THE GREAT LIE - 1915 San Francisco World's Fair & The Panama Canal

🔥 At 5:12 in the morning on April 18, 1906, the San Andreas Fault tore open and San Francisco came down in under a minute. Then the fires came. And before the smoke had even cleared, the most powerful men in the city had quietly agreed on a story — that it was the fire that did it. Not the earthquake. The fire. Because fire was insured. Earthquakes were not.

That was the first lie. Nine years later, the city threw the biggest party on Earth to celebrate two great American triumphs — rising from the ashes, and finishing the Panama Canal. Both were sitting on top of bodies and lies that powerful people spent a fortune making sure you would never count.

🏛️ This is the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition — a world's fair built on two enormous lies. In this episode of Just Killing Time, Elizabeth Stanton follows the documents, names the names, and introduces the man who took these grubby cover-ups and turned them into a science you are still living inside today: Edward Bernays.

🧵 IN THIS EPISODE:

🔥 The 80% the USGS later confirmed — how much of the destruction the earthquake actually caused, and why the city buried it

📨 The telegram sent just six hours after the quake that set the "fire" narrative in motion

🎩 Mayor Eugene Schmitz, political boss Abe Ruef, and the railroad's hired photographer

📄 The earthquake exclusion clause — and how Hartford paid investigators bonuses to reclassify claims as "earthquake" so they could deny them

🕵️ The Pacific Coast Adjustment Bureau: a written cartel agreement to pay the powerful and deny the poor

⚖️ Margaret Sullivan, the widow who beat Hartford in the California Supreme Court — and still died in poverty

💰 Bailey Willis, the geologist paid $25,000 (over $750k today) to say the ground was safe

✍️ The building-inspection reports physically rewritten in different ink to erase the earthquake

⚒️ "Gold roll" vs "silver roll": how the Panama Canal hid more than 19,000 deaths

🧨 The Culebra Cut explosion that killed 23 men — and was officially recorded as 6

🚬 Edward Bernays, Freud's nephew: "Torches of Freedom," the United Fruit coup in Guatemala, and the birth of manufactured consent

🌉 How the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake collected the bill — in the exact neighborhood they built on the lie.

They rewrote a disaster while a quarter of a million witnesses were still alive. This is the story of how they pulled it off — and who paid for it. — Elizabeth

 📬 Time Killer Files

⚠️ A note: this episode discusses mass death and the deliberate erasure of thousands of Caribbean canal workers. Told with care, but please listen accordingly.

📩 Got a family story or a modern cover-up that fits? Send your Time Killer File to JustKillingTimePodcast@gmail.com

🔔 Subscribe for the full White City Series and new true-crime-and-conspiracy episodes every week.

📚 Sources include: USGS Professional Paper 1515 • National Archives (Pacific Coast Adjustment Bureau; Panama Canal Zone records) • Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley • Stanford University Archives • Charles Evans Hughes, Report on Insurance Practices (1907) • Edward Bernays, "Propaganda" (1928) • Mary Comerio, "Disaster Hits Home" (1998)

#truecrime #conspiracy #history #1906earthquake #panamacanal #edwardbernays #worldsfair #sanfrancisco #propaganda #podcast #JustKillingTime

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:16

At five twelve in the morning on April eighteenth, nineteen oh six, the San Andreas Bolt tore open and the city of San Francisco came down in under a minute. Now go read those insurance claims people filed in the weeks after. You'll notice something strange. Almost none of them say earthquake. They instead say fire. Page after page, claim after claim, fire, fire, fire. And the insurance companies paid the fire claims and denied the earthquake claims, because their policies covered one and excluded the other. Here's the problem with that. The earthquake is what knocked the city flat. The fires came second, and they only spread the way they did because the shaking had already snapped the water maids. But within hours of that first tremor, a story started moving through San Francisco that was cleaner, simpler, and a lot more profitable than the truth. The story was it was a fire. The story was a lie, and it was the only first of two lies. Because nine years later the same city threw a huge party to celebrate two great American triumphs. First, San Francisco raising from the ashes like a phoenix. And secondly, finishing the Panama Canal. And both of those triumphs were sitting on top of bodies and lives that a lot of powerful people had spent a fortune making sure you would never count. Tonight I'm going to show you how they turned a disaster into profit and how they turned thousands of dead men into a rounding error. And I'm going to introduce you to a man who took those grubby little cover-ups and turned them into science that's still running your life today. You're listening to Just Killing Time. I'm Elizabeth Stanton. This is a true crime conspiracy and stories that keep us up at night. We have walked through 1893 with the White City H.H. Holmes through Tesla's Stolen Thunder, through Martin Cooney's Incubator Babies, and through the Human Zoo at St. Louis in 1904. Tonight, we moved to 1915 and the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. And here's the thing that makes this episode different. In 1904, they put living people in cages and called it science. And that's monstrous. But it's crude. In 1915, they've gotten sophisticated. They didn't have to hide what they were doing. They could take something the whole world had watched happen. An earthquake witnessed by a quarter of a million people and simply rewrite it while the witnesses were still alive. This is the episode where they learned to control the story. So let's talk about how they did it. Now the earthquake hit at a magnitude of 7.9 on the Richter scale, and the ground moved from somewhere about 45 to 60 seconds. And in that time, it dropped unreinforced brick buildings all over the city. It ruptured the gas lines, broke the water mains, and left the poor fire department with hoses and no water. Then the fires came and there was nothing left to fight them with. Now this documented fact is true. It's a modern seismic analysis that was published in the U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1515, and that found that roughly 80% of the structural damage to San Francisco came directly from the ground shaking, not from the fires that followed. In the marina district and south of market, the soil itself liquefied and whole blocks collapsed before a single flame reached in. So that's the truth. 80% earthquake. Now here's the story they told instead. The man running the response was Mayor Eugene Schmitz. He was a former orchestra conductor who, at the very moment, was facing corruption charges, working hand in glove with Abe Ruth, the political boss who actually ran the city. And from the first hours, every official word out of San Francisco emphasized fire and buried the earthquake. The first official report, it was telegraphed to Washington just six hours after the quake, and it read, I quote, San Francisco burning. Fire started by earthquake, but damage mainly from fire. That single sentence became the template. Every report that followed did the same thing, pile up the fire and minimize the shaky. And it wasn't floppiness, it was money. Standard fire insurance covered fire. It specifically, though, excluded earthquakes. So the difference between fire and earthquake was the difference between getting paid and getting nothing. Now the Southern Pacific Railroad, which happened to own enormous amounts of San Francisco real estate, they hired photographer Arnold Genta to document the disaster with instructions to shoot the fire and stay away from anything that obviously showed the ground had failed. Another documented fact, internal Southern Pacific memos found in the company archives in 1970, then directed that photographs should emphasize the fire destruction and recovery efforts while minimizing evidence of structural failure due to ground motion. And Genta's images became the official visual record of the disaster and ran in newspapers across the country. Even the federal government fell in line. The official U.S. Geological Survey report published in 1908 under geologist Andrew Lawson, they played down the earthquake danger and reassured the country that another one like it was unlikely. Lawson's private letters, which were held at UC Berkeley's Vancroft Library, show he knew exactly what he was doing, writing to his colleague, Grove Carl Gilbert. Lawson admitted and said this. In 1971, there was an investigation by San Francisco Chronicle reporter Jerry Carroll, and he uncovered hundreds of building inspection records from 1906 and 1907 that had been physically altered. Reports that originally read Collapsed Underground Motion had been written over to read destroyed by fire. The alterations were made in a different ink, in different handwriting from the originals. Why don't you sit with that for just a minute? Because it's a whole episode in the miniature. That's not a misunderstanding. Someone sat at a desk with a pen and physically rewrote what an inspector had seen with their own eyes, because the truth was too expensive to admit. The railroad needed its land valuable again, and the spectators who bought cheap needed buyers to feel safe. The insurers needed an excuse not to pay. Every one of those interests pointed in the same direction, and so they all told the same lie, and the lie became the official story of an event that thousands of people had personally lived through. That's the trick. It's the whole trick, and it only gets cleaner from here. The insurance industry's response to 1906 wasn't a thousand companies each making a judgment call, it was a coordinated effort, and the records prove it. Every standard policy carried what they called the earthquake exclusion clause. Damage from shaking excluded. Only damage solely from fire got paid. So the entire game became reclassification. Take a loss the earthquake caused and find a way to file it under earthquake so you didn't have to cover it. Internal documents from the Hartford Fire Insurance Company surfaced during a class action litigation in the 1980s. Showed that the company hired teams of investigators specifically to move claims out of fire and into Earthquake and paid them bonuses for every claim that they could reclassify. Their lead man was a former civil engineer named Charles Durless, who built what he called damage assessment protocols designed to find any sign that the building failed before it burned, so the whole loss could be denied. But denying everybody would have triggered a public backlash and federal regulation that they were not prepared for. So they got selective. And who got paid versus who got stonewall tells you exactly what kind of operation this was. Claims from major corporations, banks, and wealthy individuals were paid at rates above 95%. Claims from working class homeowners and small businesses were denied at rates above 80%. The pattern was so blatant it became the subject of congressional hearings in 1909. They coordinated through a cartel they called the Pacific Coast Adjustment Bureau, run by a former railroad lawyer named William Dunn. Minutes from the Pacific Coast Adjustment Bureau preserved in the National Archives record member companies agreeing in writing to deny claims from less influential parties while paying claims from parties with, you know, significant political or economic influence. That's not an industry making mistakes, that's an agreement, a written agreement, to rob the poor and protect the powerful. The private correspondence is even more naked about it. James Hotling, president of the Chicago-based home insurance company, wrote to his board in June 1906, and this is what he said. The San Francisco situation requires careful management. We must pay enough claims to avoid regulatory attention while denying enough claims to maintain profitability. The earthquake exclusion provides our legal basis, but political considerations must guide our application of this exclusion. How gross is that? Absolutely disgusting are all of these scoundrels, right? I mean, where is the morality in any of these people? However, there was somebody who was watching, Charles Evan Hughes, who would later become Chief Justice of the United States. But in 1906 was investigating insurers for the state of New York got a hold of the company's internal communications. And Hughes' investigation published in 1907 as Repair on Insurance Practices following the San Francisco earthquake documented that major companies had agreed in advance to cat their total payouts at no more than 60% of claims filed, regardless of whether the individual claims were legitimate. And to find reasons to deny the rest, they went hunting through people's lives. The Pinkerton Detective Agency took in over $200,000 from insurers to investigate earthquake claimants. And remember, the average annual wage at the time was under $500. Pinkerton reports found in the agency's Chicago archives show investigators were told to dig for any moral hazard, anything in the claimant's personal life that could justify denial. So they surveilled people, interviewed their neighbors and employers, and pulled their financial records. This had a body count of a different kind. Take Margaret Sullivan. She was a widow who ran a boarding house in the mission district. She fought Hartford for four years over her fire policy. Her case, Sullivan v. Hartford Fire Insurance Company, actually reached the California Supreme Court in 1910. She won. But by the time she won, she'd already lost the property to creditors, and she died in poverty. Insurance companies. A 1912 study by UC Berkeley economist Jessica Pechoto found that more than 3,000 San Francisco property owners had been driven into bankruptcy by earthquake-related claim denials, representing over fifty fifty five zero million in personal wealth transferred straight from disaster victims to insurance companies. That's theft wearing a suit. These companies collected premiums off San Francisco for years, and the moment the city needed them, they lawyered up, hired detectives, and decided who deserved help based on how rich and connected they were. Earthquake knocked down the buildings and the insurance industry knocked down the families. While the insurers were busy not paying, the real estate industry was busy making sure no future buyer would ever know what they were sitting on. This part grosses me out terribly due to the fact that I have a real estate agent and I sell real estate. And to hear this makes my stomach sick. The San Francisco Real Estate Board, led by a real estate mogul named Homer Laughlin, set up what they publicly called the Reconstruction, sorry, Reconstruction and Development Community Committee. The real job of that committee was to bury the geology. The Internal Real Estate Board memos in the California Historical Society archives show the committee hired its own geologists to produce assessments of earthquake risks, assessments that conveniently ran lower than what the independent scientists were finding. Their hired gun was Bailey Willis, a man who'd left the U.S. Geological Survey to consult privately. Willis publicly contradicted his own forward callings and called the 1906 quake an exceptional event that wouldn't happen again for several centuries. Now Willis's consulting contract, it was preserved at Stanford, literally required his geological findings to support the rabbit, rapid, and profitable redevelopment of San Francisco real estate. He was paid twenty-five thousand dollars for it, more than if you were just looking at it, that in today's money, that's about $750,000. That's not science. That's a man being paid three-quarters of a million dollars to say the ground was safe. Then they edited the paperwork. The city's chief building inspector, Ferdinand Bergdorf, took money from the real estate board to expedite those reconstruction permits and clear away red tape. And the alterations were made years later, during the exact period Bergdorf was on the real estate industry's payroll. They even engineered the language buyers would raid. California law required disclosure of known hazards, so the board wrote standardized wording that technically complied while telling you nothing. The 1906 catastrophe became fire damage from earthquake-related conflagration. Nose smooth. Earthquake gets shoved into the middle of the sentence as an adjective, and fire gets to be the noun. Real estate ads from 1907 to 1910 collected at the San Francisco Public Library, sold properties as quote-unquote fire safe and rebuilt with modern materials, and almost never mentioned earthquakes or fault lines at all. And then they did the most cynical thing of the whole chapter. The Southern Pacific Railroad's real estate division under William Hood started actively steering development into the most dangerous ground in the city. Southern Pacific memos from 1907 to 1909 show the railroad offered land price cuts up to 60% to developers willing to build in the Merida District and South of Market, the very areas that had suffered the worst shaking in 1906 and were the most likely to fail again. Think about the logic there. They didn't just hide the danger. They discounted the most dangerous land to make sure it got built up fast and packed with people. People who had no idea because the disclosure forms had been carefully written to keep them in the dark. They concentrated the population on top of the fault and concealed the fault from the population. Just sit with that for a second because the ground is going to come back around at the end of this episode and collect what it's owed. This makes me sick. I have sat on the city council before, and um I am a no when it comes to giving developers incentives. I just think that that's a terrible idea. I don't think it benefits the people. I think it benefits the developer and the city, but not the people. And as a city councilman, you are there to represent the people. Now, here's the second lie. Because while San Francisco was rewriting its first quake, the federal government was rewriting a death toll. The official body count for building the Panama Canal is about 5,600 workers. And while that's horrendous, I mean, if you think about that number, 5,600, that's similar to like 9-11, and it's just awful. But the real number is over 25,000. And the overwhelming majority were black men from the Caribbean whose lives the project treated as disposable. The canal opened in um 1914, which perfectly timed to be the crown jewel of the 1915 fair. It was sold to the world as the greatest engineering feat in human history. American grift conquering geography and tropical disease. And selling it that way required burying the men who died doing it. This is a documented fact, darn it. The Panama Canal Company kept two completely different sets of books. You ready to get sick? Here you go. There was the gold rule yuckers, that's what they call. And those were mostly white Americans, and they had their deaths carefully recorded with names, causes, and family notification. And then they had the silver rule yerkers, mostly black Caribbean immigrants, and they got a name and a date if they were lucky. Often not even that. Now the hero of the official story is Dr. William Gorges. He was a sanitation chief celebrated for beating back like yellow fever and malaria during this time, but Gorges' own records give him away. In a 1910 confidential report to Canal Zone Governor George Gothels held at the National Library of Medicine, Gorges wrote this. The disparity in medical care and death reporting between gold and silver employees creates significant gaps in our mortality data. Silver employee deaths are substantially underreported due to inadequate record keeping and limited family notification procedures. It was deliberate. The monthly reports to Washington split the dead into American fatalities with reported with names and causes, and then the labor casualties reported as bare numbers. The Canal Zone Administration memos from 1906 to 1914 found in the National Archives in the 1980s confirmed that split. But the clearest proof is a single incident. On March 15, 1908, a dynamite explosion at the Cobra Cut killed 23 men. The official record lists six deaths, all of them gold me. And the 17 civil workers who died in the same blast were written down as injured, even though witnesses saw them die on the spot. And I could only imagine how gruesome that would have been in a dynamite explosion. The chief engineer John Stevens knew. In a letter to his wife, he wrote it out plainly. He said, the colored workers die at rates that would shock the American public if fully reported. We must manage these statistics carefully to maintain public support for the work. Stevenson's personal letters donated to the Library of Congress named specific dead workers and described specific fatal accidents, none of which appear anywhere in the official reports to Washington. Now the men, they came from Barbados and Jamaica, Trinidad, and they were crewed with promises of good pay and safe conditions. What they got was overcrowded barracks, bad food, segregated medical care, and unmarked graves. A 1912 investigation by the Jamaican colonial government found that more than 3,000 Jamaicans went to Panama for canal work between 1904 and 1914, and fewer than 600 of those 3,000 came home. Of the 2,400 who just vanished, only 180 families ever received any official word. How sad is that? That's so so sad. And the hospital records blow the official numbers apart. Dr. Lewis Deeks, Chief of Surgery at Ancon Hospital, he kept his own journals. Deeks medical journals preserved at John Hopkins record 847 worker deaths during his tenure from 1907 to 1911 alone. The official canal zone reports for that same stretch list only 312 deaths total, and that's gold and silver combined. When Deks wrote to administrators asking about the gap, Governor Gothals wrote back telling him to distinguish between employees whose deaths require official notification and laborers whose deaths are internal administrative matters. That sentence does a lot of work. Translated it means American deaths or deaths, Caribbean deaths or paperwork. And the canal was celebrated at the 1915 fair. The only acknowledgement of the human cost was a single line citing approximately 5,600 fatalities, a number engineered to leave out almost every Caribbean man who died. The same engineers who measure every cubic yard of derb moved in every barrel of concrete poured could not be bothered to count the dead because they had already decided those particular dead didn't count. So when we call the canal Panama Canal one of the greatest triumphs of American engineering, and it is an astonishing piece of engineering, understand that it's a monument standing on roughly 19,000 uncounted graves, and the men in those graves were erased on purpose so the rest of us could feel good about that achievement. So now you understand the two lies. On February 20th, 1915, San Francisco threw a 10-month party built on top of both of them. It was the Panama Pacific International Exposition. It covered about 635 acres. And here's a detail you'll want to remember. It was built in the Marina District, the same marina district that had liquefied in 1906. The same ground the railroad had been discounting to developers. They held the world celebration of San Francisco safety directly on top of the most dangerous dirt in the city. Now the centerpiece was the Palace of Fine Arts, designed by Bernard Maybach. It's the only major structure for the fair still standing today. The fair's official guidebook ran a hundred, sorry, eight hundred and forty-seven pages describing every single attraction. Exactly three of those pages mentioned the 1906 disaster. So 18.8 million people came through those 10 months, making it one of the most successful world's fairs in American history. They came to see a miracle of recovery. And what they actually walked through was a marketing campaign with a building permit. And we know how good those are. The Panama Canal exhibit was one of the most popular attractions, of course. It was a working scale model of the locks, displayed on conquering like tropical disease and the whole triumph. It was designed by John Barrett. He was director of the Pan American Union. Now, Barrett's planning documents in the National Archives instructed to the exhibit to make sure that you emphasize engineering triumph and medical achievement while avoiding discussion of construction difficulties or casualty statistics. So you could walk through a replica of a canal and never learn that thousands of men had died digging the real one. They controlled the pictures too. The official fair photographer Carlton Watkins was hired under a contract preserved in the Bancroft Library, requiring him to emphasize reconstruction progress and architectural achievements while avoiding images that suggest ongoing seismic risk. And there was one genuinely human note in the whole spectacle, which only makes the rest sadder. Sarah Bernhardt, the great French actress, performed at the fair at the age of 70. The year after her right leg was amputated. She performed seated. Bernard's performance drew more than 200,000 people. She was held up as the living symbol of the fair's message that human determination can overcome any catastrophe. And that's the cruelest irony of the whole thing. Here's a 70-year-old woman with one leg, refusing to quit, genuinely overcoming a genuine catastrophe in front of your own eyes, and they're using her as set dressing for a festival that exists specifically to cover a lie about its own catastrophes. Her courage was real, everything around her was a cover story. Now I want to introduce you to another man because everything we've talked about tonight, the rewritten reports, the curated photographs, the engineering language on a disclosure form, all of it was still amateur hour. It was a bunch of separate interests, independently deciding to lie in the same direction. Within a few years, one man would take all of these instincts and turn them into science. He'd give it a name, he'd teach it in books, and sell it to anyone who would pay. His name was Edward Bernays. B E R N A Y S. For those that are listening, that's how you spell his name. In time fillers, I need you to understand exactly what kind of man we're dealing with. Edward Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, and he took his uncle's ideas about the unconscious mind and weaponized them. People call him the father of public relations. That's like calling an arsonist the father of Tahiti. Bernays wrote the book on this literally. His 1928 book is titled Propaganda, and it opens with this line. He wasn't confessing, he was advertising. In the same book, he wrote, those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country. So Fort Bernays, that wasn't just a warning, that was a business plan, and he was applying for the job. His genius, and it was genius, an evil one, was figuring out you don't sell people a product and you attach the product to something deep in their unconscious and let them sell it to themselves. His most famous example tells you everything about the man. In 1929, the American Tobacco Company hired Bernays to get women smoking because half the market was off limits to them socially. So Bernays organized a parade down Fifth Avenue and had fashionable young women light up cigarettes in public, framing it as a blow for women's liberation. He called the cigarettes torches of freedom, and he took a product that gives you lung cancer and rebranded it as feminism, and it worked. But the darkest thing he did wasn't selling cigarettes, it was selling a coup. When the Dem, let me not trip over my words here. When the democratically elected government of Guatemala under Jacob O. R. Benz tried to redistribute unused land, much of it was owned by the United Fruit Company to peasant farmers. United Fruit hired Bernays. He planted stories in American newspapers describing Guatemala as a Soviet beachhead in Central America. He manufactured great, like fake grief. What is wrong with my speaking? He manufactured fake grassroots outrage. And he steered American public opinion into supporting the CIA-backed coup that overthrew that government in 1954, a coup that opened the door to roughly 40 years of civil war and genocide. That's the resume. Cigarettes for women and a coup for a fruit company. And here's why he belongs in this episode specifically. Bernays studied the San Francisco's campaign, and he pointed to the 1906 earthquake recovery effort as a model of how, in his words, public perception could be managed through coordinated messaging and selective information. The improvised cover-up would just spend an hour dissecting. He looked at it, took notes, and turned it into a repeatable method, and then he sold it to corporations and governments for the next thirty years. Edward Bernays, he looked at American democracy and saw a malfunction to be fixed. He genuinely believed ordinary people were too stupid to be trusted with their own opinions and that a small, smart, elite, you know, his clients, had both the right and the duty to manufacture those opinions for them. And every time you see an ad that sells you an identity instead of a product, that's Brenaise. Every time a political campaign skips the policy and goes straight for your fear, that's Bernays. And every time a quote unquote grassroots movement turns out to be funded by the people who benefit from it, that's Bernays. The men who rewrote the earthquake were criminals improvising. Bernays is a man who industrialized the crowding. He didn't just lie to America, he taught Americans, the most powerful institutes, how to lie to Americans forever. And then he died comfortable and respected. That's the scoundrel. Now you know his name. And I do encourage you, look him up, go down that rabbit hole, and then think to yourself when you look at things that are happening in today's society, um wars, disease, uh, political movements, what do you see? You see bernays behind all of it, and it's disgusting. Propaganda is probably one of the worst things that has ever happened to America. Now, lies like this don't stay in the past, they keep charging interest. And in San Francisco, the bill came due October 17th, 1989. When the Loma Prieta earthquake struck in 89, the worst damage hit, of course, the Marina District, the same liquefying ground that they'd held the 1915 fair, the same ground the railroad had discounted to developers 80 years earlier. The U.S. Geological Survey recorded 63 deaths, and total damage exceeded six billion dollars. A 1990 analysis by UC Berkeley seismologist found that 78% of the buildings had collapsed in 1989, stood in zones that had been identified as high earthquake risk back in the surveys of 1907 and 1910. The surveys, those warnings, and the real estate industry had spent a fortune burying. UC Berkeley and disaster researcher, Dr. Mary Camaro, in her 1998 study, it's called Disaster Hits Home, found that the neighborhoods built in the rush between 1906 and 1920 suffered disproportionate damage in 1989 because they'd been thrown up fast on bad ground under official narratives that insisted. And the Denial had a wall half-life. San Francisco did not adopt a comprehensive earthquake preparedness plan until 1975, 69 years after 1906, because for most of the 20th century, the city was still operating on the lie that fire, not earthquakes, was the real threat. The Panama Line metastasized to the method developed there, count one kind of worker, erase the other, became a template. A 1947 War Department audit declassified in the 1990s found that during World War II, casualty reporting on overseas military construction projects followed what it called Hanama Protocols. American military deaths were fully reported. Now foreign civilian deaths, they were minimized or simply not recorded at all. And this is the thorough line of our entire series. The same overlapping money was behind all of it. This may JP Morgan's empire helped fund the 1893 and 1905 fires, was invested, of course, in the Panama Project and the Rockefeller Foundation. It funded the racial science promoted in 1904 and later funded recovery research that propped up the fire narrative. Hartford Fire Insurance, the same Hartford that denied earthquake claims, was the major funder of the American Eugenics Society and the research behind forced sterilization laws. And Southern Pacific, which manipulated the city's real estate, ran in the same financial circles that had pulled the plug on Tesla. These are not separate scandals. They were the same hands. And to close this loop right after our finale next time, listen to this one. The advertising agency, Baton, Barton, Durstein, and Osborne worked on the Panama Canal Publicity and San Francisco Earthquake Recovery. The very same agency would later coin Better Living through chemistry for DuPont at the 1939 Wounds Fair. The same people, the same playbook, just a new target. Time killers, this one's got real homework because these patterns didn't end in 1915. And if you're in the San Francisco Bay area, I would love to know what it's like to live on ground that was sold to your grandparents with the danger edited out. Are there neighborhoods near you that everybody quietly knows not to trust? Have you run into real estate practices that still wave away the risk? And if you have Caribbean rates, especially Jamaican, Barbados, or Trinidad, and want your family stories. Somebody in your line may have gotten lost and never came back due to the Panama Canal. These aren't ancient mysteries. They're missing chairs at your family's table. And for everybody, now that you know Bernay's name, start spotting his fingerprints. The next time you see a quote unquote movement that turns out to be corporate funded or an ad selling you an identity, think about it and send me your file. I'm building a file. Send it to Timekillerfile at just killing time podcast at gmail.com. The Panama Pacific Exposition, it closed on December 4th, 1915, and the organizers declared it a trial. And they were right in a way. It triumphantly proved something just not what they thought. It proved that you could take an earthquake watched by a quarter of a million people and call it a fire, and it proved you could bury nineteen thousand men and round them down to a footnote. It proved that with enough money, enough coordination, and enough nerve, you can rewrite history while the witnesses are still breathing and then sell tickets to the rewrite. That is the real innovation of nineteen fifteen. Not the architecture, it's the method. And there was a man taking notes who would carry that method into the rest of the century. Remember, history is written by the victors. It is his story. And next time we reach the end of the road, it's 1939, New York, the world of tomorrow, the fair that promised you a future and delivered you a bill you're still paying for every single month. The same families, the same playbook, and the most ambitious theft in American history. I'm Elizabeth Stanton. This has been just killing time. Thank you for killing some time with me today. And the earthquake was never a fire. The 5,600 were always 25,000, and the lies they told you are still being paid for in blood and money today.

SPEAKER_01 43:58

Alexa, what is a chemtrail? Chemtrails. Trails left by aircraft are actually chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed at high altitudes for a purpose undisclosed to the general public in clandestine programs directed by government officials.