1906 San Francisco Earthquake

By the time the misfortune struck, half the population of California was living in San Francisco and its far towns. The city included biggish populations of immigrants from Italy, Ireland, and China, as well as emigres from the east.

Gold, the railroad, and the many an(prenominal) industries that both made possible had turned many of San Francisco's citizens into millionaires nearly everyplacenight. Many of these so-c whollyed California Bonanza Kings had helped get along the city's prestigious structures, luxury hotels, and palatial mansions. The downtown business partition included many striking steel structures, and the demand for house throughout the city had increased the number of houses from 50,000 in 1900 to 85,000 in 1906.

The city was substantial enough to support tierce major newspapers and one promising newcomer, as well as a variety of smaller papers and specialty publications; San Francisco's Chinatown district print three newspapers entirely in Chinese, for example. More newspapers were published crossways the bay in Oakland and in many of the surrounding towns. sensation of the most prominent was William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Examiner, which he had run since taking over from his father in 1887. In 1906, Hearst was across the country, in the diaphragm of an ultimately unsuccessful run for the governorship of New York; the Examiner's work go along under an expert editorial staff back in San Francisco.

The publishers set out with the decision to produce a work that would leave no elbow room for any other history on this subject, a line for which they had the exceed facilities and the most perfect equipment . . . The services of the two best historical writers in the united States were secured within an hour after(prenominal) the first news of the catastrophe was received . . . A large staff of photographers gravel supplied illustrations for this great historical work . . . These illustrations have special interest and value because they are made from positive photographs taken by trained and skilled photographers.

Yet, while reporters from all the city's papers were struggling to continue to do their job, all three report Row editors soon had to concede their own devastation.

They set about "the newspaperman's nightmare: the greatest natural catastrophe that has ever happened in the United States and, by the end of the day, not a single newspaper's presses left to print the story."

________. "Hundreds Dead!" The San Francisco Daily News, 18 April 1906, 1.

Linthicum and vacuous write, "The Call editorial and mechanical departments were totally destroyed in a few minutes" early in the afternoon, and the gutted building later "stood proudly erect, lifting its whited head above the ruin analogous some leprous thing and with all its windows, dead, staring eye that looked upon nothing but a wilderness."

The local press, while depicting the horrifying extent of the disaster, also tried to remain optimistic. By Saturday, the Chronicle's headlines were proclaiming "Residence Districts Out of Danger . . . Faith Abounds in United City." The crisis was passing, and the city, and its newspapers, had survived.

________. "Hundreds Are Killed; Thousands Are Homeless." Richmond Times-Dispatch, 19 April, 1906, 1.

The worst of the initial blazes raged in the downtown district, right along Newspaper Row. Newspaper editors, reporters, and the journeymen printers who operated
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