Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
“Substantial Citizenship”
In renewing his call for volunteer observers, Wood may also have been in-
spired by a colleague—the Stanford geologist Bailey Willis, president of the
SSA from 1921 to 1926. In his vigorous public activity, Willis hammered
home the message that the work of the SSA could only be accomplished
“in cooperation” with “laymen.” Willis set the goal of expanding the so-
ciety's membership from four hundred to one thousand, and by 1927 he
had achieved it. He earned himself the popular nickname the “earthquake
Professor.”
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early one June morning in 1925 an earthquake struck the picturesque
city of Santa Barbara, roughly a quarter of the way up the Pacific Coast
from Los Angeles to San Francisco. the death toll of twelve was lower than
it might have been if the city had been hit during business hours, but the
damage was estimated at $5 million. the Santa Barbara Mission, which
had been wrecked by earthquake in 1812 and rebuilt on the same spot, was
again severely damaged. An earthquake with a similar distribution of inten-
sities had struck Santa Barbara in 1883. Back then, the press had rejoiced
that the shock had “waked her [the city] from her Rip Van Winkle sleep”
and “stirred her pulses to activity.” “Santa Barbara is not stagnant,” the
San
Francisco Times
had concluded in 1883; “It is in the bud now, but by and by
it will open into the perfect blossom.”
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this style of California providen-
tialism was repugnant to Willis. to him, the Santa Barbara earthquake of
1925 laid bare the folly of American-style development.
Willis painted a bucolic image of Santa Barbara back in Spanish colonial
times: a place of “stateliness, license, piety, and poetic romance.” the city's
subsequent history was, on his telling, typically American. It had become a
playground for the wealthy, where “wonderfully landscaped estates . . . bore
forbidding 'no trespass' signs.” the town had lost a sense of community, of
“substantial citizenship”—“where wealth is spent freely, lavishly, it is inevi-
tably exploited, and the cohesion of society is weakened by the domination
of self-interest.” Its civic leaders were “thoroughly American, gifted with
the American capacity for organization and engineering, but limited, as too
many Americans are, in appreciation of history, art, and architecture.” Such
a society was apt to forget the lessons of past disasters: “Progress and com-
mon sense crowded tradition and romance to the wall, heedless of their
charm, regardless of their permanent value in the life, yes, even in the pros-
perity of the community, forgetful also of the earthquake.”
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Willis sug-
gested that Californians had even forgotten how to observe their landscape
properly (see figure 10.2). the cliffs of Santa Barbara had become merely a
