The Dream Book Blog – Empowering women through fiction and history.

Making Progress: Thanksgiving in the Progressive Era

It’s that time of year when Thanksgiving is upon us (at least it is if you’re in the US). A few years ago, I wrote a blog post about Thanksgiving in the Gilded Age. But since I’ve been diving into the Progressive Era with my Adele Gossling Mysteries, I was curious to know how turn-of-the-century Thanksgiving traditions compared to those of America’s Gilded Age.

The Gilded Age was, remember, all about excesses, wealth, and showing off when it came to the holidays. Well-to-do Americans saw the holidays as a time to get into their best dress and parade themselves in hotel dining rooms or swank restaurants for a multi-course Thanksgiving meal that included non-traditional Thanksgiving fare such as oysters and lobster (if you don’t believe me, take a peek at the menu I included in the blog post mentioned above.)

Photo Credit: Cover of Puck magazine showing a mother making a pumpkin pie in the kitchen while her four children look onward, emphasizing the family nature of Thanksgiving, 1903, chromolithograph, created by L. M. Glackens: pingnews.com / Flickr/Public Domain Mark 1.0

Americans started to get a grip on all those excesses and realized their country needed to make some changes in the Progressive Era. Reform was the order of the day, including worker’s rights, women’s rights, and environmental concerns. There was also more emphasis on intimate social circles (family, friends), probably because the modern era made many people feel fragmented and isolated (something I daresay we struggle with today in our social-media-heavy 21st century.)

For all these reasons, Thanksgiving became more of a family affair at the turn of the century. Magazines and books came out with Thanksgiving recipes to help encourage Americans to stay home for the holiday rather than let hotels and restaurants do the cooking. The recipes were much more what we consider traditional Thanksgiving foods, such as roasted turkey, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. The 1902 menu on this site still has some oddities, such as oysters, but it looks much more like the kind of Thanksgiving meal we feast upon these days than the menu on my previous blog post.

Progressive reformers carried their work into the holidays as well. One thing we see with turn-of-the-century Thanksgiving which was less prevalent in the Gilded Age was the idea of giving thanks and gratitude by helping others. Missionaries and other charitable organizations hosted large Thanksgiving feasts for the poor all over the country. In addition, holiday gift boxes became popular just as they are today (my local Sprouts Market prepares gift bags with food every year that customers can purchase and have the store give to a family in need). Overall, the spirit of gratitude and giving was not lost on early 20th-century progressives.

While none of my Adele Gossling Mystery stories feature a Thanksgiving murder yet, be on the lookout for one in the future! In the meantime, check out The Carnation Murder, the first book of the series, which is totally free on all bookstore sites.

If you love fun, engaging mysteries set in the past, you’ll enjoy The Missing Ruby Necklace! It’s available exclusively to newsletter subscribers here. By signing up, you’ll also get news about upcoming releases, fun facts about women’s history, classic true-crime tidbits, and more!

One Thing Leads To Another: The Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906

America is no stranger to natural disasters. We’ve seen it all: hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, fires, earthquakes. Only last month, Florida experienced two hurricanes back-to-back (Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton) and the damage and lives lost from these two disasters combined was devastating.

Whether due to Mother Nature’s temperament or human error, disasters seem to come in packs. In the case of the above-mentioned Hurricane Milton, damage was caused not only by the winds and floods it brought but also by the tornadoes that formed even before the hurricane hit the ground. Looking back in history, this is not something we can blame on climate change or global warming. One of the worst natural disasters in the history of Northern California endured a back-to-back disaster: the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. While there is no doubt that the earthquake itself caused a lot of damage in San Francisco and smaller cities along the coast, reports show most of the damage (nearly eighty percent and some sources state it was closer to ninety-five) happened because of the fires that followed.

The facts of the earthquake are well-documented, and I go into them in the author’s note included in my upcoming Adele Gossling Mysteries book. The earthquake began on April 18, 1906, at 5:12 a.m. in, ironically, the ocean. But it quickly moved to land and tore up cities along the coast, including San Francisco (though to call it the San Francisco Great Earthquake is misleading, since many smaller cities in the area, including Santa Rosa and San Jose, suffered massive damage). The magnitude of the earthquake has been debated, but most experts put it at 7.9-8.25 which stands today as the biggest quake in the area. The strong shock lasted about 45-60 seconds. While that might not seem like a long time, it was enough to completely incapacitate the entire city. The quake broke gas and power lines, damaged water pipes, and made telegraph lines useless. Houses and buildings of the time were made of wood (and still are, so they easily crumbled with the strong tremors, especially in the downtown area. There were a few buildings that withstood the disaster and survive even today in their more-or-less natural state, including the Flood Building (a majestic-looking office building on Market Street) and St. Mary’s Cathedral.

Photo Credit: Residents looking toward the downtown at the fires breaking out during the 1906 Great San Francisco Earthquake, 1906: U.S. Geological Survey/Flickr/CC0 1.0 Universal

While the earthquake did its damage to buildings, infrastructure, and pavements, leaving some places with such huge cracks that horses fell through them, many argue the majority of the disaster came not from the tremors but from the multiple fires that broke out in the city almost immediately after the earthquake. Gas lines broke all over the city and ignited fires that were difficult to stop. There’s the famous “Ham and Eggs Fire,” for example, where a housewife in Hayes Valley turned on her gas stove to make breakfast for her family soon after the earthquake. Little did she know the chimney had been damaged by the quake. The stove ignited a fire that spread throughout the downtown area. Before it was finally quenched, it had destroyed some of the city’s most important and iconic buildings, including City Hall. To add insult to injury, water lines were broken so firefighters had trouble getting water out of the pipes to put the fires out. And human error had a hand in it as well. When water was clearly not going to be the answer to putting out the massive flames, the military resorted to dynamiting buildings (in an effort to prevent the fires from spreading), but their lack of experience in this area only made the fires worse.

Photo of San Francisco downtown area after the earthquake and fires had ceased, taken from a camera attached to a kite and suspended some 1,000 feet from the air. The large street going down the center is Market Street. Note how nearly all the buildings on either side are completely destroyed.

Photo Credit: Taken by George R. Lawrence, 28 May 1906, Panoramic photographs, Library of Congress: Grook Da Ogre/Wikimedia Commons/PD US

All told, by the time the fires had subsided (and it would take four days for this to happen), they had claimed three thousand lives across the Bay Area and eighty percent of San Francisco. It took two years for the city to rebuild.

My book, Murder Among The Rubble, features this disaster and focuses on the rebuilding phase just a few weeks after the earthquake (featuring a murder, of course). You can pick up a copy on preorder now at a special price here.

I’ll be talking more about the 1906 San Francisco Great Earthquake, its aftermath, and the effect it had on the lives of the residents in my newsletter as the release date for this book gets closer in December. You won’t want to miss that! If you’re not already signed up for my newsletter, I encourage you to click here and do so. You’ll get lots of free goodies, including my book The Missing Ruby Necklace (not available anywhere else!) if you do.

Fun and Mischief: Halloween in the Early 20th Century

It’s Halloween in the United States today, and if you live in America, you likely already have bags of candy stashed on the front table near your door, expecting little nippers to come knocking and calling “trick or treat!”

Halloween these days is a relatively tame affair where fun is the name of the game. It means dressing up in costumes, taking the kids door to door to get candy, and for some, attending a party or settling on the couch to watch spooky movies (I already have my collection of classic horror films geared up). But in the early 20th century, kids had a very different idea of what constituted “fun” for Halloween. Mischief and mayhem were the order of the day (or, I should say, the night).

What do I mean by mischief? Watch this clip from the 1944 classic film Meet Me in St. Louis. The film is set in 1904 and gives a pretty accurate glimpse of how kids celebrated Halloween in the early 20th century. In the scene, kids build a bonfire, throwing in anything flammable they can get their hands on (and one suspects some of the chairs they’re throwing into the fire might have been ripped off neighborhood porches). Then, they huddle together, trying to figure out who they’re going to torture with their bags of flour (yes, knocking on someone’s door and throwing flour in their face was a thing back then). That was the turn-of-the-century’s idea of Halloween fun.

Photo Credit: A non-grotesque and non-creepy Halloween costume of a witch, 1910: jamesjoel/Flickr/CC BY ND 2.0

This scene also shows how kids dressed up for Halloween over one hundred years ago (and if you’re curious to see more costumes from this era, you can look here). Unlike today where we’re more likely to see cute costumes on smaller kids and spooky-fun costumes on older kids, kids used whatever they could find around the house. The results were creepier and, in some cases, even grotesque.

Trick-or-treating is an organized affair in the 21st century. In the neighborhoods in my area, the local newspaper designates specific days (not necessarily October 31) and times when trick-or-treaters can go around town. In the early 20th century, things were a lot more chaotic. Kids would go trick-or-treating in parades and they could become quite unruly. And did they get candy? Not always. Until the mid-20th century, kids got whatever was lying around. That could be a toy or a game the child of the house didn’t want anymore or some non-candy goodies or fruits or nuts (which would make many moms and dads very happy today).

But what really characterized early 20th-century Halloween was mischief. In addition to the bonfire and the flour-in-the-face, it wasn’t unusual for kids to vandalize homes belonging to people in town they didn’t like or even steal things off their lawn or porch (in the film clip above, one of the adults warns her children to return a neighbor’s hammock after they steal it). I remember when I was a kid, Halloween meant you were at risk of being “egged” (having kids throw rotten eggs at your house) if you didn’t open the door and give out candy. Thankfully, that practice has largely gone out of style.

Want to have even more Halloween fun this year? Come solve a mystery with the protagonist of my Adele Gossling Mysteries series as she helps search for a missing child from the community Halloween party! You can get this story (plus a novella and other goodies) only if you sign up for my newsletter here.

The Treatment of the Chinese in San Francisco after the 1906 Earthquake

Today is a special day for the people of China as it’s National Day of the Chinese Republic. On this day in 1911, a group of revolutionaries led a revolt against the Qing Dynasty. They overthrew the imperial rule that had dominated for centuries, declaring the country a republic. You can read more about the revolution here.

Why am I mentioning this? First, we are all connected to one another in some way, so knowing about the history of other countries besides our own is part of that connection. Second, I’ve come to appreciate the struggles of the Chinese not only in their own country but in others as well, especially during the early 20th century. In fact, it was researching the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and the rebuilding that happened afterward for my upcoming book, Murder Among the Rubble, that led me to not only appreciate the way the Chinese were treated during this time but also to include this community in that book.

Photo Credit: Chinatown, Waverly Place at Clay Street, 9 April 1900 (six years before the earthquake), glass plate negative: San Francisco Public Library/Flickr/CC BY NC ND 2.0

San Francisco is known as a liberal city that opens its arms to all and celebrates its diversity. But it wasn’t always this way. Many ethnic groups like the Latino and Asian communities, experienced abominable racism in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Before the earthquake, the Chinese, who numbered about 15,000, were seen as instigators of corruption and vice. They were regulated to a twelve-block radius known as Chinatown and forced to live under squalid conditions. Many couldn’t find decent work and resorted to earning a living with businesses catering to the tourist trade or related to vices, such as opium dens and prostitution houses. The community was stereotyped as one without morals and willing to engage in criminal activity such as the slave trade. This stereotype was so prevalent that a film made in 1965 portraying the Chinese in Chinatown in this way garnished protest from Asian-American actors and led to the creation of the East West Players. I wrote about that here.

When the earthquake hit San Francisco in 1906, Chinatown was, like eighty percent of the city, destroyed. About two-thirds of the Chinese living there fled to Oakland (where they weren’t welcomed – if you can stomach it, read this article that appeared in the Oakland Herald and really shows the attitude toward the Chinese at the time). The other third remained in the city.

Photo Credit: Chinatown after the earthquake, 1906, Harold B. Lee Library: Picryl/Public Domain

The committee that was formed after the earthquake to oversee the rebuilding was faced with what to do with these people. The remaining Chinese were first placed in makeshift tents on Van Ness Avenue, far away from any of the main camp locations, but officials feared they would slowly migrate back to their ruined homes in Chinatown (more about why this was a concern to the committee later). So they were transferred to the Presidio to a separate camp on the other side of the reservation, far away from the main camps populated by Caucasians. Their tents were much smaller, and the food, supplies, and medical attention they received were inferior to those of the whites.

During the rebuilding phase after the earthquake, one of the biggest debates was the question of the fate of Chinatown. Logic would dictate the city would rebuild Chinatown where it had been before, just as they were rebuilding all other neighborhoods in the city. But the real estate of those twelve blocks was prime and businessmen who had been trying to get their hands on it for years saw an opportunity to steal it from the Chinese (since records of their leases would have been burned in the ires). These businessmen tried to get officials to move Chinatown to Hunter’s Point, a remote part of the city used by the Navy shipyard at the time.

Luckily, they did not succeed. The Chinese community in San Francisco, though relatively small, was not without a voice or its supporters. A delegation consisting of American-Chinese and Chinese authorities like the Consul-General of San Francisco called upon the governor to protest against the move, threatening to cut off commercial ties with China. The delegation made the following powerful statement: “America is a free country, and every man has a right to occupy land which he owns provided that he makes no nuisance.”

Photo Credit: Chinatown in San Francisco (in all its glory), taken 2 December 2007 by Tony Webster from Portland, OR: Hiku2/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 2.0

Moved by this plea (and by the idea of losing trade relations with China), officials nixed the idea of moving Chinatown to Hunter’s Point. Chinatown was rebuilt where it had stood before the earthquake and where it still stands today. The area lost its reputation for vice after the earthquake when the city “cleaned up” such places as the Barbary Coast and Chinatown. Instead, it became a tourist attraction, rebuilt with ornamental gates, panoramas, and pagodas. It’s now one of the most popular places to visit when in San Francisco.

If you want to find out more about how the Chinese faired after the San Francisco earthquake, be sure and check out Murder Among the Rubble, coming out at the end of this year. You can pick up a copy for preorder now at a discount on all online bookstores.

If you love fun, engaging mysteries set in the past, you’ll enjoy The Missing Ruby Necklace! It’s available exclusively to newsletter subscribers here. By signing up, you’ll also get news about upcoming releases, fun facts about women’s history, classic true-crime tidbits, and more!

Works Cited:

“Chinese Make Strong Protest”, San Francisco Chronicle, 30 April 1906. https://sfmuseum.org/chin/4.29.html. Accessed October 4, 2024.

More than I Love Lucy: Desi Arnaz

This month is Hispanic Heritage Month where we celebrate, among other things, the history and contributions of the Hispanic community. Probably one of the most well-recognized names (and faces) of the Golden Age of Hollywood is that of Lucy’s husband, Desi Arnaz. Only, he was much more than just Lucy’s sidekick in the I Love Lucy show.

Now, I really do love Lucy. Not only did she open doors for women comediennes at a time when men were dominating the comedy genre in film and television, but her I Love Lucy character offered a different glimpse of who women were in the Occupation: Housewife era of the 1950s. It also gave us another image to look up to other than the happy and contented housewife that characters like June Cleaver (though I defend June in this blog post) that many women of the mid-20th century found so oppressive.

But the success of I Love Lucy wasn’t due to Lucille Ball alone. I was recently watching a documentary about Lucy and while it went into details about her life and career, the mention of Desi Arnaz seemed almost like an afterthought. That annoyed me and made me curious about the life and work of this Cuban-American icon. What I found was a man who displayed a technical brilliance and talent of his own, not to mention a resilience that many people immigrating to America (including me) could identify with.

Photo Credit: Desi Arnaz, publicity photo, 1950, General Artists Corporation: Wikimedia Commons/PD US no notice

Desi came from Cuban nobility, which did not sit well with the revolutionaries active in Cuba in the 1930s. In fact, his family had to flee to America when the revolutionaries destroyed their home and possessions in 1933. They came to Miami with nothing and, like many immigrants, had to struggle to survive. They lived in a garage and Desi mentions in several interviews that he had to clean out birdcages among other odd jobs to help the family income.

However, his musical talent led him to form his own orchestra and tour around the country which got him into films. This, of course, is where he met and married Lucille Ball in 1940.

As Lucy’s husband on the show, he was charming and tolerant of her crazy schemes. But Desi’s real talent lay behind the scenes. He was a very savvy businessman and as passionate as Lucy about developing the technical side of television (which, in the early 1950s, was still very new). Desi is always credited for coming up with what is now considered the gold standard of the TV sitcom world: the multiple-camera set up. Up until 1951, most sitcoms were produced in New York and were recorded and broadcast to the rest of the country in a less-than-attractive way in terms of quality. Desi and his cameraman developed a system of multiple cameras filming at the same time on a sound stage with a live audience in the background which allowed for higher-quality images and a realtime feel to the show. Another thing Lucy and Desi are credited for is the invention of the rerun. They insisted on retaining the rights to the I Love Lucy show which allowed them to negotiate contracts with TV stations to broadcast the reruns we still see today.

After Lucy and Desi divorced in 1960, Desi continued to be active in film and television, though not to the degree that Lucille Ball was (who went on to create two more shows in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as star in a multitude of films). He largely retired from the limelight.

Still, his contribution to television is one of the endearing legacies of the medium, not to mention his marriage to Lucille Ball. In the 1950s, multi-racial marriages were much less common than they are today (something that plays a role in my upcoming Adele Gossling Mysteries book Murder Among the Rubble).

If you want to know more about what women enduring in the 1950s, you might enjoy my post-World War II short story collection, Lessons From My Mother’s Life. You can read all about it and find out where to get it here.