Free A Crack in the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester Page A

struggle. There was too much disregard for certain aspects of the new. The 78,000 registered cars on U.S. roads in 1905 (up from just 300 in 1895) were still considered, for example, to be little more than barely useful toys; the 51-day journey taken in 1903 by the drivers of a 20-horse-powerWinton automobile from San Francisco to New York, the first-ever cross-country road trip, was initially denounced as a fraud. Then again, social change was slow to be accepted, too: A woman was arrested for smoking a cigarette in an open car in New York. “You can’t do that on Fifth Avenue,” the arresting officer reportedly said. And an Illinois congressman loudly attacked the brand-new practice of adding strange confections to hitherto natural foods, to make them taste better, or to eke out the ingredients and make their supply more profitable. *
    Despite all of science’s froth and exuberance, and despite a growing perception of the brave new world it promised, 1906 was in many ways a year still hesitant, partly pinioned in the Edwardian era by its mannered ways. And though this hesitancy was perhaps more apparent back in England—which still had an empire to act as bulwark to its more reactionary values—it permeated America, California, and San Francisco, too, though inevitably in America it was colored by a bolder and brasher style.
    Teddy Roosevelt, a man who epitomized these conflicts in attitude and style—“Speak softly and carry a big stick” was the adage for which he remains best known—had been president since 1901, assuming the post after William McKinley was assassinated at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. The tone he then set reflected the duality of the times. He had been a frail and sickly child, but as a young man he was determined to conquer his limitations by strenuous exercise, becoming a rancher and a volunteer cavalryman. When he eventually came to lead his country he did so in a rambunctious, almost defiantly physical way, bringing explorers and soldiers and boxers to the White House, making stirring speeches advocating valor and national sturdiness, and promoting American prominence throughoutthe world. His memorials are legion, the most notable (aside from his having won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for brokering the peace treaty ending the war between Russia and Japan) being the Panama Canal, the building of which he secured by acquiring the Canal Zone from Colombia in 1903.
    His dream was for Americans to dominate in particular the Pacific Ocean, to stand firm against the encroaching ambitions of any “Orientals” who might entertain similar hopes, and to create in San Francisco a base for a naval force that would secure America’s supremacy forever. He may have been an Easterner of the old school—a graduate of Harvard and Columbia, married to a Bostonian—but he was a man who valued America’s blue-water West, in part because of the buccaneering spirit of those who settled there, but also because of the coast’s utility as a base for his own imperial ambitions. When he went to San Francisco in 1903 to dedicate the monument to Admiral George Dewey and the fleet that had so roundly defeated the Spanish in Manila Bay, he thrilled the immense crowd by declaring that the proper place for all Americans was “with the great expanding peoples, with the people that dare to be great.” San Francisco was, in Teddy Roosevelt’s eyes, very much the Imperial City, a gateway to great fortunes won on the far side of its vast ocean. The city could not have had a more enthusiastic champion in the nation’s capital when it suffered its greatest calamity.
    A YEAR, AND A COUNTRY , and a president, all of them in balance, all expectant and optimistic and apprehensive by turns as a whole world of changes—changes political, psychological, social, and, most of all, scientific—began to sweep in from the future. The year,