A Crack in the Edge of the World (39 page)

The biggest of these cities survived. The smaller communities—Pompeii and St. Pierre, for example—lost their raison d'être once their buildings were gone, once their monuments were buried and their byways obliterated. But the world's big cities generally exist for reasons that go far beyond the accumulation of buildings that is their outward manifestation. Their presence in the place they occupy is invariably due to some combination of geography—they lie by a river crossing, in a bay of refuge, at the mouth of a mountain pass—and of climate, together with some vague and indefinable organic reason that persuades humankind to settle there.

Trials of any kind—war, pestilence, natural or human violence, with wholesale death or total physical destruction, or both, being the harshest of all—may slow that growth or cause some other setback; but such things are just setbacks, and before long the original reasons for a city's existence reassert themselves. Life returns, buildings and roads are rebuilt, new monuments spring up or old ones are found and dusted off, and before long the city returns to its old self, ready to see what more fate can hurl at it, to challenge and strengthen and temper its will to survive. It may not always entirely regain its predisaster status—San Francisco had to cede much to Los Angeles, for example. But generally, so far as their respective quiddities are concerned, great cities always recover.

It is a different matter when there are no cities—when disaster afflicts rural communities that lack settled centers of great consequence, as happened when the Sumatran tsunami swept across the Bay of Bengal at the end of 2004. In cases like this the return to normality is more shaky, less certain. A city has an uncanny ability to shrug off catastrophe; a devastated countryside, without a city to help it pull itself up by its collective bootstraps, can remain ruined for generations.

So whether it is Manhattan, Falluja, Warsaw, Coventry, or Hiroshima, it seems true that though cities may on occasion lose their heart, they seldom also lose their soul; and San Francisco was no exception. All that its shattered, wearied, and suddenly impoverished citizens needed was leadership, someone to take charge, someone to lift the demoralizing burdens of wreck and ruin from their shoulders, and show them the possibilities of remaking the place that they had called their home.

The leader who first emerged was a forty-year-old career soldier, a braggart and bully with a controversial record of recklessness and impetuosity—just the right man for the job, some would argue—named Frederick Funston.

It was only by the purest chance that Brigadier General Funston was on duty at the time. The resident commander of the American army's Pacific Division, based in the San Francisco Presidio beside the Golden Gate, was Major General Adolphus Washington Greely—a man who had ample personal reason to hope for the chance of meeting a challenge, such as restoring order after an earthquake. Twenty years before he had led a military expedition to the Arctic that had gone badly wrong—nineteen of its members had starved to death, and there were rumors of cannibalism, kangaroo courts, and drumhead justice. Greely's reputation and career had in consequence gone into a decline, and he must have known that skillfully organizing a military response to a major catastrophe would do much to restore his standing. But it happened that in April 1906 he was away on leave in Chicago, at his daughter's wedding, and he was able to get back to his command only by way of a slow transcontinental train, four days later. By this time General Funston, his deputy, had matters pretty much in hand.

Funston had a lively reputation. He had won his spurs both in the Cuban revolutionary army and in the Philippines, where he led so cunning and courageous a campaign against the nationalist leader Emilio Aguinaldo that he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in his thirties and promoted to one-star general. But there were always dark rumors: that he took no prisoners, that he engaged in summary executions, that he looted Catholic churches for the amusement of his Southern Baptist troopers, that he had an “advertising bureau” to promote his image as a man of courage and dash.

There was a brief suggestion that he might be Teddy Roosevelt's running mate in the 1904 election;
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but the bombast and braggadocio he displayed during a whirlwind speaking tour across America—threatening to establish “bayonet rule” in the Philippines, for example—put an end to that, and it brought a warning from the White House for him to pipe down. He was then sent off to be Greely's deputy commander in San Francisco, in the hope that he might fade, if briefly, from public view. To his presumed delight, and to Greely's presumed chagrin, the earthquake saw to it that he did no such thing.

Funston and his family had quarters on Washington Street, halfway up Nob Hill. On being awoken by the shudderings he ran to the summit of the hill, then down the steep slope of California Street toward the flatter reclaimed land beyond Montgomery Street. As he went, so he saw the fires beginning—smudges of smoke, flickers of flame, some of them already starting to coalesce into larger and more dangerous blazes. He quickly surmised that the water mains had broken; he imagined that very shortly there would be overwhelming demands made on the city's civil authorities—the police, ambulance squads, fire department. He knew that the city telephone systems were down, and that there was no immediate hope of making contact with either Greely or any other senior federal official.

So he was the senior soldier in the area, in charge of many hundreds of well-drilled soldiers. He suspected he might have to use explosives to limit the spread of fire, and knew full well how to get his hands on them and the military engineers who could use them; and he understood that he would have to commit his troops, to ensure they were fully armed to deal with who knew what, and to commit them without further ado.

A policeman he encountered told him of the ruin of City Hall, and cleverly predicted that it was most likely that the mayor, Eugene Schmitz (a man who also rose to the occasion, and organized matters quickly and very handily), would use the so-far-little-damaged Hall of Justice Building on Portsmouth Square as his operational headquarters. And so, almost without thinking, General Funston acted.

He needed first to send out orders, and from an army base. He tried to flag down cars and wagons that were speeding by, but was ignored. (He was a moderately sized man, and at this moment was in mufti, without much appearance of authority. And besides, most drivers had more urgent business.) He ran back up the ten steep blocks to the army stables at the corner of Pine and Hyde Streets, and from there wrote hasty messages to his two senior commanders—a Colonel Morris at the Presidio main base, and a Captain Walker at the smaller army detachment at Fort Mason. He gave the notes to his coachman, saw him mounted on a carriage horse, and told him to ride like fury. The messages read: “Immediately send all available troops at your disposal to the Hall of Justice, and make them at the disposal of the mayor and of the chief of police.”

All went like clockwork. The first troops left their barracks at 7:15
A.M.
and arrived half an hour later—initially Captain Walker and 155 soldiers, all in field equipment and each with twenty rounds of ball ammunition, reported to Mayor Schmitz at 7:45
A.M.
They found him in a fighting mood—one born perhaps out of his initial bewilderment at what was going on. The city clerks who had turned up at the wrecked City Hall at 6:00
A.M.
were astonished that their mayor wasn't already there. They drove with difficulty to his house three miles away on Fillmore Street, then back to City Hall, then on to the Hall of Justice. From this point on the mayor was seized with determination: Clearly, those around him said, he was not going to let his early puzzlement inhibit his ability to issue commands.

And so he did, with staccato efficiency. If Funston took immediate charge, Mayor Schmitz promptly joined him in equal stature. He first declared that soldiers should cordon off all burning areas and keep onlookers away. A strong detachment would go immediately to City Hall, bayonets fixed, to secure the Treasury, with its millions of dollars in cash and specie. He ordered that looting, instances of which he had already seen on his drive to work, was henceforward a capital offense, and that soldiers would be ordered to shoot on the spot anyone they found stealing from ruined stores and houses. Saloons would close. The sale of liquor would be prohibited. Naked candles would be banned.

It was a draconian pronouncement, and for years later it was assumed—because soldiers did indeed execute looters on the spot—that martial law had been declared. But it never had been. A city mayor has very limited authority—only the state governor can call in National Guardsmen, and only the president can summon federal troops. And, in any case, the civil courts were still in theory operational in San Francisco in 1906. So, although soldiers were given a free hand for a short while, it was at the behest of the city's civil authority, which was always in unofficial, though ultimate, control. Later Schmitz explained: “While the orders issued at the time were perhaps without legal authority, and were extraordinary, they were accepted by the people with good nature and good will, and there was a general desire to carry out the suggestions made in my written and verbal messages.”

But he demanded that the orders be printed. The most controversial of these was rushed out by the Altvater Printing and Stationery Company, whose works down in the Mission District were still functioning, though without electric power. Soldiers commandeered passersby to operate the treadles. The mayor had 5,000 handbills letterpressed, each sternly (and technically illegally) telling the citizens:

The Federal Troops, the members of the Regular Police Force and all Special Police Officers have been authorized by me to
KILL
any and all persons engaged in Looting
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or in the Commission of Any Other Crime.

Very few people were actually shot on Schmitz's order. When General Greely's train arrived and he reassumed command on the following Monday, he began an inquiry but came to the conclusion that only two men had been executed by soldiers. And in May the Coroner's Office reported that of the 358 corpses thus far recovered and examined, only one had a gunshot wound. While the figures were probably higher—bodies, it was said, were often thrown into burning ruins in order to be incinerated beyond recognition and forensic inquiry—it does appear that more was made of the intent of Schmitz's pronouncement than of any employment of its explicit threat.

Somehow it is indeed quite hard to imagine anyone—no matter how well armed or endowed with authority he may be—feeling anything but the utmost reluctance to carry out a summary execution in the midst of a tragedy like this. William James observed that people involved in the tragedy were awestruck by the unfolding events—their awe compounded by the fact that there was no one to blame, that everyone had suddenly become a victim of a vast natural circumstance. There was neither anger nor envy in the air, just an all-consuming need for survival. How difficult must it have been for a soldier to shoot someone dead, particularly some shabbily dressed thief who was, in all likelihood, a victim of ruin just trying to survive?

Schmitz's other proclamations were less contentious. He warned people that the local gas and electrical companies had been ordered to suspend their services until the mayor's office said otherwise. “You may therefore expect the city to remain in darkness for an indefinite period.” He ordered a nighttime curfew and ended with a warning about broken chimneys and leaking gas pipes. There was no bombastic rhetoric, no call to arms, nothing to inspire or encourage. Mayor Schmitz simply forbade, warned, threatened, and instructed—a strategy that, by all indications, seemed to work well, and quickly.

He used such military telegraph links as were working to signal both Governor Pardee in Sacramento and the mayor of Oakland, demanding help: food, fire engines, hoses, dynamite. And from all over the state, assistance began to pour in remarkably swiftly: A train from Los Angeles with wagonloads of packaged food and medicine arrived by midnight, a scant eighteen hours after the quake.

General Funston sent cables to Washington, demanding tents, rations, medicine. William Howard Taft, the secretary of war—and the next American president—responded with exemplary promptitude. An order went out at four the following morning—Congress would pass an emergency enabling resolution the same day, making everything legal and fiscally proper—and 200,000 rations were dispatched immediately from Vancouver Barracks, on the Canadian border in Washington State. The next day more trains were ordered to leave army bases in Texas, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Iowa, and Wyoming, all loaded with equipment. Before long every single tent in the military's possession was in San Francisco, and the largest hospital train ever made had been sent out from Virginia. A few weeks later fully 10 percent of the standing army was there as well—an enormous commitment of men and matériel, and an immense expenditure of federal funds.

Later on the day of the earthquake, as the first troops were fanning out and the general was ordering still more from other bases in California and beyond that were in his command district—he had 1,500 soldiers deployed by noon—the mayor moved to set up a formal committee that would reestablish order and good government in the shattered city. The committee was made up of fifty supposedly upstanding citizens, all of them men. Many were political cronies and yet, by all accounts, not nearly as corrupt as might have been supposed. Printers were swiftly set to work issuing pronouncements about the committee's existence and its responsibilities.

The body's very first meeting was something of a shambles: It had to be moved from the Hall of Justice after soldiers outside dynamited a nearby building and all of the hall's windows blew in. Schmitz, who at the time was in midstream with a powerful piece of oratory further demanding the shooting of “all and any miscreants who may seek to take advantage of the city's awful misfortune,” asked that everyone immediately move outside to the grass in the middle of Portsmouth Square—the old plaza, in the time when the city was born—and carry on their meeting in relative peace and quiet there. The Committee of Fifty, Schmitz said, would meet twice a day for as long as the crisis lasted—and so they did, though hastily moving their points of rendezvous whenever fires bore down on them or the soldiers' dynamiting became too deafening.