Recovery for whom? Social conflict after the San Francisco earthquake and fire, 1906-1915

On April 18, 1906, a strong earthquake followed by a three-day fire devastated the city of San Francisco. Close to seven hundred people died and three quarters of the city's population lost their homes. The fire burned an area of over four square miles, including almost the entire business and industrial districts. While the fire burned, refugees gathered in city parks with what belongings they managed to take with them. At the end of the three days, about 250,000 people were living without food in makeshift tents and shacks in parks and scattered lots outside the burned area.; This enormous catastrophe not only levelled much of built San Francisco, it also tore at the social fabric of the city. The great disruption to the structures of everyday life brought San Franciscans an unusual opportunity to experiment with social policy during the difficult decade that ensued. A brief moment was opened during which relief and charity agencies, municipal governments, labor organizations, and elite businessmen tried out new solutions to the problems of housing, unemployment, and poverty. Each group brought a different set of biases to their efforts to shape relief efforts, as did poor working people themselves. Initial hopes for the remaking of San Francisco into a model of social cohesion and prosperity quickly faded. Instead, economic need drove various groups into repeated conflict over the use of limited relief resources.; For an extended period following the earthquake and fire, many working class San Franciscans demonstrated a strong sense of entitlement to aid. They struggled against the efforts of social workers, city administrations, and the business community to restrict and deny them assistance. At the same time, the difficulties that businessmen experienced in recovering from the disaster encouraged them to strengthen their dominance over the city's politics as well as its social and economic policies. In the end, promising social programs succumbed to class prejudices and commercial opportunism. As business leaders placed their hopes for economic revival in the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, their determination to ensure the fair's success repeatedly undercut or eliminated efforts to help poor people.