Part I: Market (Street) Disruption: The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fires

By Cole Manley

***This piece is adapted from an essay I wrote for a History course at UC Davis. Part II will publish soon. Going forward, I'm not sure what form the blog will take, and how often I will post. PhD life is busy. But thanks for reading. This story, in particular, has so many connections to the political and social environment of San Francisco today.***

Fig. 1: San Francisco’s City Hall, destroyed by the earthquake. See: https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=File:Tendrnob$old-city-hall$quake_itm$old-city-hall-1906.jpg.

Introduction

On the morning of April 18, 1906, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake leveled much of San Francisco, including its newly-built City Hall, the business district, Chinatown, South of Market, and many other neighborhoods. The destruction was soon compounded by raging fires, triggered by ruptured gas lines, that consumed most of the eastern half of the city. The city’s fire department was rendered useless, with many water lines supplying hydrants and tankers ripped apart by the earthquake. The death toll from the disaster was arbitrarily set at 325, but the actual number of dead was probably closer to 3,400. Many anonymous poor white, Black, Latino/a, and Chinese San Franciscans were killed, and subsequently erased from historical records of the death toll. In the eyes of the Sub-Committee of Statistics, the official city agency responsible for reporting missing and dead San Franciscans, their lives, and their deaths, did not matter. In the span of a few days, more than half of the city’s 400,000 residents found themselves homeless.

For the intensity of its devastation, the 1906 earthquake has rarely been seriously considered by scholars. Joanna Dyl’s 2017 book Seismic City is a recent exception, but, largely, journalistic and personal accounts of the disaster have predominated. The historian Ted Steinberg notes that accounts of the earthquake rarely transcend “the realm of caricature and myth.” In this essay, I attempt to move beyond the earthquake’s mythology to consider the effects it had on San Francisco’s political economy, and on its racial, class, and gender politics.

In analyzing the aftermath of the disaster, I focus on the processes of creative destruction and racial capitalism that it unleashed. I argue that the aftermath represented a period of rapid reconstruction during which capitalists consolidated their hold over the downtown financial district. Rapid reconstruction privileged the capital of upper class and white San Franciscans, while working class and non-white residents were left to largely fend for themselves in securing housing and jobs. Chinatown was a rare success story in survival and rehabilitation, as Chinese renters were able to resist their expulsion from the city by organizing an independent relief effort, and by leveraging their ties with white landlords.

The post-earthquake period represented a critical turning point in San Francisco’s development. The expansion of the city’s financial district into formerly working-class neighborhoods kickstarted the deindustrialization of San Francisco, with many industries leaving for Oakland and other parts of the Bay Area. We can thus see how disasters do not just destroy physical infrastructure, but also pave the way for spatial and political reorganization, transforming urban spaces and landscapes.

Creative Destruction

Because of the compounded nature of the San Francisco disaster, with the earthquake and the fires, the city’s recovery efforts had a much greater task, and a much greater opportunity. San Francisco capitalists and city planners, epitomized by the urban reformer and architect Daniel Burnham and the engineer Marsden Manson, promoted two differing philosophies for the city’s reconstruction. Both plans seized upon the opportunity to rebuild and restructure the city along Progressive Era beliefs in race, class, and gender. The city’s financial downtown--today ground zero of tech and fin-tech companies--was to expand into formerly working-class neighborhoods. Both plans held to reconstruction which privileged wealthy and white San Franciscans over working class, immigrant, and non-white populations.

The similarities and differences between these plans are revealing, as they illustrate both the ways in which capitalists privileged a social order with labor sidelined from economic and political power, and the ways in which the commercial interests of the city would be upheld. Ultimately, the Manson plan for the city, which called for a less expensive and more “utilitarian” reconstruction, and a Sierra Nevada water supply, triumphed over the more expensive plans of Burnham. But before highlighting the victory of the Manson contingency, it’s important to first explore the racial, class, and gender politics of the Burnham plan, and what this plan underscores about racial capitalism during the Progressive Era in San Francisco.

The Burnham Plan

Many historians have noted the symbolic importance of the Burnham plan, and some have been smitten by it. In A Crack At the Edge of the World, Simon Winchester waxes romantically about the plan, writing that city reformers “had a chance. They had an empty slate. There was an opportunity for the city’s elected leaders to re-create San Francisco in the way that London had done after its great destruction in 1666.” He adds that “[m]aybe Burnham’s plan was not ideal, or without its shortcomings; but it did offer the city a chance for civic greatness.” Why have writers been so emotionally invested in the Burnham plan? Part of the appeal of the plan was its orderliness: the sense of control over the natural world and city life that it envisioned. Before assessing why the Burnham plan helps us understand the functioning of racial capitalism in 1900s San Francisco, it’s necessary to first explain the details of the plan.

Fig. 2: The Burnham plan from 1905 incorporated large urban parks and diagonal boulevards modeled after Paris and Washington, D.C. See: https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Burnham_Plan_1905.

The Burnham plan sought control over nature and control over labor upheaval through the imposition of wide avenues (modeled after the Champs-Élysées in Paris), large urban parks, and massive monuments to Roman and Greek mythology and history. It was a plan that reproduced, in an aesthetically appealing series of architectural drawings and maps of San Francisco, a white supremacist vision of the city. Burnham essentially drew out in fine detail the racist and classist desires of upper class and white citizens who, during the Progressive Era, increasingly sought new degrees of control over labor. During this period, working class Americans, white and Black and immigrant, shut down railroads in massive strikes across the country, organized agricultural unions in the fields of California through the Farmers’ Alliance, and increasingly sought economic and political power through new political parties.

The Progressive Era was a period of intense class conflict between labor and capital, and the Burnham plan was, at its core, a product of this class warfare. San Francisco, in particular, was seen as a particularly active site of labor organizing from the late 19th century through the early 1900s. The first streetcar strike occurred in January of 1874, and public transit would remain one of the most likely sources of strikes and general labor discontent in the years to come. In 1901, 15,000 workers were on strike or locked out of employment, and the newly-formed Union Labor Party won important local elections in support of workers. Joanna Dyl cites that, by 1904, “not only did labor interests control the municipal government but one-third of San Francisco’s workforce belonged to unions--three times the national average.” San Francisco was a union city.

Capitalists understood that their political and financial position in San Francisco was threatened by labor organizing, and so, even before the earthquake, they mobilized in envisioning a new urban design that would lessen the threat of strikes. In 1904, two years before the disaster, James Phelan, the former mayor of San Francisco; Henry Crocker, son of Charles Crocker (who was one of the “Big Four” running the Central Pacific Railroad); and a group of male and like-minded political and business leaders, formed the Association for the Improvement and Adornment of San Francisco. One of the Association’s first and most important actions was hiring Daniel Burnham to “direct and execute a practical and comprehensive plan for the improvement and adornment of the city,” which included as one of its main goals increasing civic pride in the “care of private property.” The Association then built a “bungalow… on a spur of Twin Peaks” where Burnham lived and worked, quite literally overseeing the reconstruction of San Francisco from a bird’s eye and hilltop vantage point. In the 1905 report that he produced, Burnham designed a new blueprint for the city, seen in the image above.

Burnham was a well-known commodity. He was a leading planner in the “City Beautiful” movement, which sought to beautify cities through urban parks, boulevards, and monuments. Frederick Law Olmsted was perhaps the most famous of these planners, and, when Olmsted died in 1903, Burnham was the heir apparent to his legacy. Burnham was well-known for designing the first skyscrapers in Chicago and for coordinating the Columbian Exposition, one of the massive world fairs that graced Chicago in 1893. Burnham’s plan emphasized administrative and educational development over purely commercial or industrial construction. In his overview to the report, he explained that governmental and civic buildings such as City Hall, the Court of Justice, the Custom House, the Opera House, the Library, and the Concert Hall, among others, represented the “real being of the city proper; all else should contribute to its honor and maintenance."

Together, these buildings would be showcased by an urban plan that was oriented around wide streets and large parks. The plan is filled with drawings of boulevards and streets which would criss-cross San Francisco, as well as an “outer encircling driveway” that would girdle the city completely, allowing for ease of navigation and orderliness. He was particularly obsessed with turning streets into “concentric rings” modeled after the European streetscapes of Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Moscow, and London. The historian Robert Cherny notes that Burnham also took inspiration from the diagonal streets and circular intersections of Pierre L’Enfant’s plan for Washington, D.C.

In the plan shown above, parks occupy about one-third of the total land area of the city, with Burnham calling for a park that would have stretched in a southwest direction from Twin Peaks to Lake Merced. These parks were highly engineered spaces. As Joanna Dyl explains, the parks were “a civilized urban nature” that would reorganize the city. Even the trees that would have covered swaths of San Francisco would have been a departure from the way this part of the Bay Area looked as early as the 19th century. Before the development of Golden Gate Park, San Francisco was mostly windswept dunes, a result of its proximity to the Pacific Ocean and its windy and cool climate.

The question of where residents would have lived, with so much of the proposed city taken up by parks and boulevards, was not thoroughly addressed by Burnham. His grand plan for San Francisco said remarkably little about residential development and housing, but what he did say about working class residential areas was remarkable for what it tells us about Burnham’s racial and class position. First, Burnham wrote that “[t]he residential districts develop as necessity demands.” The practicalities of where working class residents would live, in particular, seem not to have factored into Burnham’s planning.

Instead, he called for a design that would have destroyed working class residences in the name of urban beautification. For example, he determined that “[a] great charm might be lent to certain quarters, particularly the less expensive and flatter sections of the city, by the elimination of some of the streets in the monotonous system of blocks, and substitution of a chain of park-like squares, formed in a measure by the unused or mis-used back-yard areas.” Perhaps no other sentence in Burnham’s report conveys as much information to the modern-day reader as this one. Burnham saw working class neighborhoods as unpleasant and blighted areas which would best be eliminated by urban parks. Working class San Franciscans “mis-used” their backyard and open spaces, and, consequently, it was up to enlightened citizens such as Burnham to better manage the city and its landscapes. Notably, parks would not be built in upper class sections of the city, such as the hilltops of Nob Hill and Russian Hill, which were quickly becoming populated with mansions.

We can see numerous parallels between the language of Burnham and the ideology of “urban renewal” during the post-World War II period, when city planners such as Robert Moses used highways to destroy working class and Black neighborhoods in cities such as New York. In this way, Burnham’s 1905 report presaged later, and ultimately more successful, attempts at urban reorganization and destruction.

Burnham’s plan reflected Progressive Era-beliefs in social control, organization, and order. Burnham’s boulevards were not just aesthetically pleasing, but also would have enabled police and military forces to more easily suppress labor uprisings, marches, and protests. Intelligent urban design was increasingly seen as instrumental in controlling labor and working class agitation. Even Burnham’s tree plantings would have had an ulterior motive. He justified the orderly and grid-like quality of his design for plantings by explaining that “this amounts to a lesson of order and system, and its influence on the masses cannot be overestimated.” The masses were seen by Burnham in a patronizing light, as a class of San Franciscans unfit for the luxuries and opportunities of modern urban life, and simultaneously as a dangerous class, as people who had to be organized into obsequiousness.

The Patronage of James Phelan

Burnham’s patron was the former San Francisco mayor, James Phelan, who believed wholeheartedly in a racialized form of urban design and social control. The historian Robert Cherny argues that Phelan “considered people of color as incapable of being assimilated, culturally or physically, and therefore saw them as a threat to the cultural values he sought to promote through beautification and his patronage of the arts.” As a politician, Phelan consistently sided with fellow capitalists by opposing the Union Labor Party, represented by workers. While he solicited workers’ votes to get elected, when in office, Phelan worked to erase their political and economic power in the city, a frustratingly common occurrence in American government.

Phelan’s racism targeted Chinese, Japanese, and African American people in San Francisco, and in the United States. He opposed immigration from Asia and believed in racial segregation. In 1912, he wrote that “[t]his is a white man’s country…. We cannot make a homogenous population out of people who do not blend with the Caucasian race.” In 1920, he campaigned for the Senate with the slogan, “Keep California White.”

Such obvious displays of racism also reflected the power of scientific racism and eugenics during this period. In the orderliness of Burnham’s plan, we can see parallels to the eugenics movement, which relied on pseudo-scientific categorization to place white people above Black people (and any non-white individuals).

The Progressive Era was a period when racial and class hierarchies were used to justify and implement wide ranging discriminatory and exclusionary policies, such as the Chinese Exclusion Acts of the 1880s through the 1920s. In his embrace of Burnham’s plan, Phelan showcased his own racist understanding of modernity, one in which working class and non-white people were excluded from San Francisco. Through this urban planning, we can see a city-specific example of racial capitalism in the proposed destruction of working class and non-white neighborhoods. The racist quality of this urban planning can be seen most clearly in Phelan’s advocacy for the destruction of Chinatown following the earthquake, which I will highlight shortly.

The environmental historian Kevin Rozario has also studied the Burnham plan, and, similar to Cherny, he concluded that the plan represented Progressive Era beliefs in social control. Rozario argues that capitalists felt “a combination of disgust at the chaotic physical and social evolution of their city and a sense of alarm provoked by the deep recession of the 1890s.” As San Francisco grew rapidly in size following the 1849 Gold Rush, reaching a population of 400,000 by 1906, the city attracted sizable populations of non-white immigrants, as well as Eastern Europen and Irish immigrants who were read as non-white due to the odd racial and class logics of the time. While Chinese labor helped build San Francisco (and the transcontinental railroad) into the largest city in the American West, white Progressive Era reformers such as Phelan resented their increasing visibility on city streets. The Burnham plan was an attempt to reorganize the city so as to lessen the visibility of non-white labor.

Though some socialists and labor organizers at first supported the Burnham plan, most saw the urban planner as out of touch with the concerns of working class San Franciscans. Rozario argues that “[t]he dramatic plans of… Burnham, and elites such as Phelan came to represent the opposite of ‘improvement’ to many San Franciscans, particularly those struggling to get back on their feet in the aftermath of the earthquake.” Thousands of San Franciscans lived in relief camps and earthquake cottages for months on end, or in temporary dwellings in other neglected regions of the destroyed city. Their concerns revolved around more immediate needs in the weeks and months following the earthquake, such as access to clean water, adequate food, and safe shelter.

When thousands of San Franciscans struggled to obtain eggs and milk, the width of boulevards and the height of Grecian monuments were seen as less vital reforms. In the image below, for instance, Burnham proposed a massive “Athenaeum” on the top of Twin Peaks, which has been described as “a Parthenon-like complex nestled between the Peaks, with polo fields and pools laid into white marble.” The monument was a not-so-subtle homage to Grecian democracy, and it represented at the same time a vision for a racially-exclusive and Eurocentric civic society. A 300-foot tall female statue named “San Francisco” would have graced the top of Twin Peaks. Unsurprisingly, for working class San Franciscans, the statue would have been seen as a less pressing transformation of urban space than the rebuilding of their homes.

Fig. 3: “The Athenaeum.” See: Devin Smith, “Twin Peaks Falls: Battle of Vista Francisco - FoundSF,” accessed March 17, 2021, https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Twin_Peaks_Falls:_Battle_of_Vista_Francisco.

Rapid Reconstruction and the Manson Alternative

Despite his powerful political allies, Burnham never saw his plan enacted. In the aftermath of the 1906 disaster, capitalists sided more strongly with the rapid reconstruction contingency, and their design leader, the engineer Marsden Manson. Manson moved to California in 1878 and obtained a Ph.D. in engineering from the University of California, working as an engineer for the California Highway Department, the State Harbor Commission, and the San Francisco Department of Public Works. Manson was a political insider in state government, and someone whom capitalists believed in because of his long track record as a city and state planner. In this respect, he was seen as a more “native” Californian than Burnham, even though Manson was originally from Virginia.

While Manson was a member of the Sierra Club, his plan “downplayed Burnham’s emphasis on scenic beauty,” and instead emphasized a more utilitarian and less expensive approach to reconstruction. The Manson plan privileged commerce over beauty. Many capitalists felt that parks and boulevards would constrain urban development and limit capital accumulation. In their mind, San Francisco was supposed to be a financial and commercial center, not an homage to Parisian or Grecian beauty. They believed strongly in short-term development, and in the possibility of expelling more working class people from the city center as quickly as possible. Burnham’s plan, in this regard, was simply too slow in evicting San Franciscans from the Mission and South of Market.

Manson proposed improvements to the waterfront--the commercial hub of the port city--above reconstruction of destroyed neighborhoods. The waterfront was where San Francisco saw much of its commercial activity during the 19th and early 20th centuries, with ships pouring into the city’s docks and facilitating an international and domestic trade that was vital to the city’s economic position. Much as New York City exploded in size during the 18th and 19th centuries because it was a port city, San Francisco saw a similar expansion because of its maritime links to East Asia, Europe, and the Eastern United States. The waterfront was also crucial in the reconstruction of San Francisco, as it was where ships carrying humanitarian aid docked in the days and weeks following the disaster. Burnham also recognized the importance of the waterfront in his 1905 report, calling for its “indefinite expansion,” even as he privileged more expensive reforms such as the construction of parks and boulevards.

Much of the financial and commercial capital of San Francisco was centered in the region around Market Street, and in the waterfront docks blocks away. In this relatively concentrated area of real estate, rapid reconstruction would have an outsized effect on the city’s political economy. Focusing on the waterfront would enable capitalists to consolidate their grip over the city’s trade ties, and over the laborers who kept this trade moving by unloading and loading ships. Before Oakland became the center of trans-Pacific trade along the West Coast, San Francisco was the Bay Area’s shipping hub. San Francisco’s waterfront was the site of dramatic confrontations between labor and capital over the control of trade, and over the future of the commercial urban landscape. For immediate and long-term reasons, then, Manson’s focus on developing the waterfront was tied to the interests of capital.

Capital Flows

Capital flows from the East Coast privileged the short-term nature of the Manson plan over the idealistic and ostentatious designs of Burnham. The Burnham contingency failed to secure the necessary financing from both the federal government and New York banks that would have allowed for their bold and expensive plans. They failed to secure a loan from the federal government, and they also failed to secure the $100 million that they requested from New York banks.

New York investors were understandably fearful of such wholesale and indiscriminate financial commitments in the aftermath of such a potent disaster. Instead, these investors sided with Manson and the rapid reconstructionists. Rozario explains that “the imperatives of development encouraged local leaders to try to entice outside investment by dismantling objectives to the movement of capital. Their unintended legacy was to increase the influence of financiers over development patterns in a city once proud of its independence from Eastern investors.” San Francisco’s Manson contingency tied itself to the whims of New York investors in embracing rapid reconstruction. Financial links between the two cities became more pronounced, but this was probably not an overly alarming development for Manson and San Francisco capitalists. Post 1906, capitalists needed capital for reconstruction wherever they could obtain it, and New York offered deep reserves.

The many links between East Coast investors and San Francisco may have been more distressing to Leland Stanford, the founder of Stanford University and one of the “Big Four” capitalists of the Central Pacific Railroad, along with Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker (whose son, Henry, backed the Burnham plan). In apocryphal memory, Stanford famously founded his University after being rebuffed by Harvard University President Charles Eliot. In actuality, there were many reasons Stanford founded a citadel of learning on the West Coast. It was not just an antagonism towards the “old money” of the East Coast (where, ironically, Stanford had been born) but also Stanford’s belief in cooperative association, and in training a generation of managers of labor, which led to the creation of Stanford in the 1880s. Nevertheless, Stanford’s proclivities about New York investment were irrelevant in 1906. He had died in 1893, just two years after his University had opened. The mansions of the “Big Four” had also been burned and destroyed in the 1906 disaster.

Part II to publish soon, on how neighborhoods such as the Western Addition and Chinatown resisted the city planners.

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