American History Hit - The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake

Episode Date: August 28, 2023

45 seconds. An estimated 7.9 on today's Richter scale. The deadliest earthquake in US history.In this episode, we're examining the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. What happened? Why were this earthquake and the fires it caused so disastrous? And who did this seemingly indiscriminate force of nature hit the hardest?Don is joined by Joanna Dyl, an environmental historian at Pomona College and author of 'Seismic City: An Environmental History of San Francisco’s 1906 Earthquake'.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Siobhan Dale. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, James Holland, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribeYou can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. We're jolted awake, shaken, bolted from a bed, somehow moving in all directions. In the city outside, the sun has barely risen, and the earth roars.

An otherworldly, guttural roar, moving from the distance, rolling closer, faster, louder. Plaster dust clouds the air. Out in the streets, walls are breaking from buildings. What is this? Think. Where should we go? Stay here in this room, in this house that feels made of paper? Do we run into the madness? Do we grab the children and run? Get us together. Family, gather, gather, gather.

The children are crying. Shh, shh, shh, it's going to be okay. The screams of the city, breaking glass, china smashing. It's downstairs. The building is creaking. Pipes are rattling. popping, grab the children, let's go.

A minute later, the earth is quiet again. No more roaring, but something else. Heat, flame, burning, the smell of it. The dust is so dense. Dizzying desperation,

it's so hard to breathe. The earth has shifted, but the air stayed thick and still, we must leave. Hi, everyone. Time for another episode. of American History Hit. I'm your host, Don Wildman. Thanks for listening in. Much appreciated.

San Francisco in 1906 was a remarkable city in the United States. Consider the fact that only about a half century earlier in 1848, at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War, the country had been ceded by a defeated Mexico, most of Alta, California, Upper California, that wide Western territory of more than 300 million acres that would eventually be developed into nine U.S. states, including California, which officially joined the United States a few years later. For the next five decades, thanks especially to something called the California Gold Rush, it would become one of the most consequential areas on the continent. And San Francisco, with its ideal location, temperate climate, and golden-gated harbor,

would figure centrally. It would become, for its day, a most progressive American city with modern transportation and infrastructure. It was demographically diverse, a center of migration, especially from China. In 1869, the railroad, so many of those Chinese immigrants had taken part in building, was finally connected at the Golden Spike Ceremony in Utah. And from that day onward, California and San Francisco would become the legendary destination. It still is for so many today. And then, it all crashed and burned, literally. On April 18, 1906, the city was jolted awake by a 25-second foreshock that was then followed by about 45 seconds of the real thing.

The San Andreas Rift, it would later be called a fault, runs 800 miles north-south through California's Central Valley. That morning, it had suddenly sheared along its northernmost 300 miles, rupturing the earth and creating a powerful shockwave moving in all directions. This was long before the Richter scale had become the standard measurement for earthquake strength, but scientists today estimate, had that Richter scale existed, this would have been a 7.9, which is devastating, even by today's standards, never. in 1906, when almost nothing man-made was sturdy enough to withstand such force. As a result, buildings and homes and streets crumbled, trapping people where they slept. As with all great

earthquakes, aftershocks then ensued. The quake and the fires that followed, the city burned for days, leveled the city and killed thousands and completely destroyed this version of the city forever. The San Francisco that rose from the ashes would be an even more modern and resilient metropolis that would keep on changing America and the world. It's a tragic, an epically fascinating tale told in the 2017 book, Seismic City, an environmental history of San Francisco's 1906 earthquake by the author Joanna Dill, a native Californian who teaches environmental studies at Pomona College and who lives but a stone's throw, well, a few miles away, from the San Andreas Fall,

brave woman. Welcome to American history here, Joanna. Thanks for having me, Don. Thanks. Before we start with this history, brief anecdote, a few years ago, I was doing a TV series, And I did one show about the 1906 earthquake, and we joined this crew from a local office in Hayward, which is in the region there. And there is a major fault line. And we're at this small intersection, two typical neighborhood streets with our surveying equipment, getting a reading of how much the fault line had moved since the reading of a year ago or so. And this woman who lived on the street asks me what we're doing because she just bought a house there. And she was completely shocked to understand that a major fault line ran directly through her property. I told her to call the real estate agency and a lawyer. But this is a way of life out there, isn't it? I mean, there are fault lines everywhere in the Bay Area.

That's true, yes. All of the Bay Area is close enough to either the Haywood fault or the San Andreas fault to certainly be at risk in the case of a major earthquake on either of those two faults. Your book is a remarkable study in all kinds of directions. Socially, scientifically, it's a really interesting and complete history of this moment in time. And I was really taken by this. Was my description of San Francisco correct as to what it had gone through for the the previous five decades? I think so, yeah. It was an incredibly diverse city. It had grown,

you know, incredibly quickly. It was the eighth largest city in the United States in 1900 and, you know, still in 1906, about 400,000 people. I think the major thing that I would add, particularly from the perspective of the 1906 earthquake, is the way that so much of the city's development had involved filling in land along the coast, making land. And then those were the areas that became death traps, the areas that were at highest risk in an earthquake because that new fill was far less consolidated, far less solid than, you know, Rocky Hills or then, you know, natural land. Anybody living in California learns the word liquefaction really fast. It's always on the local news. Another concept that didn't exist yet in 1906, but reading the accounts, you can see the

descriptions of what we now call liquefaction, exactly where you would expect. it. Yeah, it was the really ambitious and understandably exciting idea that you could make new land by bringing in fill and creating these more even water fronts and so forth and creating real estate essentially. And they did that everywhere in the world, let alone out in California. And no one really understood what an impact that would have when a really big earthquake hit, which is a big part of this story. Let's talk about the earthquake. April 18th, 1906. I described it as a sort of one-two punch. Is that correct? Yes. I mean, it is sort of quick. enough, you know, that force shock and that main quake, that there wouldn't have been much time to react between the two, and then there were, you know, smaller aftershocks throughout the day that people would have felt. And, you know, 45 seconds is a very long time for an earthquake. If the ground is shaking that long, you know, it's a big one. That is nasty stuff, boy. You know, if you've been through any kind of earthquake, they usually last for a few seconds, you know, and they're scary that way, let alone for a minute

of your life that it's all shaking around. And, you know, there's incremental differences it seems through all the Richter scale, but the truth is, each time you go up, it's this entirely different experience. Yes. Where, you know, the shaking is horizontal and it's just your whole life is going through your, flashing through your eyes at the time. This was a worst case scenario in that it was when people are sleeping, right? Yeah. 7.9 magnitude and 5 a.m. in the morning. Bad news. Yeah. Well, it's mixed on whether the time was good or bad because there were a lot fewer people out in the streets than there would have been later in the day. There would have been more deaths than the streets

if more people were out and about. There were definitely cases of fires being started by untended, you know, kitchen fires and things that might not have happened, you know, later if there were more people awake. So hard to say if it's a positive or a negative to have it happen that early in the morning. Tell me about the buildings in San Francisco at the time.

Are they mostly masonry or wood? They're mostly wood. More than 90% of the buildings were wood. There were some, you know, masonry buildings there were some iron buildings, different structures. But yeah, it's mostly a wooden city. And this also has mixed. Obviously, this is not great in the case of a massive fire.

But wooden buildings are safer than masonry in an earthquake, unless you're talking about a really well-built masonry building. And San Francisco, because it's developed so recently, relatively, has new systems, all kinds of underground stuff. And, you know, they pride themselves on this, what is going to become quite fateful, right? All the gas lines that are in the ground. Yeah, the gas lines were a problem, the water system, which is something that San Francisco had been sort of struggling with, obtaining enough water throughout its short history.

How much were they aware of earthquake history out there? You know, when they built this place, I mean, back to the Spaniards, they must have been feeling shakes, right? They were, yeah. You can find in the early newspaper, the Alta California, in the 1840s, the early 1850s, mentions of earthquakes and indicate this idea of earthquake country and even this sense that we're used to it here and, you know, people from the. East are scared by these quakes. So similar to a dynamic that you could find today among Californians. And then there were two significant earthquakes during these decades when San Francisco was developing. There was one in 1865 and one in 1868. These were actually on the Hayward fault that you mentioned earlier, not on the San Andreas. So they are really centered across the Bay and the East Bay.

But there was enough shaking in San Francisco to cause significant damage, particularly on field ground. And, you know, looking at the newspaper accounts of those earthquakes, there's very much an awareness of this disproportionate risk. They traced out, you know, where the damage happened. They talked about never letting it happen again. And then they rebuilt in essentially the same way. And by 1906, there had been so much turnover in the population of the city and so much additional development since those earthquakes that certainly, you know, San Francisco had that reputation of earthquake country. you know, old-timers remembered these quakes at the 1860s, but I think the vast majority of people there were completely unprepared for a major earthquake. It's interesting to think of how

preparation like retrofitting and so forth, which comes later on, is so driven by a federal government mandating it of state governments. It's interesting. Unless government gets involved, you just keep getting these things rebuilt the way they were built before and on a budget and so forth. And there you go. I think of the San Francisco, I think popular understanding. is that the earthquake is damaging, but it's really the fire that does the, that's really the devil, right? It's that terrible three days or so that happen afterwards. Explain how that occurs, and there are different fires going on, right? Yes. So fires start all over the city. And my feeling as a historian is that you can't separate the earthquake and the fire. And there's various practical reasons why people

tried to do so in the aftermath, particularly insurance coverage, which would cover fire, not earthquake, and then also this sense of reputation, right? That fires could happen anywhere. Earthquakes were seen as sort of unique to California or to San Francisco. So if they don't want to scare away people from migrating to the city, so you talk more about the fire. So there's a couple of practical reasons why people try to distinguish these two. You know, all these fires started because of exploding gas lines

because of, you know, people tried to cook in chimneys that were damaged and then caught on fire. Oil lamps turned over, right? This is still an era, even though, you know, there's a fair amount of electricity in the city. But it's also still an era where there's open flame in people's homes in a way that in businesses, in a way that we don't really see as much today. So it really starts all these different fires in all these different places.

And then, you know, they just spread with incredible rapidity. There's a famous one called the Ham and Eggs Fire in Hayes Valley, which is near City Hall today, started when a woman, like you mentioned, attempts to cook breakfast, unaware that her chimney is damaged. I don't know how that works exactly, but, you know, something catches fire in that chimney. I guess, and ends up destroying 30-block area around that area, including the Hall of Records and City Hall. You know, very consequential moment there.

Yeah, for months after the earthquake, people had to cook on these kitchens in the streets until they could get all the chimneys inspected and repaired. So you have these amazing photographs of these street kitchens throughout San Francisco in the months after the earthquake. The estimation is, and maybe this is questionable, as given what you said before, that 90% of the destruction of this event really happens because of the fires. 25,000 buildings, 500-ish city blocks are burned. I mean, this accounts for these amazing photographs,

which is the other unique thing about the whole event is that you have media involved for the first time in one of these things, and people are actually seeing what we're so used to seeing now, these devastated streets and people wandering and trying to figure out their lives. All that stuff is suddenly showing up in New York City as a photograph, I guess. Yeah. Media and personal photography, in a sense. This is one of the first cases where, you know, people had cameras and had that ability. to document it themselves.

Exactly. More regular people. So, yeah, there's a tremendous collection of photographs. Officially 700 people are said to perish, but estimates are higher, much higher, you know, 3,000 and above. Every neighborhood is affected, but some more than others, Chinatown in particular. Was Chinatown located then where it is today? Yes.

Explain how that neighborhood experiences this earthquake differently than others. Yeah, and Chinatown, yeah, was located, you know, where it is today. it suffered significant damage in the earthquake and then essentially total destruction, you know, during the fires. In Chinatown, the fires were particularly exacerbated by very ineffective ordering on criminal, probably actually criminal use of black powder to try to create fire breaks. But essentially, the man doing this was drunk. They didn't know what they were doing. It was a disaster. You're talking about firefighters actually using dynamite or powder in this case to destroy buildings in the way of fire. just like they do in the forests.

Yeah, exactly. Trying to create a fire break, but they didn't know what they were doing. The policies were focused too much on protecting property, so they couldn't get ahead of the fire far enough. And Chinatown particularly suffered from that. Yeah, yeah. But in my opinion, it would have burned either way. They weren't able to stop the fire in other neighborhoods where there was less of that.

So I think that even effective firefighting ultimately probably would have failed in China. The biggest factor there is the lack of water. As we talked about with the underground, water pipes right coming into the city are all underground. And the big pipes bringing the water into the city ran down the peninsula. One of them actually ran along the San Andreas Fault. That one suffered something like 19 breaks, but the others broke as well. So there's no water coming into the city.

And then within the city, the earthquake, shattered pipes and, you know, broke all those like distribution pipes. going to different buildings and homes. So the water that was in the system leaked out. So the firefighters were handicapped by so many things, but the biggest one was a lack of water to fight these fires. There were a lot of San Franciscoans who didn't want Chinatown to be there. This was a useful situation in their case. Yes, and this is, I think, one of the really interesting stories in the aftermath of the earthquake and fire,

which is that many white San Franciscans, including political leaders of different factions, proposed relocating Chinatown out of central San Francisco. They wanted to seize this land and thought it could be more economically beneficial for the city to have white businesses along there rather than to rebuild Chinatown where it was. And the Chinese successfully, obviously, contested and fought this. And they used some really interesting alliances to do so, including Chinese government officials coming in. And here's a case where the fact that Chinese could not have been. become American citizens as a legacy of the Chinese Exclusion Act and anti-Asian racism, which was

incredibly strong in San Francisco in 1906. But because they couldn't become American citizens, the Chinese government was very prepared to get involved. The Chinese formed alliances with white landowners who rented the land in Chinatown to them. So they signed new leases. This was probably not entirely altruistic on the part of the white landowners because they could charge a tremendous amount to the Chinese because they weren't able to live. live elsewhere in the city because of racial segregation. But the Chinese definitely worked to maintain their foothold in the city successfully. And I think it's a really interesting example of the way that a community that looks to be

really disempowered that is facing all these obstacles was able to come together and defend their place in the city. It is a tenacious neighborhood. I mean, throughout history, in all kinds of eras. That Chinatown, boy, does that deserve to be there. They fought hard to exist. And it's still there. I'll be back with more American history after this short break.

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I'm reminded of the Chicago Fire, 1871, 35 years earlier. Hadn't San Francisco considered that kind of inevitability to American cities? Or did they just accept the possibility that this kind of thing might happen? Never mind the earthquake danger. Yeah, they definitely were aware of it. And this was very much an era of major fires in American cities. Baltimore had burned in 1905. So fire was an urban phenomenon in a way that it's not so much in the 21st century, although it could change again. And San Francisco was known as an incredibly high-risk city in terms of fire because of all those wooden buildings we talked about. The wooden row houses that distinguished San Francisco today were already, you know, present. So very closely packed structures, narrow streets, high winds. If you've ever been to San Francisco,

you know it's a very windy city. So all of these factors, the hills that make it hard to get water and fire trucks, which at this era were still being pulled by horses, you know, two parts of the city. So all these factors, you know, made it at high risk for fire. And people were actually probably more, you know, worried about that than they were about earthquakes. But, you know, there's only so much they can do. But they did have a very modern version of a fire department, didn't they? Yes, they were proud of their fire department.

And San Francisco had suffered a series of fires in the 1850s, five or six, I forget the exact number. So after that, they had gone from a volunteer fire department to a modern fire department and had worked to maintain that. Yeah. I'm fascinated by a theme in the book, which is that this whole area, the Bay Area, which has suffered a lot of struggle, you know, naturally that other places haven't, has tended to make these kind of spasmodic leaps of culture. You know, it almost informs the whole region and contributes to it culturally and educationally. It's a crucible is what I'm trying to say of sort of modernism because over and over again they've had to react to this kind of challenge. Did that figure into your thinking writing the book? It did. Yeah. And I think it's an interesting balance because there's a lot of ways in which things didn't change that much after the earthquake in which there's a lot of continuities, right?

Labor conflict is going on before and it happens after criticism of the child. Chinese is going on before, and then we see that play out in the recovery. But then, yeah, there are other ways in which they do try to seize an opportunity to modernize. But then there are the cases of continuing to make the same mistakes, like building on made land, creating new made land. And there's always tensions there in rebuilding after disaster, I think, between sort of an idealistic idea of we're not going to let this happen again versus the practical reality that people want to rebuild, you know, as quickly as they can. They only have so much money to use to rebuild. They want to get their businesses back going. They want to get their homes back.

So again, there's this, you know, really understandable and I think, you know, difficult to navigate tension between we don't want to let this happen again. And we need to get the city working again, right? Even today, I mean, something happens back then that sort of resonates through to today, which is this class struggle that's such a big part of life everywhere in America, never mind, but in San Francisco for sure with a huge wealth disparity that existed then. And actually, I am fascinated by the Pacific Heights neighborhood is a direct result of the earthquake. Yeah, the class implications, I think, are really one of the patterns that we see in 1906 and that we see after so many other disasters, you know, into the present.

And particularly in San Francisco, you see that disparity developing. So in the initial aftermath, the fire was pretty indiscriminate in its destruction. The mansions of Knob Hill burned as well as the boarding houses of Chinatown or the boarding houses south of market where the working poor lived. The fire was so powerful that very, very few buildings were able to stand up to it. But, of course, the wealthy were quickly able to relocate across the bay or find other places to live. So you had an initial class unity as there were 250,000. people out of that population of 400,000 who were initially left homeless. So there's tons of people who need food aid who need assistance. But the wealthy of the middle class are able to get back on

their feet, you know, much more quickly. So it, you know, becomes the working poor who are left homeless, you know, through the summer, into the fall. And that initial unity then degrades into greater class conflict, into, you know, these tensions over who deserves what in terms of aid. And you saw very much in the tradition of class organizing of San Francisco and of this era, the people left homeless who I'm going to go ahead and use the term refugees, which became a very controversial term after Hurricane Katrina. But at the time, that was the term that people used and that they really accepted. They organized as the United Refugees. So there's refugees, you know, fought for their share of the aid, fought for relief in different forms for, you know, places to live,

for assistance. But you saw these class divisions really become exacerbated by the disaster. Was this a moment of governmental change? Did the state government step up and create new kinds of responses to this kind of stuff? Not too much. The federal government did. Congress quickly voted more aid than had been voted to, you know, in the aftermath of disaster before. But, yeah, not too much government involvement. You do see the Red Cross coming in.

You see different sort of familiar forms of relief. So when San Francisco finally gets back on its feet again, how many years have transpired? I mean, how long did it take them to recover? It does take years. Some things are put back together relatively quickly. There was a world's fair in 1915, the Panama Pacific International Exposition. I really used that as sort of a celebration of the city's recovery. They were able to rebuild pretty quickly. It's a lot of insurance money that came in actually might have triggered the panic of 1907, which was a recession because of that sort of a huge shift in money as a result of insurance company payments in San Francisco, but it's kind of a side story. It took, again, varying amounts of time for different people, particularly. the working poor struggled for a long time and struggled to find, you know, stable places to live, you know, stable jobs to get back on their feet. A 7.9 earthquake is a huge shake. That's as big as it comes, right?

The big one that's coming, they keep telling us, it'll basically be about that same size. Yes, that's as big as we would get on the San Andreas in California. You do have bigger ones, you know, in Alaska. There are other fault systems that can produce bigger quakes. But, yeah, this was the big one for the San Andreas. I mean, you're in Native California, very familiar with all of this. You wrote a book about it. How much are people reflecting on the 1906 earthquake as relevant to what might happen today? I think not nearly enough. It's interesting in California, and, you know, having lived here at, you know, different points in my life over several decades, we haven't had a significant earthquake in California since Northridge in 1994.

Before that, there was 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake in the Bay Area. And I think that earthquakes again are starting to slip out of people's awareness and that they're not thinking about them and that risk anymore. But just wait when it hits. My God. I went through that Northridge earthquake, but I was in old Hollywood, which is not liquefaction properties. And so it was kind of a minor experience for me. I remember a box of pasta fell out where, you know, in Northridge it was a horror show. And so it can be a completely different experience, even within the same city. And so often many of those people, people just choose to move on and forget about it a month later. Here's this horrific thing that can happen. But that didn't compare to what's down the road, you know, and 1906 is the model for all

of that, which comes after. In thinking about 1989 and Loma Prieta, whenever the next earthquake happens, there's going to be expected damage, you know, the damage that people foresaw. And then there's going to be the unexpected thing. So in Loma Prieta, a section of the Bay Bridge collapsed. The Cyprus Freeway in Oakland collapsed. Cyprus freeway had actually been retrofitted, obviously not effectively. So there's going to be these damage that we're not going to be prepared for whenever the next earthquake happens.

And this is the challenge with earthquakes is there's really no warning and you just have to, you know, react as best you can. I think there was a lot of retrofitting that could happen. And one of the problems in California is it's largely left to the local level, to the city level. So wealthier cities have done a much better job of retrofitting, you know, then poorer cities. So those disparities, I think, again, we're going to see whenever the next earthquake comes. We're going to see those disparities come into play. It's pretty scary how Blase people get really fast about earthquakes. They hit fast and they're forgotten fast. And that reality will only make sense when you're actually going through it. It's a weird cycle that human beings

choose to go through. Yes. And that's why I think the history of earthquakes and natural disasters in general is so important to know and to talk about, to recognize, you know, the next disaster is not unprecedented. These do happen. They're part of living on this, you know, geologically active disaster-prone planet. And there are lessons that we can take from the history, you know, from 1906, San Francisco. And the craziest thing of all, it could happen in a minute from now. You have no idea. That to me is so fascinating about the Bay Area. You have to live on your toes subconsciously. And I've always felt like that underscored, literally the culture, you know, and has contributed a great deal to the activity in the area, you know, just a mental activity, never mind everything else. It both is a positive and a negative that's going on at any given time.

Joanna L. Dill is a native Californian, as I said, who earned her BA from Stanford and her Ph.D. in history from Princeton. She teaches at Pomona College. Her book is Seismic City, an environmental history of San Francisco's 1906 earthquake. and I highly recommend it. It's a fascinating read. Thank you, Joanna, for joining us. Thank you so much, Don. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for listening to this episode

of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time.