Progressives, with President Theodre Roosevelt quietly cheering them on from the sidelines, were guilty of unleashing a violent, divisive drama in a city that badly needed an intermission from chaos in order to heal.”
The city administrators made only minor changes in its safety infrastructure and rebuilt without improvements to the building standards and codes. The forests of the Pacific Coast were logged for lumber as far north as Washington State, and thousands of horses were worked to death to speedily rebuild the city. San Francisco arose again, a city with the same general institutions, injustices, and divisions, extraordinary still in some ways, ordinary in others. The political fracas was part of business as usual—self-interest, corruption, and the plays of power.
What became of that moment when everything was different? What are the unseen, far-reaching consequences of an event? With what scale can you weigh an event that affects a million people or more? What of the differences that are immeasurable, a sense of possibility or a sense of grief that redirects a life? What if one minor figure who will come to have a major impact is shaped by that event? What if the consequences of an event begin so quietly they are imperceptible for decades even if they come to affect millions? Many events plant seeds, imperceptible at the time, that bear fruit long afterward.
Dorothy Day was eight and a half when the earthquake struck. She was then the odd, thoughtful third child of a racetrack journalist; she is now, nearly three decades after her death, the revered founder of a radical movement with more than a hundred centers still active in the United States alone and a candidate for sainthood in the Catholic Church. She was already looking for something beyond the usual pleasures and woes of childhood, a hungry reader, a voyager into the neighbors’ churches and religions, a strong-willed child full of longing. At eight, her apprehensions of God as “a great noise that became louder and louder, and approached nearer and nearer to me until I woke up sweating with fear and shrieking for my mother” got mixed up with her remembrance of the earthquake—“the noise which kept getting louder and louder, and the keen fear of death makes me think now that it might have been due only to the earthquake.”
The quake itself “started with a deep rumbling and the convulsions of the earth started afterward, so that the earth became a sea which rocked our house in a most tumultuous manner.” Her father pulled her older brothers from their beds, her mother grabbed her younger sister, and Day was left in a big brass bed that rolled around the floor of the family’s house in Oakland. She was equally struck by the social aftermath. In the 1930s, she wrote, “What I remember most plainly about the earthquake was the human warmth and kindliness of everyone afterward. For days refugees poured out of burning San Francisco and camped in Idora Park and the race track in Oakland. People came in their night clothes; there were new-born babies. Mother and all our neighbors were busy from morning to night cooking hot meals. They gave away every extra garment they possessed. They stripped themselves to the bone in giving, forgetful of the morrow. While the crisis lasted, people loved each other.”
Love in Practice
“While the crisis lasted, people loved each other.” Day remembered this all her life, and she dedicated that long life to trying to realize and stabilize that love as a practical force in meeting the needs of the poor and making a more just and generous society. Because of that moment of the earthquake and moments of social engagement afterward, she was able to see this as a reality she had already tasted rather than as an abstract possibility. But the road toward it was a long one. After the earthquake, her family—which had lived in Oakland only a few years—sold the furniture for cash and got on a train to Chicago. They
The city administrators made only minor changes in its safety infrastructure and rebuilt without improvements to the building standards and codes. The forests of the Pacific Coast were logged for lumber as far north as Washington State, and thousands of horses were worked to death to speedily rebuild the city. San Francisco arose again, a city with the same general institutions, injustices, and divisions, extraordinary still in some ways, ordinary in others. The political fracas was part of business as usual—self-interest, corruption, and the plays of power.
What became of that moment when everything was different? What are the unseen, far-reaching consequences of an event? With what scale can you weigh an event that affects a million people or more? What of the differences that are immeasurable, a sense of possibility or a sense of grief that redirects a life? What if one minor figure who will come to have a major impact is shaped by that event? What if the consequences of an event begin so quietly they are imperceptible for decades even if they come to affect millions? Many events plant seeds, imperceptible at the time, that bear fruit long afterward.
Dorothy Day was eight and a half when the earthquake struck. She was then the odd, thoughtful third child of a racetrack journalist; she is now, nearly three decades after her death, the revered founder of a radical movement with more than a hundred centers still active in the United States alone and a candidate for sainthood in the Catholic Church. She was already looking for something beyond the usual pleasures and woes of childhood, a hungry reader, a voyager into the neighbors’ churches and religions, a strong-willed child full of longing. At eight, her apprehensions of God as “a great noise that became louder and louder, and approached nearer and nearer to me until I woke up sweating with fear and shrieking for my mother” got mixed up with her remembrance of the earthquake—“the noise which kept getting louder and louder, and the keen fear of death makes me think now that it might have been due only to the earthquake.”
The quake itself “started with a deep rumbling and the convulsions of the earth started afterward, so that the earth became a sea which rocked our house in a most tumultuous manner.” Her father pulled her older brothers from their beds, her mother grabbed her younger sister, and Day was left in a big brass bed that rolled around the floor of the family’s house in Oakland. She was equally struck by the social aftermath. In the 1930s, she wrote, “What I remember most plainly about the earthquake was the human warmth and kindliness of everyone afterward. For days refugees poured out of burning San Francisco and camped in Idora Park and the race track in Oakland. People came in their night clothes; there were new-born babies. Mother and all our neighbors were busy from morning to night cooking hot meals. They gave away every extra garment they possessed. They stripped themselves to the bone in giving, forgetful of the morrow. While the crisis lasted, people loved each other.”
Love in Practice
“While the crisis lasted, people loved each other.” Day remembered this all her life, and she dedicated that long life to trying to realize and stabilize that love as a practical force in meeting the needs of the poor and making a more just and generous society. Because of that moment of the earthquake and moments of social engagement afterward, she was able to see this as a reality she had already tasted rather than as an abstract possibility. But the road toward it was a long one. After the earthquake, her family—which had lived in Oakland only a few years—sold the furniture for cash and got on a train to Chicago. They
Similar Books
