A WORLD UPSIDE DOWN

An important part of the context underlying my project on resisting reform is the conflict San Franciscans faced when thinking about their Gold Rush roots. Many were proud, many were embarrassed, many wanted to maintain the “Spirit of ’49” in the city’s personality, while others thought it was unbefitting the leading city on the west coast.

Thus, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, some San Franciscans made a tremendous effort to shed the disorder of their Gold Rush roots. A great diversity of cultures, an imbalanced sex ratio, a population explosion that outran the ability of local officials to effectively exercise authority, and the presence of a bustling sea port led one observer in 1855 to comment, “The great recognized orders of society were tumbled topsy-turvy…all things seemed in the utmost disorder.”[1] San Francisco’s reforming class of the early twentieth century often traced their concerns of their era to this social fluidity.

Despite the uneven numbers of men and women, heterosocial leisure was a distinctive feature of the miners’ social world. French, Mexican, and Chilean women, gambling, fandangos, and heavy drinking comprised the world of early California and reflected what both miners and later reformers saw as a “lack of society.”[2] As the city grew and developed and came to resemble more closely some of the major urban centers throughout the country (which had in most cases existed for a century or more), the city’s leading businessmen and government officials attempted to assert control over the city’s inhabitants in ways Barbara Berglund describes as “hierarchy-building” along race, class, and gender lines. The success or failure of this effort, they believed, reflected the “the city’s progress or decline.”[3] Critics in the late nineteenth century frequently commented that the city’s pleasurable pursuits–gambling, drinking, dancing, sex–were “relics of old mining days” and the period’s infamous lack of restraint, they insisted hopefully, the city “long ago emerged.”[4] Year after year, reform crusaders declared a “lid” had been placed on, clamped firmly down upon, screwed or nailed shut, on the Barbary Coast or one of the city’s other numerous vice districts.[5] But in these crucial years of the city’s development during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as permanent structures replaced tents and wooden shacks, as immigrants became permanent residents rather than “Argonauts,” a resistance to “respectability” became deeply ingrained in the city.

As with the next topic, “defining vice,” the articulation of this pride or disdain for San Francisco’s earliest years will be explored in more context-specific detail as the occasions allow.

[1] Frank Soulé, John H. Gihon, and James Nisbet, Annals of San Francisco (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1855), 645; “A World Upside Down” taken from Edmund Booth, Forty-Niner: The Life Story of a Deaf Pioneer, Library of Congress, accessed 30 January 2018, https://www.loc.gov/item/53003517.

[2] Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), 51, 100-101, 142.

[3] Barbara Berglund, Making San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in the Urban West, 1846-1906 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 8, 2.

[4] “Close the Dives,” Call, April 7, 1892; “To Discuss the Dives,” Call, May 26, 1892.

[5] “Lid Clamped Down Tight by Board of Police,” Call, February 11, 1913; “Shea Sitting Tight on Lid of Barbary Coast,” Call, February 13, 1913; “Board Will Add Spikes to ‘Lid’,” Chronicle, February 15, 1913; “Barbary Coast Lid to be Screwed Down Tight,” Call, March 4, 1913.