When the killer was an earthquake670 dead, counted exactly · July 1927
July 1927
When the killer was an earthquake
An earthquake hit Nablus in July 1927. Three papers here covered it, and between them they do everything the rest of this collection spends a century not doing.
“670 Killed, 3000 Injured in Palestine Earthquake… Property Damage $2,000,000 — Majority of Dead Arabs.”
The Morning Union, Springfield. An exact number. Not scores, not as many as, not reports differ widely. And the dead are identified.
CP-1927-017“Scarcely a House in Palestinian City That Had Stood for Over 2000 Years, Left Intact · Dead Lie Unburied, Injured Unattended · Wailings of Despair by Stricken Population Resound Throughout Desolated Community”
Waco News-Tribune. A Palestinian city, in Texas, in 1927. And grief: the unburied, the wailing, survivors begging the rescue parties to dig out their relatives.
CP-1927-001“Nathan Straus First to Respond With $20,000 — No Jews Killed · Jews of Tel Aviv Aid Anti-Semitic Arabs”
Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle. On a story about 670 dead, the news in the second line is who was not among them.
CP-1927-007Everything that goes missing when a person does the killing is here. The exact number. The adjective. The dead identified. The grief. American papers had all of it in 1927 and spent it on an earthquake.
Which means the vagueness everywhere else was a choice. The next time you read a headline where nobody kills anyone, ask what the same papers managed for a fault line.