The Halifax Explosion and Post Apocalyptic Human Behavior

Halifax, December 8, 1917

On December 6, 1917, a cargo ship full of munitions exploded in the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Some people say it was the most powerful human-made explosion before the atomic bombs. Every building within a mile was destroyed; the ship's two-ton anchor landed two miles away. About 1,800 people died and 9,000 were wounded in a city of 60,000.

Among the witnesses to the explosion was a pastor named Samuel Prince, and three years later he published a book about the event called Catastrophe and Social Change. This book helped to inagurate the serious study of catastrophes and the human response to them. You can read the whole thing online here, or check out the article by Sam Knight in the May 22 New Yorker. Knight:

Prince's church was hit by shrapnel. It served as a temporary hospital and morgue during the disaster. Prince observed throughout the city a "very general consciousness which seemed to draw all together into a fellowship of suffering." Social distinctions fell away. Wounded solliders gave up their beds. Cafés and drugstores handed out goods for free. The people of Halifax looked after one another, preferring their initiatives to "the intrusion of strangers." Afterward, Prince discerned a link to the work of the Peter Kropotkin, a Russian anarchist, who used the term "mutual aid" to describe an alternative, cooperative model of human society. . . . "Catastrophe and the sudden termination of the normal which ensues become the stimuli of heroies," Prince wrote, "and bring into play the great social virtues of generosity and kindness."

Now there's a zombie apocalypse scenario somebody should explore, in which the surviving humans are inspired to form an anarchist commune based on Kropotkin's Memoirs of a Revolutionist.

Since I read Knight's article, which actually focuses on a contemporary disaster expert, I have been perusing Prince's book. I find that while Knight captures the overall theme that Prince drew from the experience, Prince saw a lot more than simple cooperation. The first thing that impressed him was that despite the scale of the disaster, nobody cried:

Here again the unusual degree of stimulation which catastrophe induces brings about a behavior other than that which commonly attends the experience of grief. A phenomenon associated with wholesale bereavement is the almost entire absence of tears. A witness of the San Francisco disaster said it was at the end of the second day that he saw tears for the first time. At Halifax, where the loss of life was many times greater, there was little crying. There seemed to be indeed a miserable but strong consolation in the fact that all were alike involved in the same calamity.

There was “no bitterness, no complaint, only a great and eager desire to help some one less fortunate.” Another observer said: “I have never seen such kindly feeling. I have never seen such tender sympathy. I have never heard an impatient word.” And this was amongst men “who were covered with bruises, and whose hearts were heavy, who have not had a night's sleep, and who go all day long without thought of food.” Another visitor remarked “there is not a more courageous, sane and reasonable people. Everyone is tender and considerate. Men who have lost wives and children, women whose sons and husbands are dead, boys and girls whose homes have been destroyed, are working to relieve the distress.” A Montreal clergyman reported that “Halifax people have been meeting with dry eyes and calm faces the tragedies, the horrors, the sufferings and the exposures which followed the explosion.”

So, yes, lots of mutual aid. Also extraordinary amounts of work, done by people who hardly ate or slept for four or five days but reported no fatigue. But also this:

Few folk thought that Halifax harbored any would-be ghouls or vultures. The disaster showed how many. Men clambered over the bodies of the dead to get beer in the shattered breweries. Men taking advantage of the flight from the city because of the possibility of another explosion went into houses and shops, and took whatever their thieving fingers could lay hold of. Then there were the nightly prowlers among the ruins, who rifled the pockets of the dead and dying, and snatched rings from icy fingers. A woman lying unconscious on the street had her fur coat snatched from her back.... One of the workers, hearing some one groaning rescued a shop-keeper from underneath the debris. Unearthing at the same time a cash box containing one hundred and fifty dollars, he gave it to a young man standing by to hold while he took the victim to a place of refuge. When he returned the box was there, but the young man and the money had disappeared.

Then there was the profiteering phase. Landlords raised their rents upon people in no position to bear it. The Halifax Trades and Labor Council adopted a resolution urging that the Mayor be authorized to request all persons to report landlords who “have taken advantage of conditions created by the explosion.” ... Plumbers refused to hold their union rules in abeyance and to work one minute beyond the regular eight hours unless they received their extra rates for overtime; and the bricklayers assumed a dog-in-the-manger attitude and refused to allow the plasterers to help in the repair of the chimneys. And this during days of dire stress ... when many men and women were working twelve and fourteen hours a day without a cent or thought of remuneration. One Halifax newspaper spoke of these men as “squeezing the uttermost farthing out of the anguished necessities of the homeless men, women and children.” Truckmen charged exorbitant prices for the transferring of goods and baggage. Merchants boosted prices. A small shopkeeper asked a little starving child thirty cents for a loaf of bread.

The stimulus of the same catastrophe, it thus appears, may result in two different types of responses—that of greed on the one hand or altruistic emotion on the other. One individual is spurred to increased activity by the opportunity of business profit, another by the sense of social needs. Why this is so—indeed the whole field of profiteering—would be a subject of interesting enquiry.

Prince goes on to explain that the city government quickly cracked down on all this profiteering and ordered that rents and prices be set back to pre-crisis levels. It struck me that this is another side of the mutual aid response after a catastrophe, an increased willlingness to ignore business and markets and slap down anybody seen as profiteering. Maybe part of what encourages people to pitch in is knowing that anyone trying to profit on the sly will get tossed in jail, and maybe all that working together brings with it an increased willingness to forget about individual freedom.

I was also impressed by Prince's account of how quickly utilities and other services were restored to most of the disaster zone. Most electricity was restored in a day, gas within three days. The local newspaper printed a reduced edition the next day. The largest morgue in Canada was set up by 40 soliders within 36 hours. The first school re-opened on December 10, five were open by January 10, and things were pretty much back to normal by May 20. Even the biggest bomb in history couldn't knock out one small Canadian city.

Another angle, which Knight alludes to, is that while the people of Halifax worked very happily with local police, firemen, and government officials, they wanted nothing to do with "experts" sent down from Toronto or from outside charitable organizations:

The merest touch of “cold professionalism” soon became fuel for the burning disapproval which spread through the city regarding the methods of relief. Letters to the press gave vent to the indignation of the sufferers. One of the judges of the Supreme Court was as outspoken as anyone. In criticizing the food-distribution system he wrote very plainly of the “overdose of business efficiency and social service pedantry.”

They were also intensely suspicious of reporters from out-of-town newspapers.

So a fascinating event, showing a human response with a lot of complexity, some outright thuggery, but a willing collaboration that turned at least one witness into an anarchist hopeful of the human future.