Before I was a historian, I was a firefighter in San Francisco. I learned to climb hundred-foot aerial ladders, slice holes through burning roofs with a chain saw, rescue panicked swimmers from the surf, and provide basic life support to unconscious victims. The fire academy instilled confidence that I could handle any emergency scenario. But I was unprepared for the emotional impact of the crises I encountered. Each real-life emergency told a story greater than the immediate effects of physical trauma. Fires and medical emergencies catch victims off guard. They interrupt routine and, for a moment in time, stop daily...

No one could fully realize what was in store when a 7.8-magnitude earthquake pulsed through San Francisco at a little past five in the morning on April 18, 1906. Some San Franciscans, seasoned by past tremors, dismissed the event. Roland Roche, a letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service who lived with his family outside what would soon become the disaster zone, stayed snuggled in bed when the earthquake hit. “We were not ordinarily frightened by earthquakes, so the thing was in full blast when she [his wife] awakened me.”¹ After the earthquake struck, the fires needed just wood and...

San Francisco became a city of the homeless in a matter of days. Residents scattered everywhere; the 100,000 who refused to leave the city camped in their yards or dragged their belongings to parks, vacant lots, and beachfronts. Some of those without family and friends nearby took refuge in old trolley cars, voting booths, and empty cisterns. The mayor declared martial law while soldiers struggled to guard property and hand out the relief supplies that poured into the city. At first, giving aid was nearly as chaotic as dealing with the disaster. The breadlines stretched for blocks, and thousands, residents...

Disaster relief flooded the city with money and conferred a newfound authority on policy makers as they apportioned millions of dollars in relief funds among those they deemed the most productive and promising citizens. The weeks spent in organizing and streamlining official disaster relief left most refugees in dire straits. Local residents—middle-class women, Catholic nuns, and Chinatown leaders among them—took charge and did what needed to be done while officials scrambled to put a centralized relief effort in place. In a sense, the catastrophe created new opportunities for those local residents and communities who responded to thousands of...

The 1906 catastrophe removed physical boundaries between public and private property in San Francisco and literally pushed domestic life into public space, giving both politicians and Progressive reformers unforeseen access to private life. If the public is, as Mary Ryan argues, “situated analytically so as to exercise decisive authority over the private world and over its female inhabitants in particular,” then the San Francisco earthquake and fire amplified that authority.¹ Refugees recognized it by another name: disaster relief. Responding to real (destroyed neighborhoods) and imagined (non-elite refugees) social disorder, relief policy reinforced gender, race, and class norms. As discussed in...

Like disaster relief, reconstruction widened the economic divide between the city’s social classes. Rebuilding also exacerbated racial divisions when political and business leaders demanded Chinatown’s permanent removal from the city. Despite the loss of land titles and insurance records as well as buildings in the fires, the power-hungry mayor—armed with new land title legislation, insurance protocols, and relief grants—rapidly began reconstruction. Fire insurance was a boon to wealthier property owners who tapped into top compensation rates.¹ Insurance payouts covered half of the reconstruction costs (approximately $250 million), while relief grants added more cash to the rebuilding effort. Relief...

This book begins with a brief description of disaster narratives, those vital accounts that make sense out of wide-scale destruction. San Francisco, of course, had its own disaster narrative that defined the catastrophe for both the city and the nation. But that story was not entirely truthful. Rather it was a fictive yarn spun by business and political leaders, who wanted to rebuild an economically prosperous city. To understand why this was so, it is useful to turn to Carl Smith’s thoughtful exploration of a calamity’s “imaginative reverberations.” Smith contends that disaster narratives are the attempt to make sense of...