The Shame of San Francisco

Philip L. Fradkin. The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 418 pp. Illustrations, notes, selected readings, and index. $27.50.

Shortly after the 1906 earthquake and fire, muckraker and native Californian Lincoln Steffens wrote a series of four articles on graft in San Francisco and the efforts of leading businessmen to prosecute corrupt officials. In his account, Steffens clearly sided with the businessmen reformers. He celebrated Rudolph Speckels and James Phelan as champions of the public good trying to rescue the city from machine mismanagement, corruption, and vice. In one article, "Rudolph Spreckels: A Business Man Fighting for His City," Steffens claimed that Spreckels fought "in the service of democracy."¹ Conversely, Steffens portrayed the accused grafters—which included Mayor Eugene Schmitz and "city boss" Abraham Ruef—as unscrupulous opportunists betraying the interests of the people in order to amass personal wealth and power. He concluded that the Schmitz administration was "as corrupt as any business government this country has ever produced" and did real harm to the city and its people.² We should expect such moralizing from a partisan such as Steffens.

Philip Fradkin, who is also a journalist, rakes some of the same muck as Steffens and writes an equally moralistic and judgmental account of San Francisco during and after the 1906 earthquake and fire. Fradkin's interpretation, however, is populist not Progressive. In his version, San Francisco's wealthy businessmen, especially Phelan, are the villains. They were greedy, imperious, and racist, which led them to respond to the disaster by subverting democracy, discriminating against the poor and racial minorities, and prioritizing economic redevelopment. All of this exacerbated the tragedy of the earthquake and fire. The heroes in Fradkin's account—even though they appear infrequently—are the common people. They suffered disproportionately from the earthquake and elites' abuse of power, but remained law abiding, generous, and resilient. The plight and virtue of the people, however, are peripheral to Fradkin's main storyline about the greed, hubris, and culpability of elites. Like Steffens, Fradkin writes for general readers and intends to startle and incite them. Historians will likely find the book provocative and informative but also biased and flawed.

Fradkin divides the book into three sections: before, during, and after the 1906 earthquake and fire. In "Before," he examines San Franciscans' response to several earthquakes and fires that ravaged the city during the nineteenth century. Each time, they hurriedly rebuilt, constructing shoddy, fire-prone wooden structures on the same unstable "made land" where most of the damage had occurred. In doing so, they repeated the mistakes that magnified each previous disaster and laid the foundation for the catastrophic consequences of the 1906 earthquake. Fradkin also briefly assesses the 1871 Chicago fire, the 1900 Galveston hurricane, and the 2001 terrorist attacks. His unstated point seems to be that Americans—especially economic and political elites—respond similarly to disasters. They suspend civil liberties, abuse power, ignore the obvious lessons, and then celebrate their actions.

The 150 pages devoted to the three earthquake and fire days of 1906 focus on several critical choices and circumstances that largely determined the character and extent of the disaster. Hours after the earthquake, the acting commander of the army's Pacific division, Brigadier General Frederick Funston, dispatched troops into San Francisco even though martial law was never declared. The army's occupation of the city caused "legal lawlessness," in which soldiers shot innocent citizens and looted homes, and confused the lines of authority. San Francisco Mayor Eugene Schmitz added to the disorder and lawlessness when he ordered police officers, soldiers, and deputized citizens to shoot looters on the spot. The consequences "were the hasty abandonment of democracy and the legal system, and instant death for some" (p. 6). Perhaps most consequential, the city's water mains fractured during the earthquake, which left firefighters almost no water to battle the flames. Without water, the city dynamited structures...