"Riff-raff of San Francisco and Oakland" Not Welcome, Says 1906 Los Angeles Relief Committee
Officially the Los Angeles Citizen Relief Committee recoiled at the thought of hordes of earthquake refugees from the San Francisco Bay Area streaming into the city. "We must be careful not to advertise our city as a dumping ground for the riff-raff of San Francisco and Oakland," said the chair of the committee. The official reasoned that rebuilding San Francisco will offer "work from them all," and that Los Angeles was already doing its fair share by sending food and relief supplies to the San Francisco homeless.
Off the record, the Los Angeles committee and area residents mobilized to provide help to the refugees arriving every day from the Bay Area. The Citizen Relief Committee had set aside $30,000 to help care for the destitute and children from the quake zone. Mostly the committee wanted men from the north to stay put and "shift for themselves."
Los Angeles citizens actually provided considerable assistance. Local Catholic Churches were tasked with receiving and classifying refugees for needed assistance. A Women's Relief Committee dedicated its efforts to the destitute refugees. (Many arrivals had the means for transportation and other help; but others had lost everything to the earthquake or the fire). The women encouraged residents to donate clothing and supplies. The faculty of a small college outside Pomona (Lordsburg College) opened its buildings for 500 refugees. Homeowners in Inglewood pledged to house 100 arrivals. Seventy-five ministers agreed to take 5000 people in their church buildings and at the YMCA. Several local physicians offered their waiting rooms for overnight stays by the refugees.
A Los Angeles "doctor train" was one of the city's most immediate and effective responses to the disaster in the north. The City Council chartered a special train to take 100 physicians and 150 nurses to San Francisco to provide medical relief.
"Homes Thrown Open to the Refugees," Los Angeles Times, April 22, 1906,
"Hundred Thousand Pledged from Here, " Los Angeles Times, April 19, 1906.
In Portland – The Morning of the Great San Francisco Disaster
"On the morning of April 18, 1906 Portland's largest circulation newspaper, the Oregonian, landed on porches and appeared at newsstands too early to include reports of the biggest story of the new century.
"Instead, Portlanders read the grim account of three African-American men lynched by a mob in Springfield, Missouri, and they followed the plight of two hundred thousand Italians left homeless and destitute after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. They scanned the story of Portland's fierce suffragist Abigail Scott Duniway who rallied local women and delivered a rousing talk the night before. (The electorate would decide – and deny – women's right to vote in June).
"Yet by midmorning, no one paid attention to anything but what news they could get from San Francisco. An operator of the local Postal Telegraph Company had suspected trouble as he completed his night shift. Just afterfive o-clock in the morning, his connection with San Francisco went dead. He queried the operator in Ashland, the southern Oregon exchange for north-south transmissions, but Ashland had been severed from the Bay Area as well.Eighteen minutes later the Sacramento office relayed the news from Chicago that San Francisco had been struck by the worst earthquake in California history, causing massive devastation and death."
Excerpt, Marie Equi, Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions by Michael Helquist. Published by Oregon State University Press, September 2015. Available at bookstores and at online sources.
NOTE: Marie Equi was the only woman doctor who joined the "Oregon Doctor Train" to rush relief to San Franciscans after the calamity. She was proclaimed a heroine by the San Francisco Mayor, the California Governor, and the US Army.
Jan Kubelik drew large audience at the Heilig Theater
Special Presentation: "Portland to the Rescue" Oregon History Talk
McMenamins Kennedy School, Portland
Monday June 27, 2016, 7pm
Transgender Appearance in 1912 Portland, Oregon
Note: Dr. Marie Equi, the first publicly known lesbian in Oregon, was associated with a transgender individual more than 100 years ago. Below is an excerpt from the new biography "Marie Equi: Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions." Available in bookstores and online outlets.
On another occasion Equi's reputation as an outsider led to an association with a cross-dresser arrested in a "white slavery" incident. In September 1912, Portland police arrested twenty-eight-year-old Harry Allen of Seattle for transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. Equi was reported to have visited Allen in jail. During the police interrogation, Allen claimed he was innocent, and that he was, in fact, a woman whose birth name was Nan Pickerell. He also declared that he was "married" to his female companion, who had willingly traveled to Oregon with him.[i]
Although western newspapers occasionally carried reports of cross-dressing men and women, the police and the public were uncertain what to make of Allen. Was he a man as he presented himself, a woman who wanted to dress as a man, a woman who refused to wear feminine attire, or a woman forced by circumstances to seek the better paying jobs reserved for men? Few people were conversant with the psychological nuances of cross-dressing and the subtleties of an individual's gender and sexuality identification. At the time of his arrest, Allen explained that he had "always wanted to be one of the boys" and had dressed in men's clothing for the last dozen years. He described having a "boyish manner" as a child that remained and that his current "long stride and basso voice" were now natural. Although Portland Police suspected Allen of using a "disguise" for criminal purposes, the "white slavery" charge was dropped once his sex was discovered.[ii]
The Harry Allen affair prompted Portlanders to consider the phenomenon of cross-dressing, but they could treat it as a curiosity far removed from their lives. Another year would pass before the world of sexual outsiders became too close to dismiss. For many observers, Equi's association with a cross-dresser may have placed her at greater distance from the rest of society, but she remained a doctor willing to treat an individual others avoided.
[i] "Police Are Castigated," Oregonian, September 3, 1912, 9; "Not Portland Police,"Oregonian, September 4, 1912, 10; Peter Boag, Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 23–31.
[ii] "Woman Known to Friends as Man," Oregonian, December 12, 1906, 1; Peter Boag, "Go West Young Man, Go East Young Woman: Searching for the Trans in Western Gender History," Western Historical Quarterly, 36:4, (winter, 2005), 479–80, 485–87; "Nan Pickerell Wants a Job as a Longshoreman," Portland News, June 12, 1912.
A Masterful Dark Tale of Tough and Gentle Desert Characters
While researching and writing my biography of Marie Equi, I had little time to read fiction. Now I can indulge and catch up on some fine work. Here's a short review of a new novel by Oregon writer James Anderson.
I miss Ben Jones and his hardscrabble life in the harsh and beautiful Central Utah desert. For what seems too brief a period, I entered his world of fiercely independent characters with contradictions, delusions, and longings in an environment that only partly accommodates them. Jones encounters them all on their own ground with a mix of surprise, curiosity, some cringing, and ultimately a deep appreciation and respect.
In Anderson's debut novel, Jones is a short-haul trucker along Highway 117 making deliveries to customers who jealously guard their secrets. Only desert insiders are permitted a view of what counts for daily lives – a hideaway for two brothers with a criminal past, a beautiful woman who plays an "air cello" on a first encounter, and a self-identified savior who carries a cross, literally. And then there's the never-open desert diner, a masterful noir creation that tantalizes and then horrifies with its own dark past.
Anderson is a master story-teller who has created an evocative tale that is at once a diversion from our troubled times and a tonic that reveals a prevailing human resilience. His first novel leaves readers anxious for his second.
​Happy Birthday, Marie Equi - Doctor, Political Radical, and West Coast Lesbian
On April 7 in 1872 Marie Diana Equi was born at home in a working-class neighborhood of New Bedford, Massachusetts. She was the fifth child and fifth daughter for her parents, John Equi and Sarah (Mullins) Equi. Her father was an Italian immigrant who worked as a mason; her mother, an Irish immigrant who maintained the family home while giving birth to eleven children over a sixteen year period.
Equi remained in New Bedford until she was 20 years old. She attended Middle Street Grammar School in the city's new West End neighborhood. She contracted tuberculosis and was sent to Florida with family friends to recover, returning to begin studies at New Bedford High School. After one year of high school, Equi's parents insisted that she drop out and work in the city's textile mills to help support the family. She joined 1900 other teenage girls and women in the city's gritty factories at a time when laborers benefited from few workplace protections.
After two years of mind-numbing, exhausting mill work, Equi escaped with the help of an older girlfriend, Bessie Holcomb, from a wealthy family. Holcomb financed a year of study for Equi at a highly regarded girls' school in north central Massachusetts. A few years later both women left New Bedford to become to settle on land – as homesteaders – in Oregon along the Columbia River.
In Oregon and in the West, Marie Equi embarked on a life of fierce independence, political activism, and personal notoriety.
Oregon State University Press, September 2015
Available at bookstores and online.
MARIE EQUI "Deserves Wide Readership" – Review in Oregon Historical Quarterly
One of the West's pre-eminent history journals, the Oregon Historical Quarterly, features an enthusiastic review of the new biography of Dr. Marie Equi in its Spring 2016 issue. Reviewer Adam J. Hodges, Associate Professor of History at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, notes that Marie Equi: Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions "deserves wide readership and much debate."
Hodges explains that much of Equi's personal papers and medical records have been lost, creating a challenge to biographers. He salutes author Michael Helquist's "extraordinary feat of detective work" tracking primary sources from across the nation. The work led to a book-length biography of "one of the most fascinating characters ever to make Portland home."
Equi has been known primarily for her political radicalism, fighting for labor rights and free speech on the streets of Portland, Oregon in the early decades of the 20th century. But, as Hodges writes, this new biography "may have redefined our basic understanding of her as well." Practicing medicine was essential to Equi's life. She treated working-class patients, and she ignored the law to provide birth control information and to perform abortions when both were illegal. "The centrality of her medical work emerges more clearly than ever before as a result.'
Equi became the West Coast's first publicly known lesbian as a result of living openly with women as early as the 1890s. Her biography examines Equi's romantic and political relationships with women, and Hodges concludes that the study reveals "how these connections enabled and sustained an unconventional life."
The Oregon Historical Quarterly is available by subscription and at JSTOR, accessible through many public and school libraries.
Oregon State University Press published Marie Equi in September 2015. The book is available from the Press (800-621-2736, osupress.oregonstate.edu), at bookstores everywhere, and online.