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1906 MEDIA RACISM REPORT CARD

Jeff Elliott Leave a comment

Raise a weak cheer for the Santa Rosa newspapers in 1906; their reporting on people of color was certainly better than the two previous years, but that only means the dial was turned down slightly from red-zone disgusting levels.

Start with the Great Earthquake: Four Chinese men and a Japanese man died that horrible morning, all at either the Saint Rose or Occidental hotels. Hooray that the papers didn’t refer to them as “Chinks” or “Japs,” but they were identified only by race, whereas Whites usually had their occupation and/or place of death described. (For the record, two of the Chinese men were merchants, two were cooks, and the Japanese man worked as a dishwasher at the St. Rose.) But any effects of the quake in Santa Rosa’s “Chinatown” on Second Street and non-fatal injuries of community members were ignored. Sure, perhaps there was no damage there and no one was harmed, but that’s very hard to believe, considering it was only two blocks from the worst of the fires and devastation. More likely that it was a textbook example of racism by omission.

The most contentious racial incident occurred in March, when a local bricklaying contractor misled African-American workers from Los Angeles into coming here to break a strike. A group of out-of-town masons confronted a Black man in a bar, mistakenly believing that he was part of the group from LA, and a fight broke out. The two newspapers printed quite different accounts of the incident; in the version told by the Republican, the man was attacked by a mob – but in the Press Democrat, he was a troublemaker who “ran amuck.”

Press Democrat editor Ernest L. Finley gets both the highest and lowest marks for racial coverage that year. In December, the newspaper ran a perfectly matter-of-fact report about “Charles Jefferson, a colored man” being assaulted for tipping his hat to a White woman. Yet a few months earlier, the paper had printed a ginned-up story about “a foxy Chinaman. Ah Wang” who supposedly allowed himself to be arrested to gain a free ride from Geyserville to Santa Rosa. That story, complete with pidgin dialect, read like a tale whipped up in a saloon. It was a shameful throwback to the tired, racist crap that the PD routinely published in years past.

FOXY CHINK A GOOD JESTER
Gets Free Ride From Geyserville to Santa Rosa, and After Minute or Two in Jail Pays His Fine

Talk about a foxy Chinaman. Ah Wang holds the record, aided and abetted by a well known Santa Rosa lawyer, Reuben M. Swain, Esq., Referee in bankruptcy, etc.

Ah Wang was tried before the Geyserville justice on Wednesday on a charge of having attempted to induce a young girl there to enter his room. He was acquitted on this charge, as the evidence did not sustain the complaint. Then a second complaint was filed against him, and he was convicted and fined twenty-five dollars or twenty-five days in the county jail.

He was brought to jail here, and no sooner had he been given into the custody of the officer in charge of the county bastille than he set about paying his fine.

In the eyes of the law after his entry and reception in jail and the turning of the key in the lock he had served one day of his sentence and consequently in order to regain his liberty he had only to put up twenty-four dollars. He had some money and borrowed the rest from his attorney, Mr. Swain, who had been to Geyserville to defend him. He then paid his fine.

It seems that the Celestial desired to make the trip to Santa Rosa anyway, and by having the constable bring him to jail he saved the price of the face [sic] from the northern town. By going to jail for a few minutes he served a day of his sentence and thus saved another dollar.

“Me heap sabee law, you bet, I likee advice Judge Swain, you bet,” was his gleeful comment.

– Press Democrat, August 16, 1906
WHITE MAN HITS COLORED MAN
Attack Made at the Corner of Third and Main Streets on Thursday Afternoon

Charles Jefferson, a colored man, who has been employed as stableman in a stable on lower Fourth Street, was the victim of an assault on Thursday afternoon at Third and Main streets at the hands of a white man.

The colored man lifted his hat to a passing lady, whose son keeps his horse at the stable, as she was approaching a buggy at the sidewalk. The perpetrator of the assault stepped up and with the exclamation: “I’ll teach you to take off your hat to women in this country,” struck Jefferson a violent blow in the mouth and felled him to the ground, and then, according to the statement of Contractor Rushing, who says he witnessed the assault, kicked him while down.

Jefferson could make no effort catch his assailant. Contractor Rushing tried to stop him as he ran off. The injured man later swore out a John Doe warrant for his assailant’s arrest in Judge Atchinson’s court, and the warrant was given to Constable Boswell to put into execution. The lady to whom Jefferson said he doffed his cap called at the police station and said the attack on the colored man was entirely unprovoked. She did not see Jefferson’s salute, as it happened, and said it would have been all right anyway, as she had seen the man frequently when she went to the stable with her horse, and had always found his respectful. Jefferson’s face was badly cut.

– Press Democrat, December 21, 1906

A COLORED MAN IS BRUTALLY ASSAULTED

Because a colored man attempted to be polite to Mrs. Birdie Miller on Third street Thursday evening, he was brutally assaulted. He was first knocked down by a vicious blow in the mouth, and then kicked in the face while he was prostate on the ground. The man who made the assault ran away in a cowardly fashion after injuring the man he assaulted. Mrs. Miller is incensed at the treatment given the colored man who had spoken to her, and so expressed herself to Justice A. J. Atchinson and others after assault. The man works in a livery stable where Mrs. Miller’s son keeps his his horse and she drives in there frequently. It has come to a pretty pass when an inoffensive man is brutally assaulted for being polite.

Contractor W. E. Rushing witnessed the assault and he characterizes it as a piece of dastardly work. He attempted to overtake the fleeting man, but was unsuccessful, and later informed the officers where the man was employed and gave a description of him.

Charles Jefferson is the man assaulted and he bears a reputation of being peaceable. He has never been in trouble during the months he has been in Santa Rosa and he deeply regrets the unfortunate occurance. He was given no opportunity to defend himself and the savage kick he received in the face opened a large place on his forehead between the eyes from which blood flowed freely. Jefferson said later he would like to be turned loose with the man who struck him in a field so he could get a chance at him.

A warrant was sworn to by Jefferson for the arrest of his assailant and Constable Boswell made a search for the man without avail Thursday evening. The man was seen by several persons and later talked to others of what he had done and will be pointed out to the officers at the earliest possible moment and taken into custody.

– Santa Rosa Republican, December 21, 1906

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1906 EARTHQUAKE: WHAT WE KNOW WE DON’T KNOW

Jeff Elliott Leave a comment

This wraps up the core 1906 Santa Rosa earthquake series (except for a discussion of the relief fund, which requires peering into the following year). There are still a slew of coming items that touch upon the disaster in some way – search for the tag “earthquake 1906” to review them all. I have also corrected and/or added new material to some (okay, most) earlier articles since they were first posted, so you might want to take another look at them.

There’s still lots of original research that could be done, particularly in creating a better estimate of how many people died, a topic discussed previously in “Body Counts, Part II.” In San Francisco, city archivist Gladys Hansen and others expanded their fatality list from 478 names to over 3,000, finding many who were critically injured in the city but died elsewhere. There’s no question that similar research here would turn up far more than the 76 known killed; the majority of serious injuries in Santa Rosa occured in hotels and rooming houses, where almost everyone was an out-of-towner – a salesman, someone traveling through, a friend or family relative.

Casualty hunting aside, researching the 1906 San Francisco disaster is a far easier task than examining its little sister in Santa Rosa. There are at least four books currently in print that promise to reveal the “true story” of what happened in the jeweled city, and each successfully tells its particular aspect of the tale (the best of the lot, in my opinion, is Fradkin’s “The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906“). Each of those books has the advantage of building upon a mountain of previous writings about the disaster; in Santa Rosa, however, the record is mostly blank.

Santa Rosa was not San Francisco, where three ultra-competitive dailies rushed out special editions with the latest details (and rumors), printed at regular newspaper plants in nearby Oakland. Santa Rosa’s media was limited to a flyer-sized edition cranked out on a newsletter press at the town’s business school. Nor did the local press have journalists experienced in wrestling with such a momentous story; the muckraking editor of the Republican apparently fled town after the quake, leaving the narrative of Santa Rosa’s most dramatic days in the hands of Press Democrat editor Ernest L. Finley, who had no newspaper experience outside of publishing his own small town daily.

No descriptions of what actually happened in Santa Rosa that awful morning ever appeared in the meager editions of the Democrat-Republican paper, which is quite understandable; with space at such a premium, best to use it as a broadsheet, informing residents about the whereabouts of displaced persons and temporary locations of stores, reports on disaster related civic matters, and whatnot. And besides, newspapers in that era often didn’t report on news that was already common knowledge; for example, it was never announced in the Democrat-Republican that all Santa Rosa saloons were closed after the quake, even though that was a significant event for all residents (well, all male residents). Yet even though space was so tight, column inches were available for daily updates about the situation in San Francisco, and by the end of the month, there was room for sensationalist tidbits about a midwestern scandal and LA murder.

But the silence over events of those traumatic days continued after normal publication of the Press Democrat and Santa Rosa Republican resumed. No recollections appeared on the first anniversary, and the paper didn’t even print a major 1908 speech that described the aftermath, and which was written by the PD’s own former city editor for the dedication of the new courthouse. Finley himself skated over the quake in his 1937 county history, and wrote directly about those days only once and with nostalgia, describing how he whipped together the temporary printing plant.

Finley was also an indefatigable civic booster and no fool, so it can be assumed that he minded his words knowing there was widespread national interest in Santa Rosa’s calamity. Left intentionally unmentioned were probably a hundred details to downplay the awfulness of the situation. For example, farmer Martin Read brought eggs to sell a few days after the quake and noted in a letter that there was a smell from bodies still unrecovered. Had Finley even mentioned something like that, it surely would have been republished in newspaper headlines as, “Stench of Death Lingers Over Santa Rosa.” Instead, fluff fillers such as this appeared in the Democrat-Republican: “Property in Santa Rosa will soon be at a premium, and worth more than ever before, because Santa Rosa is going to be a better and more prosperous town than it has ever been.”

There’s also a gaping hole in our knowledge because of papers missing on the microfilm for both the Press Democrat and Republican between May 3-18 (presumably a snafu at the town library, which archived the newspapers). We can somewhat reconstruct what happened in this period by looking at what was picked up by other editors. In this period the official death count was upped to 69, the city declared the official value of damage at $3 million, labor was compulsory for any able-bodied male expecting food from the relief donations, and the city declared it was nearly out of cash for clean-up efforts. All stuff important enough to make the Oakland and San Francisco news, but much is obviously lost that might have filled in the picture. A major area of research can yet be done in reading microfilm of nearby papers – Petaluma, Healdsburg, Sebastopol, and Napa – to see if there’s other gleanings from those editions of the Press Democrat, and further hints at what Finley didn’t say.


Main Street, south of Courthouse Square. The mostly-cleared lots on the right of the street were the sites of the Grand and the Eagle Hotels. Detail of image courtesy Larry Lapeere

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1906 EARTHQUAKE: FORWARD INTO THE PAST

Jeff Elliott Leave a comment

There’s no disputing that the 1906 earthquake changed Santa Rosa forever, and it’s easy to offer a glib generalization that the disaster hurled the town into the Twentieth Century. I’ve certainly suggested that here in a few posts. But I’ve come to realize the truth is the opposite – that the earthquake thwarted meaningful progress, and entrenched Santa Rosa in its 19th Century ways.

Santa Rosa certainly looked more cosmopolitan a few years afterwards. The fires swept away the jumble of 19th century buildings that gave the downtown a “Wild West” appearance, with most stores having ornate Victorian cast-iron façades and hitching posts at the curb. In their place rose steel-framed buildings in the Louis Sullivan style – practical, sturdy, and mostly plain. In pre-earthquake photos, downtown could have been Main Street, Dodge City; in newer pictures, it was Commerce Boulevard, Modernburg USA.

Looks deceive; these were just new buildings in the same old town. There were no infrastructure changes in the disaster’s wake. The Civil War-era layout of the streets was unchanged; the water system remained perpetually on the brink of collapse; Santa Rosa still didn’t have a single public-owned park (unless you count the cemetery) and the blight of 1st Street – ramshackle sheds and barns blocking access to the creek and a redlight district that stretched over two blocks – was left alone.

It didn’t have to turn out this way. Living here at the time was William H. Willcox , a renowned architect who intended to build an auditorium large enough to host state or even national events. Willcox also proposed a design for an expansive water park along the creek. But once the quake hit, nothing more was mentioned in the newspapers about either project; Santa Rosa was focused on quickly rebuilding what was, not taking a little time to think about what it should be.

Santa Rosa’s fatal flaw in the early 20th century (and still today, I’ll opine) was that it had grand ambitions and a terrible lack of foresight. “Build a better and greater Santa Rosa,” the City Council proclaimed right after the earthquake, just as there was a mandate the year before for the population to double by 1910. Both messages shared the same underlying notion: Build, build, build, as fast as you can. Planning may be okay for lesser towns, but we’re in a hurry to grow big quickly, and if we just have more buildings and a bunch of new people, the place will be transformed into a majestic city. Somehow.

Also curbing progress after the earthquake was the dearth of investigative journalism to shine a light on the town’s problems. This was the Golden Age of muckraking, and probably every metropolitan area in America had at least one newspaper scratching away at corruption, ineptitude, and graft. For a year-and-a-half before the disaster, the Republican newspaper was leased to a pair of out-of-town firebrands who weren’t afraid to peer under Santa Rosa’s dirty rocks. They exposed that this became a “wide open town” whenever horses were running at the track, with Fourth Street turned into something like a lawless miner’s camp – and that it was a problem that apparently had been an open secret for decades. Then just a couple of weeks before the quake, they further charged that city leaders were in cahoots with a “scheming coterie of gentlemen who manage to protect their private interests by the conduct of the city government through the present administration.” If they had kept up the call for reform, it’s likely that Santa Rosa would have followed San Francisco’s lead in holding Grand Jury hearings concerning the town’s political elite. But after publishing a single edition the afternoon of the earthquake, the reform-minded team apparently left town, and the Republican lapsed a week later to the control of mild-mannered owner and former editor Alan Lemmon.

The “Democrat-Republican” that spanned about two weeks was a joint effort in name only – it was clearly the creation of Press Democrat editor Ernest L. Finley, always the uncritical booster of Santa Rosa’s business interests. After a premiere editorial calling for citizens to stand “shoulder to shoulder” in egalitarian spirit, the following issues used the precious little space available to mainly push for widening downtown streets, with the apparent hope of the town someday having a San Francisco-sized streetcar system to serve that coming city of majesty that would sprawl over the entire Santa Rosa Plain.

The one saving feature of the situation is that “we are all in the same boat.” As a result of the complete destruction of the city’s business interests, no man has any advantage over his neighbor. To put it frankly, we are all broke, and the moment anybody asks us to liquidate “the jig is up.” It is only by standing shoulder to shoulder for the rehabilitation of Santa Rosa, and showing our faith in the future and confidence in each other, that the great problem which now confronts this community can possibly be worked out. We will all pay when we can.
– Democrat-Republican, April 21

Sonoma County will have to build a new courthouse, and the county will have to be bonded for the purpose. While we are about it, we might as well build it right. A modern, up-to-date structure is the only thing that will fit the bill.

Property in Santa Rosa will soon be at a premium, and worth more than ever before, because Santa Rosa is going to be a better and more prosperous town than it has ever been.

One of the first things the City Council should attend to is the establishment of the new street lines. All the business streets should and must be widened, and now is the time to do it.

– Democrat-Republican, April 23

For a long time it has been generally recognized that the majority of Santa Rosa’s business streets were too narrow, and now that the opportunity for widening them has arrived it must be embraced. It will only be a few years until electric cars are occupying all our principal streets, and in addition to this the ordinary demands of business must be considered. Third, Fourth, Fifth, A, B, Main, Mendocino and D streets can now be improved in the respect noted without difficulty and practically without cost, and the authorities should see to it that the lines are set back before any of the foundations of the new buildings talked of are laid. We have it in our power to make Santa Rosa one of the finest and most attractive little cities in the whole country, and we will be playing false to our own best interests if we fail to do so.
– Democrat-Republican, April 30

“First meeting of the Board of Supervisors and County Commissioners after the Earthquake” on April 23, five days after the disaster. According to the Democrat-Republican, little was done at the meeting except ordering cleanup of wreckage at the courthouse, seen to the left. Note that everyone wearing a hat has an access pass in the hatband.

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