A Paradise Built in Hell (10 page)

James took up the subject of the earthquake again in his keynote address to the American Philosophical Association that December. His talk was called “The Energies of Men” and its subject was the “energies slumbering” in most people that only extreme situations and extreme individuals awaken and put to use. He spoke of a friend of his, a Western student of yoga, “breaking through the barriers which life’s routine had concreted around the deeper strata of the will, and gradually bringing its unused energies into action.” And he spoke of the “stores of bottled up energy and endurance” that people in the earthquake had discovered within themselves. One of his ongoing inquiries was about human nature’s extremes, about the mental and emotional states of saints, mystics, visionaries, the mentally ill, people under duress, about the forces that produced selflessness, heroism, transcendence, sacrifice—the sources of the extraordinary rather than the ordinary. In disaster, the state of mind he describes is neither sought nor exceptional: these remarkable qualities become widespread.

His is in many ways the first good empirical investigation of human nature in the crucible of disaster, and its conclusions are in line with those the disaster sociologists would reach through methodical study of many more calamities. James’s investigation concluded that human beings respond with initiative, orderliness, and helpfulness; they remain calm; and suffering and loss are transformed when they are shared experiences. In the earthquake he found what he had been looking for: a moral equivalent of war, a situation that would “inflame the civic temper as past history has inflamed the military temper.” The
civic temper
—the phrase suggests social engagement not just as a duty but also as an appetite and an orientation. The earthquake awoke something of that temperament in one child, and though William James had only four years left to live when the quake struck, she had seventy-four in which to make her mark and exercise that appetite, and she did so with vigor.

W
hat are the consequences of a major event? The usual measure takes stock of changes in what is already visible: the prominent players and large-scale institutions. The 1906 earthquake, for example, helped prompt what is sometimes described as reform of the corrupt Schmitz-Ruef administration in San Francisco but could be equally described as the replacement of one coalition by another that was more patrician but no less self-serving. Ruef and Schmitz were indicted for graft and bribery, and the former was given a long prison sentence, a witness’s house was bombed, an editor was sued for libel, a prosecutor was shot in the courtroom. Though the corruption put on trial was real, the relentless pursuit of the pair was equally due to anti-Semitism and rage against Schmitz’s alignment with labor. The
New York Times
reported that the Progressive coalition headed by Spreckels and Phelan was engaged in the “formation of a political machine . . . to carry out their plans of revenge and the ruination of certain corporations which stood in the way of their plans.” Or as Fradkin puts it, “The California Progressives, with President Theodre Roosevelt quietly cheering them on from the sidelines, were guilty of unleashing a violent, divisive drama in a city that badly needed an intermission from chaos in order to heal.”

The city administrators made only minor changes in its safety infrastructure and rebuilt without improvements to the building standards and codes. The forests of the Pacific Coast were logged for lumber as far north as Washington State, and thousands of horses were worked to death to speedily rebuild the city. San Francisco arose again, a city with the same general institutions, injustices, and divisions, extraordinary still in some ways, ordinary in others. The political fracas was part of business as usual—self-interest, corruption, and the plays of power.

What became of that moment when everything was different? What are the unseen, far-reaching consequences of an event? With what scale can you weigh an event that affects a million people or more? What of the differences that are immeasurable, a sense of possibility or a sense of grief that redirects a life? What if one minor figure who will come to have a major impact is shaped by that event? What if the consequences of an event begin so quietly they are imperceptible for decades even if they come to affect millions? Many events plant seeds, imperceptible at the time, that bear fruit long afterward.

Dorothy Day was eight and a half when the earthquake struck. She was then the odd, thoughtful third child of a racetrack journalist; she is now, nearly three decades after her death, the revered founder of a radical movement with more than a hundred centers still active in the United States alone and a candidate for sainthood in the Catholic Church. She was already looking for something beyond the usual pleasures and woes of childhood, a hungry reader, a voyager into the neighbors’ churches and religions, a strong-willed child full of longing. At eight, her apprehensions of God as “a great noise that became louder and louder, and approached nearer and nearer to me until I woke up sweating with fear and shrieking for my mother” got mixed up with her remembrance of the earthquake—“the noise which kept getting louder and louder, and the keen fear of death makes me think now that it might have been due only to the earthquake.”

The quake itself “started with a deep rumbling and the convulsions of the earth started afterward, so that the earth became a sea which rocked our house in a most tumultuous manner.” Her father pulled her older brothers from their beds, her mother grabbed her younger sister, and Day was left in a big brass bed that rolled around the floor of the family’s house in Oakland. She was equally struck by the social aftermath. In the 1930s, she wrote, “What I remember most plainly about the earthquake was the human warmth and kindliness of everyone afterward. For days refugees poured out of burning San Francisco and camped in Idora Park and the race track in Oakland. People came in their night clothes; there were new-born babies. Mother and all our neighbors were busy from morning to night cooking hot meals. They gave away every extra garment they possessed. They stripped themselves to the bone in giving, forgetful of the morrow. While the crisis lasted, people loved each other.”

“While the crisis lasted, people loved each other.” Day remembered this all her life, and she dedicated that long life to trying to realize and stabilize that love as a practical force in meeting the needs of the poor and making a more just and generous society. Because of that moment of the earthquake and moments of social engagement afterward, she was able to see this as a reality she had already tasted rather than as an abstract possibility. But the road toward it was a long one. After the earthquake, her family—which had lived in Oakland only a few years—sold the furniture for cash and got on a train to Chicago. They had been middle class, but in Chicago they moved into a flat over a tavern and underwent a long period of comparative poverty, eating overripe bananas and toast for dinner and getting to know the poor people around them. She writes of her high-school self, “I did not want just the few, the missionary-minded people like the Salvation Army, to be kind to the poor, as the poor. I wanted everyone to be kind. I wanted every home to be open to the lame, the halt, and the blind, the way it had been after the San Francisco earthquake. Only then did people really live, really love their brothers. In such love was the abundant life and I did not have the slightest idea how to find it.”

Day grew up with a yearning for God and an empathic love for those at the bottom, neither of them a legacy from her parents, who were uninvolved in either religion or politics. Reconciling the two would be her great challenge. She wanted to mitigate the suffering of the poor, but she saw something holy about poverty too. In her autobiography she writes, “One afternoon as I sat on the beach, I read a book of essays by William James and came on these lines:
. . . one wonders whether the revival of the belief that poverty is a worthy religious vocation may not be the transformation of military courage, and the spiritual reform which our time stands most in need of. Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung. . . . We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient realization of poverty could have meant; the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by who we are and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment.”
Upton Sinclair’s novel
The Jungle
made the invisible lives of the poor living nearby in Chicago real to her, and this “made me feel that from then on my life was to be linked to theirs, their interests were to be mine; I had received a call, a vocation, a direction to my life.”

She used the language of religion intentionally. All her life before her conversion to Catholicism just before she turned thirty, she longed for prayer, for the shelter of the church and the larger meanings religion provided, for something grander and more mystical than everyday life or revolutionary politics could offer. But religion didn’t seem compatible with the other part of her life in the radical America of the early twentieth century, and only the radicals seemed to address the needs of the poor. And Day was radical. She was a tall, striking woman with a strong jaw, pale skin, black hair, usually cut in a bob, a decisive stride, strong opinions, and like many young people, a lot of pieces she could not quite put together. She fell in with anarchists, Communists, feminists, and other revolutionaries, worked with them on newspapers, marched with them on Washington, drank and danced with them at balls and bars, went to prison with them, talked with them about what the world could be and should be.

She fell in love with many things, and she uses the term intentionally to describe objects of enthusiasm and devotion entirely unlike romantic, erotic love. In
The Long Loneliness
, her autobiography published when she was in her fifties, she recalls, “There was a new baby that year, born in May. I fell in love that year too—I was fourteen years old—and first love is sweet.” The love was for a band conductor down the street to whom she never spoke. And she goes on to say, “The love for my baby brother was as profound and never-to-be-forgotten as that first love. The two seemed to go together.” The Russian Revolution came in 1917, when she was nearly twenty, and she joined the thousands singing and celebrating in Madison Square Garden. “I was in love now with the masses. I do not remember that I was articulate or reasoned about this love, but it warmed and filled my heart.” One love led to another; of Forster, the man she was deeply in love with ten years later, she wrote: “I have always felt that it was life with him that brought me natural happiness, that brought me to God. His ardent love of creation brought me to the Creator of all things.” And in coming to God, she destroyed her common-law marriage with the antireligious Forster.

There are other loves. But we have little language for them. In an era whose sense of the human psyche is dominated by entertainment and consumerism and by therapy culture—that amalgamation of ideas drawn from pop psychology and counseling—the personal and private are most often emphasized to the exclusion of almost everything else. Even the scope of psychotherapy generally leaves out the soul, the creator, and the citizen, those aspects of being human that extend into realms beyond private life. Conventional therapy, necessary and valuable at times to resolve personal crises and suffering, presents a very incomplete sense of self. As a guide to the range of human possibility it is grimly reductive. It will help you deal with your private shames and pains, but it won’t generally have much to say about your society and your purpose on earth. It won’t even suggest, most of the time, that you provide yourself with relief from and perspective on the purely personal by living in the larger world. Nor will it ordinarily diagnose people as suffering from social alienation, meaninglessness, or other anomies that arise from something other than familial and erotic life. It more often leads to personal adjustment than social change (during the 1950s, for example, psychology went to work bullying women into accepting their status as housewives, the language of Freudianism was deployed to condemn their desires for more power, more independence, more dignity, and more of a role in public life). Such a confinement of desire and possibility to the private serves the status quo as well: it describes no role for citizenship and no need for social change or engagement.

Popular culture feeds on this privatized sense of self. A recent movie about political activists proposed that they opposed the government because they had issues with their fathers. The implication was that the proper sphere of human activity is personal, that there is no legitimate reason to engage with public life, that the very act of engaging is juvenile, blindly emotional, a transference of the real sources of passion. What if that government is destroying other human lives, or your own, and is leading to a devastating future? What if a vision of a better world or just, say, a better transit system is a legitimate passion? What if your sense of self is so vast that your well-being includes these broad and idealistic engagements? Oscar Wilde asked for maps of the world with Utopia on them. Where are the maps of the human psyche with altruism, idealism, and even ideas on them, the utopian part of the psyche, or just the soul at its most expansive? In his book
Arctic Dreams
, Barry Lopez writes of whalers in the far north in 1823: “They felt exhilaration in the constant light; and a sense of satisfaction and worth, which came partly from their arduous work.” The sentence stands out for measuring human purpose and pleasure by different standards than the familiar ones. Work gives worth, light gives exhilaration, and the world becomes larger and richer, even for men toiling in cold and dangerous seas far from home.