An Introduction to “San Francisco Resists”–Blog Sized Bytes

Interior of the Moulin Rouge nightclub in the Barbary Coast district, c. 1911. San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.

My 2018 dissertation, “Resisting Reform: San Francisco Vice in the Progressive Era,” has many problems. Unfortunately, the most significant problem is also the one preventing it from becoming anything more: a unifying and interesting story. The basic idea of the project, the persistent and often successful resistance to the numerous attempts to “reform” the city by discouraging or outlawing activities such as gambling, drinking, and sex, I think is promising. But I never really found a thread or explanation–an argument–to make sense of the numerous incidents across the half century I examined. I started with, and tried to highlight as often as possible, the gender dimensions of the resistance. But I recognize that gender cannot explain everything. So I was left with describing a series of events, crusades, to make the city “respectable,” and their ultimate failures, more often than not. I had a consistent place–San Francisco–I had a consistent type of human activity–resistance to anti-vice–but that does not seem like enough to turn my dissertation into a manuscript.

So my answer is to give it up for now and take what I do have, which is a lot if interesting stories from San Francisco’s first eight decades as an American city, and turn them into blog sized bytes. Maybe something will emerge from this exercise. But at the very least it will give me an outlet to write a bit and think through what I do have in the hopes that a larger story or argument will reveal itself.

I will start with the early 1850s, during which the first attempts to curtail drinking appeared right alongside the first rush of gold seekers; move through the last quarter of the nineteenth century and more temperance and anti-dive campaigns; into the twentieth century and the Barbary Coast, and slumming, and Prohibition.

Much of this time a group known collectively as Progressives, “reformers,” attempted to enforce their middle-class values of respectability in cities across the nation, including San Francisco. But for all of the publicity they have received (this period of American history is known by that label), they often came up well short of their goals in California’s leading metropolis.