A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster

Twenty years after the quake, a series of personal narratives was published in which citizens reflected upon their experiences. In one, a policeman named H. C. Schmitt is on patrol near the fires when he hears rumor that his house has burned down. When he reaches his neighborhood, he promptly sets up a makeshift kitchen near his home where, through cooperative coordination of supplies, he is able to feed many neighbors. Other citizens conducted similar work. One citizen observes that everyone seemed to be lighthearted overall, despite the tragedies that unfolded in the aftermath of the quake. Another commenter remarks on how pleasant society is without the evils of money, wishing it were always so.

Writer Pauline Jacobson published an essay in the local paper describing her thought process after the disaster—she was going to buy some face cream but then decided against it because doing so would necessitate bringing some of the old “permanence” back, a permanence that included class divisions and material possessions for some while others had nothing. She also expresses that there is something “lasting” to this new way of being, a hopefulness and inclusivity that she senses will leave them all changed.

General Funston, in contrast to the citizens described in the previous two chapters, sees his duty as “saving the city from the people” rather than the inverse (58). He moved his troops into the city without governmental permission, instituting an unauthorized state of martial law. His soldiers killed about 500 citizens, worsened fires, and treated citizens like the enemy. General Funston was violent, hot-headed, and impulsive, and the way he handled the earthquake’s aftermath was due to both his own nature and the influence of the elites in power. Even the mayor, a well-liked populist, plastered the city in posters warning that looters would be killed. Solnit notes that the term “looting” conflates the “emergency requisition of supplies” with “opportunistic stealing” (62).

The military credited itself for controlling the looting and violence that it viewed as inevitable had it not been there to subdue it. The soldiers shot many citizens who were gathering supplies from pharmacies, hotels, and other partially destroyed buildings and even participated in looting. In many cases, the military worsened the fires through its use of gunpower instead of dynamite to make firebreaks, thus blowing up buildings that contained flammable materials, and stopping citizens from fighting the fires.

The mayor appointed an “unelected government” to oversee rebuilding efforts in the earthquake’s wake. Many of these roles were helpful and logical, but they also included efforts to relocate Chinatown in an opportunistic, racist power grab. Citizens displayed a mix of solidarity and racism in reaction to the difficulties that Japanese and Chinese immigrant communities faced following the quake. When the business community intervened, it was usually self-serving rather than for the public good, and to reinstate the status quo as quickly as possible.

When institutional, top-down relief work began, citizens had to show tickets entitling them to meals, whereas the community-directed relief networks had worked on the honor system. Solnit notes the difference between “independence and dependence, between mutual aid and charity” (77).

This chapter introduces William James, a pragmatist philosopher who lived through the earthquake. James was interested in the consequences of beliefs rather than their truth. The consequences of belief are significant in disaster contexts. If you believe that people behave as an unruly mob, then an appropriate reaction may be an authoritarian-style crackdown like that of General Funston. But if people are peaceful and cooperative, a “milder” reaction is due. Thus, for Solnit, disaster is a question of human nature, or more accurately, “natures” or tendencies, including “Funston’s fear that bred conflict and Jacobson’s solidarity that generated joy” (80).

In 1906, James was at the height of his career and had begun lecturing at Stanford, which he found utopic. Just prior to the quake, he delivered a lecture called “The Moral Equivalent of War.” James had anti-imperialist and anti-war stances, but he admitted the war could be utopic for some, as it instills a sense of duty and belonging to a collective. For James, “ending war requires coming to terms with what human ideals and desires it feeds” (85), and thus a peacetime equivalent was needed. James believed peace was only possible in a society with a sense of purpose beyond the pursuit of pleasure. He proposed that the “moral equivalent of war” could take the form of a youth corps engaged in civic development and community service, but it was not until the earthquake that his idea solidified.

James met the earthquake with “glee,” an experience he later documented in an essay called “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake.” Two important observations struck him: first, how quickly people made order out of chaos, and second, the “equanimity” with which people dealt with the earthquake. For James, “suffering and loss are transformed when they are shared experiences” (91); rather than suffering through personal struggles without a support network, the difficulty was collective. In the earthquake, James found his moral equivalent of war in the communities that formed; these communities harnessed a collective mentality and “inflamed the civic temper” (91).

Following the earthquake, San Francisco was rebuilt with the same “general institutions, injustices, and divisions” (93), and buildings were erected without significant improvements to building codes and construction. The corrupt Schmitz-Ruef administration was removed, but the party that replaced it was all too similar.

Devout Catholic and radical organizer Dorothy Day was a young girl in the quake, but it had a major impact on her life. She recalls “the human warmth and kindliness of everyone afterward” and that “while the crisis lasted, people loved each other” (94). Her life’s work was to “stabilize that love as a practical force” for justice (95), especially for the poor. She tried to reconcile her deep sense of faith with her radical politics, finding that only the anarchists, feminists, and revolutionaries cared about the poor.

Day wrote extensively about the many things and people she was in love with, using the term broadly. Solnit comments on Western, modern culture’s emphasis on love as something belonging solely to the personal and private spheres. Even psychotherapy emphasizes the importance of these areas and deemphasizes “the soul, the creator, and the citizen” (97). This “privatized sense of self” is visible in a movie’s portrayal of activists’ opposition to the government as an indication that they had “issues with their fathers” (98), rather than legitimate political grievances and the conviction that their “well-being includes these broad and idealistic engagements” (99). For Solnit, and Day, a broader scope of love gives rise to a fuller experience of being human, giving one a self with “a soul, ethics, ideals, a chance at heroism, at shaping history, a set of motivations based on principles” (100).

When Day converted to Catholicism, she left her radical politics behind but soon felt her life had become “puny” as the Catholics had no great social mission. This changed when she met Peter Maurin, a French monk, and the two quickly merged their religion with their politics, creating the popular newspaper The Catholic Worker. They also started organizations based on mutual aid and solidarity with the poor. Day valued community highly and opened “houses of hospitality” run as communes, some of which continue to this day.