“If, as they say, God spanked the town
For being over-frisky,
Why did he burn the churches down,
And save Hotaling’s whiskey?”
This bit of doggerel might have made an apt introduction to British author Simon Winchester’s April 21 talk at Filoli about the historical significance of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
Appropriately, the author of “A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906” was speaking in Filoli’s elegant ballroom, just a few hundred feet east of the fault where the earth jerked more than 8 feet 100 years ago. The shaking was felt from Anaheim to Eureka.
The year 1906 was uniquely important in human history, Mr. Winchester told an audience of more than 100 earthquake buffs and Filoli supporters. “1906 represents a tipping point in how we humans react to natural disasters.”
Before 1906, natural disasters — earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis — were viewed as the work of an angry god, Mr. Winchester said.
After the great Lisbon earthquake of All Saints Day in 1755, the priests “rounded up all the heretics they could find and burned them,” Mr. Winchester said — “with the single exception of Voltaire.”
Similarly, when the Krakatoa eruption of 1883 spurred huge tsunamis, the mostly Hindu islands converted to Islam. “It was clearly the work of an angry Allah,” said Mr. Winchester, author of the book, “Krakatoa: the Day the World Exploded.”
The new Muslims placated Allah by killing the Dutch, who were white, western and ruling over them, Mr. Winchester observed. The catastrophe marked the “beginning of the end of Dutch rule, and the beginning of Indonesia.”
1906 was different
After the shaking earth flattened San Francisco in 1906, scientists and the authorities for the first time began looking down at the earth — rather than up to heaven — for natural explanations, Mr. Winchester said. “Rather than unleash the priests, they released the scientists.”Berkeley geologist Andrew Lawson headed the official Earthquake Investigation Commission. Its 1908 report tracked the break in the earth both north and south along “an uncannily straight line,” Mr. Winchester said.
The arrow-straight San Andreas Valley, where San Francisco’s water supply is stored, gave its name to the most famous earthquake fault in the world. The fault stretches 750 miles from Mendocino to the Salton Sea.
“This is the reason I wrote the book,” Mr. Winchester said. “For the first time in history, religion was put aside.
“Seismology was born 100 years ago.”
Not that religion was absent from the responses to the earthquake.
Mr. Winchester gleefully described how the earthquake rocketed a fringe evangelical movement into national prominence.
A fiery one-eyed preacher was inspiring converts to speak in tongues and give themselves to God in an old stable on Azusa Street in Los Angeles.
On April 15, he predicted a major manifestation, Mr. Winchester said. The prediction appeared in the Los Angeles Times. Two days later the most sinful city in the country was leveled. Ten thousand people came to the next revival meeting, when the preacher said, “I told you so.”
That “Azusa Street Revival” powered the Pentecostal movement, Mr. Winchester noted. The movement has gained enormous power, and has even reached the White House today.
Mr. Winchester’s talk was sponsored by Borel Private Bank & Trust Company; Bingham, Osborn & Scarborough, LLC; and Sand Hill Advisors, Inc., in conjunction with Filoli Center and the California Historical Society.
