Free A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit Page B

Francisco—tried to shut down a rival who was running streetcars for free immediately after the quake. Safety precautions were cited, but the assistant director of the United Railroads recalled, “Prior to the earthquake, Mr. Spreckels was directing a fight against the United Railroads, and on the day before the earthquake, Tuesday, April 17, a rival system of his own had been incorporated.” The mayor gave the company the go-ahead, Spreckels stopped them again, and finally General Greeley—who had been away during the quake—intervened, and the cars resumed running on April 27. There are worse stories, like that of a waterfront man pressured by his banker to obtain dynamite—so the embezzling banker could blow up the bank and its crooked books. Ruef attempted to reduce wages by arguing that in the crisis “there is pressing need for mutual concession,” so unskilled workmen should accept $2.50 for a nine-hour day rather than $8.00, as it had been before. What made the concession mutual was not specified. By summer, the unions were striking for better wages and the newspapers were deploring them. The United Railroads strike was particularly long and bitter.
    Employer-employee relations were turbulent all through this period. A story by the Argonaut , which served the elite of San Francisco, complained in July of “the extreme scarcity of house servants, although there are many thousands of people out of employment. The Relief Committee frequently receives communications asking where all the female servants have gone. According to General Greeley, it seems the relief camps are full of idle domestics.” The general remarked, “The sooner this feeding of able-bodied men and women is stopped, the better it will be for the city.” The Argonaut admitted the following week that there were few “drones” in the camps, though only six of one thousand women accepted employment when it was offered to them. The Bulletin had run a more sympathetic piece, “The Dignity of Labor,” in late May, which itemized some of the callous treatment meted out to women servants during the earthquake and reported that with the dearth of servants “mistresses who have been the severest of taskmasters . . . have been forced into the position of the scorned menials, and a strange world opens before their startled eyes.” The journalist Jane Carr saw the disaster as a great leveler and liberator, though not everyone was eager to be leveled or happy others had been freed from drudgery.
    The immediate aftermath of the disaster, in which everything was topsy-turvy, money was scarce to irrelevant, citizens improvised their own care, and much was given away rapidly, yielded to more institutional management of the disaster, which was often effective but seldom joyous. The informal citizen-run kitchens were replaced in many parts of the city by soup kitchens, which required people to show tickets. The authorities had a great fear that people would eat twice or collect extra supplies, and the system was meant to prevent people from getting too much. “Pauperization,” the transformation of independent citizens into dependents, was another great concern of the time and an argument against all but the most unattractive forms of relief and assistance. The Argonaut reported, “The great majority of refugees who had established their own cooking arrangements, and preferred cooking in their own way the meat and other supplies that they drew from the relief stations, greatly resented the new regime. Nevertheless, it was put in force, and the immediate result of its adoption was an extraordinary decline in the number of refugees applying for relief. The method was so unattractive—many people called it revolting—and the system so extraordinarily unpopular that people preferred the hardships of hunger.”
    Only in the Mission District did citizens successfully resist the insti tutionalization of their eating sites and systems. The Argonaut reports