Seven Events That Made America America (14 page)

More important, however, the people of the Miami Valley, just like those in Johnstown, not only accepted private philanthropy, they accepted and welcomed the “strings” that accompanied it. It was understood that as soon as possible people had to pitch in and help other victims; that it was not permissible to take handouts without attempting to repay them, either directly to the giver, or indirectly by helping others in similar circumstances.
No one
expected government at any level to provide any amount of relief at all, save basic police protection.
Everyone
knew that if they had to rely on government, instead of friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens, not only would relief take longer, it might never come at all.

In 1900, when a massive hurricane slammed into Galveston Island, Texas, it put one-third of Galveston under water and killed six thousand. Although Mayor Walter C. Jones created the Citizens Relief Committee (CRC) to organize the short-run recovery, the committee members did all the work of setting up relief stations, acquiring goods, and enlisting local workers to clear wreckage and retrieve bodies.
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A building committee built 483 houses at a cost of only $350 each, while railroads gave free passes to those seeking to relocate. As in other disasters, money poured in, and, of course, the Red Cross arrived. Galveston’s consumer economy began to return in less than three weeks. Except for the involvement of Jones, the private sector had handled the recovery and cleanup.

A disaster of a different sort—but met with quite similar public response—occurred seven years earlier on the other side of the United States. At 5:12 in the morning on April 18, 1906, the ground under San Francisco shook violently from a massive earthquake (today estimated to be in the range of 7.8 on the Richter scale). Its epicenter lay only two miles offshore, and as entire sections of city buildings collapsed, more than 3,000 people died. A quarter of a million people became homeless as 80 percent of the city was destroyed directly in the quake or shortly thereafter in the ensuing fires, which consumed 25,000 buildings and covered almost 500 city blocks. Unlike in Johnstown or Dayton, in San Francisco the U.S. Army under Maj. Gen. Adolphus Greely moved in rapidly and provided valuable services, guarding all the banks and city offices and helping to feed, clothe, and supply the thousands of victims. The Army also constructed over 5,500 relief houses, grouped in eleven camps and rented to the refugees for $2 a month until their homes were rebuilt.

Perhaps the greatest story of San Francisco heroism, however, came in the form of an Italian banker, Amadeo Peter Giannini, who had founded the Bank of Italy two years earlier. Giannini, asleep in his home in San Mateo, was thrown out of bed by the force of the quake. He dressed, took a commuter train some of the distance to San Francisco, then “ran, walked and hitched the rest of the way.”
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An employee had opened for business as usual at 9:00, and the bank held $80,000 in gold, silver, coins, and paper National Bank notes when Giannini arrived there. He figured he had “about two hours to get out of there [and] no place in San Francisco could be a safe storage spot for the money.”
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The banker assembled two teams of horses and two wagons from his stepfather’s produce company that were loaded with orange crates, emptied the oranges and filled the boxes with gold, and waited until nightfall to attempt to leave. He found the streets clogged with refugees and firefighters, and expected to be robbed at any moment. Somehow, Giannini reached his home and stored the gold in the ash trap of his living room fireplace.

When he returned to the city, much of it had burned down and the Italian residents of North Beach had been badly hit. There was no Bank of Italy building left, and all the assets that remained were the $80,000 Giannini had to cover deposits of over $840,000. Yet Giannini correctly perceived that it would be not only a bold statement of confidence, but also good business for the bank to reopen. Despite a government prohibition and bank holiday, Giannini stretched a banner across some barrels to create a makeshift sign and opened the Bank of Italy in a temporary headquarters before any other banks were doing business. Typically, the government stood in the way of progress, but Giannini would have none of it: he announced in a booming voice to anyone who would listen, “We’re going to rebuild San Francisco, and it will be greater than ever.”
⁴⁴
He placed a big bag of money conspicuously in the open and by his—and the bank’s—presence stated that he believed in San Francisco. Although he only gave depositors half of what they said they needed, he reckoned, correctly, that many people were hoarding gold and that his confidence would help bring that into circulation. In a mere six weeks after the earthquake and fire, deposits exceeded withdrawals. The North Beach Italians stunned the rest of the city by rebuilding faster than anyone else, and within two months, Giannini announced plans (plus a $500,000 stock offering) to build a new office.

The larger story, of course, was that Giannini went on to reshape American banking with his massive system of branch banks and through his innovative approach to lending in which he focused on smaller borrowers. “A retail bank for the many,” he would later call the Bank of Italy. It never could have happened, though, without his daunting rescue of San Francisco when the government said “No!”

Downtown, the city hall was in ruins after the earthquake, so Mayor E. E. Schmitz proceeded to the Hall of Justice. The earthquake rendered the jails unsafe, so Schmitz ordered the release of petty offenders and sent the serious felons to San Quentin State Prison. In the subsequent looting, police were so busy helping with the rescue of those crushed and wounded that they could do little. Other than that, and closing the saloons, the city government commandeered several ships in the harbor which had provisions. Yet Schmitz also quickly sent telegrams to architects, draftsmen, and builders in several major cities, causing an army of architects to arrive while the rubble was still smoldering. As the
American Builder’s Review
sarcastically noted:

One of the best memoirs of the San Francisco earthquake, “Man at His Best,” was written by Robin Lampson, who recalled his childhood experience of feeling the buildings shake in Geyserville, California, located in Sonoma County, some seventy-five miles north of San Francisco.
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As word spread farther south that survivors of the calamity needed food, Lampson recalled that a freight train shunted a boxcar onto a siding in Geyserville (as it did at every way station along the route). The town, with a population of four hundred, responded with remarkable generosity: within a couple of hours, “men, women, and children began coming to that boxcar with baskets and packages and armloads of food . . . [bringing] homemade bread, mason jars of home-canned fruits and vegetables, sacks of potatoes, bags of dry beans, rice and sugar, and jars of fresh milk and freshly churned butter.”
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Without radio or television—relying only on postal carriers and bicycles to carry information—people kept delivering food. Meats arrived later that day, Lampson recalled. Even though families traditionally put away most of their canned food for the winter, his parents quickly agreed to share half of what they had. But the most remarkable thing was what followed: “the next morning the northbound freight left another empty car on the siding—and the amazing spontaneous process of filling it began all over again. And from the report I remember hearing at the time, the same sort of response was happening at all the other stations of the railroad.”
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This went on, he wrote, for almost two weeks. None of the people in the community were wealthy, but all shared.

In each of these cases, and others (such as nineteenth-century strikes), consistent with the Constitution, the federal government only became involved in disaster relief when there was a threat to public order that affected national interests. From 1886 to 1900, the “most deadly weather ever to hit the United States,” including six hurricanes, a flood, an earthquake, and wildfires, battered the country, but there was no federal response because in no case was the
national
security issue involved.
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When disaster relief was deemed of national import, the militia (later the National Guard) was the primary coordinator and source of manpower, since it was considered a security issue, not philanthropy. Hence, administrations used the 1807 Insurrection Act, which empowered the president to deploy troops to put down insurrection and rebellion and to crush strikes at steel plants.

In 1917, the War Department’s Special Regulation Number 67 first federalized disaster coordination in its “Regulations Governing Flood Relief Work in the War Department.”
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Even then, and until the Cold War, citizens did not expect the U.S. government to contribute to relief efforts, and both Democratic and Republican administrations followed Article II, Section 2, clause 1 of the Constitution (i.e., the presidential “commander in chief” clause) to govern their responses to natural disasters.

During the pre-Cold War period, administrations were careful not to tread on the rights of states following the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 in which the Congress, responding to the deployment of federal troops in the South to maintain civil order following Reconstruction, stated that the use of federal troops for law enforcement within the United States was prohibited except “in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress.”
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There were deep and widespread concerns that the use of federal troops to conduct law enforcement on home soil would lead to the politicization of the military and possibly dictatorship. While the Cold War became the mechanism by which the federal government incorporated disasters into the catalogue of occurrences over which it had authority, the change in public attitudes toward government help had come more than a decade earlier, under the New Deal.

Although, as so many scholars have pointed out, the New Deal had its programmatic origins in the administration of Herbert Hoover, conceptually Franklin Roosevelt broke with all previous American attitudes toward relief by tying national security to the economy, and tying the economy to confidence. When he proclaimed, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he had subtly bundled public confidence with policy, thus giving him the authority to do whatever was necessary (including lie) to restore a positive view of the future. As Amity Shlaes wrote of the moment, “The country was in no mood . . . to put Roosevelt’s concepts up to a microscope. What mattered was change: like an invalid, the country took pleasure in the very thought of motion.”
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Will Rogers, a comedian and social critic, observed, “The whole country is with him. . . . If he burned down the Capitol, we would cheer and say, ‘well we at least got a fire started anyhow.’”
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The purpose here is not to review the New Deal. Amity Shlaes and Burton Folsom have done so in detail, explaining convincingly how FDR’s programs prolonged and deepened the Depression by squelching capital formation, innovation, work, and investment.
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An entire cohort of Americans moved from self-sufficiency to government dependency. It was irrelevant if they
thought
their work was legitimate and productive. In the absence of a war, virtually all make-work created by the government is by definition unnecessary or unwanted, or market forces would have already addressed it. A small group held out—the “Forgotten Men”—who still tried to “get along without public relief.” But in the meantime, noted one Muncie, Indiana, paper, “the taxpayers go on supporting many that would not work if they had jobs.”
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Roosevelt’s “revolution” had the dual effect of convincing ordinary Americans that welfare was not a badge of shame, while at the same time encouraging more and more Americans to accept it even when they could work. Thus Americans began to see government as a savior that addressed life’s inequities.

And nothing was more unfair than a natural disaster. The Cold War provided the final impetus toward transferring disaster response to the federal government with the Disaster Relief Act of 1950, which sought to provide “orderly and continuing . . . assistance to the state and local governments [suffering] from a major
peacetime
disaster. . . . [emphasis mine]”
⁵⁶
By including peacetime disasters, the act opened the door for the federal government to act in the case of non-war-related events, and as one historian of the bill noted, it “was a logical expansion of the New Deal social policies.”
⁵⁷
Andrew Mener, a student of government disaster response bureaucracy, observed that by assuming those powers, “the federal government became the subject of intense criticism every time disaster relief was less than ideal.”
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Authority was batted around different agencies until it finally landed in the Department of Defense, and within the DoD it continued to be transferred repeatedly.
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Control of the program jumped from the Housing and Home Finance Agency (1951-52) to the Federal Civil Defense Administration (1952-58) to the Office of Civil Defense and Mobilization (1958-62) to the Office of Emergency Planning (1962-74) to the Federal Disaster Assistance Administration (1974-79) before Jimmy Carter created the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Relief efforts after Hurricane Agnes in 1972 were “characterized by mass confusion.”
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The National Governors Association began lobbying for better preparedness and more aid.