Because San Francisco is in such a morose slump I keep wondering about the nature of this town. Most institutions are shaped by their founders. Cities are no exception to this rule.
San Francisco’s founders were ribald, New Orleans migrants with a strong outlaw sensibility. Gambling, sex, license and corruption were the key ingredients. Government was weak and pretty useless. Crime was controlled for decades by vigilantes. The City burned to the ground many times, once completely in 1864. By 1895 it was home to pre-hippy radicals, Wobblies and by 1930 the City had one of the only two general strikes in the U.S. The main union, the longshoremen, was run by a public communist for twenty years (an acquaintance of mine).
I know San Francisco history pretty well. In 1974 I started the first non-Grayline tour. The tours were for real people and was anti-tourist. It was so successful that two years later there were 90 such non-Grayline tours operating in the City.
I also know the political history...
I also know the political history of San Francisco having started Research in Politics in 1965. At one of my first meetings I had an out of town guest lecturer, a visiting political scientist, from San Francisco State College just starting the Fall semester. I started by questioning whether there was corruption in San Francisco. I knew the Mayor and a few of the City leaders.
My recent experience had been three years in Chicago where we all put a $10 or $20 bill in our driver’s license holder for when the police stopped us. That kept us from getting tickets. Doing the same thing in San Francisco only got antagonism from the S.F. police who considered themselves incorruptible.
The visiting political science professor in his talk outlined his plan to study
corruption and find it in San Francisco. By the end of the Spring
semester he had found the corruption and reported on it.
The Tax Assessor was the central secret figure in the whole corruption system. The Assessor personally owned a dozen hat check concessions in the fancy restaurants in the City. Any insider who wanted to get his property tax reduced would do it by giving the appropriate cash in an envelope to the hat check women (older loyal women, all on salary). The money went back, daily, to the Assessor.
The political science professor called a press conference. The story never saw the light of day. He checked and all the San Francisco newspapers and TV stations had very low tax assessments.
The Assessor at the time,1965, was Russ Wolden who, succeeding his father of the same name, had been the assessors since 1916.
The story of corruption in assessments first broke in Contra Costa County and was obligingly picked up in by the District Attorney in San Francisco. Russ was found guilty of corruption and sentenced to prison. The only mention of the matter was in one San Francisco newspaper, buried very deep inside, on the day of his sentencing.
To put it simply, San Francisco is a corrupt town, deeply corrupt and always has been. But San Francisco corruption is sophisticated and deeply buried.
Sophisticated corruption thrives in a population that is naïve, idealistic and blase'. That describes San Franciscans.
The current malaise is probably due to the fact that the rest of America is in a patriotic, upbeat, hard working, prosperous, go to church mood. California is in a reform mood with Governor Schwarzenegger wildly popular( San Francisco voted seven-to-one against the governor and President Bush). San Franciscans are always against reform, they voted against the greatest California reformer, Hiram Johnson.
San Franciscans are always waiting for a revolution which is why the Hippy world thrived in San Francisco as did the gay world.