A Paradise Built in Hell (7 page)

Total demoralization doesn’t describe the mood of the city, and there was no evidence that riots were likely, but the city got the National Guard troops anyway (and the governor kept them there even after the mayor requested their removal). The military and National Guard were deployed to prevent things that often existed largely in their imagination. Funston wrote, “I have no doubt, and have heard the same opinion expressed by scores of citizens, that had it not been for the prompt arrival of the large force of Regular Troops, who are acting under orders to shoot all looters, the saloons would have been broken into, and then the crowd, becoming turbulent, would have begun sacking the banks and jewelry stores.” The same claim has been made in many other situations—that the reason there was no malicious or mob behavior was police or military action. Logically, the argument is akin to the one that the amulet you wear wards off the evil eye; that something has not happened is not always evidence that it was prevented by the measures taken. Major William Stephenson of the U.S. Army wrote to his college classmates in Maine, “The prompt appearance of our troops was all that saved the city from the terror of a mob, plundering first the saloons, of which there were thirty-four hundred, and then the stores and mansions.”

Colonel Charles Morris, who was in command of the western side of the city, said, “I was waited upon at my headquarters on Broadway by a committee of highly respected citizens of the district, who stated they had learned on good authority that the poor who had been burned out, felt that the rich had not suffered losses as had the poor, and were therefore determined to invade the Western Addition and lay it waste by incendiarism and attendant acts of spoil, looting, and violence. I completely reassured this committee by informing them of the precautionary measures, particularly as regarded the destruction of liquor, adopted to safeguard the lives and property of the people residing in my district.” Morris, like much of the occupying army, may not have known the city very well. The fires had ravaged many mansions, luxury hotels, and the central business district almost as soon as it burned the poor neighborhoods nearby. Other working-class districts—Telegraph Hill, Potrero Hill, and the Mission District—came through with earthquake damage but little fire damage.

The authorities’ fear was not precipitated by anything the public did in those days, but by earlier anxieties in that era of upheaval. They believed uncontrolled crowds routinely degenerated into mobs, and they doubted the legitimacy of the system they dominated, since they expected mobs to tear it apart given the least opportunity. San Francisco had a lively working class, a strong labor movement, and a history of dramatic public actions, from parades to real mob activities such as the anti-Chinese riots of 1877. But there is no evidence of civil unrest in the period of the 1906 earthquake. The mayor had ordered all saloons closed to preserve the public peace, but soldiers and marines took the orders too literally, and with an order given by Colonel Morris to justify them, began breaking into closed saloons and grocery stores on the west side of town and destroying the whole stock of alcohol. The rampage frightened the citizens. You could argue that the army sent to prevent mobs became a mob.

Opportunistic theft began with the cigar stealers Officer Schmitt thwarted early in the morning on April 18. There isn’t evidence that it constituted a major problem. Far, far more property, including homes, warehouses, and workplaces and all their contents, was lost in the fires for which those in command bore partial responsibility. And some of the thieves were soldiers. A banker who stayed in the old Montgomery Building downtown, which survived the flames, witnessed the soldiers who were supposed to be guarding it “going in and out at all times except when the officers were coming to pass the word along to post the guard—then they would skip out like rats from a trap—I don’t think that the officers ever saw them. . . . I saw the soldiers carrying out cigar boxes loaded under their arms, ten or twenty boxes, as much as they could carry.” A navy man saw two drunken sailors trying to rob a jewelry store and was nearly shot by one of them when he intervened.

Others were engaged in what might better be called “requisitioning”—the obtaining of necessary goods by taking them where they could be found. One improvised emergency hospital was supplied with mattresses and bedding that volunteers took out of abandoned hotels. Volunteers, including some from the Salvation Army, broke the windows of drugstores on Market Street to get medical supplies. Among those participating in such ethical pillaging were cable car company president James B. Stetson and his son Harry, an attorney. Another man was seen picking over the rubble of a ruin, and the discoverer fired a warning shot. The man ran, and a soldier shot him dead. He had been trying to free someone trapped in that rubble.

The police invited Mormon elders to take supplies from a grocery store about to be destroyed by fire. On their second trip to bring food to their camp in Jefferson Square, a soldier ordered everyone out and then shot and killed the man standing behind them. They had returned to the wrong store, and the penalty for the mistake was death. A woman told a cadet that a grocer invited the crowd to help themselves before the fire got his store, and a soldier bayonetted one of the invitees who was leaving laden with groceries. A grocer who charged extortionate prices had his goods expropriated by soldiers and “a dozen rifle barrels were leveled at the grocer’s head”—perhaps slightly more just, but not much less violent a response. A National Guardsman yelled at an African American man stooping over something on the ground to “get out but he paid no attention to me, so I up and fired at him. I missed of course, but the shot must have scared him and he started to run. I was just getting ready to shoot again, when a shot was fired from across the street and the fellow toppled over. . . . An officer came along and ordered us to throw the body into the still burning ruins, so in it went.” On April 21, the
Bulletin
reported that soldiers shot four men breaking into a safe; another story on the same page stated that twenty men on the waterfront were executed for refusing to help with the firefighting effort. The cashier of a bank was shot as a looter while he was trying to open his company’s vault two days after the quake. Many of the executed were incinerated in the fires or dumped in the bay. Their numbers will never be known.

General Funston later wrote, “Market Street was full of excited, anxious people watching the progress of the various fires now being merged into one great conflagration. A few moments before seven o’clock there arrived the first detachment of regular troops, the men of the Engineer Corps at Fort Mason. Their presence had an instantly reassuring effect on all awe-inspired persons.” And the non-awe-inspired? In a long letter about life in one of San Francisco’s refugee camps, an upper-class woman wrote, “A drunken soldier had pushed his way into a tent full of sleeping women and threatened to shoot them. Hardly a day passed that all camping there were not roughly ordered to leave the ground by some uniformed person who strode shouting over the sands. On the first of these occasions after our arrival, there being only two or three women of us present, we were much distressed.” Mary Doyle wrote a cousin on a scrap of brown-paper bag, “A large number of men and even women have been shot down for disobeying orders of soldiers.” An officer’s daughter wrote a friend, “A good many awful men are loose in the city, but the soldiers shoot everyone disobeying in the slightest, no explanations asked or given.” Henry Fitchner, a nurse, reported, “I saw one soldier on O’Farrell Street, between Van Ness Avenue and Franklin Street, beat with the butt of his gun a woman—apparently a servant girl—who wanted to get a bundle of clothing that she had left on the sidewalk in that block.”

“The terrible days of the earthquake and fire,” General Greeley reported on May 17, “were neither accompanied nor followed by rioting, disorder, drunkenness (save in a very few cases), nor by crime. The orderly and law-abiding conduct of the people rendered the maintenance of order a comparatively easy task.” Not all authorities were terrified of the people they were supposed to serve—but Greeley had been away during the earthquake, and it is impossible to know what his first response would have been.

Early historians chose to emphasize the fire over the earthquake, and in the decades afterward, 1906 was remembered for “the Great Fire.” Some recent historians charge that this was a cover-up, geared toward reassuring investors that San Francisco was not a peculiarly disaster-prone place, since fires, unlike earthquakes, can happen anywhere. It may also be that the public remembered the three days and nights of fiery inferno better than the one minute of earthquake at dawn, and while there is no struggle against a quake once it has begun, the fire was fought fiercely—if ineptly on many counts. Flames destroyed much of the evidence of earthquake damage too. San Francisco’s fire chief, Dennis Sullivan, was fatally injured in the earthquake, and so the city lost at the inception of the disaster the person who might have directed subsequent efforts wisely. The earthquake broke many water mains, so fighting the fires became far harder than it could have been. Sullivan had long worried about a major fire and thought about how to fight it. In his absence, the firefighters were joined by the army, and the latter tried reckless experiments in using explosives to make firebreaks. Their mistakes were many.

One was the use of black powder, or gunpowder, in place of dynamite. The latter simply blows things up; the former tends to also ignite them. Thus many buildings were turning into burning, flying brands that spread the fire farther or started new conflagrations entirely. Another was setting the firebreaks too close to the existing flames, thereby simply breaking buildings up into more flammable debris. A third was setting explosives to buildings that contained chemicals, alcohol, and other highly flammable substances. A fourth was setting explosions that restarted or started fires in areas that were previously secure. And a fifth was keeping away from the flames the public who might have supplied the power to fight the fire by hand.

Many of the most successful firefighting efforts were by groups of citizens armed with buckets of water, with shovels, with wet gunnysacks, with whatever came to hand—and often by smothering sparks on roofs, fires could be prevented from becoming overwhelming conflagrations, when people were allowed onto those roofs. Another important firefighting tactic was summoning the political clout to turn back the dynamiters and break through the military lines. It was a struggle between the reckless technological tactics of the occupying forces, convinced that their strategy of destruction could save structures and neighborhoods elsewhere, and the citizens committed to saving as much as possible through hands-on methods. Former fireman Dennis Smith reports in his
San Francisco Is Burning
that by the second day the National Guard allowed citizens to fight fires, but the army persisted in evacuating, or evicting, them. Historian Frank Hittell writes of fighting fire himself with professional firemen who asked where the rest of the volunteers were. They were being kept back by soldiers, so the two uniformed groups were in open conflict. Hittell was struck by soldiers when he volunteered again.

Jerome Barker Landfield lived at the north end of the city, and he wrote afterward, “Water was lacking, but the proprietress of a little grocery at Larkin and Greenwich Streets gave me two barrels of vinegar. This proved to be a godsend. A score of volunteers armed with blankets soaked in vinegar, extinguished flaming cinders on neighboring roofs, and we held Greenwich Street safe from Larkin to Van Ness. Two agile schoolboys with pails and cups climbed to the roof of the Robert Louis Stevenson house at Chestnut and Hyde and saved the mansion by putting out sparks as they fell. By eleven o’clock Friday morning we believed that the rest of our district was out of danger.” Then the military blew up a nearby patent-medicine company, whose thousands of gallons of alcohol went up in flames, threatening to destroy what they had just saved. Landfield saw the mayor but was unable to convince him to stop the dynamiting. Fortunately Abe Ruef, the political boss who had put Schmitz in power and organized the network of bribes that enriched both men, came by in his automobile, listened to Landfield, and put an end to it.

The big post office still standing today at Seventh and Mission streets was saved because ten employees refused direct orders to evacuate and put out the flames with wet mail sacks. The U.S. Mint downtown was also saved by its own employees. Blazes started by dynamite raced ahead of the fire into the district southeast of downtown, but huge crowds fought them. A hundred men at a time pulled houses down by ropes and removed the dismantled structures from reach of the flames. A miller reported that ten of the Globe Grain and Milling Company’s employees were prepared to save the mill, and could have, in his opinion, but were driven away at gunpoint. Losses totaled $220,000. The Mission District was saved by sheer manpower, and the crucial battle was near the kitchen operated by Officer Schmitt’s family at Dolores Park. A volunteer named Edwards worked for twenty-four hours without stopping, and when the fire was out, his shoes had burned through and the soles of his feet had been so badly scorched he could no longer walk. A mail carrier named Roland M. Roche credited the men and boys of the neighborhood with saving it, fighting fire by hand, carrying milk cans of water from a laundry to the fire: “This improvised bucket brigade, working in the face of almost insufferable heat, saved their own valley from imminent destruction, and thus probably saved the greater part of San Francisco that survived the fire.”

Another angry citizen summed up the fire history of 1906 San Francisco: “The stories have but one beginning and one end. They begin with the criminal idiocy of the military; they end with the surmounting heroism of the citizen.” He was the writer Henry Anderson Lafler, and his long attack on Funston and the military attack on San Francisco was never published. In it he summed up the aftermath of the earthquake thus: “During those unforgettable days the city of San Francisco was even as, a city captured in war, the possession of an alien foe. We were strangers on our own streets; driven from our own houses; gray-haired men, our foremost citizens, the sport of the whims of young boys, whose knowledge of the city was confined to its dance halls, its brothels, and saloons. Were we children—we, the citizens of San Francisco—that we should have thus been suddenly gripped by the throat by a stupid soldiery, and held fast till all our city burned?”