"A classic of urban history, environmental history, California history, and socially oriented architectural criticism, this work contains scholarship that is thrilling in its comprehensiveness. Never before have the inner dynamics of the regional civilization centered in San Francisco been so comprehensively integrated."—Dr. Kevin Starr, State Librarian of California, author of Americans and the California Dream

"Imperial San Francisco is a great gift of a book, the product of extraordinary research, insight, and hard work that connects a lot of dots and gives me a reinvigorated focus and curiosity [about] what California culture was and what might become of it all."—Gary Snyder

Gray Brechin has worked as a journalist and television producer and is coauthor of Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream (UC Press). He received his Ph.D. from the U.C. Berkeley Department of Geography in 1998

Imperial San Francisco

Urban Power, Earthly RuinBy Gray A. Brechin

University of California Press

Copyright © 2006 Gray A. Brechin
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520250086

Chapter One

The Pyramid of Mining

* * *

Those who succeed us can well take care of themselves.

Copper king and U.S. senator William A. Clark, 1907

MYTHOLOGIZING MINING

Six hundred tons of sculpted bronze and granite would be sufficient tocrush any doubts about pioneer morality, claimed speakers at the dedicationof the Pioneer Monument on Thanksgiving Day, 1894. Just theday before, a prominent San Francisco preacher had told his congregationthat the proud members of the Native Sons of the Golden Westwere "degenerate descendants of unworthy sires" who had been "Sabbath-breakersand hoodlums" during the increasingly fabled gold rush.Another divine had claimed that unlike the pilgrims, California's pioneershad come to escape religion, that "they came not for conscience,but for coin." Yet another told a church club that "the honor thatbound the Pioneers together ... was the honor that binds thieves togetherfor protection." He added that they had passed their criminalgenes down to subsequent generations of Californians.

    Guardians of the golden legend could not permit such heresy to gounchallenged. Real estate magnate James Lick had left a great deal ofmoney in his will for statuary to honor his fellow pioneers, and his bequesthad bought a lot of art. Willard B. Farwell, official orator of theselect Society of California Pioneers, indignantly referred to the clergy'simpiety in a speech nearly as ponderous as the monument he was dedicating.The impressive pile would "command unceasing veneration andrespect for the California pioneers through long lines of generations yetto come," Farwell claimed. It would tell "the romantic story of theearly days, and the boundless possibilities of this great empire of peaceand prosperity." Its bronze men would pass "from age to age?the legendsof the mission days, and of that wondrous tale?more strange indeedthan fiction ever told?the story of the Argonauts."

    Those who joined the gold rush had called themselves Argonauts andimagined themselves to be reliving a classical legend. In the monuments,memoirs, chronicles, reunions, pageants, and gimcrack triumphal archesthat proliferated as the Golden State neared its golden anniversary in1900, they and their children gilded their past while claiming for theirbloodlines the superhuman valor of Jason's warriors seeking the GoldenFleece in far Colchis. They never tired of telling outsiders and one anotherthat their city by the Golden Gate was the Mistress of the Pacific,the Queen City on her seven?or hundred?hills, looking westward to adestiny proportionately greater than that of imperial Rome.

    Crowned with the buxom figure of Minerva taken from the GreatSeal of California, the monument elevated San Francisco's founding toVirgilian epic. It stood in a grassy square, directly in front of City Hall,itself a stupendous pile that had been rising for more than twenty yearsas the city's leading symbol of municipal graft. High above Minerva, aneven larger iron statue, The Goddess of Progress, crowned the baroquedome of City Hall, her hair a corona of electric light bulbs. She watchedover a metropolis that only fifty years before had been a sleepy Mexicanhamlet, but which, Farwell said, enterprise had created "as if by thewave of a magician's wand." For the orator and his associates, "thesmoke from hundreds of manufacturing establishments enveloping halfof this great hive of industrial traffic" was fragrant proof of the city'sadvance.

    The Union Iron Works on nearby Potrero Hill contributed much tothat smoky prosperity. Its owner, the munitions king Irving MurrayScott, opened the dedicatory festivities with a brief speech of his own.Scott's excellent mining machinery and battleships had won the cityworldwide fame, and Farwell praised him for "the great leviathans ofwar that one by one have been launched upon the great waters fromyour colossal works." The Pioneer Monument itself seemed poised onthe ways for a launch down Eighth Street and into the bay.

    James Lick's trust specified that the monument should be led by arepresentation of agriculture, but the sculptor or trustees had taken theliberty of moving one of mining to the fore and thus relegated farmingto the side. Gold panners were more appropriate, they felt, for it wasmetal that had drawn the pioneers to the Golden State in the numbersnecessary to create both San Francisco and Lick's fortune in urban realestate. Wheat may have launched California to sustained prosperity,but it wasn't the stimulant for statehood, nor did field crops carry theromance of bright ingots and sudden, spectacular wealth or producethe global muscle that gold has historically bought.

    Mining engineers and historians repeatedly claimed that miners werethe true vanguard of progress, and so it was only appropriate that theyshould lead. To the merchant's oft-repeated cliché "Commerce followsthe flag," the champions of mining added the condition "but the flagfollows the pick." They spoke a little-known truth, for the founding ofCalifornia and its leading city were merely way stations on the courseof empire in its eternal quest for metals and the energy necessary to acquireyet more of the same. The Pioneer Monument ennobled the unpleasantriesof that millennial march into all regions of the earth.

THE INVISIBLE PYRAMID

San Francisco's motto?Gold in Peace, Iron in War?as well as thechoice of mining by Lick's trustees as best emblematic of the city'sfounding, compresses the impetus for more than five thousand years ofcity making into a few choice words and one salient image. Agricultureand mining represent the two prototypical human activities from whichtowns first sprang. Until recently, they stood for opposite ways of regardingand transforming the natural world.

    Literally rooted in organic reality, the life of the farmer was traditionallytied to the rhythms of earth and sun, changes and vagaries ofthe seasons, and, above all, cultivation and replenishment of the soil forhuman ends. Cities first rose upon the surplus biotic energy that theAgricultural Revolution made possible, as well as on the settlement inplace that it demanded. Within the city wall, granaries provided ameasure of security never before available to nomadic tribes?a reservoirof calories to drive human and animal labor, which in turn couldtransform nature into finished goods, leisure into thought, and thoughtinto technical innovations to yet further transform nature. Out of thepool of surplus energy that farmers produced for those within the cityrose the nonproducers: priests, nobles, bureaucrats, merchants, andarmies. The city served, above all else, as humanity's great transformer.As long as it remained small and close to the land, it furnished the tillerswith a nitrogen-rich source of fertilizer that they returned to the soil ina closed organic loop. City and contado existed ideally in harmonicsymbiosis.

    The Roman writer Cicero thus envisioned agriculture as a kind of ecologicalbookkeeping, observing that "the farmer keeps an open accountwith the earth" which returned interest depending on how wisely hetreated the principle. Like other classical writers, Cicero associated farmingwith simplicity and morality, a...