[May 6th
marks the 80th
anniversary of the Hindenburg fire, a turning point in the use of video and newsreel footage
to chronicle tragic disasters. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of
historical disasters, leading up to a weekend post on that and other contexts
for the Hindenburg.]
On two distinct,
equally inspiring communal responses to one of our most destructive disasters.
The April 18th,
1906 earthquake that struck the coast of Northern California, with a
particular locus of the San Francisco Bay Area, was itself a particularly
destructive one, measuring 7.8 on the Richter
Scale and hitting the maximum level of Mercalli intensity
of XI (both of those measures were developed in the 1930s, and so have been applied
retroactively to estimate the quake’s force and effects). But it was the fires
that developed throughout the city in the quake’s aftermath—some
started by firefighters themselves while dynamiting buildings to create
firebreaks; others supposedly started by homeowners seeking
insurance payouts; but most simply the effects of a natural disaster on a
largely wooden city—that produced the most widespread destruction; by the times
those fires died down several days later, an estimated 80% of San Francisco had
been destroyed. Well more than half of the city’s population of 410,000 were
left homeless by the quake and fires, with refugee
camps in areas such as the Presidio and Golden Gate Park still in operation
two years later. Although the relatively new technology of photography
and the very new technology of film
allowed the quake’s effects to be catalogued more overtly than for any prior
disaster, amplifying the destruction’s public visibility, by any measure and
with or without such records the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake was one of
America’s most horrific natural disasters.
No amount of
inspiring responses to that tragedy can ameliorate its horrors and
destructions, and I don’t intend for the next two paragraphs to do so. Yet in
the aftermath of the earthquake, San Francisco communities did respond to it in
a couple of distinct but equally compelling and inspiring ways. In the quake’s
immediate aftermath, the city’s residents began to set up emergency procedures
and services with striking speed and effectiveness, a process documented and
celebrated by none other than William
James. The pioneering American psychologist and scholar was teaching at nearby
Stanford at the time, and, after waking up to the earthquake, managed to journey
into San Francisco later that day and to observe at length the city’s and community’s
ongoing responses to the quake. He detailed those observations in Chapter IX, “On
Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake,” in 1911 book Memories
and Studies, describing what he saw as “a temper of helpfulness beyond the
counting” and noting that, while “there will doubtless be a crop of nervous
wrecks before the weeks and months are over, … meanwhile the commonest men
[used in a gender-neutral way, I believe], simply because they are men, will go on, singly and
collectively, showing this admirable fortitude of temper.” While not all
American disasters have produced that same communal spirit (as we’ll see later
in the week’s series), it does represent a consistent historical thread, and
James’s observations ring true across many such moments.
The other
inspiring response to the earthquake came from a more specific San Francisco
community, and represented an opportunity to challenge a discriminatory and
unjust law. By 1906 the Chinese Exclusion
Act and its many subsequent extensions had been in operation for a quarter
century, leading to both the detention and exclusion of Chinese arrivals and
numerous hardships for existing Chinese American families and communities (such
as San
Francisco’s century-old Chinatown). When the 1906 fires destroyed numerous
public birth records, members of those Chinese and Chinese American communities
saw a chance to resist and circumvent those laws, and the concept of the “paper sons”
was born. Current Chinese American men and families would produce fraudulent birth
documents, whether for children born in China or to be sold or given to other
unrelated young men, in order to claim them as having been born in America and
thus U.S. citizens (itself certainly a fraught category for this community, but
one to which, the Supreme Court had ruled in 1898’s United States vs. Wong Kim Ark decision,
the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship still
applied). Despite its unequivocal horrors and losses, then, the 1906 earthquake
allowed for the city’s and nation’s Chinese American community to continue and
grow despite the Exclusion era’s xenophobic limitations, a positive and
inspiring outcome to be sure.
Next
DisasterStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other historical or contemporary disasters you’d highlight?
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