roaming the city biting earlobes to secure earrings from corpses or biting off fingers to secure rings. Dennis Smith claims a higher number of people were shot but agrees that for three days San Francisco came under the control of soldiers and National Guardsmen, many of them drunk or themselves looters, together with equally hostile specially sworn-in deputies. The deputies turned the city into an unconstitutional nightmare for ordinary citizens trying to defend their property from the flames or retrieve belongings from the ruins or smoldering ashes of their houses. Nor was martial law ever officially declared. Funston repeatedly pointed out that the mayor, not he, was in charge of the city, and that he was only making the Army available as a supplementary force to assist the police. The willingness to accept that San Francisco was under de facto martial law was, like the shoot-to-kill order, a symptom of great social anxiety—fear that San Francisco was too unstable to handle its own affairs. How does one account for such confusion, for such a lack of coordi-nation? Part of the answer lies in the very random nature of catastrophe itself. We cannot expect the San Francisco of 1906 to have had on hand an articulated and well-rehearsed emergency plan for a catastrophe that had never even been imagined, much less planned for. But we also must face the fact that the San Francisco establishment was then deeply divided against itself. On one side were Mayor Schmitz and the super-visors 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 Progressives, led by former mayor James Duval Phelan, Call newspaper crusading editor Fremont Older, activist reformer Rudolph Spreckels, and their chief investigator and muscle man, William J. Burns, a Secret Service agent sent by President Theodore Roosevelt to help investigate graft in San Francisco. Roosevelt was angry at the Schmitz administration and the school board for its ongoing program to segregate Japanese students in the public schools of the city, which highly upset the Japanese gover-nment, whom Roosevelt admired as the “Yankees of the Orient.” 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, yet recognized the risks of providing Abe Ruef with envelopes stuffed with cash to ensure favorable votes from the board of supervisors, especially in the matter of streetcar franchises and other public utilities–related developments. The San Francisco that had to cope with the ’06 earthquake was, in effect, in a state of political civil war. Phelan and his fellow reformers of the Committee of 100 formed a parallel government in the city, particularly after Roosevelt made the decision that federal funds would be channeled through the committee and not the office of the mayor. But, then again, here was a city that in 1851, 1856, and 1876 had been seized by vigilante groups dominated by the respectable, bypassing elected government. The hundreds of special deputies running around town with rifles and ammunition belts slung across their chests—edgy, some of them drinking, some of them just looking for someone to shoot—expressed this de facto civil war, this deep psychological division in the city. The subsequent graft trials that eventually sent Abraham Ruef to San Quentin constitute the grand saga of political reform prior to the Progressive takeover of the state in 1910. Among other things, the prosecutor was shot in court, his assailant was found dead in his cell under mysterious circumstances, and the police chief of San Francisco met an equally suspicious watery end in the bay. In the course of the trials, half of the San Francisco establishment turned on the other half, revealing a network of corporate bribery. Yet of more than 350 indictments handed down, 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, Call editor Fremont Older reversed course and successfully campaigned for the early parole of the onetime boss. A free man after serving about 5 years of his 14-year sentence, Ruef returned to San Francisco and, continuing to tell no tales, prospered in real estate. Real estate was obviously thriving as San Francisco rebuilt itself, a process celebrated in the Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915. (Veteran Chronicle reporter Carl Nolte’s The San Francisco Century describes this reconstruction with specificity and panache.) From the beginning, San Franciscans seemed eager to suppress the history and meaning of April 1906, lest the city be considered an unsuitable site for rebuilding. Suppressed as well was the fact that human error and misbehavior had caused most of the damage. It has taken a hundred years for this truth to be asserted, proven, and, it can be presumed, acknowledged. The power of Simon Winchester’s A Crack in the Edge of the World comes from his comprehensive understanding of the geological forces that brought about April 1906 and will, perhaps sometime before 2037, bring about an equal if not greater upheaval. Whereas Fradkin and Smith focus on human error and misbehavior in the disaster, Winchester encourages us to consider the San Francisco catastrophe as a funda-mental responsibility, an inevitable requirement, of sojourning on this planet. Merely by being here we are at risk, Winchester argues, and we occasionally have to pay a price. But the human error and misbehavior chronicled by Smith and Fradkin suggest that, thanks to our increasingly destructive technology and our proclivity to resort to violence to attain social and political goals, we can be even more dangerous to the planet and to ourselves than all the mega-forces seething beneath that uncertain geological sea that supports our fragile cultures and our vulnerable, brief lives. Kevin Starr MLS ’74 is a professor at the University of Southern California and state librarian emeritus. Random House has just published his California, A History. For information on events surrounding the centennial of the 1906 earthquake, visit seismo.berkeley.edu/seismo/1906.
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