A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit Read Free Book Online Page A

waited, it being useless to try to save anything but a few immediate necessities, and when the intense heat made it necessary to move, they get up with a laugh.”
    The socialist novelist Jack London, whose birthplace in the poor district south of Market Street burned in the quake aftermath, agreed: “Remarkable as it may seem, Wednesday night while the whole city crashed and roared into ruin, was a quiet night. There were no crowds. There was no shouting and yelling. There was no hysteria, no disorder. I passed Wednesday night in the path of the advancing flames, and in all those terrible hours I saw not one woman who wept, not one man who was excited, not one person who was in the slightest degree panic-stricken. The most perfect courtesy obtained. Never in all San Francisco’s history, were her people so kind and courteous as on this night of terror.” Though almost no one seemed terrified either once the shaking stopped. People watched the firestorms with detachment.
    Charles B. Sedgewick ’s earthquake was so ennobling it begins to test the limits of belief, though more moderate accounts of the same phenomenon are widespread. He wrote, “The strong helped the weak with their burdens, and when pause was made for refreshment, food was voluntarily divided; the milk was given to the children, and any little delicacies that could be found were pressed upon the aged and the ailing.” And then he says, “Would that it could always be so!” And here you get to the remarkable fact that people wish some aspects of disasters would last. He continues, “No one richer, none poorer than his fellow; no coveting the other’s goods; no envy; no greedy grasping for more than one’s fair share of that given for all. True it is, I reflected, that money is the root of all evil, the curse of our civilization, seeing that it is the instrument which frail mortals use to take unjust advantages. What a difference those few days when there was no money, or when money had no value!”
    Money was irrelevent for many of the transactions: food was given away, and the public kitchens ran into the summertime. And cash was in short supply, so people made their own. One newspaper reported, “Owing to the fact that every bank in the Bay Counties has been more or less injured, to the fact that every reserve bank has been destroyed in San Francisco, that the coin and currency in the vaults will not be recoverable for several weeks, the citizens of San Francisco and Northern California are quietly using bills of exchange, private checks, and ordinary notes as currency. This . . . is a sign of the faith of Californians in the stability of their communities.” Other forms of relief included donated clothing and free medical care. The U.S. Post Office at San Francisco forwarded unstamped mail, often written on scraps and oddments, from the survivors to destinations around the country. There were thieves, opportunists, and people who refused to help the needy, but the citizens for the most part seem to have entered a phase of solidarity that crossed many social divides and to have felt for each other deeply. There were callous and fearful authorities who lashed out, but also institutions such as the post office that just quietly broke the rules to make life a little less disastrous. For Sedgewick, the disaster was a corrective to a society poisoned by money.
    No one had a better time of it than the journalist who published a piece in her San Francisco newspaper, the Bulletin , eleven days after the quake, titled “How It Feels to Be a Refugee and Have Nothing in the World, by Pauline Jacobson, Who Is One of Them.” Jacobson, an observant Jew and playful writer who had studied philosophy at the University of California, plunges straight into the reasons for that joy that hovers around the other accounts. She had lost everything in the earthquake (except, unlike the majority of her fellow citizens, her job), gone over to Oakland to buy “a stock of