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Chapter Title: INTRODUCTION

Book Title: Inventing Disaster Book Subtitle: The Culture of Calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood Book Author(s): CYNTHIA A. KIERNER Published by: University of North Carolina Press. (2019) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469652535_kierner.4

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1

I N T RO D U C T I O N

Perhaps because disasters are so commonplace in twenty- first- century America, responses to such occurrences—whether a tornado in Missouri, wildfires in California, or a hurricane on the Gulf Coast—are predictable, even ritualized, features of our political and cultural life. When disaster strikes, the news media quickly provide basic information about the inci- dent to people outside the affected area. Those reports gradually become more detailed and more expansive, quantifying losses of both lives and prop- erty and highlighting human- interest stories that generate sympathy for the suffering and admiration for volunteers providing assistance, either on the scene or remotely as facilitators and fund- raisers. Official and quasi- official groups—FEMA , the National Guard, the Red Cross—arrive to maintain order and provide relief, with varying degrees of effectiveness. In time, the affluent turn to insurance to recoup their losses, but for others, suffering and deprivation continue long after public sympathy wanes. Meanwhile, govern- ment and business leaders consider initiatives to prevent future disasters or limit their effects but mostly reject them as too expensive or inconvenient. Then another disaster occurs, and the entire process begins all over.

Experts struggle to provide a single concise definition for the term “dis- aster.” All agree that disasters involve collective or community suffering and not merely individual losses. Some favor quantitative measures—typically the number of fatalities or the dollar amount of property losses—as crite- ria for deciding whether an event qualifies for disaster status. Others argue that certain qualitative features—geographic scope, duration, length of fore- warning, speed of onset—are disasters’ defining attributes. Historians and social scientists see disaster less as an event than as a process that unfolds in its particular social and cultural context, exposing social fissures and ten- sions that engender robust and often revealing public debates and conflicts.1

Scholars in the interdisciplinary field of disaster studies reject the rhe- torical binary that distinguishes so- called natural disasters from those caused by human error or agency in favor of a spectrum of disaster causa-

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2 Introduction

tion. No disaster is purely the result of natural causes, they argue percep- tively, because “human decisions frequently exacerbate the effects of disas- ter agents, as earthquakes, for example, tear through areas that either should not have been populated in the first place or should have been retrofitted once the area’s vulnerability became clear.” In this sense, all disasters are to some degree “man- made,” no matter how much our current political dis- course chooses to cast them as “acts of God.” A hurricane becomes a dis- aster only when it intersects with humans—and that intersection becomes more likely when humans choose to live in hurricane- prone areas and when their leaders neglect to construct the levees and enforce the building codes needed to protect such vulnerable populations.2

At the same time, however much human agency can be responsible for any particular disaster, scholarly definitions of disaster do not embrace catastrophic events that are intentional or foreseeable. The deplorable mass shootings that have become appallingly routine in the United States are tragedies but not disasters because the resulting fatalities are both inten- tional and foreseeable. Nor can we categorize even the most costly or unex- pected military defeat as a disaster because death and destruction are always foreseeable as possible outcomes of war.

In this book, I use the term “disaster” to describe bad things that hap- pened that resulted in substantial and unintended losses of lives and prop- erty, measuring the significance of a particular episode primarily in terms of its larger cultural resonance. Inventing Disaster is less a descriptive narrative of specific incidents than a cultural history of the idea of disaster and of re- sponses to calamities ranging from shipwrecks and fires, on the one hand, to more seemingly “natural” phenomena, such as hurricanes and earthquakes, on the other. The book is not a comprehensive account of every disaster that occurred globally, or even in North America, between 1607 ( Jamestown) and 1889 ( Johnstown) but rather focuses on select occurrences—some fa- mous, many more less so—that help to explain how and why a modern cul- ture of disaster emerged incrementally during this period.

Understanding the historical and cultural roots of our contemporary culture of calamity is a prerequisite for assessing how we approach pre- vention, relief, and recovery efforts in our own disaster- ridden times. For one thing, our modern approach to disaster is rooted fundamentally in an Enlightenment- inspired confidence in humanity’s ability to conquer and control nature. Is that confidence sustainable now—indeed, was it ever? Should disaster prevention be a matter for government mandates, or for community voluntarism? Should disaster relief be a social priority, and, if

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Introduction 3

so, which people or entities should provide aid to disaster victims and how should such assistance be funded? In a democratic society, is disaster re- lief first and foremost an expression of sympathy, or an effort to maintain social order? When disaster strikes, who deserves sympathy and attention? Who decides? How do disaster stories, in the media and elsewhere, shape our often- conflicted understandings of why disasters happen and how we should plan for such occurrences and react to them in times of crisis? These questions, which were first pondered during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, continue to drive whatever debates we have about disasters in twenty- first- century America.

§ Hurricanes, floods, fires, and other calamities have afflicted people since time immemorial, but our own contemporary response to such episodes—what one historian has called “a new code of calamity eti-

quette”—is a relatively recent development.3 Inventing Disaster traces the gradual coalescence of this modern culture of disaster over nearly three cen- turies, in the British Atlantic world and then in the independent American republic. My story begins in Jamestown, England’s first American colony, where settlers died in large numbers from famine, disease, and other catas- trophes, though few outside Virginia knew much about their misery and fewer still sought to provide relief or help. It ends with the great flood that destroyed Johnstown, Pennsylvania, when a poorly constructed dam burst in May 1889, killing more than 2,000 people in what was the deadliest American disaster to date. Much like a twenty- first- century disaster—but very much unlike the fatalities at Jamestown—the flood brought hundreds of journal- ists (including illustrators) and relief workers (including the Red Cross) to Johnstown. It also generated a massive outpouring of public sympathy and charitable donations as well as post- disaster investigations and litigation. Although radio—and later television and social media—would make news of and opinions about future disasters travel even faster, public discourse about Johnstown was timely, vigorous, and varied. And like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Johnstown became a tourist attraction, as curious visitors snapped photos of the devastated area and took souvenirs from the piles of wreckage that engulfed the ruined community.4

This response to calamity, so prominently displayed in Johnstown and in the aftermath of other contemporary disasters, grew out of three inter- related developments that scholars associate with modernity, which I define broadly as the questioning worldview that both inspired and advanced from the Enlightenment’s celebration of reason and pursuit of knowledge, as well

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4 Introduction

as its resulting belief in the possibility of human progress.5 The first of these developments was the spread of information—knowledge, news, and nar- ratives—via travel, trade, and print, initially through the missives of govern- ment officials, explorers, and merchants and later by a more widely acces- sible world of print that represented diverse perspectives via newspapers, magazines, broadsides, sermons, treatises, and novels. The second was the Enlightenment belief in human agency and progress, which inspired efforts to explain the causes and characteristics of hurricanes, earthquakes, and other hazards and to find ways to limit their ruinous effects. The third and final precondition for the emergence of a modern culture of disaster was a new appreciation for humans’ capacity to respond to the suffering of others with genuine fellow feeling, a quality known as sensibility. By the eighteenth century, denizens of the Atlantic world read stories about hurricanes, earth- quakes, and shipwrecks in the same way that they read novels. All of these narratives aimed not only to entertain but also to arouse powerful emotions that could, in turn, inspire virtue and benevolence.

Although the response to the fire that destroyed much of London in September 1666 featured some of these attributes, historians generally re- gard the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755—which killed tens of thousands of people and destroyed the Portuguese capital—as the first modern disaster. Letters and newspapers spread information about what happened in Lisbon quickly throughout Europe and the Americas. Although some viewed the earthquake as a sign of divine vengeance, the Lisbon disaster also led to sci- entific investigations of its physical causes; empirical observations and sci- entific findings shaped the ambitious government- funded rebuilding of the ruined city. Affecting and sometimes graphic stories from Lisbon tugged on readers’ heartstrings and inspired much bad poetry, as well as the first inter- national relief effort in world history. Above all, the Lisbon earthquake was a cultural event that elicited vigorous debates about religion and science, church and state, and the respective responsibilities of governments and citi- zens in times of crisis.

Although governments across Europe orchestrated and distributed most of the relief that went to Lisbon, the overwhelming majority of eigh- teenth- and nineteenth- century relief efforts were unofficial and ad hoc. In British North America, when colonists looked to London for aid in the aftermath of hurricanes, floods, and fires, assistance was more likely to come from philanthropic committees of merchants and clergy than from the king and Parliament. After the Revolution, when disaster struck, the af- fected community formed a committee to solicit donations to help injured

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Introduction 5

and homeless survivors. In the United States, state and federal governments occasionally dabbled in disaster relief—and much less so in disaster preven- tion—before the Civil War, though federal intervention grew somewhat in the postwar era. Nevertheless, the Civil War was not a true watershed mo- ment in the history of government involvement in disaster- related activities. No federal policies, bureaucracies, or laws specifically pertained to disasters until 1950, when the Disaster Relief Act authorized the president to declare as a major disaster “any flood, drought, fire, hurricane, earthquake, storm, or other catastrophe,” which would trigger “assistance by the Federal Govern- ment to supplement the efforts and available resources of States and local governments.” 6

The 1950 law, which prioritized the preservation of property and civic order and provided no assistance to individuals, was in many ways a logical culmination of more modest earlier government interventions that aimed to manage the challenges inherent in what sociologists and culture theorists call a “risk society.” Urbanization, economic growth, and especially the use of new technologies brought prosperity and comfort as well as risk, or the idea that leaving property and people vulnerable to devastation was a trade- off worth taking in pursuit of convenience, efficiency, and profits.7

A by- product of modernity, a risk society is one that “no longer tries to achieve security and certainty by any means . . . [but] accepts uncertainty and ignorance as an unavoidable element of modernity and tries to man- age, rather than to abolish, them.” In the United States, steamboats (and later railroads) were widely hailed as transformative but nonetheless dan- gerous technologies; exploding steamboats (and later train wrecks) raised the specter of human negligence and culpability, which, in turn, generated nineteenth- century debates about the role of government in preventing dis- asters and in regulating private enterprises that could occasion the loss of lives. In the twentieth century, that conversation continued and intensified in relation to the nuclear technologies of the Cold War era. The threat of nuclear attack, cultural historian Kevin Rozario has argued persuasively, “created the emotional and cultural conditions that inclined Americans to federal emergency management,” which helped account for the timing of the passage of the Disaster Relief Act in 1950.8

An important part of this story is the normalization of disaster, or how hurricanes, fires, and other calamities—even before climate change— became almost routine and unremarkable facts of life. However much the growth of cities, factories, and improvements in transportation signaled the expanding power and prosperity of the American republic, these and

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Platte Gronde der Verbrande Stadt London. London’s Great Fire, in September 1666, was one of the earliest calamities to attract international attention. London was the second largest city in Europe, after Paris, and the capital of an increasingly ambitious colonial and commercial power. In this plan of London, made by Marcus Willemlz of Amsterdam shortly after the fire, huge swaths of the city the flames destroyed are shaded in black. Descriptions of the fire are in Dutch, French, and English. Harvard Map Collection, Harvard Library.

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8 Introduction

other contemporary developments also sowed the seeds of future calami- ties. Rozario writes of a “catastrophic logic of modernity” by which Ameri- cans and their leaders, who prized prosperity and economic growth and who accepted vulnerability and risk in exchange for profit and comfort, came to view disasters as agents of progress. The idea of destruction as a “blessing in disguise” and an avenue to improvement has long been a staple of post- disaster discourse, but this sort of rhetoric became especially prevalent after the mid- nineteenth century, when those who had access to insurance and credit deemed bricks and mortar expendable and readily replaceable and sometimes even stood to profit by ambitious post- disaster rebuilding efforts. In 1906, for instance, after a horrific earthquake and fire famously destroyed much of San Francisco, some cheerfully predicted that the city would be rebuilt in “brand- new splendor.” After all, observed the editor of Harper’s Weekly, Chicago, Boston, Galveston, and Baltimore were all thriving and much improved after having been “laid waste by conflagrations, earthquakes or tidal waves” in recent years.9

What historian Ted Steinberg calls the “demoralization” of calamity also helped government and business leaders to reconceptualize disasters as nor- mal and inescapable consequences of modern life. When people interpreted disasters as divine vengeance, they had been able to believe that personal and collective repentance and reform might prevent future calamities. Once science explained the physical causes of disasters, however, those in power came to characterize storms, earthquakes, and other deadly phenomena as unavoidable “acts of God” or nature. As Steinberg notes, this approach typi- cally works to preserve the status quo and to benefit the rich and powerful by promoting the belief that disasters are unpreventable and thereby justifying policies on the part of government and business that are “both environmen- tally unsound and socially, if not morally, bankrupt.” 10

Modern economies and technologies create conditions that put citizens at risk, but the politics of location ensures that not all people are equally vulnerable. The poor typically live in areas most susceptible to floods, fires, and other hazards, and they are less likely to have access to resources to pro- tect their communities when disaster strikes or to rebuild when the crisis is over. Significantly, post- 1950 government programs and federal flood insur- ance, which protect the financial interests of investors and property owners in wealthier communities that are unusually prone to hurricanes and other disasters, do not help tenants and others who own little or no property. In modern America, what scholars have variously dubbed the “federalization of risk” or “socialized disaster relief ” forces all taxpayers to fund the lifestyle

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Introduction 9

choices of a few, though those choices wreak environmental havoc in places like hurricane- ravaged Florida and densely populated southern California, an area that is unusually vulnerable to wildfires, mudslides, earthquakes, and other disasters. Billions of dollars spent on routine disaster relief in such re- gions, moreover, diminish federal funding for other programs designed to benefit less affluent Americans.11

While a macro- level approach to disaster history emphasizes the per- spectives of governments, newspaper readers, and other outsiders, micro- histories of specific communities elucidate disaster as a process that exposes and accentuates cultural tensions and social conflicts. Disaster generates dis- course—preserved in documents and other sources—that provides a win- dow onto the values and culture of a particular society. According to its most thoughtful historian, the great Chicago fire of 1871, for example, should be read as a “case study of the interworkings of identity and power in an urban community,” pitting immigrant groups against native- born reformers and relief workers and also revealing political and cultural divisions among elites at the local, state, and federal levels. More recently, the experience of New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina laid bare stark and troubling in- equalities of race and class and exposed the callous disregard of federal au- thorities for the needs of poor people of color, who suffered disproportion- ately during and after the storm and were further stigmatized by pejorative media coverage that portrayed them as violent, hapless, or otherwise deviant others—themes that were reprised in Puerto Rico in 2017 during Hurricane Maria’s sadly protracted aftermath. In these and other cases, official relief efforts aimed primarily to control or to silence the suffering survivor popu- lation. Gender, class, and race were key categories that authorities deployed to distinguish deserving relief recipients from their supposedly less worthy counterparts.12

This book builds on the insights of both the macro- and micro- level approaches to disaster history and is in some respects a prequel to exist- ing cultural histories and case studies of iconic American disasters. On the one hand, I chart the evolution of larger discussions concerning the causes, meaning, and responses to bad things that happened in the English- speaking Atlantic world during a pivotal period, showing how Enlightenment ideas, the spread of literacy and print culture, and the culture of sensibility gave rise to a rudimentary culture of disaster by the middle of the eighteenth cen- tury—evidenced most prominently by the response to the Lisbon earth- quake—and then explore how nation- building, economic and territorial expansion, and the increasing ubiquity of steam- driven technologies later

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10 Introduction

shaped how disasters were experienced, understood, and managed (or not managed) by postrevolutionary Americans. On the other hand, case studies from the period provide the evidence that shows both change and conti- nuity in America’s culture of disaster, as well as the contested nature of most disaster- related discourse. The Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of 1793, for instance, revealed and intensified class and racial divisions in the afflicted city while leading many non- Philadelphians to leaven sympathy for their fel- low Americans with quarantines to protect themselves by barring Philadel- phians from their own communities.

While episodes such as the Lisbon earthquake and the Philadelphia yel- low fever epidemic are well known and amply studied, there are notably few scholarly case studies of other disasters that occurred before the late eigh- teenth century. Aside from the Great Fire of London of 1666, earlier disasters that have attracted the most scholarly attention are the hurricanes that ha- bitually pummeled the Caribbean island colonies. As historians Matthew Mulcahy and Stuart Schwartz have shown, those hurricanes (and an occa- sional earthquake) produced treasure troves of evidence—including the correspondence of merchants and government officials, many of whom pro- vided eyewitness accounts—that shed much light on the impact of recur- rent disasters on religious beliefs, material culture, and governance in these island colonies, where capital investments in sugar, slaves, and shipping cre- ated one of the world’s first wildly lucrative risk societies. Government offi- cials, merchants, sea captains, and planters wrote so much about Caribbean hurricanes and earthquakes precisely because these colonial settlements were both strategically and militarily important and economically uniquely valuable.13

Discourse about the bad things that happened in England’s first colony in Virginia was more muted, and the response far less purposeful, in part be- cause the stakes may have seemed lower, at least to people across the ocean in faraway London. Chapter 1 of Inventing Disaster examines the discourse surrounding the trials of Virginia’s early settlers and draws on first- person accounts, Virginia Company reports and apologias, and ministers’ sermons to show that contemporaries viewed neither Jamestown nor the deadly things that happened there either as problems to be resolved or as disasters in the modern sense. For one thing, Jamestown’s remote location and the absence of newspapers or other forms of public communications rendered the settlers’ suffering virtually invisible. The only contemporary story related to the early troubles at Jamestown that circulated widely was Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, which scholars believe was loosely based on the saga of the

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Introduction 11

Sea Venture, a ship that wrecked off the coast of Bermuda in 1609, on its way to provision the starving Jamestown colonists.

Shipwreck stories, as I argue in chapter 2, fittingly became the first genre of disaster narratives because, in an era of burgeoning overseas commerce and colonization, maritime misadventures exposed both people and prop- erty to unusual levels of vulnerability and risk on a regular basis. Early news- papers, with their heavy emphasis on commercial news, reported maritime losses, and, though some continued to interpret shipwrecks as signs of divine wrath, secular accounts increasingly featured human- interest stories that sought to elicit sympathy and benevolence more than penitence and horror.

The book’s next two chapters examine the culture of disaster in the British Empire in the decades before the imperial crisis that led to the Ameri- can Revolution. The focus of chapter 3 is the Lisbon earthquake as a cul- tural event and, more specifically, its impact in the British Atlantic world. The widely publicized generosity of Britain’s King George II toward Portu- gal’s suffering earthquake victims was a source of pride to Britons on both sides of the Atlantic, who increasingly saw themselves as a uniquely benevo- lent nation. After 1755, residents of British colonial America had heightened expectations for relief from London when disaster struck. Chapter 4 exam- ines the imperial response to five colonial disasters—two fires, one flood, and two hurricanes—in the decades after Lisbon, amid deepening tensions within the empire. Benevolence and statecraft worked in tandem, but some- times at cross- purposes, as Britons to varying degrees responded to suffering colonists’ calls for help.

Americans experienced changes in both the quality and quantity of dis- asters in the postrevolutionary era. On the one hand, they were increasingly vulnerable to new categories of calamities, as fires and epidemics prolifer- ated in the growing cities of the early republic. On the other hand, they in- habited a print- saturated environment in which such episodes were widely reported and sometimes assumed national significance. Focusing primarily on several disasters with national implications, chapter 5 situates the evolv- ing American culture of disaster in its larger political context and argues that, unlike in the contemporary British Empire with its expanding program of centralized benevolence, in the American republic disaster relief was de- centralized, locally orchestrated, and ad hoc. In the postrevolutionary era, disasters gave rise to new conversations about benevolence, religion, and other issues, which in turn were part of the contested process of construct- ing American national identity.

The idea of disaster as a recurring phenomenon that evoked sustained

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12 Introduction

and meaningful public debate emerged from the virtual epidemic of steam- boat explosions that began in the 1820s. The sheer number and violence of these waterborne disasters ensured public interest in them, while print and pictures made steamboat stories both ubiquitous and sensational in the ante- bellum era. Chapter 6 explores the popular culture of steamboat explosions and argues that graphic and emotionally moving representations of steam- boat disasters, coupled with the increasing pervasiveness of steam travel, created a vast and vocal imagined community of prospective steamboat casualties in nineteenth- century America. Far more than storms and earth- quakes, or even fires, steam technology also raised the issue of human agency and culpability and therefore led to public meetings and coroners’ inquests, and eventually to successful demands for federal intervention to protect the public by improving the navigability of rivers and regulating the practices and standards of steamboat corporations. A turning point in the history of American disasters, the steamboat acts of 1838 and 1852 were the first federal statutes expressly designed to protect citizens by preventing at least this one specific type of disaster- related casualty.

Although some of the disasters discussed in this book are well known, others are not. The criteria for inclusion was less the number of lives lost or the value of property destroyed than an event’s resonance in the wider cul- ture—the debates it informed, the affecting narratives it generated—judged by the evidentiary trail left in newspapers, visual images, sermons, govern- ment records, and other sources. The politics of location ensured that cul- tural resonance was not always commensurate with quantifiable losses. In October 1871, for instance, the cultural impact of the Chicago fire, which took the lives of some 300 people, vastly overshadowed that of the confla- gration at Peshtigo, Wisconsin, which on the very same day killed more than 2,000, making it the deadliest fire in American history. Likewise, though the New Madrid earthquakes, which destroyed entire communities and trans- formed the topography and landscape of the Missouri River valley during the winter of 1811–12, were clearly horrific for those who experienced them, the Richmond theater fire of December 1811 inspired far more public conver- sations about faith and reason, disaster prevention and relief, and American national identity.14 Though by some measures the events in Peshtigo and New Madrid were more significant than those in Chicago and Richmond, the latter two had a greater impact in the public discourse and popular cul- ture of their respective historical periods.

Many of the episodes discussed in this book would qualify as what scholar Mike Davis calls “ordinary disasters,” or calamities in which the

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Introduction 13

causes of destruction are part of the regular landscape of everyday life.15 For Davis, whose work centers on contemporary southern California, the prime culprit is overdevelopment, which feeds a continuing cycle of ruinous droughts and wildfires. While catastrophic events related to climate change and other forms of environmental degradation have come to be the ordinary disasters of the twenty- first century, shipwrecks, urban fires, and steamboat explosions were the ordinary disasters of earlier eras.

Historicizing disaster reminds us that our own code of calamity eti- quette is a cultural construction that originated—for better or worse—in the intellectual, economic, and political environments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While the advent of organized disaster relief and fed- eral regulation might be interpreted as progress, as we shall see, the larger story is more ambiguous. Indeed, many of our twenty- first- century experi- ences during and after hurricanes, oil spills, and other disasters would have made sense to Americans who witnessed the urban fires of the early republic or the steamboat explosions of the antebellum era. They, too, wanted expla- nations and sought to assign blame; they, too, sympathetically consumed stories about people who lost their homes, their loved ones, or their lives. And perhaps most importantly, for us, as for them, understanding the causes of disasters and learning their victims’ stories are often more a means of managing loss, both practically and emotionally, than a way of preventing future tragedies.

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