A Crack in the Edge of the World

by Simon Winchester

  For in the years just prior to the San Francisco Earthquake there had been a number of very costly disasters. In 1903 some 600 people had died in Chicago at a fire in the Iroquois Theater. A blaze aboard the steamship General Slocum on the East River off Manhattan killed 1,021 people in 1904. And the enormous fire in Baltimore the same year wrecked the city’s business center, with losses of up to $90 million. The ruin caused by the earthquake and then the fire in San Francisco was the last thing the insurance industry needed in 1906. The total value of property destroyed was perhaps as much as $500 million—of which the insured liability was estimated at around $235 million. About a hundred insurance companies, some big and national, some tiny and local, had written policies for householders and businesses in San Francisco. Of the total risk, British underwriters had written about a fifth, and German insurance companies stood to be out of pocket by a similar amount.

  Claims were made by 90,000 people and companies within a day or two after the last fire was out. But the fires had caused unforeseen complications: Many people had lost their policies, and many insurance companies had lost their offices. Confusion and consternation erupted on all sides.

  Then there began as a consequence a great deal of undignified haggling—though, from a moral viewpoint, most now think there should not have been—as company after company tried to force policyholders to accept far less money than they had insured for. Some firms argued in a quite arbitrary fashion that one risk was insured and another was not; and often technical arguments went on for months over whether it was a fire or the earthquake that destroyed a particular building, because one risk was reasonable and covered, the other an act of God and not. In particular there was much heated debate over whether to invoke the so-called fallen building clause that was now standard on most American policies, which held that “if a building, or any part thereof, fall except as a result of fire, all insurance by this policy on such building or its contents shall immediately cease.” Only three American companies that used the standard form, and that could therefore by rights apply the clause, decided to ignore it and to pay up in full. Most of the rest dithered, argued, stalled.

  Many others cunningly suggested a dastardly solution: They offered what they christened a “horizontal cut,” proposing to each policyholder that since it was impossible to determine if it was fire or shock waves that had caused his building to collapse, why not take a 30 percent deduction and say no more about it? There was an almighty outcry over the sheer impertinence of this suggestion; but in the end the horizontal cut was applied by a large number of companies, though the discount was reduced to 10 percent, and those firms that applied it became moderately less unpopular as a result.

  The reputation of the insurance industry as a whole suffered grievously from the poor behavior of these companies, particularly after the topic became a national issue when a local congressman stood up before the House of Representatives in Washington and inveighed against the number of blatantly dishonest and evasive companies that had been trying, as many began saying, to weasel out of their obligations.

  A scant six of the one hundred firms involved were said to have performed impeccably, paying all of their policyholders in full and on time. Four of these were American—the Aetna of Hartford, the California of San Francisco, and the Queen and the Continental of New York. The other two, the Royal and the Liverpool London, were British. The Hartford essentially paid in full as well, deducting just a small percentage for those who demanded to be paid in cash. Some thirty-seven firms had no choice but to go back to their stockholders and pass on the liability to them—to “assess” them, to use the formal phrase, a total of $32 million in claimed money. Twelve companies went entirely broke.

  There was enormous praise for the Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company, based in San Francisco, which faced more than $11 million in claims, with only $7 million in assets. Fireman’s took the unusual step of forming an entirely new company—paying out all the cash the old firm had on hand, and offering policyholders stock in the new firm in lieu of the cash they were owed. A body called the Credit Men issued a report some while later saying this company above all had “proven itself entitled to the confidence, good-will and patronage of the insuring public.”

  The same could not be said of fully fifty-nine other firms—a technical majority of the total of one hundred companies that were known to have written policies, though not representing the greatest part of the total value they had insured. Of these pariah companies, all of which argued, prevaricated, demanded huge deductions for paying out cash, and who in some cases defaulted altogether, the very worst appear to have been those based in Germany and Austria. Six of these firms denied all responsibility and simply closed up shop and went home. The Hamburg-Bremen Company seems to have been a special villain. It demanded discounts of between a quarter and a fifth for nearly all of its $4 million in liabilities; and it was excoriated for “insulting and discourteous treatment” of its customers, and for misleading New Yorkers—potential new customers—by running advertisements claiming, falsely, that funds had been sent over from Hamburg to pay San Franciscans in full.

  AND THEN THERE was the question of Chinatown. It had been almost entirely destroyed. As anticipated by the insurance board, fires had roared along the tiny alleyways and consumed almost every single one of the tenements of its nine crowded city blocks; and though Chinese casualties were relatively light, thousands of Chinese men and women, made comprehensively destitute, immediately set to roaming the city in search of shelter, food, and work.

  At first the city was, if sotto voce, delighted. There was still a powerfully racist element to San Francisco—at least, so far as the Celestials were concerned—and not a few thought the fires a blessing. Now many residents breathed quietly, the Chinese could push off elsewhere, and the slums where they had practiced their peculiar arts could be replaced by office buildings or houses for more respectable folks. A committee was very quickly formed—within six days—to decide where they should be put. No thought was given at first to where the Chinese themselves might want to live; it was merely assumed by members of the committee (which was led by a Methodist minister named Thomas Filben, and had members named Deneen, Ward, and Phelan—not a Chinese among them) that they knew what was best for this most alien of communities.

  By now the terrified Chinese had scattered, many taking boats across to Oakland and settling in what was perceived as relative safety. The committee demanded they come back: first to a temporary camp set up for them at the foot of Van Ness Avenue and then to what had long before been planned for them, an “Oriental City” out at Hunter’s Point, a bleak peninsula to the southeast of the city. An industrialist named John Partridge had been pressing for the Chinese to be moved to this distant redoubt, well away from the city center, for some time; now, it seemed, there was an opportunity to achieve his ambition.

  But the Chinese were having none of it. They wanted their old community rebuilt, and they wanted to live there. They swiftly won the backing of their government at home in Peking—and by mid-April the Chinese legation in Washington had made it abundantly clear that no less a figure than the Dowager Empress herself, speaking from deep within the Forbidden City, had demanded that her people be housed where they had long wished to be housed. To underline the issue, the legation (which sent an official party to San Francisco) pointed out that the Chinese government owned title to land on Stockton Street, in the heart of Chinatown, and fully intended to rebuild its consulate there. To suggest they do otherwise would offend the Forbidden City, would damage relations between China and the United States, and would damage, no doubt, the lucrative trade across the Pacific.

  Faced with such dire consequences, the committee backed down; and Chinatown—though later to be subjected to trials of an altogether different kind, as we shall see—began to rebuild itself in its selfsame sixteen blocks, where it remains today, aromatic and mysteriously and defiantly different from all the rest of San Francisco.


  FIVE MONTHS AFTER the quake the British consul general, Sir Courtney Bennett, was in what at this remove seems a gloomy mood when he wrote a lengthy assessment for his superiors in London. He had a prescience about him that comes across today in one passage, close to the end of a lengthy telegram. He had written copiously about the insurance debacles, about the strikes and riots that he felt were now gripping the city, about the fractious and disputatious mood of the place, and of how even the local press was abandoning its eternal optimism and beginning to ask questions about the city’s long-term future. And then he began:

  The moral effect of the earthquake has been great, and would-be investors are wondering whether there are not places other than San Francisco where money might not be more profitably invested. A man naturally hesitates to put up a million dollar building when it may be shaken down at any moment.

  … a building could be put up in Los Angeles … for thirty percent less than in San Francisco.

  And this, in essence, is what then happened. Though the city was rebuilt—hastily, without regard for the kind of planning that might have given it the appearance of the imperial city that so many longed for it to be—and though its commerce did return and its courage was recognized and has been celebrated ever since, one reality obtained. And Sir Courtney, perhaps unwittingly, had forecast it: This was the end, slow in coming and slow to be noticed, of San Francisco’s supremacy among the cities of the American West.

  The torch would in due time be passed southward, to Los Angeles. And though many will argue that such a transfer of power and standing would have occurred anyway, for other, organic reasons, it remains an unarguable fact that San Francisco’s crown began to slip immediately after the disaster of 1906. And the city has never regained its status, nor will it ever.

  Large cities survive great natural disasters, true; but earthquakes, of all such trials, tend to have a very different kind of effect upon the future of the cities that survive them. The very fact that a city falls victim to a huge shaking of the earth on which it is built tends to suggest an unanticipated flaw in the process that brought the city into existence in the first place—a sudden revelation that the land on which the city was built held some dark secret, which lay cunningly unrevealed to those who first arrived.

  When the first settlers put down their tent poles beside the meadow of sweet-smelling yerba buena, and when they saw how safely and prettily their schooners rode out in the calms of the harbor, there seemed no end of logic and good sense to building a homestead; no one could possibly have imagined the turmoil that was lurking deep within the earth. There was no clue, no hint, of any trouble to come. And then came 1906, and all those comfortable assumptions were shattered, and deep-seated confidence was replaced overnight with an equally deep-felt anxiety.

  Earthquakes can as a consequence have effects on cities and city populations that may not become clear for years, or decades, but that in time are realized—as is recognized here—to be profound indeed. A deep anxiety for the future conspired with a host of other circumstances to ensure that, over the decades following 1906, the lure of San Francisco ebbed away, to be replaced by the undisputed magnetic appeal of the gigantic and seismically rather safer city that was then starting to grow 400 miles to the south.

  Los Angeles has earthquakes, true. Everywhere in California that lies close to where the two tectonic plates are scraping past each other is, when compared to stable places like Kansas, Nebraska, Siberia, Queensland, or the Canadian Shield, relatively seismically unsafe. It is all a matter of degree. San Francisco was in 1906 almost obliterated by a quake; Los Angeles has, by contrast, never been more than scarred.

  And this has all to do with proximity. The change of relative status of the two cities is a result of one immense and often unstated factor: the relative closeness of each to the track of the San Andreas Fault. San Francisco is no longer America’s principal western city because, quite simply, the fault runs directly underneath it. Los Angeles, on the other hand, has taken over as the now unassailable capital of California and of the American West because, equally simply, it does not.

  ELEVEN

  Ripples on the Surface of the Pond

  And there were voices, and thunders, and lightning;

  and there was a great earthquake, such as was not

  since men were upon the earth, so mighty an

  earthquake, and so great.

  And the great city was divided.…

  Revelation 16:18

  THE VENGEANCE OF THE LORD

  SOMETHING SO BIG, MAJESTIC, POWERFUL, AND INEXPLICABLE as this great shaking of the earth could only have been brought about by the hand of God. For years afterward hundreds of thousands of sensible people across America believed this simple explanation, and a considerable number in all likelihood still do today. In churches across the country, from Oregon to Florida, from Maine to Arizona, American citizens who went to worship the following Sunday prayed energetically for the souls of the San Francisco dead, for the relief of the wounded, and for the revival of the city—while at the same time stoically accepting, by and large, the cruel mysteries of the ways of the Creator.

  The depth to which this belief was held varied from place to place. A clever and a skeptical few looked for a natural cause, while the faithful and the pious accepted without question that this was divine fate, nothing more or less. A pamphlet distributed from the then-village of Mountain View told its readers that without doubt the event had been retribution for “the sin of man.” This view was firmly held around the planet, too: The great British expository preacher George Campbell Morgan, who could draw crowds of almost 2,000 at Westminster Chapel in London, had no hesitation in ascribing blame and cause. The earthquake and the fire that followed it, he told his enraptured congregation soon after the dust had settled, was the judgment of God, visited on a wicked city.

  But few believed more dutifully that all was the mysterious workings of the Divine than a small gathering of faithful who had met in Los Angeles for the first time just a few days before the earthquake. They were in the main black men and women, and they had gathered to profess their faith—in a very new and somewhat surprising way—in a disreputable-looking two-story mud-colored clapboard building, a former church that had fallen on hard times and was being used as a boarding stable.

  The building was huddled into a short and otherwise forgettable alley in an industrial quarter of the city, an alley that is as famous to many ardent believers around the world as Golgotha, Medina, or the Hagia Sophia are to those of other creeds. It was called Azusa Street—and the beliefs that sustained the small congregation that met in what had once been the Azusa Street Methodist Church were to have consequences that would bring about a profound alteration of American society, one that has continued right up to the present day.

  They called themselves Pentecostalists, in remembrance of an ancient Jewish feast day and in honor of the Holy Spirit, whom they worshiped with unalloyed enthusiasm. They clapped and cheered and waved their hands and they spoke in tongues; they interpreted the words of the Bible strictly, as fundamental laws; and they claimed they were guided by unmistakable signs from heaven to perform the Lord’s work on earth. The San Francisco Earthquake was the first sign this congregation had ever seen, and coming so early in the movement’s history it was universally interpreted as a message of divine approval, a spur that would henceforward send out the Pentecostalists fearlessly on their way.

  The intellectual roots of Pentecostalism can probably be traced to John Wesley and to the Methodism that he founded in the middle of the eighteenth century—a church for ordinary people, a profession of Christian faith that had been stripped of its deadening burdens of propriety and pomp. Although Wesley’s thinking had been well regarded in America for some time, as a movement it took off rather later, flourishing essentially after the Civil War; it has been viewed as a reaction among the less well off to the cold formalism of most Christian church services of the times. Moreover, the
poor and the dispossessed and the neglected of America were eager to take matters rather further than their British counterparts: They wanted to participate in what was called “heart religion,” to profess their faith with uninhibited enthusiasm and drama, and to do so in “Holiness” churches that recognized miracles and otherwise inexplicable happenings that could only be the work of the Almighty.

  They finally got what was needed when, in 1900, a preacher named Charles Parham, teaching at a seminary in Topeka, Kansas, triggered an extraordinary reaction in a young female student—soon to be as famous among charismatic Christians as Bernadette was to Catholics—named Agnes Ozman. During the school’s New Year’s Eve service, Miss Ozman asked Parham to baptize her. As he did so, he later wrote, so “a glory fell on her, a halo seemed to surround her head and face, and she began speaking the Chinese language and was unable to speak English for three days. When she tried to write in English to tell us of her experience she wrote the Chinese.”

  Agnes Ozman had demonstrated the miracle of xenolalia—a sudden ability to speak a foreign tongue of which she had no prior knowledge.* Parham and his followers promptly saw this as an unambiguous revelation, a sign from the Holy Spirit that he had visited and baptized the young woman. The Holy Spirit had done so, moreover, in precisely the same manner as he had done—according to the Bible, in Acts 2:1-4—for the twelve disciples on the Day of Pentecost, fifty days after the second day of Passover. That being so, the followers of the new religion that the Reverend Parham now saw revealed to him would call themselves Pentecostalists.

  Within days other students, too, began speaking in languages unfamiliar to them—Swedish, Russian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Italian—and in ways that independent experts confirmed as accurate and authentic. Parham now had no doubt: The Holy Spirit was being revealed in these miracles, an age-old prophecy was being fulfilled, the new church must be founded, spirited missionary work must begin. And so, religious fervor being what it is, within months thousands of adherents were swarming to Parham and his charismatic church—so much so that he and his acolytes quickly established themselves in Texas and Missouri, two of the states that bordered Kansas, as well as in Florida and Alabama.