Free A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit

put out the flames with wet mail sacks. The U.S. Mint downtown was also saved by its own employees. Blazes started by dynamite raced ahead of the fire into the district southeast of downtown, but huge crowds fought them. A hundred men at a time pulled houses down by ropes and removed the dismantled structures from reach of the flames. A miller reported that ten of the Globe Grain and Milling Company’s employees were prepared to save the mill, and could have, in his opinion, but were driven away at gunpoint. Losses totaled $220,000. The Mission District was saved by sheer manpower, and the crucial battle was near the kitchen operated by Officer Schmitt’s family at Dolores Park. A volunteer named Edwards worked for twenty-four hours without stopping, and when the fire was out, his shoes had burned through and the soles of his feet had been so badly scorched he could no longer walk. A mail carrier named Roland M. Roche credited the men and boys of the neighborhood with saving it, fighting fire by hand, carrying milk cans of water from a laundry to the fire: “This improvised bucket brigade, working in the face of almost insufferable heat, saved their own valley from imminent destruction, and thus probably saved the greater part of San Francisco that survived the fire.”
    Another angry citizen summed up the fire history of 1906 San Francisco: “The stories have but one beginning and one end. They begin with the criminal idiocy of the military; they end with the surmounting heroism of the citizen.” He was the writer Henry Anderson Lafler, and his long attack on Funston and the military attack on San Francisco was never published. In it he summed up the aftermath of the earthquake thus: “During those unforgettable days the city of San Francisco was even as, a city captured in war, the possession of an alien foe. We were strangers on our own streets; driven from our own houses; gray-haired men, our foremost citizens, the sport of the whims of young boys, whose knowledge of the city was confined to its dance halls, its brothels, and saloons. Were we children—we, the citizens of San Francisco—that we should have thus been suddenly gripped by the throat by a stupid soldiery, and held fast till all our city burned?”

Utopia Besieged
    Lafler calls it a war, and two worldviews and two responses were at war in the earthquake. It is true that most of the citizenry had little responsibility beyond their own survival and their own property. But they reached out to each other, improvising public kitchens and large camps and fighting fires by hand. The city government and military were responsible for preserving a larger-scale version of the city, for fighting the fire, and for preserving the peace. And they accomplished much, from the navy’s successful efforts to fight the fire on the waterfront to the city’s Committee for Housing the Homeless’s building of temporary shelter for seventy-five hundred people in the parks. There’s no question about why these powers succeeded in doing what they were supposed to do. The question is about why they chose, for the most part, to regard the public as an enemy and to presume that they needed to control them. The fires undermine the case that the people in power were working in the city’s best interest, and so does the apparent murder of dozens to hundreds of citizens by soldiers, National Guardsmen, and vigilantes. But the evidence is much more extensive than that.
    Take, for example, the Committee of Fifty that Mayor Schmitz appointed. Its name was drawn from the old Committee of Thirteen, or Committee of Vigilance, that had in the 1850s taken over San Francisco and run it to serve the members’ business interests. The Committee of Fifty served for months afterward as an unelected government. It included many commonsensical appointments—a subcommittee on Restoration of Light and Telephone, and another on Roofing the Homeless. But before the quake was a week old, Schmitz had