A Paradise Built in Hell (5 page)

“The grocer on the corner put out all his supplies the first day; so we had plenty of tea and coffee and sugar and butter and everything; as well as canned goods, while they lasted, and then the Red Cross people began supplying things. The wholesale butchers used to send out meat for the refugee camps from the Potrero; and when a wagon was passing our place, the man would dump out a few fine slabs of meat on the corner, and that kept the stew-boiler going. It was the same with the dairymen from down the Peninsula. They always dumped down one or two big ten-gallon cans of milk at our corner as they drove by. So that all Mrs. Schmitt and the girls had to do was to keep awake and keep the boilers full and the fire going.” Like the Mizpah Café, Schmitt’s family kitchen became a community center, a site in which strangers and neighbors took care of each other. Billy Delaney, a local entertainer with considerable charm, took on the task of foraging for firewood and water to keep the kitchen going.

Schmitt’s reminiscences continue, “Then when the dynamite explosions were making the night noisy and keeping everybody awake and anxious, the girls or some of the refugees would start playing the piano, and Billy Delaney and other folks would start singing; so that the place became quite homey and sociable, considering it was on the sidewalk, outside the high school, and the town all around it was on fire.”

Thomas A. Burns, who was a partner in one of those produce firms Schmitt routinely patrolled, also took care of his neighbors. He lived on Lyon Street next to the Panhandle—the long strip of greensward east of Golden Gate Park—and he owned a wagon and team of horses. That first day, he took fifty boxes of oranges to the Panhandle and gave them away, then went to his house, which had been shaken from its foundation but was otherwise fine. Into it he moved dozens of guests, “some that we knew before and some that we did not know from Adam. All were refugees from the fire. And, for some reason that I cannot explain, the house still had its supply of running water. Therefore, it was the great central rendezvous of all the refugees in that neighborhood. They came with buckets, and pails, and bottles, and everything else in the way of a container, to draw water from our faucets. Thus the place was crowded from about four o’clock each morning to about twelve o’clock each night. When we found out that the water was still flowing, and that hundreds of persons were suffering from lack of it, we passed the word around.” With the help of a borrowed police badge, he was able to keep his team and wagon from being commandeered by the army or National Guard and continued hauling food out to the neighborhood to give away for the next three weeks. He said of the people he gave food to, “No questions were asked, no investigations were attempted. Whatever the applicant required was given to him or her, if I had it; and the plan seemed to work excellently.”

Another policeman downtown that first morning, Sergeant Maurice Behan, helped rescue a woman with a baby and commented, “Men were taking all sorts of risks to help other people who were in danger.” A pawnbroker he saw bought a whole load of bread from a baker’s wagon and began giving loaves away to people fleeing the flames. Nearby an agent for a mineral water company set up a primitive bar out of a plank and a couple of trestles and gave water away all day and all night to the thirsty crowd. Later Behan and some citizens helped firemen rescue five people from a damaged building. They were taken to the hospital in a fish cart, a laundry wagon, and an automobile—still a relatively rare piece of machinery in those days. Behan commented, “What impressed me particularly was the lighthearted way in which everybody seemed to be taking the calamity. All seemed to be merry, many of them were cracking jokes as they pushed along. . . . Of course it was heartrending to see some of the mothers with their babies in their arms and other tiny children hanging on to their skirts or trotting behind. But the spirit of them all was a wonderful thing to see. No matter where you went or who you spoke to, in the thick of that ruin with the fire blazing all around you, somebody found something to joke about.”

There were tragedies nonetheless. A man from the business department of one of the city’s many newspapers found a baby about four months old abandoned, orphaned, or lost the day of the quake, carried it with him, joined up with a stray company of opera singers whose female members helped care for the child and found it some milk, and took it to sleep with him in Golden Gate Park that night, embraced it to keep it warm, but found it cold and dead when he awoke. Tragedies and gen erosities: the plumbers union decided, five days after the earthquake, to volunteer their services without pay for a week, “and in pursuance of this action about five hundred plumbers worked day and night for over a week repairing all broken pipes and stopping waste of water in the unburned district.”

Charles Reddy, the manager of Miller & Lux, one of the big slaugh terhouses on the city’s southeast shore, also tells of the openhandedness that sprang up in the hours and days of the disaster. Reddy says that the proprietor’s “first thought that morning was that homeless people would soon be wanting meat, and my straight orders were to give every applicant all he needed and take money from nobody. Black, white, and yellow were to be treated just the same; and they were treated just the same, even if we had all Chinatown camped down quite near us. Thousands of the excited Chinese from Chinatown proper trekked down to our end of the Potrero to be near their cousins, the shrimp catchers on the bay below us. At the time of the earthquake we had on hand, slaughtered and ready for delivery, about three hundred head of cattle, five or six hundred sheep, thirty or forty calves, and about a hundred and fifty hogs. None of this meat was lost or destroyed; every bit of it was distributed to the people, and the supply lasted seven days. We started distributing at five o’clock the afternoon of the earthquake. . . . All the firms, except two, were giving away their meat or allowing the people to take it. . . . The two firms that did not open up their warehouses had all their meat rot on their hands.”

Giving away the meat rather than letting it rot made sense. But going to the lengths that Miller & Lux did, of hiring more men and coming up with distribution plans to meet the needs of as many refugees as possible, was not a business decision but an altruistic gesture. So was driving injured people to the hospital in your laundry wagon, or buying a whole load of bread to give away, or hauling oranges across town to distribute. You can argue that sustaining the city through a crisis served the interests of businesses that depended on a local customer base, but few seem to have been making such long-term calculations. Just as Mrs. Holshouser and Mrs. Schmitt seemed to need no explanation for why they set up public kitchens and began feeding their neighbors, so Reddy needed none for giving away a fortune in food. It was what you did.

It’s not as though hunger did not exist in San Francisco before April 18, though it was less visible and less widespread; the city was in 1906 a many-tiered society with enormous opulence at the top and grim destitution at the bottom. It’s tempting to ask why if you fed your neighbors during the time of the earthquake and fire, you didn’t do so before or after. One reason was that you were not focused on long-term plans—giving away thousands of pounds of meat was, of course, not profitable for Miller & Lux, but in the days after the disaster there were no long-term plans, just the immediate demands of survival. Another is social: people at that moment felt a solidarity and an empathy for each other that they did not at other times. They were literally in proximity to each other, the walls literally fallen away from around them as they clustered in squares and parks, moved stoves out onto the street to cook, lined up for supplies. They had all survived the same ordeal. They were members of the same society, and it had been threatened by the calamity.

Though disasters are not necessarily great levelers, some of the formerly wealthy in this one no longer owned more than the poor, and many of the poor were receiving relief for the first time. Nearly all shared an uncertain future—though because they were all in it together, few seemed to worry about that future. (Many left town to start again elsewhere in the state or the country, but the city’s population rebounded in a few years.) That lack of concern made it easier to be generous in the present, since much self-interest is more often about amassing future benefit than protecting present comfort. More than a hundred thousand people were camped out in San Francisco in the days and weeks after the earthquake. In the first few days, people took care of each other, and the methods and networks they developed continued to matter even after the Red Cross and other relief organizations moved in.

And the rules were clear. William G. Harvey, who managed an automobile dealership, wrote, “All the big hotels, such as the St. Francis, the Palace, and others, were filled with eastern and other tourists who seem to have lost their heads entirely. Indeed, the only really scared people that I can remember having seen through the first three days of the fire were people of this class. In many cases these would come to the garage offering to pay any price for the use of an automobile that would take them out of the city. However, we absolutely refused to accept money from any such applicant, and as long as we saw that the petitioner was able to walk, we refused to furnish a machine. All our machines were kept busy carrying the sick and wounded.” There were extortionists who charged people huge sums to transport goods, but there was also this giveaway, this refusal of profit, that brought those with resources into community with those who needed them. The hotel dwellers seem to have been scared because, as outsiders, they did not feel part of this community or know how to navigate the city, but many of the affluent responded with fear in part because they feared their fellow citizens would deprive them of their advantages. (In many cases the disaster had already done so, albeit temporarily.)

Most San Franciscans seem to have been at home in the city even when they had no homes. But a series of groups felt ill at ease: the occupying armed forces, who had been instructed to see chaos and impose order; the wealthy who feared an uprising; the city’s governors who knew only that they were not in power and believed their task was to take it back; the outsiders who did not navigate the city with ease.

Generosity was one highlight of the postquake citizenry, equanimity was another. Everyone would say then that it was the spirit of San Francisco, as they would talk about British composure during the bombing of London or New Yorkers’ resilience after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Eric Temple Bell, who was a teacher in 1906 San Francisco but would later become known as a mathematician and science-fiction writer, recalled, “The best thing about the earthquake and fire was the way the people took them. There was no running around the streets, or shrieking, or anything of that sort. Any garbled accounts to the contrary are simply lies. They walked calmly from place to place and watched the fire with almost indifference, and then with jokes that were not forced either, but wholly spontaneous. In the whole of these two awful days and nights I did not see a single woman crying, and did not hear a whine or a whimper from anybody. The rich and poor alike just watched and waited, it being useless to try to save anything but a few immediate necessities, and when the intense heat made it necessary to move, they get up with a laugh.”

The socialist novelist Jack London, whose birthplace in the poor district south of Market Street burned in the quake aftermath, agreed: “Remarkable as it may seem, Wednesday night while the whole city crashed and roared into ruin, was a quiet night. There were no crowds. There was no shouting and yelling. There was no hysteria, no disorder. I passed Wednesday night in the path of the advancing flames, and in all those terrible hours I saw not one woman who wept, not one man who was excited, not one person who was in the slightest degree panic-stricken. The most perfect courtesy obtained. Never in all San Francisco’s history, were her people so kind and courteous as on this night of terror.” Though almost no one seemed terrified either once the shaking stopped. People watched the firestorms with detachment.

Charles B. Sedgewick ’s earthquake was so ennobling it begins to test the limits of belief, though more moderate accounts of the same phenomenon are widespread. He wrote, “The strong helped the weak with their burdens, and when pause was made for refreshment, food was voluntarily divided; the milk was given to the children, and any little delicacies that could be found were pressed upon the aged and the ailing.” And then he says, “Would that it could always be so!” And here you get to the remarkable fact that people wish some aspects of disasters would last. He continues, “No one richer, none poorer than his fellow; no coveting the other’s goods; no envy; no greedy grasping for more than one’s fair share of that given for all. True it is, I reflected, that money is the root of all evil, the curse of our civilization, seeing that it is the instrument which frail mortals use to take unjust advantages. What a difference those few days when there was no money, or when money had no value!”

Money was irrelevent for many of the transactions: food was given away, and the public kitchens ran into the summertime. And cash was in short supply, so people made their own. One newspaper reported, “Owing to the fact that every bank in the Bay Counties has been more or less injured, to the fact that every reserve bank has been destroyed in San Francisco, that the coin and currency in the vaults will not be recoverable for several weeks, the citizens of San Francisco and Northern California are quietly using bills of exchange, private checks, and ordinary notes as currency. This . . . is a sign of the faith of Californians in the stability of their communities.” Other forms of relief included donated clothing and free medical care. The U.S. Post Office at San Francisco forwarded unstamped mail, often written on scraps and oddments, from the survivors to destinations around the country. There were thieves, opportunists, and people who refused to help the needy, but the citizens for the most part seem to have entered a phase of solidarity that crossed many social divides and to have felt for each other deeply. There were callous and fearful authorities who lashed out, but also institutions such as the post office that just quietly broke the rules to make life a little less disastrous. For Sedgewick, the disaster was a corrective to a society poisoned by money.