Hopeless Optimism: Framing Early Twentieth-Century Earthquakes as News and History in the Making

At the beginning of the twentieth century, disasters were thoroughly mediatized international events—they were experienced, retold, and represented against a backdrop of burgeoning modernization and ideologies stressing entrepreneurship and innovation. After an earthquake and fires destroyed large parts of San Francisco in April 1906, the survivors rallied behind visions of their city rebuilt grander, more beautiful, and prosperous than ever. To maintain this vision, Californians had to strategically tweak reality—including an interpretation of the disaster in which the earthquake’s role in the city’s destruction was severely downplayed. Rather than being the catastrophic effect of an unpredictable natural force, the events were reframed as a large-scale but ultimately manageable accident that conveniently created new business opportunities and a tabula rasa for urban renewal. As writers like Kevin Rozario argue, this attempt to make (economic) sense of disaster belongs to a larger “culture of calamity” in the United States, where catastrophic events are incorporated into a national narrative of creative destruction. While such optimistic inscriptions of disaster into an ongoing history of progress and growth might help survivors to come to terms with loss and trauma, they also hamper processes of disaster mitigation and prevention, effectively rendering a society more vulnerable to future calamity. In this chapter, I want to expand upon this argument by juxtaposing the 1906 San Francisco disaster with US reactions to the 1908 Messina earthquake. Here—as already in narratives surrounding the 1906 disaster—Anglo-Saxon heroism and entrepreneurship are contrasted with the Southern Europeans’ alleged backwardness and irrationality. Using examples from newspapers and magazines, but also insights from disaster sociology and psychology, I discuss how such narratives are informed by “Western” ideology on the one hand but also arise from (and amplify) general misconceptions about human behavior during times of crisis on the other.