A Paradise Built in Hell (50 page)

43 A volunteer named Edwards worked for twenty-four hours without stopping:
Argonaut,
October 30, 1926.

43 A mail carrier named Roland M. Roche
. . .
“This improvised bucket brigade”:
Argonaut,
January 8, 1927.

43 “The stories have but one beginning and one end”:
In Henry Anderson Lafler, “How the Army Worked to Save San Francisco” (a riposte to General Funston’s essay of the same title, unpublished manuscript, July 1906, Museum of San Francisco Online),
http://www.sfmuseum.org/1906.2/lafler.html/
.

44 the subcommittee on the permanent relocation of Chinatown:
See Fradkin,
The Great Earthquake
, 35-36.

44 Hugh Kwong Liang:
In Barker,
Three Fearful Days
, 119-23.

45 indignant citizens broke the Chinese porcelain:
Fradkin,
The Great Earthquake
, 293.

45 “The Japanese asked for very little relief”:
San Francisco Relief Survey: The Organization and Methods of Relief Used After the Earthquake and Fire of April 18, 1906. (The Russell Sage Foundation, 1913),
http://www.sfmuseum.org/conflag/relief1.html/
.

45 Phelan and Adolph Spreckels were competing:
See
Argonaut,
September 11, 1926.

46 “Prior to the earthquake, Mr. Spreckels was directing a fight”:
Argonaut
, August 28, 1926.

46 a waterfront man pressured by his banker:
Hansen and Condon,
Denial of Disaster
, 74.

46 “there is pressing need for mutual concession”:
Ruef, quoted in
Bulletin,
May 9, 1906.

46 “the extreme scarcity of house servants”:
Argonaut,
July 21, 1906.

46 “drones”:
Argonaut,
July 28, 1906.

46 The
Bulletin
had run a more sympathetic piece:
Jane Carr, “The Dignity of Labor,”
Bulletin,
May 25, 1906.

47 “The great majority of refugees”:
Argonaut,
June 9, 1927.

47 The
Argonaut
reports:
“The system, despite forceful and ubiquitous protests, was quickly extended throughout the entire city except the Mission, where the resistance was so vehement, and where any attempts to force the regime was so likely to produce disorder, that its adoption was not forced by the relief authorities” and goes on to quote “Colonel Fegiber,” saying, “The influence of this contract method of supply . . . was almost immediately perceptible by the reduction of the number of persons applying for relief—an average of 80 percent, it was estimated, many declining with indignation to accept assistance in the form offered, and by outcries, more or less pronounced, demonstrating beyond the possiblity of a doubt, the intense unpopularity of this scheme. . . . In the meanwhile the number of indigents supplied daily had dropped from 313,145 (as on the 1st of May) to 15,353 on June 30.” A decline clearly not due to people’s acquiring housing and incomes so quickly.

47 I heard . . . Michael Brown of FEMA
make this statement at the University of Colorado Natural Hazards Center annual conference, Boulder, CO, July 2006.

49 “What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true?”
William James, “What Pragmatism Means,” Lecture II, in
Pragmatism and Other Writings
(Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 2000), 25.

51 “the University is absolutely Utopian”:
William James to Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller, letter of January 16, 1906, in
The Letters of William James,
Vol. 11, ed. Henry James [son of the philosopher, not brother] (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920), 148.

51 “It is verily the simple life”:
Ibid., in a letter of January 28, 1906, to Harald Hoffding, 15.

52 “The Utopian dreams of social justice”:
William James,
The Varieties of Religious Experience
(New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 360.

52 “The war against war is going to be no”:
William James, “The Moral Equivalent of War” (see
http://www.constitution.org/wj/meow.htm/
).

52 “all the qualities of a man acquire dignity”:
Ibid.

53 “there were, instead of military conscription”:
Ibid.

53 “man’s relations to the globe”:
Ibid.

53 “The martial type of character”:
Ibid.

53 “consisted wholly of glee”:
William James, “Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake,” in
Memories and Studies
(New York: Longmans, Green, 1911), 211.

54 “Everybody was excited”:
Ibid., 216.

54 “My business is with ‘subjective’ phenomena”:
Ibid., 217.

54 “The crop of nervous wrecks may yet have to be reaped”:
William and Henry James: Selected Letters
, ed. Elizabeth M. Berkeley and Ignas K. Skrypskelsis (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1997), 473.

54 “simply could not bring himself to empathise”:
Linda Simon,
Genuine Reality: A Biography of William James
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 342.

55 “Two things in retrospect strike me especially”:
In James, “Some Mental Effects,” 221.

55 “like soldiering . . . always lies latent”:
Ibid., 223.

55 “the universal equanimity”:
Ibid., 223-24.

55 “I feel that I have collapsed, simply”:
Henry James, in Berkeley and Skrypskelsis, eds.,
William and Henry James: Selected Letters,
472.

55 “We never reckoned on this extremity of anxiety”:
William James to Henry James, ibid., 473.

55 “Surely the cutting edge of all our usual misfortunes”:
In James, “Some Mental Effects,” 224-25.

56 “Never again”:
Pauline Jacobson, “How It Feels to Be a Refugee and Have Nothing in the World, by Pauline Jacobson, Who Is One of Them,”
Bulletin,
April 26, 1906.

56 “The cheerfulness or, at any rate, the steadfastness”:
In James, “Some Mental Effects,” 225.

56 “breaking through the barriers”:
William James, “The Energies of Men” (originally published in
Science
magazine and found at
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/energies.htm/
).

58 “formation of a political machine”:
In Fradkin,
The Great Earthquake
, 328.

58 “The California Progressives”:
Ibid., 306.

59 God as “a great noise that became louder”:
Dorothy Day,
The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of Dorothy Day
(San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), 20.

59 “a deep rumbling and the convulsions”:
Ibid., 21.

59 “What I remember most plainly about the earthquake”:
Dorothy Day,
From Union Square to Rome
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2006), 24.

60 “I did not want just the few”:
Day,
The Long Loneliness
, 39.

60 “One afternoon as I sat on the beach, I read”:
Ibid., 118.

61 “made me feel that from then on my life”:
Ibid., 38.

61 “There was a new baby that year, born in May”:
Ibid., 30.

61 “The love for my baby brother”:
Ibid., 31.

61 “I was in love now with the masses”:
Ibid., 46.

61-62 “I have always felt that it was life with him”: Ibid., 134.

63 “They felt exhilaration in the constant light”:
Barry Lopez,
Arctic Dreams
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1986), 3.

64 Paine writes that nature “has not only forced man into society”:
In Thomas Paine,
The Rights of Man
,
http://www.ushistory.org/paine/rights/c2-01.htm/
.

65 “The enduring attraction of war”:
Chris Hedges,
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
(New York: Anchor Books, 2003), 5.

66 “Although all disasters have their unique”:
Stephen Doheny-Farina, in “The Grid and the Village,”
Orion,
Autumn 2001, online at
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/90/
.

66 “people have so great a need to reverence”
and
“How little, how puny”:
In Day,
The Long Loneliness
, 165.

67 “genius, a saint, an agitator”:
Dorothy Day, in William D. Miller,
Dorothy Day: A Biography
(San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982), 228.

67 “the works of mercy”:
Day,
The Long Loneliness
, 185.

68 “sense of solidarity which made me”:
Ibid., 147.

73 Gertrude Pettipas . . . “A great black ball of smoke”:
In Joseph Scanlon, “The Man Who Helped Sammy Prince Write: Dwight Johnstone and the Halifax Explosion,”
International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters
(March 1992): 189-90.

73
The description of the explosion comes from Laura MacDonald,
Curse of the Narrows: The Halifax Explosion of 1917
(Scarborough, ON: HarperCollins Canada, 2005), and the statistics from Janet Kitz,
Shattered City: The Halifax Explosion and the Road to Recovery
(Halifax, NS: Nimbus Publishing, 1989), 25;
http://www.cbc.ca/halifaxexplosi on/he3_shock/he3_shock _destruction.html/.

74 The ship’s anchor shank, weighing half a ton, was thrown two miles, and the barrel of a large ship-mounted gun nearly three and a half:
Kitz,
Shattered City
, 25.

75 A native woman, Aggie March, stood ... watching:
MacDonald,
Curse of the Narrows
, 43.

75 “Go back! Go back!”
and
“Dolly, look at the stovepipes”:
In Megan Tench, “One Minute You’re Leading a Very Normal Life. The Next Minute It’s Chaos” (profile of Dolly Lloyd),
Boston Globe,
November 24, 2001.

76 Billy Wells:
In MacDonald,
Curse of the Narrows,
71.

76 Twelve-year-old Duggan:
Ibid., 79-80, 121.

76 A soldier . . . said the event “affected me far worse than anything”:
Ibid., 63.

76 Dorothy Lloyd’s:
Tench, “One Minute You’re Leading a Very Normal Life.”

76 “Hold up the train”:
Vincent Coleman, as quoted by the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic. See
http://www.museums.gov.ns.ca/mma/AtoZ/coleman.html/
.

77 Jean Groves, the telephone operator at the exchange building near the dock, stayed behind:
In Scanlon, “The Man Who Helped,” 198-99.

77 Joe Glube:
In Kitz,
Shattered City
, 62-63.

77 the supervisor of the Children’s Hospital:
Ibid., 54.

78 the chief of police reported . . . one case of attempted burglary:
Ibid., 79.

78 Halifax native Laura MacDonald writes in her history of the explosion, “Halifax, with its rigid class structure”:
In MacDonald,
Curse of the Narrows
, 89-90.

79 his church became a refuge for 350 homeless citizens:
In Scanlon, “The Man Who Helped,” 192.

79 “The word ‘crisis’ is of Greek origin”:
Samuel Henry Prince,
Catastrophe and Social Change: Based upon a Sociological Study of the Halifax Disaster
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1920), 16.

79 “Life becomes like molten metal”:
Ibid., 19.

79 “The disaster simply had the effect”:
Ibid., 130.

79-80 “catastrophe always means social change”:
Ibid., 21.

80 “The underlying basis for his thesis is actually theological”:
Joseph Scanlon, “Disaster’s Little-Known Pioneer: Canada’s Samuel Prince,”
International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters
(November 1988): 225.

80 “A world without suffering would be a world without nobility”:
Ibid., 231.

80 “sad as was the day, it may be the greatest day in the city’s history”:
Ibid., 122.

80 “At first it was a very general consciousness which seemed to draw all together”:
Prince,
Catastrophe and Social Change,
63.

81 “friction and crises”:
Ibid., 98.

81 “volunteers . . . who could not be expected”:
Ibid., 84.

81 But he also used the manuscript of a Dartmouth journalist, Dwight Johnstone:
See Scanlon, “The Man Who Helped.”
International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters
(March 1982): 189-206.

81 “the nightly prowlers among the ruins”:
Prince,
Catastrophe and Social Change
, 25.

81 Scanlon comments on Prince’s use of Johnstone:
In Scanlon, “The Man Who Helped.”

81 “the abnormal action of the glands” and frees up “the primitive instincts of man,” including “fear, fighting, and anger” and “food-getting”:
Prince,
Catastrophe and Social Change
, 36, 39.

82 “because these populations have no national soul and therefore no stability”:
Gustave Le Bon, cited in Robert A. Nye,
The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic
(London, Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1975), 43, and Gustave Le Bon,
The Psychology of Revolution
(New York: Putnam, 1913), 45.

82 “is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will”:
Gustave Le Bon,
The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
(Kitchener, ON: Batoche Books, 2001), 19.