A Paradise Built in Hell (13 page)

Money, supplies, and volunteers came from around the world, and Boston in particular distinguished itself for the generosity of its aid. In the terrible weather, finding shelter was urgent. People sheltered in boxcars, in army tents, in the intact room or two that remained of their houses, behind boarded-up windows. Residents in the surrounding countryside and towns across Nova Scotia took in many. Orphaned children and children with severely injured parents were put up for adoption or foster care, and offers to adopt came in from all over the continent. As Halifax native Laura MacDonald writes in her history of the explosion, “Halifax, with its rigid class structure—divided by religion, class, and country—briefly integrated. English Protestant mothers, who two days before would not have stepped foot in Richmond, suddenly welcomed poor Irish Catholic children into their homes. Whole families were invited to live in the parlors of wealthier citizens. Soldiers and sailors, who created so much moral apprehension in the middle classes, were transformed into heroes. They were important not only because they were organized and prepared but because they did not have the responsibility of their own families. Teenagers and young adults also proved particularly useful. They took instruction, worked for hours on end without sleep, and were free of the usual responsibilities.”

The Halifax explosion is remembered by sociologists for one man, Samuel Henry Prince, a Halifax resident whose book on the explosion is considered the rough beginning of the revelatory field of disaster studies. Prince had been born in nearby New Brunswick in 1883, got a master’s degree in psychology at the University of Toronto but also studied for the Anglican priesthood at Wycliffe College. When the explosion tore apart Halifax, he had been a curate at St. Paul’s Church there for seven years and had already seen the aftermath of one disaster. After the
Titanic
had collided with north Atlantic ice and sunk, he had gone to sea on the S.S.
Montmagny
to search for and bury bodies. After the harbor explosion five years later, the hall at his church became a refuge for 350 homeless citizens, and the organization served more than ten thousand meals that first month. The church was close enough to the explosion that shrapnel hit it; some of which is said to be still visible in its walls.

Perhaps the aftermath of the explosion begat more intellectual curiosity in Prince, because sixteen months later he was studying for a doctorate in the new field of sociology at Columbia University in New York City. His 1920 dissertation,
Catastrophe and Social Change
, is an odd mix of stilted Victorian language, unexamined conventional ideas, and acute observations. Its premise is that disaster begets social and political change, and he opens with a set of assertions about the nature of that change. “The word ‘crisis’ is of Greek origin, meaning a point of culmination and separation, an instant when change one way or another is impending.” He compares the crisis in an individual life to that of a society in disaster: “Life becomes like molten metal. It enters a state of flux from which it must reset upon a principle, a creed, or purpose. It is shaken perhaps violently out of rut and routine. Old customs crumble, and instability rules.” That is, disasters open up societies to change, accelerate change that was under way, or break the hold of whatever was preventing change. One urban-planning adviser who came to Halifax commented, “The disaster simply had the effect of bringing to a point certain things which were pending at the time.”

The nature of this change, these things pending, is not made clear in Prince’s opening manifesto, though he does admit, “catastrophe always means social change. There is not always progress.” The long-term changes in the Halifax area included improvements in public health services, education, and housing and more involvement by both citizens and civic authorities in the life of the city—and the hiring of women conductors on the trams. Beyond these practical phenomena, he noted “a new sense of unity in dealing with common problems.” Just as the sinking of the
Titanic
had prompted changes in shipping and nautical communications policy, so the explosion begat new Canadian and international maritime standards, laws, treaties, and harbor regulations. The scramble to care for the terribly injured led to advances in pediatric medicine, emergency medicine, ophthalmology, reconstructive surgery, and other areas. Some of the economic and social development of the city may have been the result of the upheaval of the war rather than the explosion, but Prince tends to credit it to the latter. He doesn’t examine the psyches of the citizens or look at how they themselves might have changed individually or collectively, politically or psychologically, or what the practical consequences of such changes might be. Halifax was a conservative, quiet town, where it was easy to believe that change rarely comes about but by crisis.

Joseph Scanlon, the scholar to study Prince in greatest depth, concludes that the priest turned sociologist was first of all a Christian. “The underlying basis for his thesis is actually theological. He believed Christ’s death on the cross showed salvation comes from suffering. He linked the idea that suffering is necessary for salvation to the idea that catastrophe leads to social change, adversity leads to progress.” And Scanlon quotes from Prince’s
Titanic
sermon: “A world without suffering would be a world without nobility.” Certainly Prince sees the Halifax disaster as both a death and a resurrection, quoting one local authority to the effect that “sad as was the day, it may be the greatest day in the city’s history.” And at another moment he consciously paraphrases the New Testament, writing, “At first it was a very general consciousness which seemed to draw all together into a fellowship of suffering as victims of a common calamity. There was neither male nor female, just nor unjust, bond nor free.” (In Galatians 3:28, St. Paul says, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”) At the very end of his book he reiterates his credo, “Progress is not necessarily a natural or assured result of change. It only comes as a result of effort that is wisely expended and sacrifice which is sacrifice in truth.”

Beyond this theological bent, Prince was muddled. Sometimes he reports social harmony; other times he mentions “friction and crises . . . which were only stopped short of scandal.” At times he hails the constructive efforts of the ordinary citizens in caring for themselves; at others he deplores “volunteers . . . who could not be expected to understand the nature of scientific relief service.” Though his conclusions are based on the long process of recovery, his most interesting reporting is on the first hours and days of the disaster. Prince’s own observations and those drawn from direct sources tend to be positive about the people of Halifax. But he also used the manuscript of a Dartmouth journalist, Dwight Johnstone, who retold the usual disaster stories about looters and “ghouls”—those who plundered the dead. Even the language shifted from dry to dramatic when he described “the nightly prowlers among the ruins, who rifled the pockets of the dead and dying, and snatched rings from icy fingers.” Ring snatchers are a major component of urban disaster myths, and in the 1906 earthquake also there were rumors of thieves who filled their pockets with fingers severed to get the rings they wore and bit off the earlobes of dead or injured women wearing diamond earrings.

In addition to referring to Johnstone’s manuscript, Prince leaned on conventions of medical and psychological literature of the era, writing that disaster provokes “the abnormal action of the glands” and frees up “the primitive instincts of man,” including “fear, fighting, and anger” and “food-getting.” An equally inflammatory source was Gustave Le Bon’s 1894 book translated from French as
The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
. It may be why Prince portrayed the Halifax explosion as generating irrational behavior and “social disintegration.” But he also drew on the ideas of a thinker as unlike Le Bon as almost anyone in nineteenth-century thought could be, referencing twice the anarchist philosopher and revolutionist Peter Kropotkin. The conjunction brings us back to the philosophical underpinnings of all disaster response, practical and intellectual. Beyond them lie larger questions about how human beings behave in the absence of coercive authority and what kind of societies are possible.

Le Bon was born a year before William James and Peter Kropotkin, and though their conclusions were wildly different, all three were preoccupied with similar problems about violence, human nature, and social possibility. At the end of his teens, Le Bon moved to Paris to study medicine and stayed on for seven decades, until his death in 1931, as a prolific writer of books popularizing and sometimes entirely bastardizing the science of the day. Kept at arm’s length by the university scientists who covered the same ground, he grew bitter about that—though he seems to have started out cynical. Even his early writings contain harshly dismissive statements about women, the poor, and nonwhite people. He speculated that South America was doomed to incessant revolution “because these populations have no national soul and therefore no stability. A people of half-castes is always ungovernable.” Like many in the era immediately after Darwin’s
Origin of Species
appeared, he mutated evolutionary theory into self-aggrandizing fantasy. He believed ardently in psycholo gies rooted in race and inherited mental states among races and classes and pursued popular pseudoscience methodologies. Behind his writing seethes a European male’s incessant anxiety about being overtaken by other categories of human being. Science moved on, but Le Bon did not, and only one of his books ever had wide currency, so wide that in many ways we have never recovered from its argument.

In his highly influential
The Crowd
, he proposed that when individuals gather, they lose themselves and are swept along by primordial forces: someone in a crowd “is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will. Moreover, by the mere fact that he forms part of an organised crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian—that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings, whom he further tends to resemble by the facility with which he allows himself to be impressed by words and images—which would be entirely without action on each of the isolated individuals composing the crowd—and to be induced to commit acts contrary to his most obvious interests and his best-known habits.”

To believe this is to believe that the very act of agglomerating into groups makes humans go mad and that the public is inherently dangerous. Before Le Bon, insurrectionary crowds were denigrated for being made up of people of criminal propensity or the deranged or imagined as being tinder lit by a demagogue’s match. Le Bon’s argument was that instead the crowd itself produced a form of irresponsible madness, a whole far worse than the sum of its parts. Because disasters push the population out into the streets and into collective solutions—community kitchens, emergency shelters, bucket brigades—disaster produces some of the crowds that made Le Bon and his ilk so anxious toward the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. That anxiety never quite dissipated. As in San Francisco in 1906, some of them saw in any assembly of people an incipient mob. Crowds did have power, including the power to change policies and sometimes governments. In his book on revolution, Le Bon claimed such upheavals degenerated into “the effort of the instinctive to overpower the rational. This is why the liberation of popular passions is so dangerous. The torrent, once escaped from its bed, does not return until it has spread devastation far and wide.” Like Hobbes, Le Bon believed the authorities reined in an essentially savage humanity. Prince subscribed to this kind of thinking too when he wrote of “the primitive instincts of man.” The belief that we have a bestial nature refined by the march of civilization was a key tenet of the nineteenth-century European world, anxious to justify colonization of indigenous and tribal peoples and to see their own achievement as more than material progress.

Disaster produces crowds by amassing people in the streets and in shelters and defines them as a crowd by giving them a shared loss and destabilization to which the remedies are often collective. Crowds are not always a benign phenomenon. Though altruism usually prevails in the moment of disaster, scapegoating sometimes follows. The most appalling such postdisaster incident was after the Great Kanto Earthquake that struck central Japan at noon on September 1, 1923. More than 125,000 died in the catastrophe, many by fires caused by broken gas mains and overturned cookstoves in that land of wooden houses crowded together. Additionally, the massive quake made many wells go cloudy. Rumors that the fires were arson and the wells were poisoned by radicals or by Koreans led to hideous massacres. About six thousand Koreans and people mistaken for Koreans were killed by vigilante groups, along with some socialists. In some cases, these people were protected by the military and by police; in others these authorities colluded or led the murders and encouraged the rumors that devastated the unpopular groups. Military police who claimed to fear that anarchists would take advantage of the disaster to overthrow the government kidnapped the anarchist writer Sakae Osugi, his six-year-old nephew, and his lover, Noe Ito, beat the three to death, and threw their bodies down a well. After disaster, savage crowds sometimes appear, but as in San Francisco, the most brutal acts in the aftermath of the Kanto earthquake were not to sabotage the status quo but to preserve it, with the collusion of or at the hands of the authorities. The same is true of lynch mobs in the old South and the Nazi crowds of Kristallnacht—they were the majority brutally enforcing their own privilege over the rights of the minority. Samuel Prince might have tested Le Bon against what actually happened in Halifax to question this fear, but he did not. He did, however, turn to someone who saw human beings individually and in the aggregate very differently.