Social class, race, and labor played a huge role in what happened—and how the city recovered.
By Marc Norton
February 1, 2024 - 48hills
I picked up a copy of Joanna L. Dyl’s excellent 2019 book, Seismic City: An Environmental History of San Francisco’s 1906 Earthquake, purely by chance, while I was doing some research in the ongoing effort to save the Valley Street Earthquake Shack Cottage. But I was immediately drawn into the book by its class struggle perspective on a subject that is usually told only as a disaster story.
Joanne Dyl is a professor at the Claremont Colleges, lecturing on environmental history and environmental justice. Her book transcends the usual “natural” disaster mythology of the 1906 earthquake, instead positing that “Disasters do not occur out of context but are embedded in the political structures, economic systems and social orders of the societies in which they take place.”
In other words, people and our rulers make choices about how and where we live, choices which can and do lead to disasters that in turn often have profound effects on the economic, social, environmental and political world in which we live.
“This book,” Dyl writes, “asks what disaster capitalism meant for the city’s working people in an era of open conflict between labor and capital across the country and in the streets of San Francisco.” Needless to say, the fundamental conflict between the working class and the capitalist class has not gone away.
The hidden political history of SF’s 1906 earthquake and fire—and what it means today
Greg
Paris, February 3 2024 - The struggle continues and European farmers are not happy.
