[125
years ago this coming weekend, the first
name in earthquakes, Charles Richter, was born. So in his honor I’ll
AmericanStudy a handful of seismic quakes, leading up to a special post on
Richter himself!]
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 quake
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Famous quakes or other natural disasters you’d analyze?
