San Francisco, the 1906 Earthquake, and the Progressive Era

Heather Cox Richardson

Recently, workers in San Francisco unearthed the ruins of the old city hall, destroyed in the 1906 earthquake.

That event has always fascinated me—not just the destruction caused by the quake itself, but the sense it has always given me that San Francisco in 1906 was a perfect example of Progressive Era America. Some of the worst destruction was caused not by the shaking earth, but by the fires that broke out in the cracked gas lines. As much as 90% of the damage in San Francisco has been attributed to the fires. The thought of the flames roaring up the streets of the city is one of those events that makes history human . . . and in this case, horrific.


Here, it seems to me, is a perfect image of both the potential of the Progressive Era to improve people’s lives—in this case, with gas lighting—and the deadly danger of that potential.

San Francisco has become for me the quintessential Progressive Era city for another reason, too. In 1905, a photographer attached a camera to a trolley car traveling along Market Street. The result was a nine-minute recording of urban life before the reforms of the Progressive Era. There are no stop signs, no traffic lights. Children are playing in the streets and running in front of the cars. People are walking, horses are pulling carts, and automobiles are in a free-for-all on undivided roads. It makes you realize how many of the world we take for granted today was, in fact, a product of the efforts of reformers to draw up some rules to make the modern world safer.

This film teaches really well (there are versions with music available on youtube, too).

It’s chilling to realize that most of the people in the film, going about their errands on busy Market Street in 1905, awoke to horrifying shaking at 5:12 AM on April 18, 1906, watched the City Hall crumble, and ran from the billowing flames.

Overlapping History Projects

Dan Allosso

It’s interesting and sometimes instructive when different threads of work occasionally overlap. I had this experience earlier in the week, when I turned from some brainstorming I was doing regarding the Historical Society’s RIHA program (thinking about how I might structure a proposal that incorporated some 19th-century American and British social innovators who lived on the fuzzy edge between religion and irreligion), back to my online Environmental History project. I’ve been dragging my feet completing the next video in that series, but I had some time yesterday afternoon, so I parked myself in the library’s coffee area determined to write up my notes on Theodore Steinberg’s Nature Incorporated, which is the basis for my next “chapter.”

For those unfamiliar with Steinberg’s book, it’s an insightful look at early New England textile industrialization, and how the social understanding of common resources gradually changed to allow corporations to completely control the Merrimack River from Lake Winnipiseogee to the ocean. Taken from his dissertation, Steinberg’s story of the gradual “instrumentalization” of natural resources leans heavily on the work of his advisor, Morton Horwitz, who showed (in The Transformation of American Law) how many of the most sweeping legal changes of the nineteenth century happened not as a result of legislative or executive action, but through seemingly insignificant lower court rulings and changes in contract law. This is clearly a missing link in the chain of “how the heck did we get here?!” that environmentalists have to deal with, so you can see why I want to highlight it in an “EH for regular people” series. But neither Steinberg’s book nor Horwitz’s are easy reads, so they’re easily overlooked outside the academy. So my task is to render the main ideas in 10-15 minutes, in plain English.

So here’s the overlap: around 1810, Boston merchants Francis Cabot Lowell and Nathan Appleton each individually seem to have visited Robert Owen’s New Lanark textile mills in Scotland. Lowell and Appleton took what they learned at Owen’s water-powered mills, and returned to Massachusetts to form the Boston Manufacturing Company on the Charles River and later, as the Boston Associates, developed the Merrimack. No doubt the size of New Lanark (Owen’s mills were the largest in Britain at the time) and the community that had been built to serve the mills suggested some of the new forms of social engineering the Boston Associates developed in Lawrence, Lowell, and Manchester. They had a different effect on Owen himself.

Robert Owen emigrated to Indiana in 1825 and established a socialist community called New Harmony, on the site of an earlier “Harmony” built by the followers of German pietist George Rapp. The New Harmony Working Men’s Institute (est. 1838) contains the oldest continuously operated library in Indiana. Owen’s son, Robert Dale Owen, became a leader of the Working Men’s Party in New York before entering politics as an Indiana Representative, corresponding with Lincoln about Emancipation, and writing a radical draft of the 14th Amendment. Both the Owens are claimed by social reformers, radicals, and secularists in Britain and America as founding fathers of their various movements.

Robert Owen’s story suggests that there was a moment of recognition, when he and others like him discovered the magnitude of the social forces they were manipulating. Why the Owens chose to respond to this discovery as they did, and the Lowells and Appletons as they did, might turn out to be a very interesting, very contemporary story.

Forward to the Past: Debt and Debtor's Prisons

Randall Stephens

How will historians understand the rise in unemployment and the increase in bankruptcy when they look back on our era? (See the graph here from www.uscourts.gov.) What are the historical and cultural ramifications of the economic downturn? Cycles of recession and depression mark major turning points in American history. The panics of 1837 and 1857 upset family life, toppled businesses, and can be charted through the rise in suicide rates and bankruptcies. The depressions of the 1890s and the 1930s shook the world.

In ages past one way to deal with all those folks who could not pay up was to throw them into the clink. If you gambled away your money and lived a profligate life in the 18th century, there was no safety net to catch you.

An entry in Mitchel P. Roth's, ed., Prisons and Prison Systems: A Global Encyclopedia (Greenwood Press, 2006) sheds light on London's famous debtor's prison:

FLEET PRISON. Built in the twelfth century, Fleet Prison became London's most famous debtors' prison and was the first building in London constructed for the specific purpose of being a gaol (jail). 11 was rebuilt numerous times and by the fourteenth century was holding; debtors, individuals convicted in the Court of Star Chamber, and those charged with contempt of the Royal Courts. Among its most distinguished prisoners was the poet John Donne, who spent a stint in Fleet Street in 1601, and later William Penn. It was demolished by the Great Fire of 1666 and then rebuilt. Partly because of its prominence as a jail for debtors and bankrupts, it was burned down once more during the 1780 Gordon Riots.

The Fleet Prison had a well-earned reputation for cruelty and corruption. The office of warden, or keeper, was considered a hereditary position. The position of keeper was a highly lucrative position with opportunities to earn fees for providing prisoners with food, lodging, and even short-term release. In the eighteenth century an individual purchased the office of the Keeper of the Fleet for 5,000 pounds. When he stepped down, he then sold the position to the deputy warden for the same price. During its heyday prisoners of both sexes mingled freely, leading one observer to describe it as the "largest brothel in England." Here women could improve their conditions by selling their bodies. The prison was usually overcrowded. In 1774 it held 243 debtors along with 475 members of their families who had nowhere else to go. The prison was finally closed in 1842. (105-106)

How did all fare in the colonies? Peter J. Coleman writes of the state of things in Pennsylvania in his book Debtors and creditors in America: Insolvency, Imprisonment for Debt, and Bankruptcy, 1607-1900 (Beard Books, 1999)

The early treatment of poor and insolvent debtors was not significantly more liberal or humane than in New York, New Jersey, or in some of the New England colonies. To be sure, the Frame of Government of 1682 embodied enlightened principles-that prisons should be workhouse-reformatories rather than mere places of punishment, and that prisoners should not have to support themselves or pay fees-but the legislature modified these concepts almost immediately (1683 and 1684) by requiring debtors to support themselves and by introducing the system of servitude for debt. Nevertheless, it proved exceedingly difficult to formulate acceptable rules governing debtor-creditor relations. The colonists quarreled among themselves and with the proprietor and his governors, and the Crown disallowed many of the early laws, including the act establishing the support and servitude systems and another of 1700 establishing (141)

Reformers began to challenge the system in force in the 19th century. (Click to enlarge the reformist paper to the right.) The following comes from the fabulously useful Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. This portion is from "Guided Readings: Pre-Civil War Reform":

Imprisonment for debt also came under attack. As late as 1816, an average of 600 residents of New York City were in prison at any one time for failure to pay debts. More than half owed less than $50. New York's debtor prisons provided no food, furniture, or fuel for their inmates, who would have starved without the assistance of relatives or the charity of humane societies. In a Vermont case, state courts imprisoned a man for a debt of just 54 cents, and in Boston a woman was taken from her three children as a result of a $3 debt.

Increasingly, reformers regarded imprisonment for debt as irrational, since imprisoned debtors were unable to work and pay off their debts. Piecemeal reform led to the abolition of debtor prisons, as states eliminated the practice of jailing people for trifling debts, and then forbade the jailing of women and veterans.

Here's a question to ask history students in the classroom. Could something like a debtors' prison come back in the western world? If so, what social or economic forces could lead to that. Is that an impossibility? If so, why?

The Roots of Contemporary American Political and Religious Conflict

Randall Stephens

Last year I used Rick Perlstein’s lively, entertaining, and insightful Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America for a course I teach on America in the 1960s. The students loved it. Perlstein’s dramatic narrative pulled us in.

At the outset Perlstein observes that by 1972 a sharp division existed between "'people who identified with what Richard Nixon stood for' and 'people who despised what Richard Nixon stood for' . . . Richard Nixon, now, is long dead. But these sides have hardly changed. We now call them 'red' or 'blue' America, and whether one or the other wins the temporary allegiances of 50 percent plus one of the electorate--or 40 percent of the electorate, or 60 percent of the electorate--has been the narrative of every election since." The book is compelling on a number of levels. Yet it lacks an appreciation for ways that America had been deeply divided in other eras.

Is the culture war that feeds our current political debates all that new? Hasn't America been split between warring factions for eons? Enter Barry Hankins. His new book Jesus and Gin: Evangelicalism, the Roaring Twenties, and Today's Culture Wars, spans over that rowdy decade and offers insight into ongoing political and religious conflicts.

The era from the 1930s to the 1980s, an era of relative religious stability, Hankins suggests, may have been the aberration. The pitched battles over immigration, alcohol, Darwinian evolution, obscenity laws, and public morality that riled Americans in the 20s "were a prologue to our own age," says Hankins. Like our era that period was "a time when religion was culturally central, participating fully in politics, media, stardom, social life, and scandal." Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, Daddy Grace, and Father Divine elbowed Charlie Chaplin, Al Joslon, and Clara Bow for newspaper headline space.

Hankins leads off with Warren Harding’s moral failings, "more repulsive than evil" in the words of a biographer. "There is a sense in which Harding’s story is the story of America during the Roaring Twenties," he remarks. The baptist president's religious life was thin, to put it mildly. His administration’s contempt for law, its moral degeneration, and the scandal that swirled around it defined the nation as well. Hankins similar treatment of moral crusades, scandalous religious leaders, and heated contests between liberals and conservatives has a contemporary ring to it.

History written through the eyes of the present, I’ve noticed, draws students in to the debates. Hankins does this well throughout Jesus and Gin. Hence, he notes that Edward J. Larson’s account of the Scopes Trial, "Summer for the Gods could not have been written between 1930 and 1980 for in that period the Scopes legend was taken for granted." In many ways the book is a comparative history that moves with ease between the Christian Right of the Reagan years and the late-Victorian moralizers of the 20s. (Though Hankins does note that there is no simple liberal-conservative split in the age of flappers and speakeasies.)

Hankins fittingly ends his with a rumination on "How the Roaring Twenties Set the Stage for the Culture Wars of Our Own Time." The major struggles of our era have roots that go back decades.

Like Perlstein’s sweeping history, Hankin’s book draws attention to the deeper political and religious clashes that shape current debates.

Higher Ed Jeremiads

Randall Stephens

Read Christopher Shea's review essay in the NYT: "The End of Tenure?" Quite a few American's outside the academy are mad as hell, and not going to take it anymore. Rumors of pampered academics tooling around their college towns in Maseratis are utterly cartoonish. But, something like that vision dominates popular thinking about the professor as aristocrat. (Anyone know how many, say, history professors actually work at schools with a 2-2 load? I'd bet money they're in the smallish minority.)

Should academics be accountable to the broader public for the writing and teaching that they do? Perhaps something like the UK's Research Assessment Exercise could be in American higher ed's future.

Anyhow, Shea considers several books that offer up nightmare scenarios of privilege or offer some suggestions for reform.

"The higher-ed jeremiads of the last generation came mainly from the right," says Shea. "But this time, it’s the tenured radicals — or at least the tenured liberals — who are leading the charge. [Andrew] Hacker is a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books and the author of the acclaimed study 'Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal,' while [Mark] Taylor, a religion scholar who recently moved to Columbia from Williams College, has taught courses that Allan Bloom would have gagged on ('Imagologies: Media Philosophy'). And these two books arrive at a time, unlike the early 1990s, when universities are, like many students, backed into a fiscal corner. Taylor writes of walking into a meeting one day and learning that Columbia’s endowment had dropped by 'at least' 30 percent. Simply brushing off calls for reform, however strident and scattershot, may no longer be an option.">>>